LATEST ADDITIONS

It's hard for me to believe that all of today's sunshine will soon be replaced by clouds and rain. Then again, there's no reason to trust in whimsical April. The forecast calls for the sky to fall at about 6pm EST. Right now, at 4:55pm EST, the tall, brick buildings outside my window are blanketed in golden warmth. I'm usually not so in touch with the weather's hourly report, but there's a special circumstance keeping me curious.

Starting this blog has made me feel almost the same way I did when Frank Sinatra died and I wrote in the pages of <I>Stereophile</I> that when I became a music writer, lo those many dark-haired days ago, I knew that someday I'd have to write a Francis Albert obit. When the blog craze first began to gallop, I knew intuitively that someday, I too would be sucked into the immediacy maw and be lured into venting my opinions, valuable or not, in the blogosphere.

Are the brains of animals hard-wired to detect the footfalls (or wingflaps) of predators? Dr. Cord Westhoff thinks so.

Yahoo reports on the "tongue port," which sort of combines elements on the space-commando neural switching technology from <I>The Stars My Destination</I> with Chip Delany's direct neural jacks from <I>Babel 17</I> and other early work. Cool&mdash;and kind of scary.

One of the most common complaints we see when writing about consumer dissatisfaction with CDs is "price gouging" by greedy corporations. Several <I>Stereophile</I> readers have written that they"know" CDs only cost pennies to make, so $16.98 is a rip-off for a product that should sell for under $10.

John Marks writes: "Peter Sykes, who played the Goldbergs live at HE Whatever in NYC, clued me in to the site www.larips.com.<P">Which is “spiral” backwards&mdash;and which argues for a solution to Bach’s temperament problem. Sykes finds it convincing.

There's a knock-knock at my door.