LATEST ADDITIONS

On Christmas day, my friend, the <I>Nuyorican</I> goddess Liz Ramirez-Weaver saw me looking at Junot Diaz's <I>The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao</I>. "It's good," she said. "You should borrow it."

"You've set the audio industry back 20 years!"

I was saddened today to read about the December 22 passing of Ruth Wallis, a singer from the 40's through 60's who specialized in creative naughtiness. Born in Brooklyn (where else?), she sang with Benny Goodman and owned her own record label, but it was her risque tunes like, "The Dinghy Song" ("He had the cutest little dinghy in the Navy") that brought her the most fame and which became the basis for an unlikely 2003 Broadway hit, <I>Boobs! The Musical: The World According to Ruth Wallis</I>. Here are a few classic couplets from the Wallis-penned title tune:

"You've gotta be filled
Two fried eggs will never grab him like grapefruits will
(And they're both breakfast foods)
But listen girls, don't try to fool your lover
Remember, he can go to Good Year if he wants rubber"

"Just think if all us girls had boobies with fluorination
We could take the cavities out of the whole damn nation
A nibble a day keeps the dentist away"

"Some push 'em up
Some stick 'em out
And some keep 'em flappin' in the breeze
Some tie then down because if they don't
They would hang down to their knees
Just you tease"

I don't remember the year, but I remember the moment when I first became intensely curious about Roy DuNann. It must have been about 1975, right after I moved to Seattle. I bought a Sonny Rollins LP called <I>Way Out West</I>, took it home, cued it up on my Thorens turntable, dropped the tonearm, and suddenly I was in a room with Rollins and Shelly Manne and Ray Brown. It was a shipping room with records stacked on shelves all around the musicians, but I wouldn't know that until many years later.

<I>Technology Review</I>, which is one of the magazines I not only eagerly await, but read from cover to cover, published <A HERF="http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=19845"… 14 page screed against network news</A> by John Hockenberry in the January/February issue.

<I>The Economist</I> has an uncredited article about <A HREF="http://www.economist.com/world/europe/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=1027… charts</A>. They're all familiar to readers of Edward Tufte's <I>The Visual Display of Quantative Information</I>, but they <I>are</I> great charts.