LATEST ADDITIONS

Huckleberry likes to sleep just above my keyboard. That part's cool, but when he wakes up, he'll decide to play swat the fingers until I give chase.

In her kittenage, before we adopted her, Bagheera was a deli cat. I don't want to psychoanalyze an animal with a brain the size of a walnut, but Bagheera <I>loves</I> cardboard boxes. She will lie on them for hours&mdash;unless we do something silly like pet her or <I>notice</I> her. Then she'll go sulk in the corner.

The great Eliane Elias put on a quite a show last night in NYC. Touring in support of her new album, <I>Something For You, Eliane Elias Sings and Plays Bill Evans</I>, the pianist, singer and longtime Evans admirer lit up Dizzy's at Jazz at Lincoln Center, which is easily one of the best&ndash;sounding rooms for live music that I've ever been in. The food in there is fairly tasty and not wildly overpriced, a total rarity on the New York jazz club scene. And that behind the stage, floor to ceiling glass that adds a Central Park West backdrops to every performance is genuinely divine. Say what you want about Wynton, but the man did make the three JALC venues happen.

I feel a bit remiss about not commenting on Bobby Fischer's passing. As a bookish chess-obssessed kid, I lived for his <I>Boy's Life</I> chess column and, during the "Match of the Century," I was hitchhiking to and from Iowa and the Spassky/Fischer battle of wits was always a safe topic of conversation. (1972 was ground zero for the mainstream born again movement and it seemed like half the people that picked me up wanted a conversion in exchange for the ride. Thank goodness for chess!)

I'd pay cash money to know how "Some stupid with a flare gun" translates into Japanese.

I first heard a CD player in my own system in 1984 or 1985, several years before I began writing for <I>Stereophile</I>. I was curious about the Compact Disc medium&mdash;I'd read about it, had listened to CDs in stores, and was eager to hear what they sounded like in my own system. I'd even bought a CD: the original-cast recording of <I>42nd Street</I>, which I already had on LP. One evening, a friend who worked for Sony and knew that I was an audiophile brought over his latest acquisition: a CDP-501ES, the second from the top of Sony's line of CD players. He also brought along a bunch of CDs, including some solo-piano discs, and Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Symphony's then-famous recording of Tchaikovsky's <I>1812 Overture</I> (Telarc CD-80041).

John Atkinson sent along <A HREF="http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/tomdispatch/2008/01/beast-without… Jay Rosen article</A> about why "the media" gets stuff like primaries so wrong.