LATEST ADDITIONS

"They Thought You'd Say This: Unlikely phrases from real phrase books" is a hoot. When I lived in Peru, I collected tourist phrase books from our local second-hand book kiosk—a place that had a two-for-one trade-in policy on books in English. Since I was teaching ESL to folks that wanted to get jobs in tourism and on the police squad dedicated to tourist-related matters, I figured that they'd need to know a lot of these common phrases. I was stunned at how many books had unlikely scenarios, but few of them were as outlandish as in this article.

As the plane approached the chaos of John F. Kennedy International Airport, I turned my head towards the small oval window to look out onto the bright City skyline.

<I>The Home Entertainment Show 2006, running June 1&ndash;4 at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel in Los Angeles, is only weeks away. Here is a sampling of some of the giveaways and special events that will take place at the Show. Several of these should be of particular interest to home-theater enthusiasts.</I>

Over at <I>The Times</I>, Terence Kealey begs to differ, not just with Barenboim's (and Plato's) premise that music uses sound to educate the soul in virtue, but also that "making music and playing it in an orchestra is the best way to understand democracy."

Next, we have this article, submitted by Jonathan Scull, which says the lectures rail against "passive noise pollution"&mdash;that Daniel Barenboim claims we are too frequently forced to hear music over which we have no control and, thus, we listen too infrequently to music we have actually chosen.

Yes! Find out that it's a lot harder than you think to make a vinyl record. Best part: Incorrectly centering the disc. (Most record presses do a pretty good job of this.)

So I don't mind if you think I'm a hopeless dweeb for loving last night's <I>West Wing</I>. After all, when I asked my flight attendant for a special service on Saturday, I said, "you'll probably lose all respect for me . . . ."