Huck: "<I>Heh heh heh</I>. Snooze, you lose, baby!"

Bagheera; "Who dares to steal my perch of power upon the CD player?"

Joey deVilla, <I>aka</I> Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, is disgruntled (trust me, Accordion Guy is at his best when he's not gruntled). His beef? The fundraising dinner held last night for Canadian MP Sam Bulte, <I>aka</I> Hollywood's MP, because of the perhaps coincidental linkage between her advocacy of extremely restrictive copyright legislation and her acceptance of financial support (57% of her campaign war chest) from institutions such as the Canadian Motion Pictures Distributors Association, Canadian Publishers Council, and the Entertainment Software Alliance.

I love Twain and view UC/Berkeley's Mark Twain Project to print <I>everything</I>. ever written by Sam Clemens (even down to the individual drafts) as God's own work. Yet, like many readers (including Ernest Hemingway), I've always had a problem with <I>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</I>'s final chapters&mdash;say, around the time Tom Sawyer highjacks the novel.

Does HT surround-sound only need to be "good enough?" According to a new NIH-sponsored study, "the circuits in the brain that process auditory information are influenced powerfully by the circuits that control where the animal is looking&mdash;the animal's direction of gaze." Umm, the animal being, for the purposes of this study, a barn owl.

Favorites:

I love Cantaloupe Records. David Lang's <I>The Passing Measures</I> is one of the most beautiful compositions I've heard this millennium and Phil Kline's <I>Zippo Songs</I> was my hit of CES2006. While supplies last, you can order a <I>free</I> Bang On A Can/Cantaloupe Records sampler and find out for yourself how good their recordings are. Adventurous and different&mdash;and did I mention <I>free</I>?