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.

<I><B>Walking Down Rainhill</B></I><BR>
Hitchhike Records

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.

I just learned that William Gottlieb died last night. Like every jazz fan, many of my images of the jazz greats come directly from his photography. Billie Holiday with her head back, eyes closed; Django Reinhardt, cigarette a-dangle, fretting a run; a skinny Frank Sinatra looking beyond the microphone . . .all are indelible Gottlieb images. You'll probably see lots of obituaries in the next few days, but a visit to the Gottlieb collection at the Library of Congress might be the best place to remember him.

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.