Robert Baird's office is a record shop crowded by tall stacks of many&#150colored jewel cases and digipaks.

Having heard from the good folks at Ralston Purina&#151sorry, "good folks" seems to be a trigger for 60's TV commercial flashbacks for puppy chow or something. Lemme try again...When I heard from the good folks at the burgeoning mini&#150mega empire that Concord/Fantasy Telarc has become that a new series called <I>Stax Profiles</I> was about to begin, I anxiously tore open a Concord box that arrived in the office yesterday.

<b><i>Espers II</b></i><br>
Drag City

Smog's <i>A River Ain't Too Much To Love</i> rose <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/091905imnew/">again</a&gt; and <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/102205hoping/">again</a&gt; in the earliest days of this blog. It reminded me of <i>Nebraska</i> and it brought me back to San Francisco, and I am a rock bottom riser and I owe it all to you.

Matsushita and Toshiba call off talks about Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Let the public decide, they say. My guess? People will say, "A pox on both your houses" rather than gamble on choosing wrong. <I>Again.</I> Don't these bozos ever learn?

Why can't our high-school students? (Okay, lighten up, I know it's because English makes no sense&mdash;I just couldn't resist the straight line.)

The CEA has taken out ads in Capitol Hill papers that tell Congress to learn the difference between pirates and regular citizens employing fair use.

RHIC creates mini-sized versions of the Big Bang. The results are perfectly surprising. Turns out, J. B. S. Haldane was right: The universe is not just stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we <I>can</I> imagine.