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Mucho Amor

Hola Familia.
I hope you're all doing very well. It's an unusually cool and rainy day here in NJ/NYC.

I'm not sure if you all know, but part of my job at Stereophile involves keeping a blog. I'm supposed to write about my interaction with high-end audio, but I often extend the focus into my personal relationship with music and beyond into my everyday relationships with friends and family.

I think you all do know that lately, even more than ever, my relationship with my father has been under a lot of pressure. The good news is I've told him exactly how I feel, so there's…

Reading the Polls

According to an AP poll, one out of every four Americans hasn't read a single book in the last year. Okay, maybe I can believe that, but whenever I read articles like this, they inevitably include some guy (and yes, it is always a guy) who says something like, "I just don't have time for fiction, when I read I want to learn something."

Oh really? I re-read Huckleberry Finn this year. It's "just a story" and it wasn't even the first time I've read it. Did I really learn nothing? What I thought I'd noticed for the first time was Twain's finely nuanced description of a far-from-homogeneous…

Felines and Memories

Memory
All alone in the moonlight
I can smile at 10 minutes ago
I was beautiful then
I remember the time I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again
For 10 whole minutes. . . .

What a Tool

Nick Hornby gets an unusual request.

Hat tip to Blog of a Book Slut.

O Macdonald!

I've written before about the Crippen & Landru publication of The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator, Including Newly Discovered Case Notes, edited by Tom Nolan, which has a cover by my buddy Jeff Wong, who also happens to be an internationally acknowledged expert on Macdonald.

The book has just received two extremely perceptive reviews, one by The LA Times' Scott Timberg, the other by the legendary Otto Penzler in The New York Sun.

The external link below is to Crippen & Landru's site, where you can order a signed, numbered,…

Happy Birthday

I walk into JA's office.

AB: "Are you busy?"
JA: "No, what's up?"

I'm holding some Dell computer speakers.

AB: "Primedia's giving away free speakers in the lobby."
JA: "Free speakers?!"

JA jumps up and rushes to the lobby.

***

Unfortunately, he comes back empty-handed: "They didn't have any left."

I feel bad that I didn't grab him a pair when I got my own. As I leave the office, I notice one of the building staff fishing through the "garbage." Apparently, someone around here just throws away perfectly good computer…

Max Roach, R.I.P.

I have a Slate column today, an appreciation of Max Roach, who died last week at age 83. (Sometimes my editors let me break away from war and peace, though I have one of those columns today, too.) The headline writer has me calling Roach the “greatest drummer” in jazz. I think Billy Higgins was probably better, but I didn’t make a fuss. In any case, all great jazz drummers who came up after the mid-1940s, Higgins included, leaned or built on Max Roach’s innovations. Listen to the sound-clips that I link to in the column, and be sure to watch the YouTube clip toward the end. If you didn’t…

The Loudness War, Part 1172

Suhas Sreedhar writes about CD over-compression in IEEE Spectrum. It's a good 'un that goes beyond the usual hand-wringing to the real danger it poses.

"With music being compressed to have smaller and smaller dynamic ranges, the need for the next high-fidelity audio format vanishes. If record companies aren't making use of the full dynamic capability of CDs, then why bother moving to another format with even more potentially unused capability? And with the average consumer being either completely unaware of, or only subconsciously irritated by, the current state of overcompressed music,…

The Eggcorn Database

An eggcorn, as regular readers of The Language Log are aware, is the label given to non-standard reshaping of expressions in common use. Substituting "eggcorn" for "acorn" or "baited breath" for "bated breath," for egg samples.

It's sort of like Jon Carroll's Mondegreens, only different.

The Colonization of Silence

I don't disagree with the need for contemplative silence, but I find our contemprary society particularly ill-suited to it. Perhaps iPods are the cure to noise pollution rather than the problem itself.