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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.

Game, Set, & Match: Rosen

In 2005, journalism professor Michael Skube wrote an uninformed "think" piece about blogs and blog culture, concluding that bloggers didn't do "real" journalism. (He's probably seen this one.) On August 19 this year, he did what hacks do—he wrote the same piece again, this time for The LA Times.

Turns out he hadn't used the intervening two years to do research or, you know, actually do any real journalism. On August 22, fellow journalism prof Jay Rosen took Skube to school big time.

I'm a simple man with simple pleasures, but watching a pompous fool have his pants jerked down…