Wes Phillips

This blog has been taken over by the evil genius Huckleberry T. Cat and will no longer parrot the pro-human party line of Wes Phillips et al.

Blogging on Stereophilia will be sporadic this week because of CEDIA—although the chaos kitties will make their Friday appearance as usual.

Be the hippest kid on your musical block.

The brouhaha over Bob Dylan's recent Rolling Stone interview surprised me. Dylan cryptic, caustic, and cranky? What a shock. Has he ever held a straightforward interview where he kept on topic? Louis Menand reviews Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews.

I feel a bit remiss about not commenting on Bobby Fischer's passing. As a bookish chess-obssessed kid, I lived for his Boy's Life chess column and, during the "Match of the Century," I was hitchhiking to and from Iowa and the Spassky/Fischer battle of wits was always a safe topic of conversation. (1972 was ground zero for the mainstream born again movement and it seemed like half the people that picked me up wanted a conversion in exchange for the ride. Thank goodness for chess!)

Stephen Ambrose gently suggested that the ingenuity of the American soldier was a contributing factor in the Allied victory in WWII, pointing to the GI-engineered solutions to, say, Normandy's hedgerows as an example. That creative spirit is illustrated linguistically, too, as shown in the linked list of acronyms and expressions.

Bagheera wants to see what's chirping outside.