The Penultimate Word

This is the Cannonball Adderly Sextet on the TV show Jazz Scene USA playing Jive Samba (called at that time Bossa Nova Nemo). This was filmed in the early 60’s. There is a short interview with Adderly before they start playing. Well worth a listen.

My friend Pete is an American living, working, raising his kids and paying taxes in England. He and his second wife, who is Polish, wanted to come to Michigan to vist Pete’s family and give his parents a chance to see their new granddaughter. It turns out that Poles must obtain a tourist visa to visit the US, so Pete’s wife made the four-hour trip from their home in central England to London to apply for one at the US embassy there. Everything was going along swimmingly until the embassy person found out that Pete is still a US citizen. At that point, they told her that she needed to apply for an immigrant visa under the theory that she and Pete planned to move the US permanently. It didn’t matter to the embassy how much documentation they produced showing that they own a house in England, that Pete has a full-time job there, that their kids are enrolled in school there, they insisted that she get a immigrant visa and they would not budge.

They considered doing just that, but were afraid that if they got one, and then returned to England when their trip was over, it would count against them if they decide in the future to move to the US and needed an immigrant visa for her for real.

Pete’s family even got Senator Levin’s office involved, but they were unable to anything.

She wound up getting a tourist visa to Canada, so she is staying at a motel in Windsor, and Pete and rotating family members drive back and forth across the bridge every day to visit her. She and Pete, as planned, are returning to England today.

This idiotic policy has done nothing to protect whatever interests the US government thinks it is protecting, but instead has generated a great deal of ill-will toward the government on the part of Pete and his wife, and their friends and relatves here and in England and Poland.

The truck itself is in the background on the right.

it would look like this. NSFW

(From Radley Balko)

Artist Adam Roford has created a set of clever illustrations for those annoying error codes that pop up on the web. This one is for the infamous 404 (Object not found!) error.

The complete set is here.

These two site’s “crack” me up:

The “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks

Apostrophe Abuse

More good stuff from xkcd:

Fascinating article in The American magazine about the growth of opera in the US.

The U.S. now has 125 professional opera companies, 60 percent of them launched since 1970, according to the trade group OPERA America. The U.S. has more opera companies than Germany and nearly twice as many as Italy. In the most comprehensive recent study, the National Endowment for the Arts found that between 1982 and 2002, total attendance at live opera performances grew 46 percent.

Annual admissions are now estimated at 20 million, roughly the same attendance as NFL football games (22 million, including playoffs, in 2006–07).

The article talks about the funding challenges faced by all American opera companies, which rely mostly on private, corporate and foundational giving since government funding is so sparse. The funding situation, however, may be one reason for opera’s popularity.

Despite the attraction of government money, [Minnesota Opera president Kevin] Smith believes that there is something “healthy about needing to prove yourself to the community on a daily basis.” He says, “Tough as it is, the American system is good in a lot of ways. In France, they have seven or eight companies that get all the money. If you’re not year-round and fully professional, you don’t get any support. Here, it’s a grassroots system, and you have to demonstrate your value.”

Full article here.

People have looking for ways to stimulate young people to vote for ages. Well, this should do it:

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A top US military officer in charge of coordinating the US war effort in Iraq said Friday that it makes sense to consider a return of the draft to meet the US military’s needs.

New York Jets coach Eric Mangini has been blasting Mozart (scroll down) at his players during practice because “It stimulates the brain waves that influence learning”.

Maybe I should donate some of my CDs to the Lions…

(From The Rest Is Noise, a music blog I highly recommend)

Wikipedia has been rightly criticized for the ability of cranks, obsessives and bad actors to squeeze out good material and drive knowledgable contributors completely off the site (some examples). Now comes a professor of computer engineering at UC Santa Cruz with a fairly straightforward method of ranking the reliability of articles on the site.

Other sites already employ user ratings as a measure of reliability, but they typically depend on users’ feedback about each other. This method makes the ratings vulnerable to grudges and subjectivity. The new program takes a radically different approach, using the longevity of the content itself to learn what information is useful and which contributors are the most reliable.

“The idea is very simple,” de Alfaro said. “If your contribution lasts, you gain reputation. If your contribution is reverted [to the previous version], your reputation falls.”

Dubious content is color-coded in deepening shades of orange.

Press release from UC Santa Cruz.

This sounds like a pretty good system.

(Thanks to my sister the librarian).

A friend of mine who teaches middle school in the Dearborn, MI district passed this test on to me. It is a demonstration of how people with good test-taking skills can do well on a poorly-designed test even when they know nothing about the subject. See how well how you can do. Bonus points to anyone who can tell me where the terms in the test came from. Answers below the fold. Cheaters will serve detention with Professor Umbridge.

1. What is the primary purpose of the cluss in frumpaling?

1. to remove the cluss-prangs
2. to patch tremans
3. to loosen cloughs
4. to repair plumots

1. The fribbled breg will minter best with an

1. mors
2. ignu
3. derst
4. sortar

1. Why does the sigla frequently overfest the treslum?

1. all siglas are mellious
2. siglas are always votial
3. the trelsum is usually tarious
4. no trelsa are directly feskable

1. Trassig normally occurs under which of the following conditions?

1. when the dissels fruli
2. when the lusp trasses the vom
3. when the balgo lisks easily
4. when the viskal flans, if the viskal is zortil

1. What probable causes are indicated when tristal dos occurs in a compots?

1. the sabs foped and the doths timzed
2. the kredges roted with the rots
3. the rakogs were not accepted in the sluth
4. the polats were thonced in the sluth

1. The mintering function of the ignu is most frequently performed in connection with the

1. arazma tol
2. fribbled breg
3. groshing stantol
4. frallied stantols

Continue Reading »

According to an article in the Ann Arbor News,

A number of bridges in Washtenaw County are in poor condition and need to be replaced - but local road officials said Thursday that the bridges are still safe to drive on.

Umm, “need to be replaced” and “safe to drive on” seem to contradict each other, no?

Stephen Stills has released a new CD, Just Roll Tape, which has a bunch of demo tracks he recorded in 1968. It’s just him and his guitar. Some of the material is very familiar, stuff he did with CSN, CSN&Y, Buffalo Springfield, etc., and some has never been released on an album. All of it is really good and a reminder of why he was a superstar in the late 60’s - 70’s.

Go to his website, turn up the audio, and just listen.

(From The Lefsetz Letter.)

Anyone who flies out of Detroit regularly has at least one Northwest Airlines story to tell. This one is pretty frightening:

Northwest Flight 1652, scheduled to depart Washington National for Minneapolis at 6:36 AM this morning, left the gate on-time. But just as it turned toward the runway, a loud, hacking sound – kind of like a handsaw cutting through sheet metal - began vibrating through the cabin. From my seat – 14D -it felt like it was emanating from the right wing, and it continued for a solid five minutes before the captain announced that we would be returning to the gate so that a maintenance crew could cool off an overheating hydraulic pump.
…

Full story.