The Penultimate Word

If you go to Google and search for the third holiest site in Judaism, the very first entry is Zingerman’s.

I love my digital music collection. I love the fact that I have 374 albums, 5117 tracks, 599 artists and 13.7 days of music on my iPod (about half my CD collection) that I can take with me wherever I go.

But I am rediscovering the joys of vinyl. My dad, who passed away in 2006, had an extensive collection of LPs and 78s. He was a classically trained organist and opera buff, so his collection was top-heavy with organ and opera recordings. But he had a number of other recordings as well, mostly classical, but also Broadway and jazz. My mom, looking to clean out her basement, told my siblings and me to take what we wanted and she would get rid of the rest.

Looking through the collection was like rediscovering old friends. I had grown up listening these records so memories of my childhood came flooding back as I looked through them. Many of them are out of print and were never reissued on CD, so they are irreplaceable. Of course, I branched out into soul, R&B, pop and rock in my teenage years, and I still have those records somewhere, but I replaced many of them with CDs.

There is something about holding an LP in your hands, reading the liner notes, looking at the sometimes beautiful and sometimes awful cover art that can’t be duplicated with MP3s. Though digital sound has come a very long way from the original brittle, almost artificial sound of the original CDs, the best vinyl pressings still sound better, to my ears at least, then the best digital has to offer.

The LP above, one my very favorites, is from a series of LPs done by the brilliant Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida. As far as I can tell, these LPs are out of print and never issued on CD, so I am happy to have them. Almeida was equally at home with classical, jazz and native Brazilian forms. This is his rendering of Debussey’s Claire de Lune.

So I recently picked up an Apple iPhone 3G, and for the most part I really like the phone. It does many things well, but some things it does badly, and some things are downright ugly. For most of the bad and the ugly, there are workarounds.

Complete review after the jump.
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For all my trip photos, check out the Photo gallery

I took a short vacation last week to Boston and New York for no other reason other than to get away for a few days. My friends Cheryl and Joe, their daughter Katherine, and another friend of ours, Tess, were taking a car vacation through the northeast and I joined them in Boston for a few days. Another friend of ours, Jim, was to have joined us in Boston, and then Jim and I were going to take the train from Boston to New York where Jim lives. The plan was for me to stay with him in his apartment in Astoria, Queens. However, Jim’s work schedule clobbered that idea and he wound up in Michigan the week I was in Boston and New York. But, Jim graciously gave me the keys to his apartment before I left so I didn’t have to sleep under a bridge or someplace when I got to NYC.

This was the first time I had been to Boston and had some time to properly see it as previous visits were business trips with no time for anything but work. A couple of things stood out. First, it is fairly compact and easy to get around either on foot or by public transit. Second, the city has made a real effort to preserve old buildings and architecture while adapting them for modern uses with things like air conditioning, good lighting, etc. I liked Boston a lot.
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Hollywood descended upon Ann Arbor, if only briefly, these past couple of weeks. It was in town filming Youth in Revolt, starring actors you have actually heard of: Michael Cera, Justin Long (Mac in those Apple commercials), Steve Buscemi, Ray Liotta, and others. This was a direct result of a package of incentives offered by the State of Michigan to woo film productions, which includes rebating up 40% of the business taxes paid by the studios, plus an additional 2% if the production is filmed in any of over 100 “core communities”, of which Ann Arbor is one. Your tax dollars at work, subsidizing some millionaire actor’s payday.

Scenes from the movie were being shot just a block from my office, but the streets were blocked off and it was difficult to see what they were doing much of the time. Mostly it seemed like a lot of people standing around all day. A lot of security was provided by the Ann Arbor police, plus a lot of rent-a-cops. They also completely took over one parking lot and much of another, making parking even more difficult than it normally is.

Yesterday, they burned a travel trailer, causing much excitement for passers-by. The picture at the top is the end of the fire, the picture below is off the Ann Arbor Fire Department mopping up.