"To a woman, size does matter. But it's not the size you're thinking of. What women really care about is the length of the list of former lovers, which is usually either too many or too, too many. No matter how sexually liberated (or liberally sexual), most women believe that the number of guys they've had sex with (the average being somewhere between 7.2 and 10.5, depending on the survey) really does count."
"20 Times a Lady" is a novel about the excuses women go to keep this a short list:
EXCUSES NOT TO ADD HIM TO 'THE NUMBER'
If he yells out another woman's name
If one or both of you ends up gently weeping
If he might be gay
If he took you out for a vegan meal first
If you're drunk, or you could have been drunk had you been drinking
If you just gave up smoking
If you just gave up having meaningless one-night stands
If it's Tuesday
If he's small
If he's small-minded
If he's Jared Leto
>
Source: YOUR LAYS ARE NUMBERED MARINA VATAJ NYPost, October 24, 2006 http://tinyurl.com/wjv3b
Christina Courtin is 23 and a recent Juilliard
grad.She studied classical violin, but she’s actually making a name for
herself as a singer. She just released her debut EP on Nov. 14.
Amazon has a cool video of vintage Frank playing with a full band in Vegas.
The 4 CD/1 DVD set is on my holiday short list of must haves.
click for video
Here's a review excerpt:
The new Sinatra: Vegas box set is the most essential Frank Sinatra release to emerge since the outstanding Sinatra in Hollywood collection of rare and unreleased soundtrack material that came out over four years ago... almost. More on that caveat later.
After enduring scores of unnecessary and pointless posthumous Frank Sinatra "best of" compilations, reissues, repackagings and "limited editions," Sinatra: Vegas finally gives both the casual fan and the die-hard collector something we actually want: four CDs and even a DVD of previously unreleased (officially, anyway) live material spanning the years 1961 to 1987, all recorded in — you guessed it — Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada.
For starters, the thing looks and feels great, packaged in a sturdy black longbox with shiny silver lettering. The discs are housed in classy yet functional digipacks, and the booklet is chock full o' photos and remembrances, if a little skimpy on details (yes, some of us want to know the exact dates of the recordings, not just the month and year). You even get a couple reproductions of vintage promotional posters to hang in your locker... or something.
As far as I'm concerned, the DVD should be the Holy Grail of Sinatra: Vegas. It claims to be the fabled "complete unreleased" May 5, 1978 Caesar's Palace concert performed in front of an audience of liquor salesmen, celebrities, and a Catholic priest, as recorded by CBS but never broadcast in its entirety. Sinatra predicts that "this will be shown in 1982" during his introductory remarks... and he was only off by about 25 years.
>
Sources:
Music Review: Sinatra: Vegas Stephen V Funk Blog Critics, November 11, 2006 http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/11/11/073815.php
FRANK SINATRA …VEGAS Five-Disc Boxed Set Features All Previously Unreleased Live Performances Of Ol’ Blue Eyes In Vegas Definitive Collection Due November 7 Spans Three Decades And Features The Chairman At His Best http://sinatrafamily.com/news/news.php
I need a double cheeseburger and hold the lettuce Don't be frontin' son no
seeds on a bun We be up in this drive thru Order for two I gots a
craving for a number nine like my shoe We need some chicken up in here In
this dizzle For rizzle my nizzle Extra salt on the frizzle Dr. Pepper
my brother Another for your mother Double double super size And don't
forget the FRIES...
The average American home now has more television sets than people ... according to Nielsen Media Research. There are 2.73 TV sets in the typical home and 2.55 people, the researchers said. — The Associated Press, Sept. 21.
I HAVE two kids. Both are away at college.
I have five television sets. (I like to think of them as a set of five televisions.) I have two DVR boxes, three DVD players, two VHS machines and four stereos.
I have nineteen remote controls, mostly in one drawer.
I have three computers, four printers and two non-working faxes.
I have three phone lines, three cell phones and two answering machines.
I have no messages.
I have forty-six cookbooks.
I have sixty-eight takeout menus from four restaurants.
I have one hundred and sixteen soy sauce packets.
I have three hundred and eighty-two dishes, bowls, cups, saucers, mugs and glasses.
I eat over the sink.
I have five sinks, two with a view.
I try to keep a positive view.
I have two refrigerators.
It’s very hard to count ice cubes.
I have thirty-nine pairs of golf, tennis, squash, running, walking, hiking, casual and formal shoes, ice skates and rollerblades.
I’m wearing slippers.
I have forty-one 37-cent stamps.
I have no 2-cent stamps.
I read three dailies, four weeklies, five monthlies and no annual reports.
I have five hundred and six CD, cassette, vinyl and eight-track recordings.
I listen to the same radio station all day.
I have twenty-six sets of linen for four regular, three foldout and two inflatable beds.
I don’t like having houseguests.
I have one hundred and eighty-four thousand frequent flier miles on six airlines, three of which no longer exist.
I have “101 Dalmatians” on tape.
I have fourteen digital clocks flashing relatively similar times.
I have twenty-two minutes to listen to the news.
I have nine armchairs from which I can be critical.
I have a laundry list of things that need cleaning.
I have lost more than one thousand golf balls.
I am missing thirty-seven umbrellas.
I have over four hundred yards of dental floss.
I have a lot of time on my hands.
I have two kids coming home for Thanksgiving.
Rick Moranis is the creator of a country music album, “The Agoraphobic Cowboy.”
Source: My Days Are Numbered RICK MORANIS NYTimes, November 22, 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/opinion/22moranis.html
Terrific commentary on this performance from Bob Lefsetz:
With the headlights on, immersed in traffic long before the dinner hour, a sound slowly amped up in the speakers. The drums started to pound. This was "Come Talk To Me".
Peter Gabriel became an accidental rock star. At too old an age, long past his triumphs with Genesis, Gabriel concocted a train-wreck of a video that no one could stop watching. We were glued to MTV, following along with the little train around Peter’s head, the dancing chickens, until in darkness, with lights glued to his clothing, Peter walked out of the room.
And since one track used to cause people to buy albums, "So" was suddenly owned by millions of people who never knew Gabriel used to dress as a flower. They reveled in "Sledgehammer", but also discovered "Red Rain" and "In Your Eyes".
How do you follow up something like this? You’ve been knocking at the door for almost two decades, suddenly you’re INSIDE? "Us" was a dud. Too stiff in production, lacking the killer riff of "Sledgehammer", Peter fumbled his moment, and reverted back to cult status. But two years later, the cult was rewarded, with "Secret World Live".
Okay, what are the best live albums?
You’d say "Live At Leeds". I’d say it’s got energy, but lacks crowd noise.
"Frampton Comes Alive" has been overplayed, but it was great.
"Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out"? Overrated. Although I do love "Sympathy For The Devil".
The newly-forgotten favorite? Tesla’s "Five Man Acoustical Jam".
But if you’re creating a Top Five, you must include "Secret World Live". All those songs lacking passion, cut with too much precision on "Us", they suddenly came ALIVE!
Don’t miss the nine minute version of "Secret World". Or the eleven minute take on "In Your Eyes". But the keeper, the one that truly gets your attention, is the opening cut, "Come Talk To Me".
You hear the crowd noise. An ethereal synth. Then Peter’s pleading voice, IMPLORING you to listen. And then POUNDING drums cause you to stand up and pay attention, hell, listen to the CROWD NOISE!
Go to: Peter Gabriel-Come Talk To Me
You won’t hear the pounding of the drums that resonate so on the CD. But yes, that’s a phone booth. Containing Peter. Singing into the receiver. Asking to be relieved of his LONELINESS!
And when the band rises out of the ground, that rush you used to get at the show comes back. The feeling of being privileged to be there. It’s no longer who you went with, you’re locked into the experience, you didn’t expect this, this is FANTASTIC! You PINCH YOURSELF!
And stay tuned in until 2:10 when Peter EXITS! And starts pulling the phone cord out, towards Paula Cole, singing the Sinead O’Connor part.
Can you show me how you feel now Oh come on, come talk to me Come talk to me Come talk to me
When you’re confused, when you’re confronted with a holiday tunnel, you need something to get you through. Some people turn to alcohol, others to drugs, to numb the pain of the human condition. You’re so supposed to feel so SPECIAL, so HAPPY! But you don’t.
Just know there are records out there, artists who understand you, who’re where you’re at. Just fire up the turntable, the iPod, and let them reel you in, let them connect you.
Ah, please talk to me Won’t you please talk to me We can unlock this misery Come on, come talk to me
And when you’re out and about, sitting at the dining room table, ignite your own personal lighter, known as your personality, and reach out. That person sitting silently across from you might be just as lonely, just as disconcerted.
We’re in this together. Forget about the talking heads, forget about not resonating with the holiday cheer. You’re a member of the group. I’m here with you. And so is John Lennon, and Peter Gabriel, and…
Source: Come Talk To Me Bob Lefsetz Lefsetz Letter, 2006/11/21 http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2006/11/21/come-talk-to-me/
The journey of the Knicks from being one of the top teams in the league to the bottom is just one symptom of a dysfunctional ownership. Cablevision is one of the more powerful companies in New York, with a basic cable service with 3.1 million subscribers and lots of revenue. But they are also a family business—with all the myriad problems that come along with it.
Mr. Dolan and his 80-year-old father Charles have publicly butted heads over the direction of the company, and have taken on highly publicized battles with the Mayor’s office over the proposed Jets stadium and competitor Time Warner Cable. Currently, they are under government investigation over a murky stock issue, including an episode reported by The New York Times in which stock options were granted to a deceased vice chairman after he had died.
The same article described a $19.2 billion leveraged bid by the Dolans to take their company private—a move that many speculate is motivated by a desire to avoid scrutiny from investors.
The mystery that has surrounded the Dolans’ basketball decision-making is characteristic of their organization as a whole. Members of the media unfortunate enough to have the task of finding out anything meaningful about them have found this out the hard way.
“This is a terribly paranoid organization from top to bottom, and they do everything they can not to allow anything to be written about them,” agreed Filip Bondy, a columnist for the Daily News. “You’ll find few anecdotes about Dolan because he’s so private. It’s a problem, and the lack of anecdotes is a part of the problem. We live in New York and we live off personality. If we at least had some personality, we could be somewhat distracted away from the team on the floor.”
Very cool documentary of one of my all time favorite Sci-Fi flix, Blade Runner: Towards the end, director Ridley Scott solves the mystery of whether Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a replicant or not . . .
Edge of Blade Runner Channel 4 52 min 16 sec - Apr 27, 2006
Buying a car can seem like a huge hassle, from figuring out what price you should pay to handling the hard sell on the dealer's lot. You can avoid the work in one of two ways.
The Easy Way: Hire a car buyer If you are willing to spend an extra $400 to $800, you can reduce the entire car buying experience to a couple of phone calls and one visit to the dealer to pick up the keys. Car buying services such as AutoAdvisor.com and CarQ.com will find the model you want, negotiate a competitive price and loan terms with the dealer and, in many cases, set up a test drive.
That's the premium approach; do-it-yourselfers can still make this a relatively painless exercise:
Almost as Easy: Buy online If you want to save as much money as you can, do it yourself. Even that doesn't have to be hard if you tap the Net. First go to Edmunds.com and use the True Market Value (TMV) tool to find out what people in your area are paying to drive your desired model off the lot. Aim to pay this price or less. You may also want to get pre-approved for a bank loan and ignore dealer financing until you have settled on a price.
Next solicit dealer offers online. At Edmunds.com (or Autobytel.com), you enter the model you want, your contact info and your zip code (or nearby ones), and within a few hours you'll get quotes by e-mail or phone. You should have an easier time haggling because the dealership's Internet department makes commissions based on volume, not the price. They won't waste time wheeling and dealing you.
>
Source: 7 Shortcuts for Major Money Hassles Kate Ashford, Carolyn Bigda, George Mannes, Walter Updegrave and Penelope Wang CNN Money http://money.cnn.com/popups/2006/moneymag/shortcuts/6.html
Chris Trapper plays the role of a hopeless loser to perfection on his latest release, "Hey You."
Proclaiming the restlessness of a life lived going in circles, Trapper articulates the frustrations of a dead-end road with first person accounts of school bullies, belittling bosses and failed relationships.
The beauty in the misery, however, is Trapper's ability to tell the stories with humor and melody. He is the former singer/songwriter of The Push Stars, and adds a sonic three dimensionality on "Hey You," with bulky drums and bass, as well as an overall modern pop feel
Fun with fizzicks: A pool filled with non-newtonian fluid.
A TV show in Barcelona, Spain filled a pool with a mix of cornstarch and water made on a concrete mixer truck. It becomes a non-newtonian fluid. When stress is applied to the liquid it exhibits properties of a solid.
An example visualization of Internet topology produced by Walrus:
Source: Courtesy of Young Hyun, CAIDA
The image above is a screengrab of a Walrus visualization of a huge graph. The graph data in this particular example depicts Internet topology, as measured by CAIDA's skitter monitor [3] based in London, showing 535,000-odd Internet nodes and over 600,000 links. The nodes, represented by the yellow dots, are a large sample of computers from across the whole range of Internet addresses.
Walrus is an interactive visualization tool that allows the analyst to view massive graphs from any position. The graph is projected inside a 3D sphere using a special kind of space based hyperbolic geometry. This is a non-Euclidean space, which has useful distorting properties of making elements at the center of the display much larger than those on the periphery. You interact with the graph in Walrus by selecting a node of interest, which is smoothly moved into the center of the display, and that region of the graph becomes greatly enlarged, enabling you to focus on the fine detail. Yet the rest of the graph remains visible, providing valuable context of the overall structure. (There are some animations available on the website showing Walrus graphs being moved, which give some sense of what this is like.) Hyperbolic space projection is commonly know as “focus+context” in the field of information visualization and has been used to display all kinds of data that can be represented as large graphs in either two and three dimensions [4]. It can be thought of as a moveable fish-eye lens. The Walrus visualization tool draws much from the hyperbolic research by Tamara Munzner [5] as part of her PhD at Stanford. (Map of the Month examined some of Munzner's work from 1996 in an earlier article, Internet Arcs Around The Globe.)
White House Caught Doctoring "Mission Accomplished" Video
A sharp eyed observer catches the WHite House croping out "Mission Accomplished"
Apparently the Bush administration has taken the Winston Churchill quote "History is written by the victors" into the video age. The official White House website is now sporting a very different version of President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech. In this exclusive video, Inside Minnesota Politics' Mike McIntee shows how the "Mission Accomplished" banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln has apparently been crudely cropped out of the video.
Power up: Ferrari, in a big change, puts the engine of the 599 GTB up front.
My heart is thumping. I press the brake, punch the red
ignition button on the steering wheel and the engine revs with a roar
that has literally been composed by sound engineers to purr and growl
differently at each setting. I go first with the automatic-transmission
choice -- yes, there's a choice -- and we glide into Beverly Hills,
Calif., traffic.
Then, I venture into the six-gear manual transmission
and the car mothers me: It downshifts when it sees fit. There's no
stick shift and no clutch to push -- just two finger-operated paddles
by the steering wheel that serve to shift down (left paddle) and up
(right paddle). An LED panel on the steering wheel flashes a warning if
the revolutions-per-minute near the 8,400 red line...
Ferrari buffs say this car is groundbreaking, with its
620-horsepower V12 engine installed up front to more evenly distribute
weight. This is an innovation over the rear-engine Ferraris that I'm
told make driving in Beverly Hills traffic much like guiding a bronco
through a rodeo chute. The engine placement allows the car to sit up
higher off the ground, making it easier to get into and out of -- in a
skirt (though I felt more comfortable in pants). This is supposed to
make the 599 the first Ferrari to appeal to women and less
race-oriented drivers. I'm thinking of it as the soccer moms' Ferrari.
Pretty hot wheels.
Sources: Just Off the Boat From Italy We Jump the Waiting List For the $265,000 Ferrari; CHRISTINA BINKLEY WSJ, October 27, 2006; Page W1 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116191181858805527.html
U.S. has bungled its moral leadership, Amanpour says
click for Video
Christiane Amanpour, chief international correspondent for CNN, delivered the first annual Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture on Oct. 17 in Kresge Auditorium. In her talk, “Journalism and the World,” Amanpour reflected on the media coverage of international issues since 9/11 and the Bush administration’s failures in Iraq. The lecture series has been established in memory of Daniel Pearl, who graduated from Stanford in 1985 with a bachelor's degree in communication, and was kidnapped and killed in Pakistan in 2002 while researching a story on Islamic militants for the Wall Street Journal.
The United States edition of the October 2, 2006 issue of Newsweek features a radically different cover story from its International counterparts, RAW STORY has learned.
The cover of International editions, aimed at Europe, Asia, and Latin America, displays in large letters the title "LOSING AFGHANISTAN," along with an arresting photograph of an armed jihadi.
The cover of the United States edition, in contrast, is dedicated to celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz and is demurely captioned "My Life in Pictures."
The International cover story begins:
"You don't have to drive very far from Kabul these days to find the Taliban. In Ghazni province's Andar district, just over a two-hour trip from the capital on the main southern highway, a thin young man, dressed in brown and wearing a white prayer cap, stands by the roadside waiting for two NEWSWEEK correspondents. It is midday on the central Afghan plains, far from the jihadist-infested mountains to the east and west. Without speaking, the sentinel guides his visitors along a sandy horse trail toward a mud-brick village within sight of the highway. As they get closer a young Taliban fighter carrying a walkie-talkie and an AK-47 rifle pops out from behind a tree. He is manning an improvised explosive device, he explains, in case Afghan or U.S. troops try to enter the village."
The United Story cover story begins:
"Annie Leibovitz is tired and nursing a cold, and she' s just flown back to New York on the red-eye from Los Angeles, where she spent two days shooting Angelina Jolie for Vogue. Like so many of her photo sessions, there was nothing simple about it. 'I talked with Angelina before the shoot,' says Leibovitz, who's famous for her preparation. 'She felt like she was coming back from having the baby and she felt very sexy and ready to go.' ... There were 50 people on the set, and racks of clothes from the New York spring collections to be tried and styled."
As an American, I am insulted that I am thought of as too squeemish to see this cover, while for the rest of the world, its fine:
Created back in Japan’s Edo period (1603-1867), the first Sunday in April sees hundreds of people go to the Kanamara Shrine in the south of Tokyo for a spring fertility festival.
The Japanese legend had a demon which hid inside a young girl and castrated two young men on their wedding nights -- a blacksmith fashioned an iron phallus, which the demon broke his teeth on. Thus, the enshrinement of the steel penis.
![[Ferrari]](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/WK-AH837_DRIVEB_20061026164752.jpg)
![[A side view of the 2007 599 GTB Fiorano]](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/WK-AH863_ferrar_20061026184116.jpg)
Ferrari buffs say this car is groundbreaking, with its
620-horsepower V12 engine installed up front to more evenly distribute
weight. This is an innovation over the rear-engine Ferraris that I'm
told make driving in Beverly Hills traffic much like guiding a bronco
through a rodeo chute. The engine placement allows the car to sit up
higher off the ground, making it easier to get into and out of -- in a
skirt (though I felt more comfortable in pants). This is supposed to
make the 599 the first Ferrari to appeal to women and less
race-oriented drivers. I'm thinking of it as the soccer moms' Ferrari.
Hysterical:
