FlaSoxxJim

Oh yeah? sez you!

My assumption is that scheherazadian would mean like Scheherazad in nature, ala' Orwellian (disutopian future scenario), Capraesque ("Wonderful Life"/"Mr. Smith goes to Washington" kind of little-guy-against-the-world). Scheherazade was the storytelling sultan's wife in Arabian Nights, so a scheherazadian novel, for example, would be one that weaves story after story, parable after parable, etc., to further the plot and characters. Jesus, with his 1001 parables, could be said to have been scheherazadian I would venture. I see that the winning word was "autocthonous," which I got a huge kick out of (as much as a word can give you) because it is a great limnological term central to a classroom lecture I just gave this spring. It reers to matter (typically organic) thaat originates from within a given ecological system rather than being transported into it - that term, of course, is "allochthonous." We biologists love our jargon.

Guinness, actually But I'm glad I can't get in trouble for beer infidelity because I like to play the field too.

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20040603_793.html

Hamm's Genuine Draft (or 'draft in a can' or whatever they called it) preceeded the 1997 acquisition by Miller I think. It would have been under Stroh's from the mid-80s until then. They had done the 'keg can' draft tie-in thing well before that in the early to mid 70s, but I'm sure they also jumped quickly on the success of MGD (still brewed exclusively at the NC plant where it started I believe). Just like there was the glut of 'dry' beers, the glut of 'ice' beers, now tythe glut of 'lo-carb' beers - the megas are not a highly original bunch.

Responses in chaotic order, as I'm off to work shortly. Vee Jay did release a US "Please Please Me" single - 3 times in fact. The first was right on the pulse of things, Feb 1962, but it failed to chart. The release you are talking about was two weeks after IWTHYH, on Jan 30 1964 - right on the cusp of the US arrival. It hit #3 and stayed there, while IWTHYH remained at #1 for 7 weeks. Everything you say about the momentousness of IWTHYH vs. Please Please Me is true - a safe-as-milk (if doubletime) harmonica intro compared to the still-reverberating through history 'dunh dunh dunh.... Dunh Dunh Dunh.... DUNH DUNH DUNH!!!! that starts the song says it all. You were more on the ball than many of the consumers of the day, and Capitol hated you for it. They did not release the "Early Beatles" as a collection of contemporary recordings, true, but at the same time they understated it's 'rarity' aspects for the sake of selling as many units of that as of everything else. Hearing the Vee Jay album 10 days before Meet The Beatles would not really have given you a true perspective of the chronology of events either, certainly. Only looking back now on how they had completely steamrolled the UK before coming over here could do that. I never suggested that releasing only one catalog or the other WAS the right choice, as I never felt it was. But I do understand it. I've read 4 or 5 essays over the years from audiophile Beatle people that go on as to why the "official" CD release didn't even represent the EMI/Parlaphone history the best way possible. I've read easily twice that in people arguing back and forth about what an 'authoritative' US cCD catalog would be. Truth is, I don't own the CD catalog. I own BOTH complete official catalogs on LP, spent years and $$$ in my youth tracking them down at Beatlefests, and more years doing just what you suggest - listening to both catalogs side-by-side. My turntable's pre-amp has crapped out on me so I'm in quite a quandry now. CDs will never get it right insofar as A/B sides will never be the same. **IWTHYH IS a very real part of the UK release chronology - it's just a single not an LP. I already suggested they had to be taken as a single body in the UK at least through 1965. As far as not being on an album, neither are the Sullivan shows, the rooftop concert, etc... But it doesn't make them any less important in the misical evolution/chronology of the group or the phenomenon. MOI "Freak Out": Not a better or more important album than Pepper. Zappa just completely understood the importance of the LP as THE medium before the Beatles did. History allows that to be seen after the fact, despite the relatively local impact (at the time) of Freak Out, and the flaws and warts of the album itself.

Ah, the beer "From the Land of Sky Blue Water", the "Paws of Refreshment", and all that. Actually, it's not an easy question to answer, Apu. Hamm's has probably been brewed in more different places by more different breweries than any other American regional beer. Since it began in St. Paul in 1865, the Hamm's family sold tthe brand to Heublein, who I think sold it to Seven Dwarfs, then Olympia, then it went to Pabst who gave it to Stroh's.... I think Heilmann's was in there somewhere, I forget. Anyway, Stroh had taken over the original Hamm's brewery in St. Paul, but closed it in 1997. Miller now owns the brand and they DID regularly produce it until the beginning of last year (2003), in WA State at the old Tumwater Brewery where Olympia began. Miller laid everone off and closed Tumwater a year ago January (that was the last of the old NW regional breweries to close its doors, so it was the end of an era). I believe production of Hamm's has been very irregular - if at all - since then. They have seven regional breweries in operation (including the once family-owned Leinie brewery in WI, friggin' Miller rat bastards), but Hamm's doesn't appear to be in regular production at any of them. I'm sure it will remain in at least intermittent production in some form because the name brand recognition and history of the product is huge. http://www.bevmo.com would be the place to keep on the lookout for it. Of course, they now list it as 'temporarily out of stock,' likely reflecting the brewery limbo situation described above. I'd give them a call direct and see what they can tell you. Happy hunting at any rate. Yours, the Beer Geek

UK versus US, re the Beatles releases. Uh, the age-old debate continues. I hope Aboz chimes in as well, but here’s my take. I’ve said before that I’ve had this discussion with another good friend who, like you, lived it and experienced it. For you, nothing will supplant the first-hand experience. And I envy you that. As for the importance of the American fan response as the true catalyst of Beatlemania, that is undeniable. In Rock and Roll and pop culture, as goes America… My geek analogy: various lowly species of fungus happily manufactured penicillin for literally hundreds of millions of years before we discovered it and it changed the face of medicine. It was important for all those hundreds of millions of years, as a chemical defense for the fungi. But as far as we humans are concerned it only hit the big time when we realized just what it was. It took America to realize just what the Beatles were. At the same time, I earnestly believe your first-hand experience with the US single and LP releases will always make it difficult to pursue the matter from a more academic standpoint. You said as much in discussing contemporary views of operatic works and them high-fallutin’ theological types versus more scholarly opinions formed with the benefit of temporal perspective and a clearer view of the big picture. The US releases - singles and LPs - stand as a permanent record of how American audiences experienced the music. But they do not give provide the correct sequence to fully appreciate the musical progression of the group. Nor do they provide the true perspective of what Epstein, Martin, and later, the Beatles themselves thought constituted their art AS THEY SAW FIT. It has stuck with me from the first time I saw that goddamn snow shovel hanging from the ceiling at the Art Institute as a teenager, that it is the ARTIST that gets to frame his art, gets to tell the audience where the art begins and ends. It is, of course, up to the audience to decide if the art has meaning for them, but it is not up to them to delimit the art. Aboz already noted that the Beatles were regularly surprised – and alternately amused and enraged – when they saw the track selections and order on the US releases. That tells me that what was received by American audiences was an approximation of the art that the group and its manager and producer intended. Not that the folks putting together the Capitol releases didn’t get it right quite often – if the American fan response can be taken as an indication. Then again, the brain trust (at Capitol refused to release a US version of “Please Please Me” (LP), despite it’s breaking all prior chart longevity records in the UK, leading to some rather unfortunate chronological song release anomalies in the US catalog (see below). So go figure. But, back to my earlier point that the order in which you would have encountered the songs as a typical American listener is not as musicologically/academically meaningful as if you were to have taken in the UK EMI/Parlaphone releases instead. As a Midwestern kid, You may have been among the very few who would have encountered the stuff on (Chicago-based) Vee Jay’s Introducing he Beatles before you got a hold of Meet the Beatles (released 10 days later). Most American fans did not, however. That is not such a big deal in and of itself. After all, the Beatles hit America when the Beatles hit America. But, most of ‘Introducing’ had been turning the UK on its ear – as the core contents of the “Please Please Me” LP, released in March of 1963, topping the charts shortly thereafter and remaining at number one for 29 weeks! Clearly there was a Beatlemania in the UK that preceded that in the US by a year (counting the “Please Please Me” single release), and that is entirely musically relevant. In the states, you either heard these songs at around the same time as the “Meet the Beatles” material, if you were lucky. But you could not ever get a feel for the true chronology of the music or the musicianship that way. If you were not lucky, you FINALLY got most of the (1963-era) “Please Please Me” material on the wide-release Capitol “Early Beatles.” This was released on 3/22/65 – two years to the day AFTER “Please Please Me” (LP) was released in the UK, AND after FOUR Capitol (or United Artists) albums of new material (THE BEATLES' SECOND ALBUM, A HARD DAY'S NIGHT, SOMETHING NEW, BEATLES ´65) had already been digested by the American audience. There is nothing musically or historically authoritative about this release sequence. And in fact, I know many people hearing “Anna” and “Chains” et al. after hearing “I’m a Loser” or “I Feel Fine”(!) instead of two years before did not know what to make of it. Cutting to the chase. The decision to go with the EMI/Parlaphone catalog as the official catalog when the CD releases came out was the right decision (IF only one catalog was to be released). It was the right decision not just because it was the LPs the Beatles intended to make and release, but also because it represents a more complete/cohesive and chronologically correct record of the musical output of the group. That doesn’t demean the American experiential importance of the domestic catalog; it only holds the UK releases up as being THE authoritative source if you are interested in the musical evolution of he group and not the American cultural perception of the work. As far as your “I Want To Hold Your Hand” question, yes it is a trick question. Again, it has everything to do with the Beatles taking America when the Beatles took America. The song was released at the end of November 1963 in the UK, entered the charts at #1 and stared there for 6 weeks. It was released in the US in mid-January (3 weeks before the band’s arrival in the states - talk about good timing), quickly charted and stayed at #1 for 7 weeks. Epstein had to convince Capitol the song was recorded specifically with the "American Sound" in mind, and of course he was feeding them a line. So then, the song did not appear on a UK LP, being recorded after the release of “With the Beatles,” and then the band having to take time out from recording to conquer America and all that, before returning to put out the next LP, “A Hard Day’s Night”. Unlike how you portray the 45s as being the experiential bellweathers for tthe US audience uup until Pepper, in the UK the 45 and LP releases through 1965 were perfectly orchestrated to allow one to parlay into the other. As soon as the "Please Please Me" single slipped from #1, for example, the LP release was ruch released (and yes, it was recorded in ite entirety in a single session in about 13 hours - frigging amazing). If “Komme, Ggib Mir Deine Hand” counts, then the first UK LP release it appears on is the UK version of ‘Rarities’ I believe. As far as Pepper being the LP that gave LPs preeminence in rock music, I’ll disagree and give the nod to Frank and MOIs “Freak Out.” But I guess that is another discussion.

It won't be, and it shouldn't be, based on today's performance alone. Cap nailed it - NOBODY stepped up when we needed it today. I lost count of the runners we stranded. A couple broken bat hits and a pitch in the dirt is a tough way to send a game into extras, and two walkoffs in two days is not easy to swallow. But those who want to hang the whole thing on Koch didn't pay attention to the first 8 innings of the game.

Only this time, nobody in the clubhouse accused Magglio of taking a powder, just some of the fickle crew on SoxTalk.

Hey, who let the optimist onto Soxtalk...? You are right of course. But, to paraphrase Joyce (a full two weeks before the Bloomsday centennial too, mea culpa)... Being Sox Fans, we have an abiding sense of tragedy that sustains us through brief periods of joy...

On hearing the prognosis for Magglio, I'd say we still have problems. I'm fleetingly happy over the Twinks loss today though. D-Rays.

Damn. Juan has cooled off a bit the last two games or so. Bot10

sac bunt

4 hit day for Crede! Let's take advantage of it Jose!

Willie!!!!!

Damn, force at 2nd gone...

Ball 2... Shut them down here!

Damn!

passed ball or wild pitch??

I've not openly bashed him all year, but that doesn't mean I've gotten comfortable with him either. That said, DO IT BILLY!!!

Foul out!

lead off single

no leadoff walk please!