FlaSoxxJim

Roy tried to force the issue last year, and several years earlier as well the first time Roy left the board. This time around it centered around Disney's stupid mandatory retirement age which meant Roy had to go based on his age. I think the pairing is somewhat better than AOL/Time-Warner, because you have at least two bricks and mortar institutions and not a bunch of virtual assets like AOL. I just think that Disney/ABC/ESPN/GoNetwork has already spread itself out as an entertainment juggernaut to the detriment of its core animation/family film and theme park operations. There used to be a day when competition actually spurred companies to make a better in-house product. Now it's easier just to buy up all competing interests so there is no competition and no reason to put out a quality product. Walt himself was no saint, despite the corporate spin to the contrary. He was a bear to work for, was a puritanical father with some freaky mother issues, and was not all that generous an employer. But he was completely involved in every animated feature right up until Cinderella (when Disneyland took up more of his time), and then again in the features of the 60s right up until he died during production of Jungle Book. His role as a central visionary is what allowed almost impossible film projects to get done. Glenn Keane may have been the closest thing to filling those shoes, but as a Directing animator he had enough other duties that allowed him to work on only every second or third film. Plus I don't think he was nearly as agile and fluid in jumping styles as Walt was. I had high hopess for Chris Sanders from the Florida group to really become a visionary for the animation studios, but I don't know how he is going to gel with the Burbank group.

Eisner is sucking the creative life out of the company right now. Between closing the Orlando animation studio and not being able to get things squared aqay with Steve Jobs and Pixar, they lost 2/3 of their animation muscle in a less than 2 week period. I don't like the idea of a ComCast takeover, but Eisner needs to go. If he was voted out several years ago, then Jeff Katzenburger (sp?) would pprobably not have initiated the first creative brain drain that gave rise to Dreamworks SKG.

Nothing against Tennent's per se, Soxy, but Scotland has much better to offer. I think it's a near-abomination of the Natural Order for lagers to be brewed in the UK - British Real Ale has a hard enough time surviving in the pubs with all the imported lagers. Scottish ales tend to be a little darker, sweeter, and often more alcoholic than the pub bitters from England. Scotland is just a little too far north to be good for hop growing, so most of the hops have traditionally been purchased from the hop growers in Kent. To keep production costs down, the beers are generally underhopped, leading to the sweet malt-accented flavor. The higher alcohol of the "80 shilling" offerings all the way up to Scotch ales (usually called "wee heavies" - I love that name!) is understandable given the percieved warming effect of alcohol and the climate of the country. Truly, I'm not knocking your liking of Tennent's, it's quite well made. I'm just encouraging you to be a little more adventurous if you ever have anyone willing to bring you back beer from Scotland. I'll give you my list if you need one! Oh, and don't even gt me thinking about the pure rapture that is the single malt Scotches from Islay and some of the coastal distillers... YUMMMM!

I am not very happy with Panther so far, as much as was digging Jaguar (10.2). Th edefault securiuty settings are a major PITA and I have not figgured out how to set the security level to administrator throughout. I have to enter a password to move files and stuff. I stuck with OS 9 on most of my machines for a whole year after OS X was released because some multimedia authoring software I rely on heavily took so long to go Carbon. I have now come to like X enough that it's painful to have to work in Classic on anything, but I still think they did some screwy stuff with the new upgrade. It could be worse, though, I could be doing time chained to the "cheap iron" (i.e., Wintel boxes). So, anyway, what would you get if you crossed my Mac with my ex-girlfriend? That's right... a computer that NEVER GOES DOWN!

I seriously need to take a sabatical and get up to speed on Flash animation and programming. About half of my professional time is spent doing educational authoring in Director, Macromedia's other flagship product. Since most of what I do is CD-ROM or kiosk-delivered, bandwidth consideratiosn were never an issue so I wasnot an early adopter of Flash. But now that the Macromedia MX titles have merged a litle more, and Director's Lingo programming language allows such fin-tuned control of Flash objects, it's become quite a liability that I'm so Flash-illiterate. I just fought through a Flash issue to get a pdf browser button panel created in Flash into a Director project that does some neat pdf file manipulations. When I animate in Director, I still do mostly old school sprite-based animation so I'm still pushing pixels instead of manipulating vectors. The whole "old dog, new tricks" thing I guess, but I have to get up to speed on Flash for my own good. Plus, maybe I can get good enough to land a sweet Quiznos Subs commercial gig like the "I Like the Moon!" dude.

It's good to warm my bones beside the fire.

You have to actually have to know what is in your water before you can determine if a cheap inline filter is going to make it drinkable. Brittas and the like are fine for removing most chlorine/chloramine (Britta scrubs about 75% of that according to the manufacturer) and lead (Britta scrubs 90+% of that). But Brittas and other cheap options do NOT remove pathogen cysts (resting stages), many microbes, or most of the industrial contaminants like THMs, VOCs, atrazine, benzine, MTBEs etc., so if that's where your home water problems lie you have to spend way more on remediating the problems. Radon and cadmium wouldn't be removed either, and I've seen various claims as to arsenic. The cheap filters can give a false sense of security because they are not up front about all the nasty stuff they DON'T remove. MTBEs in particular are going to become an increasing headache, and they are going to very soon uncover a lot of groundwater contamination in the petroleum refining states. Those aquifers may be deemed unfit for human use in some already water-strapped states. It's no wonder the MTBEs are looking to make sure the limited liability provisions remain intact in the current ugliness known as the energy bill.

The Midieval monks beat me to it. Most of the brewing monastaries that got their start in the Middle Ages did so because of the health benefits of "liquid bread" (beer), as opposed to the dubious surface waters of the day. This was back in the days when nobody knew anything about microbial contamination, before microscopes were even imagined. But, the heat used in the brewing process killed pathogens in the source water, and the alcohol in the beer they produced was sufficient to keep the beer from becoming secondarily infected. On top of that, a high gravity all grain beer was sustaining, and the liquid bread moniker was appropriate. Middle Age spiritual pilgrims who wound up on monastary doorsteps could be offered a safe, sustaining alternative to contaminated water sources. Beer. It's what's for dinner. (Apologies to the Beef people)

That's usually 100% covered by your auto insurance, because it is a potential safety issue. It's such a racket with auto glass companies fighting for the business down here (so they can submit inflated bills to the insurance companies) that usually you can even find a glass company that throws in a box of steaks or something to get you to use them. I wonder if there is a higher % of suspicious cracked windows during peak BBQ season...?

Get a Mac?

Arguably?? There's no argument.

Free Four - Obscured by Clouds Se Emily Play - 1967 single. Not enough people know the Barret-era stuff. Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With A Pict - Ummagumma. Great song title to give the other team when playing charades I like a lot of stuff from their impressive discography, but I make a point of not even listening to any of the post-Waters stuff amd cut it off at The Final Cut. It's not that I think Waters was the band or anything at the time, but all the more recent stuff just sounds sooo self-derivative, like Gilmour just stopped trying very hard.

As has already been noted here, literally volumes have been written on ths subject. It can barely be touched on here. But what the heck, off the top of my head... Musically alone, they ushered in the Brit Revolution, helped people cross over into more folk-oriented stuff, introduced a wider world to sitar and Indian musical motifs, released the first "concept album" and simultaneously set off the "Summer of Love" with Sgt. Pepper, showed people just how a 4-track recorder could indeed be used to layer complex multitrack recordings with the same release.... The guitar-oriented, catchy-harmonied, stupidly peppy broken-heart "power pop" genre was born in the Beatles. Paul changed the way the bass giutar is approached as a rock instrument. New technologies were unveiled with their performances, like "All You Need Is Love" being broadcast to more than 350 million viewers worldwide as the first large-scale satellite television broadcast. Dylan notwithstanding, the Beatles were the ones to demonstrated that music could be a social force. The Our World broadcast, John and Yoko's "Bed-In For Peace," the contribution to the WWF benefit album, George's Concert for Bangladesh. Musical muscle lent to socially relevant causes was not a common thing before the Beatles. People like James Taylor (a favorite George's and part of the original non-Beatle stable of Appel Records recording artists) may neevr hav ebeen brought to a larger audience. The Rolling Stones didn't bother writing their own stuff until they got the inspiration from the Beatles, and early on had a couple UK hits like "I Wanna Be Your Man" from somgs written by Lennon-McCartney. Ditto for Petula Clark and Cecilia Black (I know..who?).

Me again, Wino. You have me stumped as far as a "Revolution 1" being on a Hey Jude EP. You have me intrigued. The US Hey Jude album (aka "The Beatles Again") had the suped up electric version, titled "Revolution," while it was the 'White Album' (both US an UK versions) that had "Revolution 1". The latter one was the slower "shoo-be-do-wap-oh" version. There are no official "Hey Jude" EP releases as far as I can tell. I have the complete UK EP collection packed away back north, but I'm certain there is not a Hey Jude EP in that lot (which makes sense since the Hey Jude album was a US release). The last US EP from the original run was in 1965, so that doesn't fit either. Hey Jude/Revolution (not Rev1) was the lineup of the single released in 1968, but I'll be damned if I can find any solid lead on an Extended Play release. Can you shed some light ("inner" or otherwise, ala the other 1968 single, Lady Madonna/Inner Light)? Sorry, I'm a complete vinyl Beatles geek and it will drive me nuts otherwise.

I like the World Wildlife Fund benefit album's version of Across the Universe best of all the officially released versions, an like that version of revolution a lot, too. But, for sustained musical intensity, the sonic grandeur sandwiched in Between "Here Comes the Sun" and "Her Majesty" is hard to top.

Nice work indeed.

You haven't seen today's news then. Or else you are in on it and are playing dumb, hmmm?

Oh, THAT kind of 'colon.' I thought you were referring to the Colon cleansing that extricated Bart from the Sox roster this off season.

I might just have to agree with you there. TheY went out with a bang and NOT a wimper.

You are the only other person on this thread to mention the Critic. I was a big fan and I think that it was the only prime time animated series to come close to the best Simpsons stuff in terms of clever writing. I like most of the shows mentioned, including Family Guy, but I think the Critic and King of the Hill are funnier shows with the humor operating on a few different levels. They all have their running gags. One I particularly liked from the Critic was seeing Jay's kid's friends from the UN school - Klingon kids and big stone0headed Easter Island kids, etc. The Holywood send-ups were always good, and Jay's job as a film critic gave the writers an easy way to work a lot of those kinds of things in every episode. Glad to hear these are out on DVD, now I know what to ask for for my birthday.

My bad, it is indeed Winwood. But I don't think he has gone by "Stevie" since his days with the Spencer Davis Group. Major cool points if you recalled that Steve's brother Muff Winwood was also in that original 1963 SDG lineup. The Blind Faith shows must have been something, I'm jealous. As far as all the things that did line up right to allow the Beatles to take off, I do think that the cloud that America was in at the time of their arrival was an important part of the mix. Having lived through it, you know a lot more how the older generation reacted to the groups first appearance, but I know Sullivan's stamp of approval carried some sway with those adult squares. There has been so much revisionist history concerning those early weeks, when a lot of newspapers and music critics did dismiss the Beatles and had to backpeddle and eat crow when the band stuck to the wall. Anyway, we all know it was Murry the K that single-handedly made the Betles, right?

I'll stand by my claim - no vocal range. Strong voice? Yes, over time he has developed a competent singing voice, but his range is limited, not unlike a lot of blues guys. "Would you know my name..." I can hear that line in me head, and playing it here on the piano, the highest note in the song (would you KNOW MY name..) is an E above middle C. Hardly operatic vocal dynamics. And note who got the hard vocal part in the duet with Baby Face? All the inferred high vocals in the stuff from the 70s came from Tvonne Elleman (sp?) and the other fine backing vocalists from the Slowhand/Sunset Blvd./Backless days.

I'll take the time to respond to more of this in a bit, and I highly regard EC, but better than the Beatles vocally? What are you smoking? Just today I was listening to the live "Concert for George" CD, and McCartney and Clapton do a cdover of "Something" on there. Paul sings the line in the first verses where there is no harmony, and then as soon as the harmonized 3rd verse begins, it's PAUL that takes the harmony and Eric singing the lead line because Eric, bell his chinless hear, HAS NO VOCAL RANGE! Jack Bruce took on vocal chores for anything needing a stretch of anything more than an octave in Cream, and Jackie Lomax, Steve Windwood, etc., sung anything requiring vocal range on the Derek and the Dominos and Blind Faith offerings. I'll concede EC is a better singer than Ringo. Barely. At his best, he can't hold a candle to any of the other three. Note I'm not calling you out on the better guitarist claim. I think George was the more interesting guitarist, but Clapton is Clapton after all.

That's what makes it so amazing, that four "just people," flesh and blood, kill-able by bullets and cancer, etc., could come together and put the world on its ear the way they did. It's all the more remarkable that the four in question did not come together from the far corners of the world; they were born and grew upo within 10 miles of one another in the same, sooty industrial northern English town, met each other on schooltards and at church skiffle competitions. There is a commonly heard 'right place/right time' rationalization that the world was ready for something and, if not the Beatles, somebody else would have filled the gap. The time was right, and America and the world needed something in the months following JFK's assassination. The stagnant West Coast sound of the Beach Boys and their clones wasn't cutting it, nor newer American 60s bands like the Four Seasons. But the void would have gone unfilled if not for the Beatles. Add to the mix, Epstein, George Martin, Hamburg, side sessions with Tony Sheridan and fierce competition with other progenitors of the Mersey Sound, etc., because without any of those elements it wouldn't have turned out the same. As much talent, drive, and inventiveness as they had, the Beatles would not have succeded had they not honed their skills and their friendships through a year and a half tour of duty in the Cavern Club in Hamburg's red light district. 12 hour shifrts, six days a week - hour long sets interspersed with hour breaks (during which the lads drank, smoked, screwed, and contracted most of Europe's STDs). Instead of playing the same sets over and over, they pushed, learned new material, retooled harmonies, ditched non-musician Stu Sutcliff made Paul the bassist. In the process, they were already becoming way more than the sum pf their parts. I think it can truthfully be agrued that the Beatles wouldn't have conquered America as readily as they did had Kennedy not been killed. Capital and Vee Jay had released limited press domestic Beatles records, but they were not really pushing them. Then, Epstein makes teh trip to the US prior to the Beatles, foes over the heads of the A&R guys and tell the top execs he has a can't-miss group. Somehow, he convinces the right people. Then the Beatles arrive and it turns out they are not just musicians but the whole package. Infectious personalities, wit and charm, enough hair and confidence to suggest a little danger but not enough to stop parents from also being glued to the tv sets - lovable bad boys. Moptops. Heck yeah, it's astounding that a group at the heart of this mania could transcend the screaming girls and generally dismissive press, and not just be a flash in the pan ala' any number of others. But they had the talent, drive, inventiveness, and solid friendship to make it happen. It's special precicely because they WERE just people. All had successful post-Beatles careers, but alone the parts never could be equal to the whole. Unlike cw and a couple of others, my experience of the Beatles is second-hand like most on the board. I was born three weeks before Sgt. Pepper was released, and I was three when they split. I did not witness Sullivan or Beatlemania, and when I(!) first 'discovered' the Beatles I was pretty impressed that a lot of other peolpe seemed to like them too.