https://youtu.be/6QHposMOOzc “Brilliant Corners,” Monk’s “unplayable” tune—his one recording of it, back in the Fifties, required twenty takes, and, even then, required some primitive surgery to come up with an “acceptable” version. Stanislaus Loken does the arrangement here, featuring three trombones. I can’t resist that. Can you? More versions here. Clarinet – Andrew Conrad; Alto Sax…
Pseudo New Yorker
Legal humor here. “OK. We’re not going to end up like those people in “Lost.” Do you have any expectations beyond that?” “‘Meet the new guard, same as the old guard.’ That’s getting a little old.” “I think it’s a vast improvement. Remember the weekends? It used to be hell.” “I don’t mind bribing him…
Alan Vanneman, percipience personified, when not entirely out to lunch
Or asleep at the wheel. You’d think that a dude who has been monitoring the mouth and brain of Supreme Court Justice Antonin “Nino” Scalia as assiduously as I have might have noticed that El Nino published a book last month. But I didn’t. The New York Times, which I also monitor rather assiduously, was…
Workers of the World, Unite!
Over at Reuters, Felix Salmon gets into it over the seemingly esoteric topic of whether the “Uber” rent-a-limo folks have an economic justification for charging customers an $8 base fee plus $3.95 a mile for a Lincoln town car, compared to a base of $5 plus $3.25 a mile for a Prius. Previously, Uber had…
Joe Walsh, probably not a true hero
Freshman Republican Congressman Joe Walsh (IL) has a problem. His Democratic opponent is Tammy Duckworth, former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, who retired after losing both legs when her helicopter was hit by an RPG in Iraq, while Joe never served. What to do? Attack the colonel for having a big mouth! “Understand something…
Mississippi being Mississippi
Yes, there are a lot of nice people in Mississippi, but Roy Nicholson, Chairman of the Mississippi Tea Party, isn’t one of them. Reacting to the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act, Nicholson went ballistic in a truly southern manner: “With its 5-4 ruling upholding Obamacare the US Supreme Court has joined…
Pseudo New Yorker
Legal humor here. “Wow. This one takes me back. ‘New boy in town,’ that pretty much says it. Lots of hair, not many inhibitions.” “Okay, this is from my first race for citywide comptroller. Obviously, I had found my voice. I never looked back, and neither have the voters.” “New York, 1998, Givenchy….
More on the ACA
Over at Salon, Paul Campos advances the argument, using Scalia’s dissent to the Court’s decision upholding most of the Affordable Care Act, that Roberts made a last-minute switch. He doesn’t follow David Bernstein in making dark accusations regarding “unidentified circles” that supposedly leaned on Roberts to come around or the “heat” supposedly applied by President…
Alan Vanneman, Percipience Personified
Mere hours ago, I wrote, of Supreme Court Justice Antonine Scalia’s furious, even frumious, dissent in Arizona v. United States, “One can even hope—and this is probably nonsense, and will probably be exposed as nonsense at 10 o’clock this morning—that his fulmination was sparked in part by frustration over his brethren’s refusal to overturn the…
The Washington Post surprises me
Since I’ve gone out of my way to make fun of the Washington Post on numerous occasions, I guess it’s only right for me to provide a little praise when praise is due. Well, here’s some praise: the Post’s recent editorial on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s gross and unseemly posturing was spot on. Although…