Thursday, March 23, 2006

A Festive Time of Year

It's Jazz Festival time at the college; as you may know from the sidebar, this year's guests are the esteemed trumpeter Bobby Shew and local drumset hero Mike Drake. Tomorrow's concert, featuring the college faculty combo with our two guests, starts at 8:00 (the school's Jaztet One opens), as does Saturday night's concert, which includes the college big band and the Texas Instruments Jazz Band, both with Bobby Shew. (Saturday is also the awards presentation, as a number of high school--and even a few middle school--jazz bands will be performing during the day; this concert is quite likely to be sold out for that reason, so if you want to see Bobby, I'd encourage you to come tomorrow.)

The festival will "own" me from about tomorrow afternoon through all of Saturday (my first band to judge will play at 8:15 on Saturday morning), so posting will resume after that; I've started the final chapter of the New Orleans trip series, and I'll finish that later as well.

Oh, and thanks to UNT prof John Murphy for turning my shameless plug about the concert on the Green Room forum into a post on the beta version of the new UNT jazz studies website.

That's a lot of excess baggage you're carrying there: Did the airlines lose your luggage last year? You're not alone; a recent study found that they lost over thirty million bags in 2005, and 200,000 of them were never found.

It was for a science experiment, I swear: A Virginia teacher was arrested after he allegedly gave a student some pot.

Dutch treat? Anyone who wishes to immigrate to the Netherlands has to watch a racy movie as part of an extensive testing process to see if the would-be immigrants are "ready to participate" in the Dutch culture.

A Dutch not-so-treat: Speaking of the Netherlands, one family has, for the second straight year, received a bill for the nation's "dog tax." The only problem is, the family doesn't own a dog; they just have a barking doorbell, bought in honor of their German shepherd, which died years ago. (Cool word of the day: the Dutch dog tax is called the "hondenbelasting.")

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