It's A Dog's Life Flight, and Other Stories

Some random thoughts from the whirlwind trip to Cleveland:

• The flight up there was...interesting. It was one of thsoe "regional jets" with one seat on one side of the aisle and two on the other. I had the "C" seat--the window seat of the set of two--and when I got there, a haggard-looking woman was in my seat. She was wrapped up in blankets, trembling, sniffling...she pretty much looked half-dead. I was almost reluctant to ask her to move, but I did request the window seat, so I politely pointed out that the "C" seat was mine.
  
  Once the flight started, it was obvious that she was a "crowder"--she kept stretching her legs out so that they touched mine and almost looked like she was going to fall asleep on my shoulder a few times. I was reluctant to catch whatever might be ailing her, so I had to sit in this awful, convoluted position for most of the three hours. But the kicker came about two hours into the flight, when I noticed the main reason she was under all thsoe blankets: She had smuggled a small dog aboard the plane in her carry-on bag! To the dog's credit, it didn't bark the whole time, didn't try to lick me when it was uncovered, and I couldn't see--or smell--any evidence of elimination on its part. Still, it was quite surreal when the lady said "ok, time to get back in now" (meaning the carry-on bag) to the dog as we approached the end of the flight.


• From the Cleveland airport, I took the Rapid Transit train downtown. I was born in a suburb of Cleveland, and my grandparents lived in that suburb, so all these memories came flooding back--the street where we'd go from the airport to their house, the street where Mom and Dad had their first apartment after getting married, and so on. And there was a point where the RTA tracks parallelled the "real" railroad tracks for a while. I wondered if Grandpa, who was a railway mail clerk, worked on those same tracks once upon a time.


• I got there too late to go to the Indians game that was part of the convention, but I saw both Jacobs Field and the new Browns stadium up close during my trip. In a way, it's too bad that the Cowboys weren't able to work out a deal for a move to downtown Dallas, because these venues definitely added something to downtown up there.


• As you probably know, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and, much like Dallas has lots of brightly-colored Pegasus statues in honor of that iconic sign atop a downtown building, Cleveland has lots of giant, brightly-painted electric guitars around town, quite a few of which were in our hotel. I got a picture of one of them with my phone and will post it here eventually, once I figure out how to do stuff like that.


• The weather was great; it was in the 60's and somewhat drizzly when I arrived, whch was a nice contrast to the 106-degree days of Texas last week. We went to an outdoor Cleveland Orchestra concert last night, and it was quite pleasant; some people even got a little cold. (Also, on the way to that concert, we arrived at the Blossom Center, a great outdoor amphitheatre, and the bus in front of ours suddenly had smoke start billowing out of it; it turns out that it had totally blown a tire. Better there than at 70 mph, I guess.)


• In the Extreme Irony Department, there was a dog on my row on the way home as well....but this one was in an approved carrier, and I was in the (single) "A" seat, while the dog-owner and her husband were across the aisle.


• In the Small World Department, I saw a guy with a UNT Homecoming '05 shirt in the Tower City food court in Cleveland. Also, the conductor at the Clelveland concert was the musical director of the Ft. Worth Symphony, and several of my fellow Texans remarked at how funny it was to travel a thousand miles and see a guy from your own backyard.


• I noticed something upon both departing and arriving at DFW: There's a cartoon of some guy's head on the back of Alaska Airlines jets; I'm not sure who it's supposed to be, but it looks a lot like the famous Che Guevara image that's on all those T-shirts. Surely it's not, but...who is he?

More later...

Travel Advisory I

Camp was great, but there's no time to rest yet. I'm off to Cleveland in the morning for the tail end of the fraternity convention. When I get back Sunday night, I will have approxmiately twelve hours in town before I fly out again for the big band trip to Washington state. I won't be bringing the laptop this weekend, but it's my plan to do so on the longer trip. It's also my plan to actually get a few hours of sleep before then, assuming my laundry gets done soon. I'll have a quick post Sunday night during what really should be an all-nighter, since our meeting time is so early.

Heath Bars, Part 2: The Even Better Sequel

A few years ago, I got to see Jimmy Heath with the One O'Clock; tonight, I was among those on stage, and it was one of the most amazing musical experiences I've ever had. Since there's one more (rather busy) day of camp, I'll have to tell the whole story later, but read the old post if you haven't done so already, and it will "warm you up" for the story of tonight.

Concert Advisory

It's been the longest day of the week, so there's no real post today save for this: The concert with Jimmy Heath has been moved to Thursday night. He got stuck in New York today when a rolling blackout left his terminal at LaGuardia without power, but happily, he was able to get his flight rescheduled, and he'll be with us in two days. Tomorrow night is THRASCHER night; they're doing the show all by themselves, so if you were intending to head out and hear me, go ahead and wait one more day.

The RAZR's Edge?

From time to time, I poll my readers when I'm contemplating some sort of new technological gizmo, and it's time for another one: I got something in the mail from Cingular a few weeks ago; they're offering me a RAZR phone for fifty bucks. Should I go for it? Why or why not? I realize that I'll miss my righteous texting keyboard that's on my current phone, but the RAZR is pretty cool, and it's about time to re-up and change my calling plan anyway (the current one doesn't roam at all). So I think I'm about to do this unless somebody throws out a compelling reason why I shouldn't do so.

UPDATE (three days later): Got the RAZR. I haven't figured out all its features yet, but I'm enjoying it so far.

Happy camper: Blogging may be sparse this week, as jazz camp has started. The concert at the new amphitheatre went well last night, though it was all kinds of hot out there. Today was a relatively relaxed day of meetings and auditions, and we start out full force tomorrow. I will pop in from time to time with updates here and there.

This Idea Is Gonna Work, By Gum

Everybody seems to have some sort of crazy weight-loss idea, ranging from the practical to the absurd. I certainly realize the best way to accomplish this task: Expend more calories than you take in. You won't see me taking diet pills or using "lose weight while you sleep" cream or any of that stuff, but I do have one little thing that, while it may not actually help me lose weight, will at least help keep there from being any more of me. The unlikely source? Altoids gum.

Here's the thing: I'm sometimes a really bad snacker. Late at night, when I'm sitting here at the computer, I find myself going into the kitchen way too often. Usually it's just a handful of peanuts or maybe a single cookie, but I've come to realize that I can end up doing that on multiple occasions some nights, and I know that's not good for me.

So a few months ago, I spied this little box of gum at the checkout counter at Super Target. I've always liked the Altoids mints, so I figured that I might as well give the gum version a try. But what I also noticed was that if I had the gum in my mouth, it made it virtually impossible to go in there and grab any of that other stuff. And a little while back, when I ran out of the gum and couldn't find it at the checkout counter, the over-snacking resumed. Thankfully, I have the gum again, and sure enough, less snackage occurs now.

I realize I need to get to the gym more (if their hours were more in sync with mine, that'd be great), and I really miss playing racquetball on a weekly basis...and ultimately, more of those two things will mean less of Kev over time. But until then, anything I can do to keep the after-hours intake down will be a good thing.

Anyone else have a weird food-suppressant device you'd like to tell us about?

Another weighty subject: Do you remember the story a while back about the opera singer in England who was fired by the Royal Opera House for being too fat? She got stomach surgery, lost 135 pounds, and now she's gotten her job back. (But I guess those Wagnerian roles with the Viking horns are out of the question now...)

While I Was Out...

I may not have been blogging the past few days, but I've still kept collecting those unusual stories that you usually see at the bottom of every post. Here are the best ones so far; oddly enough, they come in pairs:

Culinary delights, part 1: How about a delicious eel salad to start things off?

Culinary delights, part 2: And you can top it off with a beer float. (And kudos to the inventor; among other things, he opened up a jazz bar that 1) allowed teenagers and 2) didn't allow smoking. Yay for both of those things...)

All in the family, part 1: The husband is a Republican; his wife is a Democrat. They're both running for the same seat in an upcoming Kansas House race. (I guess the header for this could have been "bedfellows make strange politics.")

All in the family, part 2: The president of Poland announced his new appointment for the office of prime minister: His identical twin brother.

Animal stories, part 1: A man in Borneo was convicted of bigamy. His punishment? He was fined a buffalo and a pig.

Animal stories, part 2: Over in Alaska, a dog is running for governor.

With any luck, I'll have a normal post tomorrow.

Adult Homework

I have two reports that absolutely must be done in the early part of this week, so it's time for a bit of forced discipline. As much as I'd like to post, I'll be refraining from doing so until at least one of the reports is done. So if I'm really industrious, I'll be back on here tomorrow night. If not? Wednesday, for sure.

A Little Help For My Friends

I have a gig tonight--you can read about it on the sidebar if you're reading this on the day I'm writing it--but I'm not here to promote it. It's at a really nice, pricey steakhouse, so it's not the kind of place that my usual crowd could just descend upon with the same one day's notice that I had.

But that's OK; if you're in the area and you want to hear live jazz, I'm going to ask you to support my friends tonight instead. My buddy Colin, who's the drummer in every combo that I'm associated with right now, also has his own group. I subbed with them two weeks ago in the newly-reopened-and-renamed Coffee Haus (it's now called the Fusion Cafe) in downtown Plano, and that's where they'll be tonight. There's no cover, but if you go, please buy something; the drinks are quite good, and I want this place to succeed the second time around, and not just because I want to book my own band there. They're playing from 8-10 tonight, and it should be a good time, so help them pack the place. (If the cost of the place where I'm playing isn't a deterrent, you're welcome to come see me, but I think I'm pretty much in the background--designer wallpaper, if you wish. Again, check the sidebar for details.)

I Am a Poet Hermit. I Am Very Fond of Bananas

As it approaches midnight, I realize that today was a very weird day. I didn't drive my car at all. I didn't spend any money. In fact, I didn't even leave the house at all except to get the paper and the mail and to see friends off when they left. Yes, I did have people over, but it was still very odd for me to not participate in any sort of commerce whatsover, especially on a Friday.

But considering all the things that start up at the end of next week (jazz camp, fraternity convention and the college jazz band trip, all back-to-back), I'm not at all complaining about living the hermit's life for one day--especially since I got a gig for tomorrow night, which I'll talk about in the next post. There hasn't been too much "quiet" this summer, so one day of it should do a body good.

Oh, and if you're confused about the title of this post, go here.

Words to your mother: The newest edition of Merriam-Webster's College Dictionary has come out, and as always, they have added several new words. Among this year's entries are unibrow, soul patch, drama queen and google...and yes, executives at the popular search engine are concerned that their company's name will become the generic name for its product, much like Thermos, Xerox, Kleenex and Dumpster have already done.

I wonder if he was listening to "Ride the Lightning" at the time: A teenager in the Denver area is lucky to be alive after being struck by lightning while mowing the lawn wearing his iPod. The current evidently went right up the headphone wires, as his ears, cheeks and side were burned.

Another Cool Class Discussion: Desert Island Week

Last month, we had a cool discussion in the summer evening combo (which I posted about here), where each person in the group was asked to name the one tune in the Real Book that they thought was essential for everyone to know. That generated a really good conversation (as well as the opportunity to play each tune that was contributed), so I decided to carry it one step further this week by going to a "desert island" theme. The premise is simple: If you were stuck on a desert island and could only play one tune, what would that tune be? I also asked them to give a little background information about their tune, and, when feasible, perform their portion from memory.

We still have one more week to go (the combo has twelve members at this point), so I'll wait and post the selections they made after we're done, but I'm throwing the discussion open to readers of this site as well: What is your "desert island" jazz tune...and why? The comments are open...

(Cross-posted at The Green Room and my music MySpace)

Speaks, No Evil

I seem to be relaxing a bit from the opinion pieces for this part of the summer...which is fine; I'm sure I'll get back to plenty of those during the year. In the meantime, I'm once again asking my readers for opinions on cool new gadgets. This time, it's speakers for the MacBook. The ones from my old computer were a two-input set, and this has a single headphone-type jack, so I need something that works that way. I'm not looking to spend a big chunk o' change, but I want something that will be powerful enough to play Aebersolds behind me and whomever I'm teaching/jamming with (yes, I can use my stereo in the other room for big jam sessions, but it's nice to use the computer for that when teaching) while letting me listen to CD's or iTunes without going deaf in the process. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

She's driving them bananas: A snow monkey, appropriately named Oops, escaped from the city zoo in Roanoke, Virginia, prompting a shutdown of the entire park that surrounds the property.

I hope they had a blast, because the town didn't: The town of Old Fort, North Carolina didn't exactly have a sparkling Fourth yesterday after someone stole all the fireworks that were meant to be used in the town's display that night.

The Wheel of Fire...Works

Just a few random thoughts as we conclude the celebration of our nation today:

• Here in this part of Texas, we've had a drought for most of the year. So it figures that we'd get a pretty decent rain on the one day we didn't want it to do so. At least the fireworks show out here wasn't rained out...


• In another touch of irony, Firewheel was more crowded than I'd ever seen the place (even on opening week or around Christmas), but it was one of the first times in recent memory that I didn't run into anyone I know there.


• Moving the Fourth fireworks to Firewheel (say that ten times fast) was a shrewd move on the City of Garland's part. If the city and the new town center had tried to compete, Firewheel would've won (definitely for me, because of the proximity). The fake downtown of Firewheel was a perfect substitute for the actual downtown that, although it seems poised for revival with the DART train station and all that, hasn't seen much life lately.


• The traffic control has a few bugs that need to be worked out. I parked across the turnpike at Fuddruckers, and it took us an hour to get home (keep in mind, this is a place that's so close to my house, we could've walked there and back and there again in that amount of time). Next year, it's an earlier trip and dinner at Potbelly to get a good parking place close to the road.


• In case your neighborhood festivities got rained out, check out an oldie but a goodie: The Vitural Fireworks Display; it's even better over here this year, thanks to my much faster computer. (Once again this year, the hat tip goes to Dave Barry's Blog.)


• The lucky-but-stupid award of the day goes to the family in Fuddruckers parking lot who decided it would be OK to let their kids light up sparklers and wave them around in front of the whole world. Thankfully, they put them out just mere minutes before the local firefighters came out from dinner to that same parking lot.


• Quick poll: Did you work today? My boss was a slavedriver and made myself teach till lunchtime...but it was all good.

Hope you had a wonderful time today, in whatever way you chose to celebrate.

From the archives: One of my all-time favorite questions asked of me about the Fourth happened again and again during the summer that I went to Switzerland with the college jazz band. Read it, and more, in this post from 2004.

Blogging and Jazz

Over at Althouse this weekend, they're discussing the question, "Is blogging jazz?" The subject was prompted by a post at AmbivaBlog which itself was inspired by one over at the Beiderbecke Affair. (If nothing else, that's certainly like jazz; think about, say, Horace Silver writing "The Hardbop Grandpop" over the changes to "Donna Lee," which itself was done to the changes of "Back Home Again in Indiana.") The Beiderbecke piece contains a cool quote, which is excerpted by Amba:

[J]azz prides itself on impermanence & unknowing. “One of the things I like about jazz, kid,” Bix Beiderbecke told his fellow cornetist Jimmy McPartland, “is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?”

The Althouse post goes in lots of interesting directions, and a few commenters even point to Pat Metheny's G-weasel bashing from several years back, which is always great fun. A few others tried to compare some of the A-list bloggers to noted jazz musicians.

So is blogging jazz? It certainly can be, especially in the case of blogs with a lot of commenters, where the whole thing could be compared to guests at a jam session trading fours or choruses with the host. Commenter Theo Boehm, who's visited here before, weighed in at Althouse with the following:

When I was in college I used to think Kenny G was a complete fraud. He became rich and famous, while I had to sell my Mark VI alto to pay the rent.

Blogging-as-jazz: You can think of a given blog template as the type of ensemble you’re playing in. The host sets the style. The posts are the tunes, and we get a chance to solo as commenters. Some blogs are bop, some are fusion, some are cool, some are blues, etc. The topic is the tune’s harmonic progression, and we riff on that. If you stray too far from the changes you’re either revealing your incompetence, or you might be a new Thelonius Monk. And you might suggest something cool for the next person.

The analogy breaks down a little in that we’re not limited to length in commenting. “You’ve got 32 bars to make your point, or the next guy’s gonna step all over you.” Not a bad idea, but what’s the word equivalent of 32 bars? Some people cram in a lot more notes and try to impress you, while others play something simple and maybe beautiful.

I thnk Theo made some good analogies, and I added my two cents' worth down near the bottom of the comments:

As the resident active jazz musician among the commenters (or at least the only one who's uncloaked as such, so far as I know), I'm sorry I missed this thread on the day it came out. But I had a good excuse; I was jamming with friends all day!

So...are blogs jazz? Sometimes. I tend to think that Theo had it right with his point about the give-and-take between commenters and the host/hostess; it can certainly end up like a jam session in that respect.

(Oh, and Theo, I'm sorry you had to sell your Mark Vi to pay the rent. I've been lucky enough to be able to use mine to help pay my mortgage.)

As for the "musical necrophilia" link {referring to the Metheny piece], when I first read that a long time ago, it made me respect Metheny (whom I respect immensely to begin with) even more. No political correctness from him; something was crap, and he had the guts to actually say so. (It's sort of like when Clinton was president and used to play his sax on talk shows and what-not. All politics aside, the guy's just not that good of a player, but that didn't keep a lot of celebrities from kissing his butt. I remember being quite disappointed in Lionel Hampton when he said of Clinton, "He can join my band anytime." Meanwhile, Branford Marsalis said something to the effect of, "I'm sorry, but he just needs to put that thing down." )

As for my own blogging, it's not so spontaneous as I'd like it to be. It seems like I'm always going back and editing my posts until it looks just right. That process reminds me of classical composition more than jazz improvisation....but then, maybe, if you're reading my posts before they've been given the final edit, it's the equivalent of watching me practice.

Look at that--I see a few awkwardly-written sentences in there; I guess I missed a couple of changes on my solo! And since Blogger comments can't be edited, what goes out there is a lot more like a live performance than a regular post like this.

We're not likely to ever arrive at a definitive answer to this question...just like there may never be a definitive jazz solo, although many of the great ones over time are pure works of art. Still, there are about as many opinions on this as there are types of improvisation, so this was definitely an interesting topic to me. Feel free to add your own chorus in the comments.

Weird prank of the day: Workers at an Italian restaurant in Arkansas arrived there one day to discover six garden gnomes sitting atop the roof....but the owner doesn't mind; she says they help keep pigeons away.

The nose knows: Want to remember a familiar scent from your childhood? Japanese inventors are on the verge of perfecting the smellophone.

Crazy Like a (Fire)fox

I had my first freeze-up on the new computer today; I'm still not sure why. One of the sites I was visiting on the Safari browser was likely responsible for the freeze, so it made me consider the possibilty of switching to Firefox for more of my online activities. (I already use it for blogging, most of the time, because Blogger isn't fully supported on Safari; among other things, the date/time stamp menu and the comments allowed/disallowed buttons don't show up.)

But when I restarted the computer, I was quite surprised to find out that Firefox had disappeared from the Dock. It wasn't in the Applications menu or anything, so I decided to reinstall it. Yet when I did that, it relaunced with my settings intact (using The Musings as its default homepage, among other things). It obviously wasn't gone the first time; it must have just been...hiding? And when I quit the program later on, its icon disappeared from the Dock again. I now have a Firefox alias on my desktop, but it's really weird that it doesn't seem to keep its Dock position. Any comments from OS X users would of course be appreciated...

They picked the wrong place to get the munchies: Two pot-smoking guys decided to drive through a KFC in Buffalo recently; unfortunately, their smoke wafted through the window into the restaurant, where two narcotics detectives happened to be having dinner. The detectives went out to the car and made an easy bust.

FREE FOOD ALERT: Want free Chick-Fil-A on July 14? All you have to do is dress like a cow from head to toe and you'll be rewarded as such; it'll be Cow Appreciation Day, after all. (This seems a lot harder than dressing up like a Chipotle burrito on Halloween.)

A Smart Idea

I read this week about Daimler-Chrysler's plan to start selling Smart cars in the U.S. in the near future. (Go here to visit their American website and see a picture of this unusual little car, which is only nine feet in length, but gets up to 69 miles per gallon on the highway.) I saw quite a few Smarts on the streets of Montreux, Switzerland when we took the college jazz band there in 1999, and everyone got a kick out of their compact size. (Several people made the crack that the car looked like something that George Jetson could fold up and carry in his briefcase when he got home.)

At any rate, the cars are very much European in look, so it would be interesting to see them on our American streets. I'm not sure I'd feel safe sharing the road with eighteen-wheelers in one of those, but the gas mileage is certainly impressive.

Oh, and I had always heard that the Smart was originally called the Swatchmobile, as it had been developed by the Swiss watchmaker, and the story on the Smart website seems to bear that out; Swatch was indeed involved in the production, with Mercedes-Benz its corporate sibling.

Fry Street updates: I haven't chimed in on the Fry Street story for a while, so I thought I'd link two recent updates from the Denton Record-Chronicle and CBS-11 respectively. Also, the Save Fry Street! site has undergone a makeover; check it out if you haven't been there recently.

Not a Smoking Gun, But Still Good News

I was happy to read the latest report from the Surgeon General today, because it supported something I've believed all along:

The U.S. surgeon general handed advocates of smoke-free public places new ammunition Tuesday – a report declaring that separate smoking sections don't protect bystanders from the hazards posed by other people's tobacco smoke.
While not a smoking gun – it's actually a compilation of the best previously done research on secondhand smoke – the report is expected to serve as fresh fodder in a debate that has already led to restaurant smoking bans in states including California, Florida and New York and cities such as Dallas and Austin.

[...]The new report was described as the most comprehensive federal examination of the topic since the last surgeon general's report in 1986, which declared secondhand smoke a cause of lung cancer in nonsmokers.
Tuesday's report concluded that there is no risk-free level of exposure to secondhand smoke.

Read the whole thing. The report itself doesn't guarantee that any new laws will be passed, but it does provide the incentive for various government entities to do something about the problem. Cities like Plano, which have had separate ventilation systems in restaurants that still maintain a smoking section, are now being told that even that may not be enough.


There are a lot of angles to this story, but I can only speak from a personal one: I'm allergic to the stuff. It may not have shown up on my allergy tests (I'm not sure that I was tested for it, although, oddly enough, I was tested for both cockroach venom and cow dander), but I know what happens to me when I'm around it for any length of time: Watery eyes, sneezing, nasty cough. And I'll never forget the year when I went to TMEA convention and I was given a smoking room at the hotel; that was very much against my wishes, but I didn't raise a stink because its effects weren't apparent until after I got home. But the long and short of it was, I was sick for two weeks afterwards, with what many people described as a "smoker's cough." It wasn't fun, and I would definitely do something about it if a hotel ever pulled that again.

Sure, I feel for the people who have to stand outside in the cold, rain, or whatever to take a cigarette break, but the fact is, smoking is unique among all the bad habits in that it can directly affect the health of others. Some have compared it to, say, drinking, but there's no way that someone drinking across the room can directly harm someone else (and I'm not talking about drunk drivers; I'm obviously totally against that practice). And as far as I'm concerned, there's no excuse for parents smoking in the house when children are present; that back porch is there for a reason.

I'm usually not a big fan of excessive government regulation, but something clearly needs to be done here. I know that the restaurant and convention industries are resisting this (though the article above points to many situations where a smoking ban has had only a negligible effect on business...and this was just outside Las Vegas!). As one of those people who is made sick by smoke, not to mention someone who wants to play a wind instrument in a smoke-free environment, this report only serves to justify what I've experienced in my own life; your mileage may vary.

This idea got neutered pretty quickly: It seemed like a good fundraiser at first: Hold a bikini contest at a popular chain chicken-wing restaurant to create awareness of the necessity of spaying and neutering pets. But the event's title, Hooters for Neuters, raised the ire of city officials, so the Los Angeles Animal Control decided not to accept any proceeds from the contest.

At least it wasn't "REDRUM" or something: A woman in Arkansas was concerned when worms got into her tomato garden, and became even more so when the worms wrote "Hi"on one of the tomatoes.

The Virtual Yearbook?

The Internet and computers have combined to supplement, and sometimes replace, more traditional entities. This is certainly true in the area of publishing (let's face it; how many of you would be reading my musings if I had to, say, scrawl them down in a spiral notebook?), where news sites, blogs, and even the newspapers' own sites have replaced the "dead tree edition" for many readers. But would it work with the high school yearbook? A couple of enterprising teens think it can:

John Shin refuses to buy a copy of his high school yearbook. Instead, he's turning to the Internet to preserve and share memories of his sophomore year.
The 15-year-old has posted a collection of school-related photos and videos, as do many of his classmates. They're able to exchange virtual notes, vote for the most likely to succeed and take part in other yearbook traditions.
The Tuckahoe High School student is trying to persuade as many as his friends as possible to sign up at MyYearbook.com - and save some money, too.
"I'm going to bring everyone who matters to me to MyYearbook," said John, who attends school in Eastchester, a suburb just north of New York City. "I'm confident in that, and besides, they're like $70."

MyYearbook, founded by New Jersey sibilngs John and Catherine Cook, has just now started to raise revenue, thanks to banner ads on the site. But the founders think that their idea will fly with the plugged-in generation.

"We just think yearbooks are obsolete," said Catherine Cook, 16. "If you think about it, all you're going to do with it is put it on the shelf and never really look at it."

MyYearbook.com allows users to create a profile with separate sections for high school, college, graduate school and professional life. Students who sign up are automatically linked to others at their school.
Acting as their own editors, they can select friends from their classmates.

Members can "autograph" each others' yearbook pages. The site also connects students through school club and sports pages. Like other so-called social-networking sites, it allows members to upload photos and post messages.
Students have access to multimedia and interactive components that old-fashioned yearbooks can't offer, including a place for creating polls and storing music and videos.

The multimedia portion seems like a cool idea, especially the music part. After all, music functions as a (literal) soundtrack to one's life, especially in a time like high school or college, so having it there would only serve to enhance the memories. (Of course, having music there could also serve as one more way--along with clothing and hairstyles--to embarrass parents whose kids found their yearbook..which seems a lot easier if it only involves a few clicks of the mouse. Imagine a parent who went to school in the '70s having to own up to not only wearing, say, a leisure suit, but having "Disco Duck" playing in the background.)

Granted, the dead-tree yearbook companies aren't exactly quaking in their boots over this yet...

[S]keptics wonder if the free Web site can ever truly replace the traditional printed chronicle of high-school memories - even for the generation that's grown up with the Internet.
"Students continue to say they prefer print yearbooks for obvious reasons," said Rich Stoebe, director of communications for Jostens Inc., which sells yearbooks, class rings and other scholastic memorabilia.
After all, will anyone want to haul a laptop to the 25th class reunion? And what happens if the technology changes, or something happens to the dot-com?
Jostens and other yearbook companies have responded to changes in technology by offering a supplemental DVD offering student-compiled music, photos and video.

The Cooks are contemplating offering a print-on-demand version for those who want a hard copy, though they're not sure how much their generation will want such a thing. Besides, they have their sites set on loftier goals: attracting more members than MySpace (which currently numbers more than eighty million). A pipe dream, you say? Perhaps...but then, who had ever heard of MySpace a few years ago?

So, here's the question of the day: If you're in high school or college, would you buy a virtual yearbook instead of a traditional one? If you've been out of school a while, do you wish your book had some of the features that MyYearbook offers? Feel free to chime in using the comments.

Maybe they need a Smokey Bear merit badge: A teenager who tried to set a museum building on fire was stopped by a group of Boy Scouts who just happened to be nearby.

And we wonder why America is too fat: As if the fried Twinkie at the Texas State Fair was not enough, there's now a a Twinkies cookbook which has everything from Twinkie burritos to Twinkie lasagna (someone tell Garfield!), I can feel my arteries hardening just thinking about it...but dang, I bet some of that stuff is good.

More on the New Toy

The new computer is still awesome, of course. I'm getting used to the setup of the laptop keyboard, so there aren't quite so many typos anymore, but it's still an adjustment. Here are some random thoughts I've had about it in the past few days:

• Man, is this thing fast. Blazingly fast. Unfreakinbelievably fast.


• The new format allows pages to load a lot more fully than on my old machine, so there's less time spent scrolling up and down, resizing windows, etc. Besides the fast processing speeds, it's taking less time to do everything I do strictly because of layout alone.


• The flip side of that is that the text is a bit smaller than before--very much so in Word docs, but also obvious in IM's and even blog posts. The question a few months ago may have been Laptop or Contacts?, but it's looking like I'll need to invest in the other half of that equation pretty soon as well.


• Did I mention how fast this thing is?


• I haven't warmed to iChat yet; I liked the control I had with AIM--window placement, familiar alert sounds, all that--but when I tried to install AIM on this machine (a version which hasn't been upgraded in two years--the same one I had on the old computer), it quit three times in a row and even detached its icon from the Dock. I guess I'll have to put up with the quirks of iChat for a little while, though I'll try to do AIM again; maybe I just had a bad download.


• As tempting as it is to just stay on this thing for hours on end, I'm almost totally set up now, so I should be spending less time on the computer rather than more (and once I get an AirPort setup, I can use it while watching TV and get twice as much stuff done at once). At this point, I have no worries about getting addicted to it, the way some people have gotten with video games.


• Before I got OS X, I felt like I was on the other side of a big chasm, since I couldn't get the coolest new software updates; they simply didn't work with OS 9. Now that I've bridged said chasm, I realize that the bigness goes both ways; not a single thing from my old computer was able to be successfully transferred. I kept my files (such as Word docs and my iTunes library) in separate folders from their original applications, and they'll work on the new software, but everything I had before doesn't work in the new OS. It really was an "extreme makeover" on Apple's part.
'

• Oh yeah, have I told you how really fast this thing is?

I suppose I'm back to posting on regular topics tomorrow, but since this computer has consumed a big part of the last several days...well, that's what's in my head right now.

Oh, and thanks to all those who left comments on the Tasha post, especially the visitors from Althouse. It's still weird here without her, but it's getting better.

You've been slimed: Have an unruly mob on your hands? Don't want to use rubber bullets or tear gas? Now you can use a goo shooter on them.

A penny saved is way more than a penny earned, in this case: A tenant leader in New York who has been campaigning against drug dealers found her house on the receiving end of a bullet recently, but the damage was minimized when the bullet was stopped by a jar in which she was saving pennies.

Remembering Tasha

I knew this day was coming, but I was hoping it could be put off for a long time: My cat, Tasha, had to be put down today. She was sixteen years old and not in good health at all; she'd been losing weight for quite some time, despite having a ravenous appetite. Still, she had continued to be her old self until about a month ago, when she just withdrew from the world, for the most part. She stopped being interactive, and it looked like it even hurt her to get petted. (We won't even mention the fact that she used the entire house as her litterbox lately.) Mom had been agonizing over the decision all night last night, but after she witnessed Tasha have a seizure this afternoon (and the results, which included her food bowls being strewn around the kitchen, made me realize that they'd been happening for a few weeks without my seeing them) pretty much sealed the deal; there wasn't really anything that could be done for a cat that old and that sick.

Usually, a tribute such as this one would go on about what a loving, loyal and joyful pet the dearly departed was. However, saying that about Tasha would be a pretty liberal stretching of the truth (and would elicit howls of laughter from anyone in my family). She was not really a "people cat" at all, though we found a bond over the years. She couldn't stand to be held (until quite recently), she would only let herself be petted down to the middle of her back, where the line of licked-off fur started (that's Fun Facts #10 if you're playing along at home), and sometimes she'd just take a disliking to someone and would hiss at them for the severe infraction of...looking at her. Yet somehow, she managed to claim a little piece of my heart in the process.

Tasha started out as a stray; she "adopted" my sister, whose then-boyfriend lived on the property of a bunch of horse stables, at the end of college. For her first year, Tasha was a normal cat, but something happened after that which made her turn more psycho as the years went on: the hissing, refusal to be held, and so on. (We used to joke that perhaps she'd gotten kicked in the head by one of the horses at the stables as a kitten. However, last summer, the sister of a student of mine took a look at her and noticed that her two eyes were slightly different shapes; evidently this is indeed a sign of previous head trauma. Who knew?)

When my sister was in grad school, she had a female roommate with a female cat of her own, and we figured that, while the girls were gone, the two cats just got together and formed their own Man-Haters' Club of sorts. (There was a time when my dad became a regular victim of the getting-hissed-at-for-looking-at-her thing.) When my sister was out of town, my parents might cat-sit for a week, and Tasha would hide under the bed for the entire first day. A socialite she wasn't.

Five summers ago, I was given the job of cat-sitting as my sister and her family were in the process of moving to Austin; she had the tendency to bolt out an open door at first opportunity, and they didn't want that to happen when the Realtors were showing the house. After that, well...the sitting job became permanent. There were already two adults, a baby and two Sheltie dogs in their house, and Tasha always did better as an "only pet." Suddenly, my household grew by one; she followed me from the rental house over to Casa de Kev, where tonight will be my first night without her.

She definitely had her quirks: Licking all the fur off her stomach, coming to me when I whistled "Joy Spring" (but only in the right key), and her recent habit of standing atop the saxophone case of every student who came in here--to show them whose territory they were entering, of course. She also had this thing with switching her sleeping place on an almost weekly basis--on top of my CD racks, on top of my laundry basket, on top of the TV, on top of me in my bed; in the final days, it was behind the dryer. It didn't matter how much it might have inconvenienced me--she was going to sleep where she felt like it, and that was that.

But still, despite her sour nature, we bonded. Sure, the first day she came to my old house, she hid under the bed all day. But she realized pretty quickly that I was the Dude With the Food, and I was OK in her book from then on. She even showed affection at times; sure, it was always on her terms, but she let herself be petted, sat on my lap (usually while I was on the computer; there were plenty of times when I had to apologize for an instant message saying something like "hfjaskjgkl" by saying "sorry, cat typing again") and waited for me to come home every day.

She was also the master (mistress?) of stealth. I remember several times when my sister owned her and we thought she'd gotten lost; one time, at a gas stop, we thought she'd bolted out the door despite my opening it ever-so-slightly; it turns out that she'd been hiding underneath the passenger seat the whole time. On another occasion, I was getting the living room furniture from my sister's old apartment (she was getting new stuff when she got married) and we thought Tasha had escaped as we brought the sofa out the door. My friend and I looked for her around the complex for at least half an hour, only to find out that she was sitting on top of a cabinet in the upstairs bathroom. When she lived here, she'd try to go out the front door whenever I answered it, but as I found out one time, when the door was accidentally left unlocked and later blew open, she did in fact have a homing instinct, as she came right back in (chronicled here). I guess she knew where the food was coming from and decided to stay there.

I couldn't bear to go to the vet with Mom and Dad today; Mom's done this for a previous cat and a dog, so I stayed home and remembered the past five years. This house feels pretty empty right now; sure, it's cleaner than it's been in years, but it's not the same. I already thought I heard her meowing tonight, but I'm at least relieved that she's not suffering anymore.

Of all the animals that are out there, it's amazing how a select few species can come into our lives and be like famliy. We give them food and shelter, and whatever they give us back, whether it's love and affection or mostly indifference and occasional acknowledgement, it's always hard to let them go.

Today, I raise my glass (OK, it's late, so it's really a Dasani bottle; you get the idea) to Tasha. If there's a special corner of heaven reserved for pets, I hope you're having fun finding weird places to sleep as the jazz angels play "Joy Spring" on their harps. And tell Zip, Sinbad, Mr. P.C. and Sassy that I said hi.

I have a picture of Tasha sleeping in a funny place; I'll post it here once I get my digital camera software figured out on this new computer.

UPDATE: Here's the picture:

I've also submitted it to a most-appropriate website, catsinsinks.com. May she live on via the Web...