A Very Murray Christmas

Really quite bad from start to finish. Except for Miley Cyrus!

Trump

This NYT editorial kind of states the obvious for those of us living in the liberal Bay Area bubble, but it raises an important point: Which Republicans will repudiate Donald Trump in favor of Hillary, if it comes down to that? The answer says a lot about why responsibility for the country's political polarization is not symmetrical.

Hard bop

What makes hard bop hard bop and not bebop? Well, it came along after bebop, and maybe it was played a little harder (and a little faster) than bebop at times. But then again, what could be harder and faster than Bird and Diz and Max? Bebop was weird, noisy, and impossibly difficult... avant garde... Cab Calloway called it "Chinese music." Hard bop was funkier, more accessible— bebop mainstreamed, in a way. But mainstream jazz would never again be dance music or popular music. Hard bop was created by the generation who invented bebop, but also by the next generation of youngsters who grew up proclaiming: This is cool, this is what we do now.

Clifford Brown was one of those youngsters, who before his death at age 25 managed to hitch his wagon to one of the transcendent geniuses of American music, Max Roach. Study in Brown is one of their masterful collaborations. Brown is great, Max is Max, but listening tonight, it is that unsung Californian Harold Land who grabs my ear.

Missing the forest for the trees

You can't really level that claim against the NY Times. After all, they do finally put things in perspective... in the last two 'graphs...!

Indeed, the death toll from jihadist terrorism in the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — 45 people — is about the same as the 48 killed in terrorist attacks motivated by white supremacist and other right-wing extremist ideologies, according to New America, a research organization in Washington. 

And both tolls are a small fraction of the number of conventional murders, more than 200,000 in the same period. For Democrats, the common element for all of these deaths is the same — guns.

Although they also fail to mention that the number of gun suicides runs about twice the number of gun homicides. Thank God for the 2nd Amendment.

P.S. What James Fallows said.

Trump's language

This NYT article on the Donald's verbal demagoguery is interesting, based on some text analysis of all of his public utterances over the past week... but where are the tables and graphs? And more importantly, where are the comparisons with the rest of the Republican field? Is his tendency toward "us vs. them" really that different from Ted Cruz or the rest? Data analysis is all about comparisons.

Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 64

Oh, yeah, I confess, I do love the Bee Gees, even pre-disco, but especially disco-disco. And why not enjoy one of their best songs while watching a glorious scene from a fantastic movie, featuring an iconic American star in his defining role?

Tango

Some nifty Piazzolla for you, performed by Sundstrom offspring!

My HuffPost debut...

The Pope and Cap and Trade. Let the trolling begin!