Assistant Village Idiot

There are impressive solos and one admires the virtuosity and different styles.  Then at about the 5:20 mark they find a meshing point and t...

It became a jazz standard, but Benny Goodman thought he would show up young Charlie Christian, the electric guitarist who had not done well ...

Does anyone remember Cornell Notes? I never learned the technique myself, but I had a highschool teacher who showed it to us in outline, ad...

I keep forgetting to lend the CD of this Canadian band to Sponge-Headed Scienceman.  Had it out last night but left it.  Maybe Sunday. ...

Cairngorms National Park in Scotland is called   Pairc Naiseanta a Mhonaidh Ruaidh in Gaelic. It's right there on the sign and everyt...

Though the term "splitting" is misused often by line staff, it is indeed a symptom of Borderline Personality Disorder. In the conf...

I have thought that Wins Above Replacement is a useful idea, but I was suspicious about how it was calculated.  Do these knuckleheads know n...

I stopped following him much somewhere in the 1990's, as he went into a bitter period.  His making fun of people no longer had affection...

Whatever you think your job is, it is actually this: the action you must repeat in order to get paid. You can get a lot of entertainment o...

Or maybe five-part harmony.

I've already done the post, years ago, about the history of the song and its various versions.  Tonight I'm thinking I just like lis...

I was looking for this list by the UK Crime Writers Association of the 100 best crime novels of all-time, and stumbled upon related lists, ...

New Alien Life Claim Far From Convincing  read the headline in the sidebar.  Okay, I'll bite. My initial take is to be grateful that som...

Update: It occurred to me later "Which one of these women actually knows something about living in a culture where there are hundreds o...

If you heard NPR this weekend repeating the urban legend that cows have accents - that they sound different in different regions - you need ...

I have ranted before that conservatives simply have poor memories and/or do not recognise that the things they remember about education are ...

An interesting essay from Quora, written last year, about the myths surrounding Galileo , heliocentricism, and the Catholic Church. I think ...

A friend retired at work, and because he had started in 1969 there was a trivia contest about that year. I wasn't at the party, so I di...

Rick Reilly continues to be a parody of himself, writing about subjects in sports with a high ( read: banal) cultural or moral tone that no ...

I don't usually refer back to comments of earlier posts, but there's an interesting one under "Detectives" that covers gro...