cheech

I was just telling zenhell there's a lot of stuff I want to type tonight here... I hope I have the time to add on later. I'm about to pop out dinner.
Been reading more Miles on Zappa. I was telling ayurvedium how I like his critical tack and attention to details. Does Zappa act selfish here? Like a control freak there? Make no effort to be at Moon's birth, carefully planning his European tour debut instead? Hey, lay it out... let's have all the facts to fully understand, if not judge, the man.
Of course, he goes into details about his artistic triumphs and near-misses too. Frank almost gave a private show/ rehearsal to Salvador Dali... but the owners of the New York club had problems with Zappa's manager and had locked the Mothers out...
There were better times in NYC for the band, though, during their 1968 residency at the Garrick Theater:

In July, Jimi Hendrix played the Cafe Au Go Go, directly beneath the Garrick, and Zappa went to see him: "He had a whole stack of Marshalls and I was right in front of it. I was physically ill- I couldn't get out, it was so packed. Although it was great, I didn't see how anybody could inflict that kind of volume on himself, let alone other people. That particular show he ended by taking the guitar and impaling it in the low ceiling of the club. Just walked away and left it squealing."
Frank invited Jimi to see the Mothers play, and Jimi and Mitch Mitchell sat in with them. Frank was so intrigued by what Hendrix was doing that he left the stage and sat in the audience to watch him play with the band, indicating previously unseen level of respect for another musician's work.

Well, I've enjoyed my share of overly-loud live music (Lightning Bolt, B'more, June 2001), so I can see maybe better what Jimi was doing, but then I never saw Husker Du, Motorhead, or Dinosaur, so maybe I don't really know "overly-loud". Anyway, god I'd love to have a bootleg tape of the Hendrix/ Zappa/ Mitchell Mothers- WOW!!

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I had discussed a review I saw in the Washington Post Bookworld of the new Michael Crichton book with anonymouse and NoControl. Crichton argues against the validity of global warming, and the review included a chart showing that a small city in New York hadnt gotten hotter over the last century, whereas New York City had, and Crichton (and some others) argue that this helps to show the earth isnt warming.
I was somewhat impressed... but was telling NoControl Friday that I figured a temperature in Rochester or Albany might not be relevant, in terms of its latitudinal position, to global warming whereas temps in the poles show a greater change.
Well, a professor saw the book review and wrote in this letter, published today:

When a popular novelist not only tells a story but gives a detailed argument for a scientific belief, The Washington Post can't be expected to assign two reviewers. Dennis Drabelle was just doing his job when he wrote that Michael Crichton's State of Fear is boring (Book World, Dec. 26). He wasn't called on to judge whether the book is also scientifically wrong-headed. But Book World should not have printed without comment Crichton's graphs, showing that "while big cities have been getting warmer, smaller ones have not" (in the United States, anyway).
This form of denial of global warming has been peddled by a few people with low scholarly standing. The big-city heat effect was taken into account by the very first person who suspected that human activity was causing global warming -- that was G.S. Callendar, back in 1938. Since then, all responsible scientists have carefully compensated for the effect in their statistics. More about this mistake and other Crichton errors can be found on www.realclimate.org, a blog run by serious scientists.
As a science historian watching the arguments from outside, I've been even more impressed by studies of the oceans. After all, most of the heat energy in the climate system is not in the wispy atmosphere but in those colossal masses of seawater. Scientists have been lowering thermometers from ships for a century. Are the oceans getting warmer? For certain! The fact that the world has been warming up, and the view that we can and should do something to reduce our risk of serious trouble, have been endorsed by careful studies from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society and just about every other body of experts that is not supported by industrial interests -- and even by some of those.

--SPENCER R. WEART, Director, History Center
American Institute of Physics, College Park