"What I'm Listening to" Gadget

The addition of the “What I’m Listening to” gadget on the right of this page has made it unnecessary to add posts about current jazz discoveries or acquisitions. Recently, for example, I have discovered Einar Scheving’s Cycles , a 2007 release in Iceland, thanks to a recent MP3 made available for free at AllAboutJazz . Having enjoyed that initial track so much, I decided to download the entire album from CD Baby and have been delighting in this music while driving and while grading my students’ essays. Einar Scheving’s Cycles is at the top of the list appearing to the right for that reason.

A veritable flood of CD releases in jazz will be made during the remaining months of 2012. It will be difficult keeping up with these new releases as I go about making my selections for the best of jazz in 2012. I have chosen about five or six releases so far as ones that I want to recommend as the best of the year; there are other recent ones that I have not yet made a decision about. Stay tuned.

Hay Bales Within a Drought

Pictured below are hay bales in one of my favorite fields. This part of the Kansas City metro area used to have more open fields and undeveloped areas. Since I moved here in 1998, I have seen fields sold to create the parking lot for a big box store and have seen houses going for $300,000 and more built to the south and the west. Fortunately, there are a few areas that have escaped development. Whenever I am running errands or commuting, I sometimes get the chance to drive past this particular field. Although there are usually two cuttings of hay in this area, the drought has reduced the amount of hay that can be cut this year. Three or four weeks have passed since this most recent cutting. Like the grass in my yard, this field hasn’t seen much growth. Our first substantial period of rain in about seventy days fell a couple of hours after I took these pictures. The anvil shape of a developing cumulonimbus cloud is visible in one of them.

If you should decide that you want to see these pictures blown up a little, click on one and then zoom in by clicking on 150% or 200%.

Purple Coneflowers & Drought

The purple coneflowers that my wife and I planted reappear, usually in greater abundance, each year; some years, however, their seeds end up in the grass instead in the flowerbed. We are believers in planting as many flowers native to our area as possible. The purple coneflower, we discovered, is ignored by the deer who don't find the flower as tasty as, say, lilies. Most years, these flowers, in their adaptability to our climate, can resist periods of little or no rain.

Our flowers were prettiest before the most recent spell of eleven one-hundred degree days in a row. Even our watering regularly didn't prevent them from drying out. They are closer in appearance now to how they normally look in late August.

The pictures below capture our purple coneflowers when they were at their prettiest. If you should decide that you want to see these pictures blown up a little, click on one and then zoom in by clicking on 150% or 200%.

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Command and Control: A Publishing Mystery

A few years ago when I was reading Fast Food Nation, I used to share with my family during our meals what I had read the night before. That book provided a lot of information to talk about. It was Schlosser’s interview in the DVD version of Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me that convinced me to read Fast Food Nation.

For about six months now, I have been looking forward to reading Eric Schlosser’s investigative reporting in his Command and Control, a look at those accidents and near accidents in this country involving nuclear bombs. Some sources say that the book was released in 2009; other sources say that the book was published in February, 2012. Oddly, however, there are no copies available on the Internet. Even a search at Penguin USA, the publisher, produces no results. These details when added together cast doubt on the possibility of copies ever becoming available. Are these details representative of book publishing, when a company chooses not to publish one book in favor of another one with more earning potential, or should we suspect that something or someone is suppressing the book because of its subject matter?

Addendum: Contacting the author would be one way to solve the mystery. My searches on the Internet to find Schlosser's e-mail address or mailing address have not been successful. Any help would be appreciated.

Note (05/02/2013): I have recently learned that Eric Schlosser's Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety will be released on September 17, 2013. Some websites still insist that the book was originally published in 2009.