“Thelonious Monk was — is — the most fascinating figure in the history of jazz. Yet few Monk
biographies have been written, and they tend to rehash the same material. That’s partly
because Monk was a hard man to pin down. He rarely spoke to writers – or anyone else, for
that matter – and when he did, he responded to most questions curtly, if at all. It was partially a
game and it was partially a mental-health issue, but it prevented people from seeing Monk
beyond his music. Of course, that’s how he wanted it.

Biographies of the pianist and composer have tended to disappoint; Laurent de Wilde’s Monk’
(1996) is remarkably unrewarding. But now we have an intriguing idea, and a rich reading
experience, in The Thelonious Monk Reader. Here, Monk comes alive, through old magazine
stories, newspaper profiles, interviews, liner notes, record reviews, concert critiques,
remembrances, and essays. Not only do we get reminiscences on Monk’s music and life, but we
get to read what people were writing about him before and while he was at his peak.” Boston Globe

Please don’t call me Theo

Modes of address are thus not so much being lost from our culture as
being deliberately expunged.

This familiarity is a sign of the ever greater vulgarity and shallowness of
British life, of an unwillingness to exercise judgment in making distinctions.
Not all relationships are those of friendship, but they are now all those of
familiarity. This naturally results in a world in which false bonhomie is
tempered by outbursts of insensate rage. The Spectator

Mir‘s Last Gift. “Great sites crop up to track Mir‘s demise.” Byte

Catastrophe or cure? Are fetal grafts safe? New Scientist

Division is rife over schizophrenia gene
claim, about which I posted below. BioMedNet

Shouting at your kids can damage their brains, as well
as hurting their ears, according to US child
psychiatrists. The Guardian On the other hand, ‘Preschoolers who are “in touch with their feelings”‘ may be less
likely to have serious learning or behavior problems in later years, results of a study suggest.

“…(P)reschool children’s abilities to recognize and interpret emotion cues in
facial expressions have long-term effects on social behavior and academic competence,”
according to lead study author Dr. Carroll E. Izard of the University of Delaware and his
colleagues.

In a study of 72 children from low-income families, Izard and colleagues found that the ability to
read others’ emotions at age 5 predicted the youngsters’ social behavior and learning skills 4
years later. ‘

Judge Sentences Supremacist Pastor in Abduction of Grandchildren. “A white
supremacist pastor was sentenced to 30
years in prison for abducting six of his
grandchildren and keeping them at his farm to
indoctrinate them.” The children, now 9 through 16, had been held for five years until found in a police raid in May. It took four days to persuade them to come out of a small basement roon where they were barricaded, authorities say because of the depth of their indoctrination. They have since undergone mental health treatment in North Dakota.

Unusual Competency Debate Surfaces in White House Shooting Case. “The man accused of firing shots outside the White
House last month pressed a judge to let him stand trial. A federal
prosecutor argued the accused, Robert W. Pickett, should be sent to a
prison hospital.” He finds a finite prison sentence — he faces 25 years — preferable to an indefinite hospital commitment. The defendant reportedly has a history of mental illness but he and his defense attorneys insist that there is no basis for the judge to require a competency hearing. There are suggestions that, by waving a gun at federal agents outside the White House, he was trying to get law enforcement officers to kill him. APB News

Smartphone a Hot Seller in S.F. “Kyocera’s newly released personal digital assistant smartphone is sold out in San Francisco.

Retailers are apparently unable to keep up with the demand for Kyocera’s QCP 6035 — a converged PDA
smartphone that runs on the Palm operating system — since its release three weeks ago.” Wired But “only early adopters are snapping up the PDA cell phones in the United States —
and even these users seem to be carrying around more than one device.

PDA cell phones just aren’t light enough and don’t cost what consumers are willing to dish
out, the industry says. In other words, these PDA phones will languish along with the other
high-end cell phones and PDAs floating around the marketplace today.

‘I’m not willing to make a prediction for more than five years,’ said Palm’s developer Ted
Ladd. ‘I carry my cell phone and Palm. There are times when I want one or the other.’ ” Several other contenders vie with the Kyocera phone as combination devices, using various OS’s for their PDA components. Wired The trick would be if PDA cell phones avoid doing two things badly, because we already have devices that do each of the two things well.

A ‘Tiger’ of a Different Stripe. Crouching Tiger, a hit in the US because it’s so Chinese, is a flop in China because it’s so Chinese… and because it’s a hit in the US. “Put bluntly, almost every major cultural export from China over the past 25 years that has made it in the West has flopped in China…” Washington Post

With an administration full of his Daddy’s people who last did any foreign relations when we were accustomed to thinking of Russia as the Devil Incarnate, it’s no surprise the Blank Stare is taking us back into the Cold War with the biggest expulsion of suspected spies since Reagan took similar action in 1986. Reuters It’s not as if both countries haven’t been spying on each other in the interim. A Russian Foreign Ministry official’s comment that the order “went much deeper than a mere expulsion” should be seen in light of the US’ destabilizing move of meeting with Chechen representatives, and of course the broader context of our planned unilateral abrogation of the ABM Treaty to build the NMD (national missile defense) system. Russia signalled its intention to respond 1:1 to the expulsions. As usual, the Shrub and his handlers “do protest too much”, finding it necessary to assure us that he was in charge of this decision. The ‘spin’ aims to persuade us that the President has a new, hard-line, “realistic” way of looking at our foreign adversaries.

MSNBC.com photo contest turns into Israeli-Palestinian battle. “A Web site’s photo contest that
became a cyberspace battleground between Israelis and Palestinians has been pulled because users were
voting for the same image multiple times, officials with MSNBC.com said.” Nando Times