Dreams

March 25, 2014 / / No Comments

Orson & Rob

Dreams are just your barely-awake brain trying to make sense out of random electrical impulses, but often it takes its cues from things you’ve got on your mind.

Last night I had a dream similar to one I’ve had several times over the last couple of months.
I’m traveling somewhere, sometimes in a car, sometimes on a bike. I’ve stopped somewhere — I kind of know where I am, but I’m a little turned around and I’m in the process of checking maps or getting directions, which seems to never get accomplished.

But my dog Orson is with me — who died nearly 5 years ago. The dream concerns me having to keep track of him and make sure he’s safe, which is making it harder to figure out how to get where I’m going, but I’m more worried about his well-being than my travel arrangements. (A couple of times in the dream it’s my cat, the late great Cecil. One time it was both of them.)

So that’s what’s cooking in my subconscious brain kitchen.

Newman isn’t dead

March 16, 2014 / / No Comments

Wayne Knight, the guy who played Newman on Seinfeld, has been the victim of an Internet death hoax. Websites made up to look like TMZ and Us magazine reported earlier this morning that Knight had been killed in a traffic accident, but it’s not true. Knight is alive and well and tweeting away.

Yes fans: read this before you buy the new box set

March 7, 2014 / / No Comments

Yes fans — here’s what you need to know before you buy The Studio Albums 1969-1987 box set.

With one exception, these are the Rhino 2003-2004 remastered/expanded editions. So if you bought those, you already have the albums and bonus tracks.

The one exception is 1987’s Big Generator album, where Rhino inexplicably stopped when releasing their remasters. Fans had been waiting for this one, but it didn’t get the remastering/expanding treatment until 2009, and then it was available only as an import. So this is the ONE “new” item available in the box set. The bonus tracks here are just single edits and dance remixes.

The other “plus” (if you want to call it that) is that the original album covers are faithfully replicated, front and back, even in gate-fold form. The only problem is that the inner sleeves are not included, and it almost seems they should have been — because the covers are loose and the CDs fall right out. It seems to me that maybe there was a plan to store the CDs inside inner sleeve replicas, but it was scrapped to save money at the last minute. It’s very annoying.

Bottom line: the only reason to buy the box set is if you really want to spend the money to finally own a good-sounding copy of Big Generator, whose early CD releases were very lacking in the sound quality department. That album finally sounds the way it was supposed to sound.