Sad News from the ACC

Wake Forest head basketball coach Skip Prosser has passed away at the age of 56...terribly sad news for his family and friends obviously but also college basketball fans who followed the ACC at all. Prosser took over from Dave Odom in 2001 and seemed inject some vitality into the Wake program; more importantly, he seemed like a truly good guy in the sport.

Thurs Music & Visuals

just cracked into the new Charles Mingus Sextet Cornell 1964 dbl-cd set on Blue Note, what a find this is. the line-up is ridiculous: Mingus, Dolphy, Clifford Jordan, Jaki Byard, Dannie Richmond and Johnny Coles... somehow no one remembered this gig (which preceded the previously available Town Hall show) happened until a tape was discovered by Sue Mingus, but the sound and performances are amazing, and i'm only 30 minutes into 2 hrs+ of music. crazy when a document of a group like that gets misplaced for 40 yrs.

NC can claim the hilarious Zach Galifanakis as a native, but that gives me no insight as to how he got so funny, or how this happened, but i keep wanting to watch it again.

Natasha Kahn is Bat for Lashes, and her debut album is really good, reminds me of what i liked about Siouxsie and the Banshees, only less shrill. This excellent video for the song "What's a Girl to Do" doesn't really remind me of anything except that time is spied those oversized woodland creatures BMX biking through the woods behind our house...

the new National album Boxer is really good, as is this performance of "Fake Empire" on Letterman, which actually sounds decent for a change.

yeah, there's good stuff on the internets, anything to distract from fact that this simpering clown is our nation's chief law enforcement officer.

The Worst Stowaway

been awhile between posts -- sorry for the delay -- due to beach travels and nyc travels (to go see Sweden's fabulous Shout Out Louds ) and getting the awesome new Spoon album out (Merge's 2nd Top Ten album of the year -- crazy!)...

anyway when we went to the beach here in NC i took my laptop. took it out of its protective sleeve on the first day, used it a bit each day, never putting it back in the case. at one point during the week we had some people over and ate a mess of crabs and shrimp and stuff. when we're packing up there was a stench detected that we assigned to some loose crab juice starting to stink or something. apparently some had gotten on my laptop sleeve because it seemed to be the source of the smell... anyway, stuck my computer back in it, packed our small car to the gills and drove the 3 hrs back home to chapel hill. by the time we got home, the car was infected with the smell, though you only really got it if you turned off the A/C for a few minutes. unpacking the car, it was in there, and i'm thinking "how did someone get crab boil juice in my freaking car!?" -- i had kinda forgotten about the laptop sleeve.

a couple hours after unpacking i grab my computer to check email, slide it out of the case, and my wife Andrea who's in the proximity of the sleeve reminds me that it is indeed the source of the smell...in fact there's some moist scum on one corner of the powerbook...i'm annoyed and getting ready to go toss the sleeve in the washing machine when i glance inside to find... A DEAD MOUSE! not really what i expected to see at that moment! either he crawled in before we went to the beach and couldn't get out, or one of our cats stuck him in there before we left after dragging him through the cat door. either way CRIPES it's the worst thing you can smell and i had to toss the sleeve altogether after some attempts to cleanse the thing. i'm just glad rotting mouse didn't get into my disc drive, as i'm pretty sure that's not covered by apple care...