Weather

Pretty simple post here. I'm going to list some temperatures from other parts of the country that I've heard on the news or through family and friends. Then I'll give the forecast for where I am

• I read that today in Maine it was -50 degrees
  
• My brother says tonight it is 2 degrees in Charlottesville, VA
• My best friend Alex, in State College, PA, says it's 0 degrees
• In the teens in Atlanta

So here is my forecast...


FYI, I know the layout and the colors of the blog look bad, I'll fix it this weekend.

Song for 2008

I was just trying to come up with a playlist for New Years Day 2008 and thought I'd tell you about one here.

The song is the jazz standard, What's New. You can read more about the history of the chart here. In short, it was written by a bassist Bob Haggarty who included a solo for himself. My library contains three recordings of this chart.

My favorite would have to be by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers with Doug Watkins playing bass. This can be found on the CD reissue of At The Cafe Bohemia, Vol. 1 (It is a bonus track that did not appear on the original LP). First of all, it's not often you hear bass solos. Secondly, even rarer is a bass feature heard His playing is very smooth and lyrical for plucked bass and it is backed by wonderful comping from pianist Horace Silver, who does just enough to let you know he's there, but nothing to overwhelm the soloist.

An honorable mention, goes to my favorite trumpet player, Clifford Brown. His recording can be found on the With Strings album, which I always hesitated to buy/listen to because I thought it wouldn't be my cup of tea. But with Brown's warm sound and relaxed energy, you can never go wrong.

On a side note, when looking for songs for this new years playlist, I searched my library for "change," since it looks like that will be this year's theme. Oddly enough, only a few results popped up. You can bet there will probably be a lot of songs about change this year. Hopefully there will be some on the jazz size and not just pop music.

New Years

I am not one for New Years resolutions. I could never think of anything I would actually try to resolve to do and if I did I would never follow through anyway. Also, why do you have to wait every 365 days to make silly resolutions? I can come up with something each day that I want to do but never will. Well, I'm giving it a shot this year. It's pretty simple what I resolve to do, 100 posts on this blog for 2009 and also another 100 posts on my Dolphins blog. That's about two posts per week, per blog, and it's a nice round number to shoot for. We'll see how it goes.

One thing that I miss about New Years during my childhood and adolescence was that all of the important college football Bowl Games were on this day. It used to be there would be maybe 10-12 games on today and you can flip between each one and enjoy the best college football all day, and by the end of the day you would know who the national champion(s) are. College football season was over and it would be time to focus on the NFL playoffs. Well now, most of the BCS games are on the days following January 1st and the National Championship Game is usually a full week later. After that happened, some other small bowl games moved their games to after the new year. It's stupid and I don't like that. There are actually more games after new years day then on it. Right now Iowa is crushing South Carolina in the Outback Bowl and I have nothing else to watch. Lame.

Update: I just realized after publishing this that I need to redesign the blogger template some, it could look better. Leave any ideas in the comments and I will resolve to make the page look better.