Spoken

Posted by Daniel Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:18:21 GMT

It’s very rare that my birthday falls during the week and I have off. This wouldn’t seem strange on the face of it, but my birthday happens to coincide with Martin Luther King day. So you’d think that I’d have off routinely, except this holiday has not been accepted into the pantheon of “important” holidays in many businesses. However the Oxygen Network is one of those places, and since I’m currently working on a project for them, I had the day off.

So I planned to ride quite a bit today, and did, but not as much as I wished because it was rainy and nasty. Sure, I did ~30 miles (I dunno exactly I had no comp on the bike – I’m being very conservative), but I was muddy and wet and the temps were dropping, and decided that it was getting unpleasant and not in the birthday spirit, plus my riding partner quit at 26 miles (having frozen her toes to cubes) taking her comp with her. Plus, she had the route we were supposed to take, but I was riding in front. So we wound up climbing a few hills that were not on the program. Not so bad. Worse, we set ourselves up for a very steep descent into town at the end. Short, trafficy, and steep. Wet roads, wet rims, etc. Not good. All was well however, and therefore all things considered, a great first birthday ride… even if the weather did not cooperate.

While I was riding I got a chance to consider the day and the importance of diversity in my life. Diversity is the answer to so many problems. Open the doors, your home, your mind. You’ll never be sorry.

Posted by Daniel Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:03:00 GMT

Posted by Daniel Sun, 14 Jan 2007 15:08:37 GMT

Posted by Daniel Sun, 14 Jan 2007 14:39:00 GMT

NYT: Michael Brecker, a saxophonist who won 11 Grammy Awards and was among the most influential musicians in jazz since the 1960s, died yesterday at a hospital in New York City. He was 57 and lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.

The cause of death was leukemia, said Darryl Pitt, his manager.

Having taken a deep understanding of John Coltrane’s saxophone vocabulary and applied it to music that merged with mainstream culture — particularly jazz fusion and singer-songwriter pop of the 1970s and 80s — Mr. Brecker spread his sound all over the world.

For a time, Mr. Brecker seemed nearly ubiquitous. His discography — it contains more than 900 albums — started in 1969, playing on the record “Score,” with a band led by his brother, the trumpeter Randy Brecker. It continued in 1970 with an album by Dreams, the jazz-rock band he led with his brother and the drummer Billy Cobham.