Buddy Miller: Universal United House of Prayer I’ve been hearing Buddy Miller’s name, usually along with that of his wife, Julie, for a while, but have only heard a little of their work. If the rest of it is in the class with this, I want to hear a lot more. (Although Buddy’s name is…

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Bob Dylan: Modern Times Who would have thought that the latter days of Dylan’s career would see him emerge as primarily a great vocalist? His voice, always a triumph of manner over means, seems pretty well ruined as far as anything that would normally be thought of as singing is concerned. But he’s achieved a…

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How tall was James Brown? To some people, it is an extremely contentious question. I must say, it sounds like a more interesting one than the purely speculative volleying between Alabama and Auburn fans about who's going to win next year and how much difference Saban will make. I'm familiar with Atmore. It's just up…

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Being a provincialist by both temperament and conviction, I like to support the most local team in bowl games, and, besides, I always find myself hoping the underdog will win in a game where I have no stake. So I was pulling for the Gators in last night's BCS game, even though Ohio State was…

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Roy Buchanan: Sweet Dreams: The Anthology (disc 2) The second disc of this set may be better than the first, overall. It leans toward live tracks, including a few songs that take a bit of nerve to cover because the originals are so very well known: Neil Young’s “Down By The River,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey…

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Just when you get ready to fire up your new Large Hadron Collider, here they come with all sorts of silly worries. See Section 6, Safety Concerns. Pre-TypePad http://js-kit.com/for/lightondarkwater.com/comments.js

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My Favorite Christmas Music Music of the Week resumes because I can't let Christmas go by without recommending these albums. Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band: A Tapestry of Carols For reasons that completely escape me, not everybody loves this album as much as I do. How to describe it? A sort of high-spirited band…

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Yes, I said "holiday" on purpose, because there's nothing particularly related to Christmas here, except the vaguely seasonal. I suppose most people have seen this now, as it was circulated last year, but in case you haven't–remember I was saying a few weeks ago that engineers are not dull people? Here's a bit of evidence.…

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I've been hit by a bad case of One Thing After Another for several weeks now, including a major year-end crunch at work complicated by an unanticipated and, if I may say so, not altogether reasonable deadline for one task. Those who read my Sunday journal before I started this blog will have seen the…

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My brother-in-law passed away Wednesday night. It was not unexpected, as he had been in a slow decline for several years and a faster one for the past few months, so it hasn't come as a major blow to the family. I mention it here because events surrounding it have prevented me from reading the…

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