GARussell

I'll go first. Saskatchewan Roughriders Tiebreaker: 50 points

The Grey Cup game will be played this Sunday Nov. 25. The Grey Cup is the world championship of what I think is the greatest game in the world, Canadian rules football. The game has been played since 1909. The Eastern champion is the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. The Western champion is the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Both teams finished second in the final standings and won their divisions' championship game on the 18th. Saskatchewan is led by quarterback Kerry Joseph, who was named the Western Most Outstanding Player. Winnipeg was led by its quarterback Kevin Glenn, who was named the Eastern Most Outstanding Player. Unfortunately for the Bombers, Glenn broke his arm in the Division Final Sunday, and the Bombers will have to rely upon his backup Ryan Dinwiddie, who has rarely played in his (I think) two years as a pro. Here are the rules for the Grey Cup contest: Pick the winning team; and for the tiebreaker pick the total number of points scored. The winning tiebreaker will be the closest number to the total score. Your tiebreaker total points pick must be an EVEN number. If more than one person makes the same picks, the first to post wins. If two people are tied with the closest tiebreaker, the winner will be the lower of the two numbers. You may change your pick up to the deadline, but your posting time will be changed to the edit time. The deadline to play is Sunday Nov. 25, 5:30 pm eastern. That's the scheduled time of the kickoff. The prize will be a US$20.00 Mosaic Records gift certificate. Mosaic will mail it to anywhere in the world, so everyone here ought to be interested in winning it. If I have further comments to make, I will make them here on post #1. So check back here to see if I have added anything in answer to your questions. If you want to study up on what has happened over the course of the season, here is the thread about it: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...c=34428&hl= Good luck everyone! ***** Here's another rule: Only one entry per person. (I'm not sure which of you wiseacres would try to play twice, picking both teams, but I figure if I don't say something now...!) Noj wonders in post #4 if he can watch the game on TV. It will be broadcast to about 75 million US households on various cable channels. I think NESN, Fox Sports World and Comcast will be among them. You can see the game pay per view for $12.95 if you have broadband at http://www.cfl.ca Click on the CFL on CBC link. You can listen to the game for free on the internet. Post #25 of the CFL thread linked to above lists the websites of the radio stations of the teams. I expect that nearly all of them will carry the Grey Cup game. Sirius will carry the game on ch. 130.

Well, this is why they play the games! Winnipeg Blue Bombers 19....Toronto Argonauts 9 http://scoreboards.canoe.ca/merge/tsnform..../final/W650.htm When Prefontaine missed that first field goal attempt, I had a hunch it was going to be a bad day for the Argos. Glenn broke his arm. I can't imagine anybody has confidence in backup Ryan Dinwiddie. If the Bombers win the Grey Cup, it will have to be the biggest upset since 1986, when Hamilton clobbered Edmonton. Saskatchewan Roughriders 26....British Columbia Lions 17 http://scoreboards.canoe.ca/merge/tsnform..../final/W651.htm Maybe one of you knows how many times Wally Buono in Calgary and BC has finished first in the West and then lost the Western Final. It's probably a record. The Lions coughed the ball up four times, leading to 16 Rider points. That was pretty much the game right there. Dickinson was sacked six times in the second half alone. My hunch is that he will retire. I listened to the BC broadcast of the game. Rick Ball kept wondering why Wally didn't put Jarious Jackson back in the game. Two Lion o-linemen at the same position (right guard?) were injured, leaving it up to a young rookie playing his first CFL game. He was obviously overmatched, and Jackson may have been better able to elude the tacklers. edit for typo

That's a new one, and it's good! I reviewed it in the New Releases forum not long ago. I wonder why it was in the cutout bin.

The Stampeders fired Tom Higgins today. He was offered a position as VP, but he turned it down. As mentioned above, John Hufnagel is expected to be named to replace him. http://www.globesports.com/servlet/story/R...tsFootball/home ***** edit to add: I forgot to mention Monday that I learned Sunday while listening to the Western Semi-Final that the Riders signed Josh Ranek the last week of the season. He had a decent game Sunday. He was great for Ottawa, and pretty much a bust for Hamilton. I think he could help the Riders this Sunday, but I can't see them beating the Lions.

Just in case you didn't see the final standings from last week, here they are: Eastern W L T Pts PF PA Home Away Div y-Toronto Argonauts 11 7 0 22 440 336 6-3 5-4 7-3 x-Winnipeg Blue Bombers 10 7 1 21 439 404 7-2 3-5-1 7-3 x-Montreal Alouettes 8 10 0 16 398 433 5-4 3-6 5-5 Hamilton Tigercats 3 15 0 6 315 515 3-6 0-9 1-9 Western W L T Pts PF PA Home Away Div y-British Columbia Lions 14 3 1 29 542 379 7-2 7-1-1 8-1-1 x-Saskatchewan Roughriders 12 6 0 24 530 434 6-3 6-3 6-4 x-Calgary Stampeders 7 10 1 15 473 527 5-3-1 2-7 4-5-1 Edmonton Eskimos 5 12 1 11 400 509 3-5-1 2-7 1-9

I believe that that album is on a Concord label; and Concord ended their relationship with BMG/Your Music last year.

I was planning on buying the On the Corner box and probably the Brubeck 5-CD box. But I was surprised to see that of the fifteen items in my queue, none of them were Sony/BMG, so apparently the loss of that label won't mean as much to me as I first thought when I heard the news.

Through Nov. 20, BMG is offering the same deal as Your Music: $6.99 (no minimum) with no shipping. Code: N7X5

My pick this month is Enrico Rava - Tati. This will be my first Rava album. Stefano Bollani and Paul Motian are on it, but apparently no bass player. I'm looking forward to hearing it and finding out what the buzz about Rava is all about.

Jim, thanks for your response. It's not often that I feel like I am one of only 158 and 226 (I bought both of my CDs from CDBaby.). By coincidence, I'm listening to This is the Place right now. I'm going to assume that your sales are higher than most CDBaby jazz acts because of your regional popularity and this board. I wonder what the expense would be to do something like the Allman Brothers do - record every performance and burn CDs of it after every show for the people there who want it. I wonder if the machinery is too expensive for that to work. In my ignorance I would guess that the machinery would cost less than the $10,000. per CD you have spent. I wonder if ad campaigns in Downbeat and Jazz Times would put a self-produced group/album on the map. Maybe they too would be just too expensive. I hope some of us voted for the band in the two mags' Readers Polls. I still think that is an excellent way to put the band on the map.

The Eskimos fired three assistant coaches Tuesday, including Jacques Chapdelaine. http://www.globesports.com/servlet/story/R...tsFootball/home ***** Argos K Noel Prefontaine suffered his second concussion of the season during the last game. This is expected to interfere with his concentration as he lines up for a field goal attempt. http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Football/CFL/Tor...652353-sun.html

It's not evident to me that all types of music will follow the same model. In rural areas there seem to be plenty of bars with country bands that play for folks who want to go out and spend the evening dancing. That might be a two nights per week gig, but nowadays the band can easily cut a CD and sell it at the bar to augment its income. Those bands can be as loud as the crowd feels comfortable with, and they won't mind people talking through the music while some dance. My old girlfriend was a flautist who played weddings and other society gigs. Her day job was teaching kids, but it could have just as easily been something else. I'm out of touch with the rock scene. The impression I get is that the rock audience is the paying-customer base that the majors came to depend upon and are now losing their grip on. I can't say that I care if the rock scene goes down the toilet; but maybe the model to look at here is what the Canterbury prog rock groups of the past thirty years have been doing. Granted, there haven't been many of those groups, and none of those musicians are millionaires, but they are finding venues to play. In England, the members of Manfred Mann reformed a few years ago without Mann himself and call themselves The Manfreds. They go on tour all the time and play clubs, and have recorded for their own "label" at least three albums. Their singer Paul Jones said, "The music industry doesn't bother us, and we don't bother them." It seems to me that what has changed is the kids' willingness to pay for and value rock music. Over the decades there have been many rock groups whose members were set for life (if they didn't blow their money) based upon only one hit album and the touring off it. I met a man about 1970 whose son was a member of Iron Butterfly, and he told me that his son was set for life, while the members of Jefferson Airplane blew their money on cars and such. Now if the biggest change for the musicians is that rock musicians can no longer expect to be set for life because they had one hit album, I don't see that as a crying shame. I agree with the poster above (Noj?) who said that the world will always want its Britneys du jour. Hannah Montana, here we come. I don't feel that the success of ephemeral teen idols is relevant to any art I might want to listen to. So that brings us to the music we like, mainstream jazz. What is changing here? The push of the 90s is over, and I don't think downloading has any relevance to that. Few Americans want to listen to it. They don't want to buy the records and they don't want to go to clubs. The trend over the past five years has been toward self-produced albums like Big O Records. I'd like to see the sales figures of CDBaby for such projects. I think I read in Art Pepper's Straight Life the comment that in the 50s in all of America there were only 400 jazz musicians good enough to record, and they all knew each other. Maybe that 400 figure is still true today. Anyway, I see mainstream jazz to be the product of starving artists. So I don't see the model for country bands and rock bands to be the same as for jazz bands. Nearly all jazz musicians will need to find a day job because there isn't much of a market for them, not because of changes in the record industry. The few stars will continue to play auditoriums, and record for small labels like Mack Avenue and Cryptogramophone.

Thanks Harold!

RIP. I remember her from her guest appearances on quiz shows in the 60s. In her younger days, she was a real beauty.

Now fans, you seed that ball!

Tom Harrell When Charlie Rose did a piece on him for Sixty Minutes a couple of years ago, he placed the accent on the second syllable. But Saturday Les Davis of Sirius played a song of his, and placed the accent on the first syllable. Anybody sure?

I was going to post a new thread on this article, but since you have beaten me to it here, I'll say what I have to say here. I heard Mother Angelica say on EWTN Radio Saturday that it is easy to have faith during the good times, but when the times are bad it is tough. I believe that she is exactly wrong on that. Poland was a very religious country during the Communists' rule, but since the Berlin Wall fell and Poland has become free it has become much less religious, according to what I have read. Now here in the US times are usually pretty good, so we have the non-religious insist that the courts ban prayer and Christmas creches from government property. But when times are bad like they are now, the governors pray on the Capitol steps. I don't think the atheist protestors are going to make a dent in the governor's prayer meeting.

Quincy, I too bought dreadful MCA LPs a couple of times. As I recall, the two Olivia Newton-John albums I got were the worst fidelity albums I had ever owned. I thought the problem was that they stamped too many copies of the record from the same press. I remember reading at the time that that practice was going on. I didn't realize (until reading here last week) that the price of oil was a factor.

I don't agree with Daniel's first premise, that CDs will die. I believe that in my lifetime there will always be a demand for physical product. Perhaps virtually all of the downloaders were born after 1980. Let's say that they don't care about a physical product. OK, so maybe we won't have the CD (or its successor) after the year 2040. I can imagine that a shift may occur away from CDs to DVDs with DRM. But I don't see retailers like Amazon ever having nothing tangible to sell.

That's how I feel about Joe Morgan! I don't understand why some here dislike him so. My favorites: Dizzy Dean & Pee Wee Reese Curt Gowdy (pre-1970) Giulio Caravatta (BC Lions) Charlie Jones Harold Johnson (Charlotte guy who did the Charlotte Hornets of the WFL) Don Dunphy Lyndsey Nelson My dislikes: Tim McCarver (by far) Chris Schultz (CFL studio analyst on TSN) - as much fun as a trip to the principal's office Sterling Sharpe Eli Gold Al Michaels Bryant Gumbel

Two exciting finishes! Winnipeg Blue Bombers 24....Montreal Alouettes 22 http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Football/CFL/New...4648384-cp.html Saskatchewan Roughriders 26....Calgary Stampeders 24 http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Football/CFL/New...4649038-cp.html ***** Next week: Winnipeg at Toronto and Saskatchewan at BC

Happy Birthday SoW! I believe that today is also the birthday of one of my favorites, Mose Allison.

This thread spurred me to put this on tonight. Thanks!

Van, the thing about guaranteed contracts is that you wind up with this year's budget paying last year's players. Wouldn't you rather have this year's budget going to this year's players?