PicoBlog

Roy Hargrove, an incandescent trumpeter who blazed a new path for his jazz generation, died on this day five years ago. He was 49. A lot of people I know can recall where they were when they got the news. For me, it’s an indelible memory: early the morning of Nov. 3, a Saturday, I woke up in a Seattle hotel room to a text message from Amy Niles, then my boss at Newark Public Radio.

I DIDN’T KNOW their names. I only knew I was jealous watching them, those two bold 17-year-olds in bell bottoms making an unsanctioned cameo on the field when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record. If you were among the 55,773 other fans at Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium on April 8, 1974, or, as I was, in one of the 14.7 million households with TV sets tuned to the game that night, chances are you remember the bushy-haired teens patting Aaron on the back after he crossed second base.

Hello, reader. Jeremy here. And wouldn’t you know it, today’s newsletter is from a new guest writer! My good friend Anton is a man of many talents—writing, photography, graphic design, DJing, and the “waved” creations he chops up as part of the Dream Video Division (keep reading for a sample!), just to name a few.* But if you’re part of the Alabama film scene, you probably know him as the director of the Montgomery Film Festival, which I happily attend every year that I get the chance, and/or the president of the Capri Theatre’s Board of Directors.

Share Earworms and Song Loops 11 albums or cassettes (or 8-tracks or reel-to-reel tapes) for a dollar? And all I had to do was buy “as few as” 8 more albums at regular club prices over the next 3 years? What was the catch? The catch was, with the added shipping and higher than record store album prices, you could pay a pretty penny by the time three years had passed.

There’s nothing quite like gathering as a family around the table around the holiday season, chucking dice and having a great time with a game. For many families over the last 70 years, the game of choice has remained Yahtzee. Who doesn’t have a Yahtzee box hiding somewhere in a closet? And, of course, if you don’t have a box labelled Yahtzee, you may well have a handful of six-sided dice.

If you love finance, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen or read: “The Big Short”. And if so, you may be familiar with these two: In the film, the fund is renamed “Brownfield” as it follows the two’s adventure into getting an ISDA license which would allow them to trade more exotic, institutional products. But well before that, the two had generated extraordinary returns that validated their greater ambitions.

Hi all. Last week was certainly all over the map. It seems that bad news always quickly follows good news, and it’s hard to keep any shred of hope, even in a time when the pandemic sort of has an end in sight. In the wake of the Atlanta spa shootings, I didn’t have a ton of bandwidth for pop culture moments. But this newsletter is my current source of income, so there is still a letter this week.

William Pepper died in New York on April 7, 2024.  The information is that he was ill but then suffered a serious fall.  He was born in New York City and educated at Columbia, where he achieved a BA and MA.  He then attained a law degree from Boston College. Pepper was an opponent of the Vietnam War.  This came from a visit he had made there in early 1966 as a freelance journalist.

HE THOUGHT IT was a butt dial. On the night of August 8, Steve Forbes was riding a minibus at Camp Arifjan, the U.S. Army installation in Kuwait, when he felt his cellphone vibrate. Forbes, the men’s basketball coach at Wake Forest, was there for Operation Hardwood, a program that sends a group of former and current college coaches to military bases so they can coach servicemen and women through a tournament and give them a little taste of home.