Is this useful?

A note from Yahoo! tells me that I now have two gigabytes of storage available to me in my yahoo.com mailbox. The venerable Internet company is responding to the challenge of Google's gmail, the new, free email service that provides one gigabyte of storage.

It's funny, just yesterday I cleaned out my inbox because I was close to exceeding the 100 megabytes of storage I heretofore rented from Yahoo! for $19.99 per year. The cleaning got me down to 60% of my quota, but now Yahoo! tells me I am using only 2%.

For the record, my first PC had a 20-megabyte hard drive. That is 1% of my new Yahoo! allotment. And that hard drive's capacity used to seem unimaginably vast.

At any rate, if you email me that copy of The Fellowship of the Ring, now it won't max me out.

Jesus.

A thousand words

Today saw the unveiling of the official White House portraits of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and President Bush's remarks were wholly laudatory, statesmanlike, even eloquent. Discomfitingly so. What's he up to?

Good word

"Of all the various kinds of sexual intercourse, this has the least to recommend it. As an amusement, it is too fleeting; as an occupation, it is too wearing; as a public exhibition, there is no money in it. It is unsuited to the drawing room, and in the most cultured society it has long been banished from the social board."

--Mark Twain, "Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism"

Still jerky after all these years

Aeons ago I blogged affectionately about Jamerica, the Jamaican restaurant around the corner.

I just wanted to report that after a long absence I stopped in recently for some takeout jerk pork, and my affection for the place endures. The reggae still churns there, and the food is still tasty. And owner Martin Deacon remains a Willy Street stalwart. Literally: pleasant days find him enthroned on a lawn chair in front of the restaurant, and cronies often join him there. I'm not sure if he remembers, but we were introduced ages ago, and I always greet him by name when I pass. He generally nods and smiles and says something like, "OK mon OK." Which is charming.

However, I did learn from my recent visit that Martin has drastically scaled back his grocery operation. It's no great loss, I suppose--I never did buy any Carribbean canned goods there. But I took comfort in knowing I could. Most disappointingly, Martin no longer carries soup mix that is, as I reported two years ago, Cock Flavoured.

The grocery shelves have become a kind of storage area for papers and cardboard boxes and the like. These lend a drabness to the restaurant's otherwise colorful clutter. I take it as a bad omen when eateries start using the public areas for storage. In its latter days the Badger Candy Kitchen, the splendid, now-shuttered downtown diner, began using several of its formica booths as filing cabinets. Not a good look.

The darkness

Terrible reports like this one about Reagan's mental decline fill me with sorrow for him and his family and friends, and for everyone affected by Alzheimer's. What a horrible disease. How can a person just not be there?

Separated at birth?

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Going to a go-go

I enjoyed this article on the Chicago Sun-Times' web site about live-music venues in the Windy City. I'm interested in the experts' opinions of sound quality in various rooms, but mostly the article reminded me of all the great shows I saw over the ten years I lived in Chicago. I was much more invested in going to hear live music back then, and I managed to hit all but a handful of the venues the article lists.

Inevitably, the article omits several outstanding venues, like Symphony Center, the Atheneum, Ravinia and, of course, the University of Chicago's Mandel Hall.

If you're curious, here's who I saw, and where (in a couple of cases I saw not a band but a musical or opera):

Abbey Pub: Tim O'Brien, Peter Rowan

Allstate Arena: the Highwaymen

Alpine Valley Music Theatre: Haven't been! But my brother, my mom and I are going to catch the Dead there this summer

Aragon: the B-52's, the Cult, Jane's Addiction, David Byrne

Arie Crown Theatre: Pete Townshend

Auditorium Theatre: Showboat

The Chicago Theatre: Miles Davis

Congress Theatre: Verdi's Falstaff

House of Blues: Never been. Can you believe it?

Metro: Pylon, Robbie Williams, Hunter S. Thompson

Old Town School of Folk Music: Peter Rowan, Bill Monroe, the Osborne Brothers, Ralph Stanley, J.D. Crowe, Del McCoury, Richie Havens, Hot Rize

Park West: Leon Redbone, Reverend Horton Heat

Riviera Theatre: The The

Rosemont Theatre: Never been. I'm not even sure where this place is

Soldier Field: The Beach Boys (Chicagofest 1983)

Tweeter Center: Farm Aid 1998, Elvis Costello, Lollapalooza 1991

UIC Pavilion: Phish

United Center: I saw the Bulls play in the old Chicago Stadium a couple of times, but I still have not set foot in the UC

Vic Theatre: Liz Phair