Eureka!!! I got comments.

To my friends: I have not read any of your comments since late December. This is because I haven't been able to see the tiny numbers on my blog that let me know that comments have arrived. Plus, the comment window wouldn't open when I clicked the link.

All of this changed last night when I switched browsers -- from IE 6.x (which used to work fine) to the outstanding Opera 7.01.

Eureka!!! Imagine my delight when I discovered all of your thought provoking and amusing contributions. Thanks for making this experiment better than it would otherwise be. Since no one has reported any problems, it appears that the craziness is local. I have had many Windows problems in general. Big surprise, eh? Please let me know which browser (including version) you are using.

Mike

The Prime of Frances McDormand. Frances McDormand has made 26 films. She's gifted, versatile and utterly distinctive, but cinematically she's been underused. By Karen Durbin. [New York Times: Arts]

A Country Fiddler Who Swings. It wasn't a stretch for Mark O'Connor to move beyond his bluegrass roots into jazz. He's been in that groove for years. By Terry Teachout. [New York Times: Arts]

Spinning Blues Into Gold, the Rough Way. B.B. King, the last of the great bluesmen, furthered the blues tradition by salting it with jazz, gospel, country and even Frank Sinatra. By Bernard Weinraub. [New York Times: Arts]

With out a doubt, the best live performance I've ever seen was B.B. King at a black club in Atlantic City, late summer of '72. I was 21 years old and just a couple of weeks away from moving to Boston to attend Berklee college of music. I stayed up that night until dawn, playing my cherry red Gibson ES-345 with the band inside my head.

If you've only heard King on television, or on record since some time from the late sixties onward, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of "Live At The Regal."