John Jones News November 8, 1999

November 8,1999

Mick with pen, paper and tea...

My Times

This week I'm having another break from the Song of the Week.
With 10 songs already available for your listening pleasure, I hope that some of them are worth another play....

The Air Date for the Club MP3 show at the Troubador in Los Angeles is "sometime in January".
I don't know what MP3 have in mind but I'm sure it'll be great....stay tuned.

The sorting has begun. The Star Hotel mixes are finished and Mick has had a minute between speaking engagements in Brussels and London to come over and "score" the tracks. We give them stars. The ultimate award is Deluxe!
It's beginning to look like there is a lot more music than either of us imagined. We must be up to 50 tracks from the Visitor trip to Ghana alone.
Between the African Odyssey and the Blue Whale blues albums, the Lost Tapes of Fleetwood Mick are coming to life and bringing us both a large helping of pleasure.

It seems like years since we last heard of Thomas Dolby.
He started a company in 1996 called Beatnik who make a very very cool music player for the web.

"Its mission is to develop professional audio tools and technologies designed to sonify the Web, making Web pages interactive by embedding sound files that respond instantly to a user's mouse movements by playing music and sound.

The Beatnik Player is very worth having if only to do your own re-mix of Blinded by Science.

If you were asked, "where do Zamboni's come from?", would you know they were invented in 1949 in Los Angeles? Probably not.
But that is where they came from.
The early Zamboni's barely hide the Jeep they were built on top of.
The first customers were the ice shows.
Before the Zamboni it used to take an hour and a half to make new ice by hand.
What would Hockey be like without that fresh sheet of ice to skate on?

The end of a great season of Formula One came in Suzuka with Mika Hakkinen taking the World Championship that he should have won, many races earlier in the season.
Ferrari won the Constructers title, so all is fair in love and war.
The whole year was ruined by the death of Greg Moore in California at the end of the CART season in a horrific crash at Fontana.
Even after all the years of safety improvements we're still going to loose our favourite Pilots from time to time. Racing, will always be a risk. The drivers know about them. Most of them have seen the consequences at some point or another in their carreers. It doesn't make it any easier...
Along with the retirement of Damon Hill, who could not get up to speed all year, and the loss of Payne Stewart, the great sportsman, 1999 will not go down in my books as a banner year in sport.

" The fact of the matter is that we are oversold on virtually all our guns. They are very much in demand. So I hardly think that is exiting the handgun business." ."
Colt Executive, quoted in LA Times - Colt Says No, It Won't Stop Handgun Sales.