Wes Phillips

All I ever do with it is thicken sauces. Onviously, I lack imagination.

Watch the blooming of Brooklyn Botanic Garden's titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum), aka the "corpse flower" because it "releases a monstrous stench of putrefaction at peak bloom."

Well yes, obviously—but Mexican epidemiologist Rodolfo Acuña-Soto thinks that the 16th Century plague that reduced the Aztec population from 22 million to 2 million was not smallpox brought over by the Spaniards. Aztec historians of the time referred to it by a different name than smallpox, with which they were familiar(!), and, after 12 years of research, Acuña-Soto concurs.

Jason Victor Serinus, who sent it our way, suggests it might. It will certainly make your morning coffee spurt out your nose.

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! Tonight, John Atkinson is going to give me an honest to God production copy of the Attention Screen Live at Merkin Hall CD. You need to get one too. In the meantime, here's an interview with one of the truly great improvisors, Keith Jarrett.

Louis Armstrong's last LP was contemporary country music, He was asked if he was making a statement by recording what was then considered white, working class music. Silly question—Armstrong recorded with Jimmie Rodgers, after all.

Back when I worked at the lower Broadway Tower Records, those crazy cut-ups in the Classical Annex culled the stupidest, most cheesecakey covers from the used bins and covered a wall-of-shame in the count-out room with them.