John Marks

"Della, it's considerably past five o'clock. Please pour me a glass of wine. Pour one for yourself, while you're at it. Don't we have some 1954 Inglenook Cabernet in one of those credenzas out there?"

"The long tradition of professional connoisseurship has resulted in the development of a bewildering universe of specialist terminology. In certain cases, it must be admitted, there was self-indulgent proliferation of words relating to some minute feature....In fact, no clear distinction can be made between one term and its closest neighbor in meaning."&mdash;from the Introduction to Kanzan Sato's <I>The Japanese Sword, A Comprehensive Guide</I>, translated and with an introduction by Joe Earle (New York: Kodansha America, Inc., 1983)

If you've got a thousand dollars to spend, I think asking for advice in choosing between the Coriolis Effect Deluxe Rev.3.2 power cord and the Shamelessly Hosing Neither Balanced Nor Unbalanced Tofu-Filled Mystical interconnect (footnote 1) is usually asking the wrong question.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote that "The eye is the first circle; the horizon it forms is the second." A profound observation, indeed: The horizon exists only in being perceived. Kind of like music, in fact.

From the days of Les Paul's chum Mary Ford, through Amanda McBroom and Jennifer Warnes, right up to Patricia Barber, audiophiles have been fascinated, and sometimes obsessed, with female vocals. I nominate to membership in that select sorority another Patricia, in this case O'Callaghan, whose third CD has just been released worldwide by her new label, Teldec.