moon traveller herald

  Dave Purvis -played by Perry Mason nemesis William Talman - is a master criminal planner who robs the Wrigley Field revenues during a ball game. THis is the other Wrigley Field, the one in L.A. for the minor league Angels. THe movie is made in 1950. The hold up goes wrong and a cop is shot and killed. A lot of forensics, radio patrol cars and wire taps ensue in a movie that moves at a clipped pace. Purvis is involved with a burlesque dancer who is easy on the eye but a genuine tough cookie. The burlesque bits pretty much seal the fact that this was a B movie. All the criminals in this noir are desperate and untrustworthy, the kind who "never gave one dime to the United Way." Like many of these movies, the interplay of black and white in cinema composition is at times stunning. While the cops persevere the general impression is that it is a mean old world. Funny thing, The TMC moderator said Armored Car toured the country on a double bill with The Good Humor Man, a Jack Cars...

I got sad news last night that a dear Boston friend died at 79. That is Walter Powers, who I came to know through my library circles [I worked at BU Library for almost 10 years- and got to know a bunch of MIT Library people, especially Gordon Thomas, who played the organ at our wedding.] He and Walter did cataloging and had little bands during academic intermissions.   Walter Powers was a real good guy. Also, a musical historian, erudite, movie star good looking, and famous in the Boston music scene. Including the so-called BossTown Sound scene. He had been in - among others - The Lost with Willie Alexander, Listening with Peter Malickand the Grass Menagerie with Doug Yule, who went on to replace John Cale in the Velvet Underground. When Lou Reed left the Velvets, Walter replaced him, and he brought in Willie Alexander when Sterling Morrison went back to college, leaving Mo Tucker the last of the originals. Tough job to replace Lou there, Walter would admit, but honestly,...

  Sunnyland Slim with Capt Beefhart. Boston, 1978. Sunnyland liked Beefhart, and they got along well. But Beefhart could hardly sit still or have a (two-sided) conversation then. it seemed like he was up all the time. Slim bought some Johnny Walker and was looking forward to 'sitting down and talking' but Beefhart's wife had to insist he get some sleep at that point. [Paul's Mall, Boston] Slim's got a look here like he is getting ready to go on stage.

 

 

  Jellification  February 27, 2026 By Jack Vaughan  reposted from progressivegauge.com   It’s early to tell whether the recent generation of AI advances will go beyond recommendation engines and fraud detection—the two shining stars of the big data era. The distinction is simple: If I fudge a recommender, I lose a possible sale; if I fail a fraud detection, I lose money I already have. One might categorize the latter as mission critical —that high-stakes idiom from the Space Race days. Whether “nice-to-have” or “need-to-have,” the AI boom has placed immense pressure on the data centers running these LLMs and their supporting agentic systems. After all, current investment plans augur for superscale, 24/7 tokenization across the globe. This raises an increasingly urgent question: How will these data centers ensure continual operation when extreme weather—which we seem to see with increasing frequency—threatens the power supply, cooling systems, and roofing required to...