Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite radio and to our regular Saturday night Distinguished Lecture, Documentary, and Interview series. It’s two months now since we started this series, and I think that we’ve pretty much managed to sort of set the domain of discourse for our new series: from metaphysics to epistemology to axiology, that is to say, the stuff I’m interested in. From what, I should select the stuff you’re interested in? That would be a bit presumptuous of me, already, don’t you think?

Anyway, another way to look at this is to take out some of the -ologies, and note that what we are looking at here are existence, knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics. And that seems ok to me. Why not? I mean, we have to fill a whole week’s schedule here in the studio, every week, so it seems reasonable to me to designate some hooks on which to structure our hats.

Nevertheless, it remains the case that, as a result of the searches, previews, and edits I have been conducting over the last couple of months, pursuant to this Saturday night series, I have now managed to accumulate a large enough collection of works, which have passed though my filters, so that I no longer have the ability to structure them into a coherent argument, as I once did. Even if I could in principle, I don’t have the time (things are pleasantly busy here in the lab, um, at work), and besides, who am I to presuppose your interpretation of these works which I have tentatively selected for your delectation?

So, instead, I have written a little computer program to process a file in which I keep a list of all the SDA LNR DLDI Series candidate works queued but not played, to date, and pseudo-randomly choose one show for us each week. Then we, or rather you, dear listeners, at least after having suffered through my initial bloviating as here illustrated, can take the discussion into whatever aspect of the topic you find interesting.

Now you might well ask: what’s the value-added here, Vitruvius? It is, simply, that for you the value-added is that I agree with many of the common tenets here at SDA, and thus I am able to save you the cost of wading through some of the huge piles of steaming crap that exist out there; and that for me: there is one common tenet here at SDA, that is to say, not to speak for Kate, but based on the general tenor of the comments, that I disagree with, and the selection of the shows in this series gives me a chance to address that (as I see it) shortcoming, without putting too fine a point on it.

Without further ado, then, tonight’s pseudo-randomly selected pre-filtered SDA LNR DLDI Series show is Mr. Benjamin Zander presenting his talk: Classical Music with Shining Eyes (20:43).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Friday night old-time radio crime-detective show, here is Gerald More as Raymond Chandler‘s most famous character, Philip Marlowe, in The Eager Witness episode of the Adventures Of Philip Marlowe (1949, 27:43).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Thursday night wild-card show, here are the San Francisco Taiko Dojo, featuring Seiichi Tanaka, Kenny Endo, and Jimmy Nakagawa, performing the finale of their Tsunami, largely on the ōdaiko (大太鼓, or great drum), at the Edo-Tokyo Museum in 1994 (9:59).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Tuesday night open music show, here is Mr. Dean Martin performing Roger Miller ‘s King of the Road, at The Kiel Opera House, in St. Louis, in 1965 (2:23).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Monday night jazz show, here are Count Basie and his Orchestra, featuring Eric Dixon on flute and Al Aarons on trumpet, performing Blues Alley in Paris in 1968 (5:53).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Sunday night classical music show, here are Il Giardino Armonico performing Antonio Lucio Vivaldi‘s Concerto for Cello & Bassoon in E minor, RV 409 (8:52).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Saturday night distinguished lecture, documentary & interview series, here is Matthieu Ricard, previously a molecular geneticist as the Pasteur Institute, and now a Buddhist monk, presenting his talk: Habits of Happiness (2004, 20:55).

Last week, Dan Gilbert rounded out our very hasty walk, over the last two months, from the cosmos to atoms to the value of predictive pattern matching, consciousness, and happiness. In tonight’s show Mattieu continues our look into what new science and technology are telling us about ourselves, and how that relates to ancient versions of said understanding, once at a mystical level, now moving toward an epistemological level. Mattieu’s combination of Buddhist monk plus scientist I find interesting, much as in the way I find Lee Kwan Yew’s combination of Oxford economist and Confucian interesting.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Friday night old-time radio crime-detective show, here are Mildred Natwick, as Mary Curtiss, and the famous Ken Lynch, as Joe “Tasty” Martin, performing the Female of the Species episode (1939, 27:00, 7.1 MB, MP3) of Crime Does not Pay, an anthology radio crime drama series (1935 to 1952) based on Metro Goldwin Mayer’s short film series, which included roles by Bela Lugosi, Everett Sloane, Ed Begley, John Loder, and Lionel Stander.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Thursday night wild-card show, here is one of my favourite dance tunes from 1999, Danish D.J. Martin Ottesen, also known as Funkstar Deluxe, with his interpretation of Mr. Bob Marley‘s classic work: The Sun is Shining (3:33).

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Tuesday night vintage music show, here is the first known published recording of Enrico Caruso. He’s performing the Studenti! Udite aria from Alberto Franchetti‘s opera Germania, in 1902 (1:57).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Monday night jazz show, here is Mr. B. B. King, along with Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, et al., performing The Thrill is Gone (6:50).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Sunday night classical music show, here are Antal Szalai and some philharmonic orchestra performing the third movement of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky‘s Violin Concerto, Op. 35 (9:51).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Saturday night distinguished lecture, documentary & interview series, here is Dan Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard, presenting his talk: Why are we happy? Why aren’t we happy? (2004, 22:02).

In our previous distinguished lecture series shows, we worked our way from metaphysics to epistemology to Hawkins’ discussion of our neocortex, and Dennett’s discussion of our consciousness. Tonight, Gilbert takes a look at our prefrontal cortex, our synthesis of happiness, and our psychological immune system.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Friday night show, here are Bud Abbott & Lou Costello performing their classic Who’s on first? sketch from their 1945 film The Naughty Nineties (6:16).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Thursday night wild-card show, here is the great Kenny Roberts performing She Taught Me To Yodel (3:04). Those of you who liked our previous yodeling shows here at SDA Late Nite Radio will, I can say with very probably high confidence, like this one. No, seriously, Kenny definitely gets out there.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Tuesday night vintage music show, here are the Victor Concert Orchestra performing Franz Von Suppe‘s Poet & Peasant overture, parts A and B (1915, 9:02). I doubt that many will bother to listen through to part B of tonight’s show, and that’s too bad, really: they simply won’t know what they missed!

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Monday night jazz show, here is some rather rare and historic footage of jazz greats Coleman Hawkins (tenor saxophone), Sweets Edison (trumpet), Papa Jo Jones (drums), and bass and piano: not sure, perhaps Jimmy Woode and Sir Charles Thompson, performing Stoned (7:38) and Caravan (7:16), in 1964.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Sunday night classical music show, here are the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra performing one you all know, the first movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart‘s Symphony No.40, K.550, Count Nikolaus de la Fontaine und d’Harnoncourt-Unverzagt conducting, at the Suntory Hall in Tokyo (2006, 8:16).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Saturday night distinguished lecture, documentary & interview series, here is Daniel Dennett, Austin Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, presenting his talk: Can We Know Our Own Minds? (23:45).

Last week, Jeff Hawkins stood on the shoulders of our previous physics and genetics shows and started taking a look at our neo-cortex and how the modern human brain works. Now hold on to your seats: in tonight’s talk, Dan notes that not only don’t we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us. As Dan says: “Your consciousness is not quite as marvelous as you may have thought it is […] consciousness is a bag of tricks”. Of course, tonight’s show wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t at least slightly disagree with Dan, in the sense that I think said bag of tricks is, indeed, marvelous.

Your Reader Tricks, er, Tips, are, as always, welcome in the comments.

(note from Kate – for some reason, Vit’s post didn’t auto-publish last night as scheduled. I’m republishing it now, for your morning enjoymen.)

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, we have a very special show for you. Pursuant to our Friday night old-time radio crime detective show, to St. Valentine’s Day, 2009, and to eighty years ago today, here is the delightful Mr. Dickie Goodman performing:

The Touchables, running 2:04, was originally released by Goodman on February 26, 1961, on Rori Music’s Mark-X Records, pressing 8009. The B side of the 45-rpm single contains Goodman’s Martian Melodies, which is a 33 1/3-rpm version of the same recording as the normal speed version of Martian Melody that was issued as Luniverse 105 on July 13, 1957. The copy of this disk that I have here in the studios lists Glazer and Aricin along with Goodman, but I have as yet not been able to find reference to either them in the Interwebothique.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.