bookofjoe

Who's #1? — The Dow Jones College Football Success Index

Sam Walker created it.

His August 18, 2006 Wall Street Journal story explained how it works.

The complete rankings are here.

Sensational website

It's

called

Indexed.

[via Russ Thomson]

Bregott Sea Salt Butter

Tyler Brûlé raved about it in his "Fast Lane" column in today's Financial Times.

The good news: the butter exists.

The bad news: you have to go to Sweden to get some.

Brûlé wrote, "It's taken a while but Sweden's Bregott butter brand has packaged what people have been doing around breakfast tables for ages — sprinking a little sea salt on their already buttered bread to give it a creamy crunch. There's the brand's signature cow on the tub — this time he's blue — and the contents do demand you stick your knife in that little bit deeper. Watch for dairies around the world to copy this innovation."

If you go to the Bregott website, you can learn more and even watch a little video (narrated in Swedish) about the butter.

I must say that I've been dining in the wrong places all these years: I have yet to find sea salt on a breakfast table.

Suction Trivet

From the website:
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Silicone Suction Trivet

Put a heat-resistant layer between hot pots and fine surfaces with this ingenious Silicone Trivet.

Suction design plus embedded magnets hold trivet tight to most metal, ceramic, glass and plastic pot bottoms as you carry them to the table.

Loop handles allow easy detaching and handy hanging.

8½''Diam. including tabs.

Heat-resistant to 600°F.

Dishwasher-safe.
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Tell you what — if I were still featuring those "What Is It?" mystery objects, this one would've made the cut.

$9.99.

'Dika Newlin, 82, Punk-Rock Schoenberg Expert, Dies'

Above, the headline of Douglas Martin's July 28, 2006 New York Times obituary of one of the most interesting people I've encountered — if only posthumously — this year.

The full story follows.

Dika Newlin, 82, Punk-Rock Schoenberg Expert, Dies

Dika Newlin, who composed a symphony at 11, became a distinguished composer and musicologist and emerged, in her 70's and 80's, as a most unlikely punk rocker, died on July 22 in Richmond, Va. She was 82.

The cause was complications of a broken arm she suffered on June 30, said Sabine Feisst, a professor of musicology at Arizona State University who is writing a book on Dr. Newlin.

''It is hard to find out about me because I'm involved in so many different things,'' Dr. Newlin said in an interview with The Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1996. One continuing thread: she was a professor at various universities, until her retirement from Virginia Commonwealth University two years ago.

Her latest incarnation was as leather-clad, bright-orange-haired punk rocker and occasional Elvis impersonator, belting out songs like ''Love Songs for People Who Hate Each Other,'' which she wrote herself. Her flamboyant image was not exactly dulled when she posed in her 70's for a pinup calendar.

Dr. Newlin's earlier prominence grew out of her studies as a teenager with the composer Arnold Schoenberg. Dr. Newlin, among the last surviving pupils of Schoenberg, wrote the entry on him for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Dr. Feisst called Dr. Newlin ''one of the pioneers of Schoenberg research in America.'' Dr. Newlin's doctoral dissertation was published as the book ''Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg'' (1947, 1968). She also translated Schoenberg's works from German to English, and her publication of diaries she kept as his student provide some of the most intimate glimpses of him.

Dr. Newlin's own compositions reflect Schoenberg's innovative approach. Those works include three operas, a chamber symphony, a piano concerto and numerous chamber, vocal and mixed-media works. In 1999, she sang in a costumed performance of Schoenberg's ''Pierrot Lunaire,'' in her own English translation, in Lubbock, Tex.

In her punk incarnation, Dr. Newlin appeared in horror movies produced by Michael D. Moore in Richmond. In ''Creep'' (1995), directed by Tim Ritter, her character, clad in a leather motorcycle jacket, poisons baby food on a supermarket shelf.

Dr. Feisst confessed to finding this sort of thing ''puzzling and disturbing'' but said she came to view it as ''all part of the package.''

Mr. Moore also directed ''Dika: Murder City'' (1995), a documentary about Dr. Newlin.

Dika Newlin, an only child, was born in Portland, Ore., on Nov. 22, 1923. Her name, chosen by her mother, refers to an Amazon in one of Sappho's poems.

Her parents, both academics, soon moved to East Lansing, Mich., to teach at what is now Michigan State University. Dika could read dictionaries at 3, played the piano at 6 and began composing at 7.

She entered grade school at 5 and finished at 8. At 11, she wrote a symphonic piece, ''Cradle Song.'' Three years later, it was performed by the Cincinnati Symphony, with Vladimir Bakaleinikoff conducting.

She finished high school at 12 and was accepted as a college student by Michigan State, where, The New York Herald Tribune said in 1939, she had the highest I.Q. score in the school's history. At the time of the article, she was in New York to hear one of her compositions performed at the World's Fair.

After graduating from Michigan State at 16, she settled with her mother in Los Angeles so that she could attend the University of California at Los Angeles and study with Schoenberg, who taught there. She kept a diary, which she published as a book, ''Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections (1938-76),'' in 1980.

Reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review, Joan Peyser marveled at its ''absolute ingenuousness,'' saying Dr. Newlin seemed to have censored nothing.

In one entry, she tells how Schoenberg, an Austrian émigré she called Uncle Arnold, criticized her string-quartet style as ''too pianistic.'' She replied that she knew it wasn't the best writing. The entry continues, ''He replied, 'No, it is not the best, nor even the second best — perhaps the 50th best, yes?' ''

She earned her doctorate in musicology from Columbia at 22. She studied piano with Artur Schnabel and Rudolf Serkin and made a half-dozen piano recordings in the United States and Europe. Many years later, in 2004, some of her punk numbers were released on an album called ''Ageless Icon: The Greatest Hits of Dika Newlin.''

Dr. Newlin, who never married, leaves no immediate family members. She has a surviving cousin and was close to her cat, Spot. She once kept eight or more cats. Reporters noted that she slept on a mattress on the floor with a medieval suit of armor dangling above.

She told The Richmond Times-Dispatch that she had always wanted to have a rock band, and hers surely carried her own brand. Who but Dr. Newlin could have taken the text Schoenberg used for the fourth movement of his second string quartet to use as punk lyrics for ''Alien Baby''?

''I feel like a child more than I did as a child,'' she said in an interview with People magazine in 2003. ''I try more and more to live day by day, to do something because it feels good.''

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Melissa Scott Sinclair, in Newlin's hometown alternative newspaper, Style Weekly, on July 26 wrote, "'Eccentric was a word frequently employed that never did her justice. Dika Newlin was way too weird for that. She was a diminutive, brilliant, wild, often fire-haired Richmond legend."

You can listen to Newlin's songs and much more here.

If you want to be like me, you'll go to Amazon and get a used copy of her book "Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections, 1938-76."

I just paid $12.40 for the cheapest one but the next is only nine cents more than that.

If you want to be more me than me you'll also get "Bruckner, Mahler and Schoenberg" — $7.47 and up.

I'll make you a deal: you read and review it and I'll feature you and your thoughts in bookofjoe.

Ain't it great?

No one in the world can buy their way in and yet I give it away.

Welcome to the Bizarro World.

Instant Brass Buttons

From the website:

Brass Buttons

"Instant" buttons hammer together in a jif — no sewing required!

Hey, you're no seamstress.

Use these buttons to replace lost buttons on jeans, khakis, army pants, coats or jackets.

Package includes eight brass metal buttons with shanks — enough buttons to convert work pants into suspender pants.

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Chrissie Hynde-approved.

But you don't want brass buttons — you want those silvery ones.

No problema.

The genuine nickel version

works the same way.

Eight brass buttons cost $4.

Eight in nickel run $4.

LifeLock: 'Iron-clad identity theft protection — up to $1,000,000 — guaranteed'

Tell us more.

This new company's executives are a group of former senior bankers, technology officers, security experts and entrepreneurs.

Tell you what: reading what they had to say on their website I learned something interesting, namely that there are not three but, rather, four major credit bureaus that collectively decide if you'll get a loan or not and if so, what your interest rate will be.

Worth a look.

Official Coffee Mug of bookofjoe

$12.98.