Kevin Purdy

I actually like football a great deal. I am not some anti-sports prude. It has a place in our society, but not on college campuses. If you want to establish a minor league system that the National Football League pays for—which they should, given that they are the greatest beneficiaries of college football—that is fine.

To the Editor:

Let’s say you had a fire in your house. It is your most important possession, and you feel that it is irreplaceable. You want to find out what caused the fire, so you hire 100 expert fire investigators to investigate and report to you.

Ninety-seven of them tell you virtually the same thing: the fire was caused by faulty wiring, and if you don’t invest in upgrading the wiring you will almost certainly have another fire — and the next one could destroy your house.

Three of the experts tell you that you don’t have to do anything, and you shouldn’t worry about it at all. What would you do?

BOB SHAMIS New York, May 2, 2012

Woodward’s technique is no less effective for being obvious,” he wrote. “He flashes a glimpse of what he knows, shaded in a largely negative light, with a hint of more to come, setting up a series of prisoner’s dilemmas. Do you cooperate and elaborate in return (you hope) for learning more and earning a better portrayal — for your boss or for yourself? Or do you call his bluff? … If no one talks there is no book. “But someone always talks.

Another notable example of this eccentric behavior was reported to Johnny Marr of The Smiths by Karl Bartos, who explained that anyone trying to contact the band for collaboration would be told the studio telephone did not have a ringer, since during recording, the band did not like to hear any kind of noise pollution. Instead, callers were instructed to phone the studio precisely at a certain time, whereupon the phone would be answered by Ralf Hütter, despite never hearing the phone ring.

Chris Martin, lead singer of UK group Coldplay, anecdotally recalled, in a late 2007 article in Q about Kraftwerk, the process of requesting permission to use the melody from the track “Computer Love” in its 2005 release “Talk” from its album X&Y. He recalled writing them a letter and sending it through the lawyers of the respective parties and several weeks later receiving an envelope containing a handwritten reply that simply said ‘yes’.

He also left behind more than a few aphorisms, which covered more than food. There are gems: “Each morning the cuisinier must start again at zero, with nothing on the stove”; “Success is the sum of a lot of small things correctly done”; and the famous “Butter! Give me butter! Always butter!

Tusk sells a little more than 4 million copies, which, in 2008, would make it the best-selling album of the year. By a wide margin.

But things are different in 1979. In 1979 there’s no such thing as iTunes or illegal downloading.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.’