how the west was won (It's so great to have a heading that fits all the different threads in a post)

First interpretation: The great wonderfully-priced remastered power-packed 3-CD set representing two Led Zeppelin concerts in June 1972 (see previous note). Fans familiar with the BBC Sessions release will not be as awed as the rest of the crowd: Page's Bach quotes, the seamless medleys, the endless improvisations, and the (not surprisingly) overt raw sexual undercurrent to the guitar/vocals interplay. Fabulous stuff. (If you haven't already figured it out, I got myself a copy -- from Borders, which had a surprisingly low price for the set, although the retail price was not unreasonable to begin with). The only thing that prevents me from going and grabbing the 2-DVD set that accompanied this CD set, is my distaste for the whole region-specific business-minded encoding approach.

Second interpretation: TCM's Bollywood month kicks off. Caught Ismail Merchant talking to Robert Osborne, clearing the clouds on such mysteries[sic] as the meaning of the term 'Bollywood'. The kick-off film for this celebration of mainstream Hindi (which they have conveniently labelled as Indian) cinema was Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, famous among us trivia-mongers as the first Hindi (or ever?) film to have a credit that went "Title suggested by" (Kiron Kher, by the way, last seen providing faux Bengali ham in Devdas). This was a film I had seen in the cinema hall, and nothing could bring me to watch it all over again -- there are no subtleties, no fine points. Just bravura performances that border on the fence of cheese and ham.