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*Weird to my Western ears, at any rate. Theremins was a cool answer in this morning’s NY Times crossword puzzle. The theremin is forever linked with The Beach Boys and “Good Vibrations,” which to my mind is the most memorable use of a “weird” instrument. Not only can I not imagine the song without it, […]

That’s all. Yeah, it may not be his actual birthday, but a) it’s close and b) scholars like the symmetry of his birth and death being the same date, “by accident most strange,” as Prospero puts it in The Tempest.

(I don’t make the trip that often. It’s beautiful. But with very long lines/wait times….)

Seriously, that was the first clue of the NY Times acrostic puzzle today. I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for almost 35 years, and I’ve sailed boats on Puget Sound for much of that time, and I’m still waiting for my first warm Pacific Northwest wind. Okay, chinook. Somebody who, I suspect, never lived out […]

Julian Lennon has for the first time covered his dad’s song “Imagine.” It’s special. And haunting, not just the song itself, but the resonances in his voice.

I have to get blood drawn today… and I already have a needle mark in my arm from an IV Monday. I’m looking at the inside of my elbow as I don my shirt this morning, and I’m wondering, “What if the nurse thinks I’m a junkie?” Because the vast majority of “customers” at the […]

Folks are reminiscing online about the Atlantic City Pop Festival in the summer of 1969. It was a blast… mostly. I used it as the background for a chapter in a book that I haven’t completed because it was trying to be two different things at once, and because Covid happened and changed what I […]

I haven’t posted for some time. I’m not very good at this social media stuff. Actually, sometimes I’m not very social. The past two years, the plague years, have been one of those times. I heard about “social distancing” and said, Oh, yeah, here I come. (By the way, caught the plague anyway, triple-vaxxed and […]

Jim Steinman has died at age 73. He’s best known as the progenitor – music, lyrics, production, schmaltz – of Meat Loaf’s songs. Bat Out of Hell. Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad. Paradise by the Dashboard Light. I Would Do… well, I’m getting tired of typing out those lengthy titles, but you know the […]

Reasons to Be Cheerful, part 4. This, from the deck tonight: Hang in there. Spring is coming.