Things and stuff

Matt Potter, who is fair and just and nice to old people, has seen fit to publish a story of mine, "One Eleven", on Pure Slush here . (Once there, click on "The Latest")

Once More, From The Top...

So This Blog, as Charlie Pierce so elegantly puts it, is one year older as of yesterday, Eastern Time (Australians, you're on your own). Pure Slush's 2014 series rolls on, one of several places This Blog's work will be found in the days to come, and NaNoWriMo starts in 12 days.

On this anniversary of my emergence into this vale of tears, it moves me to reflect. Facebook is either
a contagion upon the world's thinking people, or the very greatest thing since breathable air. (Your mileage may vary. Australians, again, are on their own.)

But one thing it has done today is remind me that, for good or ill, many people have touched my life and, in turn, been touched by me. (Hopefully positively, and mostly appropriately.) More than 50
people stopped to wish me well-
friends, colleagues, former colleagues, relatives, internet friends, more people than I really have any right to claim. It's nice to be seen.

Now then, everybody sing!

"Yesterday it was my birthday-
I've hung one more year on the line-
I should be depressed-
My life's a mess-
But I'm having a good time."
-Paul Simon

Songs Of Innocence

The immortal Garon Cockrell, king of the Britons, defeater of the Saxons, sovereign of all England, has generously agreed to festoon his site with a record review of the new U2 album authored by This Blog, which you can read here.


-M

Watch This Space...But Don't Always Trust It

We have it on good authority that the album review referenced previously in this space is now well and truly posted here. Management apologizes wholeheartedly.

What Will Be, Will Be

The undeniably Garon Cockrell has seen fit to publish a review of mine here, this lady continues killing it wherever she writes, and the 2014 series continues onwards here, featuring 30
stupendously talented people, along with this author.

Against Football

Here is where Garon Cockrell, friend to all mankind, has seen fit to publish This Blog's review of Steve Almond's new book, "Against Football", on his marvelous (and newly facelifted) site Pop Culture Beast.

Pure Slush's "2014" gets some love

Here resides a series of interview questions about Pure Slush's "2014" book series, wherein your humble scribe is quoted.

Release the Beast!

The inimitable Garon Cockrell of the website Pop Culture Beast has seen fit to publish a concert review of mine here. Go forth and consume. Or perhaps not, because I'm not the boss of you.

A To Z Day Twenty Four: X

Ten Things, People, And Concepts That Are Neither X Ray Nor Xylophone, The Two Things Children's Books Always Use For X:

1. Red Sox infielder Xander Bogaerts
2. Former Seattle Supersonic and Boston Celtic Xavier McDaniel
3. Xavier University
4. The movie rating X
5. The punk rock band X
6. The Mitch Hedberg joke where he supposes that because Xylophone is pronounced Z, X was upset that it wasn't given enough to do, so it gets a costarring role in Tic Tac Toe
7. The X Wing Fighter
8. The X Factor television program
9. The military job XO, or executive officer
10. The left to right portion of the Cartesian coordinate system.

A To Z Day Twenty Three: Weather

Weather and weather forecasting has always fascinated me. My father always said that weather forecasts beyond 48 hours are nonsense, and experience has taught me that this is true. The systems at play in the atmosphere are simply too complex- no matter how hard you try, how big your computers are, how sophisticated your formulas are, you'll never know everything.

There is a lesson there, I think.

A To Z Twenty Two: Veterans

Does it bother anyone else that there are veteran's charities? Since we broke these people, shouldn't we, the people of the United States, be paying whatever it takes to fix them? I don't oppose the cause, of course. I just think there shouldn't be any need for it.
-M

A to Z Day Twenty One: U2

"Angel of Harlem" is one of my very favorite songs.
U2 got a lot of crap for this album (and for the accompanying film), and I don't think it was fair. People were saying, "How dare these Irish dudes tell us how great Billie Holliday was! We know how great Billie Holliday was!" Well, OK. But I was 17 when this record came out. I didn't know how great Billie Holliday was. And U2 made it cool so I could learn who Billie Holliday was. Perhaps I should have already known. But they were my gateway to a lot of great stuff, and I think that means something.

A to Z Day Twenty: The Band

One of my new favorite songs, "Richard Manuel Is Dead."

A to Z Day Nineteen: Schrodinger's Cat

The late Erwin Schrodinger, an Austrian physicist, once proposed a puzzle (a thought experiment, neither he nor I actually killed any animals) where a cat is sealed into an airtight box with a vial of poison gas , a small amount of radioactive material which has a 50% chance of decaying per hour, and a radiation detector, which if the material decays will smash the vial and kill the cat. The puzzle is, when you shut the box, is the cat alive or dead?
The answer is unclear. One can answer that it is both, or it is neither, or it is nothing until you open the box. There are a number of different interpretations and counter interpretations that try to solve the puzzle, or ignore the puzzle, or work around the puzzle. Personally, it has always just given me a headache.
To quote John Cleese, "it's people like you what cause unrest".

A to Z Day Eighteen: Rest In Peace

A List, In No Particular Order, of People I Wish Were Still Alive:
Isaac Asimov
Kurt Vonnegut
Robert A Heinlein
Freddie Mercury
David Foster Wallace
Jim Morrison
John Lennon
Kurt Cobain
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Jonathan Larson
John Bonham
Heath Ledger
Molly Ivins
My Father