This is not exactly a holiday story, except in the sense of its being about an unexpected gift. Read more »

One of my friends has mice. It’s never singular, because there’s never just one mouse. We had mice a couple years ago. My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, dubbed them “our hated enemies”, and it stuck: we have always been at war with Mouselandia. Read more »

This is one of my favorite stories, ever, period. Read more »

So I’m stuck. Read more »

Oh, what a night. (“Late September back in” – oh, wait, you can hear that.) I could see the Big Dipper dipping overhead, as I lay there in the breeze. On stage, it was Richard Thompson, the man with more fingers than me, wowing the audience with his cheeky, self-effacing English humor, not to mention his guitar playing. The sound system was perfect, the temperature was perfect, the audience was perfectly attentive. And as I looked around at the beautiful setting, what I thought was: no, thank you. Read more »

I have a good friend who’s using Kickstarter to finance the editing of a documentary he’s working on. Now, I have lots of thoughts about Kickstarter, most of which don’t really belong in this here newsletter; but the thing that caught my interest on this particular day was the fact that, apparently, some of my friend’s Kickstarter pledges are people he’s never met. That’s right, he’s gotten a little viral action out of the social aspect of Kickstarter – and I’ve gotta say, I still don’t get it. At all. Read more »

I’ve got this thing about bridges. I don’t mean the kind you drive over – I mean the kind you sing. For some reason, I discover that my cleverest moments end up being in the bridge. You need an example, you say? Well, coincidentally, I’ve got one right here. Read more »

My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I – we’re sick. Not morally degenerate (although you could make a case for that), but rather, physically ill. We don’t know what it is – but it might be pertussis, otherwise known as whooping cough. Medieval, I know, but we didn’t really have any choice in the matter. Read more »

So I’m reading the paper a while back, and Alex Beam has a column in which he mentions that my pal Chuck E. Costa has been named the official Connecticut state troubadour for 2011 and 2012. Now, I live in Cambridge, which has an official poet populist (no laureates for us here, nosiree), and this got me thinking. I mean, I’ve been waiting for someone with real authority to take this troubadour thing by the horns – they’ve been doing this in Connecticut since 1992, but Massachusetts is virgin territory, state-troubadour-wise. But before we follow Connecticut’s lead, there’s a few things we probably ought to take care of. Read more »

A while back, my pal Jon Waterman had a gig on his birthday, to which his significant other secretly invited a bunch of us, to share his birthday, and perhaps a song, perhaps one of his. I ultimately couldn’t go, but when I was planning on going, I tried working on a couple of Jon’s songs, and nothing was really working, and it hit me: why don’t I write a song for him? How often might this have happened in his life? (More than zero times, it turns out – after all, his significant other is also a songwriter. But this is me, not thinking.) Seems like a good birthday present, right? Read more »