Today is my parents’ wedding anniversary (and my brother’s birthday — hi, Joe!).

A couple of weeks ago was my father’s birthday, and Cousin Bob sent me a touching email about him.

All of which reminded me of this great song by Death Cab for Cutie:

“And it came to me then that every plan is a prayer to Father Time.”

Sadly, I can’t think of Death Cab for Cutie without being reminded of this not-quite-suitable-for-work video of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band from Magical Mystery Tour.

Magical Mystery Tour came out in 1967, the year my father died.

The Bonzo Dog Band (they subsequently dumped the Doo-Dah, then subsequently reinstated it) was an ineffably great band (if somewhat, er, ramshackle).  You can tell how ineffably great they were just by the ineffably great titles of some of their songs:

My Pink Half of the Drainpipe
My Brother Makes the Noises for the Talkies
Tubas in the Moonlight
Noises for the Leg
Cam Blue Men Sing the Whites?
Labio-Dental Fricative

Western civilization has gone straight downhill since they broke up.  Coincidence?  I think not.

So says my very fine commenter Craig Shaw Gardner.

Here, for comparison with Lana, is Adele — also on Letterman:

Dave is smitten with her as well.

There are three versions of a cover in play for Pontiff, which is described here and here.  All are variations on a theme. There are certain constraints on how you do covers in the e-book world, which I’ll talk about sometime.  The main one, though, is you don’t want to spend a bazillion dollars, ’cause it’s your own money.

By the way, I don’t have to choose one or the other of these choices; I can mix and match elements, adjust the color or the font size, etc.

Anyway, here is Version A:

And here’s B:

And here’s C:

So, help me out here.

It’s Valentine’s Day!

I saw an interview with Ellie Greenwich once where she said that, as soon as she wrote this song (with Jeff Barry and Phil Spector), she knew it would hit Number 1.  And it did.

These Brill Building songs from the early 60s seemed to find the absolute essence of the popular song.  The words and melodies couldn’t have been simpler, or more memorable.  Five years later we had yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye.

And now for something completely different.

These guys dance like me.

This video goes on a little too long.  Not unlike a Phish song.

h/t: Mark

Maybe someday everything will be available online.  Here’s something I hadn’t expected: the college newspaper I did some writing for has made its archives available on the Internet.  I can’t bring myself to read most of what I wrote way back then.  But there was one piece I was curious about — an obituary for Richard Cushing, the Archbishop of Boston when I was growing up (I was named for him, incidentally).  It holds up pretty well, I think, although the balance doesn’t quite work in one spot, and there’s a which in there that I’d definitely turn into a that.

FOR SOMEONE who grew up a Catholic in Boston, Cushing was not a name, not even an institution, he was a part of life itself: he was always there, at Confirmations and graduations and dedications of the countless schools and churches he helped build. His picture was in everyone’s hallway, a fullcolor portrait cut out of the Globe when he was made a Cardinal. You took pride in his voice and his Red Sox cap and his friendship with your President because in him you had someone only Boston could produce: that blend of worldliness and sanctity, that despiser of stuffiness and lover of ritual.

Times change-the schools start closing, the churches aren’t quite as filled anymore; a younger man with a strange unIrish name takes over. And finally, Cushing himself is gone, less than a month after the ceremony which concluded his life’s work. It’s fitting; you know it could hardly have been otherwise. But still the memories linger, of the rasping twang, of the swishing of his red silk robes, of a life that was part of Boston’s life.

Cushing is part of the past now, but he can’t rest there-by the nature of things he must become the stuff of legend and anecdote. You are supposed to remember that there was a pool for how long he would speak at Confirmation, with the winning number being around an hour. And you will recall the stories and tell the jokes even if they seem to miss what he meant to you, because Cushing was from Boston, and that is how Boston remembers a man, that is how Boston honors a saint.

Here’s the link.

Sometimes you have to live your life in the past…

How come nobody ever told me about them?

Here they are singing Stephen Foster with some friends:

While we’re on the subject of hockey: I went to the Harvard-Yale hockey game last night.  Some changes from the dark ages when I melted the shaved ice from the Zamboni and swept up discarded orange peels from the locker rooms between periods:

• TV cameras (and annoying TV timeouts)
• A video scoreboard, with annoying animations and helpful replays
• Annoyingly loud music
• Contests between periods
• Netting behind each goal to keep you from getting killed by a flying puck (and also to keep you from getting a clear view of the action)
• Raffles, Twitter contests, souvenir stands . . .

One interesting change: about a third of Harvard’s roster is foreign-born.  Not just Canadians: Sweden, Switzerland, Croatia, and the Czech Republic are also represented.  Most of these kids at least prepped at an American school, but still, this doesn’t seem like an altogether positive development to me.  There are 1600 slots in every Harvard class, about half of which will be filled by males.  These are the most coveted 1600 slots in American higher education. It seems OK to me (although many will disagree) that some number of these slots should go to kids whose primary (but not only) qualification is that they can skate fast or shoot a basketball or catch a pass.  But Harvard is at least partially subsidized by taxpayer dollars (at least in the sense that it is a tax-exempt institution); so you’d like to think it could find American kids who can skate fast enough or shoot a basketball or catch a pass well enough to fill those slots.

Anyway, there was an old guy with a booming voice sitting behind me.  Everyone else seemed to know him.  In the third period he became rightly annoyed when Harvard got a one-goal lead and went into a defensive shell.  (Yale eventually scored despite the shell, so Harvard started attacking again and scored the game-winner with a little over a minute left.)  I finally figured out that the old guy was legendary Olympic gold medalist and long-time Harvard coach and AD Bill Cleary.  Nice to see that he’s still on top of his game.

I don’t know what it’s like to not be a sports fan.

Being a sports fan means rooting for a team.  I don’t know people who are big Tiger Woods fans or Roger Federer fans.  That’s just stupid.

This is probably some kind of tribal thing, an evolutionary leftover that still demands expression.  I’m sure scientists have studied this.  But I know that my emotions were hardly unique when Vinatieri’s kick as time expired gave the Patriots their first improbable Superbowl win in 2002.  Or, even more poignantly, when the Red Sox won their first World Series in 86 years in 2004.

The Bruins’ Stanley Cup victory in 2011 was a little less exciting, but not much.  Like the Patriots’ win, it came out of nowhere.  Like the Red Sox win, it was a very long time coming.  And the games were endlessly exciting.  Sudden death in hockey is unlike that of any other major American sport: the play rarely stops, and the game (and the series) can come to an end in an instant.

Fans don’t ask much of the athletes, generally.  Try hard, say the right things.  Don’t make us sorry we’re rooting for you.  Because we can’t really help rooting for you.

And, geez, keep politics out of it.  Because politics just makes sports a mess. Do we have to be thinking about Tim Thomas’s views on fiat money when he’s making a save?  Should we worry about Brad Marchand’s healthcare policy when he’s rushing up ice?  These guys are what they do, and who they do it for.  They should understand this when they cash their paychecks.

Let’s not complicate things.