on music

As a mat­ter of des­per­a­tion, I ate lunch at Au Bon Pain today. They were play­ing painfully slow Sinatra-esque ren­di­tions of AM radio favorites like “Sil­ver Bells.” Who knew tor­ture could take the name of “hol­i­day cheer.” In my mind I was moments away from gun­ning down every­one in the room when the music made an abrupt change to that of the Ray­mond Scott Quin­tette. For real!

on guns

Some­where near the Illinois-Indiana bor­der, where end­less fal­low corn­fields meet the life­less high­way, I spot­ted a new line of road­side bill­boards in the style of Burma-Shave. I think they speak vol­umes about Amer­ica. Here is one exam­ple of a five-sign sequence:

TERRORISTS
LIKE GUN CONTROL
DISARMED VICTIMS
ARE THEIR GOAL
GUNS SAVE LIFE.com

on trees

The sub­ject of this week’s polit­i­cal con­tro­versy here in Boston is a tree. The offi­cial Christ­mas tree has been newly re-minted as a “Hol­i­day Tree.” Every­one has some­thing to say about it. Regret­tably, nobody seems to have noticed that we can set­tle this prob­lem with­out delv­ing into the issue of reli­gious sen­si­tiv­ity. The proper ques­tion to ask is, “What hol­i­day, besides Christ­mas, is sym­bol­ized by a giant conifer?”

Keep think­ing.