Today’s impres­sive Vegas hotel fire raises an inter­est­ing ques­tion: is the build­ing facade really made of foam cov­ered with stucco? Because that’s the lamest thing I’ve ever heard. A new low point for architecture.

Things here in Boston are slowly get­ting restored to their proper order. El Pelon is close to reopen­ing after their early Decem­ber fire. I’ve never been more eager for a bur­rito. Toscanini’s ice cream reopened tonight after spend­ing a week in the pos­ses­sion of the Depart­ment of Rev­enue. Owner Gus Ran­ca­tore was on hand. I thanked him for turn­ing things around. He thanked us for buy­ing ice cream, adding that we don’t know how much it means to him to see peo­ple back in the store. He’s a great guy.

Some other dude behind the counter at Tosci’s was try­ing to con­vince me that Radio­dread, a note-for-note reg­gae remake of OK Com­puter was the great­est thing ever. He rum­maged around for the CD and played it over the store PA for us. It’s… some­thing. I’m lis­ten­ing to the album on Rhap­sody as I write. I always have the same reac­tion to Radio­head cov­ers, which is that they only prove how good Radio­head is.

I try to lis­ten to a few new albums every month to jus­tify the cost of my paid Rhap­sody sub­scrip­tion, so if you think there’s some­thing I should be lis­ten­ing to instead, pipe up. “Exit Music (For a Dub)” is not very good.

In spite of the cold weather, old col­lege friends are crawl­ing out of the wood­work left and right. I saw errhode last week­end. Yes­ter­day I was hang­ing out with malvira and tbar­ton when woz showed up. Tonight I met up with ekshea and ran­domly ran into a just-married jvb. Let’s hope this kind of thing keeps up.