F R I D A Y night!

Dave Barry was great: I highly recommend googling up “dave barry” roger elaine to find many websites that have reproduced his great commentary on the differences in thinking between men and women. For a bit of fun that will unite the sexes, try googling whale oregon dynamite.

K-Tel’s first set was great; I enjoyed being part of a mass of 40-somethings dancing and singing along with songs from our high-school days. I was pleasantly surprised by how warm the Cedar Street Courtyard was with radiant heaters and lots of people

recordings, old & new

So The Child and I went down to Waterloo Saturday night after the Cantor’s performance to return the extra Matisyahu and pick up Crane Wife, which would be the third *%$! time I’ve bought it. (We now pause briefly to hate the iTunes gifting system, including its use of “gift” as a verb.) The Decemberists’ wonderful album is now old to me, but he was in Eretz Israel for 4 months and iTunes didn’t manage to convey a copy that far.

And then I remembered that another casualty of the gifting system is that he never got even one of Chicago’s “Dialogues” when I attempted to send them via iTunes last fall

Valentine’s flowers

So I was advising a guy in his first relationship about sending flowers to his sweetie for Valentine’s. First off, let me say that it’s a very good impulse, and a very promising sign that he’ll be a good partner for someone when he’s older.

While he was browsing through flower delivery sites on-line, I warned him against any of the drop-shipped arrangements. When the site says that they are delivered by parcel post or that they are shipped directly from the fields, she won’t just open the box and drop the flowers in a vase. The flowers and greenery are wrapped individually, so they arrive in great condition, but she’ll have to cut through the cable ties, tear through the plastic, pull off the outer petals, trim the stems, and arrange them in a vase herself. Romantic moments do not start with searching for the scissors and do not end with a pile of packing material.

So here is the content hierarchy:

the unknown Dave Barry

Two out of three of my friends don’t know who Dave Barry is, at least not within the context of “I have an extra ticket for Dave Barry at the Paramount.” The same two out of three were nonetheless entirely willing to go.

mixing up songs

So my short, steep driveway ending across the street from a tree was the last bit of Austin iced over. So I bundled up and walked to the grocery store to buy rock salt in hopes of being able to get out for a high-priority event in the morning. I hate being cold, but missing b’fast on Thursday is just not possible.

While I was walking oh-so-carefully and marveling at the crust of ice draped over the city, I found myself singing “Walking in a Winter Wonderland,” even though I couldn’t quite do the Saturday Night Live finger motions with ski gloves on. But lines from “Walking ‘Round in Women’s Underwear”–which I missed on Eklektikos this December–kept creeping in. I can’t sing either song straight through anymore.

Perhaps because of singing about Parson Brown, I later dreamed about being engaged even though I’m adamantly not-dating and feeling quite happy to be an individual instead of half-a-couple. A bundle of contradictions, indeed!