Do the Yak

My stepmother got us tickets to see Paul McCartney at Fenway Park as a birthday present for me, knowing what a Beatlemaniac I was (and still am, I guess). I got there in a somewhat crabby mood because they wouldn't let me bring in my backpack (I had to pay $10 to check it), expecting to be appreciative but not impressed by the concert, but I was happily surprised. I expected a 67-year-old geezer phoning it in Vegas-style ("You've been a great audience -- thank you. I'm here all week... Please tip your waitstaff") but actually, he is a great performer and a showman to the core. A real hambone, to be sure, and he really can't pull off this cheeky aw-shucks crap at his age. Sometimes I was rolling my eyes, but eventually I was pulled in (even when he twice "offhandedly" remarked that at Beatles shows, they could never hear themselves play because of all the screaming girls, evoking a predictable response). And just once I got a tiny inkling of the feel...

My daily commute consists of a 15-minute drive, during which I listen to WERS (highly recommended -- listen online if you're not in Boston); a 10-minute walk, during which I listen to my iPod on shuffle; and a 10-minute subway ride, during which I read a book. Today I was in one kind of mood when I got onto the train and a different kind when I got off; I'm not sure how to describe them, but the cause was the book I'm now reading, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer , who is my favorite living writer along with Michael Chabon. (If Kurt Vonnegut were still alive, that would make three, but now he has to compete with hundreds of great dead authors instead of a few living ones.) The book is difficult at times, even frustrating, but absolutely brilliant -- one of the few that makes we want to shove a copy into the hands of everyone I know. When I got to work, I immediately Googled "Dirty Laundry," which was a sort of underground c...

Along with the rapidly approaching obsolescence of newspapers and CDs, now I hear of the demise of music radio as the place to go for hearing the latest tunes. The Boston Globe did an article spurred by the closure of WBCN, which in the 60s and 70s was the epicenter of the rock scene around here. Now we have the online streaming-music struggle between Last.FM and Pandora . I had heard of Pandora but not LastFM so I quickly checked out both their websites. I quickly decided I preferred the look and feel of Pandora and proceeded to create my own "station." Great! Of course you have to be at a computer, but then I found you can get an iPhone app to listen to your station on the go. Even greater! So now the only remaining issues I have are (1) the car (since my 2004 model does not have an MP3 jack and iTrip sucks), and (2) what about lousy cell reception and the radio equivalent of dropped calls? Then again, radio reception isn't always perfect either; you sometimes have st...