Har wants to celebrate my new home-leasership by painting a wall, and I won’t let him because—arrgh!—I worry about the security deposit.

The Quiet Quire is so quiet that you can’t hear them even if you want to.

Club noise is their concept. They play, but they play without benefit of microphones or electrified instruments.

Truly, if you are at the foot of the stage and listen up close, then you can hear some stirring, subtle, gentle strains. But it’s you doing most of the straining.

As a conceptual performance exercise, QQ partly just wants to see what happens when the crowd realizes that they can’t hear them.

Bandleader K. Johns, who prefers not to discuss the act’s artistic thesis but is happy  to report on the response to the shows themselves (there’ve been three), says “Sometimes we’re just ignored. People just drinking at the bar often don’t pay attention to the band anyway.”

Tonight on the scene: a kiddie (high school) concert at Hamilton’s with Orange Plunge, Thurty, Who Invited You?, The Membership Cards, Thousands of Doors Rocked, Top Issues and ReEntry … Strangely, a bunch of graduates from previous high school battles at Hamilton’s are now in regular bands doing regular band things at the Bullfinch: Public Safety & Violence, CVP, Unprecedented Numbers (formerly the Naughty Numbers), Stacks of Richard and Issues or Initiatives.. An Evening with The Wofts at D’ollaire’s, but the much better band, Mihtohseeni onki, is opening….

The Toonine Eyes swarmed like wasps on the D’ollaire’s stage. They hadn’t been booked en masse, but there they were. Bandleader Stefan Staph had been told he could open the local stop on the Red Flesh tour, but only as a solo act since the stage would already be set with several bands’ worth of drum kit, not to mention house-sized speakers and a dragon’s head.

But Stefan Staph is a Socialist, and devil-may-care, and some would say willfully self-destructive. So his “solo” show involved a cadre of sidemen ten times the size of the band he usually plays with.

The boys (and two girls) ran wildly about the stage, banging on anything handy while Stefan and his oldest friends Flash and Bambo strummed mad power chords on acoustic guitars. Some of the songs were vaguely recognizable as 2-9-I tunes, but really it was just a relentless thunder of thumps.

Ten minutes in, the crowd was cheering. Fifteen minutes in, the headliners’ roadies had expressed worry about the gear. Sixteen minutes in, lights were dimmed and mics turned off. There was an insistence on retuning and rebalancing everything. It was an hour and a half before the next band played.

There were the usual rounds of “You’ll never play here again” and “I’ll sue,” but the Tooniner’s popular annual Metal High School Holiday Festival continues to be listed on the schedule, though it’s still two months away.

Was it worth the trouble to bring one’s pals onstage with you rather than simply moshing a couple feet away in the pit? “I know where I stand,” quoth Stef quizzically.

Tonight: Basement Show with nonagenarian troubadour Johnny Seed and five other singer-songwriters in the “Music Room” of the Senior Center. Don’t you all be jumping onstage at once now… A cooking demo at the Bullfinch? No, just popcorn-hurling malcontent Randolph Q. Mertz… At Hamilton’s: The Tribulanterns, playing “hits from the ‘40s,” with the son of a guy who in a big band once on sax… D’ollaire’s? Who cares?…

Gar finally moves out.

The conkers have come! Uneven as the weather has been, the chestnut trees have known it’s time to drop the chestnuts.

For old British schoolboys–like my father, who taught the sport to me– that means conker season has begun.

We found handfuls of conkers on New Haven Green after church and brought them home. There, we poked holes through them and strung embroidery thread (because we couldn’t find string) through them. Then we went out in the backyard and whacked them against each other and turned out to be pretty good at it.

We scored a few “around the world”s and remembered to say “No stamps!”

That night, one of the dogs got at the conkers declared the match a draw.

Keep dogs away from conkers. Horse chestnuts are poisonous, for starters (for dogs and humans). Whack safely.