Gar feel asleep at Our Fun (which is what we call our Chinese takeout hangout). So we left him there.

I wrote in an earlier post about how I’d won a T-shirt for writing a short essay about how much i love my Audiobook builder application from Splasm.
Nobody’s asked this time, or offered prizes, but I wanted to recommend some other apps which I could not do without. (in case you’re wondering, I’m saving my book and comic oriented apps for a future post.)

1. Shape Writer. Speediest keyboard I’ve found for my ‘phone, and the handiest for writing at the street corner while waiting for the school bus. It’s one of those set-ups where you glide your fingers over the letters and it decides which word you probably have in mind. Yes, you have to proofread the results pretty carefully, but I’ve always thought the incentive to doublecheck one’s writing was a good thing. I have the ShapewriterPRO version rather than the free “lite” one, mostly as a thank-you to the company. Just looked it up at the Apple app store and realized that nothing called ShapeWriter is currently being offered. (I got mine in 2010, and there’ve been occasional updates). There is, however, an active website at shapewriter.com promising future developments. Shapes of things to come, as it were.
2. News Feed. One whole 16-app screen page of my iPhone is devoted to news. Five are Connecticut-related, a couple are British, several are onliners like Politico, Daily Beast and HuffPost. Plus I like Associated Press and USA Today for mainstream news updates. Then there’s News Feed, a single app which encompasses dozens of different news and information apps, for when I need to hone in on a certain region of area of expertise and don’t want to get caught up in downloading whole other apps or fiddling with Google. They’re arranged like a long sheet of single apps, separated into clear categories: World & US News, Technology News, Entertainment News, Regional News, Others (such as TV Guide, Weather Channel, Men’s Health magazine, Yahoo!, Twitter, Facebook…), Sports News, Financial News, British News and Canadian News. I write a weekly news digest column for the New Haven Advocate, and one of the sections is entitled “Everybody’s Talkin’ About…” Which implies a consensus on what news organization think is important. That’s what I use News Feed for.
3. Betty Crocker Cookbook. Barely use it for meals, but the cookie and cake recipes are classic. You do have to get over your fear of dropping your ‘phone in some batter.
4. My Fitness Pal. This is a fraught friendship indeed, as this is the type of chum who’s always badgering you to lose weight. But when I use it—keeping a diary of what I eat and letting the machine add up the calories—darned if I don’t lose weight.
5. iPet. My daughters set this up, and regularly change what kind of pet it is (which you can do easily without starting a whole new account). Like so many children and pets, I’m one who has to remember to feed it. The current pet is a corgi named Georgy Girl, who morphed from a cat named Stripey. We’ve dutifully fed the pet for 595 days now, accruing more units of food than Georgy Girl could ever eat, not to mention 1576 karma points (for feeding, petting and otherwise interacting with other pets.) If you do not feed your pet for half a day, a rain cloud appears over its head. If you do not feed your pet for a day or so, a warning icon appears, demanding immediate sustenance. If you don’t feed your pet for a few days, the pet dies and a tombstone appears in its place. This doesn’t feel like a game. It certainly doesn’t feel like taking care of a pet. But it’s a few seconds of button pushing a day that make me feel better.
6. MLB. This year, the Major League Baseball app is offering a free month of MLB.TV service for “out of market” games. A lot of users consider the app rather limited compared to the mass of info they can get on cable networks, online and elsewhere. But for a simple, old-fashioned, ultra-casual sports fan like myself, who actually PREFERS listening to games over the radio and hardly ever watches them on television, this is a fantastic, convenient bargain of an app. For $15 I can not only listen to live broadcasts of Red Sox games (which I can’t always tune in clearly from the local radio station), for no additional effort I can catch games from the team I followed in my youth, the Detroit Tigers, as well. When the Tigers play the Red Sox, I can flip blithely between the team’s hometown broadcasters depending on how much of an underdog I feel like being that day. Best application of an old medium (radio) for a new one.

Its a “naked CD release” for our beloved Millie and the model marvels tomorrow at the Bullfinch. The band (full disclosure: we date its leader; and no, you can’t make any “full disclosure” jokes about that) took our advice when the CDs arrived but the packaging didn’t, and are holding the release party anyway. The disc is called Model Behavior, and liner notes (by ours truly) will be delivered by mail, with a special bonus plus a chance to win a gift certificate from the Keene Boutique on a lottery. Four Color Fun and Love in Blum open…

Another love band, Betting on Love, headlines Hamilton’s, with The Web Returns and Sun Burned… Dollaire’s? Don’t bother: Hollywood Hunks and Bikinis & Backstabbing. Told you… If you’re desperate, try Swing classes at the college on the hill with live music from May I Have This Dance…

A huge pile of blank posterboard in a dumpster near campus. Worth billions, we suspect. We hefted the whole lot home and spent the night making fake protest posters.

Kathleen, the math teacher, came home just as a loaf of Cypriot olive and cilantro bread was coming out of the oven. It’s a surprisingly basic white bread recipe (though I do one-sixth to one-quarter whole wheat flour in all my breads), only with a couple tablespoons of olive oil, rolled up with a cup of chopped black olives and a half cup of chopped cilantro.
So, the kitchen smells of Greece and not kitchen grease. And Kathleen enhances the theme with a request. A colleague who teaches high school Latin knows that I’m a former Latin student, and that my father was an internationally known Greek and Roman historian. She’s planning a Roman feast for one of her classes. Would I happen to have any Roman cookbooks?
I’d been waiting for such a request for 32 years. That’s how long its been since my own high school class had a Roman feast, and I last had occasion to use Romanae Artis Coquinariae Liber—The Roman Cookery Book, adapted from Apicius by Barbara Flower and Elisabeth Rosenblum (Peter Nevill Ltd., 1958). Suckling pig, anyone? I lend the book ecstatically.
I also held on to Cooking the Greek Way by Maro Duncan (Spring Books, 1964). But for now the bread is enough.

OK, now we’re a little annoyed. Not long ago, we defended the Meach family and their recent barn festival from charges of cultiness. We stand by that defense, think the outrage was over the top. But we were unaware until just before we wrote this that they squirrelled away the liability forms which the fest’s visitors all had to sign and have been using them to contact those folks about coming out to non-musical gatherings at the farm. More paranoid minds than ours are using phrases like “recruitment” and “indoctrination.” Now, that may be over the top to describe invitations to a potluck supper prior to one of the farm’s high-volume hoe-downs. But still, color us nonplussed.
Let’s handle this rationally—a radical approach in rock & roll, we know. These barn shows are a wonderment in themselves. The noise can distort your hearing, your vision, your sense of self. That’s plenty for us, and that’s where we stopped. If you think greater rewards lie with living on the grounds, making furniture, raising orphan kids—well, you’ve been warned.
Meantime, two of the offending bands—Limber Zeal and the Meaches’ own Shaking Quakers—have a rare downtown gig at the Bullfinch on, uh, Sunday. We predict there’ll be a spiritual showdown of some kind, with picketers and all that, but promise us you’ll stay for the music and judge it own its own terrestrial terms.

Last match, lucky at cards and blackmailer at Hamilton’s… The wounded and the slain and witness to myself call out to the college kids at Dollaire’s…

First House Night Out. We sat in the yard and counted squirrels: Four. Then we went inside and counted mice: One. Stars, Mar, said, might be more fun.

[Arnott expounds further on his old 45s]

1. Eddie Cochran, Coutnry Style EP (Rock Star). 1979 rerelease of early C&W sides by The Cochran Brothers in 1954, presaging the twang of Eddie’s impending rock & roll. He’s already yelping, racing the beat and making sure the bass is prominent, even on “Mr. Fiddle.”

2. Doug Allen’s Steven in “Out West (Vital Cog Records). Amazing collectible 7-inch starring the sassy behatted alt-comic character known for his adorable catchphrases “Eat Some Paste,” “I Hate You” and “Give Me All the Beer You Have Or I’ll Kill You.” I own T-shirts emblazoned with all these sayings, plus several collections of the comics. The strip also used to run in the New Haven Advocate. The day I joined the Advocate, I crowed loudly in the editorial room that “I’m proud to write for a paper that runs Steven!” To which I got blank stares and one staffer’s admission that “we all hate Steven.”
Doug Allen didn’t just have a comic strip, he had a band, and they come together on this disk, which is modeled along one of those old “Read-Along Books” which asks you to turn the page when you hear a blooping noise.

3. I Yam What I Yam b/w He Needs Me. Nilsson songs from Robert Altman’s Popeye movie. The picture sleeve shows Robin Williams, Shelley Duvall and the infant who played Swee’pea. Why wasn’t “He’s Large” a single?

4. Willie Loco Alexander, You Got a Hard Time Coming b/w Larry Bird. A different band on each side. The Bird anthem was penned by Erik Lindgren of Arf Arf Records, though this single was released in 1988. Mr. Alexander is in fine form. I saw him live a bunch of times during this phase of his long, astounding career. He was losing some of the punk accouterments and settling into a more fluid rock style, which presaged his brilliant jazz/rock experiments of the 1990s.

5. Deadguy, White Meat EP. Early release (from 1994 on the DaDa label) by the hardcore supergroup, who stunned me senseless every time I saw them. Wonder what it’s worth? Well, you can’t have it. The songs have lost none of their menace: “Druid,” “The Extremist” and “John Dear.”

Frieda Bettany’s class project about the sexual iconography and vocabulary of the local dance scene goes on as scheduled, 5:30 p.m. tomorrow night at D’ollaire’s. But, as you’ll notice from posters and features elsewhere in the local media, the title has been changed to something less academic than “Dance Dance Epistemology.” The show is also being done without the opening oral presentation it had when presented at the college on the hill a few weeks ago. We couldn’t reach Bettany for clarification (that is to say, we haven’t run into her at the Bullfinch lately), so we don’t know what other changes might be afoot for the project originally known as “The Other Foot.” But we know we’ll be there to see it—a big commitment, considering it means standing inside D’ollaire’s on a Saturday night…

Same night: Three (count ‘em, three!) party bands at Hamilton’s: Teaspoonful of Zest, Extra Fluffy Filling and Double Boiler, with no intellectual irony expected…

New house pact to get OUT of the house and do something as a gang at least once a week. “What if we can’t afford it?,” Har asked.