Made whole wheat biscuits for dinner one night last month. But we were out of buttermilk. Not even the powdered kind.

When fetching the accustomed substitution of regular milk with lemon juice. I noticed we still had some flavored Sugar Cookie Egg Nog (Hood brand) in the refrigerator. So I used that. Fortunately I hadn’t already put sugar in the batter.

The biscuits came out great.

Later that night, like much later, like 2 a.m. I decided to start some slow cooker oatmeal for breakfast– four cups water, two cups rolled oats, a few diced apples.

Kathleen gets up hours before i do. The note she left next to her bowl. “try the oatmeal with sugar cookie egg nog!”

That got me wondering if I could work the stuff into the potato kale soup, or quiche, or pie. Luckily, the holiday season ended and the egg nog left the Stop & Shop shelves before things got out of hand.

Joop & Junie may seldom play out anymore, but their youngest kid Marty, aka Smarm of Godawfworrr, soldiers on with spit and no polish.

Godawfworrr’s name is a slam on Smarm’s hippie half-brother Free Bus (born during the Freredom Rides), whose psychedelic act in the ‘70s was Son, God.

Fifteen years apart in age and worlds apart in temperament and taste, one of the brothers would’ve killed the other ages ago if not for their sweet, peacekeeping sibling Veeni (real name unknown, and we’re not sure we want to.)

On the heels of their parents’ benefit concert and CD announcement for their old nursery school, Smarm (now in his 40s) has decided to use his own musical might to destroy a building. Free Bush and Veenie are against the demolition. Details forthcoming. One thing for sure: the whole fam’s coming out of hiding, and there’ll be no end of benefit shows for history-loving locals.

Bullfinch closed, because the toilet pipes froze… Masked Monkey and Shattered Helmet at Hamilton’s, the club that won’t allow drug references in the band name but doesn’t mind dick jokes…  Danger on Vampire Trail at D’ollaire’s, with some slavish local imitations of that national wonder: Clue of the Screeching Owl and Mystery at Devil’s Paw…

I think I have Chronic Fatique syndrome.

Royal Baths, Better Luck Next Life. I usually find the after-plucking squeaks of guitars (a ubiquitous studio-production technique of the last ten years) to be akin to fingernails on a blackboard. But Royal Baths opens the first song on this album, “Darling Divine,” with a whole passel of ‘em, and it’s great. The frisky fingering leads you to continually expect the unexpected. There’s some straight-ahead rock stuff like “Nightmare Voodoo,” but most songs have rhythmic and vocal variations that go well beyond the wild, sitar-satiric guitar solos. Swoops of sound interrupt the vocals, echo chambers turn plinks into yowls. The soft and reflective becomes the ominous and overwhelming. There’s a song called “Faster and Harder,” but the music for it is strangely and wonderfully neither.

As the final song, “Someone New,” says,

Tell my girl she’s now alone.

This time I’m not coming home.

Keep my records and sell the rest.

Tell my girl I loved her best.

Drown in Royal Baths: Creepily cool from top to bottom.

DC Universe Legacies by Len Wein (DC Comics hardcover)

DC Comics decided to revise its entire 80-year superhero mythology. They needed this reprioiritizing and revisioning to be be anything but a boring history text.

Any number of young whippersnappers would’ve loved this assignment. But it would have turned out very differently than it did under this old whippersnapper, the legendary Len Wein, original writer of The Swamp Thing and expert resuscitator of The X-Men.

Wein frames the new DC scriptures as an exercise in nostalgia, as witnessed by a cop who’s spent his whole life scrapbooking superhero articles. The sheer mass of information that needs to be divulged is daunting—Brad Meltzer’s entire world-changing Identity Crisis series is shortened to about two panels here. There’s little about heroes’ personal struggles. It’s the DC story as written in public—the relationships, the feuds, the organizations, the sidekicks, the supervillains. Wein adds a human subplot about the cop’s gangster brother-in-law.

The artwork, by a slew of artists working in the classic muscled-hero style, adds buoyancy and color to a narrative that can’t help but bog down occasionally. Stories with their own arcs and climaxes and folded into the middle ground of a much larger tale, so naturally it’s jumpy and disorienting.

Yet for such an outrageous exercise in condensation—millions of comic stories boiled down to their essence—Wein actually builds a momentum, a plot and even a moral—people can change. Even superpeople.

Wonderful Register profile by Randy Beach about local magician and recycling activist C.J. May.

I’ve seen May’s socially conscious magic act, benefited from his environmental expertise, and enjoyed his Celtic folk howlings in parades. One of those New Haven characters whom  you hope will land on his feet. Yale’s letting May go as the beaming face of its diverse recycling efforts, diffusing his duties to a variety of departments. Don’t let the guy be thrown out. Find him a new gig worthy of his transformative powers.

One of my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipes involves corn syrup, and other than some gloppy Halloween make-up, it’s the only thing I’ve ever used corn syrup for.

When I decided to make cookies this morning, the Karo bottle had run dry, having given up its last drop for a batch of cookies just three days ago.

The sweet sticky syrupy stuff which I do keep around all the time is molasses. Don’t use it much, but it makes the kitchen feel Colonial.

So I substituted. Strong flavor, molasses. A doubly sweet cookie—trebly sweet when you count the brown sugar.

Here’s what I did:

Beat one cup brown sugar with about three quarters of a cup of margarine. (I use Smart Balance brand.)

Add two small eggs (or one large—I like buying those two-and-a-half dozen packs of small eggs) and beat some more.

Vanilla would be optional here. A teaspoon of two.

Mix all that up thoroughly.

Add a half cup whole wheat flour, one and half cups white flour, one-quarter teaspoon baking soda, three-quarters teaspoon baking powder and half a teaspoon salt.

Mix like crazy. Then add a cup to a cup and a half of chocolate chips.

Put tablespoon-sized blogs on a lightly buttered baking pan. (For cookies, I like to use my cast-iron pizza pans.) The dough can fill two large pans, and should make just over three dozen cookies.

Bake for eight minutes at 375 degrees, then check how they’re doing. (You might want to switch upper and lower pans.) Cook another two to four minutes—you shouldn’t go over 15 minutes total. Take the cookies out when they’re puffy but formed—they’ll dry a little harder than they look, and it’s real easy to overcook them.

…but not to overlook them. The aroma is exquisite.

An entire band fell asleep and missed a gig. All of five of them. With, they swear, no pharmaceuticals involved. “Except caffeine,” the singer says, “and that obviously didn’t work.”

Out-of-town affair, of course. Long drive. Wrong directions. Finally arrived, three hours before the show, at a friend’s house—empty, but the band had keys—where they could dress and nap. And nap and nap and nap.

This is why, upon their homecoming engagement at the Bullfinch, Random Hall Sweep played all night in pajamas. They’re shaking a curse.

Preschool Friends with Addi Tude at the Bullfinch… Ideas & Discoveries and Teen Ink, some kind of bright-eyed youth aggregation, at Hamilton’s… Wordy cult heroes Library Journal, with a solo set by leader Dewey, at D’ollaire’s…

Sat in the library. Just sat.

Lay in the snow. Just lay.

Life is Not a Stage by Florence Henderson (Center Street, 2011)

She got crabs from former NYC mayor John Lindsay. As much as she tries to qualify the anecdote and brace you for and apologize for even telling it, it’s what you close this book thinking about: Florence Henderson got crabs from a one-night-stand with John Lindsay. He knew, and sheepishly sent her a gift.

This is a book about a star with a long and varied career. It’s not about a woman who’s trying to convince us that she’s really Carol Brady. Nor is it a book arguing vehemently that she’s completely UNlike her best-known role. The Brady Bunch falls into the narrative logically and chronologically, after a whole bunch of Henderson adventures on the legit stage, in film and in other TV shows.

Oh, and her personal life. Where she got crabs from former New York mayor John Lindsay.

But it’s not the Brady Bunch mom who got crabs, mind you. It’s Florence Henderson.