Gar woke up in the Chinese restaurant (they had to rouse him at closing time), staggered home, saw the funny protest posters we’d made out of the dumpster posterboard, took them seriously, and thought we’d ditched him at the diner because some political upheaval had happened. I’m not sure he believes us yet—or that we want him to.

I know why James Patterson’s books have topped the list of “most often checked out from public libraries” for years. I check them out myself, and if I don’t happen to blow through them in a single sitting they languish away at the bedside until they’re due. Then I return them, then often check them out again a few weeks later.
You can devour a Patterson tome in a couple of hours, but putting them down is kind of like having to get up in the middle of an episode of some action-detective TV show. You kind of need to know what happens, but you’re not about to Tivo or bookmark the thing, or even remember the plot after a little while.
I read the first 30 or so chapters of both Cross Fire and Tick Tock on my Kindle for free, then checked them out of the library in tandem. Bad idea—the plots are pretty similar, and I couldn’t keep up with which deranged yet incredibly organized villain was blowing up which New York landmark, or which detective’s romantic involvement was an impending marriage and whose was a new relationship after the death of his wife.

This confusion ain’t ‘cause the books are heavy. It’s ‘cause they’re lite. If I want to get bogged down in technical plot details, I can read Star Wars novels. Patterson’s books are all about the slam-bang. What gets you to the explosions or the car crashes isn’t important. The showdowns are what’s important. Which is why I’ve now checked the latest Patterson, Toys, out of the library, and expect I’ll be checking it out a couple more times. It’s got a crappy sci-fi future-society gimmick at its core, but it really doesn’t matter if I buy into that (and I can’t, I just can’t) because lips will still get locked and guns will still get cocked at an alarming rate.

The coffee shop dude known as Jimmy bean—he’s worked at Brewniverse, Hallowed grounds, House With Room, Get Mugged, French Press Gang, Beanie Hat and every other caffeine dispensary in Christendom—is temporarily out of work again. A bunch of us pitched in to buy Bean a few beers at the Bullfinch—collective guilt for the many cups of Java he lent us over the years, which is probably what got him fired. After a few, he blurted out that what he’d really like to do is go into music full time.
Jimmy plays “geetar,” or so he pronounces it. He’s only ever played out at open minds at some of the java joints where he’s worked.
Seemed like a good time to conduct one of our informal inebriated surveys.
What advice would to give a coffeeshop counter man who wants to launch a musical career?
“Drink enough coffee, and the high’s the same as performing.”
“The only guys who make any coin in a lot of bands are the managers and the roadies, so you’ll still be fetching coffee.”
“Buy a coffeeshop, put a stage in the corner, brew up a pot and play all you want.”
“All the good sounds about coffee have already been written.”
“…Yeah, but in Spanish!”
“If I see another washed-up pop star using a coffeeshop as a record store to hawk his fucking comeback album, I’ll poor a cup up his nose!”
“Jimmy Bean can do anything he likes. He must be the midst popular cat in town.”
Jimmy Bean a fresh-brewed pop star? Heck, Jimmy Bean for Mayor!

Spot Sprinkle, Flurry Chance and Tapering at the Bullfinch (rescheduled show from the bad weather in January)… Aging jam band High in Our 30s at Hamilton’s (guess that new “no drug references in band names” policy doesn’t apply to them; well, they’re old, and they’re being grandfathered in) with Party Sunny (featuring Sonny Degrassi)…Guitar legend Strat Nimbus and local pickup band The Four Casters ( who’ ll also do an opening set sans Strat) at Dollaire’s…

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.