I’ve been baking squash seeds and they’ve just started popping and flying all around the inside of the oven like Mexican jumping beans.
A lot of squash seeds don’t get crispy when you bake them. They taste like uncooked seeds no matter what. If somebody’s done a chart on which seeds are bakeable and which one will just jump into odd corners of the oven, I don’t even know how to Google that.
The other thing I’ve been doing with squash is boiling the skins for broth, then putting that broth in bread dough. Works especially well with my sourdough. Moist, as you’d expect, and adds vaguely to the flavor without overpowering anything. Nice tint to the dough too.

Six years ago the Boam Hoddys wrote a song about their neighborhood: “Cosy Corner.”
Last week, it was revived as a protest song. No new verses, no new ironic or aggrieved delivery. Sung straightforward, it just sounds different in the wake of eminent domain evictions along Sankozi Corners on the shoreline. The band, which hadn’t played out in three years but technically hadn’t broken up, were convinced to regroup for a rally at Park Beach Park.
Next up: a full-blown benefit concert for those who are refusing to move, facing potentionally huge penalties and legal fees.
Other bands are being enlisted, but actual protest songs are hard to come by. Even the Boam Hoddys didn’t really have one.
So a sub-rally was held in the park following last week’s event, featuring some musicians who’d attended in their daytime guises as fearful residents.
The group wrote a song—or at least have agreed to scatter and write one. It has 27 verses so far, in an easily learned blues base. Each couplet is penned by a different protester.
The resulting song will headline a four-hour concert in Park Beach Park two weeks from now, starring the Boam Hoddys of course, plus members of Accuse Pie, The Ashcan School and Mass Young.
Call it a house band. A save the houses band.

The Art Bakers and The Bickersons at the Bullfinch, bickering…. ‘40s nostalgia nite at Hamilton’s with Chesterfield Supper Club, G.I. Jive and The High-Jinkers, for some grandparent reunion in town… Hip and progressive show of bands that aren’t in limbo yet, for a change at D’ollaire’s: The Blandings, X Minus One and The Johnny Dollars (for a change! Get it?)…

Should have asked the landlord or the super before doing all that painting.

Body Language, Social Studies. The sort of echoey, thunderclappy dance-tracks-with-voiceover stuff that usually leaves me cold, but Body Language adds appealing female backing harmonies and techno-fillips that make it more than a background beat. Tempoture sounds like the start of a sporting event. The title track resembles a tropical track from some exotic lounge vinyl. And “Holiday” opens in such a non-festive, laid-back manner, that it gets your attention more than if it had been named anything else.

I treasure my copy of Shit Haven #1, a two-sided one-page photocopied zine that I found in a bin meant for a more commercial publication last year. It’s the kind of punk attitude publication I used to do myself back in the 1980s. But my shit is old and this is fresh—even a year later, with no #2 in sight. At least I haven’t run across one, and there’s no contact info other than: “Spuds Circle, editor. To contact Spuds: Ask a punk! No submissions from Yalies.”
Here’s an excerpt (deliberately chose one which shows Spuds’ softer side):
Thinking About James Franco
Every single person at Yale dreams about the day they’re gonna be speaking French at Atticus and James Franco will sidle up alongside them and butt in with a funny comment, thus planting the seed that will flower into their lifelong friendship.
Uh:
1. James Franco isn’t funny and doesn’t have real friends.
2. Dude tried to kill Spidey (sup Tizzie)
3. If you see me around, buy me a slice of pizza.

Neighborhood Halloween party Saturday at the new community room in the new Amistad school building. Frank Douglass, who’s likely to be our next alderman, was there. So was Greg Smith, interim alderman for the past summer.
Also present was Mayor DeStefano. I asked him joshingly if he was actually the mayor or in Halloween disguise as the mayor. “I’m incognito,” he cleverly replied. Later that day I was at Tony Juliano’s insane Forgot to Laugh Sideshow and Animation festival at Lyric Hall in Westville, and there was DeStefano again—on screen, in a fun intro video to the wacky shindig.
The neighborhood event was cordial all around, the very opposite of spooky. Geraldine Florist on Chapel Street brought costumes and outfitted kids for free. There were apples and other healthy snacks amongst the candy. Kids could design buttons, the template already emblazoned with “I care about…,” lest Halloween prankiness get the better of them.
I don’t think there was a Mayor’s Halloween Parade this week, but other generous family-friendly city tricks & treats are in store with the return of Magic Week. Local magicians are honoring the 85th anniversary of the death of Harry Houdini (punched in the stomach on Halloween, 1926) with free performances at local libraries. Tonight (Wednesday the 26th) brings Gale Alexander to Stetson branch library on Dixwell Ave. Thursday, Wilson branch library on Washington Ave. welcomes Headmaster Lang of Froghearts School, who is “looking for young wizards and witches to join his school!” Saturday, Cyril the Sorcerer—an enthusiastic advocate of recycling—does two gigs in a row: 1 p.m. at the Main Library on Elm Street and 3 p.m. at Neverending Bookstore, 810 State Street. There’s a talk Sunday, Oct. 30 about the wondrous new Yale Press book Houdini: Art & Magic, at Yale’s Slifka Center on Wall Street.
Magic Week details here.

One of the gerbils died. Mabel was the only one of us who could ever tell them apart. When she announced that it was her gerbil and not Sally’s which had died, she was despondent, though she could easily have convinced us (and herself) otherwise. Sally, for her part, immediately sought to negotiate a replacement pet. One absorbing the loss, the other deflecting it.
I was the one who fed the gerbs and cleaned their cages and shared the study with them in the daytimes. Today, clearly hearing only half the accustomed amount of rodent scrabbling, I am the very model of forlorn.
In the process of removing the corpse and making a rare unscheduled cage cleaning (it’s usually every other trash day, and can take up to two hours to do properly) I scaled down the cage arrangement from a connected duplex to a single apartment with a whole lot of tubes around it.
I don’t know how I’d care to live if a constant companion suddenly expired, but I expect I’d want to nestle snugly in a small soft area for a while. And that’s just what’s happening with the surviving gerb, who’s developed a new bedroom area for herself, and has stuffed the running wheel with tissue paper as well—perhaps in tribute to her deceased athletic sister.

That really took the cake!
The cake was a bitthday surprise for Millie of the Model Marvels. We knew about because we baked it ourself. But the delicacy never made it out of the confined grease-spattered corner laughingly known as the Bullfinch kitchen (and more commonly known as the sink room).
Culprit—a rat, chased with the proverbial carving knife by Millie herself when she saw her anniversary desert being desecrated by rodent teeth.
The entire cake was disposed of. A visiting punk band turned the disposal into a new spectator sport, so laughs were had. But the bitter memory remains.
Bullfinch oddsbody Q has vowed a full investigation and extermination.
No rats will be let in without having proven that they’ve already eaten desert elsewhere.

Irene’s Riches and Words at War at the Bullfinch… Camel Caravan and Frontier Gentlemen, middlebrow world and country music collide, at Hamilton’s… Package tour at D’ollaire’s with The Candy Matsons, The Tracers of Lost Persons, The Chetters and The Penners. What’re they gonna do with all those bands?

Painted several rooms in the house.

Andrew Jackson Jihad, Knife Man. I missed this band when it came through town a couple months back. They’re probably wonderful live—scraggly and scruffy and distractable. The songs and playing are a mash of the rambling musings of a Jad Fair and the punk-rock & roll charge of Titus Andronicus. There are some wild titles—Fucc the Devil,
“Zombie by the Cranberries by Andrew Jackson Jihad”—yes, the band name is inserted into the title—opens thus: “If I had a cigarette for every time a perfect stranger asked me for a cigarette, then I’d have enough cigarettes to get me through the day. And if I had some spare change every time a perfect stranger asked me for some spare change, then I’d have enough spare change to take care of these bills I need to pay. Dude, I know that times are tough. But that does not mean you can have my stuff. So how about a ride? I can drive you to the shelter. We can eat dinner at the Andre House and you can even take a shower. Because I think you deserve much more than a smoke and fifty cents. You deserve to be self-sufficient, buy your own cigarettes” It then breaks into a sardonic chorus of “Oh, When the Saints Go Marching In” and yet more conflicted musings on charity, selfishness and social values.
The youth of today, working out their issues. That’s rock & roll. Andrew Jackson Jihad does so with considerably more words and insight than a lot of other bands.