Month: February 2025

Moose in fedora

On top of a bookcase, next to one of the Bose speakers, a moose sits under a fedora. I bought the fedora years ago at a boutique in Egg Harbor, Wisconsin, because I had a thought that I might be Indiana Jones someday, only without the whip or the flair or the derring-do.

“You look good in that,” she said, but I didn’t dare agree, so I gave it to the moose. And the moose looks more adorable than I could ever have hoped.

This is how it’s going to be, then? I will type some stream of consciousness silliness and pass it off as … and here again my brain short-circuits as seventy-something brains tend to do. Profundity! That’s not quite the right word, either, but it’s true that I will try to pass this off as profundity, when it really is simply me writing whatever floats down the stream into my fingers.

Someday I may write something truly profound this way, but I think that day is not today. Could be wrong: Someone down the road may look at these words and find the secret s/he had been searching for. I don’t see it, but the genius writer never sees it coming, does she? The DJ looks at the flip side of the mediocre song and finds the real hit. Where is my DJ?

Humphrey Bogart can rock the fedora. Harrison Ford can rock the fedora. I just look like an old guy who wishes he was Bogie or Ford. What can I say?

I can say thank you for dropping by to see what I’ve written today. I hope you can find some meaning here. Or does everything have to mean something? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, although sometimes a cigar is a symbol to drive home a special meaning with sensual gusto, if you’re willing to penetrate the surface.

And sometimes, of all things, a moose wearing a fedora is just a moose wearing a fedora. There’s another clue for you all.

An existential dilemma

This may or may not be a conundrum as complicated as Schrodinger’s cat, but I have to question this slide, which appeared on a website I was browsing the other day.

The obvious question seems to be: What video?

If the video does not exist, by what logic can you refer to “this video”? If there is something you can call “this video,” then it does exist, doesn’t it?

It’s enough to keep a guy from getting to sleep on a cold winter’s night, if he thought about it long enough. I’m pleased to report I do not plan to think about it for very long.

UPDATE: And another thing, if there’s a message that says, “This page was intentionally left blank,” it wasn’t.

Listening: It’s Now Winter’s Day

A friend posted a WLS radio top 40 survey from February 1967 the other day. “I don’t remember some of these,” he admitted, so I smugly glanced down the list remembering sweet tunes from way back then and thinking, “I remember this, I remember that.”

“Pushin’ Too Hard” by the Seeds was No. 1 that week, followed by “I’m a Believer” by the Monkees and “Georgy Girl” by the Seekers. Tommy James and the Shondells had leaped up to No. 5 with their new song “I Think We’re Alone Now,” which I adored (still do). 

I laughed at myself when I got to No. 10, “Nothin’ Yet” by Blues Magoos, and pulled up short because I didn’t remember a song by that name, then remembered that the title of their biggest hit was “(We Ain’t Got) Nothin’ Yet.” WLS just left off the parenthetical part of the title.

My smug self rattled off all the tunes in my mind until I hit No. 19. I never heard of “Now Winter’s Day” by Tommy Roe, he of “Sheila,” “Sweet Pea” and “Dizzy” fame.   Thankfully we live in an age when almost every recording ever recorded has been uploaded to the internet somewhere, so within seconds I began to listen to a lovely little song about being “snuggled warm in each other’s arms, Listening to silent sound as the snow packs the ground.”

It was 1967, and so the producer felt obligated to add some “psychedelic” sounds to intrude on the quiet beauty of the song, but otherwise I am utterly charmed and thrilled to share this gentle tune. Definitely worth waiting 58 years to hear.