Yesterday, Baltimore saw her first snow of the season coming down in big fluffy crystals. Most of it melted right away, and there certainly wasn't enough to stick to the ground, but a few cars parked all day did get a light dusting. Of course, I didn't manage to take a photo, not even on my cell phone.

Fortunately, Karl Merton Ferron, a Baltimore Sun photographer, did manage to get this shot in.

Last night around 1 AM before I went to bed I looked out the second story window of our rowhouse at the thermometer mounted outside. It read 25 degrees Fahrenheit. As in seven degrees below freezing. That's cold, for this time of year, around these parts.

The average low for the 21st of November is a nice warm 41 degrees. Of course, the record low was 22 degrees, set back in 1987. [ More details on this and other useless weather trivia here. ]

Looks like winter's coming early this year, or at least she's teasing us. More bone-chilling weather on the way. Hopefully big bushels of snow falling from the sky. Enough to bring the city to a standstill. Enough to bring the city to a hush. Enough for everyone to spend a few moments standing on their porches resplendent in the clean, frozen winter light.

You know that an album has to be good when you can't get it out of your mind. I mean the whole album, not just one song off of it. Seriously. That's what's been going on for the last few weeks with album Heretic Pride released on 2/19/2008 by The Mountain Goats on the 4AD label.

Every time I catch myself listening to John Darnielle and Peter Hughes in my head performing "Autoclave", I try to change the channel, but just end up with them doing "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" instead. Then they'll switch it up on me and skip to "Sept 15 1983", or bounce to the albums title track! When they aren't playing in my head, they're streaming through my headphones - every day at work I pull up iTunes and listen to the album, all the way through, sometimes twice. Hell, I'm listening to it right now - I can't stop! (Maybe I should listen to some mariachi music to break the The Mountain Goats feedback loop I seem to be trapped in.)

In all seriousness, this album is incredible on many levels. From the well-crafted music, heavily featuring acoustic guitar and piano, with some light-weight drums in the background and some other sounds mixed in for good measure, to the extremely literary lyrics. In fact, it's those lyrics that have cemented the brilliance of this album in my mind. Where else can you find references to the works of Sax Rohmer and H.P. Lovecraft, along with a song that imagines the last moments of Michael James Williams, and even a piece for the fictional Michael Myers (from the Halloween movie franchise)? Of course, thrown into the middle of this are various songs about the Lake Tianchi Monster and swamp creatures, and even a beautifully intimate ballad or two.

It's the genuine intimacy of all the songs, even when they're referencing obscure literary characters or monsters, that brings the album home. Many of the songs tell a story about a character as a snapshot of a day. Sax Rohmer's spies sneaking around alleyways as the sun rises. Conspirators (or they could be people hiding from someone) scared in a room with a single light when someone calls on a phone line that no one dares to answer. A guy wandering into a Brooklyn pawn shop to buy himself a switchblade. An incredibly intimate and heartbreaking scene that takes place in the mens restroom involving an East Berlin disco refugee.

And suddenly the song changes again. The Tianchi monster is staring into space, in my head, anyway, floating among sandalwood smoke and children sketching pictures...

Press photos by Mark Van S. from The Mountain Goats official web site.

George Carlin. May 12, 1937 - June 22, 2008. Goodbye.



I was fortunate enough to see this man live twice - once in Las Vegas and once in Baltimore. Both times were incredible, irreverent, mind blowing, and life altering. Possibly one of the most intelligent comedians of all time - may you find yourself finally at peace in death, Mr. Carlin.

More to come on both adventures, once the shock's worn off, the coffee's kicked in, and I make it through a day of work...

Have you ever been to the site Everything₂? Odds are, you're scratching your head right now and staring blankly at the computer screen.

I recently discovered the site after Googling the punchline to a Geek joke that I apparently wasn't Geeky enough to get (there go my über-Geek points). The site, which turned out to answer my question comprehensively, thus saving my street cred, also turned out to have entries on just about EVERYTHING.

According to the website itself, "Everything2 is a collection of user-submitted writings about, well, pretty much everything."

Everything₂'s concept is pretty simple. It's a multi-dimensional weblog joined together with the automatic linking of a Wiki. That is to say, its a website powered by a diverse user community that posts anything they want - writing about ideas, events, things, people, reviews... Then, the system automatically links words and phrases with other entries that contain those words/phrases. Or, in the terminology of the site, nodes are joined with other nodes.

Why is this so cool? Well, for one, it allows a reader to follow the writing in a random association sort-of way, stumbling from one entry to the next. It's a labyrinth of interesting ideas. In my case, I could spend hours getting lost on the site, clicking from one node to another to see where I end up.

So, for example, say I go to the site and search for "99 bottles of beer on the wall". I end up with two results, the first being a BASIC program that iterates from 99 to zero and prints the song... From that entry, I can click on the word "PRINT" and I end up reading about fingerprinting, two-dimensional works of art, and various other definitions. At this point I can keep wandering through to other words...

I also have the option of clicking on a link that says "I like it". If enough site visitors click the "I like it" link on your entry, presumably you end up in the "Cool User Picks" area on the homepage.

Even more interestingly, I can click on the "Chaos" link at the bottom of the page. This takes me to a "tag cloud"-like view somehow related to the entry in question. "Somwhere near print I got lost in..."

The first time I did this for the "PRINT" entry, I saw links to everything from "cout" to "George Washington's 1794 State of the Union Address" to "Marcus Garvey". But then, when I tried the exact same chaos, I ended up with a completely different set of entries in the cloud...

The possibilities are endless! It's better than a game of "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon".

Friends, romans, countrymen... Happy Sunday morning. It's raining here in Baltimore, thunder-storming, in fact, after a gorgeously beautiful Saturday. At least Spring has arrived, the flowers are blooming, the trees are blossoming in all their yellows and pinks and purples and greens. And the rats are coming out of hibernation. Did I say rats? Yeah, rats, the size of small ponies... Okay, maybe the size of miniature ponies... Okay, but I swear that they truly are the size of cats around here. This is Baltimore, after all.

So, you're wondering, why is he giving me an update on Baltimore flora and fauna? Has he taken up ecology or something? No, sorry to disappoint - I just don't have time for another career, what with the cyber-punk rock-and-roll poet-philosopher thing going on. Although I do enjoy pretty flowers.

This is all an elaborate ploy to keep you interested long enough to read the third paragraph, in which I divulge the fact that a short fiction piece of mine (or is it a prose poem? oh, the gray, nebulous divide) is appearing in the Spring 2008 issue of JMWW, a quarterly on-line journal. To be precise, the piece is called "Case Study: Part 16" and was inspired by/is a response to JZF's poem "John Freemont Interviews #24".

You can read 16 here:

http://jmww.150m.com/Langston.html

You can find the index and read the rest of the Spring 2008 issue here:

http://jmww.150m.com

And you can watch this excellent piece of independent documentary film making about Baltimore Rat Fishing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Yv9I33uob0

Yes, Baltimore, where the rats are the size of cats and the cats run and cower in the corners... Or at least the cat I live with.