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Home, Cold Home

There’s still no electricity at home. The utility company says it should be back on by Wednesday night, but if it isn’t we’ll be looking for a hotel room. I’ve got the fireplace going in the evening, and I can run space heaters off the portable generator. I have a 5-gallon gas container, but I wish the generator’s tank were bigger. We have oil lamps, and they work great. I can see why sperm whales were hunted to near extinction before petroleum took over. My GE Superadio III, 17 years old, has been our primary source of entertainment.

Compliments of great guy Mark Sinnott, here’s a follow-up pic from the Albany Comic Con, with me on the right, with Denro and Joe Sinnott. Men with caps! As always, I make a point of not looking directly into a camera flash, which is painful for somebody who has lattice degeneration.

LIFE misses the Beat

LIFE Magazine, or what’s left of it, has an online George Harrison tribute. There’s also a print edition of the LIFE tribute to George, but it has an error that kept me from buying the issue. It’s a particularly annoying error, that was probably repeated from Bob Spitz’s useless, mistake-filled book, The Beatles: The Biography. The error is that Pattie Boyd appeared in A Hard Day’s Night with her sister Jenny. This is incorrect. Jenny “Jennifer Juniper” Boyd was not in AHDN. The girl with Pattie was, of course, my friend Prudence Bury. The paragraph below was scanned from Hunter Davies’ book The Beatles, in which Pattie mentions her two sisters (Jenny and Paula), as well as Prue.

A couple of years ago I said that Prue’s hair stylist was her friend Vidal Sassoon. Here is a picture of Prue sporting a Sassoon cut. Vidal is on the right, and the man in the middle is Alexander Plunkett-Green, husband of fashion designer Mary Quant.

Boston, you’re my home

Boston radio station WGBH is named after the Great Blue Hill, the site of the station’s antenna (the TV tower is elsewhere). In addition to its three over-air HD stations, WGBH has online stations, including one that plays The Jazz Decades, the long-running series about the music of the era between WWI and WWII that was hosted by the late, great Ray Smith.

For those who prefer being up-to-the-minute, there’s WGBH Local Indie, a service devoted to Boston area indie bands. Last night on the Roku player I caught the tail end of a song that sent me grabbing for the netbook to find out what it is. It’s When He Comes Home, by the Banditas. The timeless, essential, stripped-down sound of garage bands lives on!

And now… sports! The Boston Red Sox had their all-time worst end-of-season collapse this year, and it’s all my fault, as Denro explained to me:

I still say that you cursed them after that rainy rescheduled “Irene” game in late August. That’s when it all fell apart. They never won two games in a row after that. It came out today that some players resented the owners for the rescheduling of the games, so you sowed the seeds of dissension, as they all read your blog.

Yes, I know, and I’m truly sorry! But let’s please try to forget the unpleasantness of this terrible year’s debacle and its front office fallout, and look back with our friends across the pond at the BBC, to the stunning success of 2004, when the Sox broke the Curse of the Bambino.

[audio:http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/witness/witness_20111015-0900a.mp3|titles=BBC Witness: 2004 Red Sox]