Thursday 1/29/26 I have a list of the books I'm working on and a list of the books I plan to write. I'm always working on a number of books at once. In that latter group, is a book on the Who's Live at Leeds . This is an album that's paired fundamentally with who I am as a listener, and shaped me in my listening journey, going back to the first time I heard it, which I remember perfectly. A friend who lived at the bottom of my street--it was a hill--who was into music and art

Wednesday 1/28/26 Received the best news in a while the other day. My niece Amelia has a friend named Hattie, who had been diagnosed with cancer. The cancer spread. Hattie was a brave little girl, though, and kept doing her treatments as she went through this awful, awful, awful thing that no child should have to endure. Well, Hattie and her family went into Chicago this weekend so that she could ring the bell! I was so happy for her. I don't know this child, but I've thought

Wednesday 1/28/26 In Robert Bresson's 1956 film, A Man Escaped --a title with myriad meanings--a member of the French resistance named Fontaine is held prisoner by the Germans. Fontaine spends his days trying to structurally weaken the door of his cell by removing fibers of wood with a tool he fashioned. His fellow prisoners don't understand why he bothers. What it is he's doing. "I battle the door," Fontaine says, which says everything. Freedom in all its forms--internal and

Wednesday 1/28/26 Wilbur Wood, who was born in Cambridge, MA and attended Belmont High School, died recently. He was a fascinating player, the kind that used to be somewhat the norm, but that you no longer see in sports. Things in our society, at every level of society, now trend to blandness. There are fewer quirks, fewer people who stand out, less individuality, and this is how it works everywhere in in a world that keeps getting worse, including in sports. Take a look arou

Wednesday 1/28/26 I think one would be hard pressed at this point to deny that the 2025 New England Patriots are a very lucky team. Sometimes you get the breaks, but these Patriots seem to get all the breaks. Had C.J. Stroud not turned in one of the worst performances by an NFL quarterback in the history of the playoffs, the Patriots very well could have lost to the Texans. Before that, the Patriots got a ripe-for-the-picking LA team in Foxborough in January. That was a nice

Saturday 1/24/26 The locals are talking as though it's a forgone conclusion that the Patriots will beat Denver in Denver now that the Broncos must play their back-up quarterback, but this isn't my view. All single-elimination games are eminently losable for each side involved. Patriots fans don't seem to realize that their team very well could have lost if their opponent last week had gotten some historically bad quarterback play. That is, if the quarterback was merely bad, r

Saturday 1/24/26 Observing the incompetence at the ownership level in Buffalo in following from the dismissal of Sean McDermott is comical. There are very few people in the world who aren't terrible at their jobs. Why do they have what they have? Again: Other things. It's almost always other things than some ability they're supposed to have in keeping with their job or position. Whether you're an NFL owner, a university president, partner at the firm, radio host, a writer at

Saturday 1/24/26 Alcohol often makes dumb people dumber and loud people louder; given that many dumb people are also loud, or on the verge of being so, the grating effect for one who is forced to bear witness before they can get away--allowing this is possible--is all the greater. You can be a person who is normally quiet, too, who is nonetheless perpetually on the verge of being loud and displaying those prodigious stores of ignorance in all their glory and doesn't speak up

Monday 1/19/26 "Rot" in all its forms will be the word of the year. You can see it already. Started happening at the end of last year. First it was brain rot. Which is bad. So, of course, people do what people now do, and invert things. What's not funny is funny, what's immoral is moral, and so on. Hence, "rot" became a positive. Bad things are good now. Good things are either hated, feared, or not understood, or some combo. "Rotting on the couch all weekend is peak living"--

Monday 1/19/26 The Patriots defeated the Texans yesterday, which was good, but I didn't think the Patriots were all that good. Houston turned the ball over a lot. The Patriots turned the ball over a lot. And it could have been more, minus their own fumbles that they recovered. Would the Patriots have won if Houston shaved off two of those turnovers? I don't know. The Patriots won in large part because of how bad C.J. Stroud was. As I mentioned the other day, he's gotten worse

January 1/18/23 Dear Amelia, Every January I think, “Amelia has another birthday this month,” and then I start wondering if someone who has been a big girl for so long becomes a bigger girl every year or if it’s just your age that changes once you’re big. Hmmm. I’ll have to keep thinking about that. Maybe you know. I hope this is a great birthday for you and that every birthday you have is better than the last and on and on and on. I also hope you like the Boston Ball

Sunday 1/18/26 Couldn't have had a much worse prediction than the one I went with for the 49ers-Seahawks unless you'd done something like picked the Broncos over the 49ers in the 1989 Super Bowl. Not a competitive game yesterday! A no-doubter pretty much immediately. Got the Bills-Broncos wrong, too, but at least the reasoning was sound. Josh Allen was bad. Bills can't win when that's so. Inevitably, I saw fans complaining after the game--and long after--about how the Bills

Saturday 1/17/26 Sports predictions never seem to go well. Or maybe I should say that they can only go so well. You can put them down in writing, and when you look back later you'll usually see you didn't fare so hot. There haven't been many times when I thoroughly believed what I would have predicted would happen actually happened. Allowing that it wasn't some huge mismatch. Two occurrences come to mind: I had a strong inkling the Patriots were going to lose to the Giants in

Thursday 1/15/26 It's funny when NFL teams make an official statement about how such and such a player will play if he makes it through the concussion protocols, like everything is on the up-and-up. It's lip-service. That player is always going to play. The NFL and its teams don't care if the brains of all the players turn to mush. That's what you're getting into in the first place--that you'll end up with a mush brain. I'd say that it's insulting the intelligence of the NFL'

Tuesday 1/13/26 I've been doing a lousy job with everything. Really lousy. Need to turn it around. Put up a good and honest fight. By honest I mean all-out effort. I have things to get up on here from Christmas that I didn't finish or tend to at Christmas. I'm just going to do it. Not going to be tethered to/restricted by the calendar. What's the calendar really mean anyway? Besides, Christmas season used to run until Candlemass on February 2. In France people celebrate the d

Saturday 1/10/26 The computer issues look to finally be resolved, which means it's catch-up time and blow-ahead time and get things written and get written things finished time. Back and surging forward with a vengeance. The issue pertained to the Cloud. On Christmas, someone told me to put everything on my hard drive up on the Cloud. I take back-ups pretty far. I have assorted forms, as one would expect, given what I do and have produced and am creating. In addition to my mu

Friday 1/9/26 It's a playoff, a tournament, so you can't really say that Miami doesn't deserve to be where they're at, but rightly or wrongly this Hurricanes team being in the national championship game feels like a result of happenstance to me rather than being indicative of the quality of the team. I just don't think they're that strong, even relative to the field. They could very well win the national championship, though. But a team from the ACC? The weak ACC? And an ACC

Friday 1/9/26 I don't believe that people are capable any longer of being organically interested in someone else. I don't think fascination exists where we might look at someone, see what they do, who they are, observe them, and be increasingly interested, drawn to them, wish to know them. I think it's other things. Usually things a person wants/has to have that have nothing to do with a specific other person. I know a woman who got divorced. She then had to move in with her

Friday 1/9/26 What is a country? Is the United States a country? To me, it's now just a place where people live. Mostly unintelligent, uneducated, lowest common denominator, selfish, narcissistic people, with brutish, base, and corrupt elected officials who attempt to run the country for their own personal gain and to gratify their desires and satiate sick needs. Of lust, power, money, control. The goal--and the motor of their cold, unchecked, detached, inhumane, un-human psy

Thursday 1/8/26 Back when I first began running stairs in the 294-stair Bunker Hill Monument in 2016, I'd kind of just go over to Charlestown and, well, go up. That seemed like something. After all, it was a lot of stairs to the top, if you don't think in terms of what a lot of stairs is, or have much experience with big numbers of stairs. I was walking over there one time and when I was between the ball field on Atlantic and the skating rink closer to the bridge, I texted so

Wednesday 1/7/26 You see this with regularity now: An overweight person begins taking Ozempic and becomes thin. They didn't become thin on account of putting any effort into doing so. They stayed sedentary. That person then leaves their spouse because now they can get someone more attractive physically. Most people would do this if they were able to or they had the option. Love essentially doesn't exist now. Everything is transactional. Being with someone. The reason for havi

Tuesday 1/6/26 The Patriots finished with the second seed in the AFC, and that could end up working out more to their advantage than if they'd been the top seed. They play the Chargers Sunday night on Gillette (what's up with an eight o'clock start on Sunday night for Wild Card weekend?). Watching the Chargers play the Broncos on Sunday, it looked to me as if the Chargers wanted this game against New England. I'm not a huge believer in that Chargers team, their quarterback, o

Sunday 1/4/26 Dry January, like many things that people do, or purport to do, and for which they seek attention, as people lacking in substance do with nearly everything that is of no real consequence, makes little sense to me. It makes sense to me why it's popular, if that's the term one wishes to use. People are faddish because they lack in substance. But let's say you successfully pull off this Dry January challenge/goal and you go the whole month without having a drink of

Saturday 1/3/26 The biggest story in sports right now--which no one is talking about, too--is the Colorado Avalanche being 30-2-7. Do you understand how difficult it is to have only two regulation losses through thirty-nine games of an NHL season? They are on pace to have less losses than the 1977-78 Montreal Canadiens. The two best hockey players in the world are on this Avalanche team. You could be watching history right here. Team USA was eliminated from the World Juniors