The 1970-71 Boston Bruins; the finest sports documentary ever made; a rare concert tape from 1968 featuring the Who and Blue Cheer; one of the best of the five-part Johnny Dollar episodes that will break your heart. 

On Eric Dolphy's solo bass clarinet version of Billie Holiday's "God Bless the Child." "His attack is all swoops, dives, and bench-pressing of  geological plates, as if coming from inside the earth and then pushing  against a canopy of stars, before raining back down in droplets of  indigo and liquefied rubber. You’re not going to find a more demanding  piece, but he underpins this dialogic wonder, as Holiday did, with the  blues. It is a blues both ancient and modern, incorporating ageless  rhythms of Africa with the Mondrian-like coloristic staccato of the  city. At some intervals you might think of it as sci-fi, and then—two  clicks of Dolphy’s tongue later—as a hymn that has enfolded the earth  since long before we got here."

Bruins, Sox, Sam Cooke, Nick Drake. 

A piece called "You're Up, You're Down, You're Up," about a man trying to keep himself alive and going by running up and down the stairs of the Bunker Hill Monument. "It is interesting the diametrically opposed way two people can look at the same thing and both retain a degree of correctness. As I climb now I think of how the Monument might be viewed as a death box. Not that anyone has died in it during my climbing career, but people do pass out, ambulances are summoned, and of course nearly everyone stops to rest two, three, four times before reaching the top a single time, bending over and sucking wind, looking at the person they are with as though they want to crack a joke, then focusing back on the task of catching their breath."

The process of writing three books at once and composing in one's head; the father-son relationship at the heart of The Rifleman examined upon the passing of Johnny Crawford; the misconceptions of Roger Clemens' Red Sox decline; an on again, off again romance with Triscuits. 

Wade Boggs, Bruins players with a shot for the Hall of Fame, the annoying sounds people make, and the Many Moments More blog reaches a milestone. 

Writing a book on the guitar solo in Pink Floyd's "Time," 1961's The Hustler, sports stats whose luster has lessened, and a couple of strange baseball exhibition games.  

Walking etiquette, Orson Welles, Beatles.

The state of the Red Sox and Bruins, Jimmy Blanton, Crosby vs. Ovechkin, and a quintessential work of New England art. 

"We’re much like Chekhov’s traveler now. We confer value on what we don’t have, or where we’re not yet at. We know others are present in this 'over there,' and we worry that we are innately lacking. The procession, the parade, matter much to us because they’re all but officially earmarked as the measuring sticks of consequence."

Cadbury Eggs, Messiah, Trane, Beatles, science fiction, and the most important commodity in the world. 

Talking about the difference between chemistry and connection and more. 

A piece for The Smart Set. "Blanton was the man who freed the Ellington sound, who made all future  sounds, it seemed, attainable. I’ll venture that no one in jazz history has played an instrument better than Blanton played the bass, but I almost hesitate to term what he did bass playing."

Walter Page, sonic liberator. "We’re talking music as elemental as the weather, a sea throwing itself against shore-rock again and again, the incessant “I’m not going anywhere” advance, and yet so orderly, controlled, both repeatable and always new. A daring empiricism, an improvised science of rhythm-making."

Don't Dorian Gray yourself. "But she didn’t know. She’ll probably never know. The point is the cliché. And it is the clichéd life that is a kind of death. Or, if you wish to be less macabre, we can just call it hardly a life at all. Not  the life of an individual."

Being plagiarised, new New York Daily News op-ed, the meaning of actual happiness. 

Why degrees are meaningless and more. 

Dating site dementia, hockey showdown, an insurance investigator, searching out West. 

Carter Family, Archie Bunker, sports ratings dip, Ambrose Bierce. 

"He wrote a huge amount of short stories — 250 — and 850 fables in a period when writers of imagination actually wrote; as in, wrote often and wrote well, rather than what they do now, which is talk about writing without actually creating anything and bragging about how they are off for another writer’s colony vacation funded by someone else."

Letterman. "Words can't express." "You can't make it up." Black coffee. Pitting the best player from each of the four major sports against each other. 

On 1981's My Bloody Valentine. 

Tom Brady and aging. 

Supermarket space eaters, some Hawks, some Yardbirds. 

Stop telling everyone--and yourself--that you're old. "The dad bod is not some necessity of being 50-years-old, or whatever age you are. You’re free to dispense with it, transform it. Those views  you’ve held for decades? They can evolve in six months, and then you have fresher, better views to work with, perhaps to transform again, as you journey forward. What often stops us is complacency enabled by a culture of complacency."