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The gig at Cleo's went very well. Martha did an exceptional job on the sound, and the crowd was very kind. Although the management at Cleo's hadn't informed the people working at the Cafe that I was booked to work there, they nonetheless were very accommodating.

Artistic Differences joined me onstage for a third set, during which I proceeded to break two (!) strings on my guitar. I think this is a record, even for me.

The evening was divided into three sets:

Set One: Originals
Woke Up On the Fourth
She Told It To Me Twice
Welcome Home
There's That Song
Tell Me What You Feel
On the Mall
Eyes up Front
Dence in My Kitchen
Rock Creek
I'll Wait for You
Minorly Disconcerted
Never Had a Brother

Set Two: Covers
Here Comes the Sun
China Grove
Wild World
Time in a Bottle
Flowers on the Wall
Leader of the Band
From the Beginning
Red Rubber Ball
Rainbow Connection

Set Three: Artistic Differences
Imposing Potato
Ouch
Bile
Tip of my Tongue

To those friends and family who read this, I'd like to offer an apology for any offense I may have caused, even inadvertedly.

The usual thing to do is to do this in between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur verbally or in writing. I've done it in song, and the newly-minted song "Sorry" is up on the music downloads page. Please take a listen; it's a short song and a fairly quick download.

For anyone who's not on my gig-announce list, I'm playing this Saturday, 9pm at Cleo's Internet Cafe, for a 2-hour gig.

This is not an open mic, it's me me me all me playing songs. Please show up and pack the place, with warm bodies (or cold ones, I'm not fussy), so they'll ask me back. If you don't like music, you could show up and talk to people, or look at the strange statues that are also lights.

Here's a map, but the place is on Raritan Ave in Highland Park, NJ, across from the video store.

Callahan's Con
by Spider Robinson

After the mediocre Callahan's Key, this latest -- and possibly final -- installment in the Callahan series of novels and short stories is a breath of fresh air. The Place, a bar frequented by a close-knit group of friends and family, gets two large problems to solve: They end up on the receiving end of an extortion racket from Tony Donuts Jr., a small-time hood who wants an in to the mob; and a Florida state education board employee who wants Jake and Zoey to prove that they've been keeping up on the home schooling of their daughter, not realizing that Erin is a supergenius, way smarter than her folks will ever be -- the best education for Erin is to leave her alone, dammit. There's also telepathy, hypocrisy, bureaucracy, and social commentary hidden in plain sight.

Don't read the back jacket copy, it gives away some of the plot. But the plot is complex, and Mr. Robinson manages to rise above the deus ex machina plot devices of making his protagonists bulletproof and Erin being a teleport. But only barely. The book does suffer from the Spider Robinson disease of turning enemies into friends and one problem somehow ends up solving the other, but there's more here than that. There's a subplot involving Doc Webster that should have been fleshed out more, but what's there is good. And Erin finally becomes at least half of a main character, if at the expense of shoving her Mother onto the sidelines.

What am I complaining about? You don't read Callahan books for the florid prose, or for the artistically drawn characters. You read them to visit old friends -- and Jake and the Doc and Eddie and the rest are old friends by now. A fun book and a fast read. Recommended to readers of the series.

The Books of Magic
Written by Neil Gaiman; Illustrated by John Bolton, Scott Hampton, Charles Vess and Paul Johnson

What would happen if a child lucked into world-shaking magical power? How would the world react? This isn't a new idea, of course. Some have claimed that the Harry Potter books stole the idea from Neil Gaiman, but this is silly. The child learning how to use vast amounts of power is a staple of fantasy literature.

Tim Hunter, a London kid, is confronted by four mysterious figures: John Constantine, Mister E., Dr. Occult, and the Stranger, also known to some as the Phantom Stranger. After asking him if he believes in magic, they take him on a tour of the occult world, past and future, Earth and elsewhere.

Much of the narrative is exposition. Gaiman is good enough to not let that stop him, though. There is some faltering in the first chapter, where he and artist John Bolton go overboard on visual metaphors (although Gaiman would continue to use such imagery to good effect in The Sandman, at the time less than halfway complete). As the Stranger took him through the past, John Constantine shows him the state of magic in the world today. In a jaunt through America invisibly painted by Scott Hampton, young master Hunter has it made quite clear by circumstance that the price of magic is often severe.

The narrative switches gears as we go with Dr. Occult and Tim into the land of Faerie. Much of this is obviously a setup for the series proper, but Charles Vess's lush graphics keep us awestruck. And finally, the paranoid, intense Mister E walks with Tim into the future of the universe, as he sees it. Ultimately, there is a price for everything, including glimpses of the future.

Again, the price of magic is not a new theme. (See The Price by Jim Starlin if you can find it. It's an excellent treatment of the theme.) Gaiman wrings out new nuances, to a story that will never grow old.

Seventy-five issues written by John Ney Reiber would follow this miniseries, and another two series. Tim's character is only lightly sketched in the original graphic novel, as it's really a story about a situation. Magic itself is the lead character, with Tim and the four would-be teachers merely supporting characters. However, it's a wonderful story for all its weaknesses. Recommended to fans of imaginative fiction and wonderful art.

At the moment, I have 4 guitars I use regularly. (I own something like 7 of them.) Some of them are named, some are not. I'll keep adding to this entry as I decide on names for the un-named axes.

Millicent, AKA Seagull S-Series Grand

This is a smaller steel-string guitar made for fingerpicking, of a body design commonly known as a "Parlor" guitar. The Parlor guitars were meant to be played in, you guessed it, a parlor. So Grazina decided it should be named Millicent, as that's a name of someone who sounde like she would have a parlor.

Kate, AKA Cort MR750

A dreadnought of decent heft, great color and sustain, and large string gauge (.013 D'Addario Phosphor Bronze), Kate is my main ax. Due to the aforementioned heavy strings, originally put on for practical reasons, and due to the great woods and a decent density of the fingerboard, you can sound a note and it'll still be there when you get back from making a spot of tea. (The dipped-in-a drum-of-polyurethane finish might have something to do with this.) Or filtered water. Have abused and dropped ths guitar and it's still very happy to produce a pleasantly scratchy, smoky, rich sound, like the actress Katherine Hepburn of yore.

The 12-String, AKA a Bluebird something-or-other

Slightly tinny, but I got this acoustic 12-string on the cheap, bought it for $200 in a parking lot. Really, I did. Added a Fishman rare earth pickup wired into an endpin jack, replaced the original open-plan hardware with closed gearheads.

The Light Bass, aka Yamaha electric bass

Not much else to say. Produces a great choppy Sid Viscious/Geddy Lee sound without paying too much for a Rickenbacker bass. Have to adjust the intonation.

The Fretless Bass, AKA Peavey T-40

Originally a stock T-40 I got in trade for a bass i got in trade for a Gibson "The Paul" guitar with tuning problems. (Shoulda kept that guitar, it just needed new tuning machines. I was Young and angsty and stupid.)


This guitar was also the victim of an ill-advised attempt to convert it into a fretless. Am looking at buying it a new neck.

The Bird, AKA Peavey Falcon

Started life as a stock Peavey Falcon, I replaced the single-coil pickups with stacked humbuckers in an effort to improve the sound. Also had a local guitar shop pull back the tension on the bridge so the whammy bar can't be used -- I don't use them much, they just throw the guitar out of tune.

Rachel and Ethan's wedding was great fun. Guests were seated in bleacher-style seats, around three sides of an outdoor square platform stage. On the grounds of the Waterford, CT Eugene O'Neill Theater, in the late afternoon sun, Rachen and Ethan's ceremony was structured much like a play would be, without losing the feel of a traditional Jewish wedding. The ceremony was in front of a tree that looks to have a larger diameter than I am tall. The simcha was held in a tent, quite large, with a dance floor and their friends DJing. We stayed until the waitrons started putting away glasses and disposable cameras.

We're up in Connecticut, spending Shabbes with Sharon Zohar and her housemate Drew. Will be going to a family wedding in the Eugene O'Neill Theater.

I learned how to play Leader of the Band in a key I can sing. Cool.

The Iron Sunrise
by Charles Stross

Writers producing novels in the same fictional world typically use the same voice and attitudes throughout. Charlie Stross has written, in the world of the Eschaton, two novels. The first, Singularity Sky, is a transparent metaphor for open-source ethics, and the sharing or technology across borders in the name of freedom and the right to receive spam. The second, Iron Sunrise, is a post-911 apocalyptic story of what can go wrong with grey goo. The fact that both novels with such disparate messages share a common voice and feel is a credit to Mr. Stross's skill.

Iron Sunrise one-ups the intergalactic intrigue and causality violation weapons we already know of by giving us a bigger and better playground. We again meet Rachel Mansour, UN black ops agent, and Martin Springfield, engineering consultant and part-time agent for the Eschaton, a weakly godlike entity that has charged itself with protecting space/time from dangerous technology. We also meet Frank, a warblogger; Svengali, a clown and generally sharp observer; and Wednesday, a precocious young adult or older teenager, we're never quite told which. If all this sounds to you like a B&W 40's detective/noir film, then you're not far off. We are also treated to more of a world where bandwidth is as pervasive as air.

The sun of the colony of Moscow explodes unexpectedly, obliterating most life in the system within hours as the shockwave spreads. Nearby colonies take in refugees and process them to nearby systems; Wednesday and her family end up in one of a system of O'neill-like stations with byzantine corridors and people.

In the meantime, Rachel finds that she's on a team to prevent the ongoing assassination of Muscovite diplomats currently on New Dresden, a colony that was cold enemies with Moscow, and also the next star system on the block -- within spitting distance from the cooling husk of Ground Zero. These ambassadors are the only people who can send the "abort" code to several slower-than-light craft who are carrying deadly, explosive cargos that will obliterate all life in New Dresden. There's more to the assassins than anyone had guessed, leading us to a colorful group called the ReMastered.

The obliteration of Moscow can be viewed as a loose Nine-One-One analogy. What this makes the ReMastered, a group of superiority junkies who want to upload the world so God can sort through the bits, is disturbing. Just as the foe in the US-spearheaded "war on terrorism" is somewhat hazy, Wednesday and Rachel end up sharing foes whose means become clear, but motives are difficult to understand. Everything ties up well enough in the end, but just as there are factions in Islamic fundamentalism, so are there in Mr. Stross's ReMastered. The real situation is even more complex, and the author is well aware of this. The strands of plot and dialog continue in the head of the reader, making for a satisfyingly complex and hazy moral universe. There are few black-hearted villans or shining saints in a Charlie Stross book, and this is no exception.

Mr. Stross's writing has improved somewhat since Singularity Sky, and it's wonderful to see him mature as a writer. Highly reccomended.

Our downstairs neighbor has a cat. I'm allergic and Martha's very allergic, in that emergency-room kinda way. But we haven't had a problem so far, they keep the cat strictly downstairs. It seems to like the basement and the garage.

A black cat, with white patches, and a small cat, he/she has a very loud meow. I once heard a cat that was stuck in an alcove meow like that; this one seems to feel this is the proper way to make noise. Does anyone know if a load meow means anything?

The cat somehow manages to be afraid of people and cuddling up to them at the same time. But don't get the wrong idea. This is not a cute cat, and it's not like it's waiting for me when I get home from work. And I did not leave it food yesterday. And Martha did not leave it milk a few weeks back.

Mew.