I traveled frequently in the job I held for 20 years starting in 1984, and when I was on planes, in airports, and in hotel rooms, before I carried a computer with me, I usually had several Dell crossword and pencil puzzle game magazines with me, as well as a deck of cards and a book or two. I was actually quite good at crosswords (here I’m talking about American crossword puzzles, not the British ones, which I never quite got the hang of), and could finish one of the puzzles that was in the in-flight magazine in the period of time between boarding the plane and it taking off. In pen. They weren’t all that difficult, so that was probably why.

One time, I was on a plane, working the crossword while waiting to take off, and all of a sudden I was aware that the woman seated beside me was watching me. "Excuse me," she said, "you’re really good at those." I thanked her, but of course I got really uncomfortable, like I was in a fishbowl all of a sudden. I’m not accustomed to being complimented on something I do just to kill time, and I was kind of worried that she was trying to hit on me. That confused me, because I’m built kind of like a bowling ball with legs, not exactly a babe magnet, and although I don’t wear a wedding ring (I outgrew it and had to have my sister-in-law, who’s a jeweler, cut it off before I lost the finger; she made it bigger, but then I outgrew that), most people can tell I’m married. I chatted with her a little bit, then went back to my puzzle. The next time I looked over, she was asleep. Crossword puzzles are not a spectator sport.

My current favorite puzzle is sudoku, which you see above. It’s a 9×9 grid that’s separated into nine 3×3 squares, and the idea is to fill in the blank squares so that every row, column, and 3×3 square has the numbers 1-9 in it. Gives me something to do while I’m lying in bed having the lymph pumped out of my leg…

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If it’s all the same to everyone, I’m not going to write about what happened twenty years ago, other than to say that next Wednesday, my cousin Genny and her husband Bob celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary. It was a breath of fresh air for all of us.

Those of you who took Latin, whether under duress or not, will immediately recognize the title as the exhortation "Always wear underwear." I took Latin because my mother said it would help me with my English, which by that time I had spoken for over 14 years (at least the dialect spoken in Chicago).

I’m not sure I know where I’m going with this. I keep thinking of the old Connie Francis song, "Where The Boys Are," theme from the 1960 movie of the same name.

All for now…

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And that finishes the beer reel…

First, an announcement: I’ve had trouble recently getting people to vote in my Battles of the Bands, and I think the reason is that I post so often, people can’t find the battles after a day or two. So, whenever I have a new battle (on the 1st and 15th of each month), I’m going to pin the post to the top of my blog so everyone can find it. That should improve my turnout. Anyway, look at the main page of my blog on the 1st and 15th for my latest battle. (I’ll take them down when I announce the winner.)

A question that was on the minds of many during the Middle Ages was "How many angels can dance on the head of the pin?" That’s used more as the example of the kind of question the answer of which is unimportant and a waste of time to come up with, but just so everyone knows, the answer is all of them (because, as angels are spiritual beings, they take up no room) and none of them (because, as they’re spiritual beings, they can’t dance). You’re welcome.

And now, from 1964, The Searchers, "Needles And Pins."

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My day has started out really well, and there’s no reason to expect that anything bad will happen. I may have just jinxed myself by saying that, or at least that’s what some folks believe. Like the old baseball superstition that says, if your pitcher is throwing a no-hitter, you don’t point it out to him, or he’ll blow it. In the late innings of such a game, everyone avoids him, nobody says anything to him, lest anyone say something about the game he’s pitching.

A few years back, Randy Johnson was pitching against the Braves and he threw a perfect game: he faced 27 batters and got all of them out, with no on getting on base. It was quite a sight to see, even if it was against my team. You could tell that the fans that were there were really getting into it. Sometimes you just have to tip your cap to them when they beat you like that.

Well, that’s where my stream of consciousness took me. What about yours?

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Of course, let’s start with ode: One of my favorite songs is Bobbie Genrty’s "Ode To Billy Joe." I just used it last week, but I’ll stick it in here, anyway…

You have a picture at the top of a dessert served a la mode, in other words with a scoop of ice cream. As good as pie, cake, cobbler, waffles etc. are on their own, they’re all better a la mode, and whenever I can get away with it, I have my dessert that way.

In music, we talk about modes of a scale. All those are simply a scale starting from a different note than the root. For example, a C major scale is C D E F G A B C. The Dorian mode of that scale starts on D, Phrygian starts on E etc. John Coltrane got heavily into modal music in the ’50’s. I won’t go any further, because I can hear your eyes glaze over…

I’m a retired programmer, so I don’t write code the way I used to. Honestly, it no longer has the appeal it once did. Nowadays there are tools that will write code for you, you just have to fill in the blanks correctly. I actually go far back enough that I can remember punching out my programs on 80-column cards. I actually worked for a company that got its start in a guy’s garage, where he had the machinery to create the 80-column cards.

I was going to say something about nodes, but I see I’m out of time. Not that it’s ever stopped me before…

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