That roar comes from everyone whispering

This is new on Sinclair Road: Everyone in the entire building seems reduced to a whisper, given the spectacle of rumors floating.

Now the Dispatch uses anonymous sources to push them out first.


I feel like humming "For What It's Worth" by Buffalo Springfield. What's happening is pretty clear, but management won't talk even with sieve-like security around its big secret.

Luckily, I have my own secrets to spread under the collective chatter.

Even this makes me miss Germany

"Wilbur, quick, give me your ATM card ....

I have slept in strange places myself, had a friend arrested in Chicago for stumbling into an high-rise atrium, passing out on a couch then having his shoes stolen while he slept, but never knew anyone too drunk to ride their horse home.

And who decided to sleep it off in a bank lobby with the horse inside.

Poor Sammy was stuck because his owner had a few too many.

Luckily, German police went easy on both of them, just sending Sammy and his owner on their way without filing charges.

It was probably hardest on the janitor stuck with cleaning up that lobby the next day....

This sadness has nothing to do with the kidnapping of Bunny Lebowski.

I should be happy, but there's so much uncertainty right now, it feels as if cutting loose a little pain in liquid form would help.

Did a man just admit to crying? Hell yeah, I wrote a fragmented villanelle about it "one of the rhyme lines was something about "the empty where men tremble and cry ." I've never bought the societal stigma against it --- pro athletes can do when they win or lose a championship (remove the tears of shame, attach the tears of joy), but if someone faces a sad streak

I can have that sadness sit on my shoulders for weeks without getting the needed release.

Usually it takes a song, a long purging conversation with a friend, or a little reading to let it go.

Before Germany, the sadness had become almost crippling. When I returned, I went nearly two months without it, but it always returns.

Or maybe I'll just watch the last 10 minutes of Fearless .... seriously, you're more likely to pull off six Saltines in a minute than to have dry eyes when its credits roll.

On days when something catches me the wrong way when the sadness is there, I'm glad for my cubicle walls (and that I'm not afraid of biting my tongue to stay composed no matter how badly it wants to emerge).

Even I have to play the game or be forever labeled a sissy boy.

Take the last word, I'm calling the last laugh

There are too many pieces of my life that at the moment I cannot or will not turn loose on the blogosphere.

But bureaucracy reared its lethargic little head out of my mailbox Saturday, when an opportunity I turned down came back at me in a form letter with almost no basis in reality.

To say anything more would ....

These songs will outlast your running days

(Blogger's note: It's been a while, but I will catch up on posting today)

I rattled off plenty of mileage on my new sneakers this weekend, and throughout it plenty of music cheered me on. Strangely, it was all music from the past, as my current tastes have not provided the oomph I need when running.

So I dug through the CD piles and found a surprising group of old tracks on the playlist:

"I'm Finding It Harder to Be a Gentleman" - Who isn't, Jack White, who isn't?
And with a new White Stripes album only six weeks away, it was time to revisit a favorite about a guy who stops being a gentleman in spectacular fashion.

"Achilles Last Stand"
"It was an April morning/When they told us we should go" opens the great overlooked Led Zeppelin epic, a song with a raging baseline that never lets up as Jimmy Page runs through about seven solos (or so it seems; this is a 10-minute song).

Columbia House sent me Presence instead of Houses of the Holy when I was in high school, and I never regretted their mistake. On an April morning jog around the Alum Creek Reservoir's dam, it sounded better than ever.

"Rainbow Connection"
Notice my fists balling up as you prepare to write it off as a children's song.

Whether Kermit or (Willie's version doesn't quite reach amphibian heights) there's something about it. Yeah, you can't escape the sappiness of talking about rainbows, but find me a better song performed by someone with split ping pong balls for eyes. The words give away a wanderlust, a longing to step out beyond the swamp and the world we know into something greater.

Plus I had to get the Sad Kermit version of NIN's "Hurt" out of my mind. If you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about.

"Clean My Wounds" - COC's swampy Southern rock-heavy metal hybrid still sounds fresh 13 years after its release and bears a chunky intensity that the legions of nu-metal bands wish they could approach. Also great for running.

As for newer tunes, the latest Modest Mouse record has displayed unexpected staying power and two months later has not left the rotation. Though at some hours, only tunes like "Cowboy Dan" or Different City" off their earlier albums will suffice.

Things no columnist ever wants to hear upon waking up

"What do you mean you're not Joe Blundo?"

It's especially bad when you made a point to claim to be Mike Harden.

Just a thought I had....

What his headshot says

With nothing more than a camera phone, a Virginia Tech student managed to capture the apocalyptic nature of the scene in Blacksburg, VA.

Pistol and rifle shots rang out across the campus as winds from the Nor'easter pounding the East Coast roared into the phone's receiver. Frantic shouts, commands and screams later joined that horrific chorus.

This guy actually terrified his professors, including personal favorite poet Nikki Giovanni. Another set up code words in case he went berserk in class. How their vigilance slipped we'll probably never know.

The push is on for information about how the killer managed to elude the law for two hours between the dorm shooting and the classroom massacres. However, people knew this guy was trouble for a long time ... if a student scared people so much, it seems some measures could have been taken. I don't want to second-guess it, but he definitely set off people's alarms.

The psychologists paraded onto the television news always crack me up a little, as they attempt to pry open the mind of someone they barely know; in this case, the shooter's disturbed history has been quickly outlined.

But really, all anyone needs to do is look at Cho Seung-Hui's photo.

His photo possesses that same soulless quality of the endlessly-displayed portraits of Timothy McVey, Mohammed Atta or Scott Peterson (not a mass murderer, but still a heinous one).

There's a humanity missing in all of them; you could say the same of my college ID photo, taken when my disgust for landing at my last collegiate choice boiled through. But preferring to kill people with my bare hands, I was no threat to pick up a handgun.


It's not the same for all .... I think of the Unabomber, Ted Kazcynski. He wears a face more disturbed than sinister; hardly soulless, but nowhere near sane. The Columbus highway shooter, Charles McCoy Jr., wore the same look. He earned his long prison term, but not the death chamber, and rightly so; though guilt, McCoy hardly looked cold-blooded. Family members turned in both of those men, incidentally.

Next time some animal authors a horrific crime such as this - we're a crude, brutal species, so don't pretend it won't - just look at their photo.

A headshot speaks louder than any television expert.

RIP, brave little toaster

Split-second power outages are native to Clintonville, with the ancient electrical wires quick to falter and leave clocks across the neighborhood blinking for midnight.

I never know what the mini-blackouts will bring. They have fried several box fans over the years, but little else.

Stopping home today, I noticed I left the toaster plugged in.

Unplugging it tossed a fireball out of outlet, sending tiny pieces of rubber cord across the kitchen. I flailed for for the fire extinguisher I didn't own, then patted down the cinders on the stove. The flame forever separated the toaster plug from its cord, sending the old metal box that burned up hangover bagels for me since my junior year at Mercyhurst.

As for the cat, dutifully licked at the ash-covered countertop while I scrubbed the scorch marks from my hands.

So long, organic cat food

Going organic - whoever coined the phrase didn't county on finicky cats.

With the pet food recall taking away the favorite brands of 2007, Percy has bounced from brand to brand; last week, I rolled the dice on organic cat food.

At a $1 per can, he'd be crazy not to like it, right?

A few licks into his first quarter can, he looked up in that disinterested feline way and walked off. By the morning, he finished.

The second batch received a cooler welcome; what went uneaten was spread in lumps across the kitchen floor.

This morning I gave it a third try, pouring out some chicken and mackerel mix, hoping that the fishy elements would be enough, since usually I only give him salmon or whitefish varieties.
He began devouring it, finishing most of the glob in his bowl before I left the kitchen.

Walking through the bedroom five minutes later, a I took a wet step and saw the trail of purges that lead to a dry-heaving cat on the closet floor.

Irony of all ironies, I gave him the organic food so he wouldn't get sick from his normal brand, which has been pulled from the shelf for causing vomiting and worse. Yeah, animals that eat quickly often toss it up, but the organic experience has felt less than natural. We're going back to preservatives and additives.

So the silver lining is that I might actually wean him off of wet food every morning. Nothing like a little barf to keep a cat on the dry stuff.

On any other day, it would have topped the news

The major Hungarian highway linking Vienna (Austria) and Budapest (Hungary) shut down Monday morning because a truck crashed, unleashing its cargo of 5,000 rabbits onto the pavement.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070416/od_nm/hungary_rabbits_dc

In Columbus, we only get idiots driving in the wrong direction on the interstate, truckers ignoring maximum height signs, and myriad crashes caused by short attention spans wooed by text messages.

I'll take rabbits any day.

Kindly look somewhere else

An unexpectedly chatty bartender at the Winking Lizard Saturday afternoon stopped our conversation cold with "Can I ask you question?"

I'm no fan of that phrase, because it implies the question to come is personal, heavyweight or otherwise a difficult topic to push. The question rarely does.
(On the flip side "Can we have a little talk?" usually means my world is about to be shaken like a snow globe.)

This one didn't, though it qualified as an odd one for a new customer.
"Do you know how old Bryan Adams is?"
General disclaimer: I'm not fan- at all - but the constant rotation of his songs on local radio was the barely ambient noise behind my junior high years.
"Bryan, not Ryan?" I clarified, well aware a drunk Ryan Adams turned over many a concertgoer to security for requesting the former's material. And I am a fan of Ryan.

I guessed Bryan was in his mid to late 40s.
"So how could he be old enough to remember the Summer of 1969?"
Here's where the "uh-oh" comes in.
"The song isn't about the Summer of 1969, it's about the summer of (ahem) 69."
Rolling Stone answered that question in 2004. Adams was 6 years old in 1969, a little young for what he describes in the song.
I explained to the bartender that he was talking about the position, not the year (Adams has confirmed this himself before).
She seemed half-disappointed and I didn't get another word until I asked for a tab.
Vonnegut was right ... so it goes.

Ambivalently yours,

Everyone's favorite asexual commentary editor

Give me the dates, and I'll be there

I watch little television anymore, and you don't know how much this excites me:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/TV/04/13/frasier.reut/index.html

I sense a trip to NYC if this becomes a reality ... odds are the Crane boys won't take up the leads in Evil Dead The Musical, but seeing them together would be cool.

Were it any other state, I'd save my suspsicion

Notice the car wreck which left New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine in critical condition with multiple injuries is being called a crash, not an accident.

There are no accidents in New Jersey, not in a place where men of unimaginable girth can strut shirtless on the boardwalk.

The red pickup truck that caused a white pickup to collide with Corzine's SUV fled the scene and remains at large.

Anonymous pickup trucks in a bizarre incident as the governor traveled to mediate between Don Imus and the Rutgers women's basketball team?

C'mon, as long as The Sopranos still have a few episodes to go, we know better.

April is the new December

I give up -- I think I have unseasonal affective disorder.

With greater frequency I'm smoking, I'm not working out (no running or biking when gale force winds cut through the many-layered athlete) and breaking free from the blankets this morning required Herculean effort.

I can handle cold - but not wind that from its first strike invalidates every effort to dress warmly. It howls against the window panes, drops the cat into a defensive crouch and pulls the life right out of me.

But I can't break it this time; when the temperature soars into the 40's, the rain pours and the hail pings mercilessly off the cars it dents

Sorry Senator Inhofe, but extended cold through April, a January where 60-degree highs almost became passe plus weather turning on a dime (I still taste record highs slipping into wintry lows) smacks of climate change.

Seriously, if you don't know the senior Senator from Oklahoma, you need to (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Inhofe). His explanation for the wacky weather is simply Biblical - and has nothing to do with the burning of fossil fuels, whose refiners and distributors contribute to his campaign coffers.

(Digression ends)

At least my lease wraps up soon, and moving somewhere warmer is an option.

Although this stranger weather shows an unusual tenacity, and might just plague me wherever I l land.

Or spring can cut the lamb nonsense and starting acting a little more leonine.

Banned in Canada

Frank Thomas just joined the Toronto Blue Jays. Baseball fans know him as The Big Hurt (though Old Man Scott and I took to calling him The Big Crybaby" whenever he whined about being underpaid at $9 million per year).

I think the kids in this video now know where the nickname originated.

Remind me never to pick a pillow fight with this man:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMdelLmvUf0

Cat on guard in a shrinking canoe

(As I've noted before, dreams never translate well, and always sound better to the dreamer. But this vivid, almost chiseled from life Easter morning dream earned its post for bizarre ideas wrapped in flawless landscapes.)
.....

Percy stood at the bow, back arched as proudly as his nightly watch atop the television set. Whatever possessed me into taking this feral one along to Maryland to see friends is beyond me, but it's a dream, and there he stands.
For some other reason left out of the dream, we've decided this 300-plus mile trip will be take by canoe. It opens with me paddling down a spacious, smooth-surfaced river, possibly the Ohio, without backwoods marksmen turning toward our fiberglass ship for afternoon practice.
Just shy of forever and long enough for me to recount the details buttressing this trip, I'm cruising through the rustic stretches of the river, not a skeletal iron bridge anywhere in view.
.....

As the waterway shrank, so shrank the canoe; it lost about two feet once we departed the main river for a flowing creek boxed in by steep, sheer rock that hardly yielded anything to the sun. I cooled my hand in the water, its pebble-strewn bottom only a foot away.

Still, the current pushed the boat along at tremendous speed; I barely paddled. Two ferrymen tore past me as the creek opened wide and the rock walls sloped down.

....

We ran aground as this tributary vanished into a small, dead canyon. I climbed the bluff for a look at the creek I just left, where I saw the falling sun turn the ferrymen into twilight-drenched shadows eking away. It was time to let them know I was late, a hard task with phone battery blinking red, and my travel companion missing from our vessel.

....

The cat vanished, and soon the river dried away into manicured suburbs, split-level houses lining a street that curved into the nothingness beyond the dream. A half-dozen kittens with the similar orange and white pattern licked and batted at my gear
"Excuse me, but where am I?"
Without astonishment, just smiling, they said, "Washington Courthouse."
Now, everyone knows reality's version is the hometown of Every Two Weeks and Steter. If that were my location, I'd have gone in the wrong direction, and should just paddle north to Columbus to quit while I'm far behind.
So I couldn't be in Ohio's Fayette County, not with the Hagerstown-Frederick region as my destination.
Due for arrival hours before, I leapt for an answer. "Maryland?"
"No, Washington Courthouse, Virginia."
I was racing into lucid dream status and with, consciousness. Somehow my tributaries dumped me out about a hundred miles off course, and I immediately set to repack the canoe, now barely larger than a child's sled and laughably small for all my gear.

Then the genuine article sunk a claw into my cheek, collapsing the pocket universe of the alternate Washington Court House and imagined rivers valleys.

"There are sources I remember/all my life/But some remain"

It's a necessary trip on a free evening, if only to illuminate where the writer started, and what baggage becomes heaped the work with time.

Tuesday seemed the best day to travel through the personal archive growing in my closet.

I skipped the college poetry and dove right into the morass of my clip files.
Many Don't Call Me Ishmael readers worked as reporters at some point; work at Somewhere Near Poverty longer than a year, and hundreds will accumulate. We all have mountains of clips somewhere, because few move onto other jobs without a paper trail.

Sorting through the past seven years last night, I stumbled upon a few 300-word masterworks I'd not glimpsed since filing them. The Upper Arlington Pearl Harbor vets at the senior center on battle's 59th anniversary shoved next to the funeral of former Gov. Jim Rhodes and the graphics-heavy feature pages on master development plans (exciting, I know, which I why once or twice I attended the sessions half in the bag in hopes the info would liven up -it didn't).

The feature obituaries jumped out, along with stories about people who passed away in the meantime. The spry pastor who celebrated his 60th anniversary of ministry died a few years later at a hospice, and my sole memory was never bringing him copies of the article. But I know he saw it, because his chamber president niece complimented me on it.

I can't estimate the total count; uneven story loads from 5-17 stories were frequent, especially in my Columbus days. But perusing the catalogue of many years' work added new depth to it all. Small and large town upheaval and controversy were the order of the day.

Now, after nearly three years on the job and a bale of new gray hair, I'm pushing the 150-column mark. Even a flip through the columns from 2004 reveals a different writer.

I don't imagine it's quite the same for P.R. types running down the archive of press releases past.

long time no see

Shortly before the German trip, an unmistakable face from the past popped up at Bob's on a Friday night.

This fellow I'd worked with at Barnes & Noble (my first job in Columbus, dating back to July 1999) was among a group congregating near the door at Bob's, dutifully absorbing the brunt of the 15-degree evening.

I anticipated, "Hello, How've you been" and "Hope to see you around," then returning to my drinking buddies, never again to run across that old acquaintance.

Around Ohio and Pennsylvania I've run into friends and acquaintances from college. On many a frustrating occasion, I've had to explain who the hell I was to someone I worked with the cafeteria or partied with 4 times a week, leaving me wonder if my memory is that solid or theirs were so patchy.

Getting ready to explain who I was to the old co-worker, I sauntered to the bar. He matched my moves and stood next to me. Standing at the bar, he glanced over and asked, "Is that you, Bill?" in that Northern Irish accent I'd not heard since Bill Clinton still lived in the White House.

We talked for a brief while, he warned me about the beating given to the American dollar on foreign markets (though it fared better against the Euro than the British pound) and about the comfort of Bob's, where he and his publishing company co-workers

When I first came to Columbus, I expect at least one person from college might be around; she lasted a month before packing it in for California. On a lightning trip out West, I tried my best to land a job in Phoenix, but realized quickly I had no experience and resigned myself to an Ohio return. The day after I flew back, I interviewed with B&N, just so I had cash while I hunted for more substantial employment - by week's end, I had a job, just in time to start hustling boxes of books at the not-yet-opened Easton store.

I was among the initial hires, stuck with the Starbucks-lite cafe, but once we finished training there, I stock books and music with the others. I met Martin (the reappearing one) and many other cool folks on the first day; people stuck together well. There's plenty of time to chat while organizing AudioBooks or alphabetizing the biographies. For the two years of my Columbus exile, I stayed in touch with them, before the inevitable drift took hold.

That's the strange thing with acquaintances - they slip around the corner, and by the time you look again, they're five years gone. Usually, the biggest figures are never far away; it's the people who fall in the margins, the ones who enjoy in the moment, that fade quickly.

Maybe that's why such an unusual reappearance with substance has baffled me. It happens, sure, but not often around these parts. I've seen Martin twice since then on Fridays, and it's nice to run into someone a regular basis.

Better that than glancing across the bar, spying a familiar face and jumping back into conversation without acknowledging the person.

And as for Columbus, well, if you're exiled anywhere long enough, it always starts wear the comforts of home.

Dear Landlord

A chance encounter with my landlord's son - an off-kilter local realtor who handles the leasing - eased my thoughts about the near future.

With another month to go on the lease, I caught him loading some bulk materials into the dumpster, and in our conversation asked about month-to-month after the lease expires in May.

"You can stay for five more years, go month-to-month and the rent will never go up."

Now, I have zero intention of a five-year tour on Arbor Village Drive, but it's nice to sign over that monthly check to someone who isn't renting apartments for profit. If that was their goal, they're seriously off the path, since two of the four units in my chunk of the building are empty. Votes of confidence turn in my favor so rarely that I'll take it for now.

It also relaxes me to know that he'd understand if circumstances in the next week or two demanded I give him 30 days' notice.

But he doesn't need that info yet ... and wait a minute, you don't either. For now.

Are you a rain dog: A word on Tom Waits' greatest long-player

A undiscovered snippet can elbow a mountain off its mooring it leverage correctly. After 10 years of listening to "Rain Dogs," a little interview with Tom Waits in from the 80s coalesced a seemingly disjointed album into one of his greatest recorded achievements.

Here it goes:

"You know dogs in the rain lose their way back home. They even seem to look up at you and ask if you can help them get back home. 'Cause after it rains every place they peed has been washed out. It's like Mission Impossible. They go to sleep thinking the world is one way and they wake up and somebody has moved the furniture." (Glenda O'Brien, "Tom Waits for No Man," SPIN, November 1985, reprinted in Innocent When You Dream: The Tom Waits Reader)

Whoever among us that cannot claim to be a Rain Dog, at least some days?

Waits clutters the dogs' landscape with broken clocks, unnecessary taxis and piles of eclectic obstacles that await the mongrel types without their pathfinders.

If you look at Rain Dogs' entirety, the theme of wandering, without a way home, infiltrates every song. It's travelogue of stops you can't wait to leave ("Singapore"), dead ends and deader relatives ("Cemetery Polka") the stop-offs never meant to work out ("Blind Love," Gun Street Girl"), recognition that you've got nothing left ("Jockey Full of Bourbon") and the place where we speed up, lock doors and roll up windows after dark ("9th and Hennepin"). And "Time," arguably the greatest Waits ballad of all (and a personal pinnacle), shows the rain dog at a crossroads, understanding that time never hangs around waiting for a decision, it just goes on without regard.

The last song, "Anywhere I Lay My Head" goes from crestfallen lament into an epiphany: "Now if feels like the world is upside down/Seems that my pockets were filled up with gold." In this case, turning the world on its head restores a better horizon, and finally accept that if the rain keeps coming, he'll have a home wherever he lands.

With the blaring horns of a New Orleans funeral march the tune blissfully winds off into the distance, home entrenched as a state of mind, not a place we need to anchor ourselves. The anchor almost becomes a limitation.

We only need accept the scents have been exiled, and then fumble on.

You'll just have to wait for tires on the runway, tech junkies

Praise you don't hear everyday - Let's hear it for the FCC, which upheld the ban on cell phones during airplane flights.

(BT lets out a deep breath, the thoughts of a million isolated voices chattering through a commuter flight still firm in his mind.)


I doubt this affect the decision -or even came up in the FCC's deliberations - but airplanes are the only places on the planet where mass amounts of people gather without interruptions from a digitized version of the "Mexican Hat Dance" or some buffoon jibbering about the pizza he ate last night.

People actually talk to each other on planes instead of bolting into an earpiece and never letting up (or catching the basest details of their surroundings). When they won't chat, then it's time for the headphones.

To gauge how bad in-flight cell phones could be, watch the reactions in the airplane cabin to landing. Just as the tires bump tarmac, the passengers are digging for their phones, addicts frantic for the stash briefly denied them. Smokers show more patience.

A week ago, I did it for the first time, if only for a few syllables ("We landed. I'm at the front of the plane. See you curbside in five."). I felt dirty for it.

At least the ever-slippery slope of cell phone use won't open the skies to a web of signals at 30,000 feet. Obviously, it's temptation I don't need.

"The winds of Thor are blowing cold."

- Led Zeppelin, No Quarter

Weather records always snare my curiosity. When 12 feet of snow buried Mexico, NY, I read all I could as less than a foot pushed Central Ohio to mayhem's border.

With the news, I'm not concerned with where the weather comes from, whether the snow squalls paralyzing us let the jetstream drag them across the Midwest or if the vestige of a hurricane ran against the normal weather patterns to saturate the region.

I want to see that little box with the record lows and highs. They are nostalgic numbers owing nothing to modern viewers, with a high mark set in 1897 and a low during an unusual spring in 1952.

This spring, a few weeks after mad weather spat out a frigid St. Patrick's Day, the records rolled in. On a recent March day, we tied a previous high in March. Yesterday, we beat past 79 and 80 degrees claimed a new record.

This morning, it's gusting, around 40 and falling fast. The wind's assault has gone on for 12 hours, scattering the sun and ushering in a sheet of thunderheads.

Now, as someone who will sleep with open windows as long we've not reached the freezing point or the July humidity stays out of the 90 percentile, this morning was a shock.

Going to bed as Jay and Dave began to blab, it was mild; a single sheet worked for comfort
.
Around 4 a.m. - time of the cat's second attempt to coerce me into dumping his daily fix of wet food - the chill grew. When his final effort for early breakfast failed around 6, I was beneath the covers with an old Nogales blanket insulating me.

Even the cat crawled underneath, his instincts conflicted by spring's vanishing act.

And the windows narrowed down to slits. Hey, it hasn't dropped below freezing ... yet.

Let the rationalizing begin

The final streamers from Florida's celebration at the Georgia Dome haven't hit the floor yet, but count on everyone in Columbus compiling scenarios leading to a Buckeye victory.

This town wanted this match-up so badly, but for every wrong reason imaginable, the biggest being revenge for bite marks Florida left in the NCAA football championship trouncing of the Buckeyes.

Months of a No. 1 ranking led everyone OSU to believe that game was a formality.
(Even this Buckeye agnostic used the phrase "done deal" a lot that day. Never again). Columbus spent the past three months stuck in denial .... until the basketball Buckeyes entered the NCAA tournament belted into a top seed.

So we get another No. 1-ranked Buckeye team against defending national champions Florida.

But there's no rationalizing this one, not when 7-footer Greg Oden dunked and blocked his way to a season-best performance. As I said to one of my editing comrades yesterday, if Florida shut down the OSU three-point machine, they's win: "He who lives by the three dies by the three."

Sometimes the other team is just better. And while the Buckeye faithful want to call it a rivalry, they miss the biggest aspect of rivalries - both teams possess the talent to win, and the victories go back and forth. That's why the Browns and Steelers no longer qualify as rivals; if the teams aren't on similar levels, there's no contest.

For now, OSU's disciples just have to live with Florida owning them in title games.

Lovely Neko, and the senior brigade

A sold-out Beachland Ballroom on a Sunday night, with a two-hour drive back and Monday deadlines gnashing to greet me on a restless morning.

Neko, if only you knew.

As her album pushed me over the hump on every bad day of 2006 - and how could it not, with her murder balladry and woeful tales of poor souls losing fingers in a cannery - I needed closure, I needed to hear these songs belted out live.

And belt she did, from all across her discography (no New Pornographers tunes in the mix, but hardly a surprise). "Star Witness" was every bit the melancholy, sordid tale that carried me across the flatlands of Indiana and western Ohio a year earlier. They felt like they could befallen the locals in any of the three-stop towns I rumbled through; that's an authenticity so often absent in modern music.

Cleansed by straighter arrangements and good presence for the banjo, that slightly smoky torch singer voice plowed through the ballroom, never breaking in its clarity.

Mixing in songs from her early days with an occasional cover (Dylan's "Buckets of Rain" stepped right into her lineup without a glitch), she quickly wiped memories clear of the opener's soporific take on Hawaiian folks songs.

"The Needle Has Landed" failed to join the setlist, the only mild black mark against a solid show.


For so spirited and tight music, I for once was not the grayest head among a sea of heavily dyed hipsters. This crowd range covered the Great Depression to newly-licensed drivers.

Her earlier banter took sharp aim at the younger crowd, asking them to take shots with their digital cameras and phones subtlely so she wouldn't pee her pants. And we all know how subtle Americans are with their gadgets ...

... But Neko never let up, digging deeper into her brand of Americana and thanking the packed house for the Sunday night turnout.

And the oldsters were noisily peppered throughout the crowd. They weren't hippies reliving their glory days --- amid the usual hipster types gathered a group more accustomed to cards at the senior center than a crowded alt-rock ballroom. Bad dyejobs were not exclusive to the young, and there were plenty of midlife studs in men's ears to go around.

When she talked up AARP's blog during the banter, a host of distinctly angry old ladies grumbled about the comments. Apparently they've never attended a show with a hostile band on stage. Neko's jokes were hardly eviscerating - she quipped that blogging and gardening were all retired seniors had time to do.

The senior contingent should try the Strokes next time, then they'll know heckling from the band. Neko was just gently poking them in the ribs between the songs all her seniors fans religiously committed to memory.

This graying fan had some gentle melodies to hum and whistle on the desolate path back to Columbus, lit only by moonlight escaping from a dense thatch of midnight clouds.

After all, is there a better hour for murder ballads?