Have asteroids been keeping you up at night? They’ve sure done a number on my sleep. I have several astrophysicists on retainer who specialize in asteroid behavior, and these highly-paid and therefore trusted confidants allege that a host of alien bodies are poised to break through our protective atmosphere and pummel us in the coming millenia, wrecking our progress.

Great, there goes my hope of getting a Jaguar! Thanks a lot, you damned, dirty asteroids! Now I have to find myself a Toyota Land Rover, with extra canisters for gasoline, so I can play the wild rover and go off road. Can’t do that in a Jaguar.

This all assumes I’m not in the path of the asteroid, as I’m told it will wreak havoc for thousands of miles. The good news is that I have Canadian citizenship and will not get stopped at the border if that’s the direction I try to head in. On the other hand, Mexico might keep me out.

When I retire, shortly after my kids’ college degrees have been secured via subterfuge and related shenanigans, I’m going to start a new business in which I give the current time to visitors of the American southwest.

You’d think from listening to our esteemed commander in chief that the biggest problem facing the US is Mexicans crossing the border to take good jobs in our Mexican restaurants, but that’s because he doesn’t ever book tours in northern Arizona, where the current time is anyone’s guess. Arizona has a deep disdain for the rigging of clocks and has adopted Mountain Standard Time as its year-round time zone, because to hell with saving daylight! Just because the liberal north has a daylight deficit doesn’t mean Arizona does. So when the rest of the mountain time zone is two hours earlier than eastern daylight time (no matter if its daylight savings or not), grumpy Arizona is an extra hour earlier.

Meanwhile, the Navajo Nation, which is almost wholly inside the boundaries of the state of Arizona, has adopted daylight savings time because they know how much it pisses off the rest of Arizona. This means that Page, AZ, just outside Navajo Nation, is on Mountain Standard Time, while the rest of the region -- predominantly Navajo -- is using Mountain Daylight Time.

This makes for complications when you book a tour of the Upper Antelope Canyon, inside Navajo Nation, and need to be onsite 45 minutes before the tour starts. Is that 45 minutes before Page, AZ time, or 45 minutes before Navajo time? Says the outfitters website: “We operate on Mountain Standard Time,” while their website displays Mountain Daylight Time.

Planning to make zillions getting people to their slot canyon tours on time.

Everyone has his or her own opinion about what’s in the Mueller Report, but no one seems to think that it will be a mostly funny and wryly-observed discourse on American social behavior, with virtually no mention of the whole Russian Interference in US Elections matter.

Except me.

Having gotten to know “Bob” (as he lets me call him in postcards I send him, which he never responds to) over the past 24 months, I’ve come to expect funny and wryly-observed discourses from him, intended to distract attention away from the subject at hand and make you basically forget about it. The idea being that no one really cared that our elections were influenced by a foreign adversary in the first place, so why not go for the funny bone instead? It’s not like Attorney General William Barr doesn’t have a sense of humor. In a recent poll, huge portions of the population listed “didn’t know there was an election” as the reason they didn’t vote, which I’m told the attorney general thought was hugely funny.

Anyway, you go with your opinion – a report mildly suggesting that the president was egging on the Russians to help the election in his direction; and I’ll go with mine – where Mueller is cracking one-liners and making risqué jokes and saying, “Bah! I’m sick of talking about this collusion witch hunt!”

We’ll find out this weekend!

I’ve received word from my publicist that you’re wondering what my rock and roll experience was like way back in the 1990s. I’d rather not talk about it. 

OK, but just this once. The decade was progressing more or less like most decades, in fits and starts without a strong sense of how to distinguish itself from other decades in the history books, when my acerbic high school principal friend Bob reemerged into the US from Colombia, where he’d been teaching. Bedraggled and looking for work, he nevertheless came armed with word of the band Soul Coughing. I was made to pay heed – probably via a cd he had illegally smuggled through customs undeclared, that sneaky bastard! Which he then ripped so we could listen to it endlessly on our smartphones (which we had purchased on Amazon).

Anyway, I listened to the first album, Ruby Vroom, on my smartphone on and on and on in the early-mid 1990s, while driving and texting, and right around when the second album was coming out, the band played a fundraiser gig at the Middle East Club in Cambridge (that be in MA). The lineup, by order of appearance, was Dan Zanes (of Del Fuegos), the incredible Groovasaurus, now lost to history (but with videos on youtube!), Morphine Jr. (Morphine sans their injured drummer, whom the show was benefitting, but with the legendary Mark Sandman at the helm), and headlined by Soul Coughing, doing a short and spot-on set (with Doughty getting pissed at one or two choice mosh-pit bullies).

I saw Soul Coughing probably 4 or 5 times after that first show, and then they too were gone forever, living on only as a band-that-was, as front man Mike Doughty wanted nothing to do with the music or the bandmates.

Until this winter, when Doughty launched a tour in which he reprised Ruby Vroom, playing it beginning to end with the band Wheatus backing him up. To my great pleasure, he played the music with faithfulness to the original hip groove, even if his band (with little pepper on the drums!) didn’t quite manage to recreate the energy of those early years.

But don’t take my word for it. Check it, from some early iteration of the band, doing Moon Sammy. (As always, I don’t own these videos and can’t count on them sticking around forever, so watch them now).