How is it that it’s 2019 and I’m just hearing about the Mountain Goats? You’d think this essential information would have been in one of the email loops I’m included in. “Maybe you missed it in a debriefing.”

OK, first of all my debriefings have been a little thin on content lately. Sorry to have to air that dirty laundry in such a widely-read forum as this blog, but eventually you get fed up with not being told about things, like really clever rock bands you probably should see, such as the Mountain Goats, or the nuclear launch codes. What if the Mountain Goats came to town, or someone said launch the nukes? How could I know to see the show and/or destroy the planet?

I shouldn’t have to rely on WMBR’s Breakfast of Champions for all my rock and roll information. Shouldn’t my government have a Rock Czar? And for that matter, why should I have to contact the Russians to find out what numbers to punch in such that we can finally have our long awaited Armageddeon?

From my informal survey of people around me, I’ve come to learn that others in my midst have not been adequately informed about the Mountain Goats either. Seems to be an epidemic of poor communication.

From what I can gather (via their tour schedule), it's clear to me that hey have something against Massachusetts. On the other hand, I'll bet they're going to Georgia.

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 like Robert Siegel of NPR fame because he never sounds condescending or smug, even when he’s interviewing an idiot. He laughs only at things that are actually funny, and although clearly not a native French speaker, still manages to impart passable French without mangling the accent (helpful during the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks).

However, he is not perfect. Whenever he introduces someone he is about to interview, his voice starts out at normal volume and then kind of peters out. “Well now joining us from his high horse in Texas is Senator Ted Cruz, Mr. Cruz welcome…”

“Thank you…”

“…to the program.”

I tend to listen to All Things Considered in my car when it would be impossible for me to hear Siegel utter those final three words in the tiniest of voices, but it’s so common for him to add the phrase after getting thanked that I know he’s used it yet again.

Otherwise, he seems never to err, except this week, when he made a goofy verbal faux pas. It was during an interview with Richard Atwood of the NGO The International Crisis Group, who wrote in a report that assassinating top Al Qaeda and ISIS leaders is a tactic of limited value. Seigel pressed him: “It doesn’t hurt a group to lose their leader or their number two?”

What was most surprising in the exchange was that the interviewee Mr. Atwood didn’t lose his own proverbial number two and burst out laughing, as I was doing in my car.