Spitball Army

While I was growing up, our house was the evening stop on Christmas Eve for relatives and friends, who would congregate in the late afternoon and early evening for a meal centered on the contents of two very large pots on my mother’s stovetop. One contained pinto beans, soaked and seasoned for a couple of days, and piping hot. The other contained her wonderful chili, a crock-pot treatment of which I have perfected over the ensuing decades. The meal also had a few other key ingredients.

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The first 45 minutes to an hour were nearly unendurable. Mamma Mia! follows the standard Hollywood musical formula, with characters singing a song where a mere sentence would suffice, in conveniently improbable settings.

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What an odd year for me and music. By that I don’t mean that it was an odd year for music (which it may have been), or an odd year for me, necessarily (though I might say that was true, as well). It was an odd year for me and music, together. For the first time in about twenty years, I wasn’t around the music “scene” every day, 24/7. All of the new music that I encountered, I had sought out, after reading about it online or in the news, or it was recommended to me by friends and former colleagues…you know, the way that music discovery is supposed to happen.

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There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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A mainstay of Comedy Central since 1997, South Park began as an exercise in vulgarity, with an emphasis on the scatological. “The round-headed protagonists may look like cruder versions of the ‘Peanuts’ gang, but ‘crude’ is the operative word,” sniffed Gail Pennington in an August 13, 1997 review for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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Matteson’s Flower Shop in Leucadia, California. Photographed on 21 December 2008, 9:56 a.m.

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Henrietta and Myrna wish you a flat affect Christmas.

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Tom & John’s house at Christmas

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A home-owner using a blowtorch to melt ice on his back porch accidentally set fire to his North End triple-decker Monday, officials said.

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