Posted inNonfiction, Quotes

Weird Al, Childhood Hero

After the show, we rode the non-scary rides and took a photo with our arms around a cardboard cut-out of Alf; please note that I am wearing a hand-me-down lilac jumper and my mom’s giant digital watch. As we headed towards the exit, my dad said “hey” to someone. (My dad is not Mister Social; my mother was the schmoozer. Once she said hi to someone on the street and my dad asked who it was. “Oh, just someone I went to camp with,” she said. It was Woody Allen.) “Who was that?” we demanded. “Weird Al,” dad answered. We set off on a chase, until my mom cornered the man in a Hawaiian shirt, nerd glasses, curly hair. “Are you?” she asked. “Am I who?” the man said. It was HIM. We told him how much we loved him and how we knew every single one of his songs and how we watched “The Compleat Al” at least once a week. My mom shoved me gently. “Sing him your songs,” she said.

Posted inNonfiction, Quotes

The Value of Letting Kids Lose

At Deadspin, Drew Magary looks at America’s ‘Kid-Competition Complex’ and explains why it’s problematic: I have a 5-year-old son who hates losing. I don’t mean this as a compliment. He BLOWS at losing. He rigs pretty much any game in the backyard in his favor, and if you call him out on him, he gives […]

Posted inNonfiction, Quotes

How Island Records Made Bob Marley Into a Household Name After His Death

In the Village Voice, Chris Kornelis writes about how Bob Marley became a household name posthumously thanks to some careful remarketing: Robinson had a hunch that suburban record buyers were uneasy with Marley’s image — that of a perpetually stoned, politically driven iconoclast associated with violence. And so he commissioned a London-based researcher named Gary […]

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