Gleanings from the On-Line

Before popular music was invented, everybody had to listen to unpopular music.

---

I pray for dead people because they are dead—but I don’t canonize them.

---

I can’t hear the words Sgt Pepper’s without going back to my days as an academic quiz team coach. Once, in the final game of an interscholastic tournament (which we won), there was the following typically quirky question: “Given the name of a person, state whether he was on the cover of Sgt Peppers, a Nobel Prize winner, both, or neither.” One of my players had the cover memorized (remember this is like 1996), so he’d shoot “on the cover” over to another player who had all the Nobel laureates memorized. They nailed every one.

---

Amateurs built the Ark; professionals built the Titanic.

---

Do I read that right? You “listen with pleasure” to “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” and “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” but you feel no impulse to dance?

Jack, you dead.