Determining Kim’s Fate

We love the Kim Wexler character on Better Call Saul. She’s whip-smart, she’s a great lawyer, her heart is in the right place, she is about as loyal as you can be, and her ponytail is a nifty signature look. The main thing we don’t like about her character (aside from the fact that she has a dismal grasp of her lawyerly ethical obligations) is that she hasn’t recognized that Jimmy McGill is fatally flawed and that she would be much better off if she put her hair in that ponytail, packed her bags, and sprinted as far away from Alburquerque and Jimmy as she can get. Of course, that hasn’t happened.

One of the really interesting aspects of Better Call Saul is that it is a prequel. We therefore already know what happens to Saul in Breaking Bad, and we know what happens to Gustavo Fring and Mike, too. We even get occasional glimpses of Saul post-Breaking Bad, when he is in full hiding mode and working as the nebbishy manager of a cinnamon roll shop at a generic mall somewhere far from Albuquerque. But Kim, as well as some of the other Better Call Saul characters, didn’t show up in Breaking Bad. We already know what happened to several of them–including Jimmy’s brother–but the fate of Kim and her ponytail remains undetermined.

This creates a dynamic like you might see if you watched a car crash happen in slow motion. We know something bad is going to happen, we just don’t know what it is, and we can’t stop watching. And since this is the last season of Better Call Saul, we know that whatever is going to happen is going to happen soon. As a result, I feel like I should cover my face with my hands when I watch a new episode of the show, because there are only two choices for Kim: she gets killed as the inevitable result of Jimmy/Saul’s decision to become “a friend of the cartel,” or she finally wakes up after Jimmy takes another ill-considered wrong turn, recognizes that she has no future with this guy, and goes on to live a happy life somewhere else, where Jimmy can’t put her in danger any more. Either way, it’s not going to be pretty for Jimmy, and the loss of Kim helps to explain why he spiraled down into full Saul Goodman mode, with a gold toilet and the most garish, bad taste home decorations this side of Al Pacino’s mansion in Scarface.

Obviously, we hold out hope that Kim leaves and survives. I wonder if we’ll see a scene in the last episode where she meets up with Jimmy at that cinnamon bun shop, recognizes him–and then flatly rejects his attempt to get back together with her so salvage something from the miserable ruin he has made of his life.

Button Crushing

Since I’ve started to wear suits and sport coats and button-down shirts and ties to the office again–just because I have a lot of suits and sport coats and shirts and ties, and feel like I might as well wear them and maintain what I consider to be a professional appearance–I’m using the dry cleaners again. That has the advantage of supporting a part of our economy that got hit hard during the pandemic, and also providing me with crisp, fresh clothing.

This disadvantage of using dry cleaning, of course, is the fatal button impact. Dry cleaning is the mortal enemy of all buttons on men’s clothing. Eventually a garment is returned from the dry cleaners and the buttons have met their maker. They’ve been smashed. Crushed. Destroyed. Splintered. Pulverized. Shattered. Atomized. Ground to a sad collection of fragments and powder, barely clinging to their home clothing.

On suit and sport coats, it’s the sleeve buttons that usually bear the brunt–as was the case with the sport coat above. With button-down shirts, it’s typically the collar buttons that get crunched. That’s irritating, incidentally, because you don’t notice the button failure until you’ve donned the shirt, put on your tie, and started to button down the shirt, only to realize that one of the collar buttons has gone to the great beyond, leaving only a pathetic nub behind so that the shirt can’t be buttoned down and you have to find a new shirt and start all over again.

What is it in the dry cleaning process that causes buttons to look like they’ve been in a combat zone? That’s not entirely clear, but it appears that the chemicals used in dry cleaning, the tumbling, and the pressing weaken the buttons to the point where they break–which is why some high-end dry cleaners specifically advertise that they will pay special attention to your buttons and, if the buttons are shell and bone, remove them before the outfit goes into the dry cleaning process and restore them after dry cleaning is done. I don’t have any buttons that fall into such exalted categories, so I endure the crushing.

The button mangling impact of dry cleaning makes me groan, but I expect that button manufacturers aren’t unhappy about it.

Just Shy Of The Cuckoo’s Nest Line

Yesterday I went to get my hair cut. In recent years, my haircuts have been an exercise in getting my locks clipped progressively shorter and shorter, because I find that I really don’t like longer hair and the work it involves at this point in my life. So I go to my hair-cutting emporium, say I’d like to have my hair trimmed a bit shorter than the last time, and my stylist responds with numbers that I don’t understand.

“Okay,” she says, with a look of knowledgeable determination. “Today we’ll try a 3.5 on the sides.” I recognize she is referring to some kind of setting on her professional-level electronic clippers, but I have no context for what that means in reality. It would be like the produce manager at your neighborhood grocery store earnestly telling you that the onions in the bin are a 3.5 on the Pyruvate scale. You might nod knowingly at that information, so as not to appear stupid to a guy wearing an apron, but you wouldn’t know what a 3.5 means until you actually taste the onion to see what that amount of Pyruvic acid tastes like.

As a result, it seems safer to approach things incrementally, and inch toward the ideal cut as the stylist gradually ratchets down the settings.

In my mind, I’ve got a pretty clear sense of what I ultimately want to get to: the same on the sides but a little bit longer on top than the haircut Christopher Lloyd sported in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, shown above, so that the hair on top can just barely be combed. I’m reminded of the old Jerry Seinfeld line about how they develop “maximum strength” pain relievers: apparently they determine what amount of pain relief will kill you, and then back it off just a bit. I want to find a haircut just shy of the Cuckoo’s Nest line.

The New Routine

I freely concede that I am a creature of habit. I don’t mind doing new things, but I ultimately like to settle into a routine. When we moved recently, part of the process was establishing a new routine.

In our German Village place, I got up at 5 or so, wrote my blog entry, and then took a walk around Schiller Park. When we moved downtown, the Schiller Park part of the routine had to change. Fortunately, our new place includes a small workout facility, so it was pretty easy to substitute a treadmill walk and some weight work for the stroll around Schiller. The treadmills feature a standard 30-minute walk, with a five-minute “cool down” period, which amounts to about the same time period consumed by my Schiller walk, and the ability to do some exercises with free weights is an added bonus. I miss the German Village scenery and I don’t get as much fresh air as I used to, but I like using the machines, setting goals and getting data about my workouts, counting the calories that the machine says I’ve burned, and seeing my fellow workout room users in the morning.

For those of us who are creatures of habit, creating the new routine is a way of getting acclimated to new surroundings and locations. I’m happy with my new routine.

Those Empty Theater Blues

As America works to recover from the various social, cultural, and economic impacts of the COVID pandemic, it’s becoming increasingly clear that one segment of the economy is facing a particularly difficult challenge: movie theaters.

The data on movie theater ticket sales tell a very sad tale for the industry. Ticket sales hit a high point in 2018, when 1,311,300,934 admission tickets were sold, producing revenues of $11,945,954,034. Sales dipped a bit in 2019, the last full pre-pandemic year, when 1,228,763,382 tickets were purchased–and then the bottom fell out. In 2020, when theaters were closed for most of the year in most of the country, only 221,762,724 tickets were sold, and I would guess most of those sales came in January and February, before shutdowns occurred in earnest in March. From that low point, sales rebounded slightly in 2021, to just under 500 million tickets, and if current trends continue, ticket sales in 2022 are on pace to hit just over 725 million–which is slightly better than half the industry’s best year.

In short, if you go to the local movie multiplex right now, you’re likely to find a lot of empty theaters, and you’ll get pretty good seats.

Interestingly, Gallup has periodically asked Americans about their movie attendance, and the recent data is dismal. In January of this year, Gallup announced that its polling data showed that Americans watched an average of 1.4 movies in a movie theater in the prior 12 months. The more compelling story, though, is told by individual movie attendance: 61 percent of respondents didn’t go to a theater at all during that 12-month period, 31 percent went out to watch between 1 and 4 movies, and 9 percent (figures are rounded for the math mafia out there) watched 5 or more movies. In 2007, by comparison, 39 percent of respondents attended between 1 and 4 movies in theaters, and 29 percent saw five or more movies. The Gallup data shows that movie attendance is particularly depressed among older Americans.

Gallup suggests that the movie theater business was grappling with challenges posed by competition from streaming services when the pandemic hit. With theaters then closed during the early days of the pandemic, and many people avoiding reopened theaters as new COVID variants emerged, the question now is whether people’s habits have changed to the point where going to a theater to watch a movie is even considered. And some of us would question whether the offerings being served up by Hollywood, where superhero movies and special effects rule the day, are going to entice broad groups of Americans to buy a ticket and a box of popcorn and settle into a theater seat to watch a film again.

Elon Musk’s Twitter Play

The media is reporting that Elon Musk–the driving force behind Tesla, and SpaceX, cultural and political gadfly, former Saturday Night Live host, and reportedly the world’s richest person–has been successful in his bid to buy Twitter. CNBC says that Twitter’s Board of Directors has accepted Musk’s tender offer in a deal that will provide $44 billion for Twitter shareholders and result in Twitter being converted from a public to a private company.

This story is an intersection of two things that are beyond my ken: the unimaginable world of the hyper-rich, and the curious universe of Twitter users and followers. Musk’s net worth reportedly exceeds $250 billion, which gives him plenty of resources to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. In this instance, Musk says he wants to buy Twitter to further free speech interests. “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a prepared statement. Promoting free speech is a highly laudable goal, of course, and Musk’s track record in moving things like electric cars and space travel from dream to reality has been impressive.

But I think Musk is wrong to see Twitter as a “digital town square” where meaningful debate occurs. The next sentence of his prepared statement–where Musk says “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans”–illustrates why. For those people, like me, who don’t use it, Twitter seems like some weird, dystopian technoworld, haunted by bots and fake followers, where the 280-character limit for tweets requires turning complicated issues into simplified mush and encourages a kind of mean snarkiness not seen since high school. The tweeting record of President Trump bears witness to this fact, but his tweeting record is not alone. Twitter seems to bring out the worst in people, and most of us just don’t want to go there.

If Elon Musk really wants to promote free speech through his acquisition of Twitter, I wish him well, but I don’t think he can do anything that will lure me into that alternate reality, much less cause me to view Twitter as a “digital town square.” If Twitter is a kind of town square, it’s located in the darkest, creepiest part of town that most people would prefer to avoid.

Parents Behaving Badly

Across the country, America is experiencing a shortage of youth sports officials. In Ohio, the roster of Ohio High School Athletic Association officials is down by more than 1,000 officials from only two years ago. The OHSAA, which is the governing body for 817 Ohio high schools, reports 13,369 officials this year, versus 14,651 in 2019-2020. And Ohio is not alone–everywhere, states are reporting declining numbers of umpires and referees, to the point where it is actually affecting the ability to schedule games.

Why are fewer people signing up to referee kid sports? Officials cite a variety of reasons, including the intervening COVID pandemic, but one significant cause seems to be the bad behavior of parents of the kids who are playing. Some parents have become increasingly verbally abusive of officials, and in some cases the abuse has become physical. The Associated Press has a troubling article about this phenomenon that tells the tale of Kristi Moore, who supervises fast-pitch softball umpires in Mississippi. Moore was working a girls’ softball game, called a runner safe at second base, was berated by an irate parent, and had to throw the parent out of the game. When Moore left the field, the woman was waiting and slugged Moore in the eye. The woman was arrested and charged with assault, and now Moore is trying to decide whether she ever wants to work a game again. And who can blame her if she decides that the abuse and the risks just aren’t worth it?

What would cause a parent to become so verbally abusive that they would be tossed from a sports event, and then wait to punch out an official, without calming down in the interim? It’s not an issue for the vast majority of parents, who root for their kids and might express disapproval at a disappointing call but would never dream of such appalling misbehavior. Anyone who has watched their kids play on a sports team knows that there are a handful of parents, however, who just don’t respect those boundaries. Maybe they are convinced their kid will be the next Mickey Mantle, maybe they’re hoping their kid gets a college scholarship, maybe they’ve invested so much time and money in travel teams that they feel entitled, or maybe they have troubled lives and can’t resist venting. But it may only take one bad experience with one enraged parent to cause a youth sports official to hang up their gear–and the shortage gets worse.

I think youth sports are important. They are supposed to be fun, they get kids exercise, and they can teach kids important lessons about qualities like teamwork, sacrifice, the value of practice, and sportsmanship. Kids who see their parents act like jerks aren’t learning good lessons, however. All parents need to take a deep breath and recognize that kid sports events aren’t the end of the world. And if one parent of a kid on a team is behaving badly, it’s up to the other parents to try to help out the officials and defuse the situation. Otherwise, we’re going to reach a point where no one will be able to play a game.

That Spring Thing (II)

A glorious spring weekend continued today in Columbus. The grass was lush and bright green, the sky was blue, and the air was warm and bore a light floral scent. It was a perfect day for a walk on the Scioto Mile and the Olentangy River trail—as countless cyclists, joggers, walkers, and skateboarders recognized.

Spring never seems to last long in Columbus; we tend to move directly from winter to summer with barely a breath of spring in between. Even the temperatures this weekend have been more like summer than spring. It’s important to enjoy these beautiful days when they are here. Regrettably, they’ll be gone soon enough.

The Random Restaurant Tour — XLIV

When it comes to burgers, size really does matter. Dainty patties and delicate presentation aren’t really what the burger aficionado is looking for. No, the true burger fan wants a burger that is a colossal handful, groaning with high quality beef and melted cheese, so huge you struggle to finish it all even as you are relishing every last morsel.

On this crucial burger threshold, Alley Burger–the new restaurant at the corner of Lynn and Pearl Alleys in downtown Columbus, just around the corner from the venerable Ringside–passes with flying colors. When the B.A. Jersey Girl, the Church Singer, and I darted into Alley Burger on a cold and rainy day last week, we found a place that definitely doesn’t scrimp on the burgers. In fact, all of our sandwiches were so large that they were held together by huge and very sharp steak knives that looked like they belonged in a Rambo movie. The presence of these mercenary-style knives on our plates definitely encouraged civility in our lunchtime conversation, and should cause any visitor to Alley Burger to choose their lunch companions with care and avoid heated political discussions during their meals.

I ordered a double cheeseburger that was so highly stacked that, after one bite, I realized it could not be eaten by hand without risking massive suit and shirt staining, so the steak knife came in handy as I chopped the double up for a more genteel approach to consumption. The burger, made with Alley Burger’s own sauce, was excellent, and I finished it all The meal also came with free tortilla chips, with another fine sauce made in house, and a reasonable order of french fries. I stuck with water, which is my lunchtime drink of choice, but Alley Burger also offers a variety of slushies, and the proprietors are looking to secure their liquor license, too.

The Alley Burger location has been a kind of revolving door for restaurants during the time I’ve worked in downtown Columbus, and that rear wall that is now painted with the Alley Burger name has sported the names of many other restaurants gone by. I’m hoping that, unlike its many predecessors, Alley Burger sticks around for a while.

Rewatching And Rereading

The new season of Better Call Saul is out. We watched the first two episodes of the new season and realized that we had lost track of many of the plot threads in the two years since the last episode of season five of the show was aired. We’d completely forgotten, for example, that Mike put himself in harm’s way with neighborhood thugs, got beat up, and then was sent to Mexico to recuperate (and, being Mike, fix a window), and we hadn’t recalled all of the nuances of the Mesa Verde/Tucumcari call center plot line, either.

Obviously, we needed to brush up on the BCS characters, so we are going back and rewatching the fifth season to be primed with all of the information needed to enjoy the sixth (and apparently last) season. We briefly toyed with the decision of whether we needed to go back two seasons, or even longer, to fully appreciate what the heck is going on, but decided one season should be sufficient.

This is not a new phenomenon. Whether it is TV shows or books, rewatching or rereading a series has become an increasingly common requirement. It didn’t use to be that way, of course; you could watch a new season of Mission Impossible, or Seinfeld, without remembering all of the different episodes from the season before. But with the complex, continuing plotlines that we see in current TV drama and books, rewatching and rereading has become essential, and you wonder if the creators and authors plan it that way. And of course, the very act of rewatching or rereading, knowing what is coming later, gives a different perspective on the characters and their activities. (Rewatching Better Call Saul, for example, makes me continuously shake my head in wonderment at how the savvy, hyper-cautious Gus and Mike ever got taken in by “Heisenberg” in the first place–or, more accurately, in the post-Better Call Saul world to come.)

The Mother of all rereadings will come if George R.R. Martin ever finishes the final two books in the Game of Thrones series. If that happens, I’ll probably have to go back to the first book and reread the whole series, just to make sure I’m fully up to speed on everything that is happening in Dorne or the Iron Islands or with the reanimated Lady Stoneheart. But I’m guessing I will enjoy every minute.

That Spring Thing

After a bout of remarkably foul April weather— featuring some late snow, cold temperatures, and incessant rain—things took a turn for the better today. The sun came out, the thermometer touched 70, and on the Statehouse grounds tulips, daffodils, and flowering trees were all in bloom.

Hooray for spring! And with fine weather like this forecast for the weekend, too, it’s time to get outside, take some deep gulps of fresh spring air, and shake off winter, once and for all.

The ’60s Play On

As I was reflecting on what a great year 1972 was for albums, I realized that all of the albums I wrote about are still an active part of American popular culture, 50 years later. If you go to any large American city, rent a car, and then try to find a radio station, you’ll scroll past multiple options that play “classic rock,” where you’re likely to hear a song from one of those 1972 albums–and for that matter any rock ‘n roll songs that have been recorded since the British invasion in 1964. People of all ages listen to those stations, advertisers pay money to advertise on them, and the musicians who recorded the songs, in many cases, are still touring and playing those same songs, decades later.

That’s odd, when you think about it. Fifty years is an incredibly long time for a musical genre to remain at the forefront of American culture. If you went back to the ’20s, fifty years before that magical year of 1972, the dominant form of music featured crooners like Rudy Vallee, shown above, and people danced the Charleston to early forms of jazz. By 1972, however, you couldn’t find a radio station anywhere that played Rudy Vallee tunes, or ragtime, and Rudy Vallee wasn’t touring and playing to packed venues, either. The music of the ’20s had been relegated to the dustbin of history, having given way to “big band” music in the ’30s and ’40s, and lounge singing and early rock ‘n roll in the ’50s. You’re not going to hear those forms of music played on any on-air American radio stations, either (although Sirius XM has ’40s and ’50s stations, if you’d like to hear that music). But once you hit 1964, the ever-changing musical tastes of a considerable portion of the American public stopped changing and became locked in place.

To be sure, punk, rap, and hip-hop have come into being since the ’60s, and “urban” stations provide stiff competition for “classic rock” stations on the radio dial–but the fact that music that is 50 years old is still findable and regularly played on the radio is pretty remarkable. Does that mean that the rock era reached a kind of musical pinnacle and just hasn’t been knocked off the peak–or does it mean that the Baby Boomers and successive generations stubbornly refused to open themselves up to newer forms of music, as their parents and grandparents were willing to do? Perhaps many of us just lack the musical flexibility of earlier generations, who didn’t hold on to Rudy Vallee when Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington came along.

The World’s Oldest Dog

Happy belated birthday to TobyKeith, a chihuahua who lives in Florida. The pooch turned 21 on January 9 and was recently confirmed to be the oldest dog in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records.

21 is remarkably old for a dog–even small breed dogs, which tend to live longer than the larger breeds. If you are trying to figure out what TobyKeith would be in “human years,” note that the American Veterinary Medical Association urges an analysis that is more precise than the old “7 dog years for every human year” rule of thumb (which would put TobyKeith at a mere 147 in human years). The AVMA now takes the position that a dog’s first year equals 15 human years, a dog’s second year equals nine human years, and every year after that equals five human years. By that calculation, TobyKeith comes in at 119 human years. Either way, TobyKeith has reached a ripe old age.

TobyKeith’s human pal, Gisela Shore, adopted him from a shelter when he was a puppy and has lived with him ever since. She’s a lucky person. Anyone who has shared a home with a dog inevitably wishes their canine friends could have a lived, and enriched the household, for a little bit longer. Having a dog that has survived for the age of 21 is a great gift.

Ms. Shore says TobyKeith’s awesome longevity is attributable to good genetics, a healthy diet, and a loving home. That’s a pretty good recipe for longevity for anyone, dog or human. And, as the photo above reveals, apparently being dressed in embarrassing outfits isn’t a barrier to a long life–although, judging from the expression on TobyKeith’s face, he doesn’t particularly care for it.

To Appeal, Or Not To Appeal

The Biden Administration is weighing a tough decision: whether to appeal the federal court decision striking down the mask mandate the federal government imposed on air and train travelers during the COVID pandemic. It’s a very tough decision on both legal and political grounds.

According to news reports, the Justice Department will appeal the court ruling if the CDC decides that the mask mandate is still necessary to protect public health. That’s a bit strange, in a way, because the CDC decided only last week, just before the court ruling, that the mask mandate should be extended for an additional 15 days, until May 3, to allow the CDC to assess the impact of yet another COVID subvariant. It seems as though the DOJ is punting the decision to the CDC and, perhaps, hoping that the CDC will change course, decide that public health now doesn’t require an extension, and allow the DOJ to cite that determination in electing not to appeal. In the meantime, the DOJ won’t pursue an immediate stay of the federal court’s decision, which means that the mask mandate won’t be enforced unless and until an appeal occurs and the appellate court rules to the contrary.

The legal and political stakes in the decision on a potential appeal are high. Legally, the issue is whether the federal government wants to take the risk that a higher court will agree with the district court judge and establish a firmer precedent that the CDC doesn’t have the kind of sweeping power it has exercised over the past two years. Some people describe the district court decision as a poorly reasoned “legal disaster,” while others contend it is a reasonable interpretation of statutory text that simply was not intended to authorize an administrative agency to unilaterally impose nationwide mask mandates. Regardless of how you come out on that issue, for now the decision is simply the opinion of a single district court judge. If an appeal occurs, the federal government runs the risk of an adverse decision by a federal court of appeals and, potentially, the Supreme Court–raising the possibility that, if the nation’s highest court agrees with the federal district court judge in this case, the CDC’s ability to issue future public health mandates could be eliminated, unless and until Congress decides to amend the statute to clarify what is permitted.

Politically, the stakes are equally high because there are strong feelings on both sides of the masking issue. News reports in the wake of the federal court decision reported pro and con comments from travelers about the decision, while videos of cheering passengers removing their masks mid-flight appeared on social media. Whatever decision the federal government makes is likely to upset one faction or the other, leaving the Biden Administration at risk of being labeled irresponsible in its stewardship of public health, or a lily-livered adherent to pointless governmental paternalism. No politician would be happy about either of those outcomes. On the other hand, if the CDC suddenly decides that, under the current circumstances, the mask mandate is no longer needed to protect public health, it has provided the Biden Administration with some political cover–and those who want to wear masks will of course be permitted to do so.

It would be interesting to know whether, behind the scenes, the Biden Administration is encouraging the CDC to move in one direction or another. It’s hard for politicians to restrain themselves from politicking. We’ll never know for sure, because if that information came out it would undercut the depiction of the CDC as the neutral, objective, apolitical entity that is focused solely on scientific and medical evidence and the public health.

Great Albums Turn 50

1972 was a banner year for rock albums. It also happened to be the year that I started my sophomore year in high school and, not coincidentally, really began to seriously focus on music. Armed with the generous, slightly above minimum wage proceeds of my bag boy job at Big Bear, I began buying albums rather than 45s and played them on the crappy turntable in my room. The fact that great musicians produced great albums on the year of my musical album awakening was a very happy coincidence.

To be sure, 1972 was an exceptional musical year. Consider, for example, Deep Purple’s Machine Head. I bought it and played it endlessly, enjoying songs like Lazy, Space Truckin’, Highway Star, and of course Smoke On The Water, which is one of the greatest driving songs ever recorded. Then there was Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book, with fantastic songs like You Are The Sunshine Of My Life, I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever), and Superstition, which became a kind of funky anthem for my sophomore year. And David Bowie’s The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, one of the greatest concept albums ever recorded and chock full of great music from beginning to end. And Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy A Thrill, which marked the band’s emergence into the dominant creative force that it would be for the rest of the ’70s, and included classic tunes like Do It Again, Dirty Work, Midnite Cruiser, and the epic Reelin’ In The Years. And we mustn’t forget the Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street, or Close To The Edge by Yes, or Elton John’s Honky Chateau (which features my favorite Elton John song, Mona Lisas And Mad Hatters), or Rod Stewart’s Never A Dull Moment, or Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together. And finally, arguably the finest album of all of 1972’s offerings: Neil Young’s awesome Harvest, which seamlessly blended folk rock and electric rock and put Young at the forefront of the American music scene, where he would stay for years to come.

There were other great albums released that year, of course, because it was just an extraordinary year for music. I owned all of these records, played all of them, and loved all of them, and I listen to them still. But what really strikes me about these superb albums is two things. First, the variety of musical styles they captured, and how correspondingly broad the listening habits and musical tastes of kids of the ’70s were; in those days, radio stations played all of the songs from these albums, and we listeners weren’t confined to a single genre.

Second, can these albums really be 50? They sure don’t feel like it when you listen to them today.