Was leafing through my old vinyl records yesterday and I pulled out Tom Petty’s Long After Dark, not really my favorite Tom Petty album, but it has a few great songs on it, including one my all-time favorite Petty songs, “Change of Heart.” Anyway, I was looking at the cover of the album and I noticed that it was kinda beat up, and upon looking at it closer, discovered what looked like my handwriting, not ON the cover, but the cover was used as something hard to write on. In other words, I had put paper on top of it for the purposes of having something hard to write on, because I was probably lying on my bedroom carpet or something, and you can’t just write on a piece of paper if it’s on carpet.
I could barely make out what I had written, but I could tell is was a lot of numbers, which led me to believe I was keeping score of something, maybe a baseball or hockey game on television or whatever. I don’t know. My whole point is that it was weird to see my handwriting back when I was 12 or whatever. I don’t have many keepsakes that have my handwriting from that time (geez, 18-20 years ago now), so it was interesting to see how much my “5” has changed.
Today, apparantly, is the 100th anniversary of air conditioning. I must say that I honestly believe that air conditioning is one of the five greatest inventions of the 1900’s. Am I serious? I’m not sure. I suppose the television, the automobile, the airplane, etc etc are all on a grand scale, but air conditioning is vital to my world. Probably moreso than airplanes.
The Fleetwood Mac albums of the 1970s with Lindsey Buckingham might be some of the best radio pop laid down to tape. Lots of people don’t see what a genius Buckingham was, and if you don’t, just have a look at what they’ve done before he was there and after he left. That really tells a story.