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The National Portrait Gallery really is worth seeing, but not so much for what’s there, but for how and why it’s there.

It’s not widely known that when Thoreau wrote Walden he was within walking distance of town. Not exactly the howling wilderness, Thoreau’s woods were almost, well, I’d have to say Suburban to portray things accurately.

A disproportionately large number of race car drivers come from North Carolina — usually from towns with names that end in something-something-Falls or something-or-other-Gap. In the mountains that border Georgia and Tennessee you can find plenty of road signs that look like the snapshot of a cracking whip and speed limits of thirty-five.

Everything that can be said about the world’s largest airshow has been said, and some of it twice. The Rocket Racing league is off and rolling, blue mountain is still the preeminent supplier of advanced navigation systems, and Fox River Brewing makes a pretty damn good beer.

“My dad died yesterday…”

Standing in the rain in Seattle freezing my ass off and wondering why I was drinking road tar with steamed milk, and why I paid six bucks for it, provided me what my alcoholic friends refer to as a moment of clarity:

I’m not in Kansas anymore that’s for damn sure. Two sugars, and thank you Dorothy.

My house on the mountain is mostly glass, when it comes right down to it.

It all started with a phone call that never happened. Like so many things that simply didn’t occur, it’s an event that’s hard to forget because of the hole it leaves in an otherwise seamless history.

Ah, Absinthe. Favored by poets, madmen and a few scientists if I’m any judge. Van Gogh loved the stuff, so did Hemingway. It’s also illegal as hell at present, but that’s not our issue here. Without getting all Pulp Fiction on you, it breaks down like this:It’s legal to have it, it’s legal to drink it, it’s just not legal to sell it.

Went to see Ben Folds last night at the Tabernacle in Atlanta. Ben, in case you’ve never heard of the dude, is part Bruce Hornsby, part Burt Bacharach: piano, drums and bass. Sparse, richly layered and beautifully lyrical.