Oh yeah ... he's still got it

Not a bad way to spend an evening.

There once was a young singer, and his voice was a revelation. My wife and I saw him in concert for our anniversary not long after we were married, and it was terrific.

The young singer is now 33, and the album that first made people take notice is now nearly 13 years old.

Last night, my wife and I went to Tanglewood to see Josh Groban in concert for a second time. Our anniversary was more than a month ago, but my wife bought the lawn tickets as an anniversary gift. Fortunately, we got great weather.

As years go by, artists come and go and various songs catch your attention at any particular time, to the point where if you're flipping through the songs you've downloaded, you skip through a lot of songs in order to hear whatever's at the forefront of your mind at the time.

In recent months, Josh Groban's songs (among others) were among the ones I skipped a lot. It's not like he stopped being good. It's not like I stopped liking his music. But it had reached the point were it was just ... there ... and there was usually something else I wanted to hear.

Then he came out on stage last night, joined by the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra (think Boston July 4 celebration) ... and the reasons for his appeal came back all at once.

The voice is still amazing (dumbest review I ever read, and one I wish I could find, was the one that said he had a "generically pleasant voice). The stage patter is much improved, I assume the byproduct of being older and having spent a lot more time in front of audiences.

The songs, particularly the older ones, are the same as I remember them. As the nearly two-hour concert appeared to be winding down, it was like the audience was waiting to hear "You Raise Me Up," and he complied.

Yeah, he's still good. He's still real good.




   

Come one, come all to our Silly Emmys party

It's Emmy time again night, which means it's time for everyone to get together and take part in the most-enjoyable aspect of any awards show ... snarky remarks, wondering how they could have worn THAT, celebrating or bemoaning who won what and generally having a laugh at the proceedings. (The Robin Williams tribute will, of course, be a notable exception. I'm expecting lots of people wondering how the room got so dusty all of a sudden, or who's cutting the onions.)

The festivities here will start around 7ish, or whenever I get the chat fired up, so we can cover the exercise in vapidness that is the pre-show. So make sure you put on your best red-carpet-if-the-red-carpet-is-in-your-house attire and join in the fun! All it takes is a valid social media account -- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

As always, there are only a few rules:

1. Do not actually come to my house unless you ask first. Otherwise, I will tell you to leave and probably call the cops.

2. Bring your own food and beverage.

3. If you're going to come to my metaphorical house, do not pee in my metaphorical pool.

Hey Facebook, why stop at satire?

In an effort to aid those whose BS detectors aren't up to snuff, Facebook is apparently going to test a "satire" tag for people's news feeds. That way, people who can't tell the difference between what's real and what's fake can save themselves the potential embarrassment.

Although at least one friend of mine considers it a sign of the impending apocalypse, maybe Facebook should do even more.

For example, we've all seen posts/sent posts/seen or sent the email that can't possibly be true, right? That's because it's usually not. (Confirmation bias can play some serious tricks on the mind.) Therefore, perhaps Facebook could hook up with Snopes.

If someone can't wait to inform his or her friends that Barack Obama is the only president not to go to the D-Day Monument on the D-Day anniversary, or that Sarah Palin wanted to invade the Czech Republic after the Boston Marathon bombings (speaking of satire), a little message could pop up saying, "Before you do this, there's something you should know. What you're posting isn't true, and while your like-minded friends will probably say 'See, I knew all along!' when they see it, to everyone else you'll look kind of silly."

And while Facebook is at it, is there any way to build an algorithm that tries to keep people from posting racist, sexist or otherwise bigoted stuff? While I would never say that people shouldn't be allowed to post what they like, maybe a note stating, "This may not be a good idea. You may think that no one outside your circle will ever notice, or that you'll just take it down, but screengrabs are not your friend" would be enough to cause second thoughts. (This wouldn't be a bad idea for Twitter, either.)

I'm no expert at writing computer code, so I don't know if either of these are even possible, but if they are, surely someone at Facebook would know how.

So get on it, Zuckerberg.

(Now, the question is, "Am I being satirical?" Maybe a little, or more than a little ...)

Thoughts from the left side

So today is International Left-Handers Day. I didn't get any cards.

In fact, I didn't even know there was such a thing until a friend of mine (whose husband is left-handed), posted a funny pie chart in which the vast majority of people, when they notice someone writing left-handed, say, "Are you left-handed?"

Being left-handed means using those little scissors with the green handles and wiping ink smudges off your hands. It means always eating with your elbows close to your sides to protect yourself from chicken-winging right-handers and hearing people shout "LEFTY!" when you walk into the batter's box.

"Sinister" and "gauche" have their roots in left-ness, and I'm sure most of us have heard and said "If the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and the right side of the brain controls the left side, then left-handers are the only people in their right minds" more often than we can count.

But in a world that finds us odd, being left-handed is just ... what I am. And it's not weird at all.

I've made some allowances for a right-handed world. I've known how to cut with right-handed scissors for years, and I was so used to right-handed desks in school that I usually refused on the rare occasions there was a left-handed desk available and someone offered. (To the righties reading this who may ask, "What's the difference?" a right-handed desk has the little area for your books and notebooks attached to the right side of the chair, while it's obviously the reverse for a left-handed desk. The intent is to not have to read or write across your body, but I got used to it.)

If I'm casually driving with one hand on the steering wheel, it's usually my right hand, and for whatever reason, I cannot type on a smartphone with my left hand at all.

Strangely enough, I've come to believe that one of the benefits of being left-handed is that lefties are aware that most of us have two hands. No matter how left-dominant a person is, it is a physical impossibility to be purely left-handed. The world isn't set up that way. However, I know right-handed people who can't do much with their left hand because they've never had to.

Yet using my left hand (or foot) to write, eat, throw, kick, roll a bowling ball, shoot a basketball (badly) or swing a bat or golf club (also badly) is as natural to me as breathing. There was no point where I realized I was left-handed, at least not that I remember, and I didn't have to be taught to do things with my left hand. I just did them, and fortunately, I'm young enough to have missed the era where left-handed kids were encouraged if not forced to change.

Sadly, the one thing I never learned how to do with my left hand was throw a curveball. Otherwise, I might still be pitching in the big leagues in my early 40s and be millions of dollars richer. (Jesse Orosco and Tony Fossas are our patron saints.)

So to all my fellow southpaws out there, Happy International Left-Handers Day. To the right-handers in my life, I like presents, but money and gift cards are nice, too.