Hey hey, my my

 

It was one of the loveliest afternoons... ever. My darling wife and I wiled away a full afternoon sitting outside on a perfect late Spring day at a restaurant we had long forgotten. Sitting there we easily remembered things from forty years ago. The River was behind me and the restaurant speakers played songs almost perfectly from the sixties, really meaning something more like '65 to '75, all of it strictly just a little before our time. 

The baby boomers might kill everything before they're done, but they were the best too. 

It's better to burn out, than to fade away.

There were Beatles and Rolling Stone songs. The Kinks. The Who. Dylan. Hendrix. Finally there was a Neil Young song. I was wearing a picture I'd made of him on my shirt; him with wings, playing a guitar.

 They give you this and you pay for that.

Does Neil Young mean it: It's better to burn out than to fade away?

Yes, but it's an elegy.

School spirit

 

My first batch of nine new t-shirts arrived today. Almost all of my new t-shirts will be of my own design, lots of bughearts of course, but the one that isn't of my design is a school t-shirt: "The Scholomance Academy".

The Scholomance isn't really an academy of course, but close enough. It's a school/shelter for young magic users that increases their very bad odds of surviving adolescence. It is now my second "School" t-shirt. I also have a "Greendale Community College t-shirt". This one is from a favorite sitcom of mine- Community. Having a second fictional school shirt makes me feel like I am developing a specialty. If I were to get another school shirt I would get, of course, a "School of Wizardry on Roke" t-shirt from The Wizard of Earthsea. One might say this is the original wizard boarding school, as created by Ursula K. LeGuin. A shirt for this school might be a bit harder to find than, say, a Hogwarts shirt, but I do feel the effort would be worth it.

I am not interested in a Hogwarts shirt.

Nevertheless, with this third college t-shirt I would be becoming a collector. Adding to my collection of school t-shirts I would very much like a Huxley College t-shirt as well. This is the fictional college from The Marx Brothers' Horsefeathers movie, a movie foundational to my sense of humor. There is also a many booked fantasy series called Nevermoor that has a school I might like a shirt for. And a "Wayside School" shirt would be fantastic, so I'll put that on the list, and so too it would be remiss of me not to add a t-shirt for Oxford to my list.

"Wait." You say. "Oxford is a real school!"

Well, like all schools, sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't.