How do you like it so far? 2021, I mean. Gonna be a wild yet somehow tedious ride, seems like.

Lotta folks did the gag of posting the “Now We Are 21” song, so of course I could do no less than join in:

That’s Gilman, 1988, when we were just a baby.

“Minor secrets” here, including this snip:

Well, it’s time for another collation of songs ’n’ minor secrets, drawn from the five most recent posts in the Songs for Odin series I’ve been doing for the past three years. And here it is, the twenty-ninth such collation. For those who care, this brings us to 161 entries, covering 125 different songs. (The numbers are different because some songs have multiple entries.)

This here Weakly Reader appears, by tradition, on Friday, though I have been known to skip a week here and there and catch up the following week.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Dr Frank Weakly Reader, wherein I have, as usual, summarized, illustrated, annotated, and expanded the contents of the week’s Dr Frank O’Sphere so it may be found in future. (Just enter “medium.com” “frank portman” “[search term]” in a google box — it works.) So here’s the weak that was.

But first, some songs about drinking, and learning to tell time…

CAN THEY DO THE THING?

“What’s a great song that mention[s] time or clocks in some way?” asked the twitterer, and “Two Martinis from Now” was one answer. And it’s true, it does nothing but that.

But it occurred to me to wonder if there were other songs that used drinks to tell time in this way. Measuring time by the ounce, in other words. …

That’s a sketch by a guy named Chris Hower, from a photo taken after a show at a venue called The Khyber Pass in Philadelphia, May 10, 1998. Quite obviously, the faces were never filled in, which is, also quite obviously, what makes it great. Plus, it’s hard to draw faces. And how does that saying go? If you can remember what your face looked like on May 10, 1998, you probably weren’t there. Something like that.

Anyhow, here’s that photo:

In the present position of the planets it’s impossible for me to say just when I’ll find my course again with these boulders in my way.

Hello and welcome to yet another Dr Frank Weakly Reader, that thing I do where I index myself on the internet because this thing ain’t gonna index itself. Just in case I ever need to search for anything. Searching is almost impossible when it comes to social media, which I hate. Sometimes there are heavy weeks, while sometimes they are light, and this is rather a light one because, well, it’s been kind of a strange one and I’ve been a bit distracted. In such situations, my drive for pointless, meaningless, fumbling self-promotion tends to flag, and suffer.

I’m not going to say anything much about this big, weird election, except to note that it is (still) happening. I find it all keenly interesting, but I am, I believe, at least slightly unusual as a contemporary American human in that I genuinely don’t take this sort of thing personally like most people seem to do. …

And we’re back gain, with the twenty-eighth collation of the Songs for Odin posts since the last time they were collated. That was all the way back in August. I skipped a few weeks in the interim, which is why there are fewer than you’d expect in this edition. It can’t be helped and it doesn’t matter anyway (and you probably didn’t notice, anyway, if anyone is in fact reading this now.) Eventually, I started back up again and herein lies the result.