Weekend Recommendations

Some recommended reading: Amanda Castleman. I traded e-mail with her over the weekend because she was looking for someone to comment on -- for want of a better term, roadside Americana -- for a short article she's writing. She'd been tipped off about my recent visit to Rosie's Diner and my writeup a few entries back. If Rosie's isn't roadside Americana, I don't know what is. I was happy to provide her more details about the visit, and why I bothered to go out of my way to see it.

Some recommended eating: Oreo Cakesters. A Kraft product. Various on-line sources tell me that they were actually introduced last year, but we only discovered them last week. Yuriko brought a couple of boxes home; I haven't asked yet where she found them or why she decided to buy them. Man, are they good. Too good, in fact, considering how plentiful their fat content is. They are not really Oreos -- that's just branding. Rather, they're two soft chocolate cookies -- roughly the size of Oreos -- pressed together with either a vanilla or chocolate cream filling.

Some recommended listening: An old, mostly forgotten one-hit wonder. One of the biggest one-hit wonders, it seems. It made quite an impression on me when I was eight. I think my brother Jim had the 45, but I'm not sure: certainly I heard it on the radio. Until this weekend, I probably hadn't heard it in 30-odd years, but the maze of little twisty passages on the web -- or is that the twisty little maze of passages on the web? -- led me to it.

Listening to it now, I marvel at what a bizarre song it is. Techophobia and eschatology in a 10,000-year framework. How many pop songs before or since offer that? It's actually not all that good, lyrically speaking -- one comment I read called it "dystopia for teenyboppers," which is apt -- but it's interesting anyway. The lead singer's voice -- I'm not sure if it's Zager or Evans, but I think it's Evans, who might be the one with the beard -- has a melancholy edge that perfectly suits the material.