Yesterday, I was headed to the Boylston Street Apple Store.

That meant getting off at the Copley Green Line stop and walking where the horror and carnage of Boston Marathon bombings occurred.

It meant walking on a sidewalk that was once stained with blood. Past a spot where people died.

Every time I pass by there I can’t help but think of the bombings and their aftermath, of the shock and disbelief as word first reached the newsroom. Of going home that night and seeing a city on full alert, choppers hovering, police cars roaring by with lights on.... More

Twenty-five years ago right around the time I write this I was sitting in my first college class.

Turns out, it was a key moment of my life.

It’s not often that something like this can be so easily pegged to a particular date. In this case I can recall it because bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughn had died the night before.

A quote from Vaughn was written across the blackboard of my Journalism 121 class. The professor, a blues fan, was especially hit. “Awful,” he said to the class. “And right after he’d cleaned up.”

Indeed.

The untimely death of... More

One of the most poignant lines in all pop music I find in Weezer’s disposable ditty Island in the Sun.

The band caught a lot of criticism when the song came out. People said it sounded like Sugar Ray. That’s a fair criticism, musically. But I find the song more meaningful than anything on the soul-baring Pinkerton album.

Frontman Rivers Cuomo spent years battling crushing depression – the “put tinfoil on your windows and never leave your apartment for years” type. The hardcore type.

Wanting to be on an “island in the sun” isn’t just about a holiday... More