‘Tis the season for year-end Worst Of lists. I was okay with this list of worst drinks till they took on the Lobstertini. That’s the most disgusting name for a drink I’ve ever heard. I don’t want that beverage to come under fire, lest it be renamed, reformulated, or removed from the menu altogether.

(‘Tis also the season for lazy writers to go with the “‘Tis the season…” lede.)

What a wonderful old building. It’s an historic building, don’t you know. An historic building brimming with wonderful sounds and odors.

Hooray for poor ventilation. And for gastrointestinal distress.

Nevertheless, this is one of the best tractor-fight sequences ever committed to film, imho.

And he also pioneered multitracking, the layering of multiple vocal or instrumental tracks to create lush, full sound from the limited recording technology of his day.

I’m not a big fan of Les’ music, and I think he went overboard with the layering on his recordings. But he was a pioneer. And I own a guitar named after him, a Gibson Les Paul Junior. It’s my favorite guitar, rude, bratty, and raw. Everything Les the man was not.

Rest in peace, Les, and thanks for your contributions to the music world. The world is a richer place because of you, and a poorer place without you.

I think that’s dangerous. A massive quadriceps never got anybody into heaven. But a working knowledge of Season 3 of Punky Brewster just might. It might help you pass the entrance exam. You never know.

I’m hedging my bets. TV, I’ll never turn my back on you.

Meet the new Pod, same as the old Pod. But smaller. Again.

If you’re Line6, I would say approximately eleventy billion.

I am not a Line6 detractor. I like their Pods and Flextones &c. But all are essentially the same product repackaged and rerepackaged and rererepackaged ad nauseam.

I guess first they had the Pod, which they then put into an amp, which was the Flextone, which they made into an amp which could layer two Pod models, which was the DuoVerb(?).

And then they made a better version of the Pod models and put them into an amp called the Vetta, and they took the Vetta amp models and made them into Pod 2.0.

Then they improved the interface and made Pod 3.0, maybe. I think.

Then they made a version with a pedal and called it the Pod XTLive.

Then they beefed up the pedal and had the XTLiver Plus.

Along the way they also made a baby Flextone called the Spider and a big Flextone called the Flextone Plus or XL or both.

And they took the effects out of the Pod and but bunches of them, by effect type, into the Delay Modeler and Filter Modeler and Distortion Modeler. Then they broke the modelers down into smaller bits, which were the Tone Core pedals.

Then they shrunk the Pod into the Pocket Pod. Now they have shrunk the Pocket Pod even further into the Pocket Pod Express, which I am not making up and which I guess is for people for whom the Pocket Pod was too big or too complicated.

So there you have it. One set of sounds, upgraded once, put into enough different housings to stock a warehouse. My pants are sort of off to the Line6 people for this, but part of me wonders what would happen if they were to actually develop some new sounds for a change. I can only buy the same tones in, like, 30 or 40 different form factors before I catch onto their little scam.

Alternately, I could eat one bowl of whole wheat Total™ (to receive my day’s supply of essential vitamins and nutrients) and one-thousand Tic Tacs (to fulfill my caloric needs). To this I would also add beer, not necessarily for its well-established nutritional benefits but mostly because I like it.

Cheez-Its (and beer): it’s what’s for dinner™.