Left to my own devices

Almost five years ago, I wrote about all of the music concerts I'd been to over the years (well, going back to the late-1990s, which is when I began going to live shows in general). Given my penchant for lists, of course I ranked the experiences. It was fun revisiting those times and, because I've been to nine more music events since that blog post, so figured it was time for an update. 2019 saw Ashley & I attend seven(!) concerts. We were really on a roll. The last one we went to was The Ocean Blue at Lincoln Hall in early November of that year. Then, of course, the pandemic happened in early 2020, and the world shut down. It was only at the very end of last month that Ashley & I ventured out to a concert venue again and enjoyed a live performance ( Suzanne Vega ). In total, I've gone to nine more shows since the last time I wrote about concert experiences, so there is an updated list, for anyone who cares. The 29 concerts I've been to, ranked.

In the wake of a leaked draft opinion showing the United States Supreme Court could be set to overturn Roe v. Wade, I've heard some renewed talk from folks on the left about how we need to increase the number of Supreme Court justices. This is something Democrats have looked into doing before and, perhaps naively, I find it perplexing. Not, at its core, the idea of changing how many justices sit on the SCOTUS bench, but the reasoning. Those on the left who have broached the notion have done so as a sort of remedy for the court becoming more conservative. I'm just not seeing what the numbers have to do with it. What matters is the who, not how many.

With the recent release of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness , we have yet another movie tackling the subject of alternate realities. The sublimely resonant Everything Everywhere All at Once also recently engaged with the theory of the multiverse, though it is not at all a new cinematic concept. One such example is the underrated 2011 feature, Another Earth . I have enjoyed the aforementioned films, to varying degrees, though I question their premise. Not that there are multiverses, but that they are all so similar. To be clear, several multiverse films have done a good job of providing creative variations of our own reality, with some of the ones we've seen presented consisting of worlds made out of paint, or cartoons, or floating objects. While that makes for eye-popping filmmaking, it is, on the whole, fairly surface-level. What gives me pause is that almost all of the parallel universe/multiverse presentations we've witnessed consist of the same characters as our...