My old tuba teacher, Sam Green, died last week. He played in the Cincinnati Symphony for something like 35 years, and taught at the University for over 50. His style was from another time: both his corny, nervous personal manner and his big, vibrato-heavy tuba playing. Yet he was the begetter of Blood & Stone, and anyone who knew him who would smile in recognition when I said I was one of Sam’s students. The cliché for an original like Sam is that when they made him they broke the mold, but in fact he was the mold.

Things I learned about the Ronettes on the occasion of their being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

I had always thought, based on those incredibly nasal voices, the Ronettes were from Philadelphia, but apparently they are from Spanish Harlem, NYC. (I may also have been misled by the fact that they recorded for the Philles label.)

I had wondered what their ethnicity was under all that make-up: black? Puerto Rican? Sicilian? The Bennett sisters, Ronnie and Estelle, are mixed-race, black and Native American mother and white father, while cousin Nedra (the cute one) is African-American. (I know, I know, race is a social construct not a biological one.)

Phil Spector is on the Rock-&-Roll Hall of Fame nominating committee, and till now had black-balled the Ronettes. They made it in this year because he was otherwise engaged with his current legal difficulties.

Oh, did anyone else see the Switzerland Invades Lichtenstein story?

Last night there was a 4.2 earthquake, which is considered moderate. I’ve experienced really small earthquakes that just feel like a truck driving by or the cat jumping on the bed and in December there was a minor one that made me think that the neighbors had crashed their car into our house. The one last night felt like a meteor had landed in the yard. Norman ran to the door to see who was shaking up the house. By the time I thought of standing in the doorframe the quake was already over, but I went and stood in it anyway just to see what it was like.