☃☃☃ HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND A WIENER-SHRINKINGLY FREEZING NEW YEAR!☃☃☃
This has been Daily Briefs with the Pitch inaccu-weather forecast. The pipes froze up in my house yesterday, but the projected temperatures for later in the week are up in the 20s. That's pretty good! As a measure of how far we've lowered our standards, I thought Garrison Keillor was pretty funny this weekend, with that ketchup commercial or Powdermilk Biscuits song, or jokes about English majors or whatever. I guess
Brian Wilson had cars and surfboards. Lou Reed had transients and smack. Neko Case, another instinctive songwriter with identifiable lyrical obsessions, has weather and animals. That's considerable symbolic acreage, yet Case -- like Wilson and Reed, to name a couple of past masters -- compresses detached observation and wet hunger into distinctive miniatures. (And her gift for melodic surprise rivals even the old Beach Boy's polished touch.) Tides and floods and tornadoes, tigers and foxes and b
