Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing

history of new music early and ad-free on Amazon music, included with Prime.

All right, there's no putting it off anymore.

Let's get started with the annual office cleanup.

This is the time of year when I go through all these scraps of paper. I've got all

these scribbles in this book here and these different note pads and there's a post it on a bunch of

post-it notes. They're hanging everywhere. And then God, there's the computer and the phone notes that

have even more information.

All this stuff here.

The goal is to determine if anything I've written down or scrolled away sometime over the last

year is of any use to this particular program.

See, when you do a program like this,

stacks of stuff everywhere,

you always need to be on the lookout for interesting stuff.

You know, arcane knowledge, bits of trivia,

oddities and strange connections.

It's practically a 24-7 thing

because you never, ever know

when you're going to run across something mind-blowingly fascinating. The problem is that with many of the cool things that I discover,

like this, they don't fit in with anything that I'm doing or writing about. But it seems to be

ashamed to discard or otherwise ignore any of this research because, I mean, this is still

fascinating stuff. So I spend the year collecting all this orphan material for this specific

...