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.

It's not just me, right?

The world is getting weirder.

Between ever-shortening news cycles, social media, and the general vibe of the planet,

most of us wake up each day wondering what

new hell will befall us over the next 12 hours? It's not always bad, but weirdness is, well,

it's everywhere. For example, there's a museum in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, commemorating the

time in 1889 when a dam broke, causing a flood that killed 2,200

people. This year, that museum was closed. Why? Flooding. Or how about this one? A guy driving

an ice cream truck in Las Vegas was attacked because someone thought it was an ice truck, an immigration and customs

enforcement vehicle filled with unidentified masked dudes looking to snatch people off the street

and deport them to El Salvador or Uganda or wherever. Ice cream truck. Meanwhile, this is how they do it

in Iceland. There was a proposal to sentence

low-risk criminal offenders to stocking shelves in grocery stores. And as someone who did that

for five years when I was younger, I might consider this cruel and unusual punishment.

But for them, it's rehabilitation. My job involves filtering through a million different news sources,

looking for information about music.

Much of what I find ends up in ongoing history of new music programs and podcasts.

But I also run across a lot of stuff that just doesn't fit for whatever reason.

Maybe it's, I don't know, off brand. Maybe it's just this one-off

fact that I can't use at the moment, or maybe it's just too weird for anything that I'm working on.

...