Top 10 Countdown to Nowhere
Happy January. This is the twenty-fifth issue of Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit — it’s just like all those other email newsletters, except a little shorter and a little older.
I bet you didn’t know it’s the year 2568 BE. Plus, ten other time warps.
Last days of the dragon
Chinese New Year is a bit earlier this year with the Year of the Snake slithering into January on the 29th.
It still makes no sense to me that the Chinese zodiac is based on years instead of months or days or the even more specific nooks and crannies of your palm.
Everyone who was born in the Year of the Snake is going to have the same fortunes next year? All 24-year-olds and 36-year-olds, etc. are expected to experience “career advancements and personal growth”🔮 all at once? OK, sure!🙁
While we’re on the subject of non-Gregorian calendars, earlier this week I discovered that my mom had her phone set to the Buddhist calendar, which I didn’t even know was a thing.
All her emails and messages had bizarro timestamps — like “6/23/67” — and when I was fumbling through settings to try to fix it, she said, that’s OK, she was used to it. (I fixed it, anyway. I could not abide.)
She also didn’t know how it got to be that way, as if her iPhone had come out of the box like that, Steve Jobs’ ghost promoting Zen Buddhism with default date & time settings.
Anyway, happy 2568, y’all.
Whatever, time is a mush, anyway
When I was a kid, one of the dads in the school carpool would always have the radio tuned to the FM oldies station, K-Earth 101. It was mostly 50s, a little bit of 60s: The Four Tops, The Ronettes, Frankie Valli, Elvis, The Beach Boys, stuff like that. Never a morning person, I found the 35-year-old, jangly, peppy “rock ’n’ roll” a bit grating.
The station still exists, still plays oldies. Except now the oldies are mostly the 80s and a little bit of 90s: Bananarama, Cyndi Lauper, Def Leppard, Depeche Mode, Madonna, Nirvana, and Tom Petty — all the stuff that was on MTV when I was a kid. I suppose if I was a carpool dad now, it’s conceivable I’d still have the radio set to K-Earth 101, torturing my young passengers with my old fogey pop tunes.
As it is, the pandemic and old age both continue to conspire to warp my sense of time. So here are 10 more random time warps from the vantage of a new year. From the first day of 2025 (Anno Domini), it’s been about:
3 years since Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted for playing vigilante with a semiautomatic rifle,
5 years since the start of the pandemic(!),
9 years since Bowie died,
10 years since Tamir Rice was shot for playing by himself with a toy gun (he would have turned 23 years old this year),
16 years since Obama was inaugurated,
20 years since the Greatest Comeback in History(!),
25 years since the Y2K bug deleted the Internet, and
29 years since Calvin and Hobbes ended.
And two more…
Nicko
This Christmas, it’ll be 50 years of Iron Maiden, born December 25, 1975 — making the band just a few months younger than me.
The band members are, of course, much older. The oldest was drummer Michael Henry “Nicko” McBrain, one of the best names and most memorable noses in rock, who retired from touring with the band last month at the heavy metal age of seventy-two.
Back in January 2023, Nicko suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right half of his body. Not great for a drummer! But he worked at it and was back behind the kit five months later for the start of The Future Past Tour in May 2023. But sadly, he did not regain all of his powers, and so he decided to hang up his sticks — for live shows, at least — at the end of the tour, which was just last month.
It’s the end of an era. Nicko had been part of the band for 42 years. This “reunited” six-member lineup — with Blaze leaving, Bruce and Adrian rejoining, and Janick staying — had been going strong for 25 years, half the band’s entire history. The classic 80s five-member lineup was together for only 7 years.
People will argue whether the 80s lineup or this reunion lineup was the best. I’ve loved this reunion lineup and feel like it saw Maiden’s best days. Live, the band’s shows have never been better. 2006’s A Matter of Life and Death ranks among their very best albums. And even their newest material — “The Writing on the Wall” and “Hell on Earth” — rank among their best songs ever.
But now — with Nicko stepping away from playing live with the band — I think we’ve seen the end of the best of Iron Maiden. Hopefully, they continue making albums, and that Nicko is up for it. We shall see.
Rickey
OK, last one: 65 years ago Ricky Henderson was born.
He died on December 20, just short of his 66th birthday — which, like Iron Maiden, is also on Christmas Day.
The best tributes were from Craig Calcaterra and Joe Posnanski, with Craig recounting this Rickey story from Mike Piazza’s 2013 memoir:
Rickey was the most generous guy I ever played with, and whenever the discussion came around to what we should give one of the fringe people — whether it was a minor leaguer who came up for a few days or the parking lot attendant — Rickey would shout out “Full share!” We’d argue for a while and he’d say, “Fuck that! You can change somebody’s life!”
RIP Rickey!
Other Rabbit Holes
Spotify Wrapped. Here is a link to my “personalized” AI podcast — which summarizes my Spotify listening habits for the year — one of the most inane uses for this technology I’ve seen so far. But it’s early yet!
Year of the Dragon. Here’s a link to my year-end Spotify playlist — made with my own puny human brain and hands — featuring oldies but goodies along with new, new-to-me, and newly remastered music that I found interesting this year. (Wacky connections: Steve Vai, who played for Frank Zappa, is a big fan of the Alice Cooper album Billion Dollar Babies. The first three Alice Cooper albums were released on Zappa’s record label, Straight Records. When Alice Cooper went solo (the band was called “Alice Cooper”, but then Vincent Furnier legally changed his name to “Alice Cooper” — wild, I know!), he and producer Bob Ezrin hired Lou Reed’s Berlin-era band to be his new band. So anyway, don’t sleep on Alice Cooper is the moral of the story — “You even make your grandma sick!”)
Inherent Vice. On the ten year anniversary of its release, an appreciation for a movie I love but still don’t totally understand.
And that’s it for this one. Have a good year. See you next month.
jf