My Life With Cables is pretty fun. Pity poor musicians, indeed. When my studio was all analog boxes, once or twice a year I’d just have to unplug every single cable, untangle the spaghetti mess, and plug them all in again. Otherwise, a 20-foot cable wouldn’t reach a box six feet away. I did get a patch bay eventually, but somehow that didn’t completely solve the problem. Cables are even more mysterious than clothes hangers.

In the Blood, a recent New Yorker article, is sort of a history of vampires in Western literature. It’s fascinating how the idea of vampires has evolved with time. For instance,

These early undead did not necessarily draw blood. Often, they just did regular mischief—stole firewood, scared horses. (Sometimes, they helped with the housework.) Their origins, too, were often quaint. Matthew Beresford … records a Serbian Gypsy belief that pumpkins, if kept for more than ten days, may cross over: “The gathered pumpkins stir all by themselves and make a sound like ‘brrl, brrl, brrl!’ and begin to shake themselves.” Then they become vampires. This was not yet the suave, opera-cloaked fellow of our modern mythology. That figure emerged in the early nineteenth century, a child of the Romantic movement.

I have always been confused by the conflation of the 15th century tyrant Vlad the Impaler with Dracula the vampire—I just didn’t get the connection. Apparently there really isn’t one. It appears that Bram Stoker heard about Vlad (also known as Vlad Dracula) and just thought that Dracula was a better name and Transylvania a better location than Count Wampyr from Austria, as he had started to write it.

There’s lots more, from sociological analysis to the Twilight books and movies, the Sookie Stackhouse books and True Blood. All in all, a pretty fun read.