You always hear the punchline, but you never hear the entire joke. Here it is.

Little Johnnie’s teacher asks him how his weekend was. “Horribly,” says Little Johnnie. “A car hit my dog in the ass.” She corrects him: “Rectum.” “Wrecked him?” Johnnie says. “Damn near killed him!”

Kind of a letdown.

Now. Where to start. First let me state that The Howard Stern Show on Monday is going to be amazing. Rush and Molloy are reporting that Lange’s entourage came under some REAL sniper fire (not that phony Hillary Clinton bullshit sniper fire) in Kandahar after the show. Everyone’s okay. But I’ll have my ears glued to the show Monday. The stories are going to be amazing.

I traversed with my Uncle Hat to Mendon New York last weekend to visit DOD to wish him a happy 60th birthday, which means I went up there to eat good food and to drink excellent wine and to spend a few days on a big fat beautiful farm and to eat eggs right out of the chicken. I have a little brother who at 12 is nearly as tall as I and whose voice is now deeper than mine. And I am confounded regarding his strangely discriminating taste in music. For him, if it’s not machine gun guitars, it sucks. He actually said, and I’m paraphrasing, that the only band in the world capable of blending reggae and hard-core in any meaningful way is called “skindred.” I laughed my fool head off. Ska-core is one of my core areas of my practice as an amateur musicologist. I lurve ska-core and I have the mosh pit scars to prove it. And, I’m sorry, but this “skindred” sucks big donkey balls. The Mighty Mighty Mighty Mighty Mighty Mighty Bosstones have nothing to worry about, nosirreebob. I for one always grew up with a broad base of musical appreciation, and the kid, he was jamming to the Jumpstarts at age 2. I just think there’s nothing like being able to sing along to both Iggy Pop and the Carmina Burana is all. Music is enormous. It’s bigger than the world. Feeding on nothing but Iced Earth and RATM forever is starving oneself, especially in a world in which Duke Ellington once thrived.

Which brings me to Ithaca. I finally got to see it. We went there for lunch on our way to Pennsyltucky to buy post-July 4 fireworks. It’s all right. It’s no Athens Georgia, no Chapel Hill, but it’s no Athens Ohio either. It has a surprising amount of Jesus and is weirdly in a valley. I would like to go back when I have more time to walk around that little college town. We stopped in a music store and I bought a local CD, which I think is simply the proper thing to do when one visits a college town with a music scene. Boy With A Fish may crop up on the B.O.N.K. at some point.

I just have to say, I do not understand why you people insist on overcrowding subway cars. Another one will be along in five minutes or less. And it will be a better ride that will not leave you staring into the guy’s armpit.

I am still trying to master programming at the B.O.N.K. It is a difficult balance to achieve. I enjoy creating playlists. I was at one time the master of the Ironic Segue Mix Tape (ISMiT). So I like to make the playlists and to put The Crew Cuts on right after AC/DC. But one can’t spend every waking hour programming one’s anti-profit Internet radio station. So you also want a prolific abundance of songs to place in a shuffle rotation as a default. But then there’s no mastery at work and you sound like any other of these wonderful Live365 stations. So I am working out the balance. Please bear with me, all of you, he said into mid-air at nobody and nothing in particular.

My latest musical fascination is with the Celtic Kickass band called Flogging Molly. It took me awhile. But I do like Celtic-tinged music though I steer clear of the weird tendency of the genre to wander into new-age bullshit. But pub rock is good, and I think FM is the best of them.

That is all.