Travis Pangburn has acquired a bad reputation for stiffing attendees and speakers at his traveling alt-light ‘philosophy’ show, but it turns out he also stiffed children’s entertainers, like Sharon, (Lois), and Bram (Lois died a few years ago, so she’s safe, unless Trav is digging up her grave for valuables now). Maybe you didn’t have kids so you have no idea who they are, but if you do, all I have to do is say “skinnamarinky dinky dink” to infect you with an earworm.

Anyway, Sharon and Bram are out $15,000. Here’s Pangburn’s response:

Asked why he didn’t pay the agreed-upon price to Sharon and Bram, he wrote, “It sucks. I am and forever will be huge fans of Sharon and Bram. The fact that the shows didn’t bring in enough to cover their full fee was not expected and it was highly unfortunate.”

You know, Sharon and Bram lost money on those gigs, because they felt responsible and an obligation to pay their crew and the venues out of their own pocket, despite the fact that they did their job and it was their promoter who screwed up, making promises he couldn’t keep. Pangburn, on the other hand, blames the crowds and defaults on his obligations.

Yeah, it sucks. The “it” in this case refers to Travis Pangburn.

One of the advantages of living in a tiny rural town is that I really don’t worry much about having packages stolen off my porch — I did once have a package fail to show up on time, and we wondered what had happened to it. It turned out that a new deliveryperson had put it on our front step — we almost never use our front door, preferring the door that opens up to the driveway and has a kind of mud room (do houses in other parts of the country have mud rooms?), so we just didn’t see it. It sat there in plain sight to anyone passing by on College Avenue for about a month, getting rained on. You could have stolen it and we wouldn’t have even noticed.

I understand it’s a bigger problem in the suburbs of big cities, and can see how it would be infuriating, especially around this time of year. This one guy took an extreme approach to handling it, though, building a combination glitter bomb/stink bomb with a GPS and multiple recording cameras to catch people in the act of theft.

I guess I’m supposed to be impressed with the elaborate, over-engineered contraption, but what struck me most was the thieves — these were ordinary people who would just casually rob others with no qualms at all. Multiple people. Not organized rings of criminals, just passers-by who would steal from their neighbors without regret, people with nice cars and nice homes. What the fuck is wrong with you? Didn’t your mothers teach you anything?

This is the question that is dominating social media right now. Should it be banned? But that’s censorship! And then the usual free-speech babble is combined with terrible in depth, word by word analyses of the lyrics to show the interpretation is malleable, depending on the views of the analyzer. I hate it all. I hate the song.

The only fair thing to do is ban all Christmas carols. Use objective methods to measure the frequency of play of certain songs, and if they show an unusual annual peak, no matter when, they are clearly not good enough to be enjoyed except in very narrow contexts, and therefore are abominations that should be prohibited. If you don’t want to hear it in July, why do radio stations think it’s desirable to inflict them on us in December? Just kill all the mediocre music.

I’m also considering a prohibition on all media that has “cold” in the title, which seems to be a cause of serious conflict. This would have the benefit of also abolishing all those endless arguments about Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations”, which used to take over certain nerd conversations, once upon a time.

I arrived late last night, so we couldn’t see much…especially since we were blinded by the radiant light shining from a certain grandchild. But today we’ll get out a little more, maybe. More likely we’ll be mesmerized by a certain baby girl.