Chunky nuggets

• Happy 75th birthday, Willie Howard Mays, Jr.
• Mays is perhaps best known as a guest host on the Dick Cavett Show, or as the inspiration for a supporting character in the pretentious but delicious prologue to Don DeLillo's overpraised Underworld. Trivia fans will note that he is also the best baseball player in the history of the game.
• Many moons ago, a friend and then-housemate crawled into my bed at 6am, freaking out after doing one milligram too many at a party. "I see baboons wired with the circuitry of fear," she kept saying.
• Now listening to "Montreal" by The Wedding Present.
• Let me tell you something: if I played trumpet (well, I did once, in the sixth grade), I would transcribe every single note of Clifford Brown's solo in the EmArcy version of "Cherokee," and I would work on it every day of my life. Finally, at age 97, I would master it, and every single resident of my nursing home on Mars would shit himself in wonder and awe. Then I would die.