Now, I’m not the world’s most experienced concert-goer, so that praise might mean less than it seems it should. But both Gwen and I were highly impressive by both the musicianship and showmanship of Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers. The setup is straight out of vaudeville, with Steve doing the “egomaniacial but blissfully unaware front man” shtick between the numbers, and the band playing the straight man. It’s clearly an act — and a very well-done at that — because during the songs the entire group had a tremendous sense of ensemble.

I’ve been listening to their album Rare Bird Alert quite a bit over the last year, and I was happy see a mix of songs from that and other material. The Rangers also took the stage alone for a pair of beautiful songs from their new album. They closed the show with a tremendous version of Orange Blossom Special, complete with fiddle interpolations of over a dozen songs, including “Norwegian Wood”, selections from The Nutcracker, and the theme from The Simpsons.

The highlight of the show for me, however, came when Steve gave the band a break and played “The Great Remember”. His introduction, in which he explained the difference between Scruggs style and clawhammer playing, made clear his deep love for and understanding of bluegrass music — and called to mind an appreciation of the late Earl Scruggs he wrote just a few months before the legendary banjo player’s death. And as he sat there on the stool, alone on stage with his banjo, I could see the straight line from his teenage years working at Knott’s Berry Farm through the arc entire arc of his career and leading to that night. And it all made sense.

1. I came down with two colds in a row in the latter half of March, which disrupted my carefully calibrated schedule,
2. I shifted most of my personal creative work from a laptop to my new iPad at the beginning of April, which involved figuring out how I needed to do things differently, and
3. Our cat Milton died unexpectedly this week.

So, as I have done before, I’m slowly digging out, catching up, and getting back into good habits. Expect to see more soon about what I’ve been up to during my radio silence (because there’s a lot of cool things).

• Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer, and Paul B. Brown talk about being able to turn an obstacle into an asset.
• Ira Glass on fighting through the gap between your good taste and work with a lot of potential.
• Kathryn Schulz explains what being wrong really means.
• And in the single most important talk I’ve seen in the last year, Dave Morris explains improv is a process and what the seven principles that underlie it are. (Key line: “Listening is the willingness to change.”

• Evan Hugh details the bizarre life story of sea monkey inventor Harold von Braunhut.
• Michael MacCambridge annotates Gay Talese’s classic Esquire profile of Joe DiMaggio.
• Joe Nocera interviews Sheila Bair, chair of FDIC during the financial crisis of 2008.
• Ernest B. Furgurson lays out Sir Winston Churchill’s alternate history of Confederate victory in the American Civil War.
• And Kathleen McAuliffe explains how your cat is making you crazy. (Mine is doing it by trying to walk on the keyboard while I’m typing this.)

This is yet another song in the chain of musically simple pieces of that have a far greater hold on me than they should. Part of that is the narrative: The improviser in me loves the triumph of the low-status protagonist, and high school-aged me relates to it — not to the Iron Maiden part, but to the crush from afar part.

A bigger part of it, thought, is the effect of re-contextualization. My theory of humor has a lot to do with violating expectations — but just a little bit and in a coherent way. So it’s odd to hear a group of ukelele players fronted by a female vocalist perform a piece about teenage angst — and even more so to hear “Lives on my block / Drives an Iroc” in a British accent. But it’s a farce played straight, as the Ukes never let on that they’re in on the joke. It has that in common with my favorite Monty Python sketches, like The Killer Joke, Nudge Nudge, or the Cheese Shop. They’re not completely absurd; there’s an inner logic to them that makes you think there’s a world in which they’re completely normal — it’s just that that reality is slightly adjacent to our own.

First off, it’s gorgeous. The clean lines, the pure geometric, the sharply contrasting lights and darks: all of these speak to my aesthetic sense.

Also, I’ve been there, back in the summer of 2006 with Gwen and three of our friends. We walked almost the whole width of this map, crossing the river and strolling along the waterfront before hiking up to the cathedral square. We ate there, at a crêperie in a building that’s on this map. The city as it’s shown is a bit different than when we were there, but I suppose that’s what the passage of a century and a half will do.

And that’s what grabs me most about the map: This is Geneva, the home of the Red Cross, the European headquarters of the United Nations, the so-called “Peace Capital” of the world — and the map is dominated by massive Vauban-style fortifications. Part of this attraction is personal irony: On that trip six years ago, after a particularly long and hot day of travel, there was almost a fight between members of our own group in front of the International Red Cross & Red Crescent Museum. We’d miscalculated how long it would take to get there, so it was closed when we arrived, which led to a flaring of tempers that was not helped by our hot and slightly dehydrated states. Fortunately, by the time we’d finished our meal at the aforementioned crêperie, all was forgiven.

But the irony works at the level of the city as well. We tend to see things at this scope as largely unchanging, thinking that places and cities always express the same ideas and values, even if the way those are expressed change over time. We forget that Switzerland was home to some of most intense religious struggles of the Protestant Reformation, that modern Germany and Italy were largely constructions of the mid-19th Century, and that for the first half of the Twentieth Century there was considerable open space and distance between Los Angeles and Pasadena (as Raymond Chandler fans will realize). Maps like remind me that the more things stay the same, the more they change.

Or something like that.

I’ve never met Kent, but I have to imagine the book is written how he speaks — because no one would write it that way if they didn’t. I’ve never encountered a more conversational book, replete with digressions, arguments with himself, tangents, and bad jokes. This doesn’t distract from the content, but instead creates authenticity. The first two sections of the book are extended examples, and written in that voice they built the sense in my head that Kent was less an author and more a person. That meant that when he switched from the descriptive to the prescriptive in part three, I took his rules as things he had learned from his experience, rather than as wisdom delivered from the mountaintop.

Speaking of part three, the question-answer form that he uses in laying out his patterns for TDD is one of the most effective ways of communicating these kinds of ideas I’ve seen. An example:

One Step Test
Which test should you pick next from the Test List? One that will teach you something and that you are confident you can implement.

This is followed by two or three paragraphs explaining the rationale for the guideline. I found this problem-solution-explanation format solves an issue that faces so many authors: How to design a text so that it can serve both as a tutorial and as a reference.

To do both of these things in a book so short is a masterstroke.

Which makes the show’s second, final season so frustrating. Bruno Heller, the show’s co-creator and primary writer, had intended a five-season arc for the show. The first, which begins with Caesar’s final battle to subjugate Gaul and ends with his assassination, is wonderfully paced. It moves right along, but it’s full of nuance. During pre-production of the second season, which he had intended to end with the Battle of Phillipi and the death of Marcus Junius Brutus, Heller found out the show would not be renewed, so he decided to collapse his plans for the third and fourth seasons into the second half of the second season. And it shows. The result is that the second season tries to do too much, and it loses of much of the subtlety that made the first season great. The last two episodes in particular are full of bombast, moving from big moment to big moment — often without the setup that would have imbued them with a greater sense of pathos. The fall of Marc Anthony and the redemption of Lucius Vorenus are both handled in a particularly ham-handed fashion — which particularly irks me because I can see how well they could have been done with more time.

I’ve seen this sort of problem before, in Babylon 5 where questions about renewal for the fifth season led to a telescoping of the end of the fourth, and in Battlestar Galactica where the production shutdown brought on by the Writers Guild strike necessitated bringing resolution to one of the storylines early. But this is a case where I don’t feel like the story would have been incomplete if they’d stuck to the original plan. I would have rather have seen a shorter arc in more detail than a rushed one painted in broad strokes. Why not end the story with the death of Caesar’s assassins? It worked for Shakespeare.

• Marco Tempest calls himself a “techno-illusionist.” In this pair of short videos, you’ll see he’s quite a storyteller as well.
• Aparna Rao (along with her partner Soren Pors) creates visual art that tells jokes.
• Charlie Todd explains his experiences with Improv Everywhere and the importance of the shared experience of absurdity.
• Brian Raftery walks us through the early history of the Upright Citizens Brigade.
• Alex Lamb — who had I had the good fortune to meet at the AIN Bay Area Conference in 2010 — has a trio of posts on an archetype-based long-form improv format he create.
• My college friend Peter Rogers, who takes amazing notes on these kinds of things, recently attended five improv workshops and posted what he learned.