The popular dude wears a harlequin suit

Friday. Also, April 1st. So the Popular Dude wears harlequin's robes today. The news will be impossible to read, as every outlet will try to outdo every other with the best joke "story," carefully footnoted in small text with a reminder that this story was filed on April 1st, reader beware.  The added air of jocularity will raise Friday's stock as a popular dude, to be sure.  And let's be honest here, I'd lock elbows with Friday no matter what he was wearing.

The campus lies in wait, this last day of spring break, much like a spring-flowing bulb just about to pop out.  Monday will bring the comforting chaos of a campus alive and vibrant.  It will also bring too many cars, endless complaints about anything that isn't just-so or which doesn't meet someone's exacting expectations, but that's also part of the seasoning in this rich stew of active community.  Everything is magnified the first couple weeks of a quarter, and (for some reason) in spring quarter particularly. So one last weekday in which (I hope!) to get caught up on at least a few projects.

Another nice blend of tunes for this morning's commute.  Gaelic Storm gave my steering wheel a good thumping with a highly charged Scottish number, sort of a bagpipe rock, I'd say.  Bob Dylan, singing for the Traveling Wilbury's, tried to make the case for happiness only truly being possible by becoming his possession ("You'd be happy as you could be if you belonged to me."); I'm not buying it.  The set wrapped up with an early Bruce Cockburn tune (again - seems to be a very Cockburn week) about a moment in an airport.

Airports can be places of excitement and reuniting, and places of loneliness and separation.  Douglas Adams said of them, "It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an Airport' appear."  Cockburn, in January In the Halifax Airport Lounge (recorded in 1975), blends observation of those around him with the latter sense of separation:

Distant times in distant lands

Worthless money changing hands

"Changing them to what?" -- I wonder

As in the dust the jet plane thunders

Carries every feeling into gloom

I miss you like I miss the flowers in bloom

There's a crisis in the outer world

In the sky the smoke trails curl

Some Winnipeg boys are Cyprus-bound

I hope they live to touch home ground

I hope we live to touch, if just once more

I need you like the river needs the shore

Replace Cyprus with Afganistan or Iraq and the song could have been written today instead of 21 years ago.

The full playlist (and not a single joke among them):

 - The Weepies: Hideaway

 - Nanci Griffith:  Trouble in the Fields

 - Gaelic Storm: Floating the Flambeau

 - Traveling Wilburys:  If You Belonged to Me

 - Bruce Cockbrun: January In the Halifax Airport Lounge