Autumn used to be an easy season. Weather was always the tipoff that the season of dying and remembrance was at hand; at the first bite of a frosty breeze, the vegetation in the neighborhood surrendered and dropped to the ground faster than Italian infantrymen.

That light at the end of the tunnel clearly emanates from those bright individuals on the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee.

About the only time libraries seem to make the front pages are when they undergo personnel problems or some kerfluffle is raised about whether homeless people are browsing or bunking there. Heed is rarely paid when a library succeeds in its daily mission to provide the citizenry access to knowledge and thus to power.

The rest of us know that at stake this Saturday in Tuscaloosa is nothing less than bragging rights to the entire universe as we know it. It is a rivalry having little to do with stats and charts and more to do with primordial ooze and the eternal disposition of the souls of men.

Last year, I jested about the fact that people going to Tannehill State Park for the annual Labor Day fest would be more likely to see a Moon Pie than a union parade, and I received quite the tart rejoinder from gentlemen of the brotherhood,...

Ordinarily, history pushes us along in a steady current toward the future, but once in a while it creates a vicious undertow that threatens to pull us under and away.

Monday, professional gloomy-gus Nouriel Roubini, who lectures on economics at NYU, tweeted the chance of another recession at 40%. That was actually a little more optimistic than fellow number crunchers David Rosenberg and Robert Shiller, who last week charted the double-dip chances at fifty-fifty.

Photographs are much on my mind of late. It started while I was researching a birthday commemoration for a local radio personality of considerable repute; delving that pulled me, as though in an undertow, back into the golden age of rock and roll hereabouts.

And still you do not care about Afghanistan. I know what you mean. Even typing the word is a chore; the peak of the A descending into the mire of FGH before shaking itself off and plodding off across the trackless wastes of ANISTAN.

Rick Kurtz is almost embarrassed that so many people want to help him out. “I am very humbled by it,” he stipulates. “Almost to the point of embarrassment.” The ace musician that songwriter Mike Duke once described as “Birmingham’s go-to guitar guy” has been off the frets since April, when a stroke took him down and laid him up in Nashville’s Skyline Medical Center for about a month. Kurtz is taking time off from his convalescence Sunday, August 8, to be feted by his friends during a very special benefit concert at Keith Harrelson’s Moonlight on the Mountain listening room.