“Can we do the interview now?” the voice asked me through the phone. “I was thinking we would find a different time for the actual interview, so I could prepare a bit,” I answered. Silence. I looked at the clock and knew I had a half hour free. “You know what? Let’s do it.” I am usually all about hyper-preparation, but when you have someone interesting on the phone — someone whose music is the most recognizable on Earth — you have to throw caution to the wind.

In last week’s newsletter, we looked at a simple, delicious Hot Toddy built on rye whiskey and maple syrup, and showed how that no-frills Old Fashioned-esque drink could be extrapolated into a General Theory of the Hot Toddy — an all-purpose structure for making and modifying Hot Toddys in various forms.  That rye-maple Toddy is an incredibly easy cocktail to make — you only need whiskey, maple syrup, bitters, a slice of orange, and hot water.

Of course I remember the first time I read the greatest rock biography ever written. The year was 2009. I was still in the Army and had just recently transferred from Fort Bliss in El Paso, TX to Fort Lewis just south of Tacoma, WA. I hadn’t even been there two weeks however, when I was told to re-pack my rucksack and immediately catch a flight south to the National Training Center smack dab in the Mojave Desert for a month-long, pre-deployment exercise with my new unit.

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains some spoilers for the finale of season 6 of “Love Is Blind.” The Charlotte-based “Love Is Blind” season that started out so promisingly is looking pretty diminished by the finale — at least when you’re counting couples. Season 6 ended up being as short on weddings as season 5, and similarly gave us more mess than romance. But the finale was no less rich of an episode because of the smaller number of weddings, opening with a scorched-earth fight between Chelsea and Jimmy and reaching a crescendo with a wedding that was more about the riveting intergenerational drama of Clay’s family than it was about the couple.

During the early years of Atlantis Magazine, I visited Patte Barham several times at her house, the Gillette Mansion, in Los Angeles. Greg had known her for a long time through his work on his Felix book, and he connected Patte and me as I was interested in the Hawaiian Royal Family and the Gillette Mansion was said to be built in replica of the Iolani Palace. It also had an Orthodox Chapel.