The man knows man and dogs.

The best press release I've ever watched.

Say hi to your mother.

This is your blog on Wordle.

In the course of writing Sunday's column, I sent Ike Richman of Comcast-Spectacor into the Spectrum's archives to determine just how much the concession stands were getting for food when the Philly arena opened in the fall, 1967, for the expansion team named the Flyers.

Not much.

He reported back to me:

A hot dog was .35 or a Kosher hot dog was a dime more. A roast beef sandwich was .75, a corned beef sandwich .85 and a pastrami sandwich .85. How about an ice cream for dessert at .25 or a milkshake for .40? Wash it down with an eight-ounce soft drink for .15 or a 12-ounce cup for .25. A soft pretzel would be a tasty snack at .15. A beer cost .40 for a regular or you can upgrade to a premium beer at .60 A slice of pizza was .25 or a whole nine-inch pie was .75.

So for a buck, you could get a dog and beer and have ice cream, too.

A bargain, until you adjust a little for inflation.

No, a bargain still. That would come to $6.55 in today's money.

Which barely buys you a (cheap) beer at The Bank.

Mr. McBride just called. Very polite. He'd read today's column and got as far as the headline before going for his dictionary.

"I can't find what indie means," he said. The column, titled "An indie effort to save a shop," was about Doylestown's efforts to keep Siren Records from being forever silenced.

I thanked him for taking the paper seriously enough to read it with a dictionary at his side.

And I explained that indie was slang for independent, and that in the past couple decades in popular music, indie had come to mean the more distinctive, diy, quirky genre that  .... and at this point I was struggling for an analogy that would connect with this gentleman whom I took to be in his 7th or 8th decade ..... is to the big labels what cable tv is to the networks.

He thanked me, said something polite about my columns, and I thanked him for slogging through a piece about a 20-or-so-year-old record story that's facing its own mortality.

"I like anything that's old," he said, and a store that's made it 20 years qualified as old in his book.

That's when I told him about my first record stores, and how they were my safe havens, where I could try out my adult voice on the patient shop clerks who must have wondered when I'd stop asking questions and start buying a record or two.

The first place was called Soundtrack. It was in a shopping center down the street and I went there involuntarily. I had scratched my older sister's Meet the Beatles badly enough that it required replacement, and I'm not sure how I scraped together the $3.17, which was expensive for the day. but I did.

Record Club of America lps cost more like $2.99 at the time, and I had lots of them --  the debut from Crosby Stills & Nash is the one I can stil picture with it's round club decal defacing the portrait of the trio on the cover.

There was another place I haunted at the local mall, and the guy behind the counter looked like David Bromberg. He was very understanding, and in truth I cannot remember a lick about his musical tastes or what we talked about, other than it was one of the few places in town where I was unlikely to get beaten up. It was a tough town for a small kid with a big mouth.

But the great places were in the city - Boston or Cambridge -emporia like the Harvard Coop, Cheap Thrills and Minute Man Records and other fabulous indie, if I may use that word, places with imports and cut-outs, where the clerks would spin the Beacon Street Union and Ultimate Spinach and Orpheus and then Fleetwood Mac from when they were a blues band, and Janis and Jimi, Electric Flag and It's a Beautiful Day. And I would haunt those places every time I went in on the train, clutching my list of records I'd made from Rolling Stone reviews, tracking down Howling Wolf's Chess cd with the rocking chair on the cover and looking for a version of Miles' Kind of Blue with the last two songs on the B side reversed. I still have that lp. I'm not sure if it's worth anything, but the memory is.

Anyway, all this to let you know of this very cool site I found in which people, some of whom you may know like Paul McCartney, Charlie Louvin and Cameron Crowe, talk about the place of the record store in their personal histories.

It offers this quote from Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity:

"Yes, yes, I know. It's easier to download music, and probably cheaper. But what's playing on your favourite download store when you walk into it?

Nothing, that's what. Who are you going to meet in there? Nobody. Where are the notice boards offering flatshares and vacant slots in bands destined for superstardom? Who's going to tell you to stop listening to that and start listening to this? Go ahead and save yourself a couple of quid. The saving will cost you a career, a set of cool friends, musical taste and, eventually, your soul. Record stores can't save your life. But they can give you a better one."

Ask Det Ansinn to describe where he lives and the president of Doylestown’s borough council talks of “our little Norman Rockwell painting.”

It’s looking more like Bedford Falls to me these days.

That, you will remember, is the fictional home of Jimmy Stewart in "It’s a Wonderful Life." In this production, the role of George Bailey will be played by Blair Elliott, proprietor of Siren Records.

He was walking down Main Street the other day, about to show me where his indie music store used to be before they padlocked it, when a woman named Jenny Isaacs grabbed him.
“You still have something to do with Siren?” she asked. She had a silver ponytail and steel rimmed glasses, a small nose hoop and an open checkbook.

She handed him $50.

Elliott walked another a half block before being accosted by another well-wisher.

This time it was Wes Goddard, owner of Basically Burgers. “I’ve got a bucket for you,” reminded Goddard, whose customers have been stuffing dollars bills inside a glass jar next to a “Save Siren Records” sign.

You see those pleas all over this picturebook town. A entire community is pulled together to try to keep a shuttered landmark from folding altogether.

“I just feel we need to take care of our own — especially in these times,” Goddard said.

A downbeat economy and the rise of the Internet threaten the independent record store. Last month Siren joined Think Music and Relapse Records in the local cut-out bin.

Siren had some additional troubles — its landlord and the borough pressured it to curtail live concerts, which it was conducting without having the proper zoning approval.

But wonderful part of this story is that fans, friends, customers, musicians and neighbors are working to write a different ending. Together they’ve raised more than $20,000 of the $33,000 that Elliott says he needs to get his property back and re-open Siren in smaller quarters.

Last weekend alone, three nights of benefit concerts raised the biggest chunk of that money. It’s left Elliott grateful, overwhelmed, exhausted.

Over coffee and a croissant he gave a short musical history of the store he began in high school with a friend named Bob Strawn. Strawn was a decade older and managed a converted barn in Furlong, Bucks County, that Elliott’s father owned. Strawn had adventurous taste in music; he gave Elliott his first home-made cassette: Pink Floyd’s debut lp on one side, the first Sex Pistols album on the other.

They called the store Siren Records because it could mean many things: a warning, a wail, a creature who calls others to rocks.

When Elliot graduated from film school at NYU he moved the store to State Street, where for 16 years he curated an eclectic, essential collection of punk, pop, ska, blues, R & B, jazz and indie rock.

For most of the year and a half it was in its last location Siren held up to three shows a week. That got the notice of the borough, which in April ordered the shows stopped. Elliott says he was in the process of applying for a zoning variance when his landlord got a judge to order the place padlocked. “I thought we had it all worked out,” Elliott says, wearily.

He’s 40, balding, bespectacled with a long, pointy goatee. “The reason Siren meant something was that customers could tell it wasn’t just a business. There was a passion behind it. We were obsessively curious about music and we drew people who shared that curiosity.”

An incurable mix-tape maker, he has been searching for the tunes that create the right soundtrack for his condition. He’s listening to the new Raconteurs CD and the Fleet Foxes, whose cathedral-pop harmonies remind him of the Beach Boys.

“When I’m in a time like this, I need a little energy and beauty — something with grace. Other times I can listen to sheer noise — like a Karlheinz Stockhausen record, but only when I’m comfortable and secure.”

You ever get the sense you're missing something? Here at the old dead-tree factory we try to catch a breeze from the falling of the axe, and over at WHYY-FM, they're throwing ice cream parties.

I was over there recording a commentary for next Sunday's Weekend Edition (my driving while texting rant/confession) and as I was walking back to the paper, I passed a room filled with shiny happy people eating free ice cream.

It gets more depressing. They were celebrating the launch of a new Bassett's flavor called The WHYY Experience.

(What would The Inquirer Experience taste like? Stale coffee and salt? Easy now, we have a sensitive objectionable-material filter.)

The new flavor, to be introduced Saturday at Bassett's Reading Terminal space, involves vanilla ice cream, chocolate covered pretzel balls and butterscotch. A listener named Sean O'Halloran of Oreland, Pa. created it.

A press guy named Jeff Bundy was scooping out the new flavor, and afterward forwarded these details of the event, which is held Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.:

Be among the first people to taste The WHYY Experience - Bassetts' newest ice cream flavor - at the 2008 Ultimate Philadelphia Ice Cream Festival. WHYY's Ed Cunningham will emcee this cool event, which includes appearances by PBS Kids character Clifford the Big Red Dog and activities for the kids provided by WHYY's Children's Service.

This all makes me wonder ...

What would the Philadelphia Experience taste like? I searched for images of a cheesesteak cone and came up empty.

The Mike Nutter Experience?

Somebody?

Russian television viewers were treated this week to some odd footage of a soccer referee getting red carded.

Sergei Shmolik started acting strangely in the second half of a youth match in Minsk, Belarus, and had to be escorted off the field.

Very slowly.

He told officials afterward that he was suffering from back pain. Blood-alcohol tests showed that he must have been treating his condition with straight vodka, because Shmolik was apparently shnookered.

Strangely, the crowd doesn't seem fazed at all.

Photo by jamacdonald from Flickr

One thing today's column doesn't get into is all of the research that says that having a hands-free phone doesn't eliminate the danger of driving while yakking.

Just being on the phone is risky if you're behind the wheel.

But I don't think you'll see any legislation to make up hang up altogether. Josh Shapiro says he's trying to make talking on the phone while driving safer, not illegal.

The research that finds that any talking on the phone fractures our attention comes from many university studies cited in this Los Angeles Times blog. (California went to a hands-free law as of July 1.)

The scariest result comes from Carnegie-Mellon U., whose scientists found that a cell in a car - held or hands-free - saps about 37 percent of our brain power.

Which would be a problem if we use just 10 percent of our brains anyway. But that's bogus.