Rick's Letter

Recently, I was privileged to separately interview Mick Box of Uriah Heep and Tom Gimbel of Foreigner. All of that classic rock-ness reminded me that, if a band has a long enough career, at some point they'll come out with a greatest hits compilation. Maybe even two or three!

And, if the act is sufficiently long-lived, the eager consumer might behold yet another clever marketing idea: a collection of "Rarities, Deep Cuts and B-Sides." Typically, this is the creative equivalent of scraping the dirt off the coffin but, if you're a big enough fan — and I speak from hundreds of dollars worth of experience — you buy it anyway.

I'm not suggesting "Rick's List" has the sort of giddy fan base that would support such a thing but, by coincidence earlier this week, my agent and Day management collectively approached me to insist it's time for the newspaper column equivalent of a "Rarities, Deep Cuts and B-Sides" collection.

Below, then, without any thematic connection whatsoever, are several observations originally written for one "Rick's List" or another. Some of them are very early drafts with no developed throughline. Others are even more inane. For oh so many good reasons, none were never published. Until now.

1Chapstick is interesting stuff

2 Broccoli and cauliflower florets are very similar — only the broccoli ones are green and the cauliflower ones are off-white. Wonder how that works?

3 The word I got tired of, reading Knut Hamsun's "Mysteries," wasn't "the" or "a" but rather "it"

4 The word I got tired of, reading Knut Hamsun's "Under the Autumn Star," wasn't "a" or "it" but "the"

5 The words I got tired of, reading "The Shore Road Mystery," volume eight in Franklin W. Dixon's Hardy Boys series, were "moonfaced" — describing Frank and Joe's porcine chum Chet Morton — and "peppery" — an adjective capturing the demeanor of the brothers' feisty but well-meaning Aunt Gertrude

6 Read something fascinating in a three-volume history of the Band-Aid, which was invented in 1924: The Dutch/Flemish painter Peter Bruegel the Elder actually conceptualized an "adhesive bandage" 400 years before. His plan, however, was to market the dressings so that, while they indeed helped the healing process, their surface would still realistically depict open and septic wounds — which he'd replicate from his own dark works like "Fall of the Rebel Angels" or "The Triumph of Death." "Could be pretty funny," he wrote, but he got bored and forgot about it.

7 I wouldn't mind rain so much if it was drier.

8 I was going to invent the word "plagiarized" but someone else had already done it.

9 I write good afferisms. (EDITOR'S NOTE: Koster means "aphorisms.")