The next night, Friday, May 21, I’ll be at O’Donovan’s in Minneapolis, across from the Target Center. The event, another drink-and-ink, is at 5:30 PM, ending in time to get me down the block to Target Field for my first outdoor Twins home game in 30 years. The Twins, appropriately, are playing the Brewers.

Books will be available in both bars.

I don’t know if I’m the only one like this, but there are a select few days in every calendar year when I have to listen to a particular song or songs. Today, the fourteenth of February, I require myself to listen to both “Valentine’s Day” by Springsteen and “Feb. 14″ by the Drive-By Truckers. On April 4, I listen to “Pride (In the Name of Love)”, preferably early in the morning. Three months after that, on the Fourth of July, I listen to Nirvana’s “Lake of Fire”, and this year, Neil Young’s “Powderfinger”, since I will have just turned 22. The cycle repeats itself yearly with U2’s “New Year’s Day.”

Steve replies:

Funny you should ask: Every year on my birthday I think of Earth Wind & Fire’s “September,” and its lyric “Do you remember/The 21st night of September?” I was born the next night, on the 22nd, and always resented Maurice White’s obstinate refusal to modify the lyric when performing live in concerts attended by me.

Beyond that, I only celebrate two anniversaries with my iPod. Every December 32, I listen to the Babyshambles song “32nd of December”. Eight months later — every seven years — I listen to Funkadelic’s “Friday Night, August 14″.

I should also say — to appease our resident music Trekkie, Michael Atchison, who is at the moment breathing into a brown lunch sack — that Bono of course got it all wrong when he wrote that lyric about early morning April 4. Martin Luther King was murdered in the early evening, at 6:01 P.M. And as great as Nirvana’s version of “Lake of Fire” was on “Unplugged,” it is still a Meat Puppets song. (And I believe the Meat Puppets even played on “Unplugged.”) There. I’m officially the guy who works in the record shop in “High Fidelity.”

Lastly, Sean, I hope your 22nd birthday doesn’t resemble anything else from “Powderfinger.” I’m not sure what’s going on in that song, but it doesn’t sound good.

Today, I watched the final few minutes of the basketball game between my alma mater (Marquette, not Catatonic State) and my wife’s alma mater (Connecticut). When UConn’s Jerome Dyson hobbled off the court with an injury, I thought of those Dyson vacuum cleaner commercials, in which that English guy talks about the superiority of a Dyson’s turning radius, pivoting as it does on a ball instead of turning on four wheels. It looks like a high-end car commercial, the Dyson slaloming through a living room like a BMW through the Alps. And I always think: This guy really needs to get over his vacuum fetish. I mean, it’s just a vacuum. (I also think: Vacuum — two cs, one u, or two us, one c?)

With 30 seconds left in the game, the TV came back into focus. (“Welcome back to the world of the living,” my Dad always said when I returned from these reveries.) Marquette’s Darius Johnson-Odom hit three straight free throws to tie the game at 68. Johnson-Odom made me think of Lindsay Wisdom-Hylton, a Purdue women’s basketball assistant. My wife recently asked her if she’d hyphenate when she got married and Wisdom-Hylton said absolutely she would. Makes me hope she’ll one day marry “Welcome Back Kotter” star Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs — or at the very least Darius Johnson-Odom — and get three hyphens in her surname. I think that would look cool on paper, like a string of railroad cars hitched together. It would give literal resonance to the phrase “getting hitched.”

But back to the game. On TV, they cut to Marquette coach Buzz Williams. It’s a great name, Buzz, and I thought of all the Buzzes who have gone before him: Buzz Aldrin, Buzz Lightyear, my great-uncle Buzz Boyle, who played leftfield for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a franchise that would later have a general manager named Buzzy Bavasi. Other Buzzes came to mind — basketball player Buzz Peterson, writer Buzz Bissinger — until all these individual Buzzes blended into one sustained buzz, a beehive of inactivity.

That’s when I realized the buzz I was hearing was the final buzzer of the basketball game. It was over. Marquette won. I haven’t a clue how.

As for the site itself: I’m not entirely sure what that “Rushin Media” window portends, but it looks ominous, doesn’t it — the rabbit-eared logo of some ’50s multinational. Perhaps I will post video there, if I can figure out how to do that.

In the coming days and weeks I’ll be writing more frequently on the site, and adding my first several appearances for The Pint Man to the News link. Incidentally, the photo on the News link – the one evidently taken through a keyhole of the manager’s office in a Barnes & Noble in St. Paul, Minnesota — is of me meeting my earliest literary hero: Jack Klugman, a.k.a. New York Herald sportswriter Oscar Madison, whose influence can be seen to this day in my wardrobe.

New York vs. Philadelphia

Famous Fare: Cheesecake vs. Cheesesteak

Famous Thoroughfare: Broadway vs. Broad Street

Musical Claim: Birthplace of Punk vs. Birthplace of Pink

Early ’90s Were: Crack-Addled vs. Kruk-Addled

Tourists Go To: Liberty Travel vs. Liberty Bell

To See Antiquity, Visit: The Met vs. The Vet

Icon Named For Rocky Character: Apollo Theater vs. Rocky Statue.

I knew that Yogi Bear and Yogi Berra were distinct creatures — one was a cartoon, after all, and the other one was Yogi Bear — but I didn’t know which had inspired which, or if their names were merely coincidental. I stood equally confused at the intersection of baseball and candy bars. Was Babe Ruth named for the Baby Ruth, or vice versa? (I wouldn’t know until years later that the answer was neither.) Was the “Oh, Henry” bar named for Hank Aaron, as I’d been led to believe, or for O. Henry, whose Twilight Zone twists at the end of each story preceded (I now know) the actual Twilight Zone.

To this day I haven’t a clue what (if any) connection exists between actor Chevy Chase and Chevy Chase, Maryland, or if the Pink Panther movies preceded the cartoon series that appeared in the title sequences of the films. (But I fear Ogar, our resident Peter Sellers expert, will elucidate.) My most inexplicable convolution involved frequent Carson guest Orson Bean and cinematic giant Orson Welles. At 8 years old, I couldn’t conceive of two people named Orson existing apart. So in my mind, Orsons Bean and Welles became one and the same.

5. Okajima!

4. Kaats

3. Hudler On The Roof

2. The Sound of Musial

1. Les Mize