Ain’t been round since you know when…. Time for a holiday/birthday miscellany:

1. The HD broadcast of carols from King’s College Chapel, Cambridge on Christmas night was deeply moving. Here’s technology for you: Dolby Digital surround sound put me into the deep, detailed ambience of this magnificent 16th-century chapel, and the music was immersively wonderful; hi-def TV from a satellite dish made the candle flames as beautifully hypnotic as they were when I first visited the chapel in 2002.

It’s all about the technology. It’s not about the technology.

2. Last night’s episode of House, M.D. was extraordinary. The dialogue was razor-sharp and very, very quick. The typically exotic medical malady was clearly a device to enable larger questions of love and fidelity, questions that spread through the entire show in an artful and disturbing way. The show’s ongoing fascination with mammary glands was so over-the-top (sorry) that it began to seem not so much exploitative as ironic, though this continues to be the show’s least defensible obsession, in my view. And there was a crystalline little acting moment when we discover something about Cameron’s past–but more than that I should not say.

3. My kid brother, thoughtful as ever, got me Rob Jovanovic’s new book on Big Star. In it I read Peter Holsapple’s tribute to the college radio station that turned him on to Big Star. It was my college radio station: WFDD-FM, in Winston-Salem N.C., the NPR affiliate at Wake Forest University. I was an announcer on that station from late 1976 through May, 1979; I served as Student Station Manager during the 1977-78 academic year.

Holsapple specifically praises the “Deaconlight” late-night free-form shows, and while I have no idea if he ever heard mine (I did a ton of ’em and loved every minute), I am delighted to think that the station played a significant part in nurturing the fascination with Big Star that would come to fruition over the next three decades. I know I played my share of Big Star on Deaconlight: over the years, I probably played every bit of the first two albums twenty times. The book and DD’s great Deaconlight site (thanks, DD) have inspired me to dig through some of my old tapes to archive this bit of personal history before it–or I (it’s my birthday, after all)–crumble into dust. I just wish I’d been a better announcer at the time.