On Monday, the Royal Canadian Mint stopped making pennies, and today we find out that we will no longer be able to slide an iron around the Monopoly board. The game piece has been replaced by a cat (LOL).

With its duck dollars, polar bear-emblazoned toonies, and flammable bills, Canada has been messing around with its currency for decades, so the decision on the penny is no real surprise (it’s been planned for a while).

But it’s harder to understand the decision to axe the iron. Monopoly’s been around forever; the references to real places or things are now lost on players; the game is, in essence, a closed system. Messing with it upsets the balance, destroys the illusion of its timelessness, the sense that when you play, you are in a world all its own: Monopolyland.

And to put a cat in there, well that’s just stupid.

In 1969, as he was leaving the Boston Symphony Orchestra as its music director, Erich Leinsdorf sat down with Jordan Whitelaw of WGBH for a very long interview. One of the highlights: Leinsdorf’s comments on TV and music. Check out part II.

Supercilious and exacting, Erich Leinsdorf had a reputation for being a difficult conductor. He believed that there was an ideal interpretation out there for every piece, and the only way to realize it was to follow the score with exacting precision. The quixotic approach didn’t win him many friends.

It’s partly because of his prickly reputation that this clip of Leinsdorf announcing to a Boston Symphony audience that John F. Kennedy had died is so poignant:

WQXR recounted the concert in an article commemorating Leinsdorf’s birthday; yesterday, he would have been 100.

His tenure at the BSO from 1962-1969 made Leinsdorf famous to US audiences, but he also spent eight seasons with the Rochester Philharmonic. No fan of Smugtown, Leinsdorf nonetheless led them in a handful of recordings on Columbia, including Beethoven’s “Eroica,” whose funeral march Leinsdorf and the BSO performed on that fateful day in 1963.

Random Classics has a transfer of the RPO version available to download for free.

I finally became acquainted with Snopes.com over the Thanksgiving weekend. I hope every single person I follow on Facebook gets to know it too, and starts using it too.

Yesterday, a guy I follow on Facebook posted a news report from years ago out of Canada that heralded dichloroacetate as a miracle drug for cancer. The report blamed “the big pharmaceutical companies” for keeping it from the public, and to my Facebook friend, this was another example of “american (sic) capitalist bullshit.”

Checking the story out with a quick Google search, I came across Snopes.com, which set things straight.

And then today, a bevy of Facebook friends posted the same boilerplate statement to declare their ownership over their own content; within minutes, others were posting the Snopes.com entry that explained why this so-called legal talisman was useless.

The next time you’re tempted to post a knee-jerk reaction to something you read on the internet, do yourself a favor and check out Snopes.com first. There’s a fine line between moral outrage and ignorance (and then there’s this, which is all to real).

The New York Times has written about this myth-debunking website, and mention a number of other fact-checking sources.

He saved the election for Obama, and, as everyone knows by now, he’s now a big TV star:
Joe Biden is simply awesome.

I heard Radiohead’s cover of “Nobody Does it Better” on the radio this weekend:

Presumably, it was on because Skyfall opened and made a ton of money. I think I’ll stay away from classic rock stations, so I won’t have to hear this.

This is not how I want to remember Guns N’ Roses. Not at all.