"In like a lion, out like a lamb."

    That's how they describe March, but it's really not accurate for New England. The weather here has been oscillating between pleasantly warm and freezing cold, often flipping back and forth a few times in the same day (and not just getting cold at night, either). No matter what I wear out the door, it's climactically inappropriate by the time I'm coming home.

    All this has me thinking that a more apt description for March would be, "In like a lion which transforms briefly into a lamb then back into a lion again to claw at your face before becoming a lamb once again to lull you into a false sense of security before transforming into a lion once more to leap at you only to become a lamb just before landing at which point you walk over to pet it and it turns into a lion again..."

    But that's all a bit cumbersome to say. Luckily, a fuzzy-headed friend of mine suggested that March in New England should be associated with the phrase, "In like a Chimera," which I think is wonderfully appropriate. We discussed this over a multitude of maple, a festive brunch at a local maple farm to celebrate the tapping of the trees. I had pancakes with maple syrup, muffins with maple butter, and maple milk. It was delicious.

    In fact, it reminded me of a song I'd written a while ago with a fellow Marxian afficianado. He had this superhero concept for Mapleman, and I wrote music for the theme song. I won't post it, but if you catch me at a piano and I'm in a good mood, maybe I'll play it for you.

    As long as we're talking about songs, I want to comment on this wonderful music-acquisition software I've been using for the past few weeks. Specifically, I want to talk about the fact that some of these mp3s are mislabeled. I downloaded a song that said "Weird Al Yankovic" which was clearly not by Weird Al. But, it was a parody song, so I suppose someone unfamiliar with Weird Al could make that mistake.

    Then I downloaded a copy of the Maple Leaf Rag, which according to the file, was composed by Janis Joplin. This is slightly less forgivable, given the complete lack of similarity between musical styles, but I suppose some youngster who has never heard of Scott Joplin or ragtime at all might stumble across the composer name "Joplin" and fill in Janis just to be helpful.

    But the most egregiously stupid mislabeling would have to be one of the versions of Pachelbel's Canon that I downloaded. The file information said:

Song: Pachelbel's Canon
Artist: Beethoven

    My only solace is that somewhere out there amidst the vast stupidity of the Internet, Johann Pachelbel may be receiving credit as the composer of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.