I can still taste the rain that day

Meadow Brook, the concert venue, I had understood to be something like the Garden State Arts Center, and that wasn't a bad model: it's one of those late-60s/early-70s open amphitheater designs, with some seats under cover and a lot that aren't and grassy fields past that to lounge on. This spot was smaller and steeper than the Garden State Arts Center --- it's also on a university campus --- but the feel of it was obvious and familiar. Since the lineup --- Magic Man [Edit; not Miracle Men, a mistake I keep on making], Walk The Moon, and Panic! At The Disco --- was a not one without a fan base, the best seats we could buy were on the row just outside the overhanging ceiling, normally a slight inconvenience, but in this weather, possibly a chance to get soaked to our bones.

Here we got a pleasant surprise: the row we were in was one of those that's partially overhung. That is, the ceiling and the seats are on different arcs, and there were seats on our row that were fully exposed to the elements, but we were technically speaking under cover. If the winds were low, or in the right direction, and it rained, we wouldn't necessarily get wet. And while it did rain a little bit over the night, it was a fairly gentle rain, and the wind was in the right directions for us; we got a very slight misting but not anything actually inconvenient.

I liked the whole location, though I suspect a lot of it is just that it's in an architectural style that I associate with field trips from elementary school, when we went to all sorts of local spots like planetariums and arts centers that were done in that late-60s/early-70s Open But Still Municipal Arts Style. You know, where the main construction is in concrete, yes, but there's plenty of dark wood to make it feel like living things have ever touched it, and the buildings are opened up in odd directions, like a bit of Populuxe styling touched the design without overwhelming it. It's hard to find these, and harder to find them in good shape; I suppose being on a campus has helped it stay in shape.

Trivia: The word ``hobby'' first appeared in print around 1375, where it referred to a small or middle-sized pony or small horse of an Irish breed. Source: Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, Sol Steinmetz.

Currently Reading: The Incandescent Ones, Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey Hoyle. OK, have a new candidate for the Least Successful Future Ever. A couple lines in this establish this 1977 book is set several centuries in the future and generations after humans contact with aliens and the Cold War (still!) is more about trying to cadge technology off of them. It is so near-future writing, though --- the protagonist is a foreign-exchange student who skis --- that I'd otherwise set it no later than 1985.

PS: Writing About E (Not By Me), as there's a bunch of ways to look at this number and they're pretty much all interesting ones.