New York Times: Red Sox Top A's, 6-5, in Tokyo Opener. For the curious, no, I did not get out of bed at 5:30 to watch the opener. I did, however, tune into the game on AM radio—something I haven’t ever used on my car before—on the way in to work, to hear that the As were up in the seventh inning.

Yes indeed: daytime temps nearing 50, the Red Sox are back in action, and it’s still light when I drive home from work. Must be spring.<?p>

I was all set to post my favorite Irish-relevant Muppet sketch—Animal, the Swedish Chef, and Beaker singing “Danny Boy”—until the coffee kicked in and I remembered I had already done it.

Ah well. If you’re in a maudlin mood, check out Eva Cassidy’s rendition.

It’s cold, cold, cold here today. Really unsettled weather over the weekend; it went from somewhat reasonable and sunny on Saturday to rainy and thundersnowing on Sunday. Twice we went out shopping in clear weather only to look out the window inside the store and see lightning and heavy, wet horizontal snow whipping across the parking lot. The winds were high and blew in 6° air from somewhere. It was too cold even for the dogs to walk, and that’s saying something.

As Dave Winer would say, it’s philosophy time for Patriots Nation. What a heartbreaker of a game last night. But it was that rare Superbowl, one that was exciting to watch from beginning to end, and for that I thank both the Patriots and the Giants.

Yeah, I thank the Giants. Now maybe Brady can get his feet back on the ground and his head back to the game. I think the last two weeks of preemptive crowning of the team in the media were not good for the play last night.

I’m really grateful to the Pats, too, who gave us an amazing ride all season long. I don’t expect to see this kind of season again, but now I’ll always hope.

When the New York Times writes about the near-demise and miraculous return from tax-evasion death of a Cambridge, MA ice-cream maker, you know there’s something special going on. And, in fact, there is.

To my astonishment, in the nearly seven years of this blog I’ve only written about Toscanini’s once, in conjunction with last year’s Ig Nobel awards. But my roots with Toscanini’s go back right to 2000, to almost the day I first set foot on MIT’s campus, where at the time there was a Tosci’s under the entry stairs at the west campus student center, one in Central Square, and one in the same block just south of Harvard Square as the stationery store. They had basil ice cream. Basil ice cream. Like the pure essence of Italian summer, like back yard gardens, like pure golden-green herbal explosions in your mouth. I was instantly hooked.

I only tasted basil ice cream twice, but there were other flavors. Green tea. Guinness, of course. And khulfee and burnt caramel and all the other spectacular flavors that they had. Completely unlike every other ice cream that there ever was.

With the Atlantic opening up their paywall, you get a little better sense of how good it really was. Ice Cream for Beginners - 00.06 describes the origins of burnt caramel, and a little of the creative atmosphere of the place. As well as how he might have gotten into the tax problems in the first place: the bit about Adam Simha wandering into the kitchen to filch ingredients probably raised no eyebrows in the happy-go-lucky creative late 90s but makes me wonder now how many other employees thought of Tosci’s as their own version of Andy Warhol’s Factory, or their Stop’n’Shop.

But all of this pales at the thought that I might be able to taste basil ice cream again. Perhaps I ought to drop Gus Rancatore a line. Right now, he might be susceptible to special requests.