Last week, I saw M.I.A. at First Avenue with Pulao and some friends. M.I.A. (a.k.a. Maya Arulpragasam) is a British hip hop musician and visual artist, and, as a child, a refugee from the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.

The show was spectacular and high, high energy. I danced my butt off. M.I.A. rhymed from atop the speakers, crowd-surfed, and, at one point, climbed from the stage to the balcony without missing a beat.

For the song “20 Dollar” M.I.A. said, “Turn off the lights! I’m going to take you to Africa.”

. . .

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I got a fortune cookie the other day that wasn’t really a fortune, but more like advice. This happens to me sometimes. The best fortunes, in my opinion, predict the future, as a good cookie should. But more often than not, I end up with a platitude. “Good things come to those who wait.” Yeah, I want to say, but are good things coming my way or what? When, cookie, when?!

This is what I got:

All right, I thought. I’ll get right on that. I kept the fortune for posterity but I . . .

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Last Monday night, Pulao and I hit the first-ever Triple Rock Social Club Pub Trivia Night with some friends. A good time was had by all. Well, I can only be certain of myself, but many other people exhibited warning signs of fun-having.

We were on the only team I saw to gather the max of six people, we knew one of the hosts, and there was a question about Harry Potter, but we still didn’t win. Life is unfair.

There was a music round, a picture round, and a taste round; the taste round was a small piece of . . .

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I just got a new laptop from work. This is a joyous, joyous day.

My old laptop was five years old, which is 127 in laptop years, and my 2002 vintage RAM had gotten very tired. To be brutally honest, it had lost some of its mental capacity.

Sometimes I would try and load a Web site and the hard drive would spin and spin and the laptop would shake and I’d stare at the green bar at the bottom right, never quite filling all the way up, and a bird would chirp outside the window and I’d look out . . .

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