Sugar and jazz

We had Office Cooking Club downtown at Big Blue. It was the first barbecue of the season! Above is my friend Melinda's husband, Mike, tending the grill on the front lawn.

This is a club we have had going in various permutations over the years. In its current incarnation we have a handful of people from work, people interested in cooking, and we might have a celebrity guest, a person who has distinguished himself or herself in the culinary field.

Last night the theme was Mexican. I made caramel ice cream!

Here is the caramel under way.

Isn't that wild? You had to heat up sugar and water and then let it boil.

"I'll believe this when I see it," I said, out loud.

But it worked! First you had to boil it unattended. That is something I have a problem doing. I always want to attend to things. You wait until it turns brown around the edges and then you stir it until it is a deep amber.

All went according to plan!

Then, zut alors, I realized the heavy cream in the fridge had gone south, despite the expiration date being still two weeks away. Forbid it, Almighty God! I had to run to the store and get more heavy cream. By the time I came back my caramel had hardened into this disc. That was all right! The Joy of Cooking said just to heat it gently and soften it.

The Joy of Cooking's directions were not perfect and kept me guessing. But you know the slogan, stand facing the stove! That is what I did and the ice cream was a hit.

It is fun to have cooking adventures! Which is what I did over the weekend. Friday it was our friend Dan's birthday, hence this cake. Which, I was proud of it! Thank you again, '80s Betty Crocker! Plus, I love birthday sprinkles.

And then came church coffee hour Sunday morning, and cooking club was Sunday night.

Speaking of caramel and the Catholic Church, one thing that cracks me up is when people write "Carmel" instead of "caramel." It happens all the time!

Hence, Carmel Ice Cream.

If you love it you are a Carmelite!

The birthday cake baker

This is me presenting Howard with his birthday cake at his birthday party.

It got me thinking about other birthday cakes I have made that I love. There is something special about making a birthday cake. I am not an expert at it! I am no good at cake decorating and never will be. Fussy things and I never agree. For instance I have never worked well outlining my projects which is one reason my Leonard Pennario book still has a little ways to go. Not much but a little.

What I am good at though, is that when I make a birthday cake I really love it.

The cake in the picture above, it is a sheet cake off of AllRecipes.com. Whenever you want to make something fattening AllRecipes is your friend!

A few other birthday cakes stand out in my mind. Once back when I was holding Monday night jam sessions at my house, my friend Peggy Farrell the jazz singer was celebrating her birthday. I made the Oatmeal Cake out of one of the Moosewood Cookbooks, I think "The Enchanted Broccoli Forest."

It baked in an 8 1/2 by 11 pan, definitely nothing fancy. But that was the whole charm. I still love remembering this cake. You made it with yogurt and oatmeal and it was dense and country-ish. I frosted it with a caramel frosting I got out of "The Joy of Cooking." Then I just stuck a bunch of candles in it and I loved carrying it out. It went, too. Everyone ate it.

Here it is! Oatmeal Yogurt Cake from "The Enchanted Broccoli Forest." I found it! If you have never made this cake before, try it. Make it for someone's birthday. Trust me.

More recently, a couple of years ago, my friend Michelle from work was celebrating a birthday and we did a little dinner at my house for a bunch of people from the office. I asked Michelle what kind of cake she wanted. That is a wonderful question to ask. I love asking it.

She asked for Red Velvet Cake!

Which I had never made. But that never stops me. I researched recipes and made Red Velvet Cake. It was in style during the 1920s. I learned that while I was reading up on it.

You had to use red food coloring which disappointed me a little. I had thought it had beets in it or something. Plus, I am warning you if you try this at home, a little red food coloring goes a long way. I saw recipes that called for a whole bottle! Luckily I chose one that needed just a teaspoon or something. Even with that, the kitchen looked like a car wreck. There was red everywhere.

But the cake turned out glorious. I mean, I loved it. It was a layer cake which I am not used to making so that gave me a thrill, trying to make one. I have a picture somewhere of me serving it to Michelle.

Oh, look, I wrote about it! Just now I started getting the sneaking suspicion that I had. Here is the picture.

Oops! That is not the picture! I do not think I ever made that cake. I am not talented enough. I do not know how it ended up in my files. Here is the picture.

So, enough about the red velvet cake, seeing that we have explored that before. There is one more cake.

That is the cake I made for Howard last night. It was his actual birthday so, another cake opportunity, not to be wasted. I had already made the cake pictured at the top of the post, which was a chocolate cake as he had requested. So now I made Blueberry Pudding Cake out of the Mark Bittman cookbook, "How To Cook Everything," that I scored for a buck at a garage sale I went to with my friend Lynn earlier this summer.

Howard loves blueberries, ergo this cake. It baked in a water bath -- weird, because I had made Mollie Katzen's Peach Pudding Cake and I do not remember it needing that. You also had to separate a bunch of eggs and beat up the egg whites, another thing I do not remember from that peach pudding cake.

The Blueberry Pudding Cake turned out great. There really was pudding in it! I had no birthday candles on hand so I used tea lights. Howard took pictures. I am going to have to wring them out of him and post them.

The moral of the story is, you do not have to be a professional cake decorator to turn out a birthday cake.

It is the thought that counts!

Hmmmm... I was just going to end with that, but all of a sudden I realized: Isn't it funny, I just noticed that the post I linked to was exactly a year ago today. That is a coincidence. I was writing about a garage sale where I bought a cake carrier. And my mother was there with me, giving advice on the cake carrier I was buying.

That was just a year ago! It makes me happy that my mom was out with me at garage sales that recently.

Celebrate the time you have with people. Celebrate with cakes.

They do not have to be perfect!

Still life with snow

Winter is fun to photograph!

Above is a shot I took tonight in beautiful downtown Buffalo in front of Big Blue. That is a corner of Big Blue you see in the upper right-hand corner.

Night pictures like this are always more impressive when you are looking at them in your little phone camera, I have to say that. They get blurry once you actually take them out and look at them. But still.

I have something with which to remember February 8, 2013!

The un-photographed life is not worth living! Luckily I have a lot of photographs for the book I am pulling together. Leonard Pennario led a photographed life. People photographed him a lot.

Another night shot. This one looks like Mars!

A vertical shot.

One more, as we used to shout to Shakin Smith when he blew his harmonica at the Central Park Grill.

One more!

The Irish kitchen

For St. Patrick's Day I decided to make Irish soda bread. It is the easiest thing in the world to make. I made Irish soda bread when I was a little kid. I am sure my 6-year-old niece, Barbara, could make it.

However!

My kitchen is where the luck o' the Irish runs out.

I was all excited about this recipe by Deborah Madison -- I will name names -- that had oats and whole wheat flour. And it looked so easy. I take two big bowls including the one I scored at Vinnie D's a few weeks ago, and I set to work making two loaves of this stuff so we could eat it while we watched the parade.

But alas!

"Gather the dough up into a ball," read one line of the recipe. You could not gather anything up into a ball, that was for sure. It was like a bowl of batter. So I am adding flour, and more flour. Meanwhile the kitchen gets coated in dough because it is all stuck to my fingers and everything I touch gets flour-y and buttery.

Finally I glopped the stuff into the flat discs you are supposed to shape it into. One goes on a cookie sheet, the other on a baking stone. That was one positive aspect to this situation, I got to use my baking stone.

"Cut a cross in the loaf." Yeah right, as Leonard Pennario used to say.

Into the oven they went and I anxiously watched them. I kept turning on the oven light to peek and see if they were rising at all. They were not.

What is Gaelic for zut alors?

Only I could goof Irish soda bread!

As I was watching and waiting the phone rang. It was my friend Lynn who was going to watch the parade with me. She was making Bailey's chocolate cupcakes.

She said that when she baked the first half dozen, she noticed they were kind of blond for chocolate cupcakes.

That was when she noticed the cocoa still sitting in the measuring cup.

Hahahahahaa!!

As Lynn said, "This is what happens when an Italian and a German try to celebrate St. Patrick's Day."

However. It did all come out OK and Lynn's cupcakes, heaped with green frosting, looked most professional and we enjoyed them while watching the parade on this glorious warm day from the steps of Big Blue. And the soda bread came out well too no thanks to that deeply flawed recipe. Normally I trust Deborah Madison but I do not know what happened here.

Perhaps she was into the Bailey's!

Forks in the road

The U.S. Postal Service may be failing but it has been good to Howard and me.

I received the Leonard Pennario autographed program I sent away for. Well, I have not opened it yet because when Howard handed it to me I was in my bathrobe with wet hair and I did not want to smudge it.

Howard received three pieces of silver that are the work of Hiram Hotchkiss!

What, you have not heard of Hiram Hotchkiss?

He was the jeweler from Connecticut who was the first known occupant of Big Blue. We know that from Father Dunn's book "Delaware Avenue Mansions and Families."

He is not to be confused with Thomas Hiram Hotchkiss, the representational artist of the Hudson River School.

here is a Mountain Landscape painted by Thomas Hiram Hotchkiss in 1856.

Wow, Thomas Hiram Hotchkiss (1834-1869) was pretty talented!

And died pretty young. He had tuberculosis.

That is not the Hiram Hotchkiss who lived in Big Blue.

Nor is it this Hiram Hotchkiss who seems to have been involved in Lewiston and Niagara area affairs, as well as the peppermint trade.

This seems to be the Hiram Hotchkiss we are looking for.

And again, success!. We have found our man.

With which:

A couple of weeks ago Howard was contacted by a gentleman in Hawaii who had come across these three forks. They are engraved on the underside with the inscription: "H. Hotchkiss." This I have seen with my own eyes! And it also says, "Patented 1860." Hiram Hotchkiss lived in the house in the 1860s.

The owner of these forks offered to sell them to Howard for just the price of the silver. It came up to I forget what. Howard told me a little while ago what silver was going for per ounce and I cannot remember that either. What can I say? It has been a long day.

Speaking of which, it has been a long 150 years for these forks.

Who knows where they have been?

Who knows who ate what with them?

They have an inscription "S" on the front which makes us wonder if they were monogrammed for a family whose name began with an "S." They are very beautiful and graceful.

Tonight Howard and I ate dinner with the forks. We ate beans and greens and sausage with parmesan cheese over pasta.

A very un-fancy dinner with fancy forks! But I did not know they were coming.

Next time I will have to make something elaborate.

At Big Blue!

>>>>>>>>>
Editor's Note:
Here is the original message I received several days ago about the Hotchkiss forks.

Dear Howard Goldman,

Aloha.


I stumbled upon your interesting blogs and the story of how you came to be the current owners of 153 Delaware after searching online for information about the nineteenth century Buffalo jeweler Hiram Hotchkiss.


I live in Hilo, Hawaii, where I run a hot tub and spa business called Big Island Spa Source (www.bigislandspa.com) Since you are an entrepreneur, Howard, you may be interested to know that we have developed and are selling a solar hot tub heating system here in the islands. It is not detailed on our website, as we are trying to protect and trademark it at the moment. It was written up in Hana Hou, the inflight magazine for Hawaiian Airlines last month.


My wife and I enjoy going to yard sales and estate sales on the weekend, usually loking for old LP records. We also keep our eyes peeled for sterling silver, and purchase that if it is priced far enough below current spot silver prices.


Recently, we found three coin silver forks stamped "H.Hotchkiss" on the back. Although they came from a sort of open air antique store, and they were not giving them away, they were priced below their value because they were not stamped "sterling". It took me a while to I.D. the maker, but I finally figured out that these were made in Buffalo by the jeweler and silversmith Hiram Hotchkiss. There is not a ton of information about him readily available on the internet, but I did find the address of his shop in Buffalo, and that is the very building you now own.


Although I like the forks, and knew that had value just from the silver in them which should continue to appreciate, I had always planned to resell them. I made some inquiries with East Coast antique dealers who specialize in coin silver. The few people I spoke with were not familiar enough with H. Hotchkiss stuff to want to make me an offer without seeing them. Living on the Big Island of Hawaii, I can't just hop in the car and take them around to show.


I wondered if you might be interested in purchasing them. They certainly seem to belong with your house, and you probably know more about Hiram Hotchkiss by now than almost anyone. I am sure that you have done your own research about him and have collected information about him from people in the Buffalo area.


Each fork weighs 50 grams. Being coin silver, which is 90% pure, they contain 4.3 troy ounces total of actual silver. I would be happy to sell them for their current melt value, which is $135.00 for the three. Of course I could sell them to a scrapper, but that would be a shame, especially since Hiram Hotchkiss silverware seems fairly rare and regionalized. Undoubtedly, their value as antiques is more than their silver value, but they are sure to go up in value as silver goes back up.


If this offer is at all interesting to you, feel free to write back or contact me through my business. To provide assurance that this is not a scam, we can run the transaction through an Ebay auction. I am also willing to ship the forks to you before receiving payment.


I buy and sell random things as a hobby, outside of my real work as a hot tub dealer. In addition to the small amount of money this generates, I get a lot of satisfaction out of making connections and matching things with people at a good price. i tell my wife that there is "someone for every thing" . I think these forks were (almost literally ) made for you, and they are an investment you can enjoy.


Let me know what you think. I'll send more pictures upon request.


Sincerely,


Lars Carlson
Hilo, Hawaii

Blue-hoo!

 

It is hard to equal the excitement of Dyngus Day but would you believe it, we have done it:

Howard's building, Big Blue, was featured in artwork at Nichols School!

I walked down the block with my friend Lizzie last night to the Flickinger Performing Arts Center to hear Chanticleer. They are a singing group from San Francisco. Wow, I was just having fun writing today in my massive and fascinating Pennario biography about Leonard Pennario playing in San Francisco, with the conductor Pierre Monteux, how about that? Plus my brother George just flew back from San Francisco.

My life is suddenly all about San Francisco!

Back to Big Blue. Lizzie and I were wandering around on break looking at pictures and we saw the picture up above. We stopped, agog.

That is Big Blue in the middle! In the exact center of the picture. I have taken art classes so I know that must mean something, that Big Blue is exactly in the center of this cityscape. Surely the artist intended some symbolism.

Here is an un-retouched picture of Big Blue if you need to be reminded what it looks like. I do not have to be reminded, I will tell you that right now.

In the picture at the top, the artist elongated the building somewhat, giving it even greater importance. I love that.

Art imitates life!

Life imitates Big Blue!

I married a nut

Last night I took pictures of Howard relaxing on the lawn at Big Blue, our property on Delaware Avenue. There he is above enjoying a late-night cigar.

Remember, that is the ashtray I scored at the Hinzes' garage sale.

Another view which shows our Pink Flamingo, which turned out to be a present from neighbors across the street at Homeland Security.


Here is a picture looking south down the avenue toward Niagara Square.


We paid an arm and a leg at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society to get pictures of Big Blue as it used to look so here is one. Big Blue is directly behind the tree in the middle of the picture.


How times have changed! Now Big Blue stands alone. Here it is the other day when Howard was getting stuff delivered.

Michael Gainer and company from Buffalo Reuse delivering 600 pound stone fireplace mantel yesterday.

Now it is time to stop thinking about Big Blue and go back to thinking about Leonard Pennario. Very much work to do today and I must get to it. No holiday weekend for me!

Well, there is time for one more picture. Here is something Howard bought this week that I am excited about. It is a pedestal sink!


It is for me! For my powder room. When Big Blue is complete.

That day will come!

I have a dream

It would not be the morning without my taking a solemn vow that today is the day I get some exercise. So here goes:

Today is the day I get some exercise!

It has been something like a week. I am turning into a schuft! And lastnight I made pork roast and ate it. Including the fat because I am German and I cannot help it. I will have to find out what "Oink" is in German because that is what I am saying today.

And as usual I start my day behind the eight ball.

At midnight lastnight I was still on the phone with the mysterious Mr. Idaho. He is the pianist in Idaho I have become friends with as a result of writing my book about Leonard Pennario.

Mr. Idaho and I have gotten to the point where we speak freely.

"Horowitz was not half the artist that Pennario was," he said once. That is the spirit! Plus it is the truth. I am sorry, but it is.

Mr. Idaho asked for my address because he wants to send me a video of him performing. He told me my address was like something out of a movie. Note to out-of-towners: In Buffalo even our normal addresses sound like something out of a movie. Life here is like that.

I am anxious to see a video of Mr. Idaho performing because I would like to know what he looks like. When I refer to him as the mysterious Mr. Idaho I am not kidding. There is something about him I do not have a handle on. I would like to see what he looks like and one day I would like to meet him, too. Perhaps one day Howard and I will journey to Idaho and we will meet with Mr. Idaho and his girlfriend in front of a roaring fire drinking goblets of red wine. That is what I imagine. I have never been to Idaho but I think that is what people do there.

This all makes me think of a daydream I have.

At Pennario's funeral it was odd, seeing people come to life whom I had known only as names. Now I imagine having a convention of all the people I have talked to for my book. I imagine us all meeting each other, talking about this great artist who drew us together. It would be a surreal occasion!

Maybe we could gather at Big Blue. The inside of the place is not up to it but the terrace is not too bad. The terrace of Big Blue is painted bright orange and red. It has a kind of Spanish look. Once in the summer I had a group of reporters from work over for a happy hour on the terrace. We have actually entertained there.

Photo taken by our fallen "502" soldier, Jay.

So that is where we could convene: Mr. Idaho, Pennario's old flame Diane, and Diane's sister Eleana, when she gets back from Antarctica. And we would also have to have beautiful Doris who would flirt with Pennario backstage and once sat all night on Frank Sinatra's lap. And Chuck and Susan from Honolulu, and Pennario's cousin Liz, another person with whom I have long, late-night conversations. And the great cellist Lynn Harrell. And you know who else I would like to invite? The pianist Seymour Lipkin. I had a great conversation with him one Saturday morning when I was in my pajamas drinking coffee. Seymour Lipkin's picture was with Pennario's and 10 other pianists on the cover of the November 1958 Steinway News. They were the only ones in formal white tie.

That is a picture of Byron Janis up above. He was on that cover and he is not wearing white tie! What is up with that?

What about Byron Brown?


Byron Brown could be at the party, too. Seeing that City Hall is right across the street from Big Blue we would be happy to have him.

Anyway, all of us, musicians and non-musicians, old and young, Jew and gentile, gay and straight, would all mix and mingle and enjoy finding out what each other looked like. And we would celebrate this marvelous man, this miracle of nature named Leonard Pennario, who was the center of so much. There would be a rightness about it, all of us gathered in the town of his birth.

I am looking forward to that.

Beady little eyes at Big Blue

Midnight on Halloween we shall pry open this mysterious
door at Big Blue and discover its horrible contents.
Click image for full sized yuck.

That was a historic debate lastnight between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. It was historic in that I stayed awake. I accomplished this through not sitting up in bed, not lying down. Eventually I lay down and then I promptly fell asleep. Howard just said, "You slept through the whole thing." But I didn't! I heard about half of it.

I am not saying the debate was boring. The trouble was, a few hours before I had dinner over at my friend Gary's house with lounge sensation Guy Boleri. Guy was drinking White Zin. That is what lounge sensations drink. But Gary and I sampled our homemade Barbera from '06 which was a very good year. Too good a year, so let's just say that by the time the debate rolled around, I was sleepy. Plus, as usual, I was up before dawn, working on this chapter about Leonard Pennario's three years in the Air Force. I have been having the best time with this chapter. I love how Pennario goes through life.

Bottom line: I cannot be awake for both Leonard Pennario and Sarah Palin. My day is not big enough for both of them.

But here's what bugs me this morning. You do not have to hear the debate to know exactly what the media will be saying about it.

Guess what: The NBC and CNN polls favor Biden. BIG surprise!

These pollsters have lost all credibility with me. They simply lie. Well, enough about politics. This October I am telling a spooky story every day and now it is time for today's.

This concerns the bat at Big Blue.

Howard was at Big Blue one night when a bat flew into the Blue Room. It did orbits all around the room, whipping right past Howard's nose. Then it flew to the center of the room and just hung there, upside down, looking at him.

Howard does a great imitation of the bat's face, of its beady little eyes. Big Blue is home to a number of bats, we believe. But that is the only one that decided to be sociable. To be honest, I do not get the idea that Howard minded that much. It is refreshing to know that in the middle of downtown, practically right across from Buffalo City Hall, is a place where bats live.

Once when Howard was in the cellar a cat came out of nowhere. That is another spooky story. You get two today, for the price of one! That was right as soon as he bought the place and there was no electricity turned on yet. "And it was in the deepest bowels," he says.

The cellar of Big Blue is a very spooky place with walls made out of stone, untouched since the days of the Civil War, and a very weird crawl space, about three feet tall and full of coal ash. We bet there are bodies in there. It is just a feeling we have.

Tomorrow I will tell a creepy story that happened further down Delaware Avenue -- near Delaware and Utica, on the site of the Jetsons building. Where Ruth Killeen has her penthouse.

That is the story of the haunted elevator shaft. It is true and it is worth waiting for.

Same bat time, same bat channel!

Blue horizons

Smoking room.

One thing that's fun about getting up early is that I am usually the first on the computer and I get to see what Howard was looking at the night before.

This morning I see that he was on Google searching for "smoking room mansion."

Does this mean we are going to have a smoking room at Big Blue? I don't smoke but I do not mind the idea. Howard was doing his search on Google Images and you should see the images he found. Unbelievable antebellum mansions against blue skies, surrounded by acres of lush lawns. The text fragments beneath the photos are even better. ".. the smoking room is straight ahead..." "Relax in the library or smoking room." "The first-class smoking room was..." And this is the best: ".. the statue in the smoking room..."

I have not mentioned Big Blue in a while so if you're new here, Big Blue is the big ol' white elephant from the 1860s, surrounded by acres of parking lots, that Howard bought downtown off Niagara Square. Did I say white elephant? I meant to say blue elephant. It was painted blue originally and now he has stripped the bricks so it is red again. Brick by brick. That is the way the Apostles were told to operate and that is how Howard, being of the same lineage, operates too. By our latest calculations Big Blue will be done by the year 2050.

Yesterday a woman named Melissa Foster whom I have not met yet but who reads the blog called and told me that she and her husband had bought a Big Blue in Kenmore. That surprised and delighted me. It made me wonder if the phrase "Big Blue" is going to become a synonym for an old building someone ill-advisedly bought. I would love that!

Melissa's Big Blue is a sprawling old house that they had been worried about because it seemed to be forlorn and without a future. That is a sign you own a bona fide Big Blue: Did you buy it because you were worried about it? Worry is frequently the major inspiration in the purchase of a Big Blue.

Another sign is if number one, people ask what you are going to do with it, and number two, you have no idea.

I am interested in the life of any fellow Leonard Pennario fan, which Melissa must be if she reads this blog. So I got the location of Melissa's Big Blue so I can do a drive-by and check it out. When I do, I will post a photo.

Meanwhile, I rejoice that she called it a Big Blue! One day, who knows, This Old House magazine will be renamed This Old Big Blue. Home Depot will have specials for the Big Blue in You. And everyone will have forgotten that Big Blue ever referred to ... what was that company again?

On that day we will celebrate down by Niagara Square, in the original Big Blue.

We will convene by the statue in the smoking room.

Batman and Robbins

Downtown Gotham last night.

After Howard took me out to Jocko lastnight I forgave him his ignoring of my artisan bread and his consumption of the Wegmans sub. Well, I am still working on forgiving him the sub. But after another trip to Jocko that should be OK.

If he didn't butter up the bread, at least he is buttering me up. And it is working!

Jocko played us "Midnight on the Cliffs" in honor of Leonard Pennario. Afterwards, Howard took pictures of the Liberty Building, Big Blue and the full moon. (See above. Big Blue is in foreground.) Buffalo has an unusual skyline, as we discussed a while ago. Lastnight we were thinking it looked like a set for "Batman."

Speaking of which, look at Howard's comment the other day about keeping company with a bat! Howard is Bat Man!

And there is a Haydn manuscript in Big Blue.

There has to be. I am sure of it. Last week I had lunch with Chuck and Kay Martina, old friends of Leonard Pennario. Kay gave me a sheaf of old newspaper clippings to look at from The Buffalo News. One was a book review of.. I forget what, because what really caught my eye was a story on the other side.

It was an interview with the musicologist H. C. Robbins Landon. He is famous for his research on Mozart -- I read all his Mozart books when I was a kid -- but he also did a ton of research on Haydn. He had a lot to do with all the Haydn that is played these days. The interview talks about how he found excuses to knock around Austria and Germany after World War II, so he could dig up all these old manuscripts.

Landon seems to have been a great interview. He has a very gritty way of talking. When he's talking about releasing the first recording of Haydn's "The Creation," he recalls seeing: "hard-bitten New York s.o.b.'s with tears streaming down their faces." And I liked this: "I had been admitted to go to Harvard and get my Ph.D., and I thought this over, and I said I'm not going to do it. I'll get myself into the army here so I can stay in Austria and get my hot little hands on those manuscripts. Harvard was insulted beyond belief. Nobody had ever said, 'I'm not going to come.'"

Ha, ha! I like anyone who insults Harvard. Anyway, Landon goes looking for those manuscripts, and he finds them in buildings -- well, like Big Blue.

"All over Austria -- the Frankenstein-Dracula country -- there are these really spectacular, dank, frightening castles that have Haydn manuscripts," he says. "One of them is called Harburg -- that's in Bavaria, and you can see the bats swarming out of it sometimes -- and it has a huge collection of Haydn."

I am not sure that Austria would be considered Frankenstein-Dracula country. I think that is Transylvania in ... Romania, wouldn't that be?

But I am sure that there must be Haydn in Big Blue. I mean, look at the place, in the picture above. All the signs are there. The bats. The dank and frightening aspects. Well, in the basement anyway. And the third floor.

I am thinking the third floor is where the Haydn is hidin'.

I am going to go in with a flashlight.