Andy Rooney didn’t begin his show-ending monologues until 1978 when it replaced the Point/Counterpoint segment featuring Shana Alexander and James Kilpatrick. I didn’t take much notice of Rooney until I was a teenager in the 1980s and had taken an interest in writing and journalism and harbored dreams of being a newspaper opinion columnist. Rooney personified the folksy, grumpy, common-sense curmudgeon and could make you roll your eyes, but sometimes could also make you wish you’d just said what he said.

In the years I watched him hold forth on subjects as varied as chairs, the Super Bowl, the job of the US Presidency, umbrellas, ice cream cones, barbers, and the random items found in people’s backpacks, I had always wanted him to do a segment on books.

It seemed an obvious Rooney segment. Always touched with a gift for making a larger point to say about something small from his own experience, I just knew that one day he would finally get around to giving TV viewers a tour of the bookshelf behind his desk. Years passed and it never came, and yet my curiosity persisted. Finally in 2007, working late one night in my office at BusinessWeek I wrote a short email to 60 Minutes with the subject line “For Andy Rooney”:

Dear Andy,

I’ve watched your segments on “60 Minutes” every Sunday since I was a very young kid. I didn’t always get what you were saying, but I got enough to know that I liked you. It probably had something to do with me getting into the media business myself.

All these years you’ve talked about the silly things that people send you, your junk mail, the mess on your desk, the stuff you find in your attic and other curiously revealing trivia. But I’ve always wanted to know more about what we see in the background behind you every week: Your bookshelf.

When I visit someone’s home I sometimes find it interesting, if I can do it politely, to peek at what’s on their bookshelf. You’ve been inviting me and millions of other people into your office for years. As someone who like you, values the written word and the simple pleasure of reading a great book, I’m curious about what’s on that bookshelf of yours and why. I doubt it’s junk, and I’m certain it would be revealing. How about a little tour?

I’m certain Rooney never read that email, and though I can’t prove it, I’m betting his producer did. Because two months later, Rooney closed the April 22, 2007 edition of 60 Minutes with a segment that included a few of his favorite books (Link goes to the video, which is not embeddable). They were: three dictionaries; a heavily used edition of Modern English Usage by Henry Watson Fowler. Walter Lippman’s A Preface To Morals; four leather-bound volumes by Charles Darwin; and the fifth edition of The Modern Researcher by Jacques Barzum and Henry Graff, also heavily used.

Over the years of watching I noticed two others, one I recognized because I own it, and one I recognized because I knew of it. The one I own, and which is plainly visible in Rooney’s final commentary is Russell Baker’s The Good Times, a memoir of Baker’s years as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun and columnist for The New York Times, often neglected in favor or his better-known personal autobiography Growing Up. The other, which I know by reputation is Words on Words by the late, legendary journalism professor John Bremner.

Two years later I got the chance to meet Rooney. The occasion was the 2009 Deadline Club Awards dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. I was a finalist in the science and technology reporting category, for a series of stories I wrote for BusinessWeek.com called “Unconnected America,” which examined how the lack of access to broadband Internet connections affected people in various walks of life and in different places. I lost out to a Time Magazine cover story, “The Clean Energy Myth.”

There was, before the banquet, a cocktail party lasting an hour or so, and Rooney happened to be there. And I noticed that my then-colleague, BusinessWeek writer David Kiley was talking to him rather enthusiastically at a set of chairs surrounding a table, as if he knew him well. It turns out he did, so ventured over to where they were sitting and waited for a chance to introduce myself.

It came. I told him about the letter I had written him and before I could get to the part of his segment on books, he cut me off.

“And I didn’t write back, right?”

“No, but I didn’t expect you to,” I said. Then I told him about the segment on books, and that I had always been curious about them because I had been watching so long. “Since I was a kid,” I said.

“Well how old are you?” I was 38 at the time, but my answer was “I’m not quite 40.”

At this he got a little indignant. He called across the table to a female friend he referred to by her last name — I didn’t catch it. “You’re really 39? Hey, do you believe this guy is 39?” he said to her.

“If he is he’s very lucky,” she said to him and grinned at me.

Then he looked back at me. “Well you look older.”

I couldn’t argue with that. And I couldn’t help but smile at having been insulted by Andy Rooney.

John Lennon’s birthday was today. As we’ve done several times over the years we’ve observed the occasion at Strawberry Fields, the memorial near the Dakota Apartments which are generally remembered for two things: Being used as the setting for the film Rosemary’s Baby, and as the home of John and Yoko from 1973 on. As this would have marked his 70th year, the crowds at the annual singalong tribute were tremendous. Maggie and I stood near the center of the action for about four hours. She took several pictures of the people we encountered there, some of whom we’ve come to know from prior events.

Between songs people would often call out suggestions for the next song they thought should be sung. Several times I heard this tiny voice behind me calling out “Revolution 9.” It was from an eight-year-old boy, which I found entertaining given his age and the fact that this song is about the least-accessible, and utterly un-singable track of The Beatles’ catalog. Who knew eight-year-olds had developed a sense of irony? He had, I learned, become exposed to The Beatles by way of a video game, which says a lot about how media consumption habits have changed since I was that age.

His gag got me thinking about the song, and about a bootleg recording I had recently heard that’s been making the rounds on the Web called “Revolution 1 (Take 20).” It’s a 10-minute track that bridges the musical gap between the slower version of the familiar hit “Revolution” that appeared on “The White Album” and the freakier “Revolution 9.”

This newly discovered version finally shows that the two Revolutions were, at least at one point, one. It is contained on a bootleg album called “Revolution: Take Your Knickers Off” that started circulating earlier this year. There is, between them a certain music logic, as you will hear in the track below. I have no idea why this track didn’t appear in final volume of the Anthology collection though perhaps its very existence was unknown at the time. The story goes that there were only two copies, one that left the studio with Lennon on the day he worked on it, and one remained in the studio. It’s not clear which one this is. Perhaps it could be packaged with that ultimate of Beatles rarities, “Carnival of Light.” So without further delay,  here’s “Revolution 1 (Take 20)” via “Never Get Out Of The Boat.”

01 Revolution 1 (Take 20) by NGOOTB

And here, courtesy of Wolfgang’s Vault, is a 1980 radio interview with Lennon, recorded as he was mixing “Double Fantasy.”

Finally, an audio curiosity I happen to have. This is taken from a John Lennon’s actual birthday party held in a Syracuse, New York hotel room on Oct. 9 1971. In attendance were:  Yoko Ono, Ringo Starr, Phil Spector, Eric Clapton, Klaus Voorman, Allen Ginsberg, Jim Keltner, Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall. It seemed appropriate to include here.

As you may or may not know, SETI stands for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Life. And the project involves a few million people donating the use of their computer when they’re not using it, to the analysis of data taken from radio telescopes. This is something that used to be handled by supercomputers, and usually on the US Government’s nickel, that is until funding was cut in the mid-1990s. Those radio telescopes are basically listening for any hint of radio signals from somewhere else in the universe — that is evidence of intelligent life.

It’s one of those big questions that people ponder from time-to-time: Are we alone in the universe? I first began to think about it seriously when I was eight or nine. I read “The Star Wars Question And Answer Book About Space” cover-to-cover several times. It contained a section on radio astronomy that was rather sophisticated for a kid’s book. Among other things it covered a basic explanation — but notably no illustration — of the Arecibo Message sent to the star cluster M13 located 25,000 light-years away. It also included sections on the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, and the golden record placed on the Voyager probes, but for obvious reasons, no pictures of the message engraved on the Pioneer plaques.

By the time I was 12 or 13 I had a subscription to Discover Magazine, had seen the film ET, and had also watched much of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on public television. The March 1983 issue of Discover had Sagan on its cover, trumpeting the launch of a new effort to search seriously for life in space. (Summary of the issue here.) Within its pages I first learned about Frank Drake who predicted that we would find intelligent life by 2000, and was first exposed to the concept of a von Neumann space probe. It arrived in the mail on a day when I was home sick from school, and I devoured it, learning more from it than I probably did in any science class I would take.

In his TV series, Sagan made an argument (which I now know was borrowed in part from Drake) that fascinated me. When you consider the number of stars in the galaxy, which is about 400 billion, the chance that there’s life out there, and that it’s intelligent isn’t unspeakably far-fetched, but by a reasonable stretch of argument, plausible. (Though Sagan’s own math is off on one point: In the clip below he says our solar system has 10 planets, when the accepted orthodoxy at the time was nine. It’s now eight. In the early 80s, when Cosmos was made, Pluto was still considered a planet, rather than a Kuiper Belt Object. Thank you, International Astronomical Union.)

In any event, the thought that I could help out in even a small way with the effort of finding a signal from somewhere out there, however remote the chance of success, has kept me mildly entertained these 10 years. As of today my computers have contributed 229,235 work units, comprised of 198.06 quadrillion floating point operations to the effort. (That’s 198,060,000,000,000,000 or an average of 54.2 trillion operations per day.) Plus I’ve earned credit for another 3,053 work units under the original “classic” SETI@Home program, which works out to 33,319 hours of computing time.

By SETI@Home standards, my numbers aren’t impressive. I rank somewhere at about 38,000th place among its base of users. A team I’m involved with, SETI.USA, has a few members who have reported more than 10 million work units, and many more who have stats north of the 1 million and half-million mark. I’ve never been quite as disciplined about keeping my machines running the program as I might have been. But when I learned that the 10-year anniversary of my participation was coming up, I had hoped to push my machines to the point of having finished 250,000 units, and have paid close attention to my progress in recent weeks. I have four computers running SETI@Home: Three at home, including my newly purchased MacBook Pro, and one at the office which runs it only when I’m not there. Obviously I didn’t hit the goal I had hoped for, but will probably see that number before the end of the summer.

I was interested to see the video below of a talk by SETI’s chief scientist Dan Werthimer, and for once to see a face on the other end of the SETI@home process. It’s been fun to have been a small part of the biggest supercomputer on the planet and the largest computation that’s ever been done. Still, no signals yet.

During the intervening years, Prine has battled throat cancer, the treatment of which has changed his voice, released four albums, and won a trophy case full of awards, including a Lifetime Achievement award from the BBC, and been inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

I came upon Prine by happenstance in 1992. He appeared on the duet track “If You Were The Woman, And I Were The Man” opposite Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies on that group’s album “Black Eyed Man.” They toured toured together that year, and among their stops was one at the Hult Center for the Performing Arts in Eugene, Oregon where I was at the time attending college. I got tickets, and attended with a friend, and was prepared to leave after the Cowboy Junkies had finished, but was convinced to stay.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Prine’s show, and quickly realized that most of the people in the audience were there not to see the Cowboy Junkies, but to see him. It was my first exposure to the Prine standards like “Big Ol’ Goofy World” and “Dear Abby.” What I didn’t yet know was that I was seeing a performance by an honest-to-goodness national treasure of the American folk songbook.

A few years after seeing that show, at the suggestion of yet another friend, I started exploring more of Prine’s work and became a devoted fan. I learned that if you peel back the outer skin of the often catchy, funny, self-effacing, working-class songs, you find work of uncommon emotional complexity expressed in an unambiguous manner. In “Blue Umbrella” he comtemplates the state of being emotionally overwhelmed by a relationship gone wrong beyond repair. He tackles false patriotism in “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” a song which can’t help but evoke memories of Country Joe McDonald.

While it’s easy to dismiss Prine’s early work, in particular his 1971 self-titled debut, as intended to be cheap knock-off of Bob Dylan. Casual contemporary observers remember him as “the guy who was supposed to be the next Dylan.” His trajectory from Army vet to postal worker, to open-mic night regular in a Chicago nightclub is well known, as is his discovery by Kris Kristofferson,  made him seem a good candidate for the adjective “Dylanesque.”

Songs like “Sam Stone” sound today as though a record executive told Prine to “do it like Dylan.” Despite its whiny, Dylan-as-hayseed delivery, the subject of the song was cutting edge for 1971. The Vietnam War was entering its closing phase, and a song about a heroin-addicted veteran having difficulty returning to civilian life was something not widely addressed. With “Sam Stone” Prine raised an issue that would not be on the national legislative agenda for another three years, nor firmly established within the popular culture for another seven. The song went on to be covered by no less an American icon as Johnny Cash.

But over time, Prine’s voice of occasional political protest gave way to songs about the emotional indignities of life, expressed in ways that anyone can understand, but which aren’t always easy to put into words. Take the bittersweet “Souvenirs,” a meditation on growing older, or the loving recollection of his grandfather in “Grandpa Was A Carpenter.” Love and relationships, with their relevant pains and joys, as in “Gold Inside Of You” and the peculiarities of intra-couple humor as in “In Spite Of Ourselves,” are constant themes of his work. “Paradise” sounds like it came from the pen of Woody Guthrie.

The performance was excellent, and I was especially happy that Maggie came along as she has endured hearing me talk about Prine for several years. Given her sophisticated and multi-faceted taste for music  — she was the one who first introduced me to the work of Tom Waits — I had really wanted her to come away appreciating Prine.

Like me, she had discovered some of his work by accident. At the DEMO Conference in 2005, we attended the Jam Session party at the close of the first day and slow-danced to a rendition of “Angel From Montgomery.” She became a fan of the song, and was surprised to learn it had been written by the man about whom I had over the years been an occasional nudnik . At Friday’s show she especially liked the spare charm of “Six O’Clock News” and Prine’s standard concert-closing number “Lake Marie,” where he lets loose with the electric guitar, and nods more toward his love of rock, while telling a wide-ranging historical and personal narrative. I have to say I agree with her on that note. On the subdued John Prine scale, “Lake Marie” is a musical epic, and in this performance it lasted 12 minutes.

Prine was backed only by two other musicians variously adding electric guitar, mandolin, and bass fiddle. At times, he appeared solo with only his acoustic guitar. Yet he proved that his simple approach can be suitable for so grand a venue as The Beacon Theater without the assistance of any elaborate performance tricks. His achingly direct delivery, propelled by the power of a heart filled with genuine emotion, to me, was enough to fill the room.

I must admit that in recent years lost some of my interest in Prine. I didn’t think much of his 1999 release of duets “In Spite Of Ourselves,” — it was a little too conventionally country-fied for me — and had concluded that Prine’s best work was behind him. In 2000 he followed with “Souvenirs” in which, post-cancer, he re-records his earlier and best-known work. When he bowed “Fair and Square” in 2005, I presumed there couldn’t possibly be anything on it to write home about, and skipped it without much thought.

How wrong I was. Prine is still writing quality songs. As evidence I submit the gentle “She Is My Everything,” the sunny “Glory Of True Love,” and the rollicking “Bear Creek Blues.” He even nods to political and social commentary in “Some Humans Ain’t Human.” In 2006 “Fair And Square” won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. I’m even enjoying “Standard Songs For Average People.” Clearly, Prine isn’t done with us yet.

I’d say the world needs more John Prines in it, but given the the volume of his output over the years, one has so far proven to be enough.

Below are two samples taken from the performance. The first is his Prine’s well-known “Angel from Montgomery”; the second is “That’s The Way That The World Goes Round.”