Salem is full of New Age and Wyccan shoppes and it has an overabundance of "museums" that are more wax museum than serious repositories of history&#151;heck, the place even has a statue of Elizabeth Montgomery in her role as Samantha on <I>Bewitched</I>. But it also has the Salem Witchcraft Trials Tercentenary Memorial.

I walked over to Giles Corey's cenotaph&#151;he is of course, the sole "witch" not hung, but rather pressed to death by heaping large rocks upon him until he was crushed. It took three days. As Arthur Miller memorialized in The Crucible, his last words were, "More weight."

After the driving was complete, Bentley got us an after-hours tour of the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum. Nice place&#151;especially if your taste runs to Venetian Renaissance palazzos filled with fine art. The tour was eye opening and afterwards we retired to the cloisters for adult beverages and a catered affair, complete with chamber music in the courtyard.

In the 1970s, a small black-and-white ad sometimes ran in the pages of Playboy magazine. The ad pictured an attractive young woman with lots of disheveled hair and a crooked grin. There was little else to the ad other than the headline, which the reader would assume was being spoken by the model: "It takes more than Martinis to build an image, Mister!"

Today is/was/forever will be remembered as: <a href="http://www.stereophile.com/news/11713/index.html">Vinyl Record Day</a>. August 12th, the day Thomas Edison blessed us with the phonograph.