My wife is aging before my eyes. Not physically, of course, but mentally. She’s clearly concerned about the years taking a toll on her brain, because she’s taken up bridge. I’ve got nothing against the game of bridge. It’s the perfect activity — for old people. My grandmother played bridge. And then she died. “You are way too young to be playing bridge,” I said to my wife last week as she headed off for her weekly lesson.

Michael Deni of Geographer performs at the Fillmore in San Francisco. The musician is relocating to Los Angeles in August. Michael Deni of Geographer gave his last concert as a San Franciscan at the Fillmore. San Francisco is about to lose another good one. Michael Deni, the musician who records and performs under the moniker Geographer, played his last concert as a local in front of a sold-out crowd at the Fillmore on Saturday, July 28.

Who was Ernst Lubitsch? To the converted, Lubitsch is a cinema god. He’s the genius behind such comic masterpieces as “Trouble in Paradise” (1932), “The Shop Around the Corner” (1940) and “To Be or Not to Be” (1942). Those of us who admire him spend a good chunk of time puzzling breathlessly over how he did what he did, how he made such sexy, smart and fluid films. Alfred Hitchcock called him “a man of pure cinema.

This may have been the best week in the history of Western civilization for women’s athletics starting when Steffi Graf played Venus Williams in an insanely great rain-punctuated quarterfinal match at Wimbledon that produced some of the most brain-boggling tennis ever seen. Venus Williams is an astonishing athlete not yet in her prime; Steffi Graf is an astonishing athlete just past her prime.

When a note from professional pianist Joshua Raoul Brody popped up in my inbox, with a subject line referencing a column preferring Flower Piano amateurs to Flower Piano pros, I winced. “I am one of the scheduled piano players to whom you gave only medium-sized shrift, as compared with the praise you heaped upon the walk-ups,” he began. I hunkered down, ready to be scolded. But “I am totally with you in that,” he wrote.

There’s a relationship between the writer and the reader. Some have glanced at this column once and decided they don’t want to read anything more about the crazy quilt family in the bedlam bungalow in the outer outer outer outer Excelsior. And there are those of you who read week after week, silent witnesses to this pilgrimage we call family. We tell you the story and the telling changes you and it changes us.

I know this space gets nauseatingly nostalgic sometimes, so I apologize in advance for doing it again. I’ll just come right out and say it — I miss Flipper. Anyone older than 60 knows what I’m talking about.

Seven years after the disappearance of KUSF, the pioneering college station, a rockin’ semblance of it has materialized. It’s KXSF-LP (Low Power), which is planned to debut this month at 102.5 FM with the intention of bringing back the kind of indie music and community radio that KUSF, based at the University of San Francisco, provided for three decades before the university sold the station’s frequency to the owner of classical KDFC early in 2011.

With brooding ‘80s hits like “The Ghost in You” and “Love My Way,” the Psychedelic Furs were one of the most influential British acts of the postpunk era. The band left a mark on everyone from the Killers to Tame Impala. But frontman Richard Butler says he recoiled when the Furs went mainstream via “Pretty in Pink,” the song that inspired the John Hughes film of the same name.

In 1950, Nurse Vivian gave birth to Brother Not X, nine months and 11 days after her wedding. Her mother-in-law, Grandma Sadie, counted each and every one of those last 11 days to make sure that her grandson was legitimate. They named him Harold, after his father. Two years later, Nurse Vivian gave birth to Brother X. For most of the ’50s the family thrived in South Ozone Park, except for the fact that Nurse Vivian still wanted a baby girl.