The first post is a bit late today because of kerfuffles at Botany Pond: a lot of itinerant drakes and hens have stopped by and interrupted feeding. There is much chasing and splashing, but nobody got hurt.
The end of the work-from-home week is upon us: it’s Friday, June 12, 2020, and National Peanut Butter Cookie Day. It’s also National Jerky Day, Loving Day (the day in 1967 when, in the case of Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme court unanimously struck down all laws in the country banning marriage between people of different races), Superman Day, Red Rose Day, and World Day Against Child Labour.
Yesterday’s crowdsourcing of opinion on whether I should leave my hair long (but get it neatened up), or go back to shorter hair, was almost a tie. So now I have no consensus to go by.
News of the Day: It’s all grim as the virus ravages America, people are worried about second spikes, a vaccine appears to be a long way off, if ever, and America, engaged in painful conversations about race, is more divided than ever. At least Trump appears headed for defeat, but who knows what will happen between now and November?
Today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 113,974 , an increase of about 900 from yesterday (the increase in deaths in our country appears to be slowing). The world toll now stands at 421,307, a one-day increase of about 5,000 from the day before (the death rate, at least as reported, seems to be holding steady and not increasing).
Stuff that happened on June 12 includes:
- 1429 – Hundred Years’ War: On the second day of the Battle of Jargeau, Joan of Arc leads the French army in their capture of the city and the English commander, William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk.
- 1775 – American Revolution: British general Thomas Gage declares martial law in Massachusetts. The British offer a pardon to all colonists who lay down their arms. There would be only two exceptions to the amnesty: Samuel Adams and John Hancock, if captured, were to be hanged.
- 1776 – The Virginia Declaration of Rights is adopted.
This document, drafted largely by James Madison and George Mason, has a marked similarity to the Declaration of Independence, drafted later that year, and of course influenced it.
- 1817 – The earliest form of bicycle, the dandy horse, is driven by Karl von Drais.
Here’s a “dandy horse” from 1820. It’s the adult equivalent of scooters, except that the rider sat on it and pushed with both feet. I’m not sure if this is a marked improvement on walking!
- 1939 – The Baseball Hall of Fame opens in Cooperstown, New York.
- 1942 – Anne Frank receives a diary for her thirteenth birthday.
Anne actually wrote more than her diary, including a redacted version that she intended to publish after the war (she died, of course, before that happened).
- 1963 – NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers is murdered in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi by Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith during the civil rights movement.
- 1964 – Anti-apartheid activist and ANC leader Nelson Mandela is sentenced to life in prison for sabotage in South Africa.
- 1967 – The United States Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia declares all U.S. state laws which prohibit interracial marriage to be unconstitutional.
- 1987 – Cold War: At the Brandenburg Gate, U.S. President Ronald Reagan publicly challenges Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.
Here’s a short clip of that famous challenge; it was two years later that the Communist hegemony in Eastern Europe began crumbling:
- 1994 – Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman are murdered outside Simpson’s home in Los Angeles. Her estranged husband, O.J. Simpson is later charged with the murders, but is acquitted by a jury.
- 2007 – Analog television stations (excluding low-powered stations) switch to digital television following the DTV Delay Act.
- 2016 – Forty-nine civilians are killed and 58 others injured in an attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida; the gunman, Omar Mateen, is killed in a gunfight with police.
- 2017 – American student Otto Warmbier returns home in a coma after spending 17 months in a North Korean prison and dies a week later.
Notables born on this day include:
- 1890 – Egon Schiele, Austrian soldier and painter (d. 1918)
- 1897 – Anthony Eden, English soldier and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1977)
- 1899 – Fritz Albert Lipmann, German-American biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1986)
- 1899 – Weegee, Ukrainian-American photographer and journalist (d. 1968)
- 1929 – Anne Frank, German-Dutch diarist; victim of the Holocaust (d. 1945)
Here’s the original Dutch edition, from 1947, of Anne Frank’s Diary. Note that the title in Dutch means “The Annex”, which of course is where Anne and her family hid:
- 1933 – Eddie Adams, American photographer and journalist (d. 2004)
Adams’s most famous photo, the execution of a Viet Cong prisoner by a shot in the head from South Vietnamese general Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, can be seen here; it won Adams a Pulitzer Prize and galvanized American sentiment against the war. Here’s the aftermath:
Those who relinquished their ghost on June 12 include:
- 1963 – Medgar Evers, American soldier and activist (b. 1925)
- 1972 – Edmund Wilson, American critic, essayist, and editor (b. 1895)
- 1982 – Karl von Frisch, Austrian-German ethologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1886)
- 2003 – Gregory Peck, American actor and political activist (b. 1916)
- 2016 – Omar Mateen, American mass murderer (b. 1986)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is enigmatic:
Hili: I fully agree.A: What do you agree with?Hili: Not with what but who whom. I agree with those who agree with me.
Hili: Całkowicie się zgadzam.
Ja: Z czym się zgadzasz?
Hili: Nie z czym, tylko z kim. Zgadzam się z tymi, którzy zgadzają się ze mną.
Reader Charles sent this tweet from Mike Pence with an acrid observation:
Just how deeply sunk in faith-based stupidity are these idiots?
I know they want to destroy our democracy, but can’t do a better job of it if they stay healthy?
Yesterday Vice President Mike Pence deleted a tweet showing the Trump campaign staff ignoring coronavirus safety recommendations. About 50 people stuffed together with no masks.
A meme from Bruce Thiel:
From Jesus of the Day. This post was absolutely made for me!
Billboard top 10, week of June 17, 1967, when I’d just finished high school (yes, there are a few dogs here, but even so . . . and three of these are great classics).
Billboard top 10, this week (none of them will be remembered in 50 years). Who wouldn’t be mad if this was their music?
QED
Two from Titania. The Independent article is real (read it!):
I will never forgive white people for inventing biological sex. https://t.co/yiNdzsvccV
— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) June 10, 2020
(From the creator of Titania via Simon):
I’ve been getting a lot of messages asking if I wrote this.
The troubling thing is, I really didn’t. https://t.co/NtmJA1Ptks
— Andrew Doyle (@andrewdoyle_com) June 11, 2020
I dont know who founded The Guardian, but I assume Titania isn’t joshing here:
Fantastic to see the Guardian celebrating the destruction of historical monuments.✊
And yes, I KNOW the Guardian’s founder made his fortune in the cotton trade & supported the South in the Civil War & denounced Lincoln for freeing the slaves, but that was AGES ago. Get over it. pic.twitter.com/NgPlvGD36p
— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) June 10, 2020
From Barry we have the most beautiful caterpillar I’ve ever seen (be sure to play the video):
This looks like a tasty sweet but is a Jewel caterpillar. Acraga coa moth caterpillar.
Its bright colour and spiny appearance bluff toxicity.
This harmless creatures only defence is its sticky coat, to which ants stick to when attempting predation
pic.twitter.com/Dyq76HoWM4— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) June 9, 2020
Tweets from Matthew, the first from Ziya Tong, and another video:
this cat's got it dialed pic.twitter.com/byPisMLUca
— Earthling (@ziyatong) May 2, 2020
Do you really want to defund this?
Not sure they understand pointing, Mr Policehuman, and they've gone the wrong way round roundabout 😏😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/enuY02ZqpJ
— Sidney Choccy & Jeeves Labby (@sidneychoccy) April 28, 2020
Get your COVID commemorative coins now–bound to be a collector’s item. They go on sale next week!!! YAY!!! This tweet has been deleted, I think, but you can get the coins here for the bargain price of only $125 with free shipping! And Trump’s name is on them!
Lookie!
I think the police were having a problem with the round-a-bout or was it the geese? They may have been Canada geese and over here we know nothing about round-a-bouts.
Somewhere in Britain not that the commentary indicates that.
Definitely Britain. If they are Canada geese, it wold explain why they went the wrong way around the roundabout
They seemed to know where they wanted to go. Evidently the walking officer had some experience with these critters as he didn’t let it get too close.
There are more and more round-a-bouts in North America now. You can tell when there is one ahead by the line of slow traffic as each driver tries to figure out what the hell to do.
I don’t know about all of North America, but I now you live in the Seattle area, and up here in Monroe/Snohomish, they sure are popping up. At first people were confused, but I think now we’re all getting the hang of it. I like them a lot more than 4-way stops.
*know* I can’t type today for some reason.
Some of my routes to my old work had a ton of roundabouts. It’s fun in the summer in my summer car whipping around them. 🙂
We have a big roundabout in Long Beach, CA. Of course, we call it The Traffic Circle, which has Pacific Coast Highway passing through it. I don’t know of many other roundabouts in the Los Angeles area. Many drivers do not know how to navigate it and their are many accidents. An apocryphal story has it that its designer and his son died in separate accidents on it. Wikipedia even has a page dedicated to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamitos_Circle
I’ve never heard anyone call it the Los Alamitos Circle. It wouldn’t make sense as Los Alamitos is an adjacent town and none of its spokes go there.
Some go out of their way to avoid it. I take it on as a challenge with my hand ready over the horn button to deliver negative reinforcement if needed. I was actually hit once in it, though it was only a gentle tap on my rear bumper.
Now they’ve modified the traffic patterns entering and leaving the circle to remove the skill element completely. It’s just no fun any more.
I seem to remember driving around the Place de la Concorde in Paris in 1969 and being astonished that those coming in from the right, even from what seemed like alleys, had the right-of-way, even onto the Champs Élysées. I have no idea if it’s still like that. Ontario has been putting a lot of roundabouts in the former countryside surrounding Toronto. People are usually not too stupid about them.
They can be pretty stupid, trust me.
Some years ago I was touring England in a rental car. It was, of course, right hand drive and a stick shift. After negotiating London traffic I was quite proud of myself and telling my wife that people who had trouble were just wusses. Then I encountered the Swindon roundabout.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon)
It looks from a distance like several busy highways coming together in a vacant lot — something invented just to see the cars smash together.
A few years ago I had to do some driving in the Manchester area and I handled a few roundabouts just fine, and the narrow roads of the Lake District, but I had an automatic and never visited Swindon.
Looks insane!
There are thousands of traffic circles in Idaho, yet almost nobody knows how to drive them properly. They treat it like a broken traffic light.
They don’t teach people correctly when they introduce them. People here still don’t know the rules.
They aren’t hard to navigate if the circle has only a single lane. It’s when they have two or more lanes the trouble starts. Many times I’ve seen cars on the inner lane shoot out a spoke, crossing outer lanes as if they weren’t even there. It’s interesting to recognize the car’s “body language” telling you they’re about to fly off the wheel.
I’ve had people behind me honk when there is someone in the circle already in front of me. I think they think the yield is for the people in the circle. How the hell would that make any sense? I also have had people almost hit me just driving into the circle when I’m in it.
The logic of the circle escapes many people, or so it seems.
Isn’t it simply pi x r^2? Sorry, It’s late and I couldn’t resist😬
Bad enough with many lanes, but in the Swindon roundabout the traffic in the inner circle was going in the opposite direction! It blew my mind. Needless to say, I stayed in the outer circle.
When I lived in NJ, I took my driving test shortly after moving there. One question was, Who has the right of way when entering a circle. Two answers were wrong. They were cars entering the circle and cars already in the circle. The correct answer was: Depends on local custom.
The circle that was near where I lived has been squared so to speak now. There was quite the kerfuffle aver the old tree in the middle of it too.
This Hili dialogue is adorable!!
I think, based on the poll results, you should cut one side, and leave the other alone.
There is a rod attached to the side of the Dandy Horse, which I think is a kick-stand. that’s kind of amazing in itself.
A bicycle without pedals belongs in a museum.
My now -yr.-old granddaughter has had one for a couple of years. They’re called”striders” and she loves it. Much sleeker than the one in the picture. She takes it on the BMX track.
Should be 4-yr.-old
Don’t some of the little people have shoes with wheels in the heels? They call them ‘Heelies’ here in the UK. You sometimes see kids gliding past you, their legs rigid, bodies still, no apparent means of locomotion available to them. It’s unnerving.
Yeah, I think I’ve seen them here, too. Wheeeee.
Less concerned about the lack of pedals than the lack of brakes! 🙂
I agree! A mullet is exactly what the good PCC needs.
The thought of PCC(E)with a mullet is the stuff of nightmares.
I think a gofundme page should be set up where PCC(E) gets a mullet if the contributions reach a certain threshold. The money then gets donated to charity. Making this happen will be a lot of hard, thankless work but I’m sure you’re up to it Jenny.
What about a celebratory mullet if/when Trump loses? Hold out ’til then…if Trump wins PCC gets to cut his hair however he wants as a salve against the horror of it, but if not then it’s a long back, short sides.
(I admit there’s not a huge incentive for PCC to agree to this.)
Cool kick-stand. Hadn’t noticed it before. You don’t really need braked because you’re low enough to the ground to use your feet.
Interesting that Byron De La Beckwith who murdered Medgar Evers was acquitted twice in 1964 by all white juries, but Evers’ wife Myrlie pursued a new trial in 1994 in which he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. He also was caught before assassinating another activist years later but suffered no consequences. He died as a prisoner at the age of 80.
Actually, for his attempt to assassinate a Jew in 1975, De La Beckwith served three years in Angola. That was well before he was convicted and went to jail for the murder of Megar Evers.
Thanks. I missed the extra 3 years. He deserved 30.
“Together We Fought the Unseen Enemy” Umm, OK, that’s past tense. What was the outcome?
The only charitable thing I can say is that it’s a molecular structure on a medallion (it would be a coin if it had a face value), which might be a first. But really, this is the medallion equivalent of that Top 10 list. And similar to what I think about much of current music, who would even spend money to produce such a gauche piece, devoid of any artistry and inscribed in a font without any character (at least that part’s fitting), let alone spend money on buying one? Augustus Saint-Gaudens is spinning in his grave.
In that police / goose clip, the color blocking on the BMW police bike looks pretty good.
Amazing that it took until 1967, when many of us who comment here were already teenagers (or older). And lucky that it happened under the stewardship of Chief Justice Earl Warren. I think the same result would’ve eventually been achieved by the Burger or Rehnquist Courts, but I doubt it would’ve been unanimous once Richard Nixon got four appointees to SCOTUS in his first term. After all, as a young law clerk for Justice Robert Jackson in the early 1950s, one of those appointees, William Rehnquist, had authored a memo urging that the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson be upheld in the school-desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education — a view roundly rejected by Justice Jackson and every other member of the Court, in another unanimous opinion by Earl Warren.
And let us recall in this regard that the constitutional “right to marriage” — regardless whether same-race, mixed-race, or same-sex — is no more set out expressly in the text of the Bill of Rights than is the right to reproductive freedom that undergirds Roe v. Wade‘s guarantee to access to abortion, a right currently under siege by the Right.
Madison’s original argument against a bill of rights in the Constitution was that such a work would never cover all rights and therefore should not be included. He thought every right should be assumed unless otherwise stated. Again, he was right the first time but no one cares.
One must also not forget that quite a number of states permitted interracial marriage before Loving. Some never had anti-miscegenation laws, others repealed them well before Loving. When I looked for a list, I came across this PDF on anti-miscegenation laws https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/exhibits/blackhistory/pdfs/Miscegenation%20laws.pdf and was surprised to find that only 16 states were affected by Loving, when the way information is presented causes most people to assume that miscegenation was banned across America before Loving.
This is somewhat similar to the obfuscations surrounding Martin Luther King, in that these days damned near every other civil rights leader and movement of the 1950s-60s has been forgotten or suppressed or subsumed and there was only Martin Luther King. I was involved in the civil rights movement and King was not my inspiration for participating. My inspiration came from other civil rights leaders and traditions, but most of all the daredevil Freedom Riders. An interesting and I think fair assessment of King in relation to the other civil rights leaders and aspects of the movement can be heard in this interview with Clayborne Carson, director of the Dr. Martin Luther King Papers at Stanford https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-june-10-2020/, whom one might expect to further the myth, but no. He says that in many instances King was playing catch-up, and people forget or don’t know about the real history.
Note: At the end of the PDF on anti-miscegenation laws there is a list of “TERMS FORMERLY USED TO REPRESENT DEGREES OF BLACKNESS.” Holy Moly! I was familiar with a few of them but these are crazeeee: “demi-meamelouc” A person who is 1/32 black,(meamelouc must come from the Arabic word Mamluk, slave soldiers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamluk); “sangmelee – A person who is 1/64 black”; “griffe – A person whose parents are a full-blooded black and a mulatto. Such a person would be 3/4 black and 1/4 white”; “marabou – A person who is 5/8 black”; “sacatra – A person who is 7/8 black. The parents would be a full-blooded black and a griffe.” But when it got too complicated, the one drop rule kicked in.
According to Wikipedia, the Guardian was founded by John Edward Taylor, who died in 1844! So no, he couldn’t have supported the Confederacy. However, Taylor was a cotton merchant, so he probably did have business relations with the planters of the slave South. Titania probably confused Taylor with his son, also named John Edward Taylor (1830-1905), who ran the paper during the American Civil War. The paper was sympathetic to the Confederacy and despised Lincoln. However, if columnist Martin Kettle is to be believed, the Guardian was not pro-slavery, but viewed Lincoln as wrong in not allowing secession since the South had the right to secede through the principle of selef-determination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Edward_Taylor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Taylor,_John_Edward_(DNB12)
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/jul/20/looking-back-american-civil-war
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/feb/24/1865-guardian-stance-us-civil-war
I don’t even know what his/her point is with that Tweet. Where’s the equivalency between an actual monument to a slave trader and white supremacist on the one hand…and a newspaper that was(or might have been) founded by the relatives of cotton merchants on the other?
Titania is like a dinner-party contrarian who gets more and more desperate trying to outrage people, until they just become an annoying bore.
I’ve been skipping over her Tw**ts for a while now.
Of course, the page for the commemorative Corona Coins (which Jerry linked to) is written by someone who doesn’t know the difference between a comma and a full stop, amongst other things. They wind up presenting it as the world being against an invisible enemy, every heroes, and Trump himself, whom they list as “President Donald J” followed by a comma and then on a different line, “Trump”. They list a certain Dr Pre-Order, and a Dr Ships, as well.
https://www.whitehousegiftshop.com/product-p/covid-heroes.htm
“someone who doesn’t know the difference between a comma and a full stop” – Pence will blame it on the interns. I think it’s an easy fix with a chisel and hammer.
You got a problem with that? Trump loves the poorly educated. He’s just giving them a chance to shine.
Actually I think giving him a rapper name is pretty good!
And they can’t even spell Steve Mnuchin’s name correctly!
According to reporting yesterday by Gabriel Sherman in Vanity Fair, the Murdoch family — owners of News Corp (which, in turn, owns Fox News and The Wall Street Journal among other outlets) — has come to the conclusion that Trump’s reelection bid is a Lost Cause.
Trump’s losing Fox News would be (since Confederate generals are once again in the news) like Robert E. Lee’s losing Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville, leaving his flank exposed when heading into his disaster at Gettysburg. Guess we’ll find out how many congressional Republicans who’ve thus far been afraid to cross Trump are willing to line up with him on Election Day for a GOP version of Pickett’s Charge.
The analogy to Gettysburg can go further. Lee did not view the Battle of Gettysburg as a disaster. His army remained intact, although badly hurt, and lived to fight another day. Only in retrospect has the magnitude of the defeat become clear (but even some historians claim still that it wasn’t a disaster). Likewise, Trump may very well shrug off Murdoch’s lack of enthusiasm for him.
Gettysburg might’ve been even more of a disaster at the time if Meade had pursued the Army of Northern Virginia as Lincoln wished him to do.
Meade claimed that the Army of the Potomac was too exhausted to pursue Lee. He was in a long line of Union commanders, who didn’t seem to encompass any long-range strategy. They just thought in terms of discrete battles. This is what separated Grant in the eastern theater from the rest. He believed in relentless pursuit of Lee, no what the cost. The strategy paid off, but, indeed, the cost was terrible. Meade was lucky, he remained commander of the Army of the Potomac, but when Grant became commander of all Union armies, his headquarters was always with that army. Somehow, I don’t think Meade appreciated Grant being not far away.
To extend the Gettysburg analogy, it was the last time the Rebels tried to invade the North — and I’d be more than satisfied if, in the upcoming election, Trump didn’t win a state north of the Mason-Dixon this time around.
Some pretty good reminders in the post today. Removing the names of all those confederate generals would be a good move. How they got the names to begin with is even more odd. Bragg was relieved of command after losing the battle of Chattanooga. Henry Benning lead troop at Antietam and Gettysburg. John Hood resigned his commission to go fight for the south, was in charge at a disastrous loss at the Battle of Franklin and hastened the fall of Atlanta. Some really fine traitors all around.
General Petraeus has come out strongly for renaming of the military installations named after Confederate traitors. They should have been renamed decades ago. I’m glad also that many of the Confederate statues have been removed (some by protestors) or will be soon. Of course, Trump is only concerned with appealing to his base, which could be a losing strategy, at least, I hope so. As Paul Waldman at the Washington Post states: “But Trump, proud son of Queens, believes firmly that stirring up division is essential to his success, and he’s always looking for ways to promote right-wing revanchism and resentment. He’s particularly drawn to symbolic fights where he can take an angry stand against cultural change.”
And you’re right. Bragg and Hood were terrible generals.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/take-confederate-names-off-our-army-bases/612832/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/11/why-donald-trump-is-standing-up-confederacy/
What is really strange also – they never named a post after Grant.
Petreaus isn’t the only one. The worm has finally turned on this Lost Cause BS.
How they got the names may be because for many decades after the war southern congressional representatives held a lot of power, and attached the namings as part of legislative negotiations.
It is what is called being on the wrong side of history. You lose the war and then name U.S. bases after the losers. Ask them why they fought the war and they don’t even know. It was to protect states rights they will say. So they raise the loser’s flag even 150 years later and wonder why black people take offense. Pathetic jerks is what they are. This is a good hill for Trump to die on.
A lot of this is down to tribalism. They lost the war, but they gained a grudging, hateful, mob to call homeboys.
Rupert Murdoch is a real flibbertigibbet when it comes to tight elections like this. He likes to bet on the right horse, and he absolutely will not side with any party purely out of ideological principle – he just wants to be able to say ‘it was the Sun wot won it’ the day after the election. I’d imagine that right now he’s teetering on the edge of turning his artillery on the White House.
One thing that’s guaranteed: if the polls continue this way Fox News reporters will suddenly develop a deep, principled scepticism about four more years of Trump.
There might be a handful of holdouts(Sean Hannity, Laura Ingrowing, etc.), but the rest of Fox News will smoothly glide into ‘always at war with Eastasia’ mode and start piling on Trump like the last four years of pathetic obeisance never happened. And that’ll be the point at which Trump’s deep-fried goose is properly cooked.
I expect there to be some real moments of truth among congressional Republicans and right-wing media shortly after Trump loses the election and starts to foment insurrection about accepting the results. The hardcore, dead-end deplorables will stand by him, but the others who wish to live on in mainstream politics to fight another day?
Some Republicans have reached that moment of truth already — Mitt Romney, and Michigan congressman Justin Amash, and perhaps now Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski. We’ll see what happens with the rest. This is where I think the Republican Party will come apart at its seams.
“Laura Ingrowing” 🤣😂
Yeah, that was good.
Statement by Rupert’s son Lachlan on the murder of George Floyd. A regular bleedin’ heart, he is:
https://twitter.com/benyt/status/1267887230439260166
Did you hear that Trump is demanding no masks and no social distancing at his June 19th Goebbels rally in Tulsa OK; what’s even more shocking, he’s making all the attendees to sign a waiver that they won’t sue DJT if they contract Covid. WTF? I thought he didn’t think it was a big deal, like the flu? We’ll soon see just how stupid his cult is.
It’s telling that Pence is well-separated from the group of people who support him.
I noticed that too. Seems as VP one doesn’t wear a mask but makes frequent public appearances. Do you suppose he’s going to last minute fill in for DJT as presidential candidate later on?
“So now I have no consensus to go by.”
It’s time to flip a coin.
Maybe an official White House medallion!
😀 If it comes up “tRump”, PCC has to dye his hair orange and style it into a “tRump do.”
THAT should be the official COVID-19 commemorative coin. On one side the Great Seal of the United States, and on the other “Get a Hair-Cut”. I know from many team calls that the decision on whether to get a hair-cut (or shave), is weighing on people now.
White House Gift Shop is not affiliated with the White House – per Politifact it started out as a fundraiser for White House police killed in action during the Truman administration, but was later transferred to a private company which owns the name. How that can happen is a travesty; shades of the White House dot com porn site.
It’s interesting how everyone seems to like the music from their own high school/college years. I’m a decade younger than you and the only one on that list I’d call a true classic is Respect. I’m assuming that’s on your list of three, what are the other two?
FWIW I looked at my own last week in high school – mid July 1978 – and I see more songs I know, but nothing I’d call classic.
I looked up mine, mid July 1984. I think mine stands up to Jerry’s very well!
I agree, I think it comes down to what you grew up with. And to consider a song to have truly withstood the test of time well I think that how popular a song became, or is, among generations other than your own needs to be considered.
The only example from Jerry’s list that stands out in that respect to me is, Respect. An example from my list that I think also does is When Doves Cry.
Purple Rain is one of the most perfect albums ever made – there is nothing that isn’t spectacular on it.
I agree. Prior to Purple Rain I wasn’t a Prince fan at all. Then I listened to Purple Rain and was instantly converted.
One of my favorite songs of his that I think really showcases how broad his musical talents were is Sexy M.F..
I weaseled a copy off my dad’s girlfriend – swapped it for a Michael Jackson album, probably Bad. All the kids I knew were huge fans of Jackson(and vice versa it turns out), but Prince was way too advanced for me at that age, musically, lyrically, sexually, all of it. It was only in my teens that I began to see how extraordinary that album is.
I like a few of his other albums from around then, they all have something worth listening to on, but Purple Rain is the one that’s just perfectly formed.
Not to mention Prince was a brilliant performer…charismatic as hell, and his musical talents were an embarrassment of riches. You could see it all on display in the short Superbowl halftime show he did in 2007. I consider it one the best halftime shows I’ve witnessed. To be fair, there aren’t many that are memorable. McCartney’s 2005 performance was a jaw dropper as well.
From my list “Baker Street” was number 2 in the US – must have been released later in the UK, and “the one that I want” from Grease was no. one in the UK (the Smurf song was no.2, for gods sake!)
Baker Street, absolutely a classic. Though it brings back such poignant memories for me I can’t hardly bear to listen to it any more.
I’m guessing that Jerry is referring to “Groovin'” and “Somebody to Love.” Those would be my picks anyway — though, as always with music, people’s mileage may vary.
I would also add “Windy” by The Association and “All I Need” by The Temptations to that classics list. The former is by a group that gets little respect, but it’s an almost perfect pop confection. The latter is a lesser-known Tempts track and was never featured in “The Big Chill,” but it shows how good Motown was in the late 60s. It was a great period. By the 80s music had become far more corporate and artistic exhaustion had set in.
Yeah, I dig those tunes, too. (Plus, “A Little Bit of Soul” — but then, I got a thing for blue-eyed soul songs.)
But above, I was taking a shot at which three I think Jerry was classifying as “classics.”
Respect and Somebody to Love are the only two which have stood the test of time with me. I remember wearing both those disks out Summer ‘67, I believe.
Summer of Love. 🙂
😻
Bingo.
I had 45s of seven of the Top Ten tunes of June ’67 — everything but E. Humperdinck (of course), “Mirage” (though I had the Shondells’ “Hanky Panky,” “Mony Mony,” and “I Think We’re Alone Now”), and “All I Need” (although I did eventually get the Temptations’ album With a Lot ‘o Soul, where it was side 1, track 3).
Poor Engelbert gets no “Respect”.
Squaresville, daddy-o. 🙂
Yes it’s terrible what that man endured. I met a woman who attended his concert and threw her underpants at him. Disgusting.
A Tom Jones wannabe. And Tom Jones himself was a pop sell-out.
“Do you really want to defund this?”
Why do you ask? No-one is proposing to defund those police.
But I seriously think that the threat of defunding might be needed to induce some of the US police to change.
I missed the poll!
I got my kid’s hair cut but I didn’t get mine cut, so I guess that accords with the 50/50 results. 🙂
My thinking is that it’s a very minor risk if the shop follows good protocols (masks, appointments only and nobody allowed to simply wait in the shop, etc.). When and how often to take that risk depends on how much you value the payoff.
For me, my thinking was it doesn’t really bother me to have longer hair and I know how to keep it clean. So I don’t get much benefit from the risk. My active outdoorsy 9-year-old who hates to take a shower, though, gets a lot of benefit from it as he’s much less likely to get ratty nasty bug-infested hair with it short. So that was worth it. Yes, I know my risk also goes up when he gets it cut, but I adopt the nuclear physics/radiochemistry ALARA principle in this case – keep risk As Low As Reasonably Achievable.
What is Melody? Leonard Bernstein and NY Philharmonic: https://youtu.be/TCSv0YcqWow
I heard a take on Dua Lipa – it’s not bad.
Sign me up for Peanut Butter Cookies. One of my all time favourite cookies (and I’m a cookie fiend). (Though having a son with a peanut allergy, we use SunButter at home – roasted sunflower seeds which actually tastes fantastic!).
BTW Jerry, about this:
” a vaccine appears to be a long way off, if ever, “
I wonder why you wrote that part. Of course experts have been cautioning us since the beginning of the vaccine race not to have unrealistic expectations. But is there anything new in the news that re-enforces that a vaccine is a long way off? As far as I can tell, things seem to be gathering pace quite well – lots of promising vaccines (as many are in the early stages) some as you know aiming for well before 18 months.
Sub-a-dub
Omg those covid pins. I want the virus vs the world one. I wish it had more America on it.
How appropriate that the podium is absent of leadership.
To add hurt to harm, US is no longer satisfied with making a mockery of the International Criminal Court by not participating while making aggressive wars, they are now threatening to sanction court members as if *they* were the criminals!
France is leading the protest movement against the blatant Trumpism, “International Lives Matter”.
File under: Worst US President Ever™.