"Sixty-four years ago, Connie Francis recorded 'Pretty Little Baby' as one of dozens of songs in a marathon recording session..."

"... that yielded three albums within two weeks. It did not, at the time, feel like a song that had the makings of a hit, so it landed on the B-side of the 1962 single... that was released in Britain. Since then, it was more or less overlooked. Then came TikTok... Over the last few weeks, 'Pretty Little Baby' has been trending on the social media app — it has been featured as the sound in more than 600,000 TikTok posts and soared to top spots in Spotify’s Viral 50 global and U.S. lists — bolstered by celebrities and influencers, like Nara Smith, Kylie Jenner, and Kim Kardashian and her daughter North, who have posted videos of themselves lip-syncing to it. The ABBA singer Agnetha Fältskog used the song for a clip on TikTok in which she said Ms. Francis had long been her favorite singer...."

From "As ‘Pretty Little Baby’ Goes Viral, Connie Francis Is Joining TikTok/With a forgotten song becoming an unlikely hit, the 87-year-old singer is happy to be back in the spotlight" (NYT).

Interviewed, Francis said she didn't even remember recording the song, but, listening to it now, she pronounced it "cute." I remember when that kind of thing was the current music...

"Our former president WANTS to wear the orange jumpsuit. He's just taunting them now, asking for it. Can this be seen as anything but contemptuous behavior?"

Writes mezzrow in the comments to the first post of the day, which is about Trump's saying things like "This is a disgrace to our Legal System/Judge Merchan should be immediately sanctioned and recused."

Trump wants a prison sentence? I don't believe that. I think he's fighting hard, in his own stubbornly perverse, insubordinate, rebellious way.

But if he gets what mezzrow thinks he wants, and if he's also elected President, how would that work? I recommend house arrest in the White House.

You may not remember, but back in 2009, I recommended that the President of the United States stay in the White House and not travel: "Let the President stay in the White House — or, at most, retreat to Camp David." I was thinking of the expense and carbon footprint of Presidential travel and all of the security needs and risk as well as the world's extreme dependence on the U.S. President to be constantly on the job to deal with emergencies. 

So it would set a good example for President Trump to serve his term under house arrest. And let the rest of the U.S. Presidents voluntarily confine themselves to the White House. If any personal appearances are truly needed, they can be virtual....

"So Yahoo's now called Altaba - not to be confused with Alt-Abba, the crypto-white nationalist Swedish pop group with hits like #DanzigQueen."

Mocking the Yahoo name change.

That's from a week ago, when the news hit that Yahoo — with one of the all-time great company names — was changing its name to Altaba.

I'm not positive this incredibly stupid change is really happening. There's also this:

Yahoo announced last week that it would be changing its name to Altaba (upon completion of Verizon acquiring core Yahoo) seemingly to reflect the investment in Chinese giant Alibaba.

However, the name change will only take effect if and only if Verizon goes through with the planned acquisition of core Yahoo....

By the way, I'm a little sensitive to all this mockery around the prefix "Alt-." I don't like this late-developing impression that Althouse is a crypto-white nationalist edifice of some kind. The "Alt-" in Althouse means "old" not "alternative" or "high," though "alternative" and "high" are at least as positive as "old." This idea of "Alt-" meaning "crypto-white nationalist" is not only inaccurate, but it's unfair to all of the persons, places, and things that have already constructed our identity with the very positive prefix "Alt-."

Taking ABBA as seriously as possible.

This essay — at NPR — is so over-the-top about ABBA that it's really very weird. I'll quote the last few sentences:

Gay people particularly respect entertainers who cloak suffering behind carefully constructed artifice because it's a skill most of us are still forced to learn. ABBA concealed the distress of their ditties with as many deliciously gaudy overdubs as the era's analog recording techniques could muster. Embedded in some of the brightest whiteness pop has ever known, ABBA invented their own blues, one that hasn't left the radio. They whispered private anguish in the midst of the party.

"Embedded in some of the brightest whiteness" refers to the fact that the members of ABBA grew up in 1950s Sweden, where you could only hear 2 hours of music on the radio each day and — amid the "classical music, jazz, Swedish folk, Italian arias, French chanson, German schmaltz and John Philip Sousa" — there might be one pop song but never any "American blues."

"In my honest opinion we looked like nuts in those years. Nobody can have been as badly dressed on stage as we were."

Writes Björn Ulvaeus of Abba, explaining that a motivation for the costumery was that they wanted the cost of the clothes to be tax deductible and that meant that they'd need the Swedish government to accept that their assertion that these things were not also usable as street clothes.

And this was in the 1970s, the decade when people wore the strangest clothes.

ABBA, Genesis, Jimmy Cliff, Stooges, Hollies.

The new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees.

We visited the Hall a couple weeks ago. Never got around to blogging about it! You can't take pictures inside, and I've blogged about it on a previous visit, so I didn't have too much to say. From the outside, it looked like this:

ABBA, the Chantels, Jimmy Cliff, Genesis, the Hollies, KISS, LL Cool J, Darlene Love, Laura Nyro, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Stooges and Donna Summer.

Such are the nominees this year for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Patrick Goldstein moans:

It's pretty pathetic when you consider that you can vote for the Chantels and Darlene Love, but not for Linda Ronstadt, Steve Miller, Chicago, Rush, Deep Purple, Alice Cooper, Journey, Dire Straits or Stevie Ray Vaughan, just to name a few of the ineligible worthies... Those of us who are actual voters are asked to choose a maximum of five nominees, using numbers (1-2-3-4-5) to signify our preferences. You can do the same. Here's how I'd make my choices as of now, but I'm open to being swayed by any especially passionate or persuasive arguments:

1) The Stooges....

2) The Red Hot Chili Peppers....

3) Laura Nyro. (Nearly forgotten today, she was a seminal influence on Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Rosanne Cash and untold other singer-songwriters.)

4) LL Cool J....

5) KISS....

Laura Nyro, nearly forgotten?! Crazy! Can you surry? Can you picnic? Perhaps you think no one even asks questions like that anymore, but we do.

"Crossword puzzles heavily favor Democrats."

LOL. And those dastardly puzzlers also betray an evil fondness for Arab cities, the Spanish language, Hindu royalty, Hawaiian fowl, and these dreadful things:



ADDED: A poll!

What's the crossword puzzle's favorite music?
	Electric Light Orchestra
	Yma Sumac
	Brian Eno
	ABBA
pollcode.com free polls

"I was born in Oslo, Norway, the son of a Volvo factory worker and part-time ice fisherman."

"My mother was a backup singer for Abba. They were good folks.... [In Chicago,] I discovered I was black, and I have remained so ever since." So goes the satirical script, written by Barack Obama's Harvard Law School classmates.

He proved deft at navigating an institution scorched with ideological battles, many of which revolved around race. He developed a leadership style based more on furthering consensus than on imposing his own ideas. Surrounded by students who enjoyed the sound of their own voices, Mr. Obama cast himself as an eager listener, sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once.

Friends say he did not want anyone to assume they knew his mind — and because of that, even those close to him did not always know exactly where he stood....

Why did his fellow law review editors elect him to lead them, to serve as their "president" (most law journals say "editor-in-chief")?

The election was an all-day affair with the ego-crushing drama of a reality TV show. Inside Pound Hall, the editors picked apart the intellectual and social skills of the 19 contenders, eliminating them in batches. At the last moment, the conservative faction, its initial candidates defeated, threw its support to Mr. Obama. “Whatever his politics, we felt he would give us a fair shake,” said Bradford Berenson, a former associate White House counsel in the Bush administration.

Read the whole article. With all those lawyers to interview and all the jealousy Obama must have inspired with his success at Harvard, it's notable that nothing nasty comes up.

But then maybe this article -- in the NYT -- is a puff piece and some juicy quotes got clipped out.