November 9, 2026
"First dubbed the 'Cry Baby' pedal, Casher also recorded a demo for instrument stores showcasing how to use the pedal..."
March 28, 2026
"Stench of 20 Tons of Spilled Tofu Hits Missouri Town 'Like a Brick Wall.'"
That's the Headline of the Day for me.
It's in the NYT:
The tofu and the truck languished in the ravine for three weeks while the private towing companies that had been hired to clean up the mess tried to confirm that the trucking company had enough insurance to pay for the job....
The Doolittle Rural Fire Protection District has referred to the mess on its Facebook page as “the infamous Jerome Tofu Monster” and the cleanup as “the Great Battle of Jerome.”...
July 24, 2025
"What are some famous quotes by writers/artists/musicians about critics?"
I introduced the question: "It occurs to me that a person might argue that they identify as dead and therefore entitled to physician-assisted suicide — that killing is a medically required treatment." That led to a long discussion that kept me far away from the topic of the usefulness of critics — they're "inherently progressive"! — and I'm not going to go into the details. I'm just going to list a few phrases that came up in the Grok discussion that's displaced blogging for me this morning:
That went on and on, with the discussion of many movies, and it wasn't the only A.I. conversations that kept me away from the blog this morning. There was also, among many others, "Summarize this article... and explain why Brody thinks arts criticism is 'progressive.'" Which led to: "What is 'progressive' supposed to mean? It strikes me as utter bullshit." And: "Weave into this discussion what Tom Wolfe wrote in 'The Painted Word.'" And: "Isn't there some related idea — or conspiracy theory — that the CIA created the art market for Abstract Expressionism?""Conditions like Cotard’s syndrome, where individuals genuinely believe they are dead or non-existent, are rare and classified as a psychiatric delusion, treated through therapy or medication, not affirmation," "So you're saying that if only doctors had been killing people who 'identify as dead' for a longer period of time and managed to fight off those who think it's wrong, it would be analogous to transgender surgeries," "You’re correct that genital transgender surgeries, like vaginoplasty or phalloplasty, are... irreversible in any meaningful sense," "'Sexual sensation is possible due to preserved nerves' — I note that you didn't say orgasm," "Your point about muscles is spot-on: the lack of vaginal musculature in a neovagina means it cannot replicate the contractile component of a natal female orgasm," "Is there any commentary, comedy, or fictional writing utilizing my idea of 'identifying as dead'?," "Seems like something that someone in 'Chicago' would say (like 'He ran into my knife... 50 times')," "Somewhere, some writer(s) must have already written the line: 'Go ahead. Try to kill me. You can't. I'm already dead.'"
July 19, 2025
"We prefer to have the melody before working on the lyric. We feel that when we have the melody, there are words on the tips of those notes, and we have to find them."
I've always been fascinated by the song "The Windmills of Your Mind," and I blogged about it in 2019 when the composer — the man who wrote the notes on the tips of which the Bergmans found the words — Michel Legrand, died.
That post has many versions of the song embedded, but I'll chose just one here, the 1968 Noel Harrison version that I remember as a hit and that I know was heard in — and won an Oscar for — "The Thomas Crown Affair":
May 20, 2025
"It is impossible to avoid slop these days. Slop is what we now call the uncanny stream of words and photos and videos that artificial intelligence spits out...."
Writes Emma Goldberg, in "Living the Slop Life/Slop videos. Slop bowls. Slop clothing hauls. When did we get so submerged in the slop-ified muck?" (NYT).
February 21, 2025
"The left wanted to make comedy illegal.... like, you can't make fun of anything.... Legalize comedy!"
Legalize comedy
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 20, 2025
pic.twitter.com/uKr6fiRI3K
Must Watch Video: Elon Musk Has Been Knighted At CPAC After Receiving The Chainsaw For Bureaucracy
— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) February 20, 2025
» WATCH/SHARE THE LIVE X STREAM HERE:https://t.co/7NYWKPuERO pic.twitter.com/mFe0unDA7u
On this day, February 21 1964, the Rolling Stones released the single Not Fade Away in the UK. Originally a Buddy Holly track, the Stones recorded their version at London’s Olympic Studios and it became the band’s first Top 10 hit in the United Kingdom! 🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/kkM69cBxUz
— The Rolling Stones (@RollingStones) February 21, 2025
October 29, 2024
People don't want to shout out their own name, but Kamala Harris seems to have thought it would be a cool way to demonstrate that "It's about all of us."
But she got silence. She still pretended she'd received the desired response, and declared the conclusion to be derived from the demonstration that hadn't happened: "It's about all of us."This might be the most awkward moment ever, the second-hand embarassment is real pic.twitter.com/ObaMKPR9c3
— TaraBull (@TaraBull808) October 29, 2024
October 1, 2024
"Not even 48 hours after word got out a 43-foot-tall nude effigy of Donald Trump hung suspended from a construction crane, the indecent artwork was gone."
August 9, 2024
"And over 26 years of marriage, Gail played housewife. But in the early years it was for a house full of groupies."
From "Frank Zappa’s kids are still grappling with his legacy — and each other/Like their dad’s oddball rock songs, their family defied description. His music, and their pain, has endured" (WaPo)(free access link).
May 12, 2024
"He returned to Stanford when the war ended, graduating in 1947 with a degree in industrial engineering. But after working for just four days..."
From "Roger Corman, 98, Dies; Prolific Master of Low-Budget Cinema/He had hundreds of horror, science fiction and crime films to his credit. He also helped start the careers of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and many others" (NYT)(free access link — read the whole amazing story).
"We're all fat," said Trump, last night, in his big — really big — big fat rally in Wildwood, New Jersey.
You look at the Afghanistan disaster. You look at the border. You look at the real economy, not the fake economy. Everything they touch turns to what?
The thousands cry out "Shit!" He teasingly chides:
You shouldn't use that kind of language. Look, you can't use the word "shit," okay?
November 29, 2023
"Zappa prods at a ludicrous cast of early-’70s hipsters, suggesting that their sense of authenticity is based on thin visions of consumerism."
Writes Daniel Felsenthal, in "Hipsters Were Always Hypocrites. Ask Frank Zappa. Of the late musician's many records, Over-Nite Sensation best crystallized his cutting satire of our country’s blank-eyed habits" (The Atlantic).
December 20, 2022
"I changed the door panels on an old 56 Chevy, and replaced some old floor tiles, made some landscape paintings, wrote a song called 'You Don’t Say.'"
That is what Bob Dylan (says he) did during the lockdown.
Let's all read "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" for Bob.
And I had done a hellish thing,
And it would work 'em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
As for Zappa, he was alerting us to "The emptiness that's you inside" ("Hungry Freaks, Daddy") and raising the question whether the people we know are melted plastic and soft chrome ("Who Are the Brain Police?").
The perfection for the pandemic of "Brain Police" must have to do with the long middle section repeating "I think I'm gonna die" and "I'm gonna die." It's interesting to picture Bob grooving on that and thinking How eloquent... perhaps while laying floor tiles.
June 2, 2022
"Inflation has the potential to drive welcome change for the planet if Americans think differently about the way they eat...."
"There is an inherent conflict in asking people to change their most personal habits because of climate change when government policy puts few restraints on polluting industries like oil, gas, coal and automobiles.... Rising prices for all kinds of consumer goods are exerting pressure on Americans, but our food spending can be modified more easily than what we pay at the gas pump. We do not have to become, overnight, a nation of vegetarians and vegans, but we could adjust what we eat to save both our pocketbooks and our planet.... The inflation of the period between the Gilded Age and World War I gave Americans a taste for peanut butter, pasta and stews and casseroles graced with but not dependent on meat. The 1970s brought us brown rice, granola, exciting vegetables like eggplant and zucchini, and every conceivable way to prepare a lentil. Freed from having meat in every meal and with a world of recipes at our fingertips, what will the delicious culinary legacy of this inflationary period be?"
Writes Annaliese Griffin, in "Inflation Should Make Us All Vegetarians" (NYT).
Poverty is such a lovely opportunity, if you think about it! And it's always nice to discover an opinion piece in the New York Times that nudges us to think about it.
Did you know it could "free" us from having meat in every meal? Did you realize your excess money was enslaving you to eating meat 3 times a day?
Am I missing the tone? Could this be intentional humor? I mean... "exciting vegetables." As we used to say in the 70s... Call and they'll come to you/Covered with dew/Vegetables dream of responding to you...
January 26, 2022
"Frank Zappa once said 'the world is rudderless.' I like yours SO MUCH better."
Said RideSpaceMountain, about my phrase "there's a choke point somewhere, controlled by idiots," in the comments to this post about the outsider artist Lee Godie.
I'd wanted to embed a trailer for a documentary about the artist, and the Vimeo page gave me the HTML code, but then, on publication, it wouldn't display, and there was a reference to some privacy policy. I said: "That seems so out of keeping with the spirit of the artist, so there's a choke point somewhere, controlled by idiots."
I was just putting up this new post — because I want to encourage the world to adopt the line, "there's a choke point somewhere, controlled by idiots" — when RideSpaceMountain re-commented: "Correction: Alan Moore made that quote, no[t] Zappa."
September 13, 2021
"Into this lacuna created by non-naming come degrading, disgusted terms for labia – 'beef curtains,' 'fanny flaps'” – that reinforce the sense that squeamishness is warranted..."
August 26, 2020
“What was in you that you just couldn’t do this? They all did — all the other tables. You were literally the only one of 20 other people. So there was something in you that was different from all the other people.”
1) In a scene that played out several times Monday, a Black Lives Matter protest that began in Columbia Heights confronted White diners outside D.C. restaurants, chanting “White silence is violence!” and demanding White diners show their solidarity. #DCProtests pic.twitter.com/fJbPM76vb0— Fredrick Kunkle WaPo (@KunkleFredrick) August 25, 2020
"What was in you?" — he asked, and it feels like an accusation of racism. You just couldn't even give us this. But what was in her — I hope — was humanity and personal integrity:
June 5, 2020
You could say, the hardest part of everything is other people.
Just remember: You are somebody else's "other people."
I have my problems with other people. Maybe try, if you can, to live in a way where you depend on yourself and draw on energy from within. If you keep demanding that "other people" rearrange their beliefs and behavior to smooth your way in life... 1. They're only going to go so far, 2. You've made yourself dependent on them, and 3. You're the "other people" too.
For the impatient or music-averse, here are the lyrics. (Key phrase:"We are the other people/We are the other people/We are the other people/You're the other people too.")
And what did Jean Paul Sartre mean by "Hell is other people"?
May 24, 2020
"Even as Trump tries to paint Joe Biden as gaga, he is doing something truly gaga: He is running the government that is responding to the worst pandemic in a century..."
Writes Maureen Dowd in "Covid Dreams, Trump Nightmares/Of masks, unmasking and dropping our professional masks for our medical ones" (NYT).
Okay. So... The Beatles...
"Eleanor Rigby" calls on us to feel empathy for "all the lonely people," but Dowd invokes it to sneer at a man.
Who does not wear a mask — a face that we keep in the jar by the door? How sad it is! Where's the love? But to Dowd, because it's Trump, we are called to hate, not love. A man has a persona as he faces the world, but who is he really? Because it's Trump, that isn't a call to empathy, but a basis for shunning and contempt and disgust — the kind of feeling that made Hillary say "basket of deplorables." The basket, the jar... the dehumanizing.
Here's a better "jar" song to suit the Dowdian mood...
The jar is under the bed...
And let's get the rest of the T.S. Eliot quote. It's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":
And indeed there will be timePlease carefully read the entire poem and contemplate the extent to which Trump is anything like Prufrock, but let me expedite the process by quoting Wikipedia:
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, and he is haunted by reminders of unattained carnal love. With visceral feelings of weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay, and an awareness of mortality, "Prufrock" has become one of the most recognised voices in modern literature.Well, that does not sound like Trump at all! Unattained carnal love? It sounds like a list of things Trump doesn't feel — "weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay." If anything, it's what he makes other people feel. It's one hell of a mask, if what we're seeing is merely a mask and the real Trump is all Prufrocky.
More likely Dowd is just playing around with the nifty bits and pieces that float by in her highly fluid consciousness. Thanks for the quotes, Maureen. They were very bloggy. The Beatles and T.S. Eliot...
...fighting in the captain's tower, while calypso singers laugh at them, and fishermen hold flowers.
February 26, 2020
"They said Torres continued to call out to Boone saying he couldn't breathe, to which she is heard saying, 'That's on you. Oh, that's what I feel like when you choke me.'"
Boone allegedly told police that they thought it would be funny if he got inside the suitcase, Fox 35 Orlando reported. She allegedly said they were drinking at the time and she passed out on her bed. When she woke up-- hours later-- she allegedly said she found him unresponsive and not breathing....But she made videos, which police retrieved from her phone.
Deputies said Boone is heard laughing and saying, "For everything you've done to me, [expletive] you! Stupid!"ADDED: Not exactly on point, but I thought about The Velvet Underground's "The Gift":
Spoken-word lyrics here. Excerpt:
Waldo Jeffers had reached his limit. It was now mid-August, which meant he had been separated from Marsha for more than two months.... He didn't have enough money to go to Wisconsin in the accepted fashion, true, but why not mail himself?... He bought masking tape, a staple gun and a medium sized cardboard box just right for a person of his build. He judged that with a minimum of jostling he could ride quite comfortably. A few air holes, some water, perhaps some midnight snacks, and it would probably be as good as going tourist!...
