Does a hot young actress really want President Trump approving of her? Poor Sydney Sweeney!

Trump, this morning, at Truth Social:

Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the “HOTTEST” ad out there. It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are “flying off the shelves.” Go get ‘em Sydney!

Well, she's selling perfectly ordinary denim. Maybe she'll make being Republican the new thing.

That's from 60 years ago, but it's a line I've never forgotten: "The new thing is to care passionately and be right-wing." In context, of course, he's laughably wrong, and everyone watching that movie knew it. Didn't we? Or did we think watch out, some day that will be true. It's all a matter of time.

Trump's post continues:

On the other side of the ledger, Jaguar did a stupid, and seriously WOKE advertisement, THAT IS A TOTAL DISASTER! The CEO just resigned in disgrace, and the company is in absolute turmoil. Who wants to buy a Jaguar after looking at that disgraceful ad. Shouldn’t they have learned a lesson from Bud Lite, which went Woke and essentially destroyed, in a short campaign, the Company. The market cap destruction has been unprecedented, with BILLIONS OF DOLLARS SO FOOLISHLY LOST. Or just look at Woke singer Taylor Swift. Ever since I alerted the world as to what she was by saying on TRUTH that I can’t stand her (HATE!). She was booed out of the Super Bowl and became, NO LONGER HOT. The tide has seriously turned — Being WOKE is for losers, being Republican is what you want to be. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

And speaking of Trump on Truth Social, there's also this, which caught my eye...

.. because I thought I saw Bucky Badger. But yes, happy birthday to the Coast Guard.

"We talk about the view that the soul exists but can’t do so without the body"/"'Is that what you believe?' he asks."

"'Ah well, I don’t, you see. My body is like a Hillman Imp and my soul is driving it. When I die, I park the car and walk the rest of the way. And I’m thinking that heaven is probably pedestrianised, so I can leave it outside.'"

From "Frank Skinner on faith and finally getting married (she said no four times)/The comedian opens up about his alcoholism, the consolation he finds in poetry — and whether he could succeed Melvyn Bragg as In Our Time presenter" (London Times).

There's a new season of "Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast" beginning this week, first episode here. I'm a big fan of that.

Hillman Imp? Apparently some sort of car. 

Oh!

That's Frank's idea of the metaphorical body that contains his soul. 

I'm reminded of the George Harrison song: "I got born into the material world/Getting worn out in the material world/Use my body like a car/Taking me both near and far...."

But George didn't name a particular car. Frank named the Hillman Imp. How about you?

"It is a disgrace that so many women can have been assaulted by so many men, and yet it turns out the only person who will go to jail is a woman."

"Where are the people — sorry, men — who flocked to 'Paedophile Island' and flew on the 'Lolita Express'? The grotty liggers who turned up because they knew he had an unquenchable supply of young, willing women? The pervert bankers who took holidays in his waterfront mansion? The celebs who partied with underage models but 'saw nothing'? The most any single man except Epstein himself has suffered in connection with this case is the mild embarrassment of being snapped with him or, as in the case of Donald Trump, once making the mistake of saying he was a 'terrific guy.' And what will Maxwell get? She could get 65 years. We know, obviously, about Prince Andrew, a terminally fat-fingered chaffering drongo who is slowly being comically lost in the snaky coils of Epstein’s former towel girl Virginia Roberts Giuffre. Will he ever end up in court? Who cares?"

From "Epstein is dead, Maxwell is guilty. Now let’s talk about the men who escaped" by Camilla Long (London Times).

I agree with the substance of this piece. That's why I'm quoting it. That said, I'd like to talk about grotty liggers and chaffering drongo. Those are 4 great words, and I only know "grotty" — short for "grotesque." So let's research. 

It turns out that "liggers" are people who "lig," and "to lig" — which is a dialect variant of "to lie" — means "To idle or lie about (colloquial); also (slang), to sponge, to ‘freeload’; to gatecrash or attend parties." That's according to the OED, which gives us the quotes "It's a time for ligging in the streets and doing your thing, man" (1969) and "The Feelgoods, now ligging and gigging around America" (1976).

So, yes, obviously, these were grotty liggers.

By the way, the OED cites "A Hard Day's Night" as the first recorded use of "grotty": "'I wouldn't be seen dead in them. They're dead grotty.’ Marshall stared. ‘Grotty?’ ‘Yeah—grotesque.’"

On to chaffering drongo. To "chaffer" is to bargain or haggle. And to call someone a "drongo" — originally a type of bird — is to say they are a stupid fool. Fine to say that about Andrew, but it's a bit unfair to disparage the bird, which seems rather smart:

A new video on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the release of "My Sweet Lord."

 

 

AND: I put the video up before watching it. Now, I've seen it, and what did it mean? The lyrics of the song are clearly about looking for God. So we see a pair of investigators with scanning devices in a library/bookstore, searching, and then in a crowded movie theater, searching. 

I had to presume they were looking for God. But it turned into looking at celebrities, and this was kind of a mystery too, not the profound mystery of the search for God, but a mystery nonetheless, because all the celebrities I have a shot at recognizing are old and radically changed from the version I know, and all the ones appearing in their famous form, the young ones, are not famous to me. 

But perhaps that's the message: If you were looking at God, would you see Him? I really wanna see you, Lord... 

In the end, the investigators tell each other that they didn't even hear what song was playing. That is, they didn't hear the lyrics about searching for God. But they turn on the car radio — streaming device? — and "My Sweet Lord" is playing there too. The song is everywhere. God is everywhere. It takes so long... it won't take long.

"In the Beatles circa 1969, Paul McCartney is the negotiator-in-chief, and he’s aware of every eggshell he has to walk around or smash to achieve greatness..."

"... or just to get shit done.... [H]e comes off as surprisingly aware of the minefield of sensitivities around him... and he’s certainly beyond aware that he’s paying a cost to be the boss. He’s a domineering older brother to George and rival/BFF/frenemy to John, and now he’s playing de facto manager to everyone — not necessarily because he’s taken pole position in the band on merit alone, but because Lennon is suddenly more invested in a woman... Seeing McCartney recognize and articulate all these shifts, and soldier on while he gets a little bit sad about them, is one of the pleasures of 'Get Back.' If you don’t come away from this with just a little more admiration for Paul, you may just be too in the bag for John and Yoko and their bag-ism, but that’s all right. Everybody is going to be your favorite or most admired Beatle, some time before you complete the eight-hour Get Back Challenge. 'Daddy’s gone away now, you know, and we’re on our own at the holiday camp,' McCartney says, about they’ve felt rudderless since the death of manager Brian Epstein. In the contretemps with Harrison where the guitarist famously says 'I’ll play whatever you want me to play, or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play,' McCartney tells the whole group he’s aware of turning into dad, and he doesn’t like it: 'I’m scared of that one… me being the boss. And I have been for, like, a couple of years – and we all have, you know, no pretending about that.'"

From "Why the Beatles’ ‘Get Back’ May Stand as the Best Rock Doc Ever" by Chris Willman (Variety).

Lots more at the link. I resisted watching this show because I didn't want to subscribe to another streaming service — in this case, Disney. But I gave in, paid the $8 for the first month, and intend to exit as soon as I'm done watching this 8-hour extravaganza. I'm only one hour into it, after 2 sessions. I can only take so much. They look bored, that is, John, George, and Ringo look bored. Paul is more or less everything. That's pretty unpleasant! But I see that's the idea, and I have to watch it slowly enough to appreciate the details, the clues. Is John bored or is he utterly mentally absent, relocated somewhere in drugworld? Is Ringo bored or is he paying intense attention and just essentially, perpetually mute? Is George bored or is he an angry, resentful son of a bitch? 

ADDED: Willman casually used the term "bag-ism" — accomplishing a little play on words. I know what it means. I remember bagism, but I looked up the Wikipedia page anyway:

George yawns as Paul invents "Get Back" out of thin air.

Watching Paul come up with “Get Back” out of literally thinking air while Ringo and George just yawn is a marvel to watch. This Beatles documentary is INSANE #TheBeatlesGetBack pic.twitter.com/09Nii0tHqr

— Darth Yavin (@DarthYavin) November 27, 2021

"The expanding reach of the technology is enough to make a person want to wear a mask indefinitely. We won’t, of course."

"With a spell of warm spring weather in New York City, masks are starting to come off and the smiles are returning to the faces—just as George Harrison once had it—and it really does feel like years since they’ve been here. To be unmasked feels good, natural, free, human. And yet, as covid-19 recedes in this country, the human face will be more vulnerable than ever. Unmasked, we’ll find that our faces have become common property. For technology, faces equal identity; we are our faces, but they are no longer ours alone."

From "Mask Mandates Are Easing, but the Way We Look at Faces Has Changed Forever/Monitoring the human face through technology has become the default mode of public encounter" (The New Yorker).

"I went to England and in the course of us meeting the Beatles, I became friends with George. He was a very nice cat, very open..."

"... a very decent human being. Invited me over to his house for dinner, that kind of thing. Hung out with us. Later on, he tells me that he’s gone to India and met this teacher, this guru. George is smitten by him. I listened to what he was saying and I wanted to say to George, 'That’s great, but take it with a grain of salt,' because usually when somebody comes on that strong that they’ve got the answer, it’s bulls—. I wanted to say, 'Have some skepticism.' But I was too chicken to do it, because I had too much respect for George. So I wrote him that song. 'I thought I met a man who knew a man who knew what was going on.' And I ended it by saying, listen, I don’t think he does know what’s going on. I don’t even know if George ever heard the song."

Said David Crosby, in an interview with the L.A. Times. 

Here's the song, "Laughing":

 

That's from Crosby's 1971 solo album that the critics "just didn’t understand," as Crosby puts it. "They were looking for another record that was full of big, flashy lead guitar and blues licks and screaming lyrics. It was not where everything else was going, so they thought it was irrelevant." 

Lester Bangs called it "a perfect aural aid to digestion when you’re having guests over for dinner." In 1971, that was a worse kick in the head than being told your music makes me want to vomit.

ADDED: Not only do I have a tag for Lester Bangs, the Lester Bangs tag appears on a post written on the first day of this blog, January 14, 2004. There is no other tag for a specific human being until the next day, when Herbert Muschamp and Dennis Miller appear. Interestingly, George Harrison shows up on January 17, 2004.

"Pretzel in pocket."

A very short podcast for reasons explained in the first minute.

Topics: "Pretzels, height, crabs, white-presenting voters, roll-off voters, Wikipedia, Billie Eilish, George Harrison, David Bowie, Chrissie Hynde, Emanuel Macron."

"George Harrison once sent a handwritten letter to a Beatles fan asking them to trash Paul McCartney’s car."

Far Out reports. 

The fan, Susan Houghton, presumably calculating what it would take to get Harrison to choose her letter as one to write a response to, had asked him how to wash her car. Harrison wrote out a 7-point list of instructions, the 7th point being: 

Now proceed to 20 Forthlin RD. with about 6 buckets full of dirty muddy greasey water, where a shiney Ford Classic will be seen. Spread contents of the buckets evenly, so as to leave a nice film of muck over the car. You can now return home knowing you have done your deed for the day. Thank you!!!

Harrison was more of a jerk than you might think if you mostly just listen to his song lyrics. So spiritual! 

"I got born into the material world /Getting worn out in the material world/Use my body like a car/Taking me both near and far." 

Do you think of your body as a car your spirit rides around in? Do you admire a man who does?

But enough of that jerk George. What was this "Ford Classic" of Paul's? I don't know exactly when George wrote that letter and gave out what seems to have been Paul's home address. But here's a GQ article from this year, "Paul McCartney's car collection is a tour de force." It says Paul has a 1962 Ford Consul Classic 315. 

Wikipedia's "Ford Classic" article has this picture (not specifically Paul's car):

(cc Charles01)

That chord.

Yeah, that was the Rickenbacker 12-string @GeorgeHarrison used in "A Hard Day's Night." Look at the chord he's playing. It's from the instrumental break of "Bells of Rhymney." :-) https://t.co/e9Z3w2hpAq

— Roger McGuinn (@RogerMcGuinn) March 9, 2019

Wikipedia says: G7add9sus4, G7sus4, or G11sus4 and others below.
Part of the chord is an Fadd9 It is F with a G on top. https://t.co/ecpxEHtSJb

— Roger McGuinn (@RogerMcGuinn) March 9, 2019

2 clouds with the same number.

I'm watching those right now as a consequence of a conversation I started on Facebook, which began:

I'm thinking of the old Rolling Stones song "Get Off of My Cloud," because I'm aware of my own instinct to step on the clouds of others. Even though you can't step on a cloud. I'm cynical re clouds. Joni Mitchell sang "Clouds got in my way." No, they didn't. But if you'd like to say I need to stop thinking about all those songs from the 1960s, get off of my cloud.

Pick a cloud.

George Harrison's "Cloud Nine."

The Temptations' "Cloud Nine."

Joni Mitchell's clouds ("Both Sides Now").

The Rolling Stones' "Get Off of My Cloud."

 

pollcode.com free polls

Guitar World's "Beatles' 10 Greatest Guitar Moments" slights George Harrison.

#1 — something you may forget is even a song — is a back-and-forth among 3 Beatles. #2 isn't a Beatle at all. And #3 is Paul (on a song written by George):

According to Geoff Emerick, Harrison struggled for two hours to craft a solo before producer George Martin suggested he let McCartney give it a try. McCartney’s solo, Emerick says, “was so good that George Martin had me fly it in again during the song’s fadeout.” Portions of it, played backward, were also applied to the Revolver track “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

Apparently, Harrison didn’t feel slighted. At the time of making Revolver, he was ambivalent about his musical ambitions and pondering Indian mysticism, to which he would eventually convert.

“In those days,” he said, “for me to be allowed to do my one song on the album, it was like, ‘Great. I don’t care who plays what. This is my big chance.’ I was pleased to have him play that bit on ‘Taxman.’ If you notice, he did like a little Indian bit on it for me.”

"The Beatles... got carried away. Why not? If you're the Beatles in the Sixties, you just get carried away..."

"... you forget what it is you wanted to do. You're starting to do Sgt. Pepper. Some people think it's a genius album, but I think it's a mishmash of rubbish, kind of like Satanic Majesties – 'Oh, if you can make a load of shit, so can we.'"

Said Keith Richards.

SPEAKING OF THE BEATLES: I was walking down the lake path the other day, listening to my "Jennifer Juniper" channel on Pandora, and a song began that I was sure was Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man." It turned out to be George Harrison's "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)." He lost a lawsuit over his excessive use of "He's So Fine" in his "My Sweet Lord," but I'd never noticed this other borrowing before. "Give Me Love" is a pretty nice recording, and the "rip off" of Dylan is quite short. Interestingly, at 0:46 in the song, it gets very like "MacArthur Park."

"George came up to me at a party once and said 'my Paul is to me what your Paul is to you.'"

"He meant that psychologically they had the same effect on us. The Pauls sidelined us. I think George felt suppressed by Paul and I think that’s what he saw with me and my Paul. Here’s the truth: McCartney was a helluva music man who gave the band its energy, but he also ran away with a lot of the glory."

Said Art Garfunkel, in a long interview, in which I also learned that he's got a website where he lists every book he's ever read and it's — in his words — "heavy shit... not fluff." He lists the books in the order he reads them and includes the number of pages in each book.

"I'll bring gifts, like you never saw/Priceless garments that you'll adore/Persian rugs to enhance your floor/For the pleasures of love..."

That's Mary Ann Mobley, Miss America 1959, in the 1965 Elvis movie "Harum Scarum." She has died at the age of 75.

"Harum Scarum" was filmed on the set Cecil B. DeMille used for the 1927 movie "The King of Kings" and uses some of the story from the 1921 Rudolph Valentino movie "The Sheik."  

"Harum Scarum" was the only Elvis movie I ever saw in the theater. This was 1965, a year after "Hard Day's Night," where money can't buy you love.



We were free, in the modern world, so what the hell was Elvis doing? He was so ridiculous. We went to the movie to laugh at him. We were like George Harrison, turning down the sound and saying rude things. We'd seen an ad in the teen magazines for "Harum Scarum" and had taken to saying "Harum Scarum" just to make each other laugh.



It seemed so funny that we thought it would be fun to watch the movie as a joke. But it was dreadfully boring. Anyway, the ad is still hilarious — the phallic symbols, the ethnic nonsense, the absurd image of 1950s Elvis blithely unaware — he thinks he's "swingin'" — as Elvis in a Sheik costume is about to poke him in the ass with a knife. As for Mary Ann, she's down there somewhere amongst the little people at his feet. If it's supposed to be a harem, they can't give one woman prominence. So stick her down there between 1950s Elvis's legs, and — because you can't have too many Elvises — put another Elvis down there. "It's Elvis" say the letters across the top, bigger than the movie title. And what was the point of misspelling "harem"? It's not as if matching "scarum" was the idea, "scarum" being a misspelling of "scare 'em." And "You won't believe it when you see it!" Why the hell not? What could possibly be hard to believe about a dumb Elvis movie. He's in a costume? There are a lot of "harem" girls for him? After seeing the damned thing, we said: "You won't believe it when you see it? You won't believe how boring it is."

But that was a half century ago, and so long, Mary Ann.

"The fact that under the influence of psilocybin the brain temporarily behaves in a new way may be medically significant in treating psychological disorders like depression."

"'When suffering depression, people get stuck in a spiral of negative thoughts and cannot get out of it,' Dr. Expert said. 'One can imagine that breaking any pattern that prevents a "proper" functioning of the brain can be helpful.' Think of it as tripping a breaker or rebooting your computer."

"Dr. Expert." I love that. The doctor really is Dr. Expert — Dr. Paul Expert. I have no idea how fascinating that would seem if I were high on psilocybin — or should I say breaking a cerebral circuit or rebooting my brain with psilocybin? But I do find that amusing. Dr. Paul Expert! How to trip/medicate like Paul Expert....

Must we be depressed to deserve the brain benefits of psilocybin?

Anecdotally, psychoactive mushrooms may positively affect even nonsufferers. They did for me. 

"Me" = Eugenia Bone, author of "Mycophilia: Revelations From the Weird World of Mushrooms." These names! I feel like I'm reading a work of fiction... a work of fiction possibly titled Dr. Expert and Ms. Eugenia Bone.

I ate the mushroom as part of research for a book. The experience lasted about four hours, much of which I spent outdoors, but seemed to last much longer. I think because everything I was seeing was so new: the way the air was disturbed behind the flight of a bee, the way the trees seemed to respire, how the clouds and breeze and rocks and grass all existed in a kind of churning symbiosis.

I experienced a number of small epiphanies — self-realizations actually — but one in particular remained with me. As the drug wore off, I went indoors to take a hot bath. For a moment I thought that might not be a good idea, as bath time is when women in middle age can be very self-critical and unforgiving, and I didn’t want the sight of my waistline to veer me into a bad trip. But while in the tub I envisioned my body as a ship that was taking me through life, and that made it beautiful.

Makes me think of the old George Harrison lyric: "I got born into the material world/Getting worn out in the material world/Use my body like a car/Taking me both near and far..."



I hope you watched that, because it was very trippy, and it might have rebooted your brain in a way that could enhance your experience as as we bring this post in for a landing and get close to Ms. Bone:

I stopped feeling guilty about growing older and regretful about losing my looks. Instead, I felt overwhelming gratitude. It was a tremendous relief that I still feel.

Ah, now, I hope the looming access to psilocybin is not limited to those who can name the right psychological ailment, so that women with body dysmorphia get access, slipping in through the door along with the depressed. That would be depressing. But look how fast the middle-aged woman who feels bad about her naked body jumps from wanting access for herself to the urge to control the young and the festive:

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting 16-year-olds take magic mushrooms. I’m not suggesting they be used to party at all. What I am advocating for is a mind open to the possibilities of their use to help people in need. Because illiberality doesn’t cure disease; curiosity does.

If you want relief from government control, you have to embody the persona of the victim. You must belong to the ranks of the "people in need." Your desire to tweak and tamper with your brain medicinally must be a matter of disease. You must portray yourself as down and trying to get to normal, not normal and seeking a higher ground.

From the Spiritual Sky/Such sweet memories have I....

"The Americans who went to the moon before us had computers so primitive that they couldn’t get e-mail or use Google to settle arguments."

"The iPads we took had something like seventy billion times the capacity of those Apollo-era dial-ups and were mucho handy, especially during all the downtime on our long haul. MDash used his to watch Season Four of 'Breaking Bad.' We took hundreds of selfies with the Earth in the window and, plinking a Ping-Pong ball off the center seat, played a tableless table-tennis tournament, which was won by Anna.... Steve Wong had cued up a certain musical track for what would be Earthrise but had to reboot the Bluetooth on Anna’s Jambox and was nearly late for his cue. MDash yelled, 'Hit Play, hit Play!' just as a blue-and-white patch of life — a slice of all that we have made of ourselves, all that we have ever been — pierced the black cosmos above the sawtooth horizon. I was expecting something classical, Franz Joseph Haydn or George Harrison, but 'The Circle of Life,' from 'The Lion King,' scored our home planet’s rise over the plaster-of-Paris moon. Really? A Disney show tune? But, you know, that rhythm and that chorus and the double meaning of the lyrics caught me right in the throat, and I choked up. Tears popped off my face and joined the others’ tears, which were floating around the Alan Bean. Anna gave me a hug like I was still her boyfriend. We cried. We all cried. You’d have done the same."

From a New Yorker story by Tom Hanks (which you can read or listen to Tom Hanks read at the link).

I'm having trouble reading Ana Marie Cox's "Dear Senate women: grow up and don't pass Hillary Clinton 'secret notes.'"

I don't know. Maybe it's because she's writing in The Guardian now. This could be some British way of writing that just can't make it into my American mind. Anyway, Cox — going on about a letter 17 female Senators wrote to Hillary Clinton urging her to run for President — is working with the premise that "male representatives are boys and women are the grown-ups." That premise is not the part I'm having trouble with. I understand it. I understand it as: Feminism-as-sexism is funny; come on, give us a little room to get in some harmless girly slaps after all the millennia of suffering.

But let's move on. Cox writes:

No one in the media has seen the letter, so I guess it's possible that it contains some kind of burn-book-level intel: Jeff Session (Alabama Republican senator) is a grotsy little byotch, Lindsay Graham (South Carolina Republican senator) made out with a hot dog, Ted Cruz (Tea Party Texan) is almost too conservative to be anything but a robot. 

"Grotsy" isn't even in Urban Dictionary, but I understand it. It's like "grotty," which was understandable as a variation of grotesque when the British comedian George Harrison said it in "Hard Day's Night." Grotsy is as understandable as ugsly.

(Maybe the "s" absconded from "Sessions," which she has as "Session.") [ADDED: Commenters say it should be "grotsky," and the phrase "grotsky little byotch" is from "Mean Girls."]

I understand the rest of those insults and why it's funny to just make up insults about Republicans to pad out a column and why — when you're talking about Republicans — it's okay to apply the mustard of homophobia. That's all well within the rules of American political humor.

"I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee."

It means something that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote "pig" instead of "pork." I think about how George Harrison sang about piggies, the bigger piggies, "in their starched white shirts... stirring up the dirt" as well as "the little piggies... crawling in the dirt." (He stirred up Charles Manson to deliver "a damned good whacking.")

Life was "getting worse" for the little piggies, while, by contrast, the bigger piggies "always had clean shirts." Now, I'm not going to veer off into the topic of The Great — big pig — Gatsby's shirts. You know if you've read "The Great Gatsby" or seen the movie that a huge to-do is made at one point about how many beautiful shirts Gatsby had.