Happy Birthday, America.

From There I Ruined It:

An angel gets his wings.

Me and Meade, after the blizzard:

AND: Here's Meade's video of this morning's sunrise:

I love the music he chose — "Wichita Lineman." The lush instrumentation prevented me from really liking it at the time, but it's great now. I enjoy the subtle evocation of telegraph noise, which made me think of another old song with a representation of telegraph noise. It's much noisier:

That's "Western Union," by The Five Americans. I played it out loud for Meade, and then I played another Five Americans song with a title that had caught my eye.

Meade liked it and asked me what it was called. I told him and he sent me another video:

 

Here are 8 TikToks to delight or vex you. Let me know what you think.

 1. "Ever since I was told that corn was real, it tasted good."

2. Yes, there is a burger bra. The question is what to wear with it.

3. For the European person — the coolest places in America.

4. Mr. Jeff's Musical Gizmos is open. 

5. Do you know the song my recently departed mother loved?

6. Getting searched at the San Francisco airport. (This can't be real, can it?)

7. Approaching the volcano in Iceland.

8. Glen Campbell and Leon Russell play "Jambalaya."

Goodbye to Glen Campbell.

The great musician was 81, and we knew he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. From the obituary in Variety:

Born into a sharecropping family in a tiny town in southwestern Arkansas, Campbell was the seventh of 12 children. Picking up guitar at an early age, he left home at age 14 to pursue music... Out west, Campbell soon found himself an in-demand session musician... recording guitar parts for such varied acts as Nat “King” Cole, Frank Sinatra, the Monkees, Merle Haggard and Elvis Presley.

Campbell reached the height of his session player power in 1965, when he became a touring member of the Beach Boys — playing bass to compensate for the absent Brian Wilson — as well as contributing guitar parts to the group’s landmark “Pet Sounds” album...

... Campbell’s career experienced a sudden, dramatic upswing in 1967, when he recorded a rendition of John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind.”... Follow-up single “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” was an even bigger hit.... [H]e began hosting a weekly CBS variety show, “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour”....

"You're the last person I will love/You're the last face I will recall/And best of all, I'm not gonna miss you."

Glen Campbell's final song expresses his graceful decline into Alzheimer's, finding comfort in his approaching inability to remember his wife, Kimberly Woollen, to whom he has been married since 1982. (Is it churlish to mention he had 3 wives before her?)

ADDED: The song, particularly the chords at the beginning, is reminiscent of the John Lennon song "Isolation."

IN THE COMMENTS: Many commenters express offense at my bringing up Campbell's life story as context for this song. One says: "Let the guy sing a song to his wife of 32 years and mind your own business about his prior personal life." I respond:

If he were singing it only to his wife, I would never have heard it. His people have made a video and are putting it out for us to consume. As such, opinions are invited, and it is our business.

They are seeking fame and wealth on a sentimental message, and it's entirely apt that the story of Campbell's marriages be attached to their enterprise.

Anyone who is dying deserves some sympathy, and it is interesting and sobering to contemplate a person losing all memory before dying and the effect this has on his loved ones.

But Campbell is a chance repository of this sympathy, and the things he did when he had his wits about him say more about the man who is now slipping away. If you care about humanity, you should care about who he really was, and not him as simply an exemplar of a disease.

Glen Campbell, despite Alzheimer's disease, gave a concert last Thursday.

And it was quite beautiful, and not in any kind of maudlin way:

Campbell was the same funny, relaxed, charismatic guy he's always been, and his fingers still rolled out those smooth Stratocaster lines that took songs along winding instrumental roads before graceful resolution. Or, as Campbell humorously acknowledged after a particularly nuanced solo, “I've got a few licks left — I've been practicing.”