"Elon Musk Gives Rambling Explanation of DOGE’s Work In Oval Office Address."

I'm laughing at that Mediaite headline. Musk speaks at length, extemporaneously, answering all the questions, managing his little son, keeping up good cheer, and making a lot of us viewers feel energized and optimistic, and Mediaite needs to stress that he rambled.

Remember when we had a President who was tightly scripted and couldn't find his way through the script without repeated stumbling? There was little sense that he knew what he was saying and we were utterly deprived of transparency about who was actually wielding the executive power. 

I ran across that Mediaite article because I'd googled "the woman that walked away with about 30 million," which is something Trump said to Musk as he prompted him to tell us about some "things that your team has found."

Musk said: "Right. Well, we often do find it sort of rather odd that, you know, there are quite a few people in actually here who have ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars, but somehow managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position."

He didn't name the woman, but, as even Mediaite admits, it's Samantha Power.

More Musk rambling:

Both VP nominees are now participating in the old tradition of responding to questions written on an orange that a reporter has rolled up the aisle of the campaign plane.

ABC reports.

Walz did it first, responding to the question "Dream dinner guest?" His answer (written on the orange and rolled back (more than a day later)): Bruce Springsteen.

(I struggle to resist re-telling the story of My Dinner With Bruce Springsteen.)

Vance's reporters wanted in on this orange action and rolled him the question "Fave Song." Under the circumstances, I would have chosen "Let Me Roll It"...

But Vance rolled back — immediately — "10 Years Gone":

Thank God something light-hearted is happening on this overwrought campaign.

Rivers always reach the sea/Flying skies of fortune, each a separate way/On the wings of maybe....

Why did it take Walz over a day to think up Bruce Springsteen? If you were going to workshop the most politically opportune answer, assuming you'd pick a pop star, wouldn't you pick a pop star affiliated with a battleground state? 

I see that Kamala Harris, on Steve Colbert's show last night — see "The high life: Kamala Harris cracks open a beer with Stephen Colbert" (Guardian)— chose Miller High Life as the beer for the little exercise in relatability" and...

Harris repeated the popular slogan “The champagne of beers”, while Colbert noted that it comes from Milwaukee, in the swing state of Wisconsin. He said: “So that covers Wisconsin. Let’s talk Michigan. Let’s appeal to the Michigan voters, OK? What are your favourite Bob Seger songs?”

Walz could have said Bob Seger! What're his politics?  

Vance answered quickly, and his choice is a bit idiosyncratic, but that doesn't free him of any suspicion of answering what he thought was politically advantageous. He's a quick thinker, and he knows the assignment. But he's chosen British pop stars, and "Ten Years Gone" is not near the top of obvious Led Zeppelin songs.  It's #40 on Vulture's "All 74 Led Zeppelin Songs, Ranked." So there's a good chance it really is his favorite Led Zeppelin song.

Is Led Zeppelin his favorite band? The name appears 4 times in "Hillbilly Elegy." Here are 2::

"150 Greatest Rock Lists Ever: Q Special Edition (July 2004)."

Saved by the Wayback Machine, here. I got up to list #49 before noticing there were 150 lists. 

I stumbled upon that compilation of compilations while reading a 2021 article, "How Led Zeppelin's 'Going to California' Crushed on Joni Mitchell." 

I've got 9 TikTok selections for you tonight. Let me know what you like best!

1. Man painted as a man.

2. A perfect "Immigrant Song."

3. What boys say when asked what girls want, and how does that line up with what girls say they want?

4. A dramatic vocal rendering of an interoffice memo.

5. Exactly how to deal with a catcaller.

6. And what to do when you hear that sound outdoors.

7. The teacher who thinks you have a right to know.

8. Whaddya need a man for?

9. "The hate crime is coming from inside the house."

"Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

Said Gustave Flaubert.

I'm reading that this morning because it popped up in the end of a New Yorker article about — of all things — Led Zeppelin:

If the predetermined task of rock gods and goddesses is to sacrifice themselves on the Dionysian altar of excess so that gentle teen-agers the world over don’t have to do it themselves—which seems to be the basic rock-and-roll contract—then the lives of these deities are never exactly wasted, especially when they are foreshortened. Their atrocious human deeds are, to paraphrase a famous fictional atheist, the manure for our future harmony.... [S]urely all kinds of demonic and powerful art, including many varieties of music, both classical and popular, have been created by people who didn’t live demonically. What about Flaubert’s mantra about living like a bourgeois in order to create wild art? In Led Zeppelin’s case, the great music, the stuff that is still violently radical, was made early in the band’s career, when its members were most sober. The closer the band got to actual violence, the tamer the music became.

Yes but who is the "famous fictional atheist" and how can I reverse the paraphrase "atrocious human deeds are... the manure for our future harmony"? Oh, I managed to do that.

"Could Led Zeppelin happen today? Could one of the world’s biggest bands get away with making albums without as much as their name on the cover..."

"... with making far-reaching, hugely ambitious music that veers anywhere from heavy metal thunder to folky laments, all bound together with lyrics that delve into the mysteries of the universe? The answer is a resounding no. 'We used to throw songs into the live set that we hadn’t recorded yet, just for fun.... We did that with Immigrant Song at Bath Festival in 1970, and nobody had heard anything like it. You don’t have that freedom now because it would be posted online immediately. It was a fun time as a creative musician, a fun time to be in a band.... The singles the Yardbirds were forced to make broke their spirit... I didn’t want to get caught up in it. You’d do Whole Lotta Love and then the record company would say of the next album: where’s the Whole Lotta Love? It was a trap.'... Page is mysterious, rather glamorous, and above all focused and organised.... Plant is... bumbling and haphazard.... 'When I’d had enough of being with Jimmy Page,' Plant said... 'When I’d had enough of being a rock star, I would go for long walks on the Welsh borders. It cleared my head.'"

From "Jimmy Page on why Led Zeppelin wouldn’t exist today/The rock star talks to Will Hodgkinson about how it all began, Live Aid and the band’s 2007 comeback gig, as he brings out a book about his life" by Will Hodgkinson (London Times).

It was 50 years ago today: the first public performance of "Stairway to Heaven."

From "Stairway to Heaven: the story of a song and its legacy/Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven continues to prop up best-ever lists. But what made it great? Jimmy Page and some of the song’s admirers explain its magic" (The Guardian): 

John Paul Jones has said the song’s first performance, at Ulster Hall in Belfast in March 1971, won no plaudits from the crowd – “They were all bored to tears waiting to hear something they knew” – though bootlegs of the show have it ending to perfectly respectful and sustained applause....

[Later], Stairway usually featured in the middle of Zeppelin’s live set (at that Belfast show, it was played sixth, between Dazed and Confused and another new song, Going to California), then, Page says, “it got to the point where, because of the affection for it from the audience, it was gonna be better to put it at the end, so there was anticipation for it. And what were you gonna follow it with? So you’d finish the set with it then come back on and do the encores.”

Zeppelin legend holds that to maximise the song’s impact, the band’s manager, Peter Grant, told Plant not to speak after Stairway, to maximise the moment of profundity. Page has an idea for what would happen if he were playing the song in this era: “Now you should just open with it.” He laughs at his own audacity. “That’d be something, wouldn’t it?”

"The ‘Rage Baking’ Controversy, Explained/'Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices' is one of the most hyped cookbooks/essay collections of the year..."

"... but Tangerine Jones, a black woman who began using the phrase 'rage baking' years ago in response to racial injustice, isn’t credited," Eater explains.

On February 4, Simon & Schuster published Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices.... Then, on February 14, blogger and baker Tangerine Jones published an essay on Medium titled “The Privilege of Rage,” outlining how she coined the phrase “rage baking” back in 2015, and watched as Alford and Gunst’s book was published to great acclaim as her work went unacknowledged. Jones, a black woman, wrote that “Being black in America means you’re solid in the knowledge that folks don’t give a true flying fuck about you or anyone who looks like you,” and that she turned to baking as a form of self care. In 2015, she started posting online with the hashtag #ragebaking, and started the @ragebaking Instagram account in the summer of 2016....

“There are huge consequences when [black women] express our rage because we’re seen as threatening,” [Jones] said in an email, even noting that her post likely wouldn’t have been as popular “if I wasn’t code switching and couching my profound disappointment and anger in ‘eloquent’ ways.”

I'm trying to understand how Tangerine Jones feels, and here's what I come up with. What if some men — without so much as mentioning me — put out a book titled "Cruel Neutrality: The Transformative Power of Blogging, Brutality, and the Detached Voice," and the authors were raking in money and doing TV appearances and their names replaced mine on a Google search on "cruel neutrality":

I don't mind seeing Taylor Swift's name on "my" page, but it would irk me if some men — I made them men to approximate Jones's racial grievance — took my phrase and monetized it, fame-a-tized it. I'd be irked. But I wouldn't think, this is how the world marginalizes people like me. So I'm not getting the full Tangerine Jones effect.

ADDED: The authors of "Rage Baking" are giving some of their profits to "Emily’s List, an organization dedicated to electing pro-choice Democrat women to office, and though Jones dismisses." It's interesting the way rage is becoming part of the Democratic Party brand. I searched for the phrase "rage baking" in the NYT archive, and I found "I Misjudged the Gender Effect/The Sanders-Warren spat looked as if it’d blow over. Instead it’s fueled the 'electability' debate" (a column by Lisa Lerer from a month ago):

Sure, the energy of the first Women’s March, the #MeToo movement and the historic number of women who won congressional seats in 2018 is still alive — or at least available for purchase. Books like “Rage Baking” urge women to use “sugar and sass” as political protest, as pink hats march down runways and designers sell $400 “resistance” sweaters. But it’s not translating into support for the remaining women in the Democratic primary....

Yes, before investing too deeply in rage, get some clarity about whether rage works. It might work to get somebody flinging flour around the kitchen and gobbling cookies — let's face it, "rage baking" comes from "rage eating," and most baking is for eating — but that doesn't mean we want rage at the center of presidential politics.

AND: Some people in the comments are making fun of the name Tangerine, but Tangerine is a fantastic name. I don't think there's anyone famous named Tangerine, but there are 2 great songs about a woman named Tangerine. There's the 1941 Johnny Mercer song "Tangerine" (listen here to Chet Baker and Paul Desmond... wait, that was great, but there's no singing, so here's Frank Sinatra):

Tangerine, she is all they claim
With her eyes of night and lips as bright as flame
Tangerine, when she dances by
Senoritas stare and caballeros sigh
And I've seen toasts to Tangerine
Raised in every bar across the Argentine
Yes, she has them all on the run
But her heart belongs to just one
Her heart belongs to Tangerine
Tangerine, she is all they say
With mascara'd eye and chapeaux by Dache
Tangerine, with her lips of flame
If the color keeps, Louis Philippe's to blame
And I've seen clothes on Tangerine
Where the label says "From Macy's Mezzanine"
Yes, she's got the guys in a whirl
But she's only fooling one girl
She's only fooling Tangerine

And Led Zeppelin had their "Tangerine"! Listen here. The lyrics are a noticeably inferior to the Johnny Mercer song, but still.... Led Zeppelin!

Tangerine, Tangerine
Living reflection from a dream
I was her love, she was my queen
And now a thousand years in between
Thinking how it used to be
Does she still remember times like these?
To think of us again
And I do

"When I try to connect with [my 15-year-old daughter], it backfires. A few months ago she cued up 'The Rain Song' by Led Zeppelin..."

"... one of my favorites when I was her age. I told her so, and she didn’t respond. I made the terrible mistake of attempting to play it for her on the acoustic guitar when we got home. She was learning to play the guitar herself, and I thought maybe she’d want to know the chords. She barely stayed for the glissando intro and then fled upstairs. As far as I can tell, she hasn’t listened to Led Zeppelin since. I know. I know. I remember how I treated my mother at that age... But now that I had my own teenage girl, I realized for the first time that my mother was[... t]rying to catch a glimpse of the girl she had given birth to, the full-grown person she had nurtured who was now walking swiftly away from her. ... I no longer saw Paulina in her natural habitat, telling jokes or even crying with those she was close to...."

From "Rediscovering My Daughter Through Instagram/Paulina was as remote as a 15-year-old could be. And then I saw her photography" by Helene Stapinski (NYT).



I felt the coldness of my winter... These are the seasons of emotion....

The Apple ringtone "Marimba” uses hemiola — "a specific type of syncopation, featuring three beats where you would intuitively expect two."

"It’s a fairly common musical technique, one that’s been around for centuries, featuring prominently in the work of 19th-century composers like Brahms, Schumann and Tchaikovsky. It also regularly crops up in popular music — from the opening riff of Led Zeppelin’s 'Kashmir'..."



"... to the chorus of Britney Spears’s 'Till the World Ends'..."



"In 'Marimba'..."



"... the accented upper line creates the hemiola with a group of three notes in syncopation against the groups of two. Further, the counterpoint of the two lines jumps dramatically in pitch range, with the upper line using higher pitches that stick out conspicuously because of the accents against the lower notes in the second line.... Like 'Marimba' and [another Apple ringtone] 'Xylophone'..."



"... Queen’s 'We Will Rock You'...



"... has two repeating strands of musical activity: the stomping and clapping line, followed by Freddie Mercury’s declamatory lyrics in a freer rhythmic pattern. It’s this combination of brevity, repeatability and layered complexity that makes both pop songs and ringtones so sticky. 'The catchiness arises from the chunked and sequential nature of tunes; once they interest an ear, they play themselves through to a point of rest,' music theorist and cognitive scientist Elizabeth Margulis..."

From "No, iPhone ringtones aren’t bad. They’re musically sophisticated" by Alyssa Barnes (in WaPo).

The entrepreneurial wisdom of Stormy Daniels. (No wonder she was a good match for Donald Trump.)

I'm reading "Interest in Stormy Daniels is surging on Pornhub" (WaPo):

... And while it’s not clear that [Stormy Daniels will] prevail in that legal fight [to get out from under her non-disclosure agreement], it is clear that her appearance in the news has been good for her marketability. Searches for Daniels’s name are skyrocketing.... And each subsequent time Daniels has made headlines for her alleged affair with Trump — when she appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel Show... searches for her name have spiked again....

“I have two choices,” Daniels told Rolling Stone of the Trump scandal. “Sit at home and feel sorry for myself, or make lemonade out of lemons.”

Led Zeppelin said it best:



The top-rated comment at WaPo uses a device I'm seeing in the comedy subgenre of mocking Trump*:

I don't see what all the hullabazoo is over some sleazy, oversized, fake-tanned, fake-blonde trashy prostitute who crawled out of the sewer just to spew forth a bunch of garbage in hopes of being more famous.

Why would anyone care?

About Trump, I mean?

And then, also in WaPo, there's a Petula Dvorak essay touting Stormy Daniels alongside "the female pioneers of the porn industry":

You hear “porn,” and you may think predatory guys with cameras in warehouses... But ever since Edison and his kinetoscope, there have been women... who have emerged as entrepreneurs in an industry made for men and run by men....

“This industry is filled with strong, smart, very business-savvy women,” [said Lynn Comella, associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at University of Nevada Las Vegas]. “They are calling the shots as directors and CEOs,” and they “are willing to stand up for themselves.”

Given the female power players who survive and thrive in such a cutthroat field, she said, “I’m not surprised to see it’s an adult performer” taking on Trump.

_______________________________


* Trump used it on himself at the Gridiron dinner on March 4th:

I won't rule out direct talks with Kim Jong-Un. I just won't. As far as the risk of dealing with a madman is concerned, that's his problem, not mine.

Of course, now the direct talks are on. And look! Now, it seems that Kim Jong-Un is cracking jokes about himself. Keep thinking, keep talking, keep joking — maybe there's enough lemonade for everyone.

Federal jury decides in favor of Led Zeppelin.

In the "Stairway to Heaven" trial.

Jurors were not played the Taurus recording, which contains a section that sounds very similar to the instantly recognizable start of Stairway. Instead, they were played guitar and piano renditions by musicians on both sides of the case. Not surprisingly, the plaintiff's version on guitar sounded more like Stairway than the defense version on piano.

Experts for both sides dissected both compositions, agreeing mainly that they shared a descending chord progression that dates back three centuries as a building block in lots of songs....

Jurors never heard a note from Page or Plant live, but they were treated to lo-fi vintage recordings of the band creating the song, renditions on guitar and piano by other musicians and, finally, the full recording of one of rock's most enduring anthems.

Page, 72, bobbed his head and moved to the tune while Plant, 67, sat still. Both men wore sharp suits, white shirts and ties throughout the trial and had their hair pulled back in neat ponytails. They didn't chat with anyone in the gallery, including several fans, and were escorted by personal bodyguards to the restroom and in and out of the federal courthouse each day....

Jimmy Page — "in a black three-piece suit with his long white hair tied back" — testified in court yesterday.

In the case about whether the acoustic guitar pattern that begins "Stairway to Heaven" was copied from the Spirit recording "Taurus."

“I know that I had never heard it before,” he said....

Mr. Page... whether he remembered a concert in December 1968 when Led Zeppelin opened for Spirit.

“I didn’t hear Spirit at the Denver show,” Mr. Page said, adding that he believed the headliner was Vanilla Fudge.

Mr. Page admitted that he owned a copy of Spirit’s 1968 debut album, which contains the song “Taurus,” although he said he did not know how he got it. His record collection contains 4,329 vinyl albums and 5,882 CDs, he said.

Earlier in the day, Mark Andes, the bassist in Spirit, testified that “Taurus” had been a regular part of the band’s set in its early days. He said he remembered drinking beer and playing snooker with Mr. Plant after Spirit played a club in Birmingham, England, in 1970. “We had a blast,” Mr. Andes said.

"Stairway to Heaven" has made over $562 million in royalties over the years.

"A few decades ago, left wing politics meant getting your skull cracked by company goons rushing a picket line..."

"... not listening to Disraeli Gears while doing bong hits. It meant getting millions of people to cast their presidential votes for a man who the U.S. government feared enough to put in prison, not for a former bomber pilot whose leftism consists of being more liberal than Richard Nixon (No offense to McGovern . . . BUT COME ON PEOPLE!)... Forty years from now today’s kids will have become the biggest pain in the ass generation of old people ever. If only because there’s so many of them! Their kids (and grandchildren) will never stop hearing about the good old days, when 'we' 'stopped the War' and a bunch of other equally preposterous claims. Through sheer demographic force, they’ll probably ensure that some kid born in 1995 can sing along to Beatles and Stones songs, if not Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk Railroad!"

Wrote The Last True Leftist, August 8, 1974.

Kids play "Kashmir."

("The Louisville Leopard Percussionists... are a performing ensemble of approximately 55 student musicians, ages 7-12, living in and around Louisville, Kentucky.")

"The key to Led Zeppelin is that somebody is always playing a counterpoint."

Said Jimmy Page, accepting an award at the Berklee School of Music (where he will be the commencement speaker today).

Here, you can see him in academic garb:

A new Van Gogh. Declared "100 percent genuine" now.

Back in 1908 it was declared a fake and stuck up in an attic.

Hey, if it's really a Van Gogh — from the "mature" period, no less — why wouldn't it be something you'd hang in full view even if you believed it was fake?

Let's contemplate the importance of authenticity. But don't start — as I tried — by Googling that phrase. You'll get bullshit about personal relationships, not art. I wanted bullshit about art.

Being who you really are. That seems like an old-fashioned subject. Something we talked about in the 60s, right?

This topic of personal authenticity took me back to "The Above Ground Sound" of Jake Holmes, specifically "Genuine, Imitation Life" (audio at link):

Chameleons changing colors,
While a crocodile cries.
People rubbing elbows,
But never touching eyes.
Taking off their masks,
Revealing still another guise.
Genuine, imitation life.

That was not a joke, but 100% genuine in 1967. Or... I'm reading the Jake Holmes article at Wikipedia and I'm now not sure that it wasn't a joke. Was he making fun of serious folksingers, making fun of authenticity? A picture from that article raises questions:



What's going on here? Caption: "Jim Connell, Jake Holmes and Joan Rivers when they worked as the team: 'Jim, Jake & Joan.'"

Holmes also wrote the song "Dazed and Confused" (recorded by Led Zeppelin) and many famous advertising jingles, notably "Be a Pepper" and "Be all that you can be." This is blowing my mind. Just that the same guy urged us to "Be all that you can be" (in the Army) and to "Be a Pepper." I'll bet the Army kicked you out back then if they found out you were a Pepper. That's weird. But that he also wrote "Dazed and Confused." And worked with Joan Rivers (and looked like he looked working with Joan Rivers).

Now, I'm questioning the authenticity of that Wikipedia article. But here's a 2010 NYT article about Holmes suing Led Zeppelin for copyright infringement.

Anyway, back to Van Gogh. Think that's a real Van Gogh?

What do you think of that "Van Gogh"?
	Authentic and bad — that's why it was mistaken for fake.
	Authentic and good — experts are experts and Van Gogh is Van Gogh.
	Fake and bad — why else would it have been stowed in an attic for decades?
	Fake but good — but then why did they put it in the attic?
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: I found — on YouTube, not in my attic — some Jim, Jake & Joan (from a 1964 movie called "Once Upon A Coffee House"):

"When the advertising gods cast my soul into hell as punishment for writing negative reviews..."

"... I'll probably be forced to watch a witless, artsy perfume commercial like this Dior Homme spot on an endless loop for all eternity."



"Moody monochrome images of Rob Pattinson's 'smoldering stares' will sear my eyes forever, while the clip's soundtrack — Led Zeppelin's 'Whole Lotta Love' — scalds my ears like the screams of the damned."

Way, way down inside... the fiery pit of hell.

"This grasping at straws was just the capstone to what even liberal observers admitted was a week of self-immolation..."

I'm annoyed that I can't get into that article — about the SG's argument in the Obamacare case — because I don't have a subscription to the Weekly Standard. Now, I'll never know whether that article contains a funnier mixed metaphor than that.

What are those images?

Self-immolation is deliberately setting oneself on fire. I picture dramatic protests from the Vietnam era, but it's been going on for centuries:

It was Western media coverage of Buddhist monks immolating themselves in protest of the South Vietnamese regime in 1963 that introduced the word "self-immolation" to a wide English-speaking audience and gave it a strong association with fire. The alternative name bonzo comes from the same era, because the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves were often referred to by the term bonze in English literature prior to the mid-20th century...

Bonzo! Most Americans think of that Ronald Reagan movie when we hear "Bonzo." Perhaps some think of Led Zeppelin. But fiery suicide, to make a political point? That's new to me.

A capstone is "a stone that caps or crowns." I'm quoting the OED, where we can see the metaphorical use of the word goes back to 1685: "Here is the fair occasion... to put the cap-stone upon his other perfections" (tr. B. Gracián y Morales Courtiers Oracle 150). By the way, the Great Pyramid is missing its capstone. Ever notice? Makes you want to put an eye there:



Okay, now what about grasping at straws? What's the image there? I realize I've always pictured ants trying to get out of water by climbing onto some bit of straw. Focusing on that for the first time, I can see that grasping at straws would probably work for an ant. You're supposed to picture a human being trying to escape drowning and desperately grasping at anything, no matter how absurdly useless it is. Wiktionary tells me that the image goes back Thomas More, "Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation" (1534). More is talking about people who will not seek the "comfort" of God. Some of them are completely lethargic — "so drowned in sorrow that they fall into a careless deadly dullness." Others are so "testy" and "fuming" that you don't even want to talk to them. Then there are people who do want to be comforted. Some of them "seek for worldly comfort":

He who in tribulation turneth himself unto worldly vanities, to get help and comfort from them, fareth like a man who in peril of drowning catcheth whatsoever cometh next to hand, and that holdeth he fast, be it never so simple a stick. But then that helpeth him not, for he draweth that stick down under the water with him, and there they lie both drowned together. So surely, if we accustom ourselves to put our trust of comfort in the delight of these childish worldly things, God shall for that foul fault suffer our tribulation to grow so great that all the pleasures of this world shall never bear us up, but all our childish pleasure shall drown with us in the depth of tribulation.

You know, that eye on the pyramid, as seen on the Great Seal of the United States dollar bill is the "Eye of Providence":

On the seal, the Eye is surrounded by the words Annuit Cœptis, meaning "He approves (or has approved) [our] undertakings", and Novus Ordo Seclorum, meaning "New Order of the Ages". The Eye is positioned above an unfinished pyramid with thirteen steps, representing the original thirteen states and the future growth of the country. The lowest level of the pyramid shows the year 1776 in Roman numerals. The combined implication is that the Eye, or God, favors the prosperity of the United States.

Have we gone so deeply into the mixed metaphor that it's all coming together somehow?

Scott Brown: "I was a jerk."

Last November, Brown was asked if he'd ever been arrested:

“My mom was on welfare a little bit, and, you know, I lived with my grandparents, I lived with my aunt, whatever. I was a jerk. I had some issues. You know, I was lost. . . . Mom was always working. . . . There was some violence in there where I would be sticking up for my mom and sisters. . . . I may get a little emotional. . . . And one day I was out with some older kids. . . . We were in Salem. . . . I had a pair of farmer overalls, and I stuck some records in them. . . . I was walking out, and a guy caught me.

“And so I was arrested and went over to Salem District Court, and Judge [Samuel] Zoll . . . gets me in his chambers, and he says: ‘So, tell me about yourself. I see you like music.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I love music. I like Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and Grand Funk, all that stuff.’ He says, ‘What else do you do?’ And I said, ‘I play . . . basketball, and I like to run.’ He said, ‘How good are you?’ And I said, ‘Well, I score about 30 or 40 points a game.’ He says, ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, a half-brother and some half-sisters,’ and he says, ‘Wow, that’s great. . . . Do they look up to you?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely.’ He said, ‘That’s fantastic.’ . . . He . . . looks me right in the eye [and says], ‘How do you think they’d like to see you play basketball in jail?’ ’’

“I was, like, ‘Whoaaa.’ . . . He says, ‘I want you to write me a 1,500-word essay on that very topic, and I want it next week.’ That was the last time I ever stole, the last time I ever thought about stealing. . . . The other day I was at Staples, and something was in my cart that I didn’t pay for. I had to bring it back because . . . I thought of Judge Zoll.’’