"Cups are used for quenching thirst across a wide range of cultures and social classes, and different styles of cups may be used for different liquids or in different situations."

"Cups of different styles may be used for different types of liquids or other foodstuffs (e.g. teacups and measuring cups), in different situations (e.g. at water stations or in ceremonies and rituals), or for decoration.... Cups are an obvious improvement on using cupped hands or feet to hold liquids. They have almost certainly been used since before recorded history, and have been found at archaeological sites throughout the world. Prehistoric cups were sometimes fashioned from shells and hollowed out stones.... There is an evidence that the Roman Empire may have spread the use of cups throughout Europe, with notable examples including silver cups in Wales and a color-changing glass cup in ancient Thrace...."

I'm reading the Wikipedia entry "Cup."

I was contemplating cups as I was out running this morning, mainly because a familiar song lyric with the word "cup" came up again on my November-sunrise-running playlist, and I often get hung up on the idea in that song and in 2 other songs I've liked for a long time. Maybe it was the endorphins, but I got to imagining writing an entire book about cups and could see all the chapter headings. Back home at my desk, following my standard sitting-at-a-desk approach to exploring a sprawling concept, I looked up the word on Wikipedia.

I love the line "Cups are an obvious improvement on using cupped hands or feet to hold liquids." That slight deviation from Wikipedia flatness — "obvious" — amuses me. And then there are the 2 words that are so weird I didn't even see them on first read: "or feet."

What's the color-changing glass cup from Thrace? — you may wonder. It's the Lycurgus Cup — "a 4th-century Roman glass cage cup made of a dichroic glass, which shows a different colour depending on whether or not light is passing through it: red when lit from behind and green when lit from in front":

 

That's King Lycurgus who tries to kill Ambrosia after Ambrosia turned into a vine that twined itself around the king. The king eventually dies (in this myth) and Dionysus laughs at him.

Yes — I am answering unheard questions — my unwritten book includes the communion cup and the  cups in tarot cards. Yes, I have thought of bra cups and the World Cup and other trophies.

The song on my playlist was "Full Measure" by the Lovin' Spoonful, which begins: "The full measure of your giving/You don't yet understand/A cupful of living/That you hold in your hand." The other 2 "cup" songs are "Across the Universe" ("Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither wildly as they slip away across the universe") and "Danny's Song" ("Love the girl who holds the world in a paper cup/Drink it up...").

If you're like me, you're wondering whether the Lovin' Spoonful cup was — like the "Across the Universe" cup and the "Danny's Song" cup — a paper cup.

Notice that all 3 songs visualize the cup as containing grand and exalted space — life, the universe, the world. Thus, this post gets my #1 all-time favorite tag, "big and small." And I'm making a new tag now — "cups" — and will add it retroactively, so wait an hour and click it, if you enjoy the random delights of the archive. While you're waiting, why not have a drink? Use a cup. It's obviously better than cupping your hands or your feet.

"Eleanor Roosevelt lived across the hall in the 1940s when we first moved in."

"My mom, Jane Bishir, was a Midwestern girl who’d come to New York to make it as a writer and became the closest of friends with Vivian Vance long before she was on 'I Love Lucy.' She was my godmother. My godfather was the best babysitter on God’s green earth, Garth Williams, the illustrator for all these wonderful books. He would be doodling, and there was one evening where he showed me three or four spiders: 'Which spider do you like?' He and E.B. White were going around the bend to avoid the Disneyfication of 'Charlotte’s Web,' and he wanted to try it out on a kid. My dad was a classical harmonica player and good friends with Burl Ives, who asked him if we could let this songwriter from Oklahoma stay at our house for a while. So I’m in bed, and in the next room I hear Woody Guthrie singing and playing, and in my total infancy I thought, 'He’s not as good as Dad.'..."

Said John Sebastian, quoted in "How ‘Summer in the City’ Became the Soundtrack for Every City Summer/The dog days of 1966 were filled with riots, protests and a nation on edge. Not to mention a brutal heat wave. But in Greenwich Village, something new was happening" (NYT).

"All 214 Artists in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Ranked From Best to Worst."

By the rock critic (not the musician) Bill Wyman.

It's an amusing read if you're not the sort of person who gets steamed because your opinions are not shared. I mean, he puts Queen second to last, beating only Bon Jovi, but he states his reasons.

Welcome back, your dreams were your ticket out/Welcome back, to that same old place that you laughed about...

From "Liberals Are Still Angry, but Merrick Garland Has Reached Acceptance" (in the NYT):

After the election, the judge took a little time off, friends said... And on Jan. 30, two colleagues on the appeals court, Judges David S. Tatel and Laurence H. Silberman, hosted a more formal affair at the Metropolitan Club here.

“It was kind of, ‘Welcome back, Garland,’” Judge Tatel said. “‘Would we have been happy to see you on another court? Yes, but we’re glad you’re back.’”

Judge Tatel added, “He’s fully engaged and he’s back to being an extremely good chief judge.”...

“He did everything right — he never said a cross word, he never made a joke about it, he never politicized it,” said Tali Farhadian Weinstein, a former Garland clerk.....

In case you need to sing the post title: here.

As for the NYT article title... it's those insidious 5 stages of grief again. I don't for one minute believe that Merrick Garland had to process the experience like that, and remaining where you've been all along is not like dying. Getting an opportunity and then having it not pan out is a big experience in life, but I think anyone sensible enough to get a Supreme Court nomination isn't going to get so high on hope that he needs 5 stages to work through dashed hope. I'm sure Garland knew all along it was a game that he'd probably lose. He had the honor and distinction of being chosen, and I'm sure he accepted the nomination with the knowledge that he was being cast in a tragic role in some political theater.

“The character he showed through the whole process proves how qualified he was for the job,” [Tali Farhadian Weinstein] added, “and it adds to the tragedy that he didn’t get it.”

My spellcheck's questioning of the word "mystifyingly" — in the previous post — has me looking up the lyrics to the old Critters song, "Mr. Dieingly Sad."

"And when the leaves begin to fall/Answering old winter's call/I feel my tears, they fall like rain/Weeping forth the sad refrain/Blue, dark, and dim it may seem/You mark a grin, a moonbeam/Brightens your smile, pray tell me/How all the while you can be/So mystifyingly glad/I'm Mr. Dieingly Sad...."

Yes, of course, it's terrible poetry. And the video, should you accept the challenge to watch it, demonstrates how wiltingly douchey The Critters were, but there's something refreshingly delightful about plunging into this disturbingly proto-Emo pop song:



Spelling brought me to this darkeningly dismal corner of 60s music, so I've got to register my dismayingly pedagogically prissy objection to "Dieingly" instead of "Dyingly."

As long as we're talking about The Critters, here's the song you know if you only know one Critters song, "Younger Girl." I love this video, with the trippy op-art scenery into which the keyboard player camouflages. And I really think there's a moment — 1:36 —when the singer shows some shame at the pedophiliac lyrics:



The lyrics are by John Sebastian, and The Lovin' Spoonful also recorded this song: "A younger girl keeps a-rollin' 'cross my mind/And should I hang around, acting like her brother/In a few more years, they'd call us right for each other/And why, if I wait I'll just die, yeah."

All of this music is from 1966, my favorite year in music. I was 15. (In real life here at Meadhouse, Meade, who was 12 in 1966, is ad libbing "A younger boy keeps rolling across Ann Althouse's mind/He's only 12 years old and he hasn't even quit Boy Scouts yet...." That's so inappropriate and so not the slightest bit sexy.)

"My daughter has repeatedly brought home books from the school library that I have a problem with. I'm a feminist and I'm anti-censorship. I'm lost."

So wrote a woman at Ask Metafilter:

Yesterday, for the THIRD time, LittleTaff brought home a fairy tale... this time Rapunzel. Objectified women with little or no agency, basing marriage decisions on the appearance or wealth of the men, and WITCHES!!!!

After the second version of the Little Mermaid came home, I had a phone interview with the head and told her that I wasn't happy about the way women were portrayed, that I could see some historical merit in the books, but thought they were more appropriate for older children... but also that the Disney version of the Little Mermaid had no literary nor historical merit and did the school need some fundraising for books. (I'm on the fundraising committee. )

We were just talking about the Disney "Little Mermaid" yesterday, specifically the song "Part of Your World" — remember the singing "dads" — and my son John emailed me a link to his Ask Metafilter answer to that worried woman:

Really, [the Disney "Little Mermaid"] has no merit? Listen again to the song "Part of your World." Do you not hear the feminist themes in that song — about "bright young women . . . ready to stand?" What could be more feminist than a young woman expressing her interest in scientific discovery — "what's a fire, and why does it burn?" (The lyrics are fresh in my mind since I sang it in karaoke the other day along with a female friend.) I'm sure there's a great feminist critique of the movie to be made. But do you really want to prevent your daughter from seeing anything that could potentially be the subject of such a critique?

You seem to assume that you've seen all the truth that exists to be seen in your world, and educating your daughter is just about transmitting these truths to her. On the contrary, it matters relatively little whether your child shares your views. What matters more is equipping your child to deal with the world in her own individual way.

So I say, let your daughter be exposed to all of this. I'll bet she can handle it. Focus on talking to her about it instead of trying to create the perfect parental filter (considering that the filter is never going to last anyway). You might even learn something from her in the process.

You can probably tell I didn't filter my children's reading/watching. And I can't remember my own parents ever saying one thing about my choices — even my choice to watch just about anything that was ever on television (when they themselves rarely watched television). (My parents spent nearly every evening sitting around talking to each other. Not reading and talking. Just talking!)

Speaking of controlling your children, I was just listening to one of my favorite old Lovin' Spoonful songs "Younger Generation" (video and lyrics at the link):

Why must every generation,
Think their folks are square?
And no matter where their heads are,
They know mom's ain't there....

Listening to it now, I'm not sure whether it's a sincere expression of a desire to let children range free — "I must be permissive... all my deepest worries must be his cartoons" — or making fun of hippie-style parents who don't know where to draw the line:

Hey, Pop, my girlfriend's only three,
She's got her own videophone,
And she's taking LSD,
And now that we're best friends,
She wants to give a bit to me,
But what's the matter, daddy,
How come you're turning green?
Can it be that you can't live up to your dreams?

Crazy dreams! (And yet, today the little girl does have her own videophone.)

"It's not just these few hours..."

"... but I've been waiting since I toddled/for the great relief of having you to talk to."

(A year ago, today.)



ADDED: Also a year ago: this.

"I heard a couple new-sounding tunes on the tubes and they blasted me sky-high..."

I was thinking about that lyric from the Lovin' Spoonful song "Nashville Cats" this morning as we were talking about the old days when you might stay up late at night to pick up the signal of a distant radio station that played music that you couldn't hear during the day.

In that song, John Sebastian sings of a radio station that captivated him when he was 13:

And the record man said every one is a yellow Sun
Record from Nashville
And up north there ain't nobody buys them
And I said, but I will

And so the boy from the north fell in love with country music. Me, back in the mid-1960s, I liked some college radio station that came in from Fort Wayne, Indiana. I heard songs they didn't play on WABC in New York City. Indiana seemed like a cooler place than NYC. (Oddly, I still think that sometimes.)

I used to write down the names of the artists they played that I'd never heard before. I remember, listening that way, late at night, hearing "I Got You Babe" for the first time and wrote down "Sonny and Cher."

That was my little experience. Did you have anything like that?

Consider this:

Dewey Phillips was on the air in Memphis around 1950. He was an anomaly at the time: a white DJ spinning regional rhythm and blues hits for black audiences. Rick Wright says Phillips and his African American contemporaries up the dial on Memphis' WDIA helped elevate disc jockeying to an art form.

People like Nat Turner, a young B.B. King, and, one of Wright's favorites, Rufus Thomas. "Now, Rufus comes in, 'Hey baby, this is Rufus Thomas, WDIA Memphis, Tennessee, where you can cop a smile about a quarter mile provided you've got time and don't mind this drive time line we're gonna try.'

Wright says that one Nashville station, WLAC Nashville was owned by the Life and Casualty Insurance Company - L-A-C. He says that that station would take this music and this DJ style to places it had never been. He says the course of American cultural history was changed one Saturday.

"And they were playing, basically, records by Guy Lombardo or whatever and it was that era of a 50,000-watter trying to find itself with no audience," says Wright. "And there were some African American students from Fiske University who had gotten past the security and got up to the station and brought a bunch of 78s with them."

And they walked into the studio and started talking to the DJ. "Mr. Nobles, can you play some of our folks' records on your radio show?"

And Nobles said sure, hand them over. Records of Fats Domino and Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Etta James, Laverne Baker.

And he played them.

"All of sudden," says Wright, "the phone started to ring, and the letters and cards were coming from all over the place. And they established that night, one of the real, first, mainstream R&B formats on a major powerhouse radio station. WLAC 1510 Blues Radio Nashville, Tennessee. The only full time R&Ber at night with 50,000 watts."

At night, 50,000 watts get you very far. Bob Dylan has said he owes much of his musical inspiration to listening to WLAC as young teenager all the way up in Minnesota.

***

It was the "Moonstruck" clip that I blogged last night that set me off thinking about Cher and the first time I ever heard her sing. It was observed that I love Cher, and I confessed to my longstanding affection for the durable diva. I loved Cher since the first time I heard 'I Got You Babe' on a radio station from Fort Wayne, Indiana, I said.

I remembered answering some questionnaire at the time about what famous person I would like to be. It was 1965, so I was 14. I said Cher. And it wasn't just that I wanted to be a female pop star. I was entranced by the strong affection that Sonny and Cher showed each other when I saw them on TV.

I searched YouTube for an early appearance — perhaps their first national TV appearance — when the two were singing IGYB while sitting at a little table. They were petting and kissing — a real public display of affection. There are, of course, a lot of clips of them doing that song, but I couldn't find that one or any other where they were transgressively pawing at each other, the PDA I'd seen when I was just 14.

So let me go in a completely different direction and show you this instead...

UPDATE: The video at the end of this post has gone dead, and I don't even remember what it was.

My 2 favorite "nice" songs.

"You Didn't Have to Be So Nice":



"Wouldn't It Be Nice?":



Very 1960s, of course. If there are "nice" songs from earlier or later eras, you'll have to flag them for me. I do know this one, but it's hardly the same thing. Meanwhile, let's vote on my "nice" songs. Just the songs. Don't count the video, which for both is nicely low quality. And don't give the Lovin' Spoonful extra credit for Peter Noone.

Pick a "nice" song.
	"You Didn't Have to Be So Nice"
	"Wouldn't It Be Nice?"
pollcode.com free polls

UPDATE: The Peter Noone version was taken down so I've changed the embed to The Lovin' Spoonful. And the old poll had gone dead, so I put up the same options in a new poll.