lickhaven

Where are the required jokes about Pam Blondie, the U.S. Attorney Jokeral?

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Chump appears ready to hand parts of Ukraine over to Russia as a friendly gesture to a fellow autocrat. We should in turn agree to give Rump a third term as president if he agrees to return Texas and Oklahoma to Mexico and Florida to Spain. It’s not like the rest of the country would miss them.

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I’ve ignored pop music from almost every decade, while choosing oddball or forgotten non-hits. And even when I find an artist or album that grabs me, it’s often because of a particular song that may have gone ignored or at least unheralded.

My favorite Bob Dylan Album is still Blood on the Tracks, from 1975. It got mixed initial reviews but sold beautifully and is now considered something of a masterpiece. It may or may not be about stresses in his personal life at the time, but that’s the sort of discussion that interests me not one bit about any piece of music. Music is what it is and needs no justification.

But it puzzles me that I’ve seldom seen reference to the song on the album that sits deepest with me, “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.” One of Dylan’s longest, with 15 verses running close to nine minutes, it’s probably the best “story” song ever put together.

It’s not about a state of mind or the state of the world or politics or society. It lays out a short story that features four main characters: the three of the title, plus Big Jim – the town boss and Rosemary’s husband (legal or assumed?) – plus a cabaret, an acting troupe, a drunken judge, a bank heist, a murder, lost love, found love, charismatic attraction, and just about every other imaginable emotional interaction.

That’s the setting, but it’s the telling that matters. It’s stuffed solid with detail yet never approaches explosive overload. And it’s a compendium of Dylan’s almost unique use of rhyme (closest I can think of is Tom Lehrer). The sense I get is that when Dylan ends a line, then picks a rhyming word that will sound the best, even if it doesn’t fit the temper or motion of the story. So he changes the temper or motion to better fit the rhyme: that is, the words determine the story more than the story determines the words.

(OK, I don’t know jack shit about writing lyrics, but I also don’t know how else to explain something like this that makes it work:

“Be careful not to touch the wall, there’s a brand-new coat of paint

“I’m glad to see you’re still alive, you’re lookin’ like a saint.”)

And there’s also Dylan’s unlikely sprung grammar and sense of language:

“Then everyone commenced to do what they were doin’ before he turned their heads.”

They commenced to do what they had already been doing? wrong word, except… it turns the scene sideways, gives it a 3/4 profile emotional slant.

Well, enough of that. This is one royal hell of a song that merges folk music with a modern sense of Byron.

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Recent headline:

“Cherry tomato-sized space rock that pierced roof and hit floor of metro Atlanta home is 20m years older than Earth.”

To be followed, I suspect, by a zucchini-sized chunk of the Big Bang.

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How much of a legend do you think Batman would have become if his sidekick had been named Pigeon?

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Growing up, I thought all tornadoes were in Kansas.

Back then, in the ‘50s, the East had no tornadoes that I was aware of, and only one hurricane, Hazel, had reached Philadelphia, in 1954. It lifted the roof of the apartment house next to where we lived on Race St., took the entire quarter-block rectangle of material and raised it like a dust-covered blanket. It should have scared me, I suppose, but I didn’t get beyond amazement and a sense of privilege.

 Since moving up here, to the top of PA, we’ve had at least three reports of tornadoes within a couple miles of the house. The most recent (2019?) shuffled a weird line dance around our immediate area, then trashed most of the older trees in Dushore – the town three miles from here – and its recently restored church tower.

The same sort of repositioning has happened to “woodland” animals in recent decades. As a kid in semi-rural suburbia, I thought of deer as near mystical beasts. By the time Linda and I left Philly, they had invaded the city parks and were doing enough damage to need control through a limited hunting season.

Coyotes, formerly roaming the legendary West (and cartoons), now inhabit every U.S. state and major city. They inhabit all parts of our Sullivan County and sometimes howl in a semicircle maybe 50 feet up the hill from us. I occasionally ask a bear, politely, to leave our front porch.

As we’re wrecked the world’s animal habitat, the beasts of legend have banded together to loudly annoy our quiet retreats.

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General Paul Tibbets, who piloted the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb, on Hiroshima, Japan, had few if any regrets about his mission, which he considered necessary to bring an end to World War II.

My favorite quote of his: 

“Morality… there is no such thing in warfare.” 

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Think about this: An ethical absolute is impossible.

Ethics are a human invention, not an externally imposed truth. Going back to Plato and before, no one has provided a universal definition of  the good” or “the correct,” nor will there be one. Religion as a guide is, at best, a passport to easy opportunity.

So, if “goodness” and “decency” are not just unsupported illusions, what are they, and how and why do we support them? 

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Another headline:

“Action needed on plastic additives linked to sperm decline, experts warn”

I agree, absolutely! We should immediately increase distribution of semenal plastic to help solve the problems of both waste-disposal and population.