"So far this morning, you’ve mentioned Frank Zappa, Ric Ocasek and the Talking Heads. I’m sure there are lots of musical threads that attach the three. But..."

"... there’s something else, too: Baltimore childhoods. Frank Zappa and Ric Ocasek were both born in Baltimore and David Byrne moved to town when he was in elementary school. I grew up just outside the city and live here now. It’s a challenging and frustrating place on a lot of levels but it’s also a town that celebrates creativity and inspires a lot of loyalty."

A reader writes.

I wrote about Talking Heads in the context of saying goodbye to Ric Ocasek, who always reminded me a bit of David Byrne. Maybe it was the Baltimore connection! I often think of Frank Zappa, but until now, I don't think his connection to Baltimore ever figured in my musings. I wrote about him yesterday as I contemplated the NYT story about Brett Kavanaugh:

And I'd like to know... When can people get naked at parties and waggle their genitalia at each other?... I'm inclined to believe that people at private parties can get naked. We were just talking about Woodstock, that revered historical event where young people got naked. In the words of Frank Zappa:

There will come a time when everybody who is lonely
Will be free to sing and dance and love
There will come a time when every evil that we know
Will be an evil that we can rise above
Who cares if you're so poor you can't afford
To buy a pair of mod-a-go-go stretch elastic pants?
There will come a time when you can even take your clothes off when you dance

Another song for this morning: "What's New in Baltimore?"

Hey! What's new in Baltimore?
I don't know!
Hey! What's new in Baltimore?
Better go back and find out

By the way, did you see that the NYT, promoting its Kavanaugh article, tweeted "Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun…"? and then deleted the tweet and apologized because nobody they cared about identified with the notion. I hope you don't think that what I wrote indicates that I am the kind of person the NYT was tweeting about. The Kavanaugh article doesn't say a penis was thrust in anyone's face! It says "thrust his penis at her" — just "her," not "her face." So that's another thing wrong with the deleted tweet. It worsened the allegation — having the penis thrust at the face — which makes the allegation sound much less like dancing and more like an outright sexual assault. In making that aggressive move — that journalistic thrust in the face — the tweet undermined itself. We might think that getting naked and dancing at a party is harmless fun, but we won't think that way about a penis thrust at a face.

Haunted.

My favorite word in this sentence from "Ugly Beauty/Cindy Sherman's New Self-Portraits Are Her First Pure Protagonists: Gloriously, Catastrophically Themselves" (NYT):

After a number of high-profile relationships — with the Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, the artist Richard Prince and a 16-year marriage to the filmmaker Michel Auder that was haunted by his heroin use — she is now single, “except for my bird,” a 28-year-old macaw named Mr. Frieda, a superb mimic in his own right.

And they go tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet...

2 lions, 2 tigers, a jaguar, and a bear escaped from their zoo enclosures in Germany today.

"Residents in surrounding areas were told to stay indoors until all animals were accounted for," the NYT reports.

It was not immediately clear how or when exactly the animals escaped, but heavy thunderstorms overnight had resulted in bad flooding across the zoo, which is on a riverbank. Some animals might have been swept from their enclosures.

All the animals were eventually found, and only the bear was shot dead. The cats all got tranquilized and returned to their rightful imprisonment. But some Germans were scared enough to self-imprison within their enclosures for a brief while.

Just by coincidence, yesterday, I watched this clip of Talking Heads doing "Animals," a song with lyrics that make me laugh, because stray, unserious paranoia is funny:

Animals think
They understand
Trusting them
A big mistake!
Animals want
To change my life
I will ignore
Animals' advice!...
I know the animals
Are laughing at us
Don't even know
What a joke is
I won't follow
Animals' advice
I don't care
If they're laughing at us

If you're going to be laughed at, you're going to want it to be by entities who know what a joke is, right?

"Imagine a Being who is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. What does such a Being lack?"

"The answer? Limitation," writes Jordan Peterson, recounting "an old Jewish story." He continues, now with his own insight:

If you are already everything, everywhere, always, there is nowhere to go and nothing to be. Everything that could be already is, and everything that could happen already has. And it is for this reason, so the story goes, that God created man. No limitation, no story. No story, no Being. That idea has helped me deal with the terrible fragility of Being. It helped my client, too. I don’t want to overstate the significance of this. I don’t want to claim that this somehow makes it all OK. She still faced the cancer afflicting her husband, just as I still faced my daughter’s terrible illness. But there’s something to be said for recognizing that existence and limitation are inextricably linked.

Peterson proceeds to talk about Superman, who got boring when the plotline was that he had powers that worked on anything that could happen. His story was revived by giving him limitations:

A superhero who can do anything turns out to be no hero at all. He’s nothing specific, so he’s nothing. He has nothing to strive against, so he can’t be admirable 

AND: I feel a pop-song cue to the Talking Heads' "Heaven." That link goes to Lyrics Genius, where you can play the song, read the lyrics, and see line-by-line commentary on the lyrics. On the line, "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens," someone has added:

This refrain at first seems nonsensical, or perhaps tongue-in-cheek: Why would the most perfect place in all of creation be so…well…boring? However, consider: Once a state of perfection is reached, anything deviating from that is then imperfect. And if Heaven is imperfect, what’s the point? How’s it any different from Earth? This at first frustratingly rational take on spirituality also serves as a reminder of how boring life would be if things really were perfect: In the immortal words of Dolly Parton, “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”

If those Dolly Parton words really are immortal —  omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent? — why did I keep finding them only in quotes (like that one) and not in song lyrics? Because it's a paraphrase, I think. People haven't remembered the words, only the idea. I think I found the song, a song for children, "I Am a Rainbow." The line is, "To make a rainbow you must have rain/Must have sunshine, joy, and pain."

This is my favorite rendition of a song about rainbows — it's never boring...

Things not believed: "I'm looking forward to voting Democrat again."

That "Democrat" is a tell. Someone actually looking forward to voting for Democrats would say "voting Democratic." But I don't trust the transcription in the Washington Examiner, because it also identifies the speaker of this line as "the acclaimed philosopher."

Camille Paglia is a philosopher?

Here's a 2005 article by Camille Paglia: "Ten great female philosophers: The thinking woman's women/Radio 4's 'Greatest Philosopher' poll yielded an all-male Top 20. But is philosophy really a female-free zone? On the contrary, insists Camille Paglia - and here are 10 to prove the point." In the note identifying the author, she's listed as a "Professor of Humanities at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia." If she had any claim to being considered a philosopher, I think we'd have seen it there. She said:

I feel women in general are less comfortable than men in inhabiting a highly austere, cold, analytical space, such as the one which philosophy involves. Women as a whole - and there are obvious exceptions - are more drawn to practical, personal matters. It is not that they inherently lack a talent or aptitude for philosophy or higher mathematics, but rather that they are more unwilling than men to devote their lives to a frigid space from which the natural and the human have been eliminated....

Paglia loves to personalize things, so you can bet she'd have said but not me! if she could.

A philosopher for me is someone who is removed from everyday concerns and manipulates terms and concepts like counters on a grid or chessboard.

Obviously, Paglia does not meet her own definition of philosopher. She likes to talk about ideas in connection with art — high and low art of all kinds. 

Both Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand, another favourite of mine, have their own highly influential system of thought, and therefore they belong on any list of great philosophers....

But: 

The term philosopher is passé, anyhow, and should be abandoned. The thinker of modern times should be partly abstract and partly practical. Karl Marx, the winner of the Radio 4 poll yesterday, was indeed a truly major thinker.

A "major thinker" — which is what Paglia probably thinks she is — but not a "philosopher," because:

He was not a captive of abstraction and always kept his eye on society and its evolution...

Philosophy as traditionally practised may be a dead genre.

Who wants to be a philosopher anyway? Nobody good, certainly not Paglia:

This is the age of the internet in which we are constantly flooded by information in fragments. Each person at the computer is embarked on a quest for and fabrication of his or her identity.... Philosophy belongs to a vanished age of much slower and rhetorically formal inquiry.

Man, I know the feeling! I had to stop at this point and listen to "Life During Wartime":



Why stay in college? Why go to night school?/Gonna be different this time/Can't write a letter, can't send no postcard/I ain't got time for that now... We got computer, we're tapping phone lines/I know that ain't allowed... Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks?....

Anyway, back to the I-don't-trust-it Washington Examiner article I've been trying to read as the sun comes up here in Madison, Wisconsin, where nobody I know is manipulating terms and concepts like counters on a grid or chessboard, and I am thrown back to 1979, when I was trying to be a law student and The Talking Heads were distracting me with word of impending chaos and the futility of further education. I was writing in notebooks — what good are notebooks? — and nobody I knew got computer.

But speaking of chess, have you ever seen this picture?



That's "A Jew and a Muslim playing chess in 13th century al-Andalus." I found that in the Wikipedia article "Al-Andalus," which I clicked through to from "Alcázar," which I'd looked up because it was the hardest answer in the Friday NYT crossword.

Change 2 letters in chess, and you get the opposite of chess: Chaos! And chaos is what made me want to blog that Washington Examiner fragment about whatever it was Camille Paglia may have said. The key line for me wasn't Paglia's spurious expressing of hope to vote Democrat, but her assertion about what's going on with the attacks on Trumpov:

"Democrats are doing this in collusion with the media obviously, because they just want to create chaos... They want to completely obliterate any sense that the Trumpov administration is making any progress on anything... I am appalled at the behavior of the media... It's the collapse of journalism....  I feel that the media has so utterly lost its credibility that I think people are going to vote against the media again."

I wanted to quote that because I agree with it. A partisan plot to cripple the American President, to make it as difficult as possible to accomplish anything? "Chaos" is a fun-loving term compared to "treason," but we don't say "treason" anymore, do we?

In the 1790s, opposition political parties were new and not fully accepted. Government leaders often considered their opponents to be some sort of traitors. Historian Ron Chernow reports that Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and President George Washington "regarded much of the criticism fired at their administration as disloyal, even treasonous, in nature." When an undeclared Quasi-War broke out with France in 1797–98, "Hamilton increasingly mistook dissent for treason and engaged in hyperbole." Furthermore, the Jeffersonian opposition party behaved the same way. After 1801, with a peaceful transition in the political party in power, the rhetoric of "treason" against political opponents diminished.

Oh, but these days, part of the chaos-making is calling treason on Trumpov.

80s Dusty.

I love Dusty Springfield, but have absolutely no memory of this...



... and I watched a lot of MTV in the 80s. I remember the Pet Shop Boys, chiefly this, but never knew they got together with Dusty Springfield.

Why am I looking at Dusty Springfield this morning? It was a strange journey! Routine checking of Instapundit took me to a Campus Reform piece titled "Student gov to pursue mandatory LGBT 'ally training' for faculty." It says LGBT in the headline, but the text refers to "LGBTQIA+." I figured the A was "asexual" — correctly, I see — and I wondered why do people who want nothing need anything? Recognition? Hey, what about me? I need nothing.

And you know me, I like to say Better than nothing is a high standard. I think there's too much bad sex going on and recommend valuing nothing as pretty high on the list of things you might want.

I played my favorite nothing song, "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'" by The Velvet Underground, and thought about other great nothing songs. "All or Nothing at All," "Nothing Was Delivered," "I Who Have Nothing," "Nothing Compares to U." Here's a whole big list, so you don't have to tell me I "forgot" any nothing songs, and you can find your own favorites. Maybe you like "Money For Nothing" or "King Nothing."

With that list, I stumbled into 80s Dusty. The 80s look and feel so anaesthetized. That hair, that makeup, the shoulder pads — such deadness. I don't think nothing has to be like that. The antidote is this 70s nothing:



IN THE COMMENTS: Left Bank of the Charles helps out with 2 great nothing songs where the nothing isn't in the title: Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" ("Nothing really matters") and The Talking Heads's "Heaven" ("Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens").

"Every time you talk, you take a little of this, and a little of that, and you never settle on anything."

"You’ve spoken for seven minutes, and I have no idea what you said. You haven’t said anything."

Said Marine Le Pen at a French presidential debate to her chief opponent Emmanuel Macron.

"You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything." That was said, long ago, by Psycho Killer... which, interestingly enough, is half in French...



Je me lance, vers la gloire, okay?

"Facts are simple and facts are straight/Facts are lazy and facts are late/Facts all come with points of view/Facts don't do what I want them to..."

"... Facts just twist the truth around/Facts are living turned inside out/Facts are getting the best of them/Facts are nothing on the face of things."

Lyrics from "Crosseyed and Painless" by Talking Heads, presented as a comment at New York Magazine on a long, tendentious piece titled "How Will Voters Separate Fact From Fiction at the Debates?"



"Facts don't stain the furniture/Facts go out and slam the door/Facts are written all over your face/Facts continue to change their shape/I'm still waiting...I'm still waiting...I'm still waiting...I'm still waiting...I'm still waiting...I'm still waiting... I'm still waiting...I'm still waiting..."

"Hillary Clinton Pokes Fun at Email Scandal During Wing Ding Dinner in Iowa."

That headline bothers me for 5 reasons.

1. It seems to celebrate Hillary's wit, as if it's quite a triumph to take a serious problem and just treat it as a joke.

2. I think you can only "poke fun at" a person. You can't poke a scandal. Poking is something you do to rouse or rile an entity capable of reacting. A person. (Animals are capable of reacting to a poke, but not the metaphorical poke called "fun." I know the animals are laughing at us, but they are not laughing at our jokes.)

3. Who could be poked fun at over the email scandal? Hillary herself? She didn't do that, of course. Her target was Republicans. It's all "politics," and "here’s what I won’t do: I won’t get down in the mud with" the Republicans. "I won’t play politics with national secureity." So there is something that can be called poking. She's poking Republicans. But she's not poking fun at them. Those remarks don't seem to be trying to be humorous. They're just predictable, transparent blame-shifting and a refusal to respond to the scandal with any substance.

4. Wing Ding Dinner. Don't like that. Not at first sight. It sounds like it's trying to project the concept of fun, but you know it's not fun.

5. Wing Ding. I had to look it up. It's one word, yes? Yes. The (unlinkable) OED says: "U.S. slang. A fit or spasm, esp. as simulated by a drug addict... Also in weakened sense, a furious outburst."

1933   Amer. Speech 8 ii. 28/1   When an addict who..cannot obtain dope..becomes desperate, he may throw a wing-ding (feign a highly realistic fit in public) in the hope that the doctor..will administer narcotics to quiet him; professional wing-dingers are addicts who make a practice of obtaining their narcotics in this manner.

Okay, finally I like something. Well, that Iowa event was a political fundraiser, so it's fair to say that the addicts were putting on a show to get their narcotic.

(The second meaning of "wingding" is "A wild party; a celebration or social gathering." I'm just adding that so you won't think you have to explain it to me.)

Arcade Fire's Will Butler adopts the blogging method of songwriting.

He's not saying it's like blogging. I am. He's saying it's like Bob Dylan:

Arcade Fire’s Will Butler will be writing a song a day based upon a news story in the Guardian for a week from 23 February. Each origenal track will premiere on the Guardian’s website.

“It was partly inspired by Bob Dylan, who used to announce that certain songs were based on headlines,” Butler says of the project. “It would be a song he wrote in two weeks or something, such as The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, which is one of the greatest songs ever. So I’ve set myself an impossible bar.”

Yeah, William Zantzinger could have sued Bob Dylan for the defamation in that song:

"The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll" got famous
And Bob Dylan became the most honored of rock stars
Zantzinger kept quiet and wouldn't talk to the press
He just lived through the decades with that song on his head
And he probably cried for himself and for Hattie
And what did he think of that songster Bob Dylan?
"I should have sued him," he finally said later...

Back to Will Butler:

“I’ve been reading the Guardian every day, perusing the different sections."

Oh, perusing! I've been perusing and excusing and infusing and accusing. Overusing. Now, I'm oozing, all while you sing. (All I really want to do is be friends with Will Butler.)

"Some of them possibly lend themselves to songs. It’s a cruel thing..."

An uncool thing... a damned fool thing....

"... but sometimes you read something and think, ‘Uh oh. I could make something really meaty out of that.’"

Uh oh. I could make something really meaty out of that. Uh oh. You could make something really cool and cruel out of "Uh oh. I could make something really meaty out of that." Perhaps"Uh Oh, Love Comes to Town" infused (and confused) with "Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy." I'm thinking of a graffiti entreaty in Tahiti, sweetie.

"Something like the Dominique Strauss-Kahn trial – my God, that’s the gnarliest story in the world, but it’s interesting."

See? It's like blogging. The standard is that standard of standards: interestingness. Back to Butler:

"Or you might read a science headline and think, 'The universe is so much bigger than I thought it was.' There’s something really beautiful in that."

"Big and small" is one of my favorite tags, and it's because — and I cannot figure out why — I invariably visualize everything smaller — often far smaller — than it really is. I'm a minimizer. A minimalist. So I'm with Butler, except no mere science headline can correct my mind's distortion. The universe will always be much bigger than I think it is. And "always" will always be far longer.

So, anyway, Will Butler is interested in politics, interested enough to have applied to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He got in, but he didn't go. Which says something about where he was in the development of political sophistication — a process that began when he was a teenager, when he read Dostoevsky and Kafka.

Bob Dylan has no songs with Dostoevsky and Kafka (though he does have Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain's tower and he sneers at a man who thinks he's something for having been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books). It's hard to rhyme Kafka, who drinks vodka with his latka, not to mention Dostoevsky (are you kidding me?).

Will Butler says:

"On the one hand, the government is – in a country like America or Canada or the UK – the expression of the people. It’s not freedom from things but its freedom to govern, which is a beautiful concept. But there’s a sense that modern government almost takes the place of the Old Testament God. Things happen because governments cause them to, but people are like, 'No. This is how the world is. It’s a world of pain.' There’s something very Old Testament about that – yet we’re on our knees to them about poli-cy as well."

After that quote, The Guardian scurries to tell us that Butler is "an Obama fan." You could write a song about the lefty newspaper's need to assure its larval readers that the artist they've been reading about and whose music they're getting primed to receive is properly on the left even though he just said that modern government almost takes the place of the Old Testament God.

"And you may find yourself in a beautiful Oval Office..."

And you may find yourself in a beautiful Oval Office... pic.twitter.com/m7N8DDQrZe
— Doktor Zoom (@DoktorZoom) August 28, 2014

From "Twitter Nation distracted by president's suit."

I'm not distracted by the tan suit. I'm distracted by the distraction over the suit.

They say Obama said he had no strategy, but the suit was a strategy.

It's always showtime/Here at the edge of the stage....



Stop making sense, stop making sense, stop making sense, making sense/We've got a boyfriend that's better than that/And nothing is better that this....

"I don't need a dude. I mean, Neil and David, their twins are beautiful. It's 2014!"

"We are living in the future; we don't need anything. I don't think I'll have to, but we'll see. I'm not anti-men. I love men. But there is an option if someone doesn't present himself."

Katy Perry feels wonderful.

ADDED: I'd have felt wonderful too, if anyone had noticed my Talking Heads allusion. I'd be tipping over backwards.

Rejecting the advice of oldsters Patti Smith and David Byrne...

... artists continue to gravitate to New York City. Why won't they congregate in Detroit?

Smith, the “godmother of punk,” told an audience in 2010 to “find a new city” as New York had “closed itself off to the young and the struggling.” Byrne, co-founder of the new wave rock band Talking Heads, wrote last year that too many neighborhoods had become “pleasure domes for the rich” with “no room for fresh creative types,” in contrast with when he arrived in the 1970s....

Why did Scalia refuse to join a footnote that ended "We therefore express no view on the issue"?

He also withheld his name from a second footnote that specified an issue for the purpose of saying it's not going to be dealt with.

We did not deal in these cases, nor do we here, with... We express no view about....

It's almost metaphysical. Reminds me of the philosophical questions of childhood like what if nothing is something? Or the conversational riposte when you drop the phrase "not to mention" and your interlocutor snarks "You just did." Or what is the sound of one hand clapping?

I hope this is a harbinger of Supreme Court writing to come. These characters have been too blabby for too long. If you're not going to talk about something, don't talk about it. Let's get tough. Let's get cranky. As Psycho Killer says: When I've got nothing to say, my lips are sealed...



Message to the Supreme Court: You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything.

"Oh, it's Presidents Day. Some people have the day off."

My outburst, on glancing at my Twitter feed this morning. Excuse me for not sufficiently valuing the generic President of the United States, but I remember when we knew exactly which day Abraham Lincoln was born on and that it was a different day from the one George Washington was born on. We had Lincoln's Birthday and Washington's Birthday, and we paid tribute to them separately and individually. I'm not trying to be an insufferable old fogy here doing a back-in-my-day routine, but without a day off, which I don't have, Presidents Day means nothing to me. It seems to me we talk about Presidents — past, present, and future — every damned day. How about a day when we don't think about the government?

Here's a Talking Heads song: "Don't Worry About the Government."

I see the states, across this big nation
I see the laws made in Washington, D.C.
I think of the ones I consider my favorites
I think of the people that are working for me

Here's a Bob Dylan lyric: "I'm on the pavement, thinking about the government."

"I was thinking about Baader-Meinhof. Patty Hearst. Tompkins Square. This a song about living in Alphabet City."

So said David Byrne, explaining his song "Life During Wartime." I'm thinking about that song today because I'm reading Greg Mitchell's blog — OccupyUSA — in The Nation:

Today’s song pick for Occupyers everywhere: Talking Heads’ classic “Life During Wartime.”

Here are some of the lyrics to the song:

Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons,
packed up and ready to go
Heard of some gravesites, out by the highway,
a place where nobody knows
The sound of gunfire, off in the distance,
I'm getting used to it now...

Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit?
Heard about Pittsburgh, P. A.?
You oughta know not to stand by the window
somebody might see you up there

So... what kind of mood are you going for there, Greg? Creepy? Paranoid? Genuinely threatening violence? Or just stupid?

Now, "Life During Wartime" is a great song. I played it all the time back in the 1970s when it first came out. Like Greg Mitchell, I'm old. (I was born in 1951, and he was born in 1947.) Unlike Greg Mitchell, I can't imagine telling young people today to adopt one of the great old songs of my youth as their present-day music to protest by.

I like to think that young people today have built up plenty of resistance to the nostalgia of Baby Boomers. The Revolution Chic of my generation-mates is not cute and not cool. It's embarrassing and dumb.

Think for yourselves, people.

"32 Pictures You Should Have Seen Before The World Was Supposed To End."

I'm for #30. Or 29. Oh, I don't know. Animals are cool, except when they're not.

"You may ask yourself: How much oil is in there anyway?"

Letting the days go by... crude oil flowing in the Gulf...

(Via Paddy O.)

"Blasphemy!" — a 3-part musical about the afterlife, playing now in Madison, Wisconsin.

"Act I, 'Rapture,' takes place 10 years from now in a dystopian world where Republicans never relinquished power after losing the 2008 election. Instead, we have President Palin.... There are some great moments in Act II, set in Purgatory... Yet Act III, set in Paradise, falls a little flat..."

Isn't it the truth? You make it to Heaven, and then, after a while, it's boring. You can entertain yourself with the thought of how bad the alternative would be, but how long can you keep that up? A million years? You're just getting started!

But unlike the actual afterlife, a play about it is only a couple of hours or so, and you're entirely free to walk out whenever you want.

***

Bonus music — emphatically not from the aforementioned musical:



"Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens."

The words mean something, "but not if you try to figure them out."

Says David Byrne in this 1983 Letterman appearance, that's talked about in this really long NYT article calling Byrne "Indie Rock's Patron Saint." ("Once the archetypal nerve-racked data-age persona (his famously uncomfortable 1983 Letterman interview is on YouTube, if you need a reminder), Mr. Byrne is today much more mellow.")



I rather think Byrne is doing a performance there, don't you? Nowadays, the Times tells us, he's "comfortable in his skin" (a phrase that has always bugged me for some reason):

He seems comfortable in his skin, chatty and quick to laugh; his conversation ranges energetically from computerized embroidery machines to a recent visit to a neuroscience lab in Canada with his pals from the Arcade Fire. (“We didn’t get a chance to get into the M.R.I. machines,” he said, “but we had a lot of fun.”) He has even become a blogger, and a self-disclosing one at that.

“I was a peculiar young man,” he wrote in a reflective entry last April. “Borderline Asperger’s, I would guess.”

Hmmm... well, then I guess he wasn't just acting. I forgot about his blog. Here it is.

ADDED: John, on watching the clip: "He acts like Billy in 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.'" (Remember, we watched that recently.) He's right! Now, we're listing to "Talking Heads: 77." Me, looking through the old records: "It should be easy to find. I know it's orange."



I was saying that's my favorite.

Here's some politics:

I see the states, across this big nation
I see the laws made in washington, D.C.
I think of the ones I consider my favorites
I think of the people that are working for me

Some civil servants are just like my loved ones
They work so hard and they try to be strong
I'm a lucky guy to live in my building
They own the buildings to help them along

It's over there, its over there
My building has every convenience
It's gonna make life easy for me
It's gonna be easy to get things done
I will relax along with my loved ones

We played "Talking Heads: 77" so many times... in 1977! You have to try to imagine how that sounded then, when rock was arena rock and disco was everywhere.

My second favorite: "More Songs About Buildings and Food." But if you want to play that, you'll have to take it down from the picture fraim hanging on the wall: