Christopher is dead, maddening man. Capable of slashing rhetoric, full of lust for the fight, rampant on the ramparts, he cut a figure. Oh yes, often wrong, and sometimes mean and low expeditious in an argument. Personally, we’re told, a generous bear of a man.
But it’s a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to Danville
With a line on a three mile grade
It was on that grade that he lost his air brakes
see what a jump he made
He was goin’ down the grade makin’ 90 miles an hour
his whistle broke into a scream
He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle
A scalded to death by the steam
This morning, I received a letter from one of our readers, a letter that could break your heart for the thousandth time concerning what teachers have become in the United States. Teachers used to be something like a holy caste, practically the most honorable among us. I come from a family of teachers. Everyone thought of it as a noble calling. Teachers earned too little, but that was remedied, over time.
Then everything went screwy. Teachers were not just well paid. (“Best part-time job in America,” Lee Iacocca once quipped, to the howls of many.) They were some of the most petulant, greediest, nastiest unionists around.
A reader emails: “What do you think would happen if a student in a public school called the principal a dictator and put crosshairs on his face? Given the prevailing zero-tolerance (aka zero-thought) policies, the best the student could hope for would be a lengthy suspension. These people really have no clue.”
Yesterday’s televised Grammy Award ceremony would be particularly disheartening if one thought it represented anything real about the culture that spawned it. There’s some connection, surely, but we have to hope that the connection’s thin, and that maybe ultimately the peeps are scornful of this Hollywood crap. Otherwise, Lord have mercy! It’s as though moose turd pie were appreciated as great cooking!
At best many of the presentations were eyewash. At the worst — and there was a lot of “worst” — they were wrongheaded, amateurish, perverse, a vulgar spectacle, a stunning End Times display. There was very little actual music on hand, some of the opening Aretha tribute being an exception. Otherwise, lots of imitation, hype, preening, and posturing. Melody was in short supply.
But it was interesting as theater. Some of the best was this little sequence below. Here’s the set-up: two earnest young would-be folk-rocker outfits (Mumford & Sons, and the Avett Brothers) precede the old Jedi, Our Hero. The master’s song, to be joined in on and backed by these pups? Maggie’s Farm!
The irony here is that Maggie’s, along with Positively Fourth Street, is widely seen as Bob’s kiss-off to the oh-so-serious topical folkies of his day, those whom the pups appear to revere.
“..essentially a protest song against protest folk…” is how the Wikipedia article puts it. There are other interpretations presented there and elsewhere. Official lyrics here. 1965 debut here (context + mp3).
You’re the top!
You’re the Coliseum,
You’re the top!
You’re the Louvre Museum.
You’re a melody from a symphony by Strauss You’re a Bendel bonneti, A Shakespeare’s sonnet,
You’re Mickey Mouse.
You’re the Nile,
You’re the Tower of Pisa,
You’re the smile on the Mona Lisa
I’m a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop,
But if, baby, I’m the bottom you’re the top!
We’ve a few more days, it seems, to wish each other Happy Christmas – at least until Epiphany. But now that the big day is past, and the New Year too, we’ve a quiet time, when the world seems just a little bit slower.
To aid in your reflecting (on, perhaps, the sorry state of yr immortal soul), Downeast humbly submits this, the greatest of the modern Christmas songs:
Some of the backstory (lots, actually) here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
For all the talk in Washington of finally regulating schools into better food choices – the core purpose of the child nutrition bill that the President signed into law earlier this month – a bit of sore news during this sweet holiday season: the federal government has been in the business of micro-managing our children’s lunches for 30 years.
The people busy subsidizing corn production and talking up the consumption of cheese (paying for a $12 million ad campaign for Domino’s new line of cheese-heavy pizzas), will now be charged with better regulating the school-lunch programs they’ve been negligently regulating for 3 decades.
