Ugh, ugh, ugh

As CNN would have it, Mike Love and John Stamos are the Beach Boys. Dana Bash called them that just now. Ugh.

The ill-named Love did not correct Bash when she said that he wrote “Surfin’,” the first Beach Boys hit. Ugh.

*

7:24: This CNN-televised performance is a godawful embarrassment. You’ve gotta work really hard to ruin “God Only Knows.” And that was before Mike Love had sung a note. Ugh again.

*

July 5: Someone has shared the evidence on YouTube.

[Brian Wilson wrote the music for “Surfin’,” and Love may have had help with the words. The song is credited to Wilson and Love.]

The Fourth

[Jasper Johns, Flag on Orange. 1998. Etching with aquatint in colors on Hahnmühle Copperplate paper. 27 × 19 9/10 inches. Click for a slightly larger view.]

Orange flag art.

Two Americas

Writing in The Atlantic, Sarah Zhang says that America’s vaccine future is fragmenting:

Earlier this year, the Biden administration set a goal of partially vaccinating at least 70 percent of adults by Independence Day. The U.S. will narrowly miss the mark; the number is currently hovering around 67 percent. When you zoom in closer, though, we’re doing both better and worse than that, depending on where you look. Our pandemic fates have diverged. The plateauing national case numbers obscure two simultaneous trends: an uptick in several sparsely vaccinated states and continued declines in well-vaccinated ones.

And some states vary widely from region to region. That’s a subject of conversation in our household almost every day. Our congressional district, Illinois-15, represented by Mary Miller, continues to have the lowest vaccination rate in the state.

We sent Miller a letter nearly a month ago asking what steps she has taken and will take to encourage vaccination in her district. No reply. No surprise. She’s busy! Witness her recent trip to the U .S.–Mexico border.

Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword is by Lars G. Doubleday, aka Doug Peterson and Brad Wilber. Easier than last week’s puzzle, I thought, but it felt a bit more challenging, with many satisfying and unusual clue-and-answer pairs. Some I especially liked:

1-A, eight letters, “Toast for tots.” I know about it because of a photograph from my infancy, and I know that it’s still made, but I think it’s pretty difficult to find in the States now, at least under this name.

1-D, four letters, “Numbers on letters.” Just because.

9-D, five letters, “Jerk.” Noun? Verb?

10-D, nine letters, “Retro golf pants.” I have no idea what they look like, but I know the word from the title of — spoiler alert — a Steve Lacy tune. (The soprano saxophonist, that is.)

16-A, six letters, “Get into gear.” Nice misdirection, even in the words “get into.”

40-D, six letters, “Prepares eggs for custard.” Strange word, and I have no idea how I know it. I think of sitting the eggs in little chairs and handing them little spoons. I think I’ve been watching too much Peppa Pig. Elaine says that 40-D is misclued, and Merriam-Webster appears to support her. The answer refers to a way to prepare eggs as eggs. Anyone who just 40-D eggs won’t come out with custard.

52-D, four letters, “Tireless runner.” I thought it had to be an animal.

54-D, three letters, “Was more than superficial.” Almost too weird.

57-A, six letters, “Turn down.” Meaning what?

My favorite clue, whose answer, even if obvious, still somehow came as a surprise to me: 12-D, six letters, “Unfinished stories, often.” I’ve been thinking too much about narrative.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

“Disobvious”

[Peanuts, July 6, 1974. Click for a larger view.]

Yesterday’s Peanuts is today’s Peanuts.

Lucy’s dilemma reminds me of the great discussions of prefixes in two recent episodes of A Word in Your Ear — 1, 2. A Word in Your Ear is a podcast from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, hosted by Katherine Feeney and Roly Sussex.

Richard Signorelli’s Twitter

Richard Signorelli is an attorney in private practice, formerly an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. His Twitter account looks to me like required reading for anyone interested in the sea of troubles the Trump Organization finds itself in.

Martin Radtke and the NYPL

When I visited the New York Public Library’s J. D. Salinger exhibit in November 2019, I took a quick photograph of a plaque in the floor — and then forgot about it. Here, from that photo, are the words on the plaque.

Inscribed here are the words of an immigrant whose life was transformed by the Library and whose estate now enriches it.

IN MEMORY

MARTIN RADTKE

1883–1973

I had little opportunity for formal education as a young man in Lithuania, and I am deeply indebted to The New York Public Library for the opportunity to educate myself. In appreciation, I have given the Library my estate with the wish that it be used so that others can have the same opportunity made available to me.

In 1974 The New York Times published a story about Martin Radtke, his donation, and the plaque.

Related reading
All OCA library posts (Pinboard)

The joys of browsing

Jason Guriel writes about the joys of browsing: libraries, bookstores, record stores, video stores: “Life in the Stacks: A Love Letter to Browsing” (The Walrus).

“Nine eight eleven alarm clocks”

V. gives us a glimpse of his brother’s writing habits:

Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941).

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

Donald Rumsfeld (1932–2021)

George Packer, writing in The Atlantic:

Rumsfeld was the worst secretary of defense in American history. Being newly dead shouldn’t spare him this distinction. He was worse than the closest contender, Robert McNamara, and that is not a competition to judge lightly. McNamara’s folly was that of a whole generation of Cold Warriors who believed that Indochina was a vital front in the struggle against communism. His growing realization that the Vietnam War was an unwinnable waste made him more insightful than some of his peers; his decision to keep this realization from the American public made him an unforgivable coward. But Rumsfeld was the chief advocate of every disaster in the years after September 11. Wherever the United States government contemplated a wrong turn, Rumsfeld was there first with his hard smile — squinting, mocking the cautious, shoving his country deeper into a hole. His fatal judgment was equaled only by his absolute self-assurance. He lacked the courage to doubt himself. He lacked the wisdom to change his mind.

And speaking of McNamara and Rumsfeld, Errol Morris’s documentaries The Fog of War (2003) and The Unknown Known (2013) are worth seeking out.

A related post
Homer’s Rumsfeld (It’s Agamemnon)