Let's get the whole gang together: Davey Moore, Hattie Carroll, Hollis Brown, Einstein disguised as Robin Hood, the motorcycle black madonna two-wheeled gypsy queen, Ma Rainey, and Beethoven, John the Baptist, the Commander In Chief, Louis The King, Napoleon in rags, Lucille, Johanna, Sweet Marie, John Wesley Harding, St. Augustine, the joker, the thief, Big Jim, Lily, Rosemary, and most of all, the Jack of Hearts, Rubin Carter, Isis, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Blackjack Davey, Charlie Patton. All of them. Play me a song, Mr. Wolfman Jack, because if you want to remember, you better write down the names.
Bob Dylan turned 83 on Friday. All of him did. All of them did. All the personae, the entire kaleidoscope of masks, the false fronts and head fakes, and, finally, the last, and in many ways, best of them all. The traveling storyteller, the seanchai as the people in the old country would call him. Out on the endless tour, up the endless highway. I think of him and I think of Turlough O'Carolan, the legendary blind Irish harper who would travel the countryside, composing his songs on the spot for whomever would give him food and drink. Go back further. Go back to Homer. Sing to him, O muse. When Dylan dropped "Murder Most Foul," virtually out of a clear blue sky, blessing us with it as consolation for the years when America had gone so terribly wrong, it was Homer of whom I thought, poet and historian both, protector of the shadowland between myth and reality, chronicler of what Greil Marcus called "the old, weird America," a phrase I wish I'd written.
He'll be around all summer, traveling with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp and a whole clutch of other artists in something called the Outlaw Music Festival Tour. It's a high-priced extravaganza but, in a very real way, he's just on the road, heading for another joint. Move along, brother Bob. The highway, as you taught us, is for gamblers, and we take what we have gathered from coincidence.
Nice to know that, now that he's back in his day job of destroying Florida, Ronald DeSantis is still the censorious meathead he was when he left. From the Sarasota Herald-Tribune (via USA Today):
Plans are in place to adorn Florida bridges in red, white and blue lighting between May 27 and Sept. 2 as a part of the 2024 Florida Freedom Summer effort, which includes free visits to state parks on Memorial Day weekend and the lifting of sales tax on recreational items in July, according to a social media post by the Florida Department of Transportation. The plan coincides with the start of pride month, when the Sunshine Skyway and the Ringling Bridge have in the past lit up in rainbow colors in celebration of the occasion. It also overlaps other public awareness efforts, including National Gun Violence Awareness Month, Juneteenth, World Fragile X Day, Women's Equality Day and National Recovery Month.
As Joy Reid shrewdly pointed out on Thursday night, DeSantis is cloaking this act of petty bigotry behind one of the most honored titles of the Civil Rights Movement—Freedom Summer, the effort by Bob Moses and Diane Nash and a host of other activists to bring like-minded individuals from the North down to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 to work of voters rights there. Among the earliest volunteers were Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. Their bodies, along with that of co-worker James Chaney, turned up buried in an earthen dam after they were murdered by local Klansmen. Ron DeSantis should be shamed out of office, and out of polite society, for using the proud name for which they died as camouflage for his own small-minded purposes.
WWOZ Pick To Click: "Positively 4th Street" (Lucinda Williams): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1969, is the Beeb's attempt to deal with hippies, accompanied by some French singer who sounds as though he's paying homage to that year's Isle of Wight Festival, where Bob Dylan came out of seclusion to play with The Band. He could also be singing about the price of baguettes in Avignon, for all I know. It's a terrible song whatever he's going on about. History is nonetheless so damn cool.
Remember all those people who pooh-pooh'ed the notion that, just because they've managed to overturn Roe v. Wade, they'd never come for contraception. I mean, that's just crazy talk, right? Incomprehensibly wrong. From Politico:
The first-in-the-nation legislation could be a model for other red states grappling with how to stop their residents from traveling out of state to get abortion pills or ordering them online despite their abortion bans. But people who obtain those pills don’t always have prescriptions for them, particularly if they are mailed from overseas. Under the Louisiana bill, pregnant women who obtain the medication for their own use would be exempt from criminal liability. But friends or family who help them get the pills and non-pregnant women who obtain them as a precaution could face criminal penalties for possession.
Under the legislation, doctors would need a special license to prescribe the drugs, and prescriptions would be cataloged in a state database, accessible to doctors, pharmacists, Louisiana’s medical board and law enforcement agencies with a warrant. Doctors fear that it could lead to more monitoring and second-guessing of their decisions to prescribe the drugs, especially in emergency situations.
That's only because it, ah, will. And a database accessible by law enforcement. Won't that be a delight in those small Louisiana towns where the local sheriff is a Christofascist yahoo. Jesus, these people.
Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From Smithsonian:
In a paper posted to the preprint site bioRxiv, the researchers detected fragments of adenovirus (which causes cold-like illnesses), herpesvirus (linked to cold sores) and papillomavirus (HPV) in Neanderthal genome data. The findings have not yet been peer reviewed. If confirmed, the new findings would be the oldest human viruses ever recovered, setting a record previously held by a 31,000-year-old adenovirus, reports New Scientist’s James Woodford.
“This DNA contains… a mixture of various DNAs, from the Neanderthal individual themselves, plus bacteria, fungus and viruses that might have infected this individual,” Marcelo Briones, a co-author of the new study and a genome researcher at the Federal University of São Paulo in Brazil, writes in an email to Gizmodo’s Isaac Schultz. “We show that the degree of such changes in the viral genome reads recovered are consistent with the age of the Neanderthal bones, thus showing that they are not present-day contaminants.” “Taken together, our data indicate that these viruses might represent viruses that really infected Neanderthals,” he tells New Scientist.
In H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, it is what he calls "a cankering disease" that kills off the Martian invaders, a disease to which terrestrial life had developed an immunity long ago. Be very strange if head colds killed off the Neanderthals.
Hey, Phys.org, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!
In studying the remains, the team was able to identify multiple skull bones, most of the creature's back, all of one hip, some of its tail bones and almost all the bones from both of its legs. They noted that the dinosaur had multiple traits that set it apart from Carnotaurus sastrei, particularly in its skull bones. They also note that the ancient dinosaur was bipedal with extremely tiny arms. The research team found that it was a species of Furileusauria, which was a group of abelisauroid dinosaurs. Also, in comparing the remains with several other types of abelisauroid and noasaurids, they found evidence of rapid evolutionary changes during some spans of time, and little to none in others.
Short arms. Fast evolution. That's science. I don't make the rules. We're happy now because they lived, and evolved, then.
I’ll be back on Tuesday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake line. Wear the damn mask. Take the damn shots, especially the boosters, and especially the most recent boosters. Watch out for the damn bird flu. And spare a moment for the good people in Iowa and across the Plains states who have been living under the gun of all the tornadoes. And for the people of Baltimore, and for the people of Israel and of Gaza, the people of Ukraine, of Lewiston, Maine, and for the victims of monkeypox in the Republic of the Congo, and of the earthquake zones in Taiwan, Iraq, Turkey, Morocco, and Colombia, and in the flood zone in Libya, and the flood zones all across the Ohio Valley, and on the Horn of Africa, and in Tanzania and Kenya, and in the English midlands, and in Virginia, and in Texas and Louisiana, and in California, and the flood zones of Indonesia, and in the storm-battered south of Georgia, and in Kenya, and in the flood areas in Dubai (!) and in Pakistan, and in the flood zones in Russia and Kazakhstan, and in the flood zones in Iran, where loose crocodiles are becoming a problem, and in the flood zones on Oahu, and in the fire zones in western Canada, and Australia, and in north Texas, and in Lahaina, where they’re still trying to recover their lives, and under the volcano in Iceland, and for the gun-traumatized folks in Austin and at UNLV, and in Philadelphia, and in Perry, Iowa, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
