"They jaywalk across bike paths, swagger through crosswalks barefoot like the Beatles, preen in the parks and..."

"... sometimes strut between office buildings and cultural landmarks in the city center. In parks, the problem can be even worse, with the droppings matting the grass and squishing into the treads of shoes."

From "Finland’s Short, Precious Summers Are Plagued by Goose Poop/Finns trying to enjoy beaches and parks during their all-too-brief summers have been vexed by legions of geese — and their droppings. The smelly mess has resisted even the most innovative solutions" (NYT).

The "innovative solutions" are ineffective pooper scoopers in the litter box that is the sandy beach. Outside of Finland, "officials fight the problem at its source: the birds themselves."

"I am having a hard time understanding the following Logan Pearsall Smith quote: 'People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.'"

"Googling didn't help much other than whose quote it is. What exactly does the above quote mean?"

Wrote someone at the English Language & Usage website, 12 years ago.

I'm reading that because I was reading — not living — this 2017 New Yorker article: "Philip Larkin and Me: A Friendship with Holes in It": "I remember him one day snatching from my mantelpiece a bookmark, on which was inscribed Logan Pearsall Smith’s remark 'People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.' He threw it down in a little fit of anger, protesting that nothing is more important than life."

These days, someone who couldn't even understand the quote — perhaps someone new to English and mystified by "is the thing" — would probably ask A.I.

I talked to A.I., which is not living, and I said: Understanding the quote (and the love for or objection to it) on a deeper level requires you to come to terms with the question whether you are not living when you are reading.

And then, getting into my A.I.-induced flow, I said: Smith is making a joke out of the implication that to read is not to live. Presumably other people, like Paul's grandfather, in "A Hard Day's Night," say that those who are reading are not living. Instead of fighting with that assertion, Smith says he'd rather read. That's a cheeky response. But it infuriates Larkin. 

"The tape sat unremarkably on a shelf behind the counter, collecting dust for five, maybe 10 years — so much time that Rob Frith says he lost track."

"Frith, 69, could not seem to recall how it had found its way to Neptoon Records, his store in Vancouver, British Columbia, which in its 44 years has become a repository for tens of thousands of vinyl records and other musical relics.... "

So begins "Rare Beatles Audition Tape Surfaces in a Vancouver Record Shop/The recording appears to be from the band’s 1962 audition for Decca Records, which notably rejected the group" (NYT).

"As the men began posting about their discovery on social media, clues about the provenance of the recording began to emerge. Jack Herschorn, the former president and founder of Can-Base Records, a Vancouver label, said that a producer at Decca gave him the tape in the early 1970s and suggested that he could use it to make bootleg recordings. But he said he had qualms about doing so. 'I adored the Beatles,' Herschorn said. 'I wasn’t going to do anything that was not morally correct in my mind.' Herschorn, who now lives in Mexico, said that he put the tape into storage before leaving the record label, which later went bankrupt."

"Play the Beatles music to your kids.... We need this music in the world. We need peace and love. And we need the magic of the 60s to stay alive."

Said Sean Lennon, accepting a Grammy — for "best rock performance" — and uttering an ambiguity (does "to stay alive" refer to the 60s magic or to us (we'll die without it)):

Watch Sean Lennon's acceptance speech as they accept the GRAMMY for BEST ROCK PERFORMANCE for "NOW AND THEN" at the 2025 GRAMMYs. #TheBeatles#NowAndThen#SeanOnoLennon #GRAMMYS2025 #Grammys pic.twitter.com/zWWzpygPkO

— Carlos 🎧 🇦🇷 ⭐️⭐️⭐️ (@carlosgvizcaino) February 3, 2025

And here's the "performance" that won:

The Beatles have won a GRAMMY Award for “Best Rock Performance” for their song “Now and Then”pic.twitter.com/W6fYGSZjbL

— The Beatles Earth (@BeatlesEarth) February 3, 2025

"[I was] at the top of the mountain, and gradually it worked its way down. And then I looked up and life came back. I truly believe in looking up."

"You’re always in a better mood if you’re looking up. It’s one of those things you notice, walking around London, or it doesn’t matter where. They’re all looking down. There’s nothing down there."

Said Ringo Starr, quoted in "Ringo Starr: ‘I only want to be in a band. You can’t play Yesterday just on drums’/In a rare interview, the Beatle says Liverpool was always the capital of country music and reveals the lesson he learnt from Elton John’s mum" (London Times).

Don’t let anyone tell you that Starr is jumping on the country bandwagon....  he sang lead vocals on the Beatles’ version of Buck Owens’s Act Naturally on the Help! album nearly 60 years ago...“There was no plan to make a country record,” says Starr....

Rose and Valerie screaming from the gallery say he must go free....

I'm reading "Grinning Luigi Mangione yuks it up in court as he enters plea in execution of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson" (NY Post):

At least two dozen women packed the courtroom for the twisted heartthrob, with just six men watching on....

"In September 1970, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, in a speech in Las Vegas, warned that drug use was threatening 'to sap our national strength'..."

"... and called out a number of pop songs, including the Beatles’ 'With a Little Help From My Friends' and the Byrds’ 'Eight Miles High,' as 'latent drug culture propaganda.' Within a year, under the Nixon administration, the Federal Communications Commission warned broadcasters about playing songs with lyrics that might promote drug use. As a result, 'One Toke Over the Line' was banned by radio stations in Buffalo, Miami, Houston, Washington, Chicago, Dallas and New York. Brewer & Shipley, Mr. Brewer said, came to embrace the crackdown as 'a badge of honor.'"

From "Michael Brewer, Whose 'One Toke' Was a Big Hit, Is Dead at 80/The duo Brewer & Shipley reached the Top 10 in 1970 with 'One Toke Over the Line,' a ditty about marijuana that ran afoul of Nixon-era censors" (NYT).

Brewer lived to be 80 and that was half a century after he expressed this conception of how he wanted to die: "My last wish will be just one thing/Be smilin' when I die/I wanna be one toke over the line, sweet Jesus/One toke over the line..."

The singer was "sitting downtown in a railway station" and "just waitin' for the train that goes home, sweet Mary." 

Even if the song originated from an exclamation about smoking marijuana, it seems that the substance of the song is religious. The metaphor of the train is seen in other songs, such as "People Get Ready (There's a train a-coming....") and "This Train (Is Bound for Glory)."

I wouldn't brush off "One Toke Over the Line" as a "ditty."

And by the way, screw Agnew. Back in 1970, young people easily opposed censorship. Who would have thought that in 50 years, the tables would be turned and the young would embrace it?

"A quick Bluesky primer: Content has a 300-character limit. Those entries are officially called posts, though some have taken to calling them 'skeets'..."

"... a portmanteau of sky + tweets, though that word has an alternate, vulgar definition, which is part of the joke for people who use it. The site also has a function called 'starter packs,' user-generated topical lists of other users, which people can follow en masse. It’s helped build up users' followings rather quickly, and many new Blueskiers post about how much more engagement their posts get here, as compared to X or Threads, and how nice and earnest people were in the replies. (Maybe a little too earnest for some X-fried, sardonic brains: 'sorry I’m being such a hater but the vibe on bluesky rn is people who say "notorious RBG,"' posted one X user.) In fact, a scan of many November conversations on Bluesky seemed to often be about how great Bluesky was. And how Blueskiers had to do whatever they could to keep it that way...."

From "X is Elon’s world. Threads is a mess. Is Bluesky any better? The virtual town square, once framed by Twitter, is now fragmented as people flee to bluer pastures" (WaPo)(free-access link).

A quote from a "35-year-old stay at home mom": "I have to find every mean person that’s on here and make sure that all nice people know there’s a meanie in our midst. I definitely think that we can keep that out if that’s what we continue to want."

I wanted to end with a clip from the end of "Yellow Submarine," with John Lennon saying "Newer and bluer meanies have been sighted within the vicinity of this theater," and though I didn't find one suitable for embedding, I did find this Ringo Starr apple juice:

@thebeatles247lover Ringo Starr apple juice commercial ❤️‍🔥Follow and like my video. Thank you so much #fyp #thebeatles #thebeatlesgetback #parati #fypシ #music #beatles #paulmccartney #johnlennon #georgeharrison #ringostarr #60s #lyrics #parati #beatleslove #beatlesforever #beatlessong #beatlestok #musicthebeatles #beatlesfans #epiphone #hofnerbass #hofner #gibson #rickenbacker #ludwigdrums #singer #songwriter #songwriters #singersongwriter #legend #music #rockmusic #rock #classicrock #georgemartin #brianepstein #photo #photos #singers ♬ original sound - thelmafields19951

"And we're going to have some fun with this, aren't we?"

Harris murmurs into the phone to Obama and Obama:

Earlier this week, Michelle and I called our friend @KamalaHarris. We told her we think she’ll make a fantastic President of the United States, and that she has our full support. At this critical moment for our country, we’re going to do everything we can to make sure she wins in… pic.twitter.com/0UIS0doIbA

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) July 26, 2024

I call her "Harris." I was going to call her "my girl Kamala" — because that's what Mrs. Obama calls her in that phone call — but the powers that be have warned us not to call her "Kamala" and of course you can't say "girl" — unless you can — and "my" is a terrible problem, perhaps insinuating a perverse sense of ownership. So I'll keep my distance. "Harris" is it. Don't harass me.

Now, about this concept of "fun." It might be the new word of the day, the word on the memo that everyone got. It came up in this new Ezra Klein podcast, "This Is How Democrats Win in Wisconsin":

I mean, Sunday, I was still hearing from Democrats worried about Harris... And now, I mean, watching the party not just converge around her, but feel a real thrill around her, like really, really become passionate Harris stans, like watching the whole party fall outta the coconut tree and live unburdened by what has been, and only in the imagining of what could be. It's fun to watch Democrats have fun. They have not had fun in a long time. And it's also a good reminder that people don't know how something is gonna feel until it actually happens....

People talking about fun... enthusing This is fun... that's not a good marker of fun... whatever fun is....

I think of Zippy the Pinhead: "Are we having fun yet?"

And "And she'll have fun fun fun/'Til her daddy takes the T-bird away...."

And "Fun is the one thing that money can’t buy."

"For those of us who love to travel, the question of whether to revisit a place you’ve been to before is a repeated conundrum...."

"You’ve changed and the place has changed. You’re visiting not simply a place, but a place captured in a moment in time — one that exists for you in the past and to a past version of yourself.... Every traveler has been told on one journey or another, 'You should have been here 30 years ago.' You missed Angkor Wat when it was largely abandoned. Beijing when the sky was still blue. Iceland before Instagram. It can seem like you’ve always arrived too late...."

Writes Pamela Paul, in "The Joys and Perils of Return Travel" (NYT).

I would think that any place that turns out to have been worth traveling to once is better seen on the second visit. This principle applies to many other things, such as seeing a movie, reading a book, eating a food, and — most obviously — meeting a person. If your reaction to a first encounter is once is enough, then, in retrospect, you're seeing that it didn't really meet the better-than-nothing standard.

Dear Dan Rather: Are you trying to allude to a Beatles title?

I don't really want to read what Dan Rather — or "Dan Rather and Team Steady" — has to say about the Supreme Court. (Sample text: "More Republican-led state houses should take note of a plethora of unintended consequences that have come from the reversal of Roe.")

I just want to talk about the headline — over at Steady — "Dear SCOTUS, Look What You Have Done/The unintended consequences that could affect the election."

Pardon me for fussing over a headline when the country is collapsing into chaos.

"When Peter first showed me some restored images of the film, one was of a couple of the Beatles from the back, and..."

"... their hair in the original looked very clumped. Then he said, 'Now let me show you what we’ve been working on.' It was the same shot, but you could see the individual strands of hair. The new version is a 21st century version of a 20th century movie. It is certainly brighter and livelier than what ended up on videotape. It looks now like it was intended to look in 1969 or 1970, although at my request, Peter did give it a more filmic look than 'Get Back,' which had a slightly more modern and digital look.... [M]ost people who saw Peter’s picture as a corrective to mine haven’t seen mine, because no one was able to see it for 50 years. So unless they were children when they saw it in theaters, the only way most people would have seen it was on VHS or bootlegs, which changed the original aspect ratio and had dark and gloomy pictures and bad sound."

Said Michael Lindsay-Hogg, quoted in "Long Dismissed, the Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ Film Returns After 54 Years Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s unloved — or misinterpreted? — 1970 documentary, the source for Peter Jackson’s 'Get Back,' will stream on Disney+" (NYT).

I saw "Let It Be" in the theater when it came out in 1970, when I was a "child" of 19. I guess I'll have to subscribe to Disney again to see this digitally restored version. If we can now see the individual strands of the famous hair....

When I get older, losing my hair... it will be digitally possible to restore your hair, to individualize the strands so that they pulsate and coruscate as never before. I was once 19, in a movie theater, gazing upon the film "Let It Be," trying to see the reason why Beatles were breaking up — couldn't Paul please lead more subtly? couldn't George tone down the sarcasm? — and now, at 73, I can strap Vision Pro goggles to my face, lie in bed, and marvel at the individuality of the hairs in the once seemingly clumpy moptops. It's getting so much better all the time.

"'Now and Then' just kind of languished in a cupboard."

Says Paul, at 5:19:

"Wow. This is it. Now, it's a Beatle record."

ADDED: Here's the song:

"Aided by the fact that McCartney is allowed to use Beatles music when almost all other podcasters are not, the appeal is in going deep into material we all know."

"McCartney explains how Eleanor Rigby, from Revolver, was about all the old ladies he knew in Liverpool, many of whom he met while knocking on doors as a boy scout on bob-a-job week. 'So I imagined this lady and I gave her a scenario....' ... She’s cleaning up after someone else’s wedding, she’s putting on cold cream at night from a jar by the door.... 'My mum’s favourite was Nivea,' McCartney says.... 'It kind of scared me.'.... For Beatles nuts this is 18 minutes of pure gold.... An episode on Back in the USSR is also released today, while future instalments — one will be released each Wednesday — will explore Let It Be, Penny Lane and even Mull of Kintyre...."

From "McCartney: A Life in Lyrics review — pure gold for Beatles nuts/In a new podcast Paul McCartney talks to the Irish poet Paul Muldoon about the stories behind 12 of his songs. First up, Eleanor Rigby...." (London Times).

"Donald in the Sky John with Diamonds Boxes."

"With his shaggy hair, hepcat beard and racy poems touching on British youth’s anxieties, dreams of freedom and lust, he was hailed as Britain’s answer to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac..."

I'm reading "Royston Ellis, Bridge Between Beat Poets and the Beatles, Dies at 82 Making his name with a blend of poetry and rock ’n’ roll he called 'rocketry,' he straddled two eras of British youth culture at the dawn of the 1960s" (NYT).

Weaving his way into the bohemian underground of the Soho district of London, he was quickly drawing comparisons to the American Beat poets, although he later cited influences closer to home, in particular the British poet Christopher Logue, who provided inspiration with his “jazzetry” — poems read to a jazz accompaniment.

Look at this from 1959:

The connection to The Beatles:

The Beatles have a new music video — "Here, There and Everywhere."

"Artist and director Em Cooper explored the space between dreaming and wakefulness, working on an animation rostrum on sheets of celluloid."

She painted every frame individually in oil-paint, a labourious process which took many months." 

 

I was alerted to the existence of that new video by the new Wings of Pegasus analysis of "I'm Only Sleeping" on the new "special" edition of "Revolver." Wings take a strong position against pitch correction and explains why it's not an insult to say that John was singing "flat": "Instead of saying 'flat, flat, flat,' we should be saying 'emotion, emotion, emotion'...."

"He was the clear extravert of the Beatles … yet 'For No One' is beautifully introspective, and even a song as extraverted as 'Hey Jude' has a contemplative side."

"John rightly gets most of the credit for 'A Day in the Life,' which many point to as the artistic high point of the Beatles’ oeuvre — but it wouldn’t have achieved those heights if it had been all John. Music is all about context, and the dissonant orchestral frenzy wouldn’t have been as interesting if it had gone from John back to John again. It needs to give way to Paul waking up and reeling off the details of his ordinary life, before drifting off into a dream."

Writes my son John, in "Paul McCartney turns 80" (posted yesterday, Paul's birthday), in the first post of a new blog. The blog is titled "Music Is Happiness," and we'll see where that goes. 

John gives high marks to Paul's 2021 recording, "Deep Deep Feeling": 

"Peter Jackson’s Beatles doc in a nutshell... #comedy #fyp #thebeatles #getback" from benniball on TikTok.

Start here. 

That's Part 1. If you like it, click the "up" arrow for Part 2, etc. You might need to have watched the 8-hour documentary to understand how good it is, but mere familiarity with The Beatles might be enough. 

I'll embed Part 1: