"When I was in my teens, I was in The Boys’ Brigade, a semi-military organization. We had a bugle band, and I used to play the snare."

"That’s how I got into playing drums. I used to like that sort of snare style, and I think I brought some of that into The Yardbirds, with 'I’m a Man,' a bit of a marching thing. But I also mixed it up with jazz. There was a military/jazz element."

Said Jim McCarty, who was the drummer in The Yardbirds.

I've listened to The Yardbirds "I'm a Man" hundreds of times, mostly half a century ago, but I've never thought of it as military....



Does it change the meaning, to think about it that way — as a military march? Lyrics here, if you want to analyze. The most notable lyric, heard over and over is: "Man, I spell M-A-N, man/I'm a man."

Smokestack rainbow.

Meade sent me that from out on his campaign (mountain biking).

Made me think of this song that mesmerized me in my youth:

When the President decried and bemoaned "The Soft American."

"Throughout our history we have been challenged to armed conflict by nations which sought to destroy our independence or threatened our freedom."

The young men of America have risen to those occasions, giving themselves freely to the rigors and hardships of warfare. But the stamina and strength which the defense of liberty requires are not the product of a few weeks' basic training or a month's conditioning. These only come from bodies which have been conditioned by a lifetime of participation in sports and interest in physical activity. Our struggles against aggressors throughout our history have been won on the playgrounds and corner lots and fields of America.

Thus, in a very real and immediate sense, our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security.

That was 1960. I don't think JFK wrote his own material, but I note his/"his" absurd dependence on pairing one word with another that means almost the same thing:  rigors and hardship...  stamina and strength... real and immediate. Many, many more in the full article: vigor and determination...  effort and determination... vigor and muscle tone... soft and inactive... physical development and prowess... health and vigor... vigor and vitality...

"For Your Love."

The other day I heard the old Yardbirds song "For Your Love" on the satellite radio in the car. This was a 1965 song that I bought as a single before the Yardbirds first album came out. I was an early adopter when it comes to The Yardbirds. (I was — and am — particularly attached to "Having a Rave Up with The Yardbirds," which is not their first album and does not contain "For Your Love." )

For some reason, the satellite radio causes me to notice song lyrics, and the lyrics to "For Your Love" are embarrassing:

The Lytro camera lets you take a photograph and then focus it.

"The Lytro camera [has] a special sensor called a microlens array, which puts the equivalent of many lenses into a small space.... [It has] sophisticated software that lets a viewer switch points of focus.... '[Photographs] become interactive, living pictures,' [Ren] Ng said. He thinks a popular use may be families and friends roaming through different perspectives on pictures of, say, vacations and parties posted on Facebook (Lytro will have a Facebook app)."

Digital cameras already let you see what part of the image is the focus point, but you don't always have time to look at the display, and in bright light it may be hard to see. Also, when you get your images uploaded into the computer and start to work with them, you might see details that you'd like to crop and focus on, perhaps things that you didn't even realize were in the shot... like in the movie "Blow-Up," when David Hemmings sees what may be evidence of murder in the blurry background shrubberies photographed with a film camera. I can't find the scene where he's blowing up the blowups of the blowups, so here's the scene with The Yardbirds: