Odds & Ends: News/Humor (with a "Who Lost the Fortnight?" poll)

I post a weekly diary of historical notes, arts & science items, foreign news (often receiving little notice in the US) and whimsical pieces from the outside world that I often feature in "Cheers & Jeers".

OK, you've been warned - here is this week's tomfoolery material that I posted.

CHEERS to Bill and Michael in PWM, our Laramie, Wyoming-based friend Irish Patti and ...... well, each of you at Cheers and Jeers. Have a fabulous weekend .... and week ahead.

ART NOTES— an exhibition entitled Connoisseurship & Collecting: Masterworks of European Painting will be at the Orlando, Florida Museum of Art to May 1, 2022.

YOUR WEEKEND READ #1 is this lengthy (yet never dry) essay in the American Prospect by David Dayen (dday on this site) about the Great Resignation (he refers to it as The Great Escape) noting that as of 2020, nearly one-quarter of U.S. jobs were low-wage, the highest percentage in the developed world— finally gaining some bargaining power.

THURSDAY's CHILD is named Socks the Coors Field Cat— a feral who ran onto the field at the Colorado Rockies baseball team earlier this year — who underwent surgery after the discovery of a tumor, yet determined not to be cancerous.

YOUR WEEKEND READ #2 is this story of a twenty year-old bank employee in Cleveland who left work one Friday in 1969 with a bag containing $215k (the equivalent to more than $1.7 mill in 2021) and so had a two-day head start when he did not show-up for work on Monday. He settled in suburban Boston — near the filming location of “The Thomas Crown Affair” (which inspired his crime), had a family and led a secret life until his death this past May at age seventy-three.  

FRIDAY's CHILD is named Zeke the Cat— an English kitteh who went missing five years ago, yet was found thirty miles away and reunited due to his microchip.

THE OTHER NIGHT yours truly hosted the Top Comments diary with a book review of The Man Who Hated Women— ostensibly about the anti-reproductive rights zealot Anthony Comstock, yet the NYT review accurately notes it is more about the lives of eight particular women he prosecuted (though he was an equal opportunity bully) ... who apparently inspired a George Washington University law school student named ... J. Edgar Hoover.

BRAIN TEASER— try this Quiz of the Week's News from the BBC ...… and the usually easier, less UK-centered New York Times quiz.

SEPARATED at BIRTH— poet Allen Ginsberg and Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun.

...... and finally, for a song of the week ...........................… although it was written by Joni Mitchell: each year at this time, I feature the man who popularized it and — according to Rolling Stone— ushered in the singer/songwriter era.“I wasn’t sure if they were crediting me or accusing me,” he remarked.

Say what you will, Tom Rush gets around. He was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, came-of-age in Massachusetts, made his mark at the Boston/Cambridge coffeehouses of the early 1960's, has lived in the Rockies and the West Coast, then Vermont, now back in Massachusetts and who-knows-where tomorrow (as he counts having moved twenty-six times).

As Steve Leggett of the All-Music Guide puts it, “Rush's warm and slightly world-weary baritone” has a way of growing on you, and he was one of the first performers to feature works by Jackson Browne and others when they were just beginning. Garth Brooks has cited him as an influence, with James Taylor going so far as to say, "I took as much from Tom Rush as possible and unwittingly modeled myself on him. Like a lot of people who do what I do, I owe my career to him".

For a few years, Tom Rush has had an album of humorous tunes Trolling for Owls - which he notes is "not available in stores!" And one of them - The Remember Song - has received in excess of 7.3 million hits on YouTube. After being told it had gone viral he wrote, "I thought I was being accused of being a musical equivalent of Ebola ......... but my children explained to me ... that this was a good thing".

And for several years, The Very Best of Tom Rush has provided listeners with his classic songs (as well as a 2013 documentary film). But it wasn't until 2009 that he released What I Know— which was his first new studio recording in 35 years— because as he explained, "I don't like to rush headlong into these things".

In 2018, he released the album Voices— with some traditional tunes as well as several new songs— of which he says, “There are very few labels that are just content to put out good music and make a reasonable profit at it. Appleseed Recordings, the label I’m on, is one of them, and I’m very thankful to be working with them.”

This marks the 59th anniversary of the career of Tom Rush and — at age 80 — is still quite active. In 2012 he recorded What's Wrong with America?— a spoof of Mitt Romney's notorious “47%” comments. He performs in a lot of college towns and — without mentioning you-know-who by name — said a few years ago:

In terms of the politics, I try to create kind of a little oasis from the problems of the world. So I don’t tend to get political, because I really don’t want to remind people of how much things suck. I’d rather give them a little holiday from all the turmoil.

On the other hand, there are times when I just can’t help myself and have to comment on something. I’ve been saying lately there are aspects of the recent election cycle that make you realize we really have to spend more on education. You can make of that what you will.

For many years he performed an annual show in Boston's Symphony Hall in December. This year, he has some shows in New England this week, then some more in the new year.