And you tell me over and over and over again, my friend

On the telehealth this afternoon with the nurse practitioner, I had the opportunity to include "comedically loud sneezing" among my repertoire of symptoms. I am being treated for a presumption of bronchitis for a week, after which if I do not improve I have to walk into a building and get X-rayed. Please cross your fingers for Team Bronchitis. In the meantime, have some links.

1. I learned this story originally from the radio astronomy side: "Why You Generally Can't Find TV Stations on Channel 37."

2. I'm not crazy about the headline, but it belongs to an intelligent essay by Emily Mortimer: "How 'Lolita' Escaped Obscenity Laws and Cancel Culture." Also I grew up on her father's books and scripts and I had no idea of the connection.

3. I knew how much Henry Ford had angered American Jews (I wrote him a haiku once!), but I did not know our calendar had in fact come for him.

So both days of this weekend I had recording sessions over Zoom with A Besere Velt, in consequence of which in the evenings I was a puddle of mush with a cat on it and occasionally coughing, in consequence of which I fell face-first into The Greatest American Hero (1981–83), in consequence of which I have now been playing Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" for something over twelve hours: sholio has the full story. Music licensing for home release is beginning to assume the proportions of a devil. I am enjoying the series immensely. It is one of the shows where the narrative level of the plot is almost always nonsense, but all of the character work is engaging and sound and sometimes criminally endearing—it's not at all serialized, but it has continuity and growth. Robert Culp's Bill Maxwell has been added to my list of favorite characters. I suspect the show of being terrifically idtastic, but most of the time its id is really nice.

This is what water, wind, and time and toil reveal

My mother is seventy-five today. She calls it being as old as three black bears. Last year, my father organized her a surprise party including friends and family from out of state; this year, I came over in the afternoon and gave her a reprint of Dorothy B. Hughes' Ride the Pink Horse (1946) and watched my father decorate almond cupcakes with whipped cream and fresh-made strawberry syrup, which neither my mother nor I would exactly have called a strawberry shortcake, but it was delicious. My brother and his family will come for the birthday observed at the end of the week. I finally got the chance to go for a walk with a camera for the first time in months. The camera then naturally died, but I got a harbinger of spring out of it first. The second photo comes courtesy of my father's phone.





My parents are now reminiscing about "Eve of Destruction." My father used to play it back-to-back with Phil Ochs' "Crucifixion." They are pretty sure it's still on vinyl downstairs.