"What do a cake, a runner, a rainbow and a kalashnikov have in common."

"10 Contested African Images of 2012."

"Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows."

This post is a present to those of you who seem to be looking for a place to honor Marvin Hamlisch, who died yesterday. I don't post about every obituary, and my standard for posting is whatever it is, and it's not that my commenters keep announcing, in random posts, that somebody famous died. But I got enough of that on Hamlisch that I looked up the obit out of curiosity. What was it that people are so worked up about? I'd rather post about the death of Robert Hughes. Why Hamlisch? He was on all those awards shows, associated with a lot of movies that I don't care about, like "The Way We Were." But I saw that he wrote the old Lesley Gore hit, and I'm up for embedding that. So here's the post people seem to want.

Here's the Robert Hughes obit. He was the big "Shock of the New" art critic. (Factoid: He caught gonnorrhea from Jimi Hendrix... second hand... through his wife... or so he thought.) And for those who look for death triads, there's Judith Crist, who was certainly the first film critic I ever read. She was in TV Guide. Here's something she said about Anne Bancroft: "She seems a cowlike creature with no aspirations or intellect above her pelvis."

There you go. There they go. Are you happy now? Is your life sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows?

"There was no pot of gold at the end of the adult-in-the-room rainbow... and there were only so many times Lucy could pull away the football."

An unnamed former Obama aide utters one of the silliest sentences we've ever read.

The context is the third year of Obama's presidency, which "did not produce outcomes sufficient for frustrated liberals [but] mark the end of the compromiser-in-chief" as described by David Corn in his new book, "Showdown: The Inside Story of Obama's Fight to Save His Presidency."

Speaking of Corn's new book, Instapundit has a story about Corn yelling at a manager at a Barnes & Noble over the stores failure to give his book its own display.

"During the discussion about the 'propaganda of homosexuality' bill in the St. Petersburg legislature, a city councilor proposed banning the rainbow symbol."

"Russian bloggers started joking that St. Petersburg would next ban the rainbow from nature. I laughed, too, and continued to think that these measures are, above all, ridiculous."

But on Thursday, the day after the St. Petersburg bill was passed and just as Moscow legislators were promising to pass one of their own, my 13-year-old son, who attends a private school with a liberal reputation in Moscow, came home and told me he had removed his new earring after a teacher told him that wearing earrings means you’re gay and is therefore inappropriate.

At the Rainbow Café...

... this is reality.

"I can hardly wait for The Althouse Woman to tear Maureen Dowd a new one today on MD's put down of Bob Dylan performing in China."

Meade reads me that comment from AllenS at the Crocus Café just as the last track of the vinyl record "New Morning" ends. We're playing "New Morning" — an album I've had since it came out when I was a college sophomore — because Meade cooked rainbow trout last night and he's been singing bits of "Sign on the Window" ever since...

Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me “Pa”
That must be what it’s all about

That is what's it's all about. Except we're in Madison, Wisconsin, not Utah. We're too old to have kids together. The house is too big to call a cabin. And we bought the rainbow trout at Whole Foods.

I started writing this post because I wanted to say, AllenS, I'm not going to do it. I'm not interested in what Maureen Dowd says about Bob Dylan. I started reading her column yesterday, and I got sick of it at the second paragraph:

The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout — even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding.

Her Bob Dylan is "the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems." I've listened to Bob Dylan singing in 5 different decades, and Dowd has him stuck in the 60s, and the early 60s at that. She's seeing him as the instrument of the American political left, when he broke away from them almost a half century ago.

It's true that Dylan still frequently plays “The Times They Are a-Changin,’ ” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” — the 2 songs Dowd thinks Dylan could have sung to upset Chinese government officials. (To play a concert in Beijing, Dylan submitted his playlist for government approval. Here's my April 6th blog post on the subject: "What's the big deal about Dylan's 'protest' songs in China anyway? They're almost entirely aimed at the United States.")

Now that I am writing about Dowd's column, I realized I had to read the whole thing and not just get tripped up at the stereotype of the early 60s Dylan (and the disgusting lie about Rush Limbaugh). And I see she does get around to something like the point I was going to make. She taps David Hajdu's book “Positively 4th Street” for something closer to the real Bob:

“I never saw myself as a folksinger,” he said. “They called me that if they wanted to. I didn’t care. I latched on, when I got to New York City, because I saw (what) a huge audience there was. I knew I wasn’t going to stay there. I knew it wasn’t my thing. ... I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.”

“Folk music,” he concluded, “is a bunch of fat people.”

He can’t really betray the spirit of the ’60s because he never had it. 

I imagine Dowd had written the column she wanted to write, then called up David Hajdu, who gave her material that forced her to backtrack and reformulate her attack. But the reformulation is lame. The lefty folky politicos were the true 60s?! If there is some true spirit of the 60s, it would be more accurate to say it is whatever Bob Dylan was. It was complicated. Politically and personally.

“I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he said.

He wrote that he wanted to have a house with a white picket fence and pink roses in back, live in East Hampton with his wife and pack of kids, eat Cheerios and go to the Rainbow Room and see Frank Sinatra Jr. perform.

A pack of kids... who call me “Pa”... That must be what it’s all about....

Real personal life, with the beauty of love and family, enhanced by the comforts of material affluence. A cabin. Fresh food. That's a more subversive message to the Chinese than what Dowd calls "[i]conic songs of revolution like 'The Times They Are a-Changin'' and 'Blowin’ in the Wind.'"

The day began with memories of rainbow trout, and I began writing this post meaning to end with rainbow. Looking up the "Sign in the Window" lyrics at bobdylan.com with my search term "rainbow" — I was looking for the rainbow — I saw all Dylan's "rainbow"s, including a second one in "Father of Night" — which is the aforementioned last track on the album "New Morning":

Father of night, Father of day
Father, who taketh the darkness away
Father, who teacheth the bird to fly
Builder of rainbows up in the sky...

Is that subversive in China?

There are 3 other Bob Dylan songs with rainbows:

1. "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." This is a song full of everything bad Dylan could think of to throw at us, and yet: "I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow..."

2. "Desolation Row." He's singing about "Ophelia," who's "already... an old maid" at the age of 22. She "wears an iron vest" and has "her profession" as "her religion." Her sin is "lifelessness." She does, however, have "her eyes ... fixed upon Noah’s great rainbow." See? She doesn't belong in the city! She needs God, a husband, a bunch of kids, and a cabin in Utah. (Ah! This makes me think about how I went to New York City, instead of out into some western landscape, after all those listens-through of "New Morning" in college.)

3. "Beyond the Horizon." "Beyond the horizon, behind the sun/At the end of the rainbow life has only begun... The bells of St. Mary, how sweetly they chime/Beyond the horizon I found you just in time." Note, at the link to the lyrics at Bob Dylan's own website — scroll down — there's a YouTube embed of Guy Lombardo playing "Red Sails in the Sunset."

Think about what that means! "We marry tomorrow/And she goes sailing no more." They marry... and they go to the Rainbow Room! Or they catch rainbow trout. Or they eat rainbow trout that they bought at Whole Foods in Madison and play their old Bob Dylan records.

"A U.S. Border Patrol spokesman says country singer Willie Nelson was charged with marijuana possession after 6 ounces was found aboard his tour bus in Texas..."

"Patrol spokesman Bill Brooks ... says an officer smelled pot when a door was opened and a search turned up marijuana."

Come on. Leave Willie alone.

At the Double Rainbow Café...

... we're feeling twice as optimistic.

Now, get out of the duckweed pond and carry on your open-threading up here, in the new day, the day we call: June 19th! Yay! Hooray for June 19th! Isn't it gorgeous? I did get some gorgeous late-sleeping accomplished, so the day is off to a smashing start.

And here's the coolest version of a great old song:



There was a semester when I listened to that in my car every day when I drove my 5 minute drive to work. Someday you'll find it... And then I found it!

Rainbows!

Welcome to the working week.

Coffee in the skillet:



Rainbow in the glass:

"I'm sending you a rainbow from the edge of my sink."

AND: Have you been half asleep, have you heard voices?

AND: Once, this was the rainbow in the kitchen:



"I've heard it too many times to ignore it. It's something that I'm supposed to be..."

The end of the ice rainbow.

We've been watching ice melt here today, so let's see the delicate end:

I bring my ice rainbow inside.

It was melting outside anyway.

The ice rainbow of hope.

Discovered here in Madison, Wisconsin, where — as George Harrison once sang — the ice is slowly melting. It's been a long cold lonely winter... the smiles returning to their faces... it seems like years since it's been clear....

But it's a rainbow-striped tomb!

You know what bugs me the most about the government's newly revised "food pyramid"? It's that it's called "MyPyramid." MyPyramid!

First, unless you want me to pronounce it mip-ee-RA-mid, put the damn space in. It's not cute to take out the space. It's just irritating.

But second, what's with the "my"? This is your recommendation for everyone. Am I supposed to think you think I'm special? Is this, like the removal of the space, supposed to be cute? Like "My Little Pony," my little advice from the government?

Could you please stop wasting my little tax contribution telling me what to eat, especially coming up with ideas like having a tomb as a symbol of health?

UPDATE: Stephen Bainbridge has more.