Alannah Myles – "Black Velvet" (1989)

Mississippi in the middle of a dry spell

Jimmie Rodgers on the Victrola up high

I recently learned that Sandra Day O’Connor – who became the first female member of the Supreme Court in 1981 – was confirmed by a 99-0 vote.

Can you imagine a Supreme Court justice being unanimously confirmed today?

Sandra Day O’Connor

The two newest Supreme Court justices were confirmed by much narrower margins.  Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was nominated by Joe Biden in 2022, was confirmed by a 53-47 vote.  Every Democratic senator voted in favor of confirming her, while almost every GOP senator went the other way.  (Three Republicans did cross party lines to vote for her.) 

The vote on Amy Coney Barrett, who was nominated by Donald Trump in 2020, was even closer.  She was confirmed by a 52-48 vote – every single Republican senator save one voted yes, while every Democrat voted no. 

I would bet dollars to doughnuts that the votes on future Supreme Court justices will resemble the close votes on Jackson and Barrett rather than the unanimous vote in favor of O’Connor.  

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I noted above that only one Republican senator failed to vote to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

That one Republican senator was Susan Collins of Maine, who was also one of the only three Republicans who voted to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson, a liberal justice appointed by Joe Biden.

Collins is up for re-election this year, and her opponents are hammering her because she voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh when Trump nominated him to the Supreme Court in 2018.  “A vote for Collins is a vote for Trump,” they say, “and a vote against reproductive rights.”

Susan Collins always has been pro-choice.  (In 2022, she introduced a bill to codify Roe v. Wade after that decision was overturned by the Supreme Court.)  

And she is arguably the most independent member of the U.S. Senate – she recently reaffirmed the independence she demonstrated by voting against Amy Coney Barrett and in favor of Ketanji Brown Jackson when she announced a few days ago that she would not vote to confirm Trump’s nominee for Attorney General.  

But independence is no longer seen as a desirable quality for a politician.  Neither is bipartisanship.  (Collins has consistently been ranked as the most bipartisan member of the Senate.  She voted with Presidents Obama and Biden as much as she voted with President Trump.)  

And heaven help candidates who are viewed as moderates.  Extremism is clearly preferred in both parties these days.  (The American Conservative Union gives Collins a 46% score when it comes to being conservative, while the American for Democratic Action – a liberal group – rates her as 45% liberal.  That’s about as middle-of-the-road as it’s possible to be.) 

Give her votes on the Barrett and Jackson nominations – not to mention her support of the two liberal Supreme Court justices nominated by President Obama – it’s ironic indeed that the consistently moderate and pro-choice Collins is being criticized for her Kavanaugh vote and painted as a Trump supporter.  But most politicians wouldn’t recognize irony if it bit them in the behind.   

Forget it, Jake – it’s politics.   

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Please don’t misunderstand my point today.  I’m not saying you should vote for Susan Collins or against her – there are perfectly reasonable arguments on both sides of that debate, and it’s up to Maine voters to decide which are more compelling. 

But as an aficionado of irony, I couldn’t resist pointing out such a juicy example of it.  Although the more I think about it, the more I wonder if the appropriate term for what I wrote about above is hypocrisy rather than irony.

According to Psychology Today columnist Jeremy Sherman, “Hypocrisy means contradicting ourselves, being inconsistent, and talking out of both sides of our mouths. But that’s also what irony means. What then distinguishes hypocrisy from irony?”

That’s a good question.  Hypocrisy and irony both involve a disparity between words and deeds.  Some have distinguished the two by saying that while all hypocrisy has an ironic element, but not all irony involves hypocrisy.

I’ll stick with my choice of irony.  But if you think hypocrisy is the more accurate term to use here, be my guest.

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A final note: if you choose to comment on this post, PLEASE don’t accuse me of being MAGA or supporting baby-killing or other such BS.  

That’s especially true if you’re someone I know.  I get along just fine with my fellow basketball referees, and the people I meet at trivia, and the people I take bike trips with – until they start talking about politics.  Occasionally someone has something thoughtful to say on that subject, but most of the people I hear talking about politics immediately prove themselves to be dumbasses.  

I want to like everyone I meet – I really do.  But it’s hard to like someone you don’t respect because they’re a dumbass.

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Today’s featured recording hit #1 on the Billboard “Hot 100” in 1989, but the first time I heard it was at my local grocery store last week.

“Black Velvet” pays tribute to Elvis Presley.  Fortunately, it sounds nothing like an Elvis record.

Click here to listen to “Black Velvet.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon. 

Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich – "Hold Tight" (1966)

Girl, you suit me for size

Forget the other guys!

I recently stumbled across a 1992 segment from Late Night with David Letterman that featured five elementary school kids telling jokes to Letterman.  Click here if you want to watch it.  (Trust me, you do.)

[NOTE: Did you remember that Letterman’s show was still on NBC in 1992?  Late Night first appeared in 1982, replacing Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow Coast to Coast program in the 12:30 am time slot following Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.  Letterman expected to take Carson’s place as the Tonight Show host when Carson retired in 1991, but that job was given to Jay Leno instead.  As a result, Letterman took his show – renamed Late Show with David Letterman – to CBS in 1993.]

My favorite joke from that Late Night segment was the one told by Leonard, a sixth-grader who appears about seven and a half minutes into the segment:

Leonard: What is the difference between a snowman and a snow woman?

Letterman:  I have no idea.

Leonard:  Snowballs!

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Last Sunday, my daughter hosted a 10th birthday party for my oldest grandson, Jack.  Also in attendance were Jack’s two oldest cousins, Tommy (who is nine years old) and Sully (who is eight).

Jack at age two

I couldn’t wait to tell them Leonard’s snowballs joke – in front of my daughter, of course!

My grandsons LOVED the joke.  I’m hoping that they tell it to all their friends when school starts later this month.   

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A couple of weeks ago, I brought Tommy to one of my weekly trivia games.  Tommy is a smart kid, and he knows more than I do about certain topics.  For example, he knows everything there to know about the 2026 World Cup, and he’s an expert on flags as well.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have any questions about the World Cup or flags that night.  But a couple of weeks later, the final question – which, like the final question on Jeopardy, is the most important one of the game – was about flags.

Here’s the question:

Situated fewer than 1000 miles apart, which two European nations – whose names contain the same number of letters – use national flags depicting a map of the country itself?

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Do you have any idea what the correct answer to that question is?  I didn’t think so.

Don’t feel bad – we had no idea what the answer was either.  As a result, we finished second instead of first.

When I posed the final question to Tommy after Jack’s birthday party, he didn’t hesitate. “Kosovo and Cyprus,” he said.

The flags of Kosovo and Cyprus

And he was right.  Which means that my dominant trivia team had a seven-week winning streak broken because we were missing my nine-year-old grandson.

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We’ve never had a trivia question about Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich.  But I’ll be ready for it if we ever do.

Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich had no fewer than eight top ten hits in the UK.  They sold a lot of records in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands as well.  But they never had a hit in the U.S.

Click here to read about Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich.

Click here to listen to “Hold Tight,” a #4 hit single in the UK and Germany in 1966.  It’s featured on the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 film, Death Proof – that’s where I first heard it.

Click here to buy “Hold Tight” from Amazon.

Weezer – "Pork and Beans" (2008)

I’ma do the things that I wanna do

I ain’t got a thing to prove to you

No dish is easier to prepare and more satisfying to consume than beans and franks.

Simply dump a 15-ounce can of Van Camp’s pork and beans into a saucepan and add a couple of Oscar Mayer beef hot dogs that have been cut into bite-sized pieces.  Then heat and serve:

That’s all there is to it.  (Sure, you could add ketchup, or garlic salt, or whatever – but why gild the lily?)

Of course, if you’re really lazy you can just buy this premixed concoction and stick it in the microwave:

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I planned a recent bike ride so that it included a stop at the legendary Weenie Beenie [sic] restaurant in Arlington, Virginia.  

I ordered the usual – a hot dog with chili, salt-and-vinegar-flavored potato chips, and a Dr. Pepper – and repaired to the bus stop across the street to eat.  (Weenie Beenie, which opened in 1954, is strictly a carryout operation.)

The homemade chili on my hot dog was tasty, but it came sans beans.  As far as I could tell, there are plenty of weenies at Weenie Beenie, but there’s nary a bean to be found there.

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I don’t know if Weenie Beenie has ever been accused of false advertising given the fact that its dishes are entirely lacking in bean content.

As a lawyer who spent much of my time defending advertisers who were accused on making false or deceptive claims for their products, I know exactly what arguments I would make on behalf of the owners of Weenie Beenie if they were to retain my professional services.

“The name of my client’s restaurant is ‘Weenie Beenie,’ not ‘Weenie Beanie,’” I would point out.  “Is it not reasonable to assume that consumers know how to correctly spell a simple word like ‘bean’?”

Case dismissed!

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Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo wrote “Pork and Beans” after the band was summoned to meet with executives at their record company and told that they needed to record more commercial material.

“I came out of [that meeting] pretty angry,” Cuomo told a Rolling Stone reporter. “But ironically, it inspired me to write another song.”

What’s ironic is that “Pork and Beans” – written as a defiant response to soulless record company suits – ended up becoming Weezer’s biggest single.  It reached number one on the Billboard “Hot Modern Rock Tracks” chart in May 2008, and held on to that top spot for eleven weeks – only the third single to retain the #1 ranking for that long.

Click here to listen to “Pork and Beans.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

White Stripes – "The Hardest Button to Button" (2003)

I had opinions that didn’t matter

I had a brain that felt like pancake batter

Last month, I wrote about David Trone, the billionaire who set a record ten years ago for the most money ever spent in an unsuccessful primary election campaign for Congress.  This year, Trone shattered his previous record by spending almost twice as much in another losing effort to win his party’s nomination for a Congressional seat.

The line I used on social media as a tease for that post was “When will he ever learn?” – which some of you will recognize as a paraphrase of the refrain to the famous anti-war song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

Perhaps that tease should have read “When will 2 or 3 lines learn?”  Because every time I write about politics, I end up wishing that I hadn’t.

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I didn’t write about Trone’s expensive defeats with politics in mind.  I didn’t discuss his political views in my post – they were irrelevant.  (Trone is a Democrat, but I would have written exactly the same piece had he been a Republican.)   

Big spender David Trone

I wrote about him because I suspect that a lot of politicians run for office primarily to satisfy their oversized egos – not only do they think they know better than you and I, but they also love the attention and the perks and the ass-kissing that elected officials get.  

I admit that I took some satisfaction from the fact that a filthy rich guy like Trone had spent a gazillion dollars running for Congress and failed.  And I figured that some of my readers might have the same reaction.  

The post was something of a cheap shot.  If I’m being honest, I have to admit that I was motivated to some degree by envy.  (Do I wish I was a billionaire like Trone?  YOU BET YOUR SWEET ASS I DO!)  But it wasn’t like I was picking on someone who wasn’t my own size – Trone couldn’t care less about what 2 or 3 lines has to say about him.)

After I was finished talking about Trone, I went on to present the rather staggering numbers for total campaign spending in recent elections.  I found those numbers of interest because I’m old enough to remember when it was taken for granted that Republicans would outspend Democrats.  But it’s the Democrats who have the edge in campaign money – and it’s been that way for some time now. 

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Not writing about politics on 2 or 3 lines doesn’t mean I don’t care about politics.  I spend a fair amount of time reading and thinking about political issues, and I enjoy discussing politics with others – even if they don’t agree with my opinions.  

Talking politics with someone who agrees with all of your beliefs isn’t very satisfying – it’s nice to have someone tell you that you’re right and that anyone who disagrees with you is wrong, but you don’t learn anything from such a discussion.  

But you very well may learn something from a friendly debate with someone who doesn’t share your opinions.  At the least, the give-and-take of such an exchange forces you to articulate and defend those beliefs.  (Maybe you walk away from that discussion even more convinced that you are right – but maybe you realize that there are some holes in your arguments, and you adjust your views accordingly.)

Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to have a friendly debate any more.  People no longer are able to agree to disagree on political issues.  When you have a different point of view from other people, they demonize you.  

If you and I have different opinions about a movie, or we like different kinds of music, we can still be friends – but if we voted for different Presidential candidates, your reaction is more likely to be “He’s an evil piece of sh*t!”

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It would be easy to attribute this sorry state of affairs to Donald Trump’s rise to prominence as a national political figure a decade ago.  People either love him or they hate him – very few are neutral on the man – and you can’t attribute the diametrically opposed feelings of the lovers and the haters to differences of opinion over whether we should raise taxes on the wealthy, or whether enforcement of our immigration laws should be more stringent, or what bathrooms transgender people should use. 

You might be familiar with the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” which is used pejoratively by President Trump and his supporters to dismiss his opponents as irrational and unhinged.  But you may not know that the use of that pseudo-psychiatric phrase to describe those who have a visceral revulsion to a political figure predates Trump.  

The late Charles Krauthammer was a Harvard-trained psychiatrist before becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist.  In 2003, he coined the phrase “Bush Derangement Syndrome” to explain what he viewed as the hysterically negative reaction of some people to George W. Bush’s presidency – a reaction that transcended legitimate policy disagreements and spilled over into something that was pathological.  

Conservative David Horowitz later applied the term to Bush’s successor.  “Obama Derangement Syndrome” was the term he applied to what he viewed as the over-the-top comparisons of Obama to Stalin, David Koresh, Charles Manson, and Saddam Hussein.  He urged his fellow conservatives not to duplicate the “manias” of those on the left with regard to Bush.  “[Obama] is not exactly the anti-Christ,” Horowitz wrote, “although a disturbing number of people on the right are convinced he is.”

There are a lot of people who have “Hillary Clinton Derangement Syndrome” or “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Derangement Syndrome” as well.  God knows that there plenty of good reasons to take the position that neither one of them should be President, but it sure would be nice if the people who felt that way didn’t go postal every time their names came up.

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Given how many people have lost their cotton-pickin’ minds when it comes to politics, I shouldn’t have been surprised to receive some pretty unhinged comments on my Trone post.

One commenter somehow read my post as being pro-Trump.  God only knows where he got that interpretation from, but it certainly wasn’t from anything that I wrote.  (Perhaps he suffered from “Trump Derangement Syndrome”?)

Another commenter couldn’t handle the truth about campaign expenditures.  Sorry, folks – but the facts are the facts.  (My numbers came from Open Secrets, a nonpartisan organization that aggregates and processes raw data directly from official government data and is widely considered to be a highly reliable source for tracking money in U.S. politics.)

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“The Hardest Button to Button” was released in 2003 on Elephant, the White Stripes’ fourth studio album.

The amazing music video for the song was directed by Michel Gondry, who is best known as the director of the 2004 movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Click here to watch it.

That music video was brilliantly parodied in a 2006 episode of The Simpsons.  Click here to watch that parody.

Click here to buy “The Hardest Button to Button” from Amazon.