Cut from the album they did together ...



Kerouac sounds a lot like Mitch Hedberg to my ear.

How One Librarian Tried to Squash Goodnight Moon
There’s a reason this classic is missing from the New York Public Library’s list of the 10 most-checked-out books of all time.

https://slate.com/culture/2020/01/goodnight-moon-nypl-10-most-checked-out-books.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab

By Dan Kois
Jan 13, 20205:45 AM

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HarperCollins Publishers

On Monday the New York Public Library, celebrating its 125th anniversary, released a list of the 10 most-checked-out books in the library’s history. The list is headed by a children’s book—Ezra Jack Keats’ masterpiece The Snowy Day—and includes five other kids’ books. The list also includes a surprising addendum: One of the most beloved children’s books of all time didn’t make the list because for 25 years it was essentially banned from the New York Public Library. Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown, would have made the Top 10 list and might have topped it, the library notes, but for the fact that “influential New York Public Library children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore disliked the story so much when it was published in 1947 that the Library didn’t carry it … until 1972.” Who was Anne Carroll Moore, and what was her problem with the great Goodnight Moon?




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She was also a tastemaker whose NYPL-branded lists of recommended children’s books could make or break a book’s fortunes. “Other libraries around the country looked to the NYPL, and if she didn’t buy it, they didn’t buy it,” explains Betsy Bird, a children’s book blogger and longtime NYPL librarian who’s now at the Evanston Public Library in Illinois. “If Anne Carroll Moore didn’t like a book, she could effectively kill it.” Marcus writes that “editors, authors, and illustrators routinely stopped by to visit with Miss Moore and seek her counsel on their works in progress”; she supposedly had a custom-made rubber stamp reading “NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PURCHASE BY EXPERT,” and she was not afraid to use it.

But Miss Moore’s taste was particular. She loved Beatrix Potter and The Velveteen Rabbit and was a steadfast believer in the role of magic and innocence in children’s storytelling. This put her in opposition to a progressive wave then sweeping children’s literature, inspired by the early childhood research of the Cooperative School for Student Teachers, located on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. The Bank Street School, as it became known, was also a preschool and the teacher training facility where Margaret Wise Brown enrolled in 1935. This progressive wave was exemplified by the Here and Now Story Book, created by Bank Street’s leading light Lucy Sprague Mitchell in 1921. A collection of simple tales set in a city, focusing on skyscrapers and streetcars, it was a rebuttal to Moore’s “once upon a time” taste in children’s lit.
“She is the quintessential bun-in-the-hair shushing librarian. She’s such an easy villain.” — Betsy Bird

<snip>

By the time Brown’s most famous book was published in 1947, Moore had ostensibly retired, though,—as Jill Lepore noted in the New Yorker in a story about Moore’s war with another children’s classic, Stuart Little—she still essentially ran the children’s section, leading department meetings even when her put-upon acolyte and successor, Frances Clarke Sayers, tried changing the meeting room at the last minute. Margaret Wise Brown wanted librarians to adopt Goodnight Moon; she even blurred out the udder of the cow who jumped over the moon to avoid offending those “Important Ladies.” But it certainly wasn’t enough for Moore, or Sayers, or the NYPL: Marcus notes that “in a harshly worded internal review, the library dismissed the book as an unbearably sentimental piece of work.” And so the book wasn’t purchased by the New York Public Library, and while children were encouraged to check out all kinds of books from the library’s extensive children’s department, Goodnight Moon was not one of them.

As Bird notes in a fascinating blog post, the legacy of Anne Carroll Moore is one that many children’s librarians struggle with. “She is the quintessential bun-in-the-hair shushing librarian,” says Bird. “She’s such an easy villain.” Her discriminating book recommendations delivered from on high represent the exact opposite of the credo pledged by most children’s librarians today: that the library’s role is to provide the widest possible array of titles and allow children to find the books they love. Yet Moore did more than anyone else in the first half of the 20th century to encourage children of all races and incomes to read. To adopt a 21st century rallying cry, Bird notes, Anne Carroll Moore “was all about diverse books waaaaaay before anyone else was.”


Perhaps in part because of Moore’s blacklisting, Goodnight Moon wasn’t an immediate commercial success; by 1951 sales had dropped low enough that the publisher was considering putting it out of print. So no one was pressuring the NYPL to stock the book, least of all Brown, who died in 1952. (Recovering from surgery for an ovarian cyst in a hospital in France, she playfully kicked her leg up, cancan-style, to show a nurse how well she was feeling; the action dislodged an embolism from a vein in her leg, which traveled to her brain, killing her nearly instantly.) The book regained popularity in the 1950s and 1960s as chains like Waldenbooks and B. Dalton grew; soon, libraries ceded their position as the primary buyers of children’s books to parents. By 1972, the book’s 25th anniversary, Goodnight Moon was nearing 100,000 copies sold a year. Perhaps it was that anniversary, speculated the NYPL’s Lynn Lobash, that spurred the library finally to stock the book.

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How Led Zeppelin Came to Be
Jimmy Page recruited “three new men” for his Yardbirds reboot, and in the process made rock history .
Rolling Stone

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-led-zeppelin-came-to-be?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Corbin Reiff



First show in 1968 as the New Yardbirds. Photo by Jorgen Angel/Getty Images.



On September 7th, 1968, Led Zeppelin played their first live show ever in, of all places, a converted gym in Gladsaxe, Denmark. They weren’t yet billed under their soon-to-be world-famous name but were instead performing under the guise of the New Yardbirds, a relaunch of the British Invasion blues rockers who’d imploded just months before. The only known quantity among this new lineup was guitarist Jimmy Page, who’d funded the tour through Scandinavia out of his own pocket, but that was enough draw a young crowd to the venue, known as Teen Club. “Their performance and their music were absolutely flawless,” local reviewer Bent Larsen wrote in the venue’s monthly newsletter, “and the music continued to ring nicely in the ears for some time after the curtains were drawn after their show.”

As far as gigs go, this show, which featured several songs that would ultimately appear on the band’s first album, like “Communication Breakdown,” “Dazed And Confused” and “You Shook Me,” paled in comparison to the marathon runs they would undertake at the Forum in Los Angeles or Earls Court outside of London in the years to come, but the momentousness of the occasion can’t be overstated. It was Zeppelin’s first step in their ascent to the top of rock’s Olympus, and Jimmy Page deserves much of the credit for making it happen.

In the spring of 1968, Page was at a crossroads. The highly touted session guitar ace was once again a man without a band. He’d spent the prior two years or so playing in the Yardbirds, first as a dual-lead foil to his childhood friend Jeff Beck and then as the group’s focal point when Beck decided to split in the middle of an American tour. After another quick run through the States, the band suddenly and unceremoniously called it a day when the different members of the group decided they wanted to pursue other artistic avenues.

<snip>

Most was a strict disciple of the three-minute pop song, and he butted heads with Page, who was taking note of what the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cream and Jimi Hendrix were doing with the album format and wanted to replicate it with his band. Page was especially inspired by a recording session he’d overseen with Beck in May 1966 that produced the song “Beck’s Bolero.” “The band was John Paul Jones on bass, Keith Moon, Nicky Hopkins on piano, and myself and Jeff on guitars,” he told David Fricke in 2012. “This session was absolutely magnificent, like a force of nature. Keith was having troubles in the Who. He’s going, ‘We should form a band with this.’” While they were passing around ideas about what they might call themselves, Moon came up with a tongue-in-cheek idea. “We can call it Led Zeppelin,’” Page remembered the drummer saying. “’Because it can only go down, like a lead balloon.’ I thought it was a great name, and I didn’t forget it.”

Beyond his talent, reputation and wealth of experience, Page also had a secret weapon. Peter Grant was a 300-pound former professional wrestler and business partner of Most, who’d taken over the Yardbirds’ day-to-day management in their final years. With that band kaput, Grant recognized that his best chances for success in the industry would lie with the slight young guitarist with the long black hair. His devotion to Page during the next 12 years would be total, and as the guitarist began to think about forming a new band, he knew he could rely on Grant to secure the requisite recording contract and help him conquer America, which they both recognized as rock’s next great frontier.

The first order of business was to find a singer. The Small Faces’ Steve Marriott was a leading contender, but his manager put the kibosh on that idea, threatening bodily harm to Page if he pursued him any further. Terry Reid, the former singer of the Jaywalkers, and another Mickie Most disciple, was another contender who begged off, but not before recommending a 19-year-old up-and-comer from the Midlands named Robert Plant, who was then fronting a group named Hobstweedle. Page and Grant made the trek north to watch this prospect for themselves.

<snip>

The John in question was drummer John Bonham, a lifelong friend and on-and-off bandmate of Plant’s. Bonham was another veritable nobody in the London scene, but Page was taken with his bombastic style from the minute he heard him play. The only catch was, Bonham was currently backing the singer Tim Rose, and making a decent wage out of it too. His wife Pat wasn’t too eager for him to go off on another adventure with Plant either, which made the proposition a tough sell all around. Finally, Grant and Page upped their salary offer, and convinced Bonham to come aboard.

The final piece of the puzzle was to find the right bass player. Fortunately for Page, one of the best in the world fell right into his lap. “I answered a classified ad in Melody Maker,” John Paul Jones told Cameron Crowe in 1975. “My wife made me.” While he’s being a bit flip about the Melody Maker bit, it’s true that John Paul Jones caught wind of what Page was doing, and at the prodding of his wife made the call to get in on it. For the guitarist, who knew and worked with Jones back in his session-player days, the decision to take him up on the offer was a no-brainer. Right off the bat he recognized he’d have a steady hand to help him in the studio, and as the years would show, one of the most dynamic multi-instrumental utility players and arrangers in rock history to help realize his grandest musical ideas.

<snip>

While they continued to rehearse for their upcoming two-week live run through Scandinavia, an interesting opportunity came up. Texas-born pop singer P.J. Proby was working on his next album and had booked John Paul Jones for the sessions weeks earlier. Rather than cancel, Jones decided to bring along the rest of his bandmates to help work on the record. Page was particularly predisposed to lending a hand, having previously worked in the studio with Proby in 1964 on the eccentric singer’s Number Three U.K. hit “Hold Me.” Thus, the first recordings ever of Led Zeppelin in full flight can be heard not on their own full-length debut, but on Proby’s 1969 album Three Week Hero.

<snip>

Somewhere in Bali, details to ....... <snip>




Now if I could only figure out the rest of the movie.

could they do ...." and they allowed and encouraged a lot of us to not vote because "one vote doesn't mean anything" which might be true until millions believe it, and they ran for every state legislature seat because too many of us thought as Democrats that the power is all in Washington and they reapportioned the states they took over to gerrymander themselves into the national government. Then they became stupid, venial AND powerful so that they ran states and DC.

Its not too late, just late for us to regain the reins. All we have to do is turn out the vote, we do outnumber them and always have and all we need to remember is every vote and every state legislature seat is important.

Legal Experts Destroy Giuliani's 'Gibberish' Argument To Void Trump Impeachment
Lee Moran
HuffPostJanuary 10, 2020, 5:51 AM CST

https://www.yahoo.com/news/rudy-giuliani-legal-experts-trump-impeachment-115120154.html

Legal experts took President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to task on Thursday after he suggested the Supreme Court should rule Trump’s impeachment over the Ukraine scandal as “unconstitutional.”

The former New York mayor argued on Twitter that such a move would “prevent a precedent from forming which would allow the House to overstep its bounds and impeach for policy differences or political leverage.”

“If this impeachment is not declared illegal it would remove the constitutional limitation of crimes on the power to impeach,” Giuliani continued. “It would allow the House to impeach for policy differences or political leverage.”

The Supreme Court should step in and rule this impeachment unconstitutional, to prevent a precedent from forming which would allow the House to overstep its bounds and impeach for policy differences or political leverage.

— Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) January 9, 2020

House Democrats have put our constitutional government in grave danger by attempting to rewrite the carefully calibrated separation of powers under our Constitution & usurping powers not granted to the House.

— Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) January 9, 2020

It would prevent a future president to raise any challenge to the most illegal, overbroad subpoena from any of the multitude of congressional committees and sub-committees. Anytime Congress disagrees, it could charge abuse of power.

— Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) January 9, 2020



Josh Chafetz, a Cornell law professor and expert on impeachment, described Giuliani’s argument as “some quality gibberish.”

“I honestly don’t know whether it would be worse if he believed this was the sort of thing that might happen, or if he was just cynically making it up for ... I dunno, reasons,” Chafetz responded, also challenging Giuliani to “file whatever sort of paperwork you think would be necessary to put this process in motion.”

— Josh Chafetz (@joshchafetz) January 9, 2020

But I tell you what, @RudyGiuliani: You're the president's "lawyer," right? So why don't you file whatever sort of paperwork you think would be necessary to put this process in motion at the Supreme Court.

Be creative! I haven't heard much about the writ of scire facias lately!

— Josh Chafetz (@joshchafetz) January 9, 2020



This is just about as good of a legal argument as everything else Giuliani says.

Back in the world of legal reality, the Supreme Court resoundingly and unanimously concluded in US v Nixon that it had no role to play in impeachments whatsoever. https://t.co/meheUeDsnK

— Neal Katyal (@neal_katyal) January 9, 2020

Former federal prosecutors Renato Mariotti and Elie Honig also chimed in:

You’re all talk and you know you’re making crap up. If not, go ahead and bring a lawsuit. Back up your talk. (You won’t because you know any federal court would throw out your suit and find the impeachment legitimate).

— Elie Honig (@eliehonig) January 9, 2020



shorter Rudy: the Supreme Court should rule the Constitution unconstitutional https://t.co/NYti2ouC7U

— Johnny McNulty Is 35 This Year & Can Be President (@JohnnyMcNulty) January 9, 2020




The gross misunderstanding of the most basic Supreme Court jurisdiction and procedure here should really be grounds for disbarment https://t.co/20NiyYoEZf

— Fiddler (@cFidd) January 9, 2020

Impeachment is literally part of the Constitution, you dunce.

— William LeGate 🧢 (@williamlegate) January 9, 2020



Have you ever considered talking with a competent constitutional lawyer before you tweet, Mr. Mayor? https://t.co/zdFciTpHW6

— Alex Howard (@digiphile) January 9, 2020

Jeff Sessions to announce run for Senate
Posted 10:39 pm, November 6, 2019, by CNN Wires, Updated at 06:29PM, November 6, 2019

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/06/politics/jeff-sessions-senate-run-alabama/index.html

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions will announce Thursday a campaign for his old US Senate seat, according to a GOP official familiar with the plan, a decision that could roil the Republican primary and provide the ultimate test of President Donald Trump’s sway over his supporters.

<snip>

Sessions, a conservative budget hawk and immigration hardliner, held the seat for 20 years before Trump nominated him to lead the Justice Department in 2017. But Sessions’ relationship with Trump splintered after he recused himself from the department’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. After spending months publicly criticizing his attorney general, Trump fired Sessions almost exactly one year ago.

Sessions reached his decision over the last several days and is building his campaign team, including hiring Curt Anderson as a political consultant, according to a source familiar with the move. The announcement will come one day before Alabama’s filing deadline — and two days before Trump heads to Tuscaloosa for the University of Alabama-Louisiana State University football game.

Sessions’ fate might very well be “in the President’s hands,” but Sessions will rely upon his long relationship with the voters of Alabama, according to a second Republican official. Neither Sessions nor his aides know what Trump’s reaction will be to his decision. Sessions has not spoken directly with the President about it, according to a Republican familiar with the matter.

<snip>

While Moore is running again for Senate, Republican political strategists are confident that the party will nominate another candidate and beat Jones in 2020. The Senate Republican campaign arm has taken an-anyone-but-Roy-Moore approach.

“I expect that Republicans in Alabama will sort out” the primary, Sen. Todd Young, the National Republican Senatorial Campaign committee chair, told CNN on Wednesday. “I have great confidence and faith in them.”

Former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville, US Rep. Bradley Byrne, Secretary of State John Merrill, State Rep. Arnold Mooney and businessman Stanley Adair are all running for the party’s nomination.

But Sessions’ entrance to the race would upend it. For years, Sessions was beloved by Republicans in Alabama. He was a fierce opponent of the Senate’s 2013 comprehensive immigration reform bill that granted a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who illegally came to the country. A year later, he ran unopposed for reelection and won with 97% of the vote.

In recent weeks, he’s reached out to Alabama Republicans in Congress, including Sen. Richard Shelby, Rep. Mo Brooks and Byrne. Shelby has said he’d endorse his friend Sessions if he ran and called him a “formidable candidate” who “should win.”

<snip>

Byrne, who may now clash with Sessions for the same voters in their shared hometown of Mobile, has told reporters that he would not leave the race with Sessions in it.

“I think it would be very damaging for Mr. Sessions to get in the race because the President is going to come out against him so hard,” Byrne said.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Sessions became the first senator to endorse Trump. But their bond broke when Sessions recused himself from the FBI investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, citing his role on behalf of the Trump campaign.

<snip>

By Jeff Zeleny, Alex Rogers and Rebecca Buck, CNN

2 Children Shot By Driver After Throwing Snowballs At Passing Cars

The boy and girl, ages 12 and 13, were hospitalized for non-life-threatening injuries, Milwaukee police said.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kids-throwing-snowballs-shot-by-driver_n_5e148bb6c5b6b5a713c0e8fa

By Nina Golgowski

<snip>

The kids were part of a group tossing snowballs at cars in Milwaukee on Saturday night when they became the targets of the violent road rage attack, police said in a series of tweets.


“It was like ‘boom, boom, boom, boom’ all in succession,” Pearlee Piggue, who heard the shooting just before 8 p.m., told local station WITI.

Milwaukee police described the shooter as driving a white Toyota. Both of the victims suffered non-life-threatening gunshot wounds, police said.

After firing into the group of children, the shooter fled the Silver Spring neighborhood in a white Toyota, police said.

A 12-year-old female and a 13-year-old male were taken to a local hospital for non-life-threatening gunshot wounds, police said.

<snip>


Just the way Trump would have done it, disproportionately. Only with Butthead Jr's AR-15.

Source: huffpost



<snip>


Pelosi said the resolution mirrored a similar effort in the Senate introduced by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.)

“It reasserts Congress’s long-established oversight responsibilities by mandating that if no further Congressional action is taken, the Administration’s military hostilities with regard to Iran cease within 30 days,” Pelosi wrote.

Senate Democrats also are demanding justification and transparency on Trump’s actions. In a letter late Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) called on the president to declassify the notification Congress received about last week’s airstrike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

“It is critical that national security matters of such import be shared with the American people in a timely manner,” the senators wrote. “An entirely classified notification is simply not appropriate in a democratic society, and there appears to be no legitimate justification for classifying this notification.”

<snip>

On Saturday, Trump informed Congress of the drone strike, as was required by the War Powers Act. However, Pelosi railed against the administration’s claims for ordering the strike, saying it raised “more questions than it answers.” Pelosi noted she had “serious and urgent questions about the timing, manner and justification of the administration’s decision to engage in hostilities against Iran.”

<snip>

Read more: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nancy-pelosi-trump-

Ricky Gervais blasts Apple’s Tim Cook at the Golden Globes: ‘You’re not in a position to lecture the public about anything’

Published Mon, Jan 6 20208:44 AM EST
Lauren Feiner
@lauren_feiner

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/06/ricky-gervais-blasts-apple-ceo-tim-cook-at-the-golden-globes.html






Apple came home with no awards and a punch to the gut after Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards.

Comedian Ricky Gervais, who hosted the event, used Apple’s nominations for “The Morning Show” as an opportunity to skewer the company over its business dealings. The series, which premiered last year on the new streaming service Apple TV+ and follows a morning news show that becomes embroiled in workplace scandal, was nominated for best television series drama and received two nominations for best performance by an actress in a television drama series.

“Apple rolled into the TV game with a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing, made by a company that runs sweatshops in China,” Gervais said as the camera panned to Apple CEO Tim Cook in the audience. “So, you say you’re woke, but the companies you work for, unbelievable. Apple, Amazon, Disney. If ISIS started a streaming service, you’d call your agent, wouldn’t you?”

<snip>

“If you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech,” Gervais said. “You’re not in a position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real-world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. So, if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your god, and f--- off.”

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ‘You’re not in a position to lecture the public about anything’


Lauren Feiner
@lauren_feiner