"Paternity Case for a New Jersey Mother of Twins Bears Unexpected Results: Two Fathers."

An interesting story which I only started reading because I thought it was about bears.

The case took root when the mother, identified only as T.M., told the Passaic County Board of Social Services in the course of applying for benefits that A.S., her romantic partner, had fathered her twins, The Law Journal reported. The board, in turn, filed an application to establish his paternity and force him to pay child support for the twins, born in January 2013.

But the woman�s claim slowly fell apart. She revealed in testimony that she had had sex with a second, unidentified man within a week of having sex with her romantic partner. A paternity test was ordered....

"David Crosby and Nash claimed they hadn't played 'Page 43' in years..."

"... deciding to add it to the setlist after an afternoon run through. Given the impressive end result, that must have been one heck of a rehearsal."

Crosby, Stills and Nash played in Milwaukee last night.

A stray quoted from David Crosby: "These songs kept coming. So I quit smoking pot. I know, its shocking. But I think if the muse is going to stop by that often, I want to have the doors open and the lights on. ... I'll get back to it I'm sure."

Anyway... I was never a Crosby, Stills and Nash fan. I held them responsible for wussifying rock and roll. (I liked Neil Young though. And I loved Crosby as a Byrd, and I was fine with Stills in Buffalo Springfield, and had no problem with The Hollies.)

But this song "Page 43." I didn't know it. Listened to (half of) it here. And then I got distracted by the existence of a Snopes article on the song. What's the controversy? Is it a reference to the New Testament?
Click for more �

Three nights and days I sail the sea/Think of girl, all constantly/On that ship I dream she's there/I smell the rose in her hair....

"Jack Ely, the Portland guitarist and singer best known for the Kingsmen's 1960s hit 'Louie, Louie' has died at age 71."

Google does fashion reporting.

The NYT reports:

In its inaugural report, Google distinguishes between �sustained growth� trends, like tulle skirts and jogger pants; flash-in-the-pan obsessions like emoji shirts and kale sweatshirts; and �seasonal growth� trends, or styles that have come back stronger every spring, like white jumpsuits. It makes similar distinctions among sustained declines (peplum dresses), seasonal ones (skinny jeans) and fads that are probably over and done (scarf vests).

Lisa Green, who heads Google�s fashion and luxury team, said the company had begun working with major retailers, including Calvin Klein, to help them incorporate real-time Google search data into fashion planning and forecasting. �Fast fashion� companies, for example, can take a trend identified by Google and run with it, Ms. Green said....

ADDED: It's so funny to think of weird things becoming fashion trends after Google mistakes searching as an indication that people want to wear something when, in fact, they're curious about it for some other reason. I mean, I'm curious about scarf vests now, just because I don't know what they are, so I'd have to look it up. And if Google's presentation causes people to adopt something that wasn't a real fashion trend, then manufacturers will want to figure out strategies to cause certain words to get searched. Or maybe they'll just notice words that are picking up in the world of Google searching and start making whatever it is � tulle skirts or some such thing. (Aren't people Googling "tulle skirts" just because little girls want them? Maybe not.)

Bus ads in NYC: "'Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah.' That�s His Jihad. What�s yours?"

"On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge John Koeltl ruled that New York�s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) cannot stop the controversial ad from running on scores of subway cars and buses."

The MTA has argued that the ad could incite violence against Jews, but Koeltl rejected that idea.

MTA officials �underestimate the tolerant quality of New Yorkers and overestimate the potential impact of these fleeting advertisements,� he ruled. �Moreover, there is no evidence that seeing one of these advertisements on the back of a bus would be sufficient to trigger a violent reaction. Therefore, these ads � offensive as they may be � are still entitled to First Amendment protection.�

The MTA's argument was premised on the idea that people would misunderstand the ad, which is intended to be pro-Israel. The ad comes from Pamela Geller's American Freedom Defense Initiative.

�What matters is not AFDI�s intent, but how the ad would be interpreted,� [said MTA Security Director Raymond Diaz]. The line �What is yours?� could be considered a �call to violence,� particularly because the CAIR posters it was mocking never appeared in New York....

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigates a blogger who quotes a lyric from the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour."

The blogger � a Democratic activist named Daniel Tilson � made fun of an on-line "tax cut calculator" as "Gov. Scott�s Magical Mystery Tax Cut Calculator" and used the line from the song "Coming to take you away, take you away..."

Some person at FDLE (an �analyst,� the agency said) eyeballed those words on Tilson�s blog and perceived a potential threat to the governor. Could somebody be plotting to take him away, take him away...?

Not since Charlie Manson got mesmerized by �Helter Skelter� has anyone twisted the words of a Beatles song so ludicrously � and Manson, let�s remember, is crazier than an outhouse rat.

Yet the FDLE, the top crime-busting force in Florida, detected possible ominous undertones in the lyrics of �Magical Mystery Tour.� An agent was promptly sent to interview Tilson....

I thought no one took song lyrics seriously anymore. Anyway, "coming to take you away" meant that whatever it is that is coming � the mystery tour or the tax cut calculator � is going to transport you on a journey into ecstasy or madness. The song "Magical Mystery Tour" is quite obviously about going on a psychedelic drug trip. It's hard even to try to project a threat of violence into "coming to take you away" in that very 1960s songs. Other coming to take you away material from those simpler times:

1. "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!," the 1966 novelty single by Napoleon XIV. The "they" who were coming were the "men in white coats" � which is an expression you don't hear anymore � who would take him to "the funny farm" � you don't hear that either.

2. Calgon "Take me away" advertising. For some, it took drugs. For others, a simple bath:

The Post Office screws up its effort to honor Maya Angelou with a stamp.

They've put her smiling face next to a quote � "A bird doesn�t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song" � that she didn't write.



As WaPo reports, the quote appeared in a 1967 children's book by Joan Walsh Anglund called "A Cup of Sun." Anglund � who is 89 � says it's her original quote (except that her "he" has been changed to "it").

A Postal Service spokesman, Mark Saunders, initially said he had never heard of the Anglund quote until The Washington Post informed him of it. In response, he sent a link to a 2013 blog post interview that quoted Angelou saying the phrase. In a later statement, he also said �numerous references� attributed the the quote to her as well.

�The Postal Service used her widely recognized quote to help build an immediate connection between her image and her 1969 nationally recognized autobiography, �I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,�?� the statement said.

So, the Postal Service's answer is don't blame us, blame Angelou, who is not alive to say she never said she wasn't quoting somebody else.

Anglund is handling the spotlight well:

"It�s an interesting connection, and interesting it would happen and already be printed and on her stamp,� Anglund said. �I love her and all she�s done, and I also love my own private thinking that also comes to the public because it comes from what I�ve been thinking and how I�ve been feeling."

Bash the Post Office, say what you will about Angelou, but consider rewarding Anglund by buying her little book, "A Cup of Sun."

Misunderstood word of the day: Yardy.

I was reading a Guardian article titled "Can Oregon's tiny houses be part of the solution to homelessness?"

The 30 dwellings at Opportunity Village[, in Eugene, are] made of prefab donated materials, cost �around $3,300 a unit.� The savings come from the fact that they are basically detached bedrooms, with no utilities or running water....

[And] Dignity Village, two hours� drive north, on the outskirts of Portland... began in 2001 as a �tent city�, and a protest against the city�s harassment of homeless people... From 2003, the tents were replaced with tiny homes. Since then, the village has successfully offered housing on the communalist model that Opportunity Village is patterned on.

A commenter named RoughSleeper:

They look like sheds on allotments. In which case, can we have chickens and grow our own food? Will there be some kind of community policing to stop a yardy culture growing?

Chickens and growing your own food? I assumed "yardies" were something like "foodies" and filed away the new slang to use the next time Meade fantasizes about putting a chicken tractor and greenhouse in our backyard.

But that's not what RoughSleeper was talking about. Urban Dictionary says � I'll quote the more polite definition � "Yardy is another word for a Jamaican, specifically one from a difficult socio-economic area. The term stems from the slang name given to occupants of government yards in Trenchtown, a neighborhood in West Kingston, Jamaica. Trenchtown was originally built as a housing project following devastation caused by Hurricane Charlie. Each development was built around a central courtyard with communal cooking facilities. Due to the poverty endemic in the neighborhood, crime and gang violence became rife, leading the occupants of Trenchtown to be in part stigmatized by the term 'Yardie.'"

"But there's a fundamental problem with the latest Carrie movie and Carrie The Musical..."

"They both try to turn her into a heroine, and her story into one of female empowerment, and it's not."

Carrie does deal with empowerment, but it's something brand new and terrifying...

[T]his is key: Carrie's a victim, and while she may get revenge � on everyone, deserving or not � she never enjoys anything remotely approaching a feminist sense of liberation. She's bullied mercilessly at school and abused at home. The character was a composite of two girls � referred to by the aliases of Tina White and Sandra Irving � King knew during high school, both of whom eventually committed suicide. "There is a goat in every class, the kid who ... stands at the end of the pecking order," King once wrote. "This was Tina. Not because she was stupid (she wasn't), and not because her family was peculiar (it was) but because she wore the same clothes to school every day."