Yeah, Biden extended Powell’s tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank — after Trump appointed him to the post. Which Donny now only maybe, sort of, remembers doing?
It’s generally agreed that Biden was showing signs of cognitive impairment when he was 80. Trump is now 79. Perhaps being president is having a similar effect on him.
I listen to Internet radio stations both near and far. One that isn’t too far from here is WATD-FM, based in Marshfield, MA.
The station’s call letters stand for “We’re At the Dump.” Its founder and owner is a gentleman named Ed Perry, who has some stories to tell.
This Perry anecdote reminds me very much of what happened to me on August 16, 1977.
“One Sunday morning in February 1959, I was playing rock and roll when the teletype started printing furiously from The Associated Press,” he recalled. “It was about the plane crash in Iowa that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. I read the news over the air, and the rest of the day I only played music from those three guys.”
I was freshly graduated from college and working as a DJ at a small AM radio station in Western Massachusetts, when the AP teletype started printing furiously. Elvis Presley was dead.
David Wessel provides a sane counterpoint to Trump’s idiotic name-calling of Jay Powell. Donald is perpetually stuck in “you’re fired!” mode.
Two additional points I think Wessel should have made are these:
The New York Times, which apparently isn’t failing, has a couple of guest essays from smart, thoughtful Massachusetts people. They reinforce how pointless all of the fabricated culture war nonsense is, when there are real problems to confront and manage. I’m using my Times subscription to share these without the paywall getting in the way.
It’s already been a couple of years since I read Rough Sleepers by Tracy Kidder, about homelessness in Boston.
Today, Kidder writes about food banks and the limits of what they can do under Trump II.
Republican leaders who dislike Harvard and MIT know-it-alls will ignore this piece about China’s economy at their own peril.
Yesterday, I thoroughly enjoyed a visit to the unique and very worthwhile Museum of Printing in Haverhill, MA.
https://www.museumofprinting.org/
I went there not knowing that a couple of years ago the museum hosted a comic book event. The computer voice in this brief video mispronounces Haverhill. The “have” should sound like “cave,” and the second “h” is mostly silent.
The museum’s library has a nice selection of comic book related items, including the gigantic volume “The Stan Lee Story” that was published by Tashen shortly after Stan’s death in 2018.
This is the original art for that cover, owned by some fortunate and presumably well-heeled person.
A member of the Comic Book Historians group on Facebook posted this excellent article about the production of the 1966 Marvel Super-Heroes cartoons. It was published in the short-lived “The World of Comic Art.”
Okay, AI, I want a song as if written by Randy Newman, that sounds like it was sung by the Kinks, with a Paul McCartney musical bridge. What’s that? You don’t need to create it, because one already exists?
