The video you posted of Christopher Walken dancing to Fatboy Slim is one of my favorites! Great video to a great song.

James Forten was a wealthy and prominent Black abolitionist. Eugene Delacroix, if it’s the famous painter, looks very different from his self-portrait as a dashing young man. The Flandrins were also painters, active from the 19th into the 20th century. Carter Stevenson and Kendall Warren both became civil engineers, after fighting on different sides in the Civil War. Warren’s sister was also something of an engineer. She married into the Roebling family and helped build the Brooklyn bridge after her husband became bedridden.

I hope things worked out alright for Sarah, Sophia, and Susannah. They were in Australia, so at least they didn’t die in the Civil War.

Sorry to be a bit of a homonym nag, but I think you mean “palate” cleanser, i.e. something to refresh the mouth before enjoying a new food. A pallet, OTOH, is a flat wooden skid that supports goods for storage or transportation. (The third word that people sometimes confuse with “palate” or “pallet” is “palette,” the board with a hole for the thumb that an artist uses for mixing paints.)

I expect Neo will come up some day with a video on words like this for one of her open threads. English is a messy language!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1W0DHaW0PPA

I just saw your comment on yesterday’s Open thread about using US3’s “Cantaloop, Flip Fantasia” as a pallet cleanser for crappy, repetitive pop music. What an odd, near coincidence. I use a different Herbie Hancock song for my pallet cleanser, but I really like that US3 number. I like Hancock’s original, “Cantaloupe Island” much more, but Hancock is a freakin’ genius! US3’s reimagining of his song is very well done and clever. I really like it, but I personally wouldn’t use it as a pallet cleanser because it is too catchy and repetitive (Biddy biddy bop/Biddy biddy bop, funky, funky). It would create another earworm. A very good earworm, but an earworm, nonetheless.

I pretty much always have a song in my head. Even when I wake up I’ll notice that a song had been in my head as I dreamed. I literally have music playing in my mind all day. (I assume many others experience this?) (As I type this US3’s “Cantaloop” is now playing.) Which makes me very susceptible to earworms and it drives me crazy when a crappy song gets stuck in my internal play loop. Sometimes the same song will stay for days and when they are lousy songs it can infuriate me. About 15 years ago I had a particularly annoying song stuck on my internal playlist for a few days and thought, “I need to think of a better song to fixate on to eliminate this one,” and started thinking about different songs to find a replacement that would work. I thought one of Hancock’s less repetitious, richer, layered works would be good and popped, “Maiden Voyage” into my internal music thoughts. Voila! Worked like a charm! And has continued to work ever since.

The reason I prefer “Maiden Voyage” to something like “Cantaloop” is it starts out slow, is very lush and layered, doesn’t get too fast, and really doesn’t repeat. There is a main theme, but the various solos on Hancock’s original recording (which is what I think of) are varied and dreamy. It’s a great, great song but the opposite of simple and repetitive.

Anyway, weird we’d both independently discover Hancock as a great tool for eliminating annoying earworms.

It certainly looks like this might play out. The Biden Administration/Democrats are certainly making the Feds job harder. I don’t think there is any courage to do what needs to be done– since the pain will still be fresh in voter’s minds in 2024.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/23/the-economic-doom-loop-has-begun/