bob dylan | nothing easygoing

Popular radio was sort of at a standstill
and filled with empty pleasantries.
What I was playing were hard-lipped folk songs
with fire and brimstone servings.

LPs were like the force of gravity.
They had covers, back and front, that you could stare at for hours.
Next to them, 45s were flimsy and uncrystallized.
They just stacked up in piles and didn't seem important.

I had no song in my repertoire for commercial radio anyway.
Songs about debauched bootleggers,
mothers that drowned their own children,
Cadillacs that only got five miles to the gallon,
floods, union hall fires, darkness
and cadavers at the bottom of rivers
weren't for radiophiles.

There was nothing easygoing about the folk songs I sang.
They weren't friendly or ripe with mellowness.
They didn't come gently to the shore.
I guess you could say they weren't commercial.


Bob Dylan, "Chronicles: Volume One"

art neufeld | hair

humans are the only creatures with hair rather than fur.

 head hair gives humans an opportunity to demonstrate that they have free will.

in ancient Egypt false metal beards were worn by kings
and sometimes by cows.

 ninety-two percent of hair whorls grow in a clockwise direction.
there is some evidence of an association
between the counter-clockwise hair whorl and male homosexuality.

there is no evidence that stress makes hair go gray.

if you laid end to end every hair that grew on your head
during a seventy-five-year lifespan
it would reach from New York City to Chicago.

ninety percent of the people on earth have black or dark-brown hair.
blond hair probably first appeared only ten or twenty thousand years ago,
produced by a mutation.
redheads make up between one and four per cent of the population,
and may be particularly sensitive to pain.


from "Hair Today" Rebecca Mead 
New Yorker, Sep 24 2012