Dean Martin

The strongest celebrities seem to know who they are when they are very young, and that is no less true of Dino. This excerpt plays off the perspective of a neighborhood girl from Dean’s childhood, Mary.

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“Dean sang steady as a little kid. He lamented all the time.”

She recalled sitting with his mother while the older woman sewed, the two of them hearing him, off in another room, singing - “lamenting,” as she put it - and the mother saying, again and again, as she sewed, “If he’s not going to be a singer, no one’s going to be a singer.”

He “wore a hat all the time, in the house.” That is how Mary always saw him, the image of him she always kept from those days: “walking around with a hat on, singing.”

-- Nick Tosches, “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams”

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Rain, Rain

So much for that sunny, springy weather. What a winter this is proving to be! We were expecting a good rain yesterday, but, man, no one said anything about needing to build an ark! And it rained all night long. The front yard is a pond; the back yard is a lake. If we had a drought problem with our city's aquifer, I think we ought to be caught up by now. The heater also came back on, after only one day's rest. Like I said, what a winter!

And Sammy ... and Sammy ... and Sammy ... he was a real bastard last night and all night long. It is not as though the cats had not enjoyed ample time outdoors over the past few days. Regardless, he just yowled and yowled as though he were burning in hell's flames in eternal damnation.

And this rainy weather is going to stick around for a couple of days. I hope Sammy gets used to it, or else we may have to drop him off at Sky Harbor, and he can see how much he likes the outdoor life there. Then he will appreciate what he had here and regret not letting his loving caretakers enjoy their night's sleep.

Hunter Hayes

When I went to get the paper this morning, I saw a somewhat elaborate package strung on the fence, and when I went to collect it, I saw that it was a Fed Ex delivery, and I realized that the white van that had stopped out front last night must have been him. It looked like a blank van with no logo in sight. I went to the porch, just in case, to see if there might be a package but saw nothing, and I assumed that it was just a random driver who was a little lost and was closely checking addresses. So, the package hung out there all night in all that heavy rainfall, but it does seem well wrapped in plastic.

When Pop gets up and talks about the package on his desk, I learn that they are tickets for Ronny for a Hunter Hayes concert. I never heard of him before. I was oddly disappointed when Pop said that he is a county-western singer. I expected better from the kid, maybe a little classical music to go with his vegan food, maybe jazz, something with a little IQ, a little style. However, when I looked up Hayes on YouTube, he actually does impress me as possibly being somebody worth knowing. He is a young blond, maybe in his twenties, handsome. His sound is very close to popular music, with a nice sense of rock and blues, another one of those young country singers who is presumably looking to crossover, like Taylor Swift. He is a guitar man, and I suspect he writes his songs, and I imagine that Ron might be looking upon him as a model for his own guitar music and the songwriting, assuming that Ron has not already dropped his musical ambitions from his life, a quick phase lasting only a year or so, a summer's teenage dreaming. I have no real idea, of course. I just fancied that he might actually have something special. He is handsome enough and is apparently bright, but I suppose there is a big step or two between that and really being somebody, instead of being just another face in the crowd.

Class

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"What we've been finding across dozens of studies and thousands of participants across this country is that as a person's levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increases," Paul Piff, an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine, announced in a 2013 TEDx talk.

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Piff and his colleagues theorize that the reason the rich seem to be less caring and compassionate compared to their peers is that their wealth affords them the luxury of not having to rely on others. Over time, their sense of empathy can grow less sensitive.

-- Ross Pomeroy, "Why Rich People Don't Care About You" at Real Clear Science.com

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Wit

True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d, What oft was thought but ne’re so well express’d.

-- Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism”

Joseph Epstein is reviewing a book about wit that offers to instruct readers in its art and use. Epstein closes his review on a rather pessimistic note, though.

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As for whether wit can be taught, my own sense is that it cannot. Honed and sharpened it can be, but it has to be there to begin with. As Aristotle, in the Poetics, said about metaphor, so one might say about wit: “It is the one thing that cannot be learned; it is also a sign of genius.” Wit, in other words, is a gift. But without an interesting point of view, a detached angle on life, a wide culture, the gift will come to naught. Wit is the expression of those who understand and are able to formulate and deflate in a pleasing way what they see as pretension, false self-esteem, empty ambition, snobbery, and much else worth mocking in life. We need wits on the scene, like doctors on the case. Without them to remind us how absurd we can be, we fall into the grave danger of taking ourselves altogether too seriously.

-- Joseph Epstein, "From Wit to Twit(ter)" in Commentary Magazine

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