Cartoons Tuesday!

Plus Jon Stewart on Trump dinner debacle and music by Jesse Welles (and more hummingbirds).

Still free to subscribe to this nearly daily newsletter! Greg Mitchell is the author of fourteen books and director of five films for PBS since 2022. In a previous life, he was a longtime editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. His latest film “Woody Guthrie and The Ghost of Tom Joad Today” is now streaming everywhere via PBS.

The Guardian (we were among the few to cover this case at Crawdaddy back in 1973):

More than 50 years after the murder of the Chilean folk singer Víctor Jara, the last man wanted in connection with his death has been tracked down and brought to justice.

Nelson Haase Mazzei, a retired colonel, fled from authorities in 2023 after he and six other retired soldiers were sentenced in absentia for murdering Jara and another man. Chilean police announced on Saturday that Haase Mazzei had been arrested in Puyehue, in the rural south of the country, with a judge ordering his immediate imprisonment.

Heather Cox Richardson:

On July 22, Sam Fortier of NOTUS reported that the Trump-appointed judges of the Presidential 1776 Award competition, emceed by Education Secretary Linda McMahon, apparently rigged the competition to cut out a 17-year-old Indian immigrant in favor of a homeschooled blonde girl from Wyoming, a Michigan boy who attended a private Catholic school, and a girl from Washington who told CNN she supported Trump and wanted to see “everyone walking away from the competition knowing this is the greatest country of the world.”

In order to privilege white contestants over an immigrant, the judges apparently changed the acceptable answers to questions about our history.

This story mirrors the larger attempt of the Trump administration to rewrite the history of the United States. Trump officials reject our traditional understanding that the country was based on the ideas the Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence and that Americans from all walks of life have struggled ever since to make those principles come to life.

Lucian Truscott IV:

Remember his speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner? He spent several minutes just bragging that he built the ballroom where the dinner was held when the hotel was the Trump International, and he picked the glorious “Czech crystal” chandeliers hanging over the heads of the supine press. And now, according to the Times, Trump has his own personal chandelier in a “lounge” on the plane. When I read that, Tracy and I spent a couple of minutes trying to imagine what a flying chandelier looks like when the plane hits turbulence, swinging from side to side, its crystals tinkling wildly.

If I were the CIA or the NSA, I would check the chandelier carefully for listening devices, because that’s the one thing Trump will never allow to be removed from his Luxomatic Force One. The chandelier is there to stay, and I, for one, am willing to bet it is gold-plated and the ugliest fucking thing in the sky.

Have not yet seen “The Odyssey” so don’t have an opinion on the much-debated pros and cons (though not a Nolan fan) but the review in the London Review of Books by Emily Wilson—translator of the latest, acclaimed and wildly popular version of the Homer epic—has gone viral. The review is a fantastic read from start to finish. Two bits:

“I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters. But ‘The Odyssey’ features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality. . .the film’s vision is too confused, its characters too underdeveloped, to deliver what it half-promises in terms of big ideas – although it is very good at conveying big bangs and big giants.”

“Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”

Music Picks

From Consequence:

Roger Waters recently unveiled “Comfortably Numb Re-Imagined,” a new version of the Pink Floyd classic featuring Palestinian singer Mona Miari. The collaborators discussed their hopes for the release, as well as the long-running accusations of anti-Semitism against Waters that have resurfaced amid his criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza in a new interview with WIRED.

For “Comfortably Number Re-Imagined” (streaming below), Waters told WIRED in an interview published Monday that he hopes people will “hear that it was prophetic — there is a right and a wrong. This is not complicated, and this song is on the right side of history.”

The new take on the 1979 Pink Floyd song off The Wall is re-envisioned as a tribute to the Palestinian people and Gaza and features a change to the refrain that makes the culminating lyric, “I will never become comfortably numb.”

Two unexpected covers from Jesse Welles this past weekend: Nirvana and then John Denver.

From Tunes to Toons

Britt:

Blitt:

Telnaes:

Danziger:

Photo Finish

Continuing our week or so of my hummingbird photos. Today’s reflection by Barbara Bedway:

I admit the first time I saw a hummingbird at our feeder in the rain, I was convinced she was in ecstasy, fluffing and floofing and rapidly swinging her head side to side like a dog shaking off water. A more scientific explanation involves the benefits of water droplets as a convenient shower, and wet weather bringing out small insects hummingbirds can snatch for extra protein. Like I said: ecstasy.