word of the day: anfractuous

word of the day: anfractuous

Marin County resident Gary Thorp has set himself the task of seeing a mountain lion, and Caught in Fading Light is the record of his search — along with the musings of a student of Zen. At this point in the narrative Thorp spots his first lion and is “elated”! Sadly, the sighting turns out to be a dream:

I have continued to experience periodic, anfractuous dreams … They spread themselves out a few weeks apart. Each lasts for only a few moments; but they are all intense enough to awaken me. A salient feature of these dreams is their utter casualness. A lion crosses a path, drinks water from a stream, or sits in sunlight. There is never any foreboding of drama, confrontation, or danger. There is no hint of any significance or symbolic importance. Indeed, these many lion sightings, which occur only while I dream, have almost become nonevents. 

definition (Merriam-Webster): full of windings and intricate turnings

Although it’s in the nature of dreams to be full of windings and intricate turnings, the lion-sighting dreams Thorp describes seem almost anti-anfractuous. “A lion crosses a path, drinks water … sits …” That’s a pretty simple dream. 

source: 

Caught in Fading Light: mountain lions, zen masters, and wild nature

by Gary Thorp

2002. Walker & Co., New York

second choice

The music magazine Mojo has a regular column in which they ask a few musicians the same set of questions. In the May 2020 issue I was amused by the dovetailing of the answers by Yola and John Grant to this question:

What was the first record you ever bought?

Yola: I wanted to buy Push It by Salt-N-Pepa, but my mother thought it was too dirty for me. Instead I had to get Ice Ice Baby by fricking Vanilla Ice! It didn’t take very long for that record to never be played again.

John Grant: It was probably Abba Greatest Hits or their self-titled one. I probably got it at K-Mart. I wanted to get Elton John’s Captain Fantastic, but we couldn’t have that filth in the house. I gave that record a good stare every time we went to that store. 

source: Mojo

May 2020, issue 318

it’s us or the Muslims?

Earlier this month I posted about right wing politicians who are courting — and succeeding in garnering — gay votes. Considering how right wing parties have historically been adamantly opposed to the legalization of gay people, let alone believing being LGBT is something to celebrate, I wonder that gay people could be gulled into giving them their votes. 

Part of it seems to be that some of the right wing leaders are themselves out gay people. Surely gay politicians wouldn’t be working against their best interests! That never happens. 

Part of it seems to be describing a common enemy. 

In France, Marine le Pen [leader of the right wing National Rally Party] openly courted the gay vote in 2017 with the message that her policies were all that stood between them and Islam’s ‘hatred of homosexuals,’ as she put it in a televised debate with [future president Emmanuel] Macron.

Other right wing parties in Europe have also sought gay voters’ support to shut down the immigration of Muslims. 

Besides the tactical considerations, Gevisser says LGBT people have “bec[o]me embodiments of progress and worldliness to some,” even on the right of the political spectrum, it seems.

source: The Pink Line: journeys across the world’s queer frontiers

by Mark Gevisser

2020. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York

What to do after being dragged through town tied to a horse cart

In the last chapter of The Pink Line, Mark Gevisser’s survey of the state of the LGBT movement worldwide, Gevisser recounts this story:

In Egypt in 2013, I met a kid who called himself Juelz, a teenager from a provincial city, who was found by his family with his male lover. His head was shaved and he was dragged through town tied to a horse cart, and then locked in a room for a month, beaten daily. He wanted to kill himself but kept himself alive by posting ‘It Gets Better videos,’ he told me, on YouTube via his cell phone, advising others in similar situations. It did get better for Juelz: he qualified as a lawyer, stayed defiantly out of the closet, and was planning, when we last spoke, to join his boyfriend in the United States.

Egypt is currently a terrible place legally for gay people. Besides hostile families like this, the Egyptian state security forces regularly hunt and persecute gay people, even beating and jailing them. But, boy, what a story Juelz tells! He had access to a cell phone to record and post YouTube videos? Maybe that was after the month-long captivity; I’m sure he was still in shock. I hope he’s in the US now. Even with Trump it’s better than Egypt. 

source: The Pink Line: journeys across the world’s queer frontiers

by Mark Gevisser

2020. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York

“I was never taught to hate myself”

Africa is a bad place legally for gay people. Not everywhere. South Africa has one of the fairest regimes in the world regarding LGBT rights. Sadly, the competition for second gay friendliest on the continent is barely engaged. Most the fight seems to be over who can be worst. 

I would like to visit Africa. But I avoid countries where gay people are persecuted. There are some, it seems, where bad laws are mostly ignored, but I prioritize places that are friendly. 

So it was a rare piece of good news that Botswana’s sodomy laws were invalidated last summer by the Botswana’s highest court. The decision was unanimous. 

The plaintiff was a young man named Letsweletse Motshidiemang, who had filed the case as a twenty-one-year-old university student, with the help of a law professor. Interviewed at the time of the judgment, Motshidiemang [said,] ‘people knew I was different, but I was surrounded by people who loved me. I was never taught to hate myself.’ That job was done by something else: ‘It was the laws.’

This story appears in the last chapter of Mark Gevisser’s exploration of the LGBT movement around the world, The Pink Line. The pink line is Gevisser’s metaphor for the divisions between and within us, the struggle to define ourselves and find a safe place to live in an often hostile world. The last chapter offers some hope, where so much that preceded described backlash and scapegoating from the self-declared enemies of LGBT people. 

Good news like this from Botswana is often fragile. As we know in the United States, court rulings can be reversed by unjust legislatures rewriting laws or constitutions. That the ruling seems to have held up for a year (it came down in summer of 2019) suggests this basic fairness may persist. 

source: The Pink Line: journeys across the world’s queer frontiers

by Mark Gevisser

2020. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York

word of the day: beechmast

word of the day: beechmast

context: “Underfoot she felt moss and beechmast — so easy to run on, soon, as her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she was running quite fast …”

definition (Merriam-Webster): beechnuts especially as they lie under trees (dictionary has it as two words, “beech mast”)

A little girl, at the direction of our mouse hero Miss Bianca, is trying to run away from the evil Grand Duchess under the cover of night. Yet the Duchess has bloodhounds with no compunction about hunting down errant little girls, and perhaps they even have, if Miss Bianca has correctly identified the detritus of the bloodhounds’ rooms, gnawed upon another little girl’s bones.

source:

Miss Bianca

by Margery Sharp

1962. Little, Brown, & Co., Boston MA

word of the day: ostler

word of the day: ostler

context: “In the stables, a couple of wall-eyed old coach-horses were carelessly fed, and still more carelessly groomed, by a couple of dissolute ostlers — both … with criminal records. (Even the horses had criminal records: each having once kicked a man to death.)”

definition (Merriam-Webster): one who takes care of horses or mules (more commonly spelled “hostler”)

source:

Miss Bianca

by Margery Sharp

1962. Little, Brown, & Co., Boston MA

word of the day: drugget

word of the day: drugget

context: “Every inch of bulstrading (Greek-key pattern) was thick with diamonds. So were the stair rods holding down the cloth-of-gold carpet. — Miss Bianca set food upon it as negligently, and ran up it as lightly, as if it had been mere drugget.”

definition (Merriam-Webster): a coarse durable cloth used chiefly as a floor covering 

The staircase is in the palace of a Grand Duchess. She’s a stone cold villain. And, not coincidentally, everything in her Diamond Palace is cold, too. Ever hear of warm and fuzzy diamonds? But our mouse hero, Miss Bianca, is confident she can free the little girl the evil Duchess has enslaved.

source:

Miss Bianca

by Margery Sharp

1962. Little, Brown, & Co., Boston MA

word of the day: exordium

Miss Bianca, one of the mouse heroes of The Rescuers, is now Madame Chairwoman of The Prisoners’ Aid Society. From this position Miss Bianca is proposing a prisoner to rescue. Usually the mission of the Prisoners’ Aid Society is to comfort the forlorn incarcerated, but in this case it’s a child and Miss Bianca believes the mice can effect a real escape. 

‘The child’s name,’ [Miss Bianca] proceeded, ‘is Patience. A pretty one, is it not? — reminding us also of that virtue which I’m sure every mother present, especially those with bold sons, needs to employ twenty times a day! Patience has no mother, however, nor father, nor indeed any relative in the world; and she is only eight years old.’

This touching exordium was not without effect. All mice have such large families themselves, and are so used to counting aunts and uncles by the score, and first cousins by the hundred, they can imagine nothing worse than having no relations at all.

definition (Merriam-Webster): a beginning or introduction especially to a discourse or composition

Margery Sharp is obviously not working with a restricted vocabulary. Though the writing can be cozy and a bit cute, Sharp never dumbs down for her young readers. I read some of the Rescuers series as a kid. I didn’t know “exordium” then, any more than I know it now. But I wasn’t one to pull out the dictionary for every unfamiliar word. Typically I got enough from context to keep going. After all, there was a story to keep up with. In the quoted passage “exordium” could have been a blank, i.e., “This touching _____ was not without effect,” yet the reader could figure out roughly what the missing word means. 

This touching speech was not without effect. This touching series of words … This touching description … 

This experience of the interchangeability of words may be a reason I don’t think one should get too anxious about whether one has found the perfect word. There are many ways to say a thing. 

source:

Miss Bianca

by Margery Sharp

1962. Little, Brown, & Co., Boston MA

are gay rights soon to be conventional wisdom?

In his book on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people holding elective office around the world Andrew Reynolds says that the assumption that out LGBT officeholders will be on the left of the political spectrum is not an assumption borne out by his analysis.

The association between being openly gay and being on the Left … is an example of American exceptionalism. It is true that the first adopters of gay rights in most of the world were on the Left, but even then somewhat grudgingly. But today the momentum is with the Right. For the most part conservative parties in democracies, including quite extreme right-wing parties, have remained steadfast in their conservative economic principles while evolving into socially liberal and libertarian movements. In the summer of 2016 the number of out LGBT MPs [members of parliament] in office globally from right-of-center parties actually outstripped the number from left-wing parties for the first time. At the start of 2017 there were seventy incumbent right-of-center LGBT parliamentarians from twenty-three countries, only sixty-three left-wing MPs in twenty-two nations. [G]ay rights … have become a nonpartisan issue in the developed world.

Gay rights aren’t the lightning rod they used to be, even in the United States. Donald Trump, who hates lots of people, nevertheless has not campaigned on the revocation of LGBT family rights. Trump has plenty of followers counting on him to transform the federal courts, lodging there for life judges that would happily strip gay people of their families, and Trump has certainly committed to that program. But it’s not been a talking point, not the way, when you look back, the Denial of Marriage Act was considered impossible to oppose in 1995. President Bill Clinton, the most pro-gay president up to that point even signed DOMA into law, with the stroke of a pen demonstrating how expendable the gays are when your political career looks like it might take a hit. At the time I thought Clinton could have allowed DOMA to become law without his signature, if he truly thought it political suicide to veto it. That, at least, would have shown a teensy bit of empathy, considering how cruel the law was. So, yeah, it’s easy to get a sense of the support from the left-of-center as “somewhat grudging.” 

Contrast the leftishts’ weak tea reform to the rightists’ triple cap latte of hate. The right wing wants to crush the gays. We are their enemies, according to their declaration, and given opportunity they would righteously reinstitute a sentence of prison time for a moment of same sex tingle. According to author Reynolds, right wing animosity has waned so dramatically in the rest of the “developed” world that LGBT voters feel comfortable voting for right wing parties, and the parties themselves feel comfortable including LGB (if not yet T) people among their leadership, not stopping at putting us up for electoral office. 

I find this hard to believe. But I can’t argue with his stats. 

Right-of-center politicians who identify as LGB are members of parliaments in Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

In a few of those places (Sweden, for one?) I’m guessing some other policies of the right-of-center parties would seem relatively left wing to Americans. You know government supplied health care isn’t considered anathema to rightist politicians everywhere the way it is in the US (besides that weird Republican love for Medicare?). Yet aren’t right wing parties everywhere more likely to hate on the gay? 

The Conservative Party in England shepherded in marriage equality in 2013 (the law went into effect in 2014) — but this was only after decades of fighting to keep LGBT people from being accepted into society. When I went to London in 1988 the Margaret Thatcher government was pushing through a law that prevented schools from “promoting” homosexuality by preventing any educator from saying anything nice about it. So it’s nice that the Tories turned around. But I, for one, would find it hard to ever vote for them after their history. Nevertheless, Reynolds says, “Since 2015 the British Conservative Party has won as great a proportion of the LGBTQ vote as any other party.”

Should the Republican Party in the US ever do a switcheroo from gay-hate to gay-respect, it still wouldn’t earn my vote. Reward the people who’ve helped you all along, I say. That plus there isn’t much else in the Republican agenda that appeals to me. Racism? No. Free the wealthy from paying taxes? Not a good idea. Shut out all immigrants? How hypocritical.

Sadly, it is not possible to say that lefties (and moderate leftishts) really have helped us all along. They’ve been much better than righties! Usually! 

On a slightly different but related topic: 

Can you name the country that has the largest proportion of LGB members in its parliament? It’s not quite an independent country, so maybe there should be an asterisk next to the name. But … it’s … Scotland!

Ten of 129 Members of the Holyrood Parliament identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, and nine of the fifty-nine Scottish MPs in Westminster [the UK parliament, in other words] were lesbian or gay. [The] Scottish Nationalist [Party] … with over 14 percent [is] the most LGBT-inclusive parliamentary party in the world. … Three of the six major party leaders in Scotland [in 2017] were lesbian, gay or bisexual: the Tory Ruth Davidson, Labour’s Kezia Dugdale, and Patrick Harvie of the Greens. Half of Scotland’s six-member delegation to the European Parliament were gay. In total that meant that twenty-two out of 194 elected representatives in a country of five million people were gay.

If it’s so gay friendly, it must be a nice place to visit. I understand they have some pretty castles.

source:

The Children of Harvey Milk: how LGBTQ politicians changed the world

by Andrew Reynolds

2019. Oxford University Press, New York

The unknown 99%

The Viking landers touched down on Mars back in 1975. I was nine. You couldn’t follow events as they happened back then the way you can these days via the internet. But when the daily paper had pictures and accounts of what was taking place on the surface of our sibling planet I was fascinated by the coverage and wanted more. 

Part of the mission of the landers was to test Martian soil for life. But how does one go about designing a test to determine whether there is life in a handful of dust? NASA tried to figure it out. With at least one of the experiments on Viking it was hoped by inundating a soil sample with tasty wet nutrients, microbes would happily start eating and excreting and growing in a way that the Earth-sent instruments could detect. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Do that to any random scoop of Earth soil and sensitive instruments will readily detect life-specific activity. Why shouldn’t it work elsewhere?

Some surprising activity took place, all right. But it wasn’t a life-like response. It was more like an instantaneous chemical reaction. The eventual conclusion was that the inundated soil reacted more like an Alka-seltzer tablet than cellular life — and for similar reasons. Did that mean the soil was sterile? Considering that the soil was continuously exposed to harsh radiation that would kill Earth life and that the soil was extremely dry, it didn’t seem likely that the rapid response to the water had anything to do with life. 

But when you are designing experiments you don’t always know what your test will be overlooking. Most Earth life wouldn’t have responded to that yummy wet food either, according to Sarah Johnson in her book about seeking life on Mars:

When the Viking payload was being designed, no one realized that the vast majority of microbes wouldn’t grow in a nutrient-rich broth — in other words, that they couldn’t be cultured. It wasn’t until we started identifying life by its genes — not waiting for cells to grow in a petri dish but instead breaking them open within a pinch of dirt or a drop of ocean — that we came to understand that less than 1 percent of the life on Earth could be grown in a lab or, by extension, a lab on a spacecraft on Mars.

The 1% of the life that will culture in any given pinch of soil blinds us to the 99% that won’t. Perhaps there was life in that Martian soil sample that the experiment wasn’t designed to find. The situation it would have survive in is so hostile it’s hard to imagine a successful adaptation, but who knows? It might be easier to imagine microbial life under the Martian surface where there really are stores of liquid water and volcanic activity may provide sufficient energy for life to feed on. In other words, we’re still looking.

source: 

The Sirens of Mars: searching for life on another world

by Sarah Stewart Johnson

2020. Crown, New York

"Hourglass" by Squeeze

I don’t think I saw the video until I looked it up for this post. It’s cute and clever, if a bit distracting. I knew “Hourglass” from the radio — and from repeated plays once I got the album. I don’t think I was able to pull out all the words of the rapidly sung-chanted chorus until I had the album’s lyrics sheet. Then I trained myself to sing along. It was a little tricky. But I got it down!

Take it to the bridge

Throw it overboard

See if it can swim 

Back in to the shore

No one’s in the house 

Everyone is out

All the lights are on

And the blinds are down

In my life many’s the time I needed to dance. Instrumentals are good, lyrics that are howled, crooned, chanted, rasped — all good. The beat in “Hourglass” is good for the hot foot. But in this case the lyrics are a big part of the attraction. According to an interview at songfacts Chris Difford writes the lyrics; Glenn Tilbrook puts them to music. I find it hard to imagine writing lyrics without hearing a song already, so it’s interesting to me that the division of labor here is so sharp. Chris Difford, apparently, does not suggest a tune to begin with, he just hands over words. Glenn Tilbrook will go through pages of offered lyrics and put music to those that strike him. The process for “Hourglass” was more immediately collaborative than usual. “This was the first time we wrote together in the same room,” says Difford. “I'd always thought of writing as a bit like masturbation: something you do on your own, not in the same room as another bloke. However, … within an hour we'd written 'Hourglass.' Lyrically it doesn't mean much but we had some fun writing it.”

The song starts with that thumping drum and nasal horns bleating, then downshifts to some guitar plucking, punctuated by the horns, which sound more assertive now. After about 30 seconds, Tilbrook comes in with the vocal: 

I feel like I'm pounding on a big door

No one can hear me knocking,

I feel like I'm falling flat to the floor

No one can catch me from falling

These are rather alienated lyrics. Unheard, unhelped, the voice, it seems, is also out of time:

The hourglass has no more grains of sand,

My watch has stopped no more turning hands

The crew have abandoned ship

The lights are on but no one is in

The stanza ends with a crewless ship where the lights still burn, a ghost ship, perhaps, adrift. Certainly this continues the alienation, the sense that the voice is alone and unnoticed. If the voice is the ship metaphorically, then the line echoes the joke about the person in a daze, The lights are on, but no one is home. 

The fast-chanted chorus rushes right in without a pause. The narration is getting a little muddled. Is the ship being taken to the bridge where “it” is thrown overboard — or is “it” being thrown off the bridge? Isn’t one more likely to use “overboard” with a boat than a bridge? Is “it” alive? Nonliving things don’t swim, though swimming could be a way of referring to an object floating in with the tide. If “it” is alive, what is it? The house on shore is as abandoned as the ship, yet the house also is lit up, though with the circumspection of blinds being drawn, so an outsider wouldn’t really be able to tell the house is empty. Contra the cliche about lights being on and no one home, the blinds being drawn suggests introspection, or at least a conscious warding off of the inquiring eye. It interests me that the chorus’ rhymes are fairly subtle: “board/shore” and “out/down”. More subtle than “door/floor” and “shore/floor”. The choice makes the chanted chorus a little softer, a little easier to take.

In the next verse the voice is “calling on a telephone” but no one answers, and is “running up a steep hill” (Sisyphus-like?). Again, the timekeeping devices are dysfunctional, with the watch not stopped, no longer telling time, that is, but timelessly, cartoonishly alive — “shaking its fist” with a “face [that] is hanging out on a spring.” The video for the song really plays up the objects as anarchic, the singer’s (band’s) situation as beyond the realm of the world where people can touch and help each other.

Most the singing is easy to make out, but that line about the face on a spring gets lost among the instruments.

The mood of the lyrics is not upbeat, but the singing is assertive and the music full of spring, especially with those blasts of horn. 

The final stanza echoes back to the first with the “or” rhymes and the singer’s attempts to attract attention. The abandoned ship seems still to have one person on it, though no one beyond the ship sees, and no one on shore responds to the voice calling out. The song concludes with a pratfall, a repeat from the first stanza, a fall which is sad and humorous, and a little bit scary. There’s a sense not only that the singer is “falling” and won’t be caught before hitting the floor, but that the falling is ongoing. A free-fall that never comes to earth is a special kind of alienation, isn’t it?

It’s a fun song to dance to. The haunted house/boat the singer describes but seems almost contented with helped me identify with the song personally. I was feeling lonely and abandoned, too, but if the only one there to dance with was my own self, well, I was going to dance with him.

source: Live 105's Cool 105.3 for 1987

the search for life on earth

The investigation of the universe beyond our own planet is often derided as a boondoggle. The money wasted on a robot sent to wander the barren wastes of Mars could be spent on starving children! 

There is plenty of money to do both. You know that, right? That we don’t do both has more to do with our human prejudices and politics than with the availability of resources. Besides, starving the space budget (metaphorically, of course) hardly guarantees that the freed up money would be transferred to those who need it most. 

Still, the ironies of searching for life beyond Earth while doing a mediocre job of learning about the varieties of life on Earth — let alone sharing the planet with a true generosity of spirit — occasionally jump out at one. I think that’s what happened to Sarah Johnson on this occasion:

Once, in one of my teaching labs at Oxford, … I’d been told to familiarize myself with the [fruitfly] larva’s functioning under a dissecting scope, then mount its brain on a glass slide, to study normal cell division, along with its testes, to study germ cell division into gametes. But even after my professor’s prompt to begin the dissection, I dallied. I pushed bits of sugar in the larva’s confused path and watched as it attempted to climb my tweezers. … What universes were down there [from a fruitfly’s perspective]? What noises were too small [for me] to hear beneath … blades of grass … ? 

I lifted the larva into the pocket of my lab coat and excused myself. I held the slide steady while I walked, glancing down into my pocket every few seconds as I descended … the stairs and found my way to the cafeteria. I left it on a bit of the banana I’d bought for lunch, spat out and dribbled from a napkin, in the base of rubber plant in the zoology building. I returned to the classroom and gazed for nearly an hour at a blank slide under the microscope, a vast field of emptiness.

That so much of the science of living things is based on the destruction of living things in the lab is either ironic or appropriate. I’m never sure which. 

source: 

The Sirens of Mars: searching for life on another world

by Sarah Stewart Johnson

2020. Crown, New York

word of the day: tenebrous

As soon as worlds beyond our own were imagined, they were imagined teeming with life. Life was taken for granted. Intelligent life, usually. What would the point have been of imagining worlds that were all inert stone or insensate fire or sterile water? In her book on the search for life beyond Earth, Sarah Johnson reflects on the failure to find it:

With a mechanical, largely lifeless universe came a newfound existential sorrow. It meant we were potentially alone in the enormity of the now tenebrous night.

word: tenebrous

definition (dictionary.com): dark; gloomy; obscure.

Dark, gloomy, obscure? Hm. Sounds like the definition of night itself, more or less. Which does kind of make “tenebrous” redundant … A tenebrous night would be a night darker, gloomier, and more obscure than it was already then, right? Well. It can always get darker, can’t it? The night, it can always get darker. 

source: 

The Sirens of Mars: searching for life on another world

by Sarah Stewart Johnson

2020. Crown, New York

"Luka" by Suzanne Vega

“Luka” sounds so sweet, with Suzanne Vega’s chirp-whisper mildly drawing the listener along through a perky guitar and frisky beat. I didn’t really get the story of the song until I’d heard it multiple times. “Please don’t ask me what it was,” I would sing. “Please don’t ask me — wait, what what was? Some kind of trouble, some kind of fight? What’s going on here?”

I read recently an editor of an anthology of folk songs responding to criticism of the subject matter of folk songs, especially the disjoint between the happy-sounding tunes and the tragedy in the lyrics. The editor said music serves a few different purposes — entertaining and sharing the news don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Puts me in mind, too, of norteno music, where telling thrilling and terrible stories about contemporary Mexico is part of the project, getting people to dance being the rest. 

I primarily knew “Luka” through the radio. Back in the day I caught the video on a video compilation show like Friday Night Videos, I think, being as I didn’t have MTV. Have to say, I’m not particularly fond of the video. But it did change how I saw the song. I thought Luka was a woman. The line about walking into a door was familiar from TV dramas about abused women. No, nobody beat me. I walked into a door. Works for a child being abused too, I guess.

The lyrics are pretty easy to understand, as Suzanne Vega enunciates clearly, and takes them at an even pace. 

Like the previous two songs I’ve done a post for, “Luka” earworms readily. It’s catchy. Sing along. “You just don’t argue anymore. You just don’t argue — anymore!”

source: Live 105's Cool 105.3 for 1987