Since I wouldn’t watch the Grammys if you paid me (unless you paid me a lot — for instance, I’d watch them, once, for a million dollars), it was sometime later that I learned that “Royals” won “song of the year.”

So I guess my 20-month-old grandson was onto something.

He has been obsessed with that video for months. If he sees a screen — a smartphone, a tablet, what have you — he immediately points to it and says, “Ah-Ooh.” Because that’s what he thinks the background vocal is saying on the refrain. You know how she goes “And we’ll never be royals” and the background echoes “ro-yals”? Well, maybe you don’t. I wouldn’t, if not for frequently giving into his request.

‘A hit is a hit,’ he says.

Anyway, when they sing that, he sings along, in tune, “Ah-ooh.” Hence the title. Or rather, his version of the title.

At first, I thought maybe he was fascinated with the girl singing the song, who is counterintuitively named “Lorde.” The mystique of an older woman (she’s 17), that sort of thing.

But he also enjoys the spoof version, with dogs, below.

Bottom line, the news is that he can spot a hit when he hears it, like Hesh Rabkin on “The Sopranos.” Maybe he has a career ahead of him in music. Either that, or as an automotive engineer…

You were either on the bus, or you were off the bus…

thestate.com published this (but it seems to have disappeared since I first wrote a draft of this post several days ago — sorry) and attributed it to AARP, although I can’t find anything about it at that site. Anyway, it’s supposedly books that “defined a generation,” yadda-yadda:

1. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (1951). OK. A model for alienation, which would be big in the 60s. But didn’t it first affect people who were older than boomers?
2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960). OK. Again, but… I see this as a timeless American classic, and don’t particularly associate it with boomers. Wouldn’t you agree, Scout?
3. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (1961). ABSOLUTELY. It doesn’t get more definitive than this.
4. The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan (1963). I wouldn’t know. If you’re one of the boomers who became a feminist, maybe so.
5. The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley, (1964). Yeah, I think so. It made a big impression on me, I can testify. Although we were assigned to read it in school, which takes off some of the luster. Odd thing, showing the way we thought in those days and at that age: I read this during the 1970-71 school year. And to me, what I was reading was history, tales of the way things were long ago. But some of the later events in the book occurred in the ’60s, I believe. Malcolm X had not died until 1965. But you youngsters should go back and look at pictures of the way people dressed, and the way cars looked, and listen to the music of the time, in 1965. Then do the same for 1971. You’ll see a much, much wider difference than between now and 2008. Or even, say, 1995. The times in which we live are far less dynamic. So much happened that six years was a long time then.
6. Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann (1966). NO. I can’t say why, but I think of this as a book that the older generation read at the time, not boomers. I don’t ever remember any of my friends talking about it, but it was out there, and I just thought of it as an old people thing.
7. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe (1969). YES!!! Because, you know, Wolfe would use extra exclamation points. If you had to pick only one boomer book, this might be it. Even though it’s not from a boomer perspective, it puts the era under a microscope and pulls you in doing so.
8. The Godfather, by Mario Puzo (1969). Yeah, I think so. I read this the same summer as Catch-22 (that would be 1970). My only doubt is that while it’s a cultural icon of the era — or actually, the movie is — it’s not really about anything that has to do with the time that boomers grew up. Neither was Catch-22, but that helped define a certain ’60s sensibility. Puzo didn’t do that. He was more about posing timeless questions about what happens when we revert from a society of laws to one of men.
9. Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach (1970). NO. Did not read it, did not consider reading it for a second, because everything I ever heard about it made me want to run the other way.
10. Love Story, by Erich Segal (1970). Oh, God, NO. Went on a double-date in Hawaii to see the Steve Miller Band (in the “Your Saving Grace” phase, before they got all commercial), and it got rained out. So we said, “Let’s go to a movie.” The girls wanted to see the film version of this, so we went. It was as bad as I had imagined, and the emotional manipulation at the end just made me angry. After it was over, the other guy and I had to stand around in the lobby for 20 minutes while the girls cried in the bathroom. And my date was a really cool girl, too, but she succumbed. So I’ve got nothing good to say about this. And no, didn’t read the book. (This and the seagull book occupy their own unsavory category in my mind.)

There are some in the honorable mentions that should have made the list, such as Fahrenheit 451, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, and maybe Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but I’m not sure about the last one, because I didn’t read it. I figured the book couldn’t improve on the title, so why bother? Books that should be on the list:

• Stranger in a Strange Land — This would be right up there with Catch-22 and Acid Test. Maybe more so. A real cult book for a generation — although, as a literary work, not as good as the other two.
• On the Road — Yeah, it’s about guys who were much older than boomers, and is rooted in their cultural references, but this had a big collective impact on us. We saw it as a wellspring of our times. After all, it shared a main character with Acid Test — Neal Cassidy.
• Something by Kurt Vonnegut. I’m not a huge fan of his, but although he wasn’t of the generation (he and my father-in-law both served in the 106th Infantry Division, and were both captured at the Battle of the Bulge), he was definitely an important author for boomers. Maybe Cat’s Cradle, I’m thinking.
• Fahrenheit 451 — Between this and 1984 and other things we read, we tended to eye the future with a certain amount of suspicion. I’d toss Brave New World into that category as well, except that it came out in 1932. I remember a huge debate we had in my English class over whether one would want to live in the world Huxley envisioned. I was shocked by those who said “yes,” and saw nothing wrong with a society given over totally to hedonistic materialism. I argued the other side so strenuously that some people in the class tried to recruit me for the National Forensic League. They wanted me on their debating team. I declined the honor.
• Dune — Maybe. Sci-Fi fans would probably rate it higher than Stranger In a Strange Land, but the Heinlein novel makes the list because it was such a free-love, hippy-dippy cult thing, whereas Dune was not. But it was very popular among Boomers, who were painfully betrayed by David Lynch in 1984.

That’s enough for now. I’m thinking, though, that since this list is so skewed toward things we read when we were kids, maybe there should be a list of books Boomers loved as adults. Say, Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker” series. Or, to return to the Tom Wolfe well, The Right Stuff…

I don’t have time today to go into great depth on this, but I thought I’d share several scattered thoughts I had about the governor’s speech and reactions to it, each of which could be developed into an extensive post on its own:

• I was pleased that she was willing to share credit on the Department of Administration bill with Vincent Sheheen. Yeah, she did it in a backhanded way, mentioning him in the middle of a list of eight people “who have been down in the trenches fighting to make this a reality,” when in truth this bill started with Sen. Sheheen years before she got involved with it. But the fact that she gave him praise and credit at all makes her look a lot more honest and generous than this mean-sounding passage from Sheheen’s own statement about passage of the bill: “South Carolinians have had to wait long enough for the accountability they deserve from Governor Haley and her administration. I urge the Governor to sign my bill immediately.” As though she was reluctant or something, which obviously she was not. This tone is unlike Vincent Sheheen, and unlikely to help him unseat the governor.
• Yeah, the governor has been taking her responsibility to govern far more seriously lately — for which I’ve praised her here (while Dems grumble about too little, too late). She’s the first governor in decades to seriously address funding equity for public schools, she wants to do more for the mentally ill, and she’s decided to drop her politically convenient Kulturkampf against the arts in SC. But unfortunately, she hasn’t dropped the intellectually offensive, neo-Confederate-style rhetoric aimed at feeding the delusions of her Tea Party base: “it is my firm belief that the federal government causes far more harm to South Carolina than good… Those running the federal government make our job more difficult, day in and day out. Unfortunately, that is simply the reality we are faced with…. We rejected the federal government’s less than generous offer to run a state exchange, an offer that would have Washington bureaucrats dictating the exchange and South Carolinians paying for it. And, with your help, we emphatically said no to the central component of Obamacare, the expansion of a broken Medicaid program that is already cannibalizing our budget, and would completely destroy it in the years to come.” Her Medicaid assertions add up to one huge lie, and her refusal, along with that of legislative leaders, to refuse the expansion is the single most indefensible failure of leadership in her tenure. It was deeply immoral, pound-foolish, a drag on the state’s economy, and the biggest case of placing ideology over serving the public that I have seen in many a year in this state. She likes to talk about job growth, but not about the thousands of healthcare jobs that the federally funded expansion would have brought, and which she turned away.
• I liked it that she quoted the father of her party, Abraham Lincoln. We don’t hear enough of that from Republicans these days, particularly not Tea Party Republicans, and most particularly not Southern Tea Party Republicans.
• She said, “Our tax code needs to be simpler, flatter, and fairer.” Well, it certainly needs to be simpler and fairer. In fact, the whole system needs to be scrapped and rebuilt. But there is no way that the main thing we need in South Carolina is tax cuts, despite the fact that Republicans have come to Columbia ever since they took control of the House in 1994 with the firm belief that that’s pretty much all the state does need. James Smith criticized her for wanting to fund road maintenance with found money (I think that’s what he meant with his “money tree” thing), rather than dedicating a reliable revenue source. Her promise to veto any gas tax increase is an immature cry against rational policy. To say you want to improve roads and won’t consider the tax increase to pay for it is governance by ideological fantasy. And if she wants to help business, then push to get lawmakers to reverse the effects of Act 388, which as I’ve written before ” distorted our whole tax system — putting an excessive burden on businesses and renters, and shifting the load for supporting public schools onto the volatile, exemption-ridden sales tax — for the sake of the subset of homeowners who lived in high-growth areas.” Act 388, by the way, was one of the big reasons why the state Chamber backed Sheheen, rather than Rep. Haley, in the 2010 election.
• She was also generous and bipartisan in crediting the lawmakers who helped her come up with her new approach on education funding — “Senator John Courson, Senator Wes Hayes, Senator John Matthews, Senator Nikki Setzler, Representative Kenny Bingham, Representative Jackie Hayes, and Representative Phil Owens.”
• In the moments after the speech, as ETV got reaction from lawmakers in the chamber, someone (I missed the name; I was busy as I listened) was talking about government waste, and mentioned once again the “Green Bean Museum.” Apparently, there have been no instances of “government waste” in the six years or so since that one came up, because it remains everybody’s first example for “proving” their belief that all government does is run around looking for things to waste our money on. Let me give a little perspective on that — Lake City sought funding for restoring a building that is a great source of local pride, the Bean Market. Trucks and trains came from all over the country to drive through that building and pick up green beans, as this was the biggest distribution point for that commodity in the region, and perhaps in the nation (I forget which). Fixing it up was related to Darla Moore’s desire to spark a renaissance in her hometown. The request didn’t come out of nowhere; it was one of a large number of purely local projects competing for money from a fund dedicated to such boosterish things. The state not only refused this request, it did so with extreme prejudice, with scorn and ridicule. Darla Moore essentially said to hell with the Legislature, and just used her own money. Her expenditures on Lake City over the last few years have been in eight figures annually. The Bean Market now houses local economic development offices, an indoor farmer’s market, and a rental venue for private functions. It’s at the centerpiece of a growing downtown complex that features a museum dedicated to agriculture-themed art, an outdoor performing arts venue, new upscale shops and restaurants, and a soon-to-be hotel — all aimed at bringing visitors through the community and building back its economy. Anyway, I thought maybe y’all should know some of that.
• I loved what Harvey Peeler said about how even though the governor has now given four of these speeches, she “still has that new car smell.” He can turn a phrase. Not for nothing is he the best Tweeter in the Senate…

On a previous thread, we got onto a digression about measurement. We split into camps between those who believe that one can know things without being able to quantify them, and those who tend to think that is impossible.

I realized we were really getting down to basics. We were touching upon a profound dichotomy in the human family.

There is left and right. There is Democrat and Republican. There is the believer, and the atheist. There is the tremendous gulf that sometimes opens between the way black and white Americans perceive a thing (say, the O.J. Simpson verdict).

But is there any bigger cognitive divide, any greater contrast in belief systems, than that between people who think the only things that matter are those that can be quantified, and those who see that as an extremely limited way of perceiving the world?

During that earlier exchange, Doug asked, “How do you know something is improved if you can’t measure it?” And he’s serious. And he thinks all logic and understanding and wisdom are entirely on his side in asserting that. In fact; he probably would say he knows it. And many folks who would be classified as an S on a Myers Briggs scale would agree, emphatically.

And yet to me, it’s practically nonsensical. Sure, there are judgments to which measurement is essential. If I look at a beaker of liquid water — neither icing over nor bubbling and steaming away — I don’t know what its temperature is, although I know it’s between 32 F and 212 F, without a thermometer. (Of course, unless I’m going to bathe in it, or develop film with it — an anachronistic activity in which I no longer engage — I don’t much care.)

With most things that matter, the things that tend to interest me, if one does not know without measuring, what has one spent one’s time on Earth doing?