Joan Baez - Silver Dagger

The first song on her first album. She was eighteen years old, and the purity of that voice is...well....words fail me.

Paul McCartney - Little Willow

One of his lesser-known later songs. When he dials back the schmaltz, McCartney writes very good songs in the slow-and-pretty category.
According to Wikipedia, the song was written for the children of Maureen Starkey, Ringo's ex-wife, who had recently died of cancer. Since McCartney's own mother had died of cancer when he was a teenager, he's clearly drawing on his own experiences. The gentle reminder of life's vicissitudes - "No one's out to break your heart/It only seems that way" - pretty much makes the song.

Frank Zappa - Treacherous Cretins

A Zappa song I'd forgotten about but stumbled across recently.

Spirit - Straight Arrow

The hippie/straight divide as seen in 1968.

Krugman on the Future of Social Security

Professor K lays some knowledge on his readers.

Start with Social Security. The retirement program’s trustees do foresee rising spending as the population ages, with total payments rising from 5.1 percent of G.D.P. now to 6.2 percent in 2035, at which point they stabilize. This means, by the way, that all the talk of Social Security going “bankrupt” is nonsense; even if nothing at all is done, the system will be able to pay most of its scheduled benefits as far as the eye can see.

Still, it does look as if there will eventually be a shortfall, and the usual suspects insist that we must move right now to reduce scheduled benefits. But I’ve never understood the logic of this demand. The risk is that we might, at some point in the future, have to cut benefits; to avoid this risk of future benefit cuts, we are supposed to act pre-emptively by...cutting future benefits. What problem, exactly, are we solving here?

The Lively Ones - Surf Rider

Pulp Fiction was on one of the cable channels, and I got reminded how cool this song is.

Altered Images - Happy Birthday

To mark a couple of birthdays, here's one of the earliest popular music videos, from 1981.