Obama shakes hands with Raul Castro.

At the Mandela memorial.

"I don’t think we should talk about Lincoln’s underwear..."

"It’s not appropriate for someone so iconic. Even in the bedroom, Lincoln is never shown in his pajamas. He’s in his shirt and pants."

Joanna Johnston, movie costume designer.

***

"But even the President of the United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked."

Bob Dylan.

***

"How many Bob Dylan songs have the word 'naked' and how many of them can you name?" I challenge Meade with a Bob Dylan test, as I tend to do when I've done a search at bobdylan.com (as I did for the "It's Alright Ma" quote, above).

Meade immediately says "even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked," then none of the others — not even "You see somebody naked and you say who is that man?" — and makes 2 wrong guesses:

MEADE: "'Mr. Tambourine Man'... just to dance beneath the naked sky..."

ME: "That's 'diamond sky.'"

MEADE: "The one where the farmer is chasing him out of his house."

ME: "'Motorpsycho Nightmare?' No."

In "Motorpsycho Nightmare," Bob Dylan is just trying to get some sleep — no sign that he's sleeping naked — when Rita — "Lookin’ just like Tony Perkins" (i.e., the murderer in "Psycho") importunes him to take a shower. He's freaked out: "Oh, no! no! I’ve been through this [movie] before." Afraid of getting knifed to death, but unwilling to run off unless her father (the farmer) throws him out (because he promised the farmer he'd milk the cows in the morning), his sees his only option as saying "something to strike him very weird." What he says is: "I like Fidel Castro and his beard."



Beards. Fidel Castro made a beard as off limits to an American president — in spite of Lincoln — as Hitler made the mustache. And here I want to go back to that "Becoming Adolf" article by Rich Cohen that were were talking about a couple days ago:

[Y]ou could not wear any kind of mustache after [WWII], because, running from Hitler, you might run into Stalin. Hitler plus Stalin ended the career of the mustache in Western political life. Before the war, all kinds of American presidents wore a mustache and/or beard. You had John Quincy Adams, with his muttonchops...



You had Abe Lincoln, whose facial hair...



... like his politics, was the opposite of Hitler's: beard full, lip bare. You had James Garfield, who had the sort of vast rabbinical beard into which whole pages of legislation could vanish.



You had Rutherford B. Hayes...



Grover Cleveland...



... and Teddy Roosevelt, whose asthma and elephant gun were just a frame for his mustache.



You had William Howard Taft — the man wore a Walrus!



After the war, the few American politicians who still wore a mustache were those who had made their name before Hitler and so had been grandfathered in. Like Thomas Dewey.



Dewey was Eliot Spitzer. He was a prosecutor in New York in the 1930s (and later governor), the only guy with the guts to take on the Mob. For Dewey, the rise of Hitler was a fashion disaster. Because Dewey wore a neat little mustache. Dewey ran for president twice — losing to F.D.R., losing to Truman. In my opinion, without the mustache, the headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune (Dewey Defeats Truman) turns true. One of the few prominent American politicians to wear facial hair in recent memory is Al Gore, who grew a Grizzly Adams beard after he lost to George Bush, in 2000. The appearance of this beard was taken to mean either (1) Gore would never again run for office, or (2) Gore had gone completely mental.



The decision to grow a mustache or a beard is all by itself reason to keep a man away from the nuclear trigger.

Are we going to decide who deserves out trust based on they look? Come on, Abe. Lose the beard. Okay.

Pick one:

Before we let one suicide end a great tradition of fun and puncturing pomposity...

... let's remember great moments in prank calls:

The Queen in 1995 spent 17 minutes talking to a man she thought was the prime minister of Canada. It was actually Pierre Brassard, a Canadian radio presenter and impressionist.

In 1998, Prime Minister Tony Blair took a call from a man claiming to be William Hague, leader of the Opposition. He immediately realised it was a hoax but took it in good humour....

Cuban leader Fidel Castro unleashed a volley of abuse after being hoaxed in 2004 by a Miami radio station presenter pretending to be Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

The Miami djs had previously tricked Chavez into thinking he was talking to Castro. I found the audio of Castro talking to not-Chavez (untranslated Spanish), and here's the English transcript of Chavez talking to not-Castro:

''I'll do what you're asking me to... But I'm going to be harmed, I confess to you,'' Castro says.

Silence from Chávez. Castro goes on: "Everything's set for Tuesday.''

''Everything's set for Tuesday,'' Chávez repeats, obviously befuddled. "I don't understand.''...

Miami's Spanish-language radio stations often play outlandish practical jokes on the air, and Castro's Cuba is one of their favorite targets. Hispanic Broadcasting Corp.'s WRTO Salsa 98.3 FM has a segment dubbed Calls to Cuba in which the morning-drive hosts, known as Los Fonomemecos, call businesses and agencies on the island with some ridiculous request or inquiry.

In a recent segment, a DJ posing as a high-ranking Cuban military officer called a Havana funeral home to request a coffin -- for Castro. The mortician burst into sobs.

Chávez, known for his folksy manner, isn't above playing jokes himself.

For the past Day of the Innocents, Latin Americans' version of April Fool's Day that is celebrated Dec. 28, he announced on the radio that he was tired and going to resign. He then changed his tone. ''Ha ha! You fell for it!'' he laughed.

Oh, yeah. April Fool's Day. That's going to have to be abolished, lest someone's feelings are hurt and suicide ensues. But Day of the Innocents... had you heard about that? Which cultures are disparately impacted by suppression of pranking? This is an angle that will, I think, soften the urge to repress that bedevils the nannies of the United States and Britain.

The atheist, building churches, said he "avoided conventional solutions, which had produced the old dark cathedrals reminding us of sin."

Oscar Niemeyer. Dead, now, at 104. He was also a communist. (Fidel Castro was a personal friend.) He won the International Lenin Peace Prize in 1963, which he accepted in Moscow, saying:

“On the politics, I’m with you.... But your architecture is awful. Look, I didn’t come here to criticize, but you asked. It’s terrible.”