Andy Warhol hated Frank Zappa.

From "The Andy Warhol Diaries," Thursday, June 16, 1983:

Frank Zappa came to be interviewed for our TV show and I think that after the interview I hated Zappa even more than when it started. I remember when he was so mean to us when the Mothers of Invention played with the Velvet Underground— I think both at the Trip, in L.A., and at the Fillmore in San Francisco. I hated him then and I still don’t like him. And he was awfully strange about Moon. I said how great she was, and he said, “Listen, I created her. I invented her.” Like, “She’s nothing, it’s all me.” And I mean, if it were my daughter I would be saying, “Gee, she’s so smart,” but he’s taking all the credit. It was peculiar.

Here's Moon performing the old 1982 song "Valley Girl." Listening to that today is a completely different experience because back then talking like that was really weird and unbelievably stupid. Today, that kind of speech is so common, perplexingly common. I hear it all the time from people who completely intend to be taken seriously — mainstream journalists, law professors — female and male.

Tracing "Valley Girl" type "uptalk" back to Dust-Bowl era Okies...

... using the evidence of a recording of a 1940 interview with Woody Guthrie.
I should also forestall the readers who will respond "But it doesn't sound like Woody Guthrie is asking questions!" by asking them to apply the same judgment to Taylor Mali's famous "Totally like whatever" screed. And then to tell me what the difference between "yes/no question rises" and other sorts of final rises really is — after reading this.

Scenes from the drive from Lincoln, Nebraska to Madison, Wisconsin.

1. On 2 overpasses to I-80, there were groups of protesters with signs calling attention to the Obama scandals: Benghazi, IRS, Fast & Furious. I saw at least one Gadsden flag.

2. "The corn and soybean crops looked really good. I didn't see any poor crops at all." So says Meade when I ask him about the highlights of the drive. Some people driving from Nebraska to Madison might say "Ugh, corn. Too much corn. When will we get past all this corn?" But Meade is not one of those people. His father was in the popcorn seed business.

3. Mostly looking for coffee, we got off the interstate in Williamsburg, Iowa, where there's a big outlet store shopping center. Meade wanted to go into Lids to get some baseball hats, so I went into the Coach store and was checking out with a book bag and at the next cash register, there was a woman who was quickly replaced by a man who said she didn't speak English. The older woman behind the counter plied him with cheerful questions including "Where are you from?" He said "Iraq," but he said it in his Iraqi accent, which is nothing like eye-RACK or even eee-ROCK. It was more eee-RAHqqq. The woman said she wasn't familiar with that country, and the man repeated the name, perhaps wondering whether this woman had not heard of the events of the last 10 years. I didn't want to intrude. I cast a glance at her and then at him, as they kept going back and forth, and it was obvious she was never going to hear the word he was saying as "Iraq." Finally, I said to her, "He's saying  eee-ROCK," and of course, she knew Iraq. To him, I said, sympathetically, "It was the way you said it."

4. Meade's team the Cincinnati Reds were playing the Milwaukee Brewers, so Meade listened to the whole game on the satellite radio as he drove, and Meade didn't see that I'd put in the earbuds and was listening to an audiobook (which happened to be "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim"). I laughed and he said "I wonder if they cooked up sushi?" because he thought I'd laughed at the baseball announcer who'd just said that the people coming to the Miller Park were tailgating and "cooking up every kind of food imaginable." Apparently, my laugh was perfectly synchronized. Meade's reference to sushi harkened back to lunch, wherein I ate this:

"Is Scott Walker an Underdog or a Favorite?"

Asks Benjamin Domenech at Real Clear Politics.

Now, Walker’s not yet a dynamic speaker, but his everyman persona is going to be more appealing in 2016 than pundits may recognize. His Men’s Wearhouse suits and accent are not the sort of things that appeal to the insider set – one gets the impression he would show up to the G8 meeting with an Old Navy American flag shirt, worn unironically, or start the State of the Union by saying he won’t keep you longer than ten minutes because there’s a game on. 

Gets the impression. No one would do that, right? You're just saying that you listen to him, you look at him, and that's the kind of thing you think.

Disrespect for the People of the Heartland rages out there on the coasts.

"Travel nightmare: Dakar, Dhaka — what's the difference? A wrong airport code sends travelers to the wrong continent."

"The code for the airport in Dakar, capital of Senegal, is DKR. The code for the airport in Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, is DAC...."

Dhaka is 6,900 miles from Dakar. The first leg of the flight got them to Istanbul, where the screwup took place:

"When the flight attendant said we were heading to Dhaka, we believed that this was how you pronounced 'Dakar' with a Turkish accent"....

"He just looked unusual - stunning really.... He was fresh and he had a very soft sort of American accent."

Writes Kathy Etchingham meeting her long-ago boyfriend Jimi Hendrix (who was not a star at the time).

[One evening] Etchingham was trying to make mashed potato and not doing a very good job of it.

"He comes along and tastes them with a fork and says they're all lumpy," she recalls. "I knew he couldn't cook himself and that's how the argument started. It ended with my screaming and shouting, throwing the plates on the floor and marching out."

Etchingham spent the night at a friend's and Hendrix missed her so much that he sat down to write one of his biggest hits, The Wind Cries Mary.

Mary is Etchingham's middle name and the guitarist would sometimes use it to wind her up.

"The Wind Cries Mary" is about an argument over mashed potatoes!

***

A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterday’s life potatoes
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife
And the wind, it cries Mary

Galeazzo Frudua replicates the sound of the Beatles' singing with remarkable accuracy...

... except for that bit of Italian accent, which proves it really is him singing all the parts. And he explains what he's doing in that charming accent in a series of YouTube videos. Here he is with "Nowhere Man":



Frudua doesn't talk about the personalities of The Beatles, but his demonstration made me think about the way John was singing his song, and George (with the lower voice) harmonized by going more toward monotony, while Paul (with the higher voice) got fancier and more dramatic, making the backup into the show-off spot. George, you might say, was modest and self-effacing, while Paul was competitive, to the point where he almost seems to be daring John to slug him for taking over his song. And yet the sound is of 3 men blended perfectly.

It's fascinating to me that Frudua is so finely tuned to the details of sound, yet retains his accent. Maybe he's choosing that. If so, it's a nice touch.

"I think that any (laws) there are in Constitution or in life, are already made."

Hey, come on. That's kind of a great answer. Now, it gets a bit odd after that:

I think that we should have a straight way to go in our similar, or ... in our lives. For example, I am a surfer and I think that the best wave that I can take is the wave that I wait for it.

But still... I see the sense in it: Libertarian!

"I'm switching to Polish now, in stores and elsewhere. But I find that I have that American softness to my speech. The Polish melodic inflection is gone too."

"I hear its absence, but I do nothing to force it back. I'm kind of enjoying the reaction. At several points, people think that I am an American who has learned Polish very very well. Nearly perfectly! The accent isn't perfect, but so what! Which brings me to this question that I come back to again and again: why do so many Poles love America so much? Even as that love is not at all reciprocated. I mean, America let them down. Again and again. Thinking back to the war (and I do, every time that I am here)...."

My colleague Nina, in Warsaw, with lots of photographs, including one of a snow-covered statue of Ronald Reagan.