Blue Monday, Big Mama Thornton edition

I was driving down the freeway when my car ran out of gas...

Blue Monday, Roscoe Holcomb edition

I know what it means, but

Whatever

Crabs, frogs, boiling water, free tuition.  You get it, right?

Allen Toussaint

I have been remiss in not celebrating the life and career of Allen Toussaint, who among many notable musical accomplishments, pretty much wrote on the fly the horn charts for one of the best live albums ever.

Blue Monday, Django Reinhardt edition

Friday night

In memory of all those people just looking for some fun on a Friday night.

The Doomsday Machine

Russia is apparently feeling nostalgic these days.

At one point, the camera zoomed in on something one of the military officers was reading: a binder opened to a page showing the weapon design.

“Maritime Multifunctional System Status-6,” a headline said, in block Cyrillic letters, above an illustration showing the submarine and a text in easily decipherable large letters explaining the weapon’s effects.

The submarine would “defeat important economic objects of an enemy in coastal zones, bringing guaranteed and unacceptable losses on the country’s territory by forming a wide area of radioactive contamination incompatible with conducting military, economic or any other activities there for a long period of time,” it said.

On Wednesday, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told Russian news agencies that the cameras had accidentally filmed a secret document.

“Indeed, some secret data fell into the field of view of these cameras,” Mr. Peskov was quoted as saying by the news agency Interfax. Because the document was a genuine secret, he said, the video was subsequently removed from the channels’ websites. “We hope such a thing will never be repeated,” he said.

Cobra snake for a necktie

Carol Doda

RIP

Blue Monday, Muddy Waters edition

Alternate take

It is a con, but these people are authentically insane

This guy apparently merited a longer obit than Sleepy Fred Thompson.

Early on, Mr. Carto sometimes presented himself as a conventional conservative activist. In 1956, he operated what he called “a nerve center” at the Republican convention that distributed 100,000 pieces of literature. He said he was ready to offer an immediate right-wing alternative if President Dwight D. Eisenhower chose not to seek re-election.

In the 1960s, he contributed money to congressmen to try to stymie civil rights legislation, and several times was invited to testify before congressional committees. He later helped bolster what became fairly conventional rightist causes: drastically slashing the income tax and blocking a constitutional amendment to guarantee women equal rights. His positions on immigration, globalization and multiculturalism — all of which he loathed — were influential.

In the 2012 Republican presidential campaign, Representative Ron Paul accepted the support of Mr. Carto’s newspaper The American Free Press, but later stipulated he did not endorse its racial views. Some of Mr. Paul’s writing had appeared in the paper, possibly without his knowledge.

“Willis has talked to me about playing the role of a respectable conservative when his true feelings are those of a racial nationalist,” Louis T. Byers, a right-wing activist and theoretician, told The Washington Post in 1971. “I was as close to being a friend as anyone Carto has known.”

 Fortunately, there were witnesses.

Blue Monday, Victoria Spivey and Lonnie Johnson edition