"The 1975" is a song by the band of the same name and the first track on
Notes on a Conditional Form (2020), their fourth album. In the song,
Greta Thunberg (pictured) calls for civil disobedience in response to
climate change, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Each of their three
previous albums began with a track titled "The 1975" that used the same
lyrics, beginning "Go down / Soft sound", but the lead vocalist Matty
Healy thought it was important to give a platform to Thunberg, the
"voice of this generation". After the recording in Stockholm, they
released the song earlier than intended—on 24 July 2019. Proceeds
from the song were donated to the grassroots environmental movement
Extinction Rebellion, at Thunberg's request. The band opened encores at
their performances with the song, before the COVID-19 pandemic halted
their touring. It was received positively by music critics, many of whom
praised the album's transition from the end of "The 1975" into the punk
rock song "People".
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1975_%282019_song%29>
_______________________________
Today's selected anniversaries:
1910:
Ottoman forces captured the city of Shkodër, ending the
Albanian revolt of 1910.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_revolt_of_1910>
1959:
Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. vice president
Richard Nixon held an impromptu debate at the opening of the American
National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_Debate>
1980:
At the Moscow Olympics, the Australian swimming team, nicknamed
the Quietly Confident Quartet, won the men's 4 × 100 metre medley
relay.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swimming_at_the_1980_Summer_Olympics_%E2%80%93_Men%27s_4_%C3%97_100_metre_medley_relay>
2014:
Fifty minutes after departing Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Air
Algérie Flight 5017 disappeared from radar, and its wreckage was found
the next day in Mali, with no survivors of the 116 people aboard.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Alg%C3%A9rie_Flight_5017>
_____________________________
Wiktionary's word of the day:
quakebuttock:
(formerly obsolete, rare, now humorous) A coward.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quakebuttock>
___________________________
Wikiquote quote of the day:
We're all children. We invent the adult facade and don it and try
to keep the buttons and the medals polished. We're all trying to give
such a good imitation of being an adult that the real adults in the
world won't catch on. Each of us takes up the shticks that compose the
adult image we seek. I'd gone the route of lazy, ironic bravado, of
amiable, unaffiliated insouciance. Tinhorn knights of a stumbling
Rocinante from Rent-A-Steed, maybe with one little area of the heart so
pinched, so parched, I never dared let anything really lasting happen to
me. Or dared admit the the flaw... The adult you pretend to be
convinces himself that the risk is worth the game, the game worth the
risk. Tells himself the choice of life style could get him killed — on
the Daytona track, in the bull ring, falling from the raw steel
framework forty stories up, catching a rodeo hoof in the side of the
head. Adult pretenses are never a perfect fit for the child underneath,
and when there is the presentiment of death, like a hard black light
making panther eyes glow in the back of the cave, the cry is, "Mommy,
mommy, mommy, it's so dark out there, so dark and so forever."
--John D. MacDonald
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_D._MacDonald>