"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