The penultimate entry seems like a good time for some randomness.
Let’s start with a final entry from the AT&T Archives: “Telezonia”.
Lawrence, this is for you:
The weird starts about two minutes in.
Bonus #1: As long as we’re talking about “psychedelic”: “Narcotics: Pit of Despair”.
Bonus #2: Couldn’t get away without one more bit of random gun crankery. This is part of an episode of “Wild West Tech” (an old History Channel show) talking about holsters.
Somewhat breaking news: John Warner, former Senator from Virginia and Elizabeth Taylor’s sixth husband.
Though a popular figure in his state, Mr. Warner was often at odds with Virginia conservatives. He became the Republican nominee in his first campaign only after the man who had defeated him at a state party convention was killed in a plane crash.
He angered the National Rifle Association with his backing of an assault weapons ban. He infuriated some state Republicans in 1994 when he refused to support Oliver L. North, the former White House aide at the center of the Iran-contra scandal during the Reagan administration, in Mr. North’s bid for the Senate. And he opposed Reagan’s ultimately unsuccessful Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork.
Edited to add: My mother and stepfather lived in Virginia during part of the time John Warner was a senator. My mother is kind of upset at the press coverage: she feels it focuses too much on Sen. Warner being Number Six in the long line of Liz’s husbands, and not enough on his accomplishments as a Senator. One of the things she mentioned to me: there was a time when they were having trouble getting money out of SSI for my stepfather. She called Senator Warner’s office and spoke to one of his people, who said, “Oh, I know somebody over there. Let me make some calls.”
They had their check two days later.
Roger Hawkins, noted drummer.
An innately soulful musician, Mr. Hawkins initially distinguished himself in the mid-’60s as a member of the house band at the producer Rick Hall’s FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala. (The initials stand for Florence Alabama Music Enterprises.) His colleagues were the keyboardist Barry Beckett, the guitarist Jimmy Johnson and Mr. Hood, who played bass. Mr. Hood is the last surviving member of that rhythm section.
Mr. Hawkins’s less-is-more approach to drumming at FAME — often little more than a cymbal and a snare — can be heard on Percy Sledge’s gospel-steeped “When a Man Loves a Woman,” a No. 1 pop single in 1966. He was also a driving force behind Aretha Franklin’s imperious “Respect,” a No. 1 pop hit the next year, as well as her Top 10 singles “Chain of Fools” (1967) and “Think” (1968).
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In 1969 Mr. Hawkins and the other members of the FAME rhythm section parted ways with Mr. Hall over a financial dispute. They soon opened their own studio, Muscle Shoals Sound, in a former coffin warehouse in nearby Sheffield.
Renaming themselves the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, the four men appeared on many other hits over the next decade, including the Staple Singers’ chart-topping pop-gospel single “I’ll Take You There,” a 1972 recording galvanized by Mr. Hawkins’s skittering Caribbean-style drum figure. They also appeared, along with the gospel quartet the Dixie Hummingbirds, on Paul Simon’s “Loves Me Like a Rock,” a Top 10 single in 1973.
Mr. Hawkins and Mr. Hood worked briefly with the British rock band Traffic as well; they are on the band’s 1973 album, “Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory.”
Mr. Hawkins and his colleagues became known as the Swampers after the producer Denny Cordell heard the pianist Leon Russell commend them for their “funky, soulful Southern swamp sound.” The Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd mentioned them, by that name, in their 1974 pop hit “Sweet Home Alabama.”