Views from the Outside

 Growing up, I was not a huge Blue Oyster Cult fan, but I liked a few of their songs.  Naturally I heard Godzilla, Don't Fear the Reaper and Burning for You regularly on the radio.  While in high school, I got a cassette tape of their live album Some Enchanted Evening and liked it ... mostly.  I liked most of the songs but some were just kind of ... bleah.   That mostly summed up my attitude towards BOC.  I liked the cover though. (I would point out here that this is about the only album cover of theirs that I liked, I thought most of theirs were cheap looking, but I was spoiled by Yes and Rush). However, while I was in college I happened to be listening to a music show on the radio that talked about a new BOC record coming out.  What I mean is, there used to be shows on the radio stations, usually on Sunday nights, where they'd talk about the goings-on in the music world.  Which bands were getting a new drummer, going out on tour, the current top...

 Well, sort of. In the 20-teens the name "Karen" entered the American popular culture as a term of derision for a bitchy woman.  In the pop culture, Karen was a middle-aged white woman with a particular haircut (called  a "Karen Cut") always wanting to speak to the manager over some perceived slight: not enough ice in her drink or the not enough salad dressing or  the coffee is cold or something.  The point of the Karens is that they don't just complain, but go ballistic.  Maybe not screaming and shouting (though that sometimes is part of the package) but persistent and intimidating by their presumed status ("I can have you fired if you don't fix this.") And of course there was a Karen Hierarchy. During the racially charged days after George Floyd, there was a story about a white woman in NY who called the cops on a black man because he was birdwatching in Central Park.  She was inevitably called the "Central Park Karen, though sh...