I’m drawing no conclusions from it, but today, on his “Theme Time Radio Hour,” Bob Dylan made a reference to Ann Coulter. The theme today was “SLEEP,” and after playing a Peter Wolf song called Sleepless, Dylan provided us with a list of famous people who are known to stay up into the wee hours (like Wolf):

Some other famous night-owls include Fran Leibowitz, Winston Churchill, Marcel Proust, Ludwig the Second of Bavaria, and Ann Coulter.

But maybe the most famous are the nighthawks at the diner; the characters in a painting by Edward Hopper.

That’s what you’d call a “neutral reference.”

And any time someone makes a neutral reference to Ann Coulter, I’d say it’s notable. One thing the bold Ann does not inspire is neutrality.

While I’m at it, a couple of people have asked me if I caught Dylan’s “slam” against socialized medicine on last week’s show. I did, but wasn’t going to mention it until I wrote up the show properly, and I’m determined to catch up with doing that for the shows one of these months. But a reader named Mike wrote to me about it today, and so I’ll just quote him:

I was wondering if you caught Dylan’s comment on his radio show last week. He played a song called “Dance the Slurp” that was released by 7-11 to promote their Slurpees He talked about the introduction of the 32 oz. Big Gulp and the 64 oz. Double Gulp. He then said “That’s a lot of soda. Good thing taxpayers don’t have to pay for your health care.“

Mike perceives it as Dylan going out of his way to make a statement, rather than just a casual joke. (Hey, maybe you could call it a botched joke!) Personally, I wouldn’t draw big conclusions from it — I think it was just a gag. The whole 7-11 bit was hilarious to me. A gratifying gag for us anti-socialized medicine types, by all means, but still a gag.

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