Your lack of knowledge and wisdom could almost cause me to weep sometimes, Martin, if I didn't have such a good sense of humour. :-) I still like you anyway, but man, you're a blockhead at times.

GUEST - Bob Dylan is Jewish. It is perfectly possible to be a born-again Christian or a friggin' atheist AND be Jewish. Plenty of Jews ARE atheists. "Jew" is not a religious designation. Check out the numerous threads in which we have collectively talked that particular truism out ad infinitum.

To put it very simply: If one or both of your parents were Jewish, you too are considered Jewish in any society I know of, regardless of what religion you practice or even if you practice no religion at all. It's a cultural designation, indicating the cultural and familial roots from which you sprang. The very fact that the Jews, as a nation, were scattered all over the known World by the Romans after the destruction of Jerusalem guaranteed that it would be through ancestry that their sense of community would be traced...not through location or even racial type, but through marriage. So Bob Dylan is a Jew no matter what religion he decides to convert to.

As for the rest of you...and my beloved pal, Martin Gibson, the most hardheaded conventional thinker ever to grace Chicago...

It's almost not possible to overestimate Bob Dylan's impact on music and song lyrics in the last 50 years...although one can, of course, agree or disagree regarding his singing ability. I'm a very good singer (in the conventional sense)...I kid you not...and I think that he, at his best, was a superb singer...but in an entirely unconventional sense. He sang in a way that WORKED beautifully for the purpose it was put to. So did Louie Armstrong. So have many others with very unconventional vocal styles. I could name more of them, but why bother?

It's now "trendy" to sing songs by rap singers and people like "Green Day" or Celine Dionne...and the stuff they write or just record is utterly pathetic. So who cares about trends? Trends are driven by ceaseless commercial marketing these days, nothing else, and that is done through music videos these days...so why would Dylan be trendy? Shakespeare isn't trendy. Neither is Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nor is Rambaud or Goethe. Get the point? The fact that Dylan isn't trendy now speaks volumes in his favour as far as I'm concerned! He is sure not forgotten. Not among songwriters and musicians. And he WILL not be forgotten. 99% of what IS trendy now will definitely be forgotten...very soon.

I still sing Dylan's superb songs and I love them.