Where those old songs give one a reassuring feeling even as they discuss personal calamities--losing a lover, or a job, or family, or discovering an overfondness for something addictive like alcohol, or pot, or, again, love--McFerrin's calamities are of the easily overcome, cardboard sort that appear in brief glimpses during ads depicting Reagan's America, brief signs of the bad that we can shoo away if we only keep up a good mental attitude.

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With his miner's helmet in one hand, a white towel in the other, [Mario] Sepúlveda began to dance. He spun with the gusto and pzazz of a huaso, a Chilean cowboy.

Many powerful pain killers are prescription drugs in the U.S.