"Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" is a song by Bob Dylan, from his 1966 album Blonde on Blonde. Like many other Dylan songs of the 1965–1966 period, the song features a surreal, playful lyric set to an electric blues accompaniment.
Lyrics
Dylan's lyrics affectionately ridicule a female "fashion victim" who wears a leopard-skin pillbox hat. The pillbox hat was a fashionable ladies' hat in the United States in the early to mid-1960s, most famously worn by Jacqueline Kennedy. Dylan satirically crosses this accessory's high-fashion image with leopard-skin material, perceived as more downmarket and vulgar. The song was also written and released long after pillbox hats had been at the height of fashion.
Animal prints have long been a popular style for many reasons. For one, they are generally expensive and considered rather exotic; hence they are a symbol of wealth and status. Throughout history, kings and other high people have used animal print rugs and such as a sign of status just as mounted animals are kept as trophies. Animal print became popular for women in the United States in the late 1960s during the Bohemian movement.
Other uses
Besides a distinctive natural animal pattern on clothing, "animal prints" may also refer to art prints of animals, printed on canvas or paper. The art prints may replicate the same skin or fur pattern found on the animal, but a flat photographic representation printed on artistic media, such as for as wall decorations. The prints are not limited to just the animal's skin or fur pattern, but may be any part of the animal and still be called an animal print.
Onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness and Robles disease, is a disease caused by infection with the parasitic wormOnchocerca volvulus. Symptoms include severe itching, bumps under the skin, and blindness. It is the second most common cause of blindness due to infection, after trachoma.
The parasite worm is spread by the bites of a black fly of the Simulium type. Usually many bites are required before infection occurs. These flies live near rivers, hence the name of the disease. Once inside a person, the worms create larvae that make their way out to the skin. Here they can infect the next black fly that bites the person. There are a number of ways to make the diagnosis including: placing a biopsy of the skin in normal saline and watching for the larva to come out, looking in the eye for larvae, and looking within the bumps under the skin for adult worms.
A vaccine against the disease does not exist. Prevention is by avoiding being bitten by flies. This may include the use of insect repellent and proper clothing. Other efforts include those to decrease the fly population by spraying insecticides. Efforts to eradicate the disease by treating entire groups of people twice a year is ongoing in a number of areas of the world. Treatment of those infected is with the medication ivermectin every six to twelve months. This treatment kills the larva but not the adult worms. The medication doxycycline, which kills an associated bacterium called Wolbachia, appears to weaken the worms and is recommended by some as well. Removal of the lumps under the skin by surgery may also be done.
Apparently at some point in recent years I’d planted the Bob Dylan seed in my eldest’s head ... “You know it balances on your head just like a / Mattress balances on a bottle of wine.” (That would be the “Leopard-SkinPill-Box Hat.”) ... Whatever it takes. .
They exploded into a near euphoria when he and his band next unleashed the 1950s blues strut of ‘GoodbyeJimmy Reed’ — which has echoes of ‘Leopard-SkinPill-Box ...
