Appearing at a press conference in Washington yesterday, Sir Paul McCartney explained the origins of some famous songs to some awestruck boomers:

McCartney is in DC to get the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Previous winners include Paul Simon and Stevie Wonder. Actually, the previous winners are Simon and Wonder; the award is in its third year. That's correct: after two years, the Library of Congress ran out of Americans to give the Gershwin award.

You might suspect they made this award so they could get cool famous people to show up for a private concert, but you would be terribly cynical.