Names and faces

■ Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of the newwave band Blondie reigned over a waterlogged edition of

New York

City’s zany Mermaid Parade. The rockers known for songs like “Rapture” and “Heart of Glass” were Mermaid Queen and King Neptune at Saturday’s parade at Coney Island. Crowds cheered as they were wheeled along the parade route in a wicker chair. Drenching rain greeted the paradegoers dressed as mermaids, fish and other aquatic creatures. The downpour let up by the end of the festivities. The Mermaid Parade was founded in 1983 and draws hundreds of thousands of revelers to the beach each year.

■ Singer Lorde was on The Tonight Show promoting the long-awaited follow-up to her hit debut album, and Jimmy Fallon quizzed her about how she passed the three-plus years in between. As she got close to finishing her album Melodrama, she’d take her laptop to a New York diner late at night and bang out lyrics in semi-anonymity. “You like diners,” Fallon noted. Lorde agreed. “Did you order onion rings?” Fallon asked. The pop star responded with a sigh as Fallon pulled from behind his desk a printout of a website that had, in the previous several days, become a distraction from the 20-year-old artist’s album rollout. Fallon held an image of a recently deleted Instagram account. It had 24 followers and was called onionringsworldwide. The only description: “Every onion ring I encounter, rated.” There was, Fallon explained, substantial reason to believe the reviews belonged to Lorde. The evidence was first presented last week on the New Zealand website Newshub, which was tipped off to the account’s existence by an anonymous teenager and noted: “the account could be best described as clandestine.” And yet among onionringsworldwide’s paltry number of followers was Lorde herself, along with several of her friends and associates. The site went as far as to compare the onion ring holder’s fingernails to the singer’s. But when it contacted Lorde’s management to ask about the onion rings, the account was suddenly removed. Before long, New York Magazine and other pop-culture media outlets were on the trail of the Instagram account’s owner. Some fans became upset over the apparent outing of Lorde’s side gig. So, gingerly, Fallon pressed the question on his show: “Someone did some sleuthing, and they believe this is your site.” “OK. I have to explain for a second,” she said. “Here’s the thing. I sort of naively didn’t realize it would be, like, a thing — that I was going different places and trying the onion rings at each of those places.” Fallon’s eyes bugged. “It is you?” “It’s me. It’s me,” she said. Lorde then explained why she took the site down. “Now that everyone knows about it, people are going to be throwing onion rings at me on tour,” she said.

Harry

Lorde