How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
In my recent interview with Ab, the Fakeologist, he wondered why, if indeed Paul McCartney is a set of twins, that it is such a deeply guarded secret. Good question. I think I have an answer now, though I did not then.
Continue reading “Why is Paul McCartney being a twin such a deeply guarded secret?”
Ab and I had quite a discussion about my face splitting techniques. He wonders why they bother repurposing anyone, say, Janis Joplin becoming Amy Goodman. I would venture a guess that they have a talent inventory on everyone, and when they see that they do not have enough talent to sustain a career in one area, they are moved to another.
Amy Goodman, for instance, used to be Janis Joplin, who we found to be a set of twins seen to the right and below. “Amy” is the one on the right here. Far from being a manic on-stage rocker (seen below), she is laid back to the point of being what I call the “Queen of Dour.” She was obviously not going to be able to carry on her part of the Joplin act, and the “Janis” down below probably was not seen as sustainable either. Why not just retire them both, be done with it?
Dave McGowan listed 60-70 deaths of rockers and actors in his book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, perhaps all fake, maybe Ricky Nelson’s and Phil Hartman’s real. They did indeed retire them before and after Operation Chaos culminated in in the Manson affair. Most have not been seen again, though I know they are/were still with us after.
Ab at Fakeologist contacted me and offered me three dates this week to do a podcast with him. I chose last night, Tuesday. Participants were Ab, Gaia (speaking from Colombia), and me.
The podcast can be found here. It is 90 minutes, all free. Below is a short list of things I learned last night.
Silver Gate, Montana rests two miles from the northeast entrance to Yellowstone National Park. It is a collection of stores and shops and motels. Most of those on the north side of the highway are owned by one man, or one company – I don’t know for sure. The good thing about him or it is this: He does not cater to motorcyclists and snowmobiles. You can always be sure, if you stay there, that you will have silence. The air will not be full of exhaust fumes, as is Cooke City in the winter, four miles down the road.
His goods are very expensive. He requires an up front deposit to make a reservation, and keeps it if you cancel. You can say that this is the price of being in business there, but no one else in the area does that. However, it is tough to be in business in a tourist trap. Cooke City addressed this problem by opening up to snowmobiles in the winter, delivering year-round revenue.
These kids are not playing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, but rather Spring, from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. I guess this has gone viral, and why not. The looks of joy as they play are contagious.
Earlier this week John le Bon and I had a 2-1/2 hour conversation, which was saved for posterity.
I do not imagine I am that interesting, so relax. I am not suggesting that you go to John’s website to listen to me rattle on for that long, but there is a trove of interviews there. I am going to subscribe, but am waiting until my credit card rolls over, some time after the 20th. I am in that time frame where I can incur an expense, and then postpone payment for almost 60 days. It is an interest-free loan.
I do urge readers to visit his site, as this very interesting young man contributed tons to our interview. He is currently a resident of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, a beautiful city north and west of Greece. One thing I wanted to ask him is how he ended up there, but I never got around to it, you know, talking about me, me and then me.
After the post below and yesterday’s interview with John le Bon (which I will discuss in a later post -a very nice young man and a very good time had), I feel a need to set the record straight, to care what others might think. I am not a person who simply abandoned his five children. Of course I am flawed, of course I have made mistakes, but walking out on my kids is not in my nature. I am Mr. Do-The-Right-Thing, and when I do the wrong thing, I pay a psychic price.
The above video is at the center of my spiritual awakening in the early 1990s. Typical of me at that time, I was not aware of the song even three or four years after its release nor had I heard of the band called U2. I was busy working and being a dad to five kids, and growing away from my wife. In fact, I had already left her mentally, or as Kramer famously said in a Seinfeld episode, “George, in my mind I am already gone.” George’s look at Kramer after that remark was a classic deadpan. I still laugh.
By the way, I have not been kind to people who put up their favorite videos here, just out of the blue, as if saying “You must like what I like.” Music is personal. I am writing about this particular video because it represented an awakening, a turning point, a point in my life when I had a future that was going to be very different from my past. I will write first about my experience, and then about the song, the instrumentation, the video and the lyrics after. Rolling Stone places it at number 93 in its list of 500 best rock songs.
I invite others to use this post to recount similar experiences. Please limit yourself to one song or video.
NASA: Not A Superstitious Agency?
The authors of the book Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers, Mary Bennett and David Percy, think that Apollo 13, the failed mission that spawned the Ron Howard movie by the name, never left low earth orbit and that all the excitement was staged by NASA and the astronauts from inside a space capsule that really did contain astronauts.
That could well be the case, and those two certainly have the chops to make that case. I’ve long thought that all those launches in the period 1969-1972 served some purpose (except Apollo 11, which I think merely took off and dumped in the Atlantic). I do not know that purpose, and have speculated that it could have been a joint effort with the Soviets to install spy satellites and weaponry in space, later to be called “Star Wars”.
We live in the mountains and have a back deck that is, at its highest above the ground, about twelve feet up. There are many benefits of living here, and some problems. One of those is these things called Golden Mantled ground squirrels, and chipmunks. We cannot grow anything down on ground level, as these creatures will eat anything we put out there. We have managed to put out Russian Sage, as they show no interest in that particular plant, but everything else is quickly toast.
Everyone who lives up here has the same problem. The best solution is planters up on the deck that are large enough that the critters cannot get up and in them. That seems to work. Other solutions are sonic devices that supposedly disrupt their nests and force them to move away. Last year we tried these, and noticed that chipmunks would perch on them while they observed the horizon. In other words, they do not work.
They do not like water, and I delight in standing on the deck and surprising them with a burst from the hose. It brings me such joy to see them scatter and hide under and in rock walls.
Piece of Mindful 