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.
“Ash Tree“
The endangered Ash Tree
What can we say
We have somehow
Numbered your days
Bright in the spring
With hint of all new
In summer you shade us
And make us feel new
So wonderful in the fall
Of Burgundy glow
So majestic in winter
Dark bark against snow
To gaze at your splendor
To wish you to stay
~ Nancy Hupperich
Our family has lived in our small, humble abode for more than 25 years. Most of the trees on our property have stood here since we arrived in the late 1990s — already fully mature. It was the landscape of tall, proud, and abundant trees that invited us in.
The lush trees have provided not only beauty, healthy habitat for wild animals, and shelter from sweltering sun in the summer, but also a place on which to hang our hammock and swing, when our children were very young.
We actually kept the swing attached after all these years. Every once in a while, I have sat pensively atop it.
We have gratefully enjoyed the offerings of the majestic trees, attempting to not take them for granted. To echo the thoughts of this writer, the bold ash trees have served to anchor our front, back, and side yards.
The photo directly above is not reflective of a storm (nor climate change), but, rather, the consequence of the blight of the emerald ash borer (EAB). Accordingly, twenty-one (yes, 21) of our trees (exclusively ash) were professionally felled. This week, it took the tree cutting service 24 hours over the span of 2 1/2 days — long days in the heat — to clean up the devastation created . . . by a frickin’ beetle.
The emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis) is a destructive wood-boring pest of ash trees (Fraxinus spp.). Native to China, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the Russian Far East, the emerald ash borer beetle (EAB) was unknown in North America until its discovery in southeast Michigan in 2002. Today, EAB infestations have been detected in 35 states and the District of Columbia; Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
(Source)
Sadly, over the past few years, the green metallic-like ash borer beetle bore inside our ash trees, ravaging them — leaving behind massive decay, and destroying the natural green canopy above us. In the meantime, the dying trees provided a home for plentiful lichen.
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”.
Piece of Mindful 