Pop quiz (courtesy of Good Eats)

I watch a show that has been running since 1998, locally and then nationally, called “Good Eats”, hosted by chef Alton Brown. I just discovered the show this year. It runs in half-hour episodes, and while I don’t look to it for recipes, I do find it useful for cooking and grilling tips, and general information (like the difference between baking powder and baking soda). Brown has a delightful screen presence, so it’s been a pleasure to watch him age over time, to gain weight and then go back to svelte using diet tips I would throw out the window, but by which he lost 50 pounds. (Hint: Smoothies are not my thing.)

I tend to watch every episode, even as artichokes, beets and turnips are not of great interest.  But watching as I do early each evening (there are perhaps two hundred shows available by my count), I notice they occasionally (and subtly) toss in a movie or music reference, leaving it to the viewer to decide where it came from. Below are three I’ve picked up on, and I leave it to you to provide the reference. (It helps to have been born in the 20th Century.)

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On writing about staring into the abyss

I wrote the post below after having mulled on it for some time, and not exactly sure where I would take it. As always, with writing, I am surprised at the outcome.

However, and completely unanticipated, writing that piece generated bouts of depression. I was reminded of my childhood, my dysfunctional family, and living in the shadow of a super achiever.

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On staring into the abyss

I had an older brother, Steve (1943-2011) whom I idolized. I had no choice really, but I really did idolize him. Steve was one of those rare birds who was genuinely nice and smart, and who was a hard worker too. In other words, it would do no good to resent him, even as I, the younger brother (he was seven years older), was known by everyone we knew in common as “Steve’s kid brother”. Either Steve’s virtues fell upon me too, or not, but nowhere in the world I grew up in was there anything but love and admiration for my older brother.

Steve had “the calling”, meaning priesthood in our very Catholic family. When he announced late in his senior year of high school that he would enter the seminary in the fall, my parents’ hearts swelled with pride. Steve was not an ordinary human – once he got a traffic citation for a rolling stop, and Mom said “That will never happen again.” It was as if the parent-child relationship had reversed, as both Mom and Dad would look to Steve for advice as their other three sons struggled in life and passage into maturity.

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Coffee without milk, anyone?

It has come to my attention that some things I think uproariously funny are not at all funny to others. A couple of recent examples:

Sarah Silverman said this as part of her standup act a long while ago. I repeated it once when seated at a table next to a gay relative, openly so and married to another gay man. It was somewhat uncomfortable, not because he as gay, as we’ve all gotten over that. It was because he seemed above it all, the gathering we were at, the drinking and family tensions. So I decided to take a chance, and repeat the Silverman line to him.

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Comparison, Astronaut Resnick and Professor Resnick

I remember a few years back when I was doing this kind of work, I would take two subjects and grab ten photos of each, preferably looking at the camera. I would then go to Photoshop with each of the 20 photos and straighten the heads so that the eyes were level. I would then go to Microsoft Paint and adjust the head size of each photo so that the eyes were set at one-inch apart. Then I would construct two files each containing all ten heads for one of the subjects, and then bring in one-half of the face from the other subject, and compare it two the ten in the file in front of me.

That might come off as humorous, but all I can say today is that it brings back memories of neck pain. I have stenosis, so that doing tedious work like this places a strain on my neck. But I persist, as it was only by this kind of tedium that, for instance, I was able to identify Buddy Holly as a set of twins, and then later ID these twins as having morphed into 1) musician Gram Parsons (Birds, Flying Burrito Brothers), and 2) to identify the separate twins has having become a) film and music mogul David Geffen, and b) movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg. (See this post.)

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Challenger disaster revisited

I have to wonder, when deeply buried secrets are uncovered, how they got uncovered. Clues Forum years ago revealed that six of the seven Challenger astronauts who supposedly died on January 28, 1986 were still alive and well. I will repeat in this post the facial work I did before, but first want to wonder aloud … how on earth was this discovery made? Who would think to ask? Who would know to do the research, to run down the participants, and expose them to the (cognitive) world?

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Blog notes …

I have decided, partly due to lack of reader response, but also due to my own “enough!” feeling, not to write about Climate Change anymore. There is nothing new to learn there. It’s a psyop run by dishonest people, or worse yet, people who mind-meld to be in the right camp. They only want to make a living, and I understand that, so that I take it as a larger statement on the human condition. Like Diogenes, we must all carry lanterns.

I do follow blogs, and the one I have come to like the most is Climate, Etc., run by Judith Curry. She does not write much herself, but when she does it packs a punch. I refer you to that blog’s three most recent articles:

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The Memoirs of Billy Shears, Part II

I am reading this book on the presumption that no one else I know will do so. I’ve worked my way up to page 150, and when i say “worked” I mean less than that, as it is both interesting and annoying. It covers the history of the Beatles from a fan’s perspective, one that idolized them and believed in certain aspects of the group that I’ll list below. It’s annoying in that in order for me to believe every word of it, I would have to be quite stupid or, as with a good movie, offer up willing suspension of disbelief. There is no “Billy Shears,” there was no death of the original Paul, and no replacement. There were two Paul’s, identical twins, from the beginning.

In the fall of 1969 radio disc jockey Russell Gibb, WKNR-FM in Detroit, received a phone call from “Tom,” who told him that Paul McCartney had died and had been replaced in 1966 by a lookalike. Thus began a cottage industry that continues to this day, now called “PID”, or Paul is Dead. It is continually churned, new clues added now and then.

It is misdirection, designed to get us asking the wrong question. Paul McCartney was indeed replaced by a virtual lookalike, and I know who the replacement is. It was not hard to discover. If I could do it, so too could all of the sleuths (including Mike Williams, the “Sage of Quay”) who make those PID YouTubes and run those PID web pages.  Why don’t they? It is, I suspect, because they are tasked with keeping the mythology alive. They are disinformation agents.

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Seven dead in tragic crash near Yellowstone

Note to readers: Fool me once, and on and on we go. Our friend Petra immediately saw this accident as a fake event, based on misspelling of names and failure to get the location right. It looked real to me, and more so, looked as though they were deliberately concealing a massive death scene caused by lithium-ion batteries. They led me to where I would go anyway. I disagreed with Petra, and was sure I was right and she was wrong, and then in one story saw the the accident happened at “mile marker 399” in Idaho. Mile markers begin and end at the beginning and end of a road within a state, and Idaho does not have 399 miles to use. I went to the road department and looked up mile markers on US highway 20. There are 47 of them total. “399”, which can be read as 33333, or a Masonic reference, is meant to indicate to Freemasons everywhere that the event is fake. The scene below was staged. Nobody died, including Isaiah.

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Out of respect for sensibilities, I ask only the curious to go to the NBC website that reports on this crash, near Henry’s Lake in Idaho, and 20 miles away from Yellowstone National Park. Seven died, eight were injured, and no doubt burn units all over Idaho and Wyoming are on call and extremely busy. (Note, the caption to the photo says that the accident happened in Idaho near Henry’s Fork, east of Yellowstone. Geographically, it can only be west.)

Very often in movies and TV shows, vehicles in accidents burst into flames, sometimes for no good reason. In real life, such fires are not the ordinary outcome of collisions. That is done for dramatic effect. How many times have you seen a car rolling down a hillside after an accident, and then Gadzooks! It bursts into flames.

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