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Hippy Music
Like a pine tree (something) a winding road, I got a
name, I got a name........
Tonight I am thinking about all those 60s / 70s hippy songs. A lot of them made no
sense, and I don't personally believe that you can attribute all of that to their pot-smoking. Anyway, I'm not talking about
"I Am The Walrus" or the Rolling Stones or the Doors. I'm talking about Cat Stevens and Harry Chapin and Peter, Paul &
Mary. These people all thought they were so deep and so complex. Like you couldn't really listen to "Puff The Magic Dragon"
and tell 1) It was a song about smoking pot, and 2) It was written while they were smoking pot.
Some of them just
confound me, like that "I've Got A Name" one. Others really show their age, like Jim Croce's "Time In A Bottle"
If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that
I'd like to do
Is to save every day
Til eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you
Now, following the internal logic of the song; if he could
somehow save time in a bottle, he would save every day...to spend them with you. Well, which is it? Is he saving them or spending
them? And if he's saving every day, in a bottle, where or when is he spending them? After he's dead? After his girlfriend
is? It would be much simpler, and more meaningful, if we understood how the bottling process works. Let's say I "save" a day
in a bottle, what happens? Do I sleep, go to work, cut the grass, blah blah blah, and just go through my daily life, then
open the bottle, wake up, and have the whole day over again? Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day? That would be cool. But it
wouldn't make sense to save every day to spend them with one person, or you'd never accomplish anything and have no goals.
Of course, that's what being a hippy was all about, anyway: Never wasting time working or bathing or anything.
Continuing:
If I had a box just for wishes
And dreams that had never
come true
The box would be empty
Except for the memory
Of how they were answered by you
Ok, this makes somewhat less sense than the
first stanza. You have a box for 1) wishes, and 2) dreams that had never come true. This would be very convenient, assuming
that by opening the box you could make your dreams and/or wishes come true. I have to assume this is what the box is for,
otherwise there wouldn't be much point to it. After all, I have both wishes and dreams that have never come true, and I don't
have any need for a box in which to keep them. Anyway, the first problem I have with this is that this hippy guy's box is
empty. Even a hippy would had to have had some wishes to use, like world peace, saving the whales, or making George McGovern
President. For myself, I could think of quite a few, starting with absolute power over every living being in the entire universe.
Having said that, my second problem with this stanza is that he explicitly states that the box would be for wishes and dreams,
and yet his would be full of memories. He didn't say anything about memories being in the box. He should have specified that
before giving an inventory of the box's contents. Just like a hippy, though, to use the box for something it wasn't designed
for. Plus, he probably did have a lot of hippy wishes to make but told this girl that just to get laid. That's all they ever
did was smoke pot and get laid.
Follow me on this:
Time In A Bottle: Let's assume it was possible. I'm not
sure how this phenomenon would manifest itself, but let's say for the sake of argument that it was the Groundhog Day thing
I talked about earlier. There are so many possibilities here. You could go out and do anything you wanted to, then start the
day over. You could sell days to other people and get rich (assuming they could live their own days over and not have to live
them as you, which in my case I wouldn't get five cents for). It would be cool if you could sell other people's days, though,
or even steal someone's days. Like a celebrity.
Ok, moving on.
Boxes of Wishes: Gosh, the possibilities are
limitless here. You could rule the world. Even if you couldn't defy the laws of physics or force all the world leaders to
concede power to you, you could still sell your wishes and get rich. You could wish that everyone would believe everything
you said no matter how outlandish it is. You could change anything about yourself or other people.
I've spent a great
deal of time talking about how this guy was a hippy and all the music was hippy music. But even still today most musicians
and actors are hippies. I don't know why it is that most creative pursuits attract hippies, or why liberals are always poets
and ballerinas.
You do have people like Tom Selleck and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and people in the middle like Bruce
Willis and Ted Nugent. And even Ronald Reagan was an actor at one time, but I'm not sure he counts because he was a Democrat
at the time.
I don't wish harm on anyone and I understand that people believe different things. Its just that liberals
are mostly wrong. But whatever. What I don't get is why there's no rock group that's all conservative, or why all the hippies
are drawn to Hollywood. Some people say its because conservatives are all greedy and don't want to go to Hollywood, because
they'd rather get rich on Wall Street. I don't buy this, though, because movie stars and rock stars are all bajillionaires.
I just can't answer this one.
Head Injuries & Nursery Rhymes
I don't know why children's rhymes have a recurring theme
of head injuries. Like Mother Goose:
Jack fell down
And broke his crown
And Jill came
tumbling after
So, Jack fell down and cracked his head open? Was Jill qualified
to administer emergency first aid in the event of head trauma?
It's raining, it's pouring
The old man is snoring
He
bumped his head
And he went to bed
And he didn't get up in the morning
This sounds like a concussion. I'm not a diagnostician and
even if I was I wouldn't be able to diagnose something based on a second-hand narrative, but I've always been taught that
when someone has a concussion you should keep them awake or they may not wake up. I wonder did the man die? Or maybe the rhyme
should be more accurate:
It's raining, it's pouring
The old man is snoring
He
bumped his head
And he went to bed
And he lapsed into a coma and languished in a vegetative state for the rest of
his freakish existence
Who Killed JFK? A Theory
On Gilligan's Island it seemed like the only reason
they never got rescued was because of Gilligan. He always seemed to screw something up, and it usually involved tripping over
something. You would think that the others on the island would have caught on to this and shut him up in a cave every time
they tried to get rescued.
<<Of course, it was always like this on
TV. Like every week someone put a spell on Darren and no one figured it out til the end, but if it was me I would be totally
the opposite and completely paranoid about it so that every time I broke wind I would wonder if Endora put a gas spell on
me (see: The Seven Plots of Bewitched). Or on Star Trek, every time I tripped or got dizzy or just lost track of time I would wonder if it
was a "spatial distortion" or a "temporal anomaly" that no one's ever seen before. And I know that The Incredible Hulk
took place years before anyone ever heard of Ritalin or Prozac, but by the late 70s manic depressives had been using lithium
as a mood stabilizer for years, and yet David Banner would rather have stood at ground zero of a nuclear blast if there was
a .002% chance it might cure him; when, face it, his problem was not that he was radioactive, it was just that he freaked
out every time he didn't have change for the pay phone.>>
Anyway, it wasn't like the island was hard to find. People landed on it
every week. It seems unlikely that they were never rescued. However unlikely it sounds, my theory is that they didn't want
to be rescued. Think about it. Here you had:
- An extremely wealthy industrialist who, despite an unexplained and extended
absence, somehow maintained his fortune in the U.S.,
- One of the finest scientific minds ever known who was freakishly brilliant
in virtually every scientific discipline known,
- A veteran of WWII with a questionable past, given to frequent auditory and
visual hallucinations, and
- An extraordinarily beautiful Hollywood starlet who somehow managed to avoid
testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee despite her intimate acquaintance with virtually every Hollywood
star of the early- to late-50s.
How did this unlikely group come to board the same small touring boat at
the exact same time? Wouldn't the Howells, at least, have chartered a private yacht, assuming that they didn't already own
one? What are the chances that a famous Hollywood starlet would board the same tour as a Kansas farm-girl?
In his book Here On Gilligan's Isle, Russell Johnson (who portrayed
"The Professor") relates that filming of the "second" pilot for the TV show was overshadowed by a national tragedy: The assassination
of President John F. Kennedy. During the opening credits of the first season (the black-and-white ones that you hardly ever
see), as the Minnow leaves port, you can in fact see several flags at half-mast in memory of the slain President.
Let's review what we know about Kennedy's assassin: A thin, gangly young
man with a military background, socially inept and easily manipulated by others. He worked on the U2 Project in Japan in the
50s and was an excellent marksman. He went to the Soviet Union to "defect" but was turned away. In November 1963 he shot the
President from the third story of the Texas School Book Depository and was subsequently killed himself by Jack Ruby.
Now let's review what we know about "Gilligan": A thin, gangly young man,
socially inept and easily manipulated by others. Not much is known of his early life, but at some point in his teen years
he began an association with Jonas Grumby a/k/a "The Skipper," a war veteran who also has a questionable past.
What's the connection between Oswald and Gilligan? We know that Oswald
was in a Dallas morgue at the same time Gilligan was setting out on his "three hour tour" from the Hawaiian Islands in 1963.
But aside from an eerie physical resemblance, there appears to be no connection.
Or is there? According to recently declassified documents from the former
Soviet Union, the KGB was known to have been developing a project in human cloning as early as 1948. To what degree the program
was successful, not much can be verified. But could the resemblance between Oswald and Gilligan be more than coincidence?
Is it possible that Oswald's claim to be nothing more than a "patsy" may have had some truth to it?
Let's look at "The Island":
There is, in fact, no evidence that living on the island was a hardship.
The inhabitants of the island lived in an almost Utopian collective and lacked for nothing. The Skipper never lost weight.
The women always had clothes. Where and how were they being supported?
The inhabitants of The Island were always turning invisible or gaining
super-powers (including enhanced vision and physical strength, or more exotic psychic abilities like mind-reading). Were these
KGB experiments?
Even more telling: On three separate occasions, people landed on The Island
who looked just like them. And the one who looked like Gilligan was a Russian spy. Coincidence? What about the pro-Castro
beatnik on Dobie Gillis who looked just like him?
Were there Gilligan clones set in place across the U.S. by the KGB to further
their sinister aims? Was the real "Gilligan" the donor agent who was whisked away to a Utopian Leninist collective immediately
after the assassination? And finally, was Oswald the clone agent who did it, or was he, as he claimed, nothing more than a
"patsy"?
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