All This Is That has returned to using word verification for comments. It kind of cuts against our ideas of creative anarchy and freedom, but we are seeing increasing--and skankier--spam all the time. So, you'll have to answer the word challenge to post a comment. Sorry about that.
Fifteen years ago, Jerry Garcia passed away. We got to see him a couple of times on his last tour with the dead, in Seattle in May, 1995. The photo below is from that show, I still miss the man and the music.
A few Garcia quotes:
"Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil. "
"For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part. "
"I'm shopping around for something to do that no one will like. "
"Nobody stopped thinking about those psychedelic experiences. Once you've been to some of those places, you think, 'How can I get back there again but make it a little easier on myself?' "
"Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us. "
"It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness. "
"I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves."
"What we do is as American as lynch mobs. America has always been a complex place. " ---o0o---
The Antikythera Mechanism has buffaloed scientists and technologists ever since sponge divers found it on a sea floor almost 110 years ago. As a largely unexplained mystery, it has also inflamed the UFOlogists. Was it the work of brilliant ancient Greek Scientists, or a gift from our cousins, The Greys? Well, I'm really good either way. As an even potential contribution from the Greys, it qualifies for inclusion as another tidbit of Alien Lore. . .
The Antikythera mechanism may be an ancient Greek sort-of-clockwork device that has taken longer than a hundred years to understand. And we still don't really understand it. The mechanism is housed in the Greek National Archaeological Museum in the Greek capital and is regarded to be the single most complex antiquity in existence. I saw it at the museum in Athens two years ago, but really didn't think a lot about it until Jeff Clinton recently pointed out several articles and videos about the science and origins of the device.
The question you have to ask: were the ancients really smarter than us (in that we haven't figured it out yet), or was the device something left behind by Our Cousins, The Greys? Anytime we can't really explain why or how something happened, there is a group of people who will attribute it to aliens, or The Greys. Gene Rodenberry was particularly cranky about this--saying something to the effect that every time we can't explain something, or we find something particularly brilliant and ancient, people say it came from the aliens. It's didn't, he said, we're smart!
The Great Pyramids are often attributed as the work of Visitors. Rodenberry believed this happens because we somehow can't accept that our forebears weren't just knuckle-dragging troglodytes. They were, in fact, smart--wickedly smart. So smart that this device used some of the same techniques and technology that we wouldn't come around to until we began to construct the first serious and powerful analog (e.g., mechanical) computers in the 20th century.
Research is still ongoing--we keep learning from and analyzing the device. The device is stunningly complex. People originally thought it was some sort of clock, but when Greek inscriptions were found using advanced technology, it turned out to be an engine for predicting eclipses and moon phases and the positions of the planets. Scientists say it seems to be 1,000 years ahead of its time.
On the other hand, the device seems to mainly track the five planets known at that time. Wouldn't The Greys, having flown to earth, been aware of the other planets in our little solar system?
From various articles, you learn that the machine was able to perform computational tasks 1400 years or so before the time when crude machines of this sort probably appeared. What sort of tasks? Well, using 37 gears or so, it can do subtractions, multiplications and divisions to show the cycles of the moon, predict eclipses, and who knows what else? It even has an adjustment you can make for Leap Day, since the calendar it employs requires you to catch up with reality once every four years.
From The Wikipedia:The mechanism is the oldest known complex scientific calculator. It contains many gears, and is sometimes called the first known analog computer,[8] although its flawless manufacturing suggests that it may have had a number of predecessors during the Hellenistic Period which have not yet been discovered.[9] It appears to be constructed upon theories of astronomy and mathematics developed by Greek astronomers and it is estimated that it was made around 150-100 BC.
The most recent findings of The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, as published in the July 30, 2008, edition of Nature also suggest that the concept for the mechanism originated in the colonies of Corinth. We know the Corinthians were no 'tards.
When a date was entered via a crank (which we did not recover), the mechanism calculated the position of the Sun, Moon, or other astronomical information such as the location of other planets. Not bad,
As you probably know by now, Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul helped *allegedly* kidnap a female student and tried to force her to smoke marijuana in a "prank" during his days at Texas's Baylor University, a GQ article reported.
Paul, with another member of a "secret liberal society" targeted a woman who was a teammate on the swim team. The kidnappers were members of the NoZe Brotherhood, an organization of liberal-minded students at the Waco, TX Baptist college.
The woman told GQ "He and Randy [Paul] came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They'd been smoking pot."
Later, they drove her to a creek in the countryside and forced her to worship a bogus God. "They told me their god was 'Aqua Buddha' and that I needed to bow down and worship him," the woman said.
"The whole thing was kind of sadistic. They were messing with my mind. It was some kind of joke."
Paul campaign manager Jesse Benton told Slate.com it was weighing its options, including legal options. “We will not tolerate drive-by journalism by a writer with a leftist agenda." Benton never explicitly denied the story. That is telling in itself.
You have to wonder how Dr. Paul can possibly wiggle out of this one. This can't play too favorably with his base, whoever they are. . . ---o0o---
First, thanks to regular tipsterDean Ericksen for pointing out this treasure trove!
The excellent blog, Letter of Note, has just released a fascinating compendium of Edward Mike Davis's Tiger Oil Company memos. This guy makes Buddy Rich look look warm and cuddly. He is consistently angry, tyrannical, and unintentionally humorous.
As I also wrote about that Johnny Carson egg sketch with Dom DeLuise, this makes 30 years ago seem like a long, long time. Jump over to Letters of Note and check out these gems.
The website also includes transcripts of all 22 memos. Wow. Many years ago, I had one boss nearly this bad, at Carl Fischer Music Publishers in NYC. What kept him in check was that he was not actually the owner of the company, although he liked you to believe he was. He was like a zeppelin in a hurricane, straining at his moorings. It seemed like any minute he could go completely crackers...He had a frightening, but in retrospect, awesome and wonderful pompadour. He was from Staten Island, natch.
Thanks to a good friend of All This Is That, Dr. Stephen Clarke-Willson, for another great tip.
As you know from previous Alien Lore stories here, over the last year or so, Russia, France, and England have opened up and begun releasing their UFO/Grey/Alien files. Literally thousand of documents have already been released by these three countries, with many thousands more queued up for release as I type this.
The Brits just released their latest batch--including a letter saying that Winston Churchill ordered a 50 year cover-up of a wartime encounter between a UFO and military pilot.
The files, published by England's National Archives, "span decades and contain scores of witness accounts, sketches and classified briefing notes documenting mysterious sightings across the country," according to Reuters.
An unidentified letter writer in 1999 says that a Royal Air Force plane returning from a mission in Europe during World War Two was "approached by a metallic UFO." The author says his grandfather attended a wartime meeting between Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower during which the two expressed concern over the incident and "decided to keep it secret." The Ministry of Defence was unable to find any primary source materials regarding this claim: and , in addition, "... the MoD does not have any expertise or role in respect of 'UFO/flying saucer' matters or to the question of the existence or otherwise of extraterrestrial lifeforms, about which it remains totally open-minded."
An earlier release--an ATIT Alien Lore post,--details a 1995 sighting. A plane approaching Manchester airport experienced a near-collision with an "unidentified object," in which a witness claimed he saw a UFO "20 times the size of a football field." (Just about Independence Day-sized). An investigation failed to turn up anything.
"Prior to the demise of the Former Soviet Union, aircraft were scrambled some 200 times annually to intercept and investigate uncorrelated tracks penetrating the UK Air defence region (AKADR) from the north..." it said. The last scramble was in September 1991 -- just about the time the Soviet Union imploded.
This inspiring quote comes from Jim Thompson's last story.
"Would they do it?" I said. "How can you be sure they would, Mr. Krutz? Have you ever thought about the potential in a crusade for not doing the things that someone else would do if you didn't?"
A few seconds later, the narrator brutally murders Mr. Krutz. OK--in light of later developments, maybe it's not so inspiring. You have to admit, 'though, that sentence "Have you ever thought..." is pretty good. ---o0o---
