Author: DOuG pRATt

The truth is out there…. waaay out there

Conspiracy theories abound, and all of them make me cover my ears and hum. Not because I don’t want to hear the “truth,” but because I don’t want to hear nonsense. Keith Allen, the father of Lily Allen, the bad girl of British Pop, has a documentary pushing the idea that Princess Diana was murdered by the Royal Family.

http://youtu.be/V5PFWc8DgFw

When has any conspiracy theory ever held up to serious examination? “Water-tight” cases were made that JFK was killed by Castro. No, wait. The Mob did it. Or was it really LBJ? Of course we didn’t actually go to the Moon. And 9/11 was an inside job. A current example is the so-called birther crowd. They demanded to see Obama’s full birth certificate from Hawaii, and when he produced it they declared it to be a fake.

Today’s Diane Rehm radio talk show featured author Jonathan Kay, who has written a book called Among the Truthers.

[audio:http://public.npr.org/anon.npr-podcasts/podcast/305/510071/136247861/WAMU_136247861.mp3|titles=Diane Rehm: Jonathan Kay ‘Among the Truthers’]

Where things get messy is with the Gulf of Tonkin and Saddam Hussein’s WMD. These have been proven to my satisfaction to have been hyped threats, with the intent of justifying military action. The problem is, from these facts people make the leap to saying that because the government has been deceitful in some instances, then FDR wanted Pearl Harbor to happen and a UFO really did crash in Roswell, New Mexico.

Barnes Newberry’s new show!

This just in from Boston-based DJ Barnes Newberry, whose radio show “Highway 61 Revisited” was part of my Saturday mornings for ten years:

RADIO NEWS! Thrilled to announce I will be on-air again very soon with my new show My Back Pages on mvyradio (mvyradio.com). Great station, fine music choices and terrific staff! Show will be Saturdays, 8 am -12 noon, available online only. All shows will be archived. Start date to be announced shortly. Please spread the word. If you were a fan of my old Highway 61 Revisited program, this will be right down your alley!

Thanks Barnes, this is great news! I’m looking forward to hearing you again. MVYradio.com is a great Internet radio station, and it has a high quality 96 Kbps audio stream. After you get started at the station I will become a member and send them some bucks in your name.

Eclairs, I declare

At work today I saw some cookies in the break room that must have been left over from some meeting, not long after my group had muffins and bagels in our monthly meeting. This brought to mind one of my favorite Disney Silly Symphonies, The Cookie Carnival, a lavish and fascinating cartoon from 1935.

Does this remind you of Dorothy’s reception four years later in The Wizard of OZ, with the parade, the Lullaby League, and the Lollipop Guild? At 2:30 into the cartoon, watch what the cookie guy (with Goofy’s voice) does with the eclairs. Obviously, the animators knew exactly what they were doing to get the attention of the adults in the audience. And I don’t think the angel food guys were interested in marrying anybody but each other.

DOuG of Arabia

I’m watching Lawrence of Arabia on TCM. One of the most memorable movie experiences of my life was seeing the 1989 reissue in a downtown Boston theater.

http://youtu.be/RQA_ldX0VI0

What made it so memorable, besides the fact it’s a great movie, was that only days before I had returned from Arabia myself. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

I spent a month there on business, and it was a very busy, unusual month. I turned down an invitation to see a public beheading, from an American who had been working there for ten years. He told me the single most important issue confronting the Kingdom, and in turn America, over the next 20 years would be the Islamic Revolution that had begun ten years before in Iran. He wasn’t wrong.