The impact of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination ó and its meaning 25 years later ó are explored in the’ hour-long documentary JFK – A TIME REMEMBERED, premiering Monday, November 21 at 9 p.m. (ET; check local listings) on PBS. Presented by WNET/New York, the program is a production of The Susskind Company and is made possible by funding from General Dynamics.
As a conspiracy nut registered with the Monkey-Brained Theorists of America, the grand old MBTA, I was absolutely tickled pink by the new Stephen King series on Hulu, 11.22.63. I have seen the first episode and loved the mix of fantasy, science-fiction, history, and horror that goes into telling a story of man who walks through a time portal into the past to be able to prevent the assassination of John Kennedy. Believe me, I know it is not true, despite what some of the anti-conspiracy nay-sayers will tell you about me. After all, they have a Monkey-Brained Club of their own and don’t even know it.
I went on a binge of watching JFK assassination-related videos on Hulu and on YouTube. There is some very good information out there compiled by some very dedicated and dogged researchers. The man who wrote the book Crossfire, Jim Marrs, is a very talented writer and researcher whose book became the basis for the movie JFKby Oliver Stone.
Marrs has an unfortunate gullibility that leads him to state as truth some very bizarre things about the New World Order, aliens and Area 51, the research of Alexander Sitchin into the ancient secrets of the Sumerians… and granted, I can’t prove some of the absolutely loony things contained in that aren’t true, but they are absolutely loony never-the-less. But when it comes to researching documents, interviewing and re-interviewing principle witnesses, and verifying facts, Marrs makes a very compelling case for the assassination of the President of the United States being done by the CIA, Secret Service, FBI, and President Lyndon Johnson.
It is a logical conclusion that Secret Service performed a cover-up during the assassination and its aftermath. They spirited the President’s body away in spite of the Dallas rules for murder investigation and autopsy. They washed and repaired the car it occurred in before the murder investigation could examine anything. They interfered with the actual autopsy, with important notes, photographs, and even the President’s brain that were placed in Secret Service’s custody going missing. No matter what you believe about the lone shooter theory, you can’t deny that a cover-up is the only explanation for these facts.
There is documented evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was working on the fringes of the CIA operation in New Orleans and reporting to J. Edgar Hoover about their activities. So, if he was a spy telling the right hand what the left hand was actually up to, who better to frame as the guilty gunman and then silence him before investigators could find out everything he knew?
And why does all this still matter more than 50 years later? Many of the actual perpetrators are dead, including former CIA hit man E. Howard Hunt who confessed to having a part in the assassination on his death bed. They can’t be punished now. But the corrupt organizations and political elite with their attendant influence are still operating in the world. This was a murder that never came to trial. Many of the facts have been sealed away by the very government agencies that have the most to hide. Connections to other CIA manipulations, like those surrounding 9-11, need to be revealed, and the way the government operates needs to be modified. But besides the fact that these things seriously impact our lives now, it is simply fun to dig and make connections and learn things that most people don’t generally know. There is monkey-brained joy in that.
Communicating with a wife is complicated. In fact, I couldn’t do the whole writer-think thing about that topic without writing a book. But I can successfully ruminate for about 500 words on the that awkward first encounter, the first time I ever was embarrassed in front of a non-sister girl.
In grade school I met my first crush in kindergarten. Alicia Stewart was a honey-sweet little brown-haired girl with a bow in her hair. I was a boy. I was not allowed to like girls. Hating them was the only thing that made sense to my friends and I. But, secretly, I didn’t hate Alicia. In fact, if I was ever to be doomed to be married when I grew up, I would’ve only accepted that horrible fate if it was with her. And in my small town school I saw her practically every school day. In fact, in Miss Malkin’s music class on Tuesdays and Thursdays I sat right next to her in Miss Malkin’s seating chart for six years.
In Miss Malkin’s music class we always did musical stuff like listening to classical records, singing songs for the yearly musical review concert (we did the songs from the musical The Music Man one year… you don’t get more musicky than that), and we did square dancing. Yeah, you heard that right. Square dancing. You had to have a girl for a partner. And one year, Miss Malkin decided it would be cute to have the boys ask the girls to be their partners. Now, as boys… in top secret boy-conversations, we had generally agreed that if such a problem would ever occur, Alicia Stewart was the only acceptable choice. We all hated girls. But we all were secretly in love with Alicia. She was girl-hating-boy approved. When I was twelve, there was another girl that was making me uncomfortable too. Marla Carter was nine when I was twelve. She had big brown eyes and dimples. Her face was somehow heart-shaped, and only Alicia could make my palms sweat any worse than she did. But in top secret boy-conversations it was ruled that she was a booger-eating little girl and totally toxic. Well, I didn’t totally agree, but I was still subject to all girl-hating directives.
“Okay,” Miss Malkin said, “the boys will now pick their partners… one at a time in alphabetical order.”
My last name began with the letter “B”, but my best friend Mark had a last name starting with “A”.
“I pick Alicia,” Mark said.
My heart sank. I had my pick of any girl besides Alicia. Marla was standing about four feet away from me, her hands folded together behind her back, looking at me with those puppy-dog eyes. My throat was too dry to speak.
“Um, ah… I can’t pick anyone…” I croaked. “You pick it, I will dance with it.”
“Now, don’t be like that, Michael. Get on with it!” Miss Malkin commanded. Everyone loved the music teacher, and so everyone obeyed her. I had to submit.
I looked at Marla, dug my toe into the floorboards, and said, “I choose my cousin Diane.”
Talking to girls has always been a matter of embarrassment. The words are always awkward and shaped not by my brain, but by my bowels. This fact has always been a hindrance to my dealings with the female species, but it has been an unending source of potential for writing humor.
When I was a boy playing cowboys and Indians with cap pistols and rubber tomahawks, we all knew that cowboys had a code. The guy in the white hat always shoots straight. He knows right from wrong. He only shoots the bad guy. He even shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand if he can. Westerns are about right and wrong, good and bad, and the unyieldingly good knights of plains.
And boys believe what they see on TV and in the movie theaters. People who make television shows never lie, do they? In fact, Wyatt Earp was based on a real guy who really lived and really shot the bad guys at the gosh-darn real OK Corral.
Daniel Boone was a real guy too. He faced the opening up of new lands full of deadly dangers. And when Fess Parker played him in 1964, wearing Davy Crockett’s coonskin hat, he walked the earth like a guardian angel, making everyone safe by the end of the episode. He even knew which Indians were good and which were bad. Mingo was always on Daniel’s side. And when they spoke to each other about the dangers they faced, it was never about killing the people they feared. It was about doing what is was right, about helping the community at Boonesboro to survive. Being encouraging… looking forward to a more settled future created by following the cowboy frontier code.
So, I am left wondering what ever happened to the cowboy code? I listen to Republican presidential candidates talking about dipping bullets in pig’s blood to kill Muslims, and building walls against Mexican immigrants, and why our right to carry assault rifles is sacred, and I wonder what happened. Didn’t they experience the same education from the television versions of the Great American Mythology? Didn’t they learn the code too?
I am old enough now to know that cap guns are not real guns and you cannot solve problems by shooting somebody. But that was never the point of the cowboy code. We need straight-shooters again in our lives, not to shoot people, but to tell the unvarnished truth. We need wise people who can tell who are the good Indians and who are the bad We need them to shoot the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands. And I know that’s asking for leaders to be larger than life and be more perfect than a man can actually be. But Daniel Boone was a real man. Myths and legends start with a fundamental truth.
Today’s picture is a potential Sci-Fi character for a Cissy Moonskipper story.
For fashion’s sake, I had to try another space suit. Of course, we have still forgotten the glove on the hand. This kid is in for a bit of severe frostbite if he goes out the airlock like this.
As I had drawn the character nude before applying the background and costume, I decided to put him into a skinny-dipping situation (in a more progressive town than Dallas.)
Being an ESL teacher (teacher of English as a Second Language) in Texas means a lot of exposure to kids who are nutty about soccer. I didn’t get to teach more than one football player in my time as a high school teacher. But soccer? Who can count? Both boys and girls. But don’t panic. This will not be a post about the joys of soccer. Or even Shakira’s amazing soccer videos where she dances and sings with very few clothes on. Whew! You dodged a bullet to the brain there.
This post is about achieving goals.
The recycled Paffoonies are all about my novel Magical Miss Morgan. It is my teacher-novel. After finishing a 31-year career of teaching and loving it and loving kids… I still needed a purpose in my life. In the Alan Watts and Carl Sagan videos I am going to site here, they both say that the only purpose human beings really ever have is the one the individual person chooses for himself (or herself). I chose to take all the things I learned as a teacher and boil them down into a stew of wisdom, humor, fairies, and silly words. The novel, then, represents the purpose I chose. And that is probably the reason why, when I finished the final edit last night, I was absolutely certain that this is the best novel I have ever written. I will submit the silly thing to the Chanticleer Book Reviews & Media YA novel contest as soon as I can scrape together the entrance fee. This is a better book than even Snow Babies. I foolishly believe I can win this time around. But the contest is hardly important. That is just a tool in the quest to build my book into a successful piece of work… to get others to complete the process and actually read the book. It will be published, even if I have to do it all myself and pay the money, as well as the blood, sweat, and tears. I have already scored the goal. It only remains to be seen if it ever gets posted on the scoreboard.
Here are the inspirational videos I wanted to share as well. One is from Alan Watts… if you have never heard of him, you seriously need to look him up. The other is from Carl Sagan. I offer both of these in the knowledge that most of you who bother to read any part of this will ignore them, but with the reminder that all the best treasure in life is found after some serious digging. My shovel is dinged-up royally, and my hands are covered in dirt. (Dang! Only 451 words today!)
The Sagan video is number 3 on the list this link gives you.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Cowboy Code
When I was a boy playing cowboys and Indians with cap pistols and rubber tomahawks, we all knew that cowboys had a code. The guy in the white hat always shoots straight. He knows right from wrong. He only shoots the bad guy. He even shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand if he can. Westerns are about right and wrong, good and bad, and the unyieldingly good knights of plains.
And boys believe what they see on TV and in the movie theaters. People who make television shows never lie, do they? In fact, Wyatt Earp was based on a real guy who really lived and really shot the bad guys at the gosh-darn real OK Corral.
Daniel Boone was a real guy too. He faced the opening up of new lands full of deadly dangers. And when Fess Parker played him in 1964, wearing Davy Crockett’s coonskin hat, he walked the earth like a guardian angel, making everyone safe by the end of the episode. He even knew which Indians were good and which were bad. Mingo was always on Daniel’s side. And when they spoke to each other about the dangers they faced, it was never about killing the people they feared. It was about doing what is was right, about helping the community at Boonesboro to survive. Being encouraging… looking forward to a more settled future created by following the cowboy frontier code.
So, I am left wondering what ever happened to the cowboy code? I listen to Republican presidential candidates talking about dipping bullets in pig’s blood to kill Muslims, and building walls against Mexican immigrants, and why our right to carry assault rifles is sacred, and I wonder what happened. Didn’t they experience the same education from the television versions of the Great American Mythology? Didn’t they learn the code too?
I am old enough now to know that cap guns are not real guns and you cannot solve problems by shooting somebody. But that was never the point of the cowboy code. We need straight-shooters again in our lives, not to shoot people, but to tell the unvarnished truth. We need wise people who can tell who are the good Indians and who are the bad We need them to shoot the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands. And I know that’s asking for leaders to be larger than life and be more perfect than a man can actually be. But Daniel Boone was a real man. Myths and legends start with a fundamental truth.
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