As Chicago Said ...

On their third album, Chicago presents a lengthy diatribe common to the 1970s, of resentment against The Man for ruining life for these overprivileged kids with a recording contract.  The shared emotion with the underclass might have been real, but there's some disingenuousness somewhere in there.  Not that I am any more pure than them ... I've simply admitted it and received forgiveness.

The words I'm referring to are from the Third Movement of "It Better End Soon," when the vocalist spits out, "You'll see that we got a raw deal ... "

Probably few guys in recent history got a more raw deal than President Kennedy.  Murdered long-distance by a bunch of sneaks?  That's a raw deal!  The guy was not morally pure or 100% a Good Guy ... but IMO civilized life might have been incinerated in the 1960s by a nuclear exchange if JFK (and RFK) hadn't resisted the impulses of the generals and other who wanted to nuke Russia or Cuba during the Missile Crisis.

Such willfulness might ... might ... have been one of the factors which led to the participation of government employees in the murder of JFK (and its ensuing cover-up).  Not that I necessarily give credence to the following article about George O'Toole's use of a voice analyzer on Oswald's arrest statements.

This is from the April 1975 issue of Penthouse.

As always, the management does not endorse nor guarantee any of the products advertised in the above images.

What do you think?  To me it's clear that Oswald could not have been the "sole" assassin.  And he could not have been upstairs in the Book Depository firing his alleged shots.  Because less than two minutes after the shots, a cop encountered Oswald in the first-floor break room drinking a Coke.  The elevator was occupied, and the stairs likewise contained people who would have encountered Oswald if he'd come down from the supposed "sniper's nest."

But "innocent"? Probably not.  He was likely a misfit Army guy recruited by the CIA to mock-defect to Russia.  After that, who knows?

Decide for yourself -- that's the American way!  See you Monday.

  

Mysteries Above and Below!

Here are some more book covers from my library, all tomes about things some of us wonder about (besides girls).

In January I reread this intriguing bit of "can you explain that?".  Sanderson lays out a lot of things observed in and under the watery kingdom, which bespeak either an organizing mind, or a category of self-organization PLUS obscurity on the part of Nature which we haven't acknowledged yet.

The above 1976 tome is in parts fass-kinn-ate-in' (as Popeye would say) and so, so dreary.  Smith goes to soporific length in quoting long prose bits regarding visits to vast underground places, usually in South America.  But only 10% of such wordage really applies to a useful description about these subterranean realms.

The topics on the cover finally get around to being discussed, but this Zebra paperback would benefit from a radical diet to about 50% of its body weight.

This 1977 Berkley paperback is full of breathless speculation about the supposed disappearances of nearly everybody but you and me.  And I'm not so sure about you, podner.  After awhile, even the most jaded of us gets tired of "could it be ... ?" and "perhaps ...?" and the like.

Well, it may be a mystery to you why I accumulate these things.  It's just one part of a brain which, like ole Sherlock Holmes, craves stimulation.  As decades have passed, however, I've come to realize how much I will never know.  And I've decided to weed out some of the clutter, like some books which pose few helpful explications.  (The Sanderson book is the most fun and absorbing of the lot.  I'm gonna hang onto it for another decade or two.)

See you Thursday, fellow mysterions!