EMPS: Too Rare to Even Photograph

Carly came up with an interesting combination of words for the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot this week: Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #126:Rare Whte Scales. Not having ready access to albino rattlesnakes, I cogitated all week about this. Then I had a great idea! I would photograph our "butcher cover," a rare Beatles album cover.

But our Beatles records are inaccessible right now. I know: I tried, fighting my way past stacked boxes and furniture to the wall where the record crates are, pulling out LPs at random and examining them with the help of a flashlight. I didn't find the main Beatles crate. But I'm going to show you, courtesy of someone's eBay item, what I wanted to photograph for you:



This is a "pasteover" copy of Yesterday and Today, a US Capitol Records album that basically compiled songs the American distributor left off previous albums plus a few non-LP 45s. When they did the photo shoot for this album cover, the Beatles originally let the photographer do something surreal and Dali-esque...and, to American sensibilities, in grossly bad taste:



It wasn't long before this cover was pulled out of stores, probably a week at most. Rather than throw the print run away, Capitol hastily pasted over the butcher cover with the bland "trunk cover." But if you look very closely at these "pasteover" copies, you can just make out the V of Ringo's black shirt showing through the white album cover. And there you have it: it's rare, it's got a white background, and it involves (musical) scales.

But those aren't my photos, so let's move on. Check out these exhibits from the Museum of the Weird:



Here are some of Harlan Ellison's older, rarer books, all with mostly white covers. Especially rare is this one:




I got this for $2 at my very first science fiction convention. It was worth about $80 at the time, at least according to Harlan. That was 35 years ago. The book dealer was miffed that the guy helping out at his table let it go so cheap, but he honored the deal.

These books haven't much to do with scales, I admit. So let's introduce this guy:



This lizard was chowing down on a cactus at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum last July. I don't know how rare either the lizard or the cactus was. The lizard was completely wild and unconfined, not part of an exhibit.

Okay, you want a rarer and whiter creature? Okay, but it's almost certainly John's photo:




Here's one of the Siegfried and Roy white tigers, photographed seven years ago. This was about six months after the incident that ended that show. This may or may not be the particular tiger that accidentally injured Roy Horn.

And that's the best I can do on the topic Rare - White - Scales! Hope you liked it!

Karen

Thirty Years Later, John Lennon Is Still Dead - But His Music Isn't

I'm old enough to remember where I was then I heard John Lennon had died. For that matter, I'm old enough to remember the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in the summer of 1964. I've been cruising YouTube and Google tonight for appropriate clips and tributes, and it occurs to me I should get something posted here before this 30th anniversary of his death passes.

Husband John's best friend from college (CGI wizard John Berton) called that night (the 8th) and said, "Lennon's been shot."

I couldn't believe it. "Is he all right?"

"He's dead."

It was a shock. I had been a Beatles fan most of my life, had done a report on them in high school, and had bought all of their LPs (except for Revolver, which I already owned) during high school and college. John had not only their commercial albums, but a number of bootlegs of their demos and studio sessions. We even had a large Beatles mirror hanging on our living room wall.

But Lennon was dead, and I was the co-owner/manager of a tiny Rock memorabilia store, Rockarama in Columbus Ohio. I had to do something in response to this horrific and life-changing event. Five years ago, I wrote about what happened next in my life, as a direct result of John Lennon's death:

Memories of December 9th
(reprinted from a post 5 years ago

On December 9th, 1980, I went to work as usual; but it was decidedly not an ordinary day.

My job at the time, such as it was, was as co-owner, manager and sole employee of Shirt Off My Back / Rockarama. The first part of the name was the original business, started by Kal and Larry in 1979. Yes, it was a used T-shirt shop. Kal and Larry also did computer portraits (primitive dot matrix portraits printed on cloth banners) at Lazarus and elsewhere on a seasonal basis.

I made about half of the buttons shown here.

We were next door to Mole's Used Records, so the rock and roll angle worked much better than the used shirts. We bought out Larry, and started carrying new rock T-shirts, posters, stickers, patches and buttons. I designed and made some of the buttons myself, while others came from suppliers in New York and London. Before we moved to a larger storefront, the place was crammed so full of all of these things, plus 45s and vintage rock collectibles, that our slogan was "A Lot of Stuff in a Tiny Room!"

John Lennon had spent half of the 1970s out of the public eye and away from recording studios, instead playing househusband to Yoko and father to little Sean. He was expected to reemerge around his birthday (and Sean's) in October, 1980. This was the meaning (or, at least, a meaning) of some buttons we had for sale, that simply said "Where's Lennon?" But John had recently relaunched his career on schedule, with the Double Fantasy LP and the hit single (Just Like) Starting Over. We knew where Lennon was, so those particular buttons were no longer topical as of early December 1980.

But the morning of December 9th, those buttons seemed to have a new and sadder meaning. People started coming in, looking for something to wear in memorial to him, and leaving with that button. So I used press-on lettering to design a new button: just the name John Lennon in white on a black background. I made about 75 or 100 of them, and gave them away. It didn't seem right to profit by his death.

Just a few weeks before that, I'd had a conversation with someone about every major rock band having at least one dead member. I figured at the time that the Beatles were "pre-disastered" (a Garp reference), because they'd met their dead member quota with Stu Sutcliffe, back in 1962. The rest of the Beatles weren't drug addicts (not anymore), and weren't likely to die of a brain hemorrhage (as Stu did), so they ought to be pretty safe. But it turned out I was wrong about that one.

Two other things happened at Rockarama on or about December 9th. One was a run-in with a couple of loud-mouthed college boys, who tried to get a rise out of me by saying they were glad John Lennon was dead. I kept my temper, and asked them to leave my store. They declined to leave on demand, but soon wandered off when I failed to entertain them further.

The other was a phone call with Toni from Relix, wholesale purveyors of rock buttons, Grateful Dead collectibles, and Relix Magazine. Toni told me she didn't have anyone to write a Lennon tribute for the next issue of Relix, which was going to press almost immediately. I offered to write it for her, and have it ready the next day. That little article was my first professional sale as a writer. I got paid $35.00 for it, and was glad to get it.

I remember other things from that tiny room, such as Mark Eitzel writing in his songs and poetry notebook in my store, back when his stage name was Billy Lee Buckeye. I remember that early on, I was so ignorant about 1970s rock that I didn't know Led Zeppelin was popular. I remember buying someone's vintage Beatles collection for about $75, including 1964 drinking glasses and bobbing head dolls. I didn't mean to cheat the guy; I just didn't realize the items were old, because they were in such great condition (and because a lot of the old stuff had been pirated in the 1970s). And I remember selling lots and lots of Pat Benatar posters, and buttons of Pink Floyd's The Wall.

Groovy times, man.

Rockarama moved onto 13th Ave. in 1981, and shut down in 1982. It never paid me more than lunch money and the occasional record or collectible. It didn't really break even, most of the time. We supported it by taking selected stock to record shows on weekends. Eventually I had to go get a real job. But heck, it was fun while it lasted. I have no regrets. Well, almost no regrets. Not about Rockarama itself.

***

That terrible, awful night still echoes across the intervening decades, like the final chord in A Day in the Life. It silenced John Lennon, ending a period of musical creativity shortly after it began, with no possibility of more brand new music to come. The much longed-for Beatles reunion happened only in the form of a posthumous collaboration, with Lennon's old bandmates adding on to a couple of his old demo recordings.

Amazingly and rather wonderfully, however, the musical legacy of John Lennon and the Beatles continues, even without John Lennon sitting at his piano or guitar. My husband published a handful of books about the Beatles in the late 1980s, written by the pseudonymous L R E King. The books were an attempt to catalog all the Beatle-related demos, live recordings, studio sessions, remixes and "outfakes" (recordings marketed by bootleggers as something they weren't) that had surfaced illegally. Much of the best material was later released legally, on The Beatles Anthology, Live at the BBC and so on. Nowadays, much of the information King worked so hard on is really available online. There is even sort-of-new material in the form of the Love album, plus gray market remixes and tributes.

And the Internet is such that tonight I've watched a 1966 video of Paperback Writer/Rain, which I probably first saw the night it aired on The Ed Sullivan Show. I've watched a 2007 live clip of a Beatles tribute band perform Hold My Hand, the Rutles song from 1978, which parodied the Beatles' appearance on Ed Sullivan in 1964. I've read parts of a 1980 interview with Lennon that Rolling Stone just got around to publishing. All these years later, Lennon's legacy is as vital as ever.

Karen

Round Robin: The Beatles' Fool, Illustrated

Good Morning, Good Morning, good! This week's Round Robin Photo Challenge is called For a Song. My inspiration, at least in part, was a book called The Beatles' Illustrated Lyrics, which I borrowed from a friend of my mom's many years ago. So, naturally, on John Lennon's 70th birthday, I'm illustrating a Beatles song. It's one of Paul's, but close enough!



Day after day,
Alone on a hill,
The man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still;
But nobody wants to know him;
They can see that he's just a fool,
And he never gives an answer,



But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down,
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning 'round.



Well on the way,
Head in a cloud,



The man of a thousand voices talking perfectly loud;




But nobody ever hears him,
Or the sound he appears to make,
And he never seems to notice,



But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down,
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning 'round.

A thousand voices of thanks to my friend Kevin Harrington, who played the Fool for my camera.

Let's see what everyone else illustrated for us!


Linking List
as of 12:26 PM MST/PDT,
Saturday, October 9th, 2010

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com

Linda - Posted!
Mommy's Treasures
http://mommystreasures.blogspot.com

Jama
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Ruth - Posted!
The ScrabbleQueen Knits, Too
http://scrabblequeen.wordpress.com

Holly - Posted!
Easy Living the Hard Way
http://easylivingthehardway.blogspot.com/

Tara - Posted!
The Lengths
http://mommaneversaid.blogspot.com/

Mairie
Wordinthehand
http://wordinthehand.blogspot.com/

maryt - Posted!
Work of the Poet
http://workofthepoet.blogspot.com

Erin - Posted!
A Hardcore Life
http://erin-hardcorehensel.blogspot.com

Gattina - Posted!
Keyhole Pictures
http://gattina-keyholepictures.blogspot.com/

Sandy - Posted!
From the Heart of Texas
http://sandyfromtheheartoftexas.com

ellen b - Posted!
The Happy Wonderer
http://happywonderer.wordpress.com

Rue - Posted!
Passion in the Moments
http://ethos-photographic.blogspot.com

Peggy - Posted!
Who Can Discover It?
http://whocandiscoverit.blogspot.com/


For John.

Karen

Weekend Assignment #273: Music(ians) of Your Life

Michael Jackson's death inspires this week's assignment.

Weekend Assignment #273: The death of Michael Jackson has provoked a huge reaction, much of it from people who grew up listening to his music. Is there a particular musician whose work has particular meaning for you?
Extra Credit: What is your personal reaction, if any, to the death of Michael Jackson?

From Michael Jackson vigil Tucson

I vaguely remember the Jackson 5 cartoon show, and listening to Ben on the car radio; so I guess you could say I grew up with the music of Michael Jackson. When I worked for McDonald's in 1979-1980, I remember proposing my opinion that Michael Jackson would benefit psychologically from being made to work anonymously at McDonald's for a month, to get some idea what the real world is like. I still believe that premise, that a celebrity who creates an artificial world around himself to the exclusion of the real world only exacerbates any self-destructive tendencies. John always said that a celebrity who has survived fame and come out psychologically healthy could do a good consulting business helping new celebs avoid the all-too-common pitfalls of drugs, ego, and money issues. A few years later, as an employee of Buzzard's Nest records, I sold a heck of a lot of Thriller LPs and cassettes, and listened to the promo copy daily for a while. I later listened to our promo of the Jacksons LP Victory, but was less than impressed by that one.

But really, I was never a Michael Jackson fan. I'm a little annoyed that my favorite cable station, MSNBC, has been pretty much hijacked by coverage of his death over the past 24 hours and counting, and that some interviewees have placed his cultural importance above that of Elvis or the Beatles. Fair enough, though: he broke the color barrier on MTV, was hugely influential in the fields of rock/pop, dance and fashion, and fascinated the public almost as much with his tragic life and death and bizarre behavior as because of his music. And we are now in the world of Twitter and texting and 24-hour news cycles. This sort of thing is probably inevitable, if not quite reasonable. (What about Iran? What about the energy bill? Isn't anything else happening today?)

Thursday evening I left the constant Michael Jackson coverage behind on tv and headed to Reid Park with the dogs. As we passed the rose garden, I saw more people there than was usual for that time of day. That's when I noticed the four trucks from three local Clear Channel radio stations in the parking lot, soon joined by news trucks from two tv stations.

More people started arriving in the rose garden, and sure enough, the gazebo was soon draped in KRQ banners. A trio of people stood with white party balloons, on which they had written in Sharpie. "I LOVE YOU, MICHEAL" was one of the things written on them. Ah. of course. As we left, someone had just addressed the crowd about having gotten his single parent mom to buy him a tape of BAD. Then they played the song Thriller, which is still stuck in my head. Darn it.

It was a typically diverse Tucson crowd - black, white, Hispanic, kids and baby boomers, man and women. Nobody was crying, or seemed particularly upset. At least one guy in his forties was standing just outside the rose garden with his young family, a vinyl LP under his arm. But the few words I heard as I walked by seemed to be about a trip to a local casino.

I have to wonder what December 8, 1980 would have been like given 2009's technological zeitgeist. I will never forget the death of John Lennon, whose murder provoked a similar reaction but in less high-tech terms. John Lennon and his three chums from Liverpool have been a significant part of my life since 1964, a hundred or a thousand times more so than Michael Jackson. I did a project on the Beatles' music for school in 1973 or so, spent high school collecting their albums, drove across town to get a McCartney LP the day it came out, wrote to Yoko after her husband's death, and eventually saw Paul and Ringo in their respective concerts in Los Angeles in the 1980s. I was a record store owner-manager when John died, and handed out free buttons in commemoration the next day. (I think I've written about this part of it before, so let's move on.) John Lennon's death was as sudden as Jackson's, and more extreme, horrible and unforeseeable in its circumstances. And like Michael Jackson, John Lennon was a complex and interesting person in his public persona.

But that's not strictly relevant to John Lennon's musical impact. I'm not one of those Beatles fans who idolize Lennon and discount the other Beatles' contributions. Paul McCartney was and is at least as talented. They complemented each other musically, and pushed each other to collaborations that were better than anything they each did alone. George was no slouch, and Ringo did his part; each deserves more appreciation than they get. But without John Lennon, I doubt that we'd all know and appreciate his friends to the extent that we do, even today. He was the one who put together the band, and instigated many of the Beatles' musical and technically innovations. 45 years after their breakthrough U.S. tours, what John, Paul, George and Ringo did still matters.

How about you? Did you grow up listening to Elvis, the Beatles the Jackson 5, New Kids or Nirvana, or someone else entirely? Tell us about your all-time favorite in your blog, and don't forget to link to your entry in the comments below. (Also, please link to this entry in the entry you write, okay? Thanks!) I'll be back next Friday (probably earlier in the day!) to recap the results, thus:

For Weekend Assignment #272: Here Comes Summer!, guest professor Carly and I asked you to describe your summer plans. Here are exceprts from the responses:

Julie said...

Vacation? What's that? Oh, I could use a few days off, but it ain't gonna happen anytime soon.

We're so swamped right now that getting away for more than a weekend is problematic. And even then it's a weekend combined with something else, like a convention appearance for me or a bowling tournament for Chris.

Florinda combined this assignment with the previous one (to describe your town or city) in her entry:

School is out for the summer now, and families will be looking for ways to keep the kids busy until it starts back up again a week or so before Labor Day. My family is no exception. The summer days in Simi Valley can get very hot and dry, but thanks to low humidity, the nights are usually pretty comfortable. However, my husband doesn't have a high tolerance for the heat, despite having lived in Southern California all of his life, so we tend to seek out air-conditioned indoor activities during the day. We'll be going to the movies a lot, or staying in to watch DVDs. This year, we want to try to make one or two trips to the beach - the nearest one is only about thirty miles away - and to use the neighborhood swimming pool. Simi Valley Town Center is an outdoor mall, so if we have shopping to do on really warm days, we'll probably go to the indoor mall in neighboring Thousand Oaks.

Mike references his own recent vacation that kicked off his summer:

Well, as you can see from my last few posts, we've already taken our summer trip. We went to Walt Disney World to see the parks and sweat as much as possible. It was a good time! That is not the norm, however. This year was our first big vacation since we had kids. (Our son is seven by the way). Jenn and I have done little weekend trips on occasion, but this was the first time we went all out on a family vacation. And, based on the cost, it's a good thing we waited this long. I need to find a place that gives the best price for plasma donations, any recommendations?

That's it for now! I'm rushing off to do a photo shoot for later tonight, but will be making the rounds properly over the next day or so - this time for sure! As always, I'm looking for suggestions for future Weekend Assignments, but at the moment I'm especially looking for participants to write the entries. Thanks!

Karen

Weekend Assignment #226: Jukebox Brain

I had a Weekend Assignment lined up that was more of a writing exercise, but the heck with that. Let's go with something simple this week. Scalzi had more than a few music-related Weekend Assignments over the years: random song lists, songs for Halloween, bad Christmas songs, songs to party by, sf songs, songs for a wedding are all among the topics I seem to recall (or just Googled). I think he even did an earworm one, but let's do a little variation on that:

Weekend Assignment #226: Is there a song that you're particularly enjoying at the moment, that's on heavy rotation on your iPod, the CD player in your car, or just in your head? If so, what is it? If not, what was the last song you were really into?

Extra Credit: What song, if any, has been playing in your head today, and you really wish it would stop now?

As for me, I suppose it's good news that I've finally stopped playing one or both of Murray Gold's Doctor Who soundtracks nearly every day. I love that music, and it makes me happy, but it kind of loses its power after the first 300 times, you know? I didn't really have a favorite specific track on either CD, but I'm quite fond of Westminster Bridge, Clockwork TARDIS (for which I keep threatening to write lyrics), All The Strange Strange Creatures and The Doctor Forever.

Now, the previous CD in my personal heavy rotation was George Martin's Love remix of Beatles songs. It was a wonderful way of making some of my favorite music of all time fresh and new again. I've been looking for my copy of it for a few months now; if I don't find it soon I'll replace it. And the only album stored on my new phone is Once More With Feeling, the musical Buffy episode. The phone doesn't play loudly enough to bother with, though. I need headphones or bluetooth or something. But I have played Going Through the Motions (Buffy sings about her "strange estrangement" while killing vampires) several times recently.

The man responsible for much of my musical joy and agony

Meanwhile, I've had McCartney's Monkberry Moon Delight in my head all evening, mostly because I referred to it in a joke last night. This morning it was The Safety Dance by Men Without Hats, which was on the radio as John dropped me off. I think I'll ask him to keep it on NPR from now on!

It's a Small World (After All) really doesn't bother me

Your turn! Tell me off music in voluntary and involuntary heavy rotation in your head these days, whether it's the latest single by Sally Obscura, Moonlight Sonata or a Gregorian chant. Write about it in your blog or journal, and post your links from there to here and here to there. The playlist gets posted a week from tonight!

And the wind played a dreadful cantata
...cantata...cantata...

Karen

Monday Photo Shoot: What's in the Box?

For the next Monday Photo Shoot, let's take our cameras indoors for something a little different:

New Monday Photo Shoot #5: Somewhere in your home is at least one box you haven't opened a while. Open it up and show us what's in it!

Casa Blocher, the Museum of the Weird, is full of boxes. Some of it is stuff waiting to be sorted into the categories Keep, Sell, Give Away, Trash and Recycle. Some of it is to be disposed of Over Karen's Dead Body, or at least only after considerable grief and negotiation. The rest is fairly non-controversially to be kept, if only we had a better place to put it.


This particular box happens to be at the top of a stack of boxes in the den. A clue to its contents can be seen in this first photo, but I didn't notice when I selected it. Let's have a look!


Ah. Magazines. But what sort? Science Fiction? Media? Disney?


No, it's the Beatles! The Newsweek, sadly, is from December 1980. They're not all from that era, are they?

Marvel, People, some tribute magazines, clippings (including a Playboy interview with Allen Klein) ... some are definitely from the wave of post-assassination publications, some definitely not.


Here are some samples: a 1977 Crawdaddy interview with George, a November 1980 profile of John in Esquire, a Yoko Ono interview in a New Age magic magazine, Musician profiles Ringo, and People looks back at the British Invasion. Good stuff! And there are a few non-Beatles items in there too, including husband John's high school diploma. Yep, this is definitely a Keep box.

Your turn! Find me a box, open it up, and photograph some or all of the contents. Is it full of books? Jewelry? 1980s clothing? Baby toys? Old photos? You tell me! Post your pictures to your journal or blog, and come back here and leave a link. I'll share your finds with the world next Sunday night/Monday morning.

Karen

Stop MDC

Black Rose Kate has no problem dispatching history's villains

"Aye, I thought ye'd be at the computer," Black Rose Kate announced. I looked up, startled. There she was, standing in front of my L'Engle books, my semi-fictional pirate friend, looking down at me with her usual air of amused tolerance. It was Thursday night, ten minutes past one in the morning. "Ariel said that you wanted to see me," she explained.

"Hi, Kate," I said. "Yes, I did. But how did Ariel know that?" Our mutual friend Ariel travels in time and between universes, meanwhile attending Croatoan College, which is itself transdimensional.

Kate shrugged. "She reads your blog. You mentioned me in tomorrow's entry. And that black cloth rose of yours was in one of your photos this week, so we knew you were already thinking of me. So tell me. Am I here for a particular reason, or is this a social call only? Did you want my expert opinion on that Johnny Depp movie Ariel has spoken of for the better part of an hour tonight?"

"Oh, I didn't go on about it that long," Ariel said, coming into the room behind Kate. "Hi, Karen."

"Hi, Ariel. And no, it's not about Pirates of the Caribbean. I have a Weekend Assignment to do, and I thought Kate might be able to help. You too, Ariel."

"Oh, one of those," Kate said, looking none too pleased.

I pasted the relevant text into this entry, and let them read it over my shoulder:

Weekend Assignment #168: For reasons best left unexplained, you have been allowed to excise one and only one person from the course of history. Which person would you choose to remove from history and why? That's right: Any one person you think history would be better without, you can now expunge. So who would it be -- and how do you think history would be changed with their absence? See. Told you it was one that would make you think.

Extra Credit: Favorite historical-themed movie. Because why not?


"I see," Kate said as she finished reading. "Because I have dispatched my share of enemies on the high seas and elsewhere, it pleases you to seek my advice before murdering some historical villain before he is ever born. Is that it?"

"Pretty much, yes," I said. "And you're right. I do think that preventing Nero or someone like that from being born is a kind of murder."

"But you don't have a problem with--" Ariel began. I was starting to think she was a mind-reader.

"Shh," I interrupted. "I don't want to talk about that. The point is, I wouldn't have the right to stop someone from ever existing."

"And you think that I, the bloodthirsty pirate, would be more ruthless about such things, and thus could give Scalzi an answer in your stead," Kate said.

"Yes," I said. "And if not, you can at least discuss the idea with me, and I can report on that."

"As I notice ye be doing already," Kate observed.

"Your problem with this is that you lack perspective," Ariel said. "There are plenty of worlds in which there was no Hitler, or no John Wilkes Booth, or no Nero. On the multiverse level, it's not that big a deal."

"It is if you're in a world where he did exist, and now you decree that he doesn't," I insisted. "That creates a whole new universe, right? And that's on top of the loss suffered by family and friends."

"I have known several families," Kate said, "that benefited greatly from the death of a father or brother or son. A woman my own age once thanked me for killing her husband, who had chained her and beaten her. Pick someone sufficiently awful, and the world is certain to benefit."

"Well, I did think about choosing someone whose nonexistence would mean lives saved," I said. "I could go with Adolf Eichmann or Josef Mengele, but that violates the spirit of disallowing Hitler."

"Who were these people?" Kate asked.

"Eichmann helped Adolf Hitler, the ruler of Germany, organize the murder of millions of Jews and Romany and other people," Ariel said. "Mengele conducted horrific medical experiments on some of their victims before killing them."

"Right," I said. "But it's all part of the same horror. And I don't think there is an equivalent person in more recent examples of genocide. Usually it's groups of people killing other groups for the crime of being a 'them'. So I was thinking along the lines of a Richard Speck, or Timothy McVeigh - you know, someone who personally killed a lot of people."

"Aye, that makes sense," Kate said. "But ye didn't need me to figure that out."

"I still don't like it, though," I said. "I still wouldn't do it. Would you?"

"Aye, with hardly a moment's thought, nor any regrets," Kate said. "Oliver Cromwell is another one I would not mind seeing gone from the world."

Ariel was rereading the text of Scalzi's assignment. "You know, I don't think you read this very carefully," she said. "It doesn't specify that one person was never born. It only says excised from history. There might be other ways to do that."

That got me thinking. "Such as?" I prompted. I was starting to have a few ideas, but wondered what Ariel had in mind.

"Lock the person up so he or she can do no harm," she suggested. "Send the person back in time, or forward, or to another universe."

"Where the person can do even more harm in unknown ways," I said. "That's no good. But if we can stop the person from becoming crazy or evil or both, that would take him out of the history we know."

"Mark David Chapman," Ariel suggested.

I nodded. "I suppose I should go with McVeigh or someone like that anyway," I said, "or the older of the two DC snipers, or one of the serial killers up in Phoenix last year. But Chapman...I don't know. If you could catch him young, get him the right treatment, keep him on the right medication and away from the Dakota, that still only saves one man's life, technically."

"Yes, but what a life you'd be saving," Ariel said.

"Whose?" Kate asked.

"John Lennon," Ariel and I said together. "Of the Beatles," I added.

Before I could explain further, Kate pointed at me, a look of triumph on her face. "Aye, that's the one!" she said. "I like the Beatles. Ariel even took me to the Cavern once."

This made me angry. "Why didn't you take me with you? You know how much I want to go."

Ariel shook her head. "We bend the rules quite a bit even just coming to see you, even for a quick conversation. Your version of the world isn't meant to have time travel, and I can't let you go wandering the multiverse with me. We're pushing the fiction boundary as it is."

"Fiction boundary? What's that?"

"It's a way of gauging relationships between realities, and the relative safety of certain kinds of interactions," Ariel explained. "As my supposed creator in the context of this reality, you can receive my visits, as long as they can be passed off as fiction. But the moment you actually go into the past with me, or off into a world in which the Beatles have been reunited for the past twenty years and are currently in the studio, you damage every timeline you touch. Sorry."

"Whereas I have no such restriction," Kate said. "Say the word and I will take this Chapman person from history, my way."

"You know I won't condone that," I said. "Much as I'd like to."

"And anyway, you can't do that either," Ariel told Kate. "John Lennon wrote a song about you. That makes you fictional to him, too."

"He did? When was that?" I asked.

"1982."

"But he died in 1980," I said.

Ariel looked thoughtful. "Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Kate does go after Chapman," she said.

"Then that's my choice, if I have to choose someone," I said. "Just don't actually kill him if you can help it."

For a moment Ariel looked tempted. Then she shook her head. "No, sorry," she said. "His death is too well established in your world. But we might be able to do it in another world, a few universes over. Are you game for it, Kate?"

"Aye, always. Let's go, then."

"Bring me back a CD," I said.

Ariel laughed. "Can't do that, either," she said. "but if you're very good, I'll find a way for you to at least hear a later album, at least once."

They left, then, and I was alone again, finishing up this entry. I don't know how serious Ariel was. She could easily have been making up all those rules as she went along. And I'm still a little worried that Black Rose Kate will kill Chapman rather than try to get him into treatment, or at least locked up.

Imagine there's no murder.

But oh, wouldn't it be something, having another 26 1/2 years and counting of new music by John Lennon?

Oh, drat, I didn't ask my guests about the Extra Credit. I'm not big on historical movies, unless you count Back to the Future or Camelot. Lawrence of Arabia was kind of amazing, although the long version really is too long. Oh, I know. My Favorite Year. That's based on a very specific history period: the days of early television, and the live comedy variety show.

Karen

(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction

Weekend Assignment #166: Name the three songs you listen to when you totally want to rock out. Note that they don't actually have to be rock songs -- they can be in any genre whatsoever, and from any era. They just have to be the songs that get you pumped up and ready to go.

Extra Credit: And name one song to cool you back down.


The song that comes to mind first is (as you probably guessed from the header) (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones. (Blogger doesn't like the link to the Wikipedia article, so here's a link to a page that can get you there.) The Devo cover of the song is fun, but the Stones version is pretty much the only non-Beatles recording I'd consider naming the best rock song of all time. In fact, Satisfaction probably is the best rock song of all time. According to the Wikipedia article, different All Time Greatest lists have put it at #1 and #2. And yet, we don't have it on CD. Odd, that.

In the Beatles oeuvre, uptempo division, there's lots to choose from: their cover of the Isleys' Twist and Shout, and their own compositions I Saw Her Standing There, Back in the U.S.S.R., Helter Skelter, and so on. I think I'll go with Get Back, 'cause of the Tucson reference in it.

I should have picked something from my favorite Beatles album, since I took the trouble to photograph it and fix the perspective. The vinyl version of Revolver was the first Beatles record I ever had. But what's rocked out on it? Taxman? Got to Get You Into My Life? Well, maybe. My favorite song on it is In My Life, but that's not a rocker, either.

The third selection has to be something by The Clash. There's plenty to rock out to in the first two albums, but I favor London Calling, the first Clash LP we bought and a little more sophisticated, but not as experimental as Sandinista! Let's go with the title song, London Calling itself. Or, if you like, we can skip ahead to Rock the Casbah from Combat Rock.

To cool down in tempo, but not in impact, my eye tonight falls on Simon and Garfunkel. The Sound of Silence isn't exactly slow or peaceful or comforting, but it does end with a definite movement in the direction of silence and introspection. Their older recording of the song, from Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., is less rocked out, and thus better for the Extra Credit here.

Having said all that, I must tell you that my current musical obsessions are none of the above. For about a month, I was playing the Beatles remix CD, Love, a couple times a day in my cubicle at the office, popping it in my computer and playing it though headphones as I worked. Now it's on light rotation on my computer and in my brain, along with the Back to the Future soundtrack. The heavy rotation goes to the new series Doctor Who soundtrack CD by Murray Gold. It's not exactly rocked out, but there are a couple of songs I'm obsessed with (I came up with an alternate lyric for one line that doesn't make sense), a nice rock instrumental in Westminster Bridge, and some rather haunting melodies in the more traditional scoring, especially The Girl in the Fireplace and Doomsday.

*****

There's another reason I named this entry for the Stones song. As of tonight, the daily nagging from Symantec to renew my Norton software was down to 1 day from expiration, so I renewed. It took hours and hours and two reboots, filled up my hard drive and tied up my computer's RAM and dial-up bandwidth, so that I couldn't really do anything else except read a few emails and struggle to clear a little disk space on my C drive. So I've barely touched the Round Robin postings again tonight. Sorry! I'll get there.

One more thing that was less than satisfactory today: you may have noticed that I finally put a comment policy on my sidebar. There have been several comment spams this week, plus a random insult. Much as I love getting comments (and I really, really do), a comment that has nothing to do with the entry is a letdown. It's just empty words. If you're going to tell me this is a "cool blog", or words to that effect, you should be prepared to show that you've actually read something in the cool blog. Otherwise I'll probably assume it's just a lame excuse to add a link. As for the insult, it was so non-specific that again, I have no reason to think the person actually read the entry, or anything else. It wasn't controversy, or dissent, or a genuine criticism, or a basis for discussion. Therefore it's gone now. I'm never thrilled with actual criticism of my words, but I'm far more likely to let it stand than random name-calling. I'm itching to tell you what this particular insult was - the disemvoweled version is only 4 letters long - but that's giving it more attention than it deserves.

Karen