During a break from their American tour in late August 1965, The Beatles rented a house in Beverly Hills. Although the Spanish-style mansion was hidden from plain view, their address eventually became public knowledge and the LAPD had to be called in to ward off eager fans. Since it was impossible to leave home, the Beatles played host to a pantload of musicians and actors, including the then-unknown Peter Fonda. The entire band, excluding Paul McCartney, dropped acid with Fonda. According to Lennon, the drug-induced Fonda kept telling the band, “I know what it’s like to be dead” and “You’re making me feel like I’ve never been born.” Lennon would later use both phrases in the lyrics to “She Said She Said.”
For all episodes in this week-long Beatlemania mini-series, click here.
Many consider this George Harrison’s best song, at least of those he wrote as a Beatle. In the late ‘60s, Harrison was deeply into the I Ching and the concept of Relativism, which states that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration.
While visiting his folks in England, Harrison made up his mind to write a song based on the first words he saw upon opening a book. Which book? Any, random book on their shelves. So he plucked a book down, opened it up and saw the words “gently weeps.” Said Harrison:
I wrote "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" at my mother's house in Warrington. I was thinking about the Chinese I Ching, the Book of Changes... The Eastern concept is that whatever happens is all meant to be, and that there's no such thing as coincidence - every little item that's going down has a purpose. "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" was a simple study based on that theory. I decided to write a song based on the first thing I saw upon opening any book - as it would be a relative to that moment, at that time. I picked up a book at random, opened it, saw 'gently weeps', then laid the book down again and started the song."
Applying the same technique, I have just started composing a song called “New and Neat Stuff from the Neatoshop.”
For all episodes in this week-long Beatlemania mini-series, click here.
We're trying something new this week! Instead of a list, we're going to try breaking a story into episodes. Think HBO mini-series style, only with posts on a blog. This week's theme is the Beatles. All week, we'll be looking at some interesting stories and factoids about specific songs. So let's start episode #1 with "Dear Prudence."
“Dear Prudence”
1968 was an eventful year for not only the Beatles, but actress Mia Farrow. For starters, while filming her first hit film, Rosemary’s Baby, in the Dakota (where John Lennon was murdered 12 years later), her then-husband, Frank Sinatra, served her with divorce papers on set. Then there was the trip with her brother and sister and world-renowned Yogi, Maharishi Mahesh, to his ashram in India for a Transcendental Meditation teacher training course. The Farrow siblings were later joined by all four Beatles.
Mia’s sister, Prudence, took the training so seriously, she wound up meditating some 23 hours a day, rarely coming out of the cottage she was living in. This inspired John Lennon to write the lyrics:
Dear Prudence, won't you come out to play Dear Prudence, greet the brand new day The sun is up, the sky is blue It's beautiful and so are you Dear Prudence won't you come out to play
Lennon said later that "She'd been locked in for three weeks and was trying to reach God quicker than anyone else."
Neatoramanaut Jody Smith runs a fun blog called Faces in Places. How'd we discover her? Well, she started following us on Twitter recently (hint hint). I checked out her blog and am posting 13 of my favorite images below. For even more fun faces, take a stroll down this way.
I mean, I'm sure I'm not the first person who's noticed this, right? I mean, everyone's saying it, right? I mean, everyone! Even Megan Draper in the 1960s is saying it. Did you notice? I mean, it was only once, a couple episodes ago, not last night's. But, I mean, she said it! She woke Don up to tell him she wanted to pursue her acting career and quit the agency. And suddenly, I mean... And it was the literal usage, as in "What I mean is..." it was the modern-day equivalent of ummmm or what the French might call, ehhhhhhhh. And you know it wasn't in the script. She just said it because that's what modern-day actors/real people say today. And no one, not the editors or producers or directors caught it. Or if they did, the rest of the take was perfect so they just figured, no one is going to notice, right? I mean, why would they?
I mean, what's going on folks? When did I mean take over from like as the most-used meaningless word of the times and are we all okay with this? I mean, like was less intrusive, wasn't it? I mean, like, it was, wasn't it?
The comments are now open below. I mean, go ahead and discuss amongst yourselves. Really. I mean, I mean it.
In this 60-second tutorial, my son, the Smart Aleck, will show you how to close out of an app completely. It's the equivalent of "quit" on a PC application. In some cases, this will help your battery last longer. In others, well, it's just good to know how to close out of an app 100%.
Here's a fun quiz I posted over on BoingBoing but you can take it right here, right now by clicking the image below. Let us know how you did in the comments below!
Maggie Koerth-Baker, the science editor at BoingBoing, has just published an amazing new book called Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before it Conquers Us, about the very hard choices we face in powering our lives without doing ourselves in. It’s adroitly written with wonderful research behind it and some very warm, yet no-nonsense Midwestern charm, as she ties many of the problems our society is facing with personal stories from growing up and living in and around the real farmvilles. We're going to give away TWO autographed copies of the book at the end of the interview, so be sure to read it thoroughly to better your chances of scoring one of them. Believe me: This is a book you want on your shelves, packed with insight into, perhaps, the biggest problem facing the modern world.
Q: Throughout the book, I found myself becoming incredibly depressed about the future and then, alternately, incredibly optimistic about it. Is this sort of how you felt, both in the research and writing of the book? I mean, talk of doomsday scenarios due to global warming and massive energy shortages can’t be too uplifting to study, yet the realm of possibilities surrounding alternative energy are way exciting to think about, especially as you get further into them. You even write in the book: “I have to admit that when I think about all of the coordination, education, and nonpartisan (not only bipartisan) decision making that needs to happen, I get the urge to go back to bed and hide under the covers.” Have you been on an emotional roller coaster these past couple years working on the book?
A: Oh, definitely. Or, rather, I’m not sure I’d call it an emotional roller coaster, because it’s not linear like that. It’s more like an emotional scrambler. I’d find myself collecting all this information--knowing that every possible solution was going to have downsides and risks, and that the risk of doing nothing were even worse--and then kind of had to sift through it all and figure out a way to talk about it that emphasized both sides of that coin. And that’s hard. There are lots of times when you feel both deflated and optimistic at once. And it really goes against the dominant narratives on energy: Which are either that we don’t need to change anything, or that we need to change and that those changes are inherently ideal things that will have no risks or downsides whatsoever. Both perspectives are wrong.
Q: In the intro, you write: “This is a book about what we’ll have to deal with and the changes that will have to happen, because we really have no other choice.” What does the choice to do nothing result in?
A: The choice to do nothing will result in change. The choice to do nothing is risky, riskier I think than trying to do something even if that something is flawed and imperfect. I can’t emphasize this enough. We have aging infrastructure that wasn’t built in any ideal way to begin with. We have climate change playing out in front of our faces. We have limited supplies of fossil fuels so that, even the stuff we have lots of still--natural gas and coal--are projected to only be enough for 100 or 200 years. (And that’s at current levels of demand. And if you don’t change anything, then demand always goes up.) All those things are happening, whether we ignore them or not. As they play out, they will force changes to the way we use energy, the way we make it, and the way we live. They will force us to spend lots and lots of money. So what we have isn’t a choice between spending a ton of money or not, between changing or not. It’s a choice between different kinds of changes. Do we want the kind of change where we spend money upfront to save it in the long run and have some control over how we address these issues? Or do we want the kind of changes that just happen to us, whether we like them or not, and cost us dearly down the road? I know my answer.
Q: With regard to energy solutions in the future, you write: “Nobody gets everything he or she wants.” Of all the interested parties, who gets most of what s/he wants and who gets the short end of the stick?
UPDATE: We've awarded 12 people t-shirts so far in our week-long contest! There's still 2 more days and 8 more winners to go. In case you're just tuning in, here's how it works: We're giving giving you 4 chances each day this week to win your choice of t-shirt from our neatoshop! All you have to do to enter is spot the Neatobot in one of our daily posts (no, silly, not this post - another post that went up today). When you spot it, click on it and enter to win! Want a better chance of winning? Follow our Facebook, Twitter and/or G+ accounts for daily hints!
If you've wound up on this page, you've spotted the Neatobot! Congrats. All you have to do now is leave a comment telling us which post you found the Neatobot on and which t-shirt from the Neatoshop you'd like if you're selected at random as a winner! We'll chose 4 winners a day for 5 days, so that's 20 chances to win!
We're running another fun caption contest over on our G+ page! Go leave a funny or witty caption. The one with the most +1s gets his/her choice of t-shirts from the neatoshop! So what are you waiting for? Get thee.
We're running another fun caption contest over on our G+ page! Go leave a funny or witty caption. The one with the most +1s gets his/her choice of t-shirts from the neatoshop! So what are you waiting for? Get thee.
