Podcasts about alice in wonderland

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling PUBLIC DOMAIN. Retold by Sir Herbert Sneakies, Lady Twizzelton and Marylin Hebert. Your favorite top 1% global kids podcast! Thank you for listening and supporting the podcast. Download the episodes:) https://www.buymeacoffee.com/sneakies :) $ tips $ :) https://www.paypal.me/anonymouscontent :) $ Donations $ :)Please Subscribe to our YouTube Channel :) Storytime Fun!https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCNwYcOSlx3rMRBfSuNrzPg?sub_confirmation=1 https://www.youtube.com/user/Fellinijr/videos :) https://enchantedbooks.godaddysites.com/ :) cool merchandise Thank you for making us a top 1% global kids podcast! #1 Australia, #1 Canada #1 UK, #1 Brazil, #1 Japan, #1 India, #1 South Korea, #1 Hong Kong, #1 Italy, #1 Sweden, #1 Demark, #1 Russia, #1 Brazil, #5 Mexico, #4 Germany #5 France #7 Ireland, #5 South Africa! :) Please support us & buy our books :) Thank you! "Skip Boots Big Safari Adventure"* - a funny animal book like "Jungle Book." https://www.amazon.com/Skip-Boots-Big-Safari-Adventure/dp/1729091547 * "Jack the Bear and Golden Hair"* -a fairy-tale like Snow White & "Alice In Wonderland." https://www.amazon.com/Jack-Bear-Golden-StorytellerUK2017-Adventures-ebook/dp/B010E479GE *"Adventures of Mooch the Pooch"*- a funny dog book like "Marley and Me" meets "A Dog's Life." https://www.amazon.com/Mooch-Pooch-Adventures-ebook/dp/B01LR86FK2 *" Blueber Goober The Monster In My Closet" *- like Monsters Inc./Casper the Friendly Ghost meets Monsters Inc. Comedy fun! https://www.amazon.com/Blueber-Goober-Monster-My-Closet-ebook/dp/B01LW1VMPQ Please Subscribe to our YouTube:) https://www.youtube.com/user/Fellinijr/videos NO COPYRIGHT MUSIC, royalty free music .

This Monday Laura takes us down the rabbit hole to the world of legit Mad Hatters! Far from being the affable, tea party having gems in Alice in Wonderland, she discusses the real cases of hatters turning mad. Happy Monday, have the week you'll have.

Batman's first tangle with the literary inspired Mad Hatter is one of the best written episodes of the series yet! Join us as we discuss...The fun weirdness of Neil Gaiman's Sandman and beautiful emotions expressed by the time traveling Paper Girls!The Mad Hatter, a self-loathing proto-incel for the early 90s!Bruce Wayne whispering congratulations to Alice? Hilarious.Batman fights a walrus, a frog, a queen, a cat and a rabbit!The X-Men TAS Podcast just opened a SECRET reddit group, join by clicking here! We also on Twitch sometimes… click here to go to our page and follow and subscribe so you can join in on all the mysterious fun to be had! Also, make sure to subscribe to our podcast via Buzzsprout, iTunes or Stitcher and tell all your friends about it! Last but not least, follow Willie Simpson on Twitter and please join our Facebook Group!

The Bolly Bop Dance by Sir Herbert Sneakies is sure to cheer up kids this summer! Copyright 2021 Stay fit and laugh out loud dancing like a Bollywood Star iin a movie. Step 1. Lunge to the right. Put your Right hand straight up to the sky. Alternate and lunge to the left. Left hand stretched out up to the air. Alternate right and left hands as you alternate lunges. Step 2. Imagine you are a Jeannie coming out of a bottle. Fold your hands in front of you and shimmy shake and do the Bolly Bop. Bob your head with chin going up and down. Turn around in a circle with arms folded. Smile. Step 3. Right hand up straight over your head bent elbow. Palms up. Left hand down with palms up. Sway your hands back and forth and wiggle your hips. Alternate to left hand up and right hand down with palms up. Sway your hands back and forth. Put both hands up in air, palms up with bent arms. Sway your hands back and forth. Make a Sassy face. Repeat Make a Smiley face. Repeat. Step 4. Do the Bolly Bop shimmey shake. Wiggle your body with your arms folded. Make a happy face and turn in a circle to the right. Sway your hips back and forth and do the Bolly Bop. Wiggle. Wiggle. Wiggle. Jiggle. Jiggle. Shake. Shake. Shake. Shimmy shake. Step 5. Put up both of your hands over your head, palms up and bent elbows. Sway your hands palms up back and worth. Shimmey your whole body by wiggling. Now clap your hands. Clap. Clap. Clap. Remember to smile and lol! Your pal, Sir Herbert Sneakies. Your favorite top 1% global kids podcast! Thank you for listening and supporting the podcast. Please Download the episodes :) https://www.buymeacoffee.com/sneakies :) $ tips $ :) https://www.paypal.me/anonymouscontent :) $ Donations $ :)Please Subscribe to our YouTube Channel :) Storytime Fun!https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCNwYcOSlx3rMRBfSuNrzPg?sub_confirmation=1 https://www.youtube.com/user/Fellinijr/videos :) https://enchantedbooks.godaddysites.com/ :) cool merchandise Thank you for making us a top 1% global kids podcast! #1 Australia, #1 Canada #1 UK, #1 Brazil, #1 Japan, #1 India, #1 South Korea, #1 Hong Kong, #1 Italy, #1 Sweden, #1 Demark, #1 Russia, #1 Brazil, #5 Mexico, #4 Germany #5 France #7 Ireland, #5 South Africa! :) Please support us & buy our books :) Thank you! "Skip Boots Big Safari Adventure"* - a funny animal book like "Jungle Book." https://www.amazon.com/Skip-Boots-Big-Safari-Adventure/dp/1729091547 * "Jack the Bear and Golden Hair"* -a fairy-tale like Snow White & "Alice In Wonderland." https://www.amazon.com/Jack-Bear-Golden-StorytellerUK2017-Adventures-ebook/dp/B010E479GE *"Adventures of Mooch the Pooch"*- a funny dog book like "Marley and Me" meets "A Dog's Life." https://www.amazon.com/Mooch-Pooch-Adventures-ebook/dp/B01LR86FK2 *" Blueber Goober The Monster In My Closet" *- like Monsters Inc./Casper the Friendly Ghost meets Monsters Inc. Comedy fun! https://www.amazon.com/Blueber-Goober-Monster-My-Closet-ebook/dp/B01LW1VMPQ Please Subscribe to our YouTube:) https://www.youtube.com/user/Fellinijr/videos NO COPYRIGHT MUSIC, royalty free music .             

The Locket by Sir Herbert Sneakies. 

The Golden Locket by Sir Herbert Sneakies.  A story about a mother's love for her son who is scared to go to his first day of school.  Summary below. Thank you for making us a top 1% global kids podcast hitting #1 around the world! ;) Thank you for listening & supporting the podcast. :) https://enchantedbooks.godaddysites.com/ :) cool merchandise :) https://www.buymeacoffee.com/sneakies :) https://www.paypal.me/anonymouscontent :) Please Subscribe to our YouTube:) Channel :) Storytime Fun! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCNwYcOSlx3rMRBfSuNrzPg?sub_confirmation=1 https://www.youtube.com/user/Fellinijr/videoshttps://www.patreon.com/sneakies Summary: A very loving mother fox gets her baby arctic fox ready for his first day of school. Do I have to go? Mom said a little white baby fox named Milo? His mother, Lady Twizzell replied that new adventures are great. You can learn new things and meet new friends. Lady Twizzell noticed that her son was very scared so she opened a drawer and took out a box and handed him a gift. Milo opened up the box excitedly. Inside was a beautiful golden heart shaped locket on a gold necklace. Milo opened the locket. Inside was a  photo of his mom and another photo of himself. He smiled. You see if you are scared or get lonely you just have to open the locket and I am with you.  At school Milo meets a Bully named Tank who takes the locket and it falls into the river. Milo is scared that his mom will be mad that he lost the locket so he hides under his bed. However, his mother's love is so big  for him that she doesn't scold him but  instead she gives him a new locket that can never be taken away from him again.   Thank you! #1- #17 USA, #1 Australia, #1 Canada #1 UK, #1 Brazil, #1 Japan, #1 India, #1 Italy, #1 Hong Kong, #1 South Korea, # Japan, #1 Russia, #1 Sweden, #1 Denmark, #1 Norway, #5 Mexico, #4 Germany #5 France & #7 Ireland!  Please support us & buy our books :) Thank you! "Skip Boots Big Safari Adventure"* - a funny animal book like "Jungle Book." https://www.amazon.com/Skip-Boots-Big-Safari-Adventure/dp/1729091547 * "Jack the Bear and Golden Hair"* -a fairy-tale like Snow White & "Alice In Wonderland." https://www.amazon.com/Jack-Bear-Golden-StorytellerUK2017-Adventures-ebook/dp/B010E479GE *"Adventures of Mooch the Pooch"*- a funny dog book like "Marley and Me" meets "A Dogs Life." https://www.amazon.com/Mooch-Pooch-Adventures-ebook/dp/B01LR86FK2 *" Blueber Goober The Monster In My Closet" *- like Monsters Inc./Casper the Friendly Ghost meets Monsters Inc. Comedy fun! Middle grade wizard book series like a fun Harry Potter--"Margaret Merlin's Journal" https://www.amazon.com/Margaret-Merlins-Journal-Battle-Black-ebook/dp/B01634G3CK Music Public Domain. Our other podcast: Film Addicts featuring Emmy and award winning animation directors, producers, writers and actors.

Episode Three: 'Twas brillig when librarians James and Rani met to talk about Alice and all the lessons left un-learned as she makes her way through Wonderland. In these passages we meet unusual characters and face strange situations, so open your ears and hop right in! If you enjoyed these excerpts, ask one of our friendly librarians to help you find the stories of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking glass by Lewis Carrol.

In this short audio I talk about one of the strange neurological distortions that occurs in chronic #stress  states:.  Called 'Alice in Wonderland Syndrome', it is a form of somatic dissociative response that occurs when the nervous system fails to relay the correct  proprioceptive (sometimes also called kinaesthetic -w here the body is in space) information back to the brain. It often occurs after trauma to that body part but may also be globalised as in chronic pain.I believe it relates to a memory of threat. Here how it shows up in some people and what you can do about it. For the medical view see the paper herehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5223006/

Learn about Alice In Wonderland in today's KTAR Timeline. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on Speak The Speech, we are joined by voice, dialect and text coach Jess Chambers. In this episode, Jess discusses what drew her to voice and text coaching, what it's like to prepare a company of actors vocally to perform in different circumstances, her work with children on Matilda the Musical, how studying speech pathology informs her practice, and her best pieces of advice for vocalising Shakespeare.   Jess Chambers works internationally as a voice, dialect and text coach. For Bell Shakespeare she has been the voice coach on over a dozen productions including Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Miser and Richard III.   Her other voice coaching credits include Matilda the Musical in Australia and London, Alice In Wonderland, Sweet Charity, and Pygmalion for The Shaw Festival Theatre in Canada, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Real Thing and How To Rule The World for Sydney Theatre Company.  She was dialect coach on Moulin Rouge! The Musical, School of Rock, Jersey Boys, Les Miserables and The Sound Of Music. Her screen credits include Frayed and The Unlisted for the ABC, and the film Hacksaw Ridge.   

This month we're discussing David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me! TW: swearing, incest, filicide, rape, murder, drug use and abuse, true crime, child abuse and rape. Join Us: https://linktr.ee/goodmourningnancy Help Out: https://translifeline.org/donate/ & https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/ Resources: The Overlooked Importance of ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me' by Katie Coxall https://film-cred.com/the-overlooked-importance-of-twin-peaks-fire-walk-with-me/ Why 'Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me' Remains One of the Greatest Prequels of All Time BY LIAM GAUGHAN https://collider.com/twin-peaks-fire-walk-with-me-great-prequel/ In the Closest with Laura Palmer by Alexander O'Connor https://www.gaylydreadful.com/blog/2019/5/27/in-the-closet-with-laura-palmer-pride-2019 The Maligned Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me Is Better—and More Important—Than You Know by Julie Muncy https://www.wired.com/2017/05/fire-walk-with-me-retrospective/ DOWN THE SNOWSHOE RABBIT HOLE: THE MAJOR CONNECTIONS BETWEEN TWIN PEAKS AND ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND by Celia Quinette https://welcometotwinpeaks.com/references/alice-in-wonderland-twin-peaks-connections/ Why David Lynch Is One of the Greatest Horror Movie Directors Ever by ASHLEY NAFTULE https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/arts/twin-peaks-fire-walk-with-me-proves-david-lynch-is-a-horror-movie-master-10955426 CRITERION'S ‘TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME' IS A SEMIOTIC FEAST by Garrett Castleberry https://www.popmatters.com/twin-peaks-fire-walk-with-me-2522754227.html Tribeca Film Festival 2022: Lynch/OZ Review by Stephen Silver https://tilt.goombastomp.com/film/lynch-oz-is-a-dynamite-film-essay-about-a-directors-inspiration/ Surrendering Logic in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me by The Criterion Collection https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5050-surrendering-logic-in-twin-peaks-fire-walk-with-me Judging Judy by 25YL https://25yearslatersite.com/2017/08/25/judging-judy/ When The Woman Screams: Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me by Elizabeth Erwin https://wordpress.lehigh.edu/screams/2020/03/19/fire-walk-with-me/ TWIN PEAKS: WHY LAURA MAY NOT BE FEMALE CORPSE EXPLOITATION by ELIZABETH ERWIN http://www.horrorhomeroom.com/twin-peaks/ Why David Lynch's ‘Fire Walk With Me' Is a Masterpiece in its Own Right by Phillipa Snow https://artreview.com/why-david-lynch-twin-peaks-fire-walk-with-me-is-a-masterpiece-in-its-own-right/ Looking Back at Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me by James Peaty https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/looking-back-at-twin-peaks-fire-walk-with-me/ 31 Days Of Feminist Horror Films: TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME by Kate Hagen https://blog.blcklst.com/31-days-of-feminist-horror-films-twin-peaks-fire-walk-with-me-b2f9f5bc0011 How Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me Reminds Us Laura Was the One, 30 Years On by Elise Soutar https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/twin-peaks-fire-walk-with-me-laura-palmer/ How Twin Peaks Gave the Beautiful Dead Girl™ Pop-Culture Currency by Anne T. Donahue https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a55039/twin-peaks-beautiful-dead-girl-laura-palmer/ CATCHING UP WITH LAURA PALMER IN TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME by Victoria Large https://www.brattleblog.brattlefilm.org/2017/05/23/catching-up-with-laura-palmer-in-twin-peaks-fire-walk-with-me-5117/ CHANTING OUT BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: MAURA MCHUGH'S FIRE WALK WITH ME by Samm Deighan https://diaboliquemagazine.com/chanting-two-worlds-maura-mchughs-fire-walk/ Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me & David Lynch's Duality http://www.screeningnotes.com/2015/06/twin-peaks-david-lynch-duality.html To All The Grown Up Laura's by Cheryll Lee Latter https://25yearslatersite.com/2017/09/20/to-all-the-grown-up-lauras/

Episode 132 - 3 Disney Restaurants To Try! 3 Disney Restaurants To Try! Hey everyone, I'm Mike, she's Sophie, that's Brenda, and and he's Grogu, and we're On the Road with Mickey! This is episode 132 for August 1, 2022, and today our feature topic is 3 Disney Restaurants To Try! Grab your favorite beverage, sit back, and relax, and tell us in the comments below what you think! Here's the rundown of what we talked about: Cheddar from the Big CheeseMike: Last Wednesday, July 27th, MagicBand+ debuted at Walt Disney World. The latest version of the popular wearable technology still does all that you are used to doing, but it also includes such new features as interactions with the Disney Fab 50 statues and more! Sophie: Last Tuesday the 26th was the 70th (or is it 71st) Anniversary of the release of Alice in Wonderland. To commemorate the anniversary, Disney Artist and Historian Stacia Martin wrote a post on the Disney Parks Blog, along with an accompanying YouTube video, showing how to draw the Cheshire Cat.Brenda: Late this summer, the Boardwalk Deli will open up at the location that used to be the Boardwalk Bakery. Featuring authentic delicatessen sandwiches, it will also have a lot of sweets to enjoy as well. No official opening date has been announced, but if you look at the calendar for the restaurant it shows operating hours starting on August 15. Also, it'll be open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.Connect with us! Here's how: Facebook: https://facebook.ontheroadwithmickey.comFacebook Group: https://facebookgroup.ontheroadwithmickey.comYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/OntheRoadwithMickeyInstagram: On the Road with MickeyEmail: info@ontheroadwithmickey.comFeature Topic: 3 Disney Restaurants To Try!Sophie: 1) Space 2202) Mama Melrose's3) Rose & CrownBrenda: 1) Victoria & Albert's Chef Table Experience2) Steakhouse 71 - dinner3) Topolino's Terrace - dinnerMike: 1) Le Cellier2) California Grill3) Coral ReefListener Feedback:We asked in our Facebook Group for what others were looking to try as well, and here's the responses:Chris from Billy's Closet of Magic said he wants to eat at Cinderella's Royal Table, Chef Mickey's, and California Grill.Chrissy from BCOM wants to eat at Topolino's Terrace, Victoria & Albert's Chef Table Experience, Nine Dragons, and Morimoto.Cindy wants to eat at The Rose & Crown, The Luau at the Poly, and Le Cellier.Jennifer wants to eat at Boma, Olivia's, and Chefs de France.John wants to eat at Victoria & Albert, Akershus, and Big River GrillePam wants to eat at Chef Art Smith's Homecoming, Space 220, and Shula's SteakhouseLastly, Sheila wants to eat at Victoria & Albert, Bull & Bear at the Waldorf Astoria, and 3 Bridges.This Day in Disney History for August 1:1933: Birth of Dom DeLuiseDisney Who's Who CharacterDopey from Snow White & The Seven DwarfsA little bit of Walt“Most of my life I have done what I wanted to do. I have had fun on the job. I have never been able to confine that fun to office hours.” - Walt DisneyComing Next Week: An update on our 22 things for 2022 list Watch us on YouTube!

With Melody Time and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Christian, Emma, and first-time guest host Tom Hemmings bid adieu to the package era of Disney films. Is this forgotten period underrated or justly overlooked, and did it end with a bang or a whimper? Find out as this month-long leg of the podcast ends with the usual sibling squabbling and titanic tangents, along with discussions about religious propaganda, the male gaze, and unheroic protagonists. Plus: between reviews, The Honore Siblings discuss the teaser trailer for what currently is the last film the podcast will cover: Strange World!

Having survived the inconsequential 1933 adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, Andrew and Dave turn their attention to writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1946 melodrama Dragonwyck, starring Gene "Not Lawrence" Tierney and Vincent Price! Just what do the podcasting duo make of the film and Walter Huston's sideburns? Does the film foreshadow Price's later horror film roles? Where can we get these placebos? Tune in and find out!Next Episode: This wax museum is pretty great. Aside from the murders, of course.All music by Andrew Kannegiesser. Editing by Dave Babbitt

Alice in Wonderland is an essential piece of modern folklore, and yet... how many of us have ever read the book? Not as many as you'd think. So Jonny Holt (@jonnyliterati) and I sit down to discuss the logic of the trip, the morality of the crazy, and when you should eat oysters.Donations from this episode will go to the New Orleans Abortion Fund: https://t.co/x0rkct0kLsWant the rest of this episode? Join our Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/fuckboisoflitLove Emily's sense of humor? Pre-order her first novel: bit.ly/VVorderFollow Fuckbois of Lit on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/fuckboisoflitThis is the live-action Alice show from the Disney Channel in the 90s: https://youtu.be/LWjLjPqwtk8 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Comics creator extraordinaire Dan Panosian has done it all-- inked, pencilled, wrote, even attended college under an assumed identity (give a listen to this episode to  understand that reference).  But nothing he's previously accomplished in his long and storied career could possibly prepare him for the Hypothetical Island! He joins Reilly and George to talk the horrors of Melbourne Florida, Alice in Wonderland stuff,  D&D as a  betting game, and more!

Pigweed and Crowhill, with special guest Longinus, drink and review a coffee stout from Guinness, then continue their "shortcut to the classics" series with a review of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. They start off with a whirlwind tour of the story, then discuss various potential meanings and interpretations. Generally speaking, the boys are not impressed, and they wonder why in the world this has become such a classic. It is the third most quoted book in the English language! It's silly and playful, but is that all? Are there any hidden meanings? Is there an underlying theme? What's the appeal of this strange book?

Dave and Chuck the Freak talk about a listener that has only eaten bread & peanut butter for 18 years, Vin Diesel has the biggest movie trailer ever made, the original Han Solo blaster is going up for auction, a fatal shootout between nudists on a beach, an old man that pooped in a pool after being annoyed by all the noise, a guy mistaken as his wife's son cause he is 6 inches shorter than her, a woman that suffers from “Alice in Wonderland” syndrome, things women think men should NOT be insecure about, a man that tried to warn Space Force about a fight between Chinese dragons & aliens, how bike seats are destroying men's junk, a pastor robbed of a $1 million worth of jewels during a Church service, Choco Tacos are being discontinued, and more!

The Sniff Squad is a great bedtime story that inspires kids to be extraordinary heroes in their community by Sir Herbert Sneakies. Thank you for making us a top 1% global kids podcast! Please support us by downloading, sponsoring, subscribing, sharing & checking out our books below the summary :)

http://www.attractionchecklist.com - Whether it's your Very Merry Un-Birthday or not, we're headed to Disneyland for a spin on Mad Tea Party on this episode of Attraction Checklist.  Attraction audio recorded on May 18, 2021. TRANSCRIPT: Welcome to Attraction Checklist. Let's head to Fantasyland in Disneyland to visit Mad Tea Party. The Disneyland Resort website describes this attraction saying: Pour yourself into an oversized teacup and spin through a whimsical party. There are no age or height requirements for this attraction and the thrill level describes this attraction as being a Spinning Ride. Before we spill the tea, here are five fast facts about Mad Tea Party. 1. The original Mad Tea Party opened with Disneyland on July 17, 1955.  This version was located directly behind King Arthur's Carousel.  In 1983, the attraction was moved to its current location near the Alice In Wonderland attraction. 2. The original Mad Tea Party that opened with the parks had tea cups that featured no brakes or clutches nothing that limited how fast they spun. 3.  In 2004, the amount of spin each tea cup had was limited after a guest experience a serious fall on the attraction.  The limitation was later restored after guests complained. 4. For Disneyland's 50th Anniversary, one the other teacups on the attraction was painted gold. 5. The designs on the tea cups were designed by Disney Legend Mary Blair. Let's pick out a teacup and get spinning.  After the ride, I'll give you my thoughts on this attraction.  This is a binaural recording so if you have headphones put them on now as we ride Mad Tea Party at Tea Party. The attraction audio recorded for this episode is available exclusively to the Saturday Morning Media Patron Patron.  Support the show and get fun Bonus content over at http://www.patreon.com/saturdaymorningmedia Episode edited by Stephen Staver FOLLOW US https://www.instagram.com/attractionchecklist/ http://www.twitter.com/SaturdayMMedia  https://www.linkedin.com/company/saturday-morning-media http://www.youtube.com/user/SaturdayMorningMedia?sub_confirmation=1 FOLLOW GRANT http://www.MrGrant.comhttp://www.twitter.com/toasterboy  https://instagram.com/throwingtoasters/ SOURCES: https://disneyland.disney.go.com/attractions/disneyland/mad-tea-party/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Tea_Party Show ©2022 Saturday Morning Media/Grant Baciocco

Episode #764 Hidden History Richard speaks with an author/historian about his alternative views on American history. Donald Jeffries has been researching the JFK assassination since the mid-1970s when he was a teenage volunteer for Mark Lane's Citizens Committee of Inquiry. His first published book, the acclaimed 2007 novel The Unreals, has been compared to Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. Books: Hidden History Survival of the Richest Crimes and Cover-Up in American Politics 1776-1963 Bullyocracy On Borrowed Fame SUPPORT MY SPONSORS!!!   COPY MY CRYPTO - Discover how over 1,300 people - many of who know nothing about crypto or how to invest - are building rapid wealth the cabal can never steal - "You don't need to know a thing about cryptocurrency if you copy someone who does" CopyMyCrypto.com/Dollar

The MILF Next Door: Part 5Jane Meets MumBy barry240646  - Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories. I was still laying on my side facing her laying on her back, and she reached up, locked her arms around my neck and pulled my face down on to her face. We kissed. A long kiss.A kiss long enough for my right leg to spread her legs apart. Long enough for me to straddle her right leg and then get both of my legs between hers. Long enough for me to position myself so the tip of my cock was touching her pussy. She was gripping me so tight around my neck and forcing my mouth down on to hers.After a while, I reached up and pulled her arms from around my neck. I started to kiss her neck. I slowly worked my way down to her right breast and ran my tongue in circles around the nipple, which was hard and prominent. She really did have large hard nipples when aroused.I gradually began to ease my body down her body, kissing as many square inches as I could. I licked her belly button. I kissed down lower. I felt her tense up in expectation. She now knew definitively exactly what I was planning to do. When my tongue found her bush, she opened her thighs, raised her knees and put her heels on to the back of my bum. I had inches to go to get to her vagina.I raised my head and let my thumbs explore her bush and find her outer lips. I rubbed up and down each lip with each thumb, and she moaned gently and rocked her head from side to side. My thumbs parted her lips and exposed her clit and then I sucked it into my mouth and teased it with my tongue.Holding her clit with my lips, I rubbed two fingers on to her inner lips and felt the moisture seeping out. Her head was still rolling from side to side, and she was making a gentle guttural sound. I felt she was moist enough and slowly penetrated her with the two fingers. Moving forwards, then backwards not quite as much, my fingers gradually invaded her most personal space. I curled my fingers and went to search out her magic spot.I knew fireworks would go off as soon as I touched it. This was the fourth woman I had made love to, and the only sexually innocent one of them. I found the spot. I was in no doubt about finding it, as when I did, we levitated above the bed. We were flying over a whole new world and there was not a magic carpet in sight!I rubbed her gently, then gradually applied more pressure as I rubbed. Her pussy was filling up with her juices, and I used my mouth and tongue to trap and enjoy as much of those juices as I could.Her thighs squeezed my waist, she was kicking my bum. She was hanging on to my neck as if to avoid a mile-high drop! She was having her first climax. I didn't stop, just rubbed gentler and let her calm down, before building up again. Soon after, she was having her second climax.I was on a roll. She was rocking and rolling, taking me with her through her thigh grip of me. We kept lifting up as she climaxed, which she did a third time. Then in a breathless voice, I heard “Mark, my love, please, please let me rest a moment.”I withdrew my hand. I got on my elbows and knees and advanced up her body until my mouth reached her lips. We kissed, and her tongue tasted her juices for the first time. As we broke the kiss, I glanced at the clock. 10 p.m.She unwrapped her arms and I rolled on to my left side, and kissed each nipple lovingly. She smiled. It was a gorgeous smile of complete self-satisfaction. Alice in Wonderland's Cheshire Cat would have looked pouty by comparison.After a long warm smile, and a kissing motion towards me with her lips, she said “So that's what sex is supposed to feel like?”I grinned back. “That's only the appetizer. We have just under two hours to serve the main course.”“Do we have any wine left?”“Yes, some in the glasses and probably one small glass each in the bottle.”“Pour it all into the glasses. please.”I got off the bed and freshened the glasses and brought them over. She took hers and half-emptied it on the first swig, “I needed that,” she said, her cheeky grin back on her face.“Maybe we should save what's left for midnight,” I said.“I'll let you into a secret. I was so convinced you were the right person to be my first real lover, I bought two bottles, so we have plenty to celebrate with.”“In that case…..” we clinked glasses and emptied them.I rolled on to her again, and we exchanged gentle short kisses and smiles. She was resting her arms lightly on my back, and between each kiss, I slightly adjusted my position. After about 10 kisses, the tip of my cock was nestling between her inner lips once more. Then, with each kiss, I would press it gently against her, penetrating just a fraction of an inch, and then withdrawing. Gradually I felt her moisture on my tip.A gentle, slightly husky voice said, as we broke a kiss, “Please, take me now.”Without saying a word, each time I thrust gently forward, I then stayed there. And so gradually, her inner lips were parted by my cock and it began to enter her. Again her thighs opened and her legs wrapped around me. We took our time, but eventually I could advance no further. Our pubic bones were in contact, my balls in contact with her. We lay still, like that, for a while.Then I started to rock forwards and backwards on her, lifting my body weight on my elbows. Her expression softened and her blues eyes gazed right at me. Her tongue ran around her lips. I stuck my tongue out and licked the tip of her nose, and she smiled and lifted her head to lick mine.And that was when my own needs took over. My thrusting picked up steam. My thrusts got longer as I withdrew more and then thrust forcefully back. Each time I thrust forward, her hips came up to meet me. Her thighs were up and around my hips. All attempts at gentle seduction were gone; this was pure animal rutting. This was total lust on both our parts.Under me, I could hear her saying “Oh, Yes! Oh Yes!” and then “Come for me, Come in me, please. Now!”And as if on command my body erupted my juices into her, deep inside her, our pubic bones crushing against each other. Almost as soon as I came, I felt her body respond back. Jane came again. Not as extremely as before, but definitely she came and she felt it and it was wonderful.I know because immediately after she told me. “Oh my God, I came again. it was not as strong, but it felt wonderful.”We lay there, me still buried in her to the limit. Then she unwound her legs from around me, and I rolled off her. I looked at the clock. It was 11:10 p.m.“Well, Cinderella,” I said, “you've got 50 minutes to spare.”“Well, at least as I am naked, I don't have to worry about my dress turning into rags!”“So, can I say what I want to happen now?” I asked.“Of course, sweetheart.”“I want us to drink the wine, snuggling on the sofa, completely naked, in our post-coital bliss. I want you to get used to being naked with me, not embarrassed in any way about your body. If you mean it about my Mum, nudity is a big part of it.”She got out the new bottle, and we poured two glasses and sat on the sofa. I twisted so I could put my left arm around her, and we stared at the rug and sat quietly, for a while.The clock on her mantle reached midnight, and almost as if that was a cue, she looked at me.“How far away is your Mum?”“About 60 miles, why?”“Well, now I realize just what I have been missing over the past three years, what my cousin robbed me off, I want to make up for lost time. I can't be your girlfriend without, a, knowing if I am a lesbian rather than a hetero, and, b, can your Mum and I share when it comes to you.”“I see. We'll have to leave it until about 9 a.m. to phone her to ask if it's okay to go home. No point in going if she and Julie have something planned, or she has a date, or something.”“Would you take me if it's possible?”“Yes, but I need to know one thing. Are you ready on a first trip to be involved in a threesome with my Mum and I?”“I am open to anything. A threesome, a foursome with your neighbor. Watching you with your Mum, or just me with your Mum. I am willing to try anything. Maybe it's because I'm scared of losing my nerve. Or maybe, just maybe,” she said with that cheeky grin, “I'm just a nymphomaniac.”I groaned. “Oh dear, two nymphomaniacs in my life!”“Two? Who's the other?”So as we sat there, naked, sipping wine, I told her all about Carol downstairs. All she said at the end was “That could be interesting in the future, now let's get some sleep.”I called Mum around 9 from my room. Jane had wanted to shower, and so did I, and there was no way to put two people in those shower cabinets and have them properly wash themselves. Cuddle in a shower, maybe, but properly cleanse ourselves, no way.So after my shower and while drying off in my robe, I called home. Mum was not going anywhere special, and when I told her the whole story about Jane, she was totally willing to let Jane explore her sexual inclinations with her and I.“Shall I warn Julie to be on standby?” she asked.“You could, but warn her it's nothing personal if it doesn't happen.”So at 9:30 we were in Mama's restaurant down the road, having breakfast. “Does having sex all night always make you this hungry?” asked Jane, and I pointed we didn't do it all night.“I shall bear that in mind when we do,” said Jane, with a grin. “Maybe prepare bedside snacks.” She was dressed in a skinny rib sleeveless top and a pair of jeans that looked as though they were painted on. “Like them? I bought them on Thursday.” In response, I just said “I'm sure the Pope would love them. Could ruin all his vows seeing you dressed like that.” Jane smiled, looking proud of herself.By 11:30 a.m. we were pulling up in Mum's driveway. Coincidentally, Julie was just getting out of her car, and waved “Hello” but didn't come over. That told me Mum had already filled Julie in on what was happening.We went indoors and Mum and I hugged, and kissed on the lips. The Mum turned to Jane, who was about to say “Hello, Mrs. Johnson,” when Mum interrupted her with “The name's Barbara, and if you want to get to know me well, you'd better call me that!” She gave Jane a knowing look, and Jane looked at me and back to her and laughed.“I have a pot of coffee made, so come through to the kitchen and have it while it's fresh, and we can talk.”Coffee poured, we sat around the kitchen table. “Nice house,” said Jane.“Thank you, we think it is. However, Julie next door has a pool, and even though we are into late September, it's still warm enough to use. Do you like to skinny dip?”“To be honest, I have never tried it. Until I met your son, I hid anything to do with my body from sight, and treated sex like a fatal contagious disease.”“Oh, my dear, what a pity, and such a beautiful girl you are too. It's just that Julie has offered us the use of her pool, and said she may join us if she was back.”“She's back” I said.Mum smiled. “Well if she's back I guess it's time for me to change from Mum to Barbara.”I laughed. “You make it seem like Superman changing in a phone box!”Jane laughed too. “Mark's already explained the name rules,” she said.So when coffee was finished, we wandered over to Julie's and Barbara started to strip off. As soon as she was naked, she dived in. I was amazed when Jane actually beat me into the water, and quite shocked when I realized she was not wearing a bra under the sweater. No wonder it fitted her curves so naturally. A couple of minutes later there was another splash as Julie, also naked, dived in.Julie swam over to me and hugged me, her breasts squashed against me, and then turned to Jane and said' I'm Julie.“"I guessed that,” said Jane before allowing Julie to hug her too. Yet another surprise as to how far Jane had travelled in her sexuality in such a short time. A week ago she was hiding in her baggy clothes, and now we were lovers skinny dipping with my mother and a sexy MILF.After about half an hour, Barbara and Julie got out of the pool and started to dry each other off, as well as wrapping their hair in towels. Jane looked at me, and beckoned with her head for me to follow her, and swam to the edge of the pool. She pulled herself out, wrapped a towel around her head and stood there naked holding another one. As I climbed out, she started to rub me down. As soon as she was finished, I got another dry towel and dried her off. Barbara and Julie were heading for Julie's kitchen with just the towels on their heads, otherwise naked, so Jane shrugged off my offer to wrap a towel around her. “When in Rome,” she said.We went into the living room, and Julie sat down in an armchair, her legs apart. Barbara sat on the sofa and beckoned for Jane to join her. I took the other armchair. Jane looked at Julie's trimmed vagina, where, given her splayed legs, the fact it was trimmed and hairless around the actual pussy was clearly obvious. She looked over at Barbara, and saw she was completely hairless down there.She laughed. “I never thought I would be sitting in a room of naked people and feel overdressed,” she said.Julie stood up. “Come with me” she said. Fifteen minutes or so later, Jane and she returned. the towels on both of their heads gone. Jane had a very sexy blonde landing strip - a darker blonde than her head, but still blonde - but all around her actual pussy lips was neatly trimmed like Julie's.She stood in front of me, and showed me. I was almost dumbfounded by how self-confident Jane had become in just a week. She had gone from not touching even her own body to touching mine, and parading herself naked in front of two older MILFs, not to mention having sex.Jane sat down again next to Barbara, who by now had shed the towel on her head. Julie sat the other side of Jane, and on an unspoken cue, both MILFs turned to Jane and started sucking on her breasts, one each.Jane's head lolled back on the sofa, and the Cheshire Cat Grin was all over her face. Julie pulled Jane's thighs apart, and started rubbing and tapping Jane's clit, very fast, at the same time both breasts were being sucked off and bitten. I could see Jane's body tensing and starting to shake as her internal sensations were building, and then after several minutes of this treatment she let out a high-pitched sound that was not quite a scream of pleasure, and ejaculated a whole load of juices from her pussy all over Julie's hand.Julie beckoned for me to cross over to her, and had me kneel in front of her. “Eat me,” she ordered. I did, naturally. As I did, I felt Barbara get off the sofa, and as I stole a look to my right, there she was, knelt between Jane's knees, sucking and licking her pussy like cleaning ice cream off a plate. Both Barbara and I could hear the groans of the two building towards climaxes.When all of this flurry of activity was over, Julie went into the kitchen and brought back glasses and a bottle of nicely chilled Chardonnay. We drank a toast to Jane and the beginning of a full life as a woman. Later, we dressed so we could go back to Mum's. Once home, Mum said, “I take it you want to sleep in your own room with Jane?”I looked at Jane, who looked at Mum, and said, “Maybe we should all sleep in your room, let's see how it goes. I can sleep with Mark any time as we live in the same house!” And she flashed me her now familiar cheeky grin.Mum laughed and said that would be okay too. Then she announced that a little later we would, the three of us, go out for supper, as she didn't feel like cooking and she wanted to save her energy for the evening, anyway, and we all knew what that meant.So we sat around for a couple of hours just chatting, and Mum and Jane seemed to hit it off really well. After a great deal of discussion we went to a steak house, and had, unsurprisingly, steaks, with salad and fries. And red wine, of course; a nice Malbec. Returning home, Mum went up to her room, and Jane and I lay on the sofa and kissed, her laying across my lap like last night.Mum called down to us, and we went up to find her completely naked, and candles lit all around her room. Some were scented, and so it smelled of flowers and the fresh air of mountains, and was quite relaxing. Mum stood in front of Jane and undressed her, which didn't take long as it was only the skinny-rib sweater, the jeans and her panties.Then the pair of them undressed me. Mum let Jane pull down my briefs, releasing my already engorged cock.“Have you sucked him yet?” asked Barbara.Jane shook her head, so Barbara said “Let me show you.”She held my cock at the base with one hand to hold it out in front of me, then pulled the foreskin down with the other. Then she started to lick the tip of my mushroom head, and to swirl her tongue around it like it was an ice-cream cone She let go of the base of my cock and held my balls and gently squeezed them. I could feel my legs getting a bit jelly like, but then she stopped.“Now you try.”Jane knelt down in front of me, and repeated the process. She had not used her mouth on me up to this point, although when I first got naked the night before, she had touched my cock. She didn't have the confidence of Barbara, at least not yet, but she was gentle and it felt really good. When she squeezed my balls, that was firm and yet just painful enough to be erotic.“What if he comes in my mouth?”“Oh, that's okay. It won't poison you. Not all women like it, but I personally love it. And it's a way of having sex during those not so pleasant days of the month.”“You mean like next week?” asked Jane.“Thanks for the warning” I said.Jane went back to sucking me, but after a few minutes, Barbara stopped her. “Save his juices for later,” she said. Looking at me, Barbara asked “So what positions have you tried?”“Just missionary,” I said.“Missionary? Is that a Papal position?” asked Jane giggling.“Not quite,” said Barbara, smiling. “Let's show you Cowgirl.” And with that, Barbara straddled me, grabbed my penis, and lowered herself on to it. She dropped all the way down, and started riding me. Jane watched, enthralled.Before I could cum, Barbara stopped and looked at Jane. “Want to try it?”She was about to say something, but instead broke out laughing, and I said “Is the Pope Catholic?” and laughed with her. The Pope was having a sex life he knew absolutely nothing about.Barbara guided her on to my penis and she started to ride. “One nice thing about this position, Jane, is that you are in control. You can stop and start to suit you, and to drive your lover into a state of frustration. You can lean forward a bit so he can play with your breasts, or lay down on him and kiss him. And he can reach your clit and play with it,” as I obligingly demonstrated.As I rubbed her clit, Jane threw her head back and exclaimed “I think we will be using this one again!” She kept riding me.Barbara straddled my head and lowered her already moist pussy on to my mouth. I could tell as her weight shifted and the sound of Jane's moans changed that they were kissing, and I guessed Barbara was playing with Jane's breasts, if they were not playing with each other's.Jane's riding got more and more energetic, and before too long, all three of us had a climax. I think Jane came first, but between her and I, it was close. She rolled off me, and soon after, Barbara got off me and we lay on our backs, Jane in the middle.All went quite for a while. Jane held hands with us both, one of our hands in each of hers, and after taking a deep breath and slowly letting it out, said “Next time I go home, I think I will kill my cousin…”“Do you think he is worth the hassle?” I asked.“It's what he deserves for depriving me of one of life's greatest pleasures for so long.”Barbara said “He isn't worth the trouble of going to prison for. You should simply take Mark home with you and let your cousin know what might have been his if his brain was half the size of his prick.”Jane laughed. Considering she was laughing about the cousin who had betrayed her and raped her, it was real progress. She snuggled up into my side, and with a Walton's style round of “Good Nights” we fell asleep.The following morning, Jane and I awoke in Barbara's bed. We smiled at each other and kissed. I hugged her close. Barbara was still asleep.“I need to ask. Are you okay with this sudden change of direction in your life? Going from a fear of sex to a surfeit of it? I will understand if you want to distance yourself while you have your period, to rethink everything that has happened.”“I will distance myself to the extent of not having sex with you until next weekend. But it's just a hiatus. And no, generally I am glad that with your help, and your other lovers' help, I have learned to enjoy the oldest pleasure known to people.The funny thing about my cousin was, up until him raping me, I had a crush on him. He could have had me, my virginity and all, if he had just asked nicely. And the fact that you were nice to me without even asking for sex, that blew me away.”“I didn't ask, doesn't mean I didn't want.”She kissed my nose. “I know, silly, but you were nice simply because you are nice. That's what I meant.”We got out of bed without waking Barbara and wrapped towels around us, checked the pathway between the houses and dashed into Julie's back garden and leapt in the pool. It was early and although the pool was heated, it still had a chilly edge to it. We hugged naked in the middle of the pool.“I think I want you to take me, next summer, to a nudist beach. What do you think?”“From what I've heard, most people on a nudist beach should stay dressed.”“Yes, but that doesn't apply to us, does it? We are beautiful naked!”That I couldn't argue with. But the fact she was talking about next summer? What might that mean, long term?We swam, then wrapped ourselves in the towels and ran back home. Mum was preparing breakfast. After breakfast we set off back to the house. We walked in and in front of my door, Jane kissed me. “My woman's thing has just started, so this is your last pashy kiss for a while. See you tomorrow in Civics.”Then she kissed me again, a nice long kiss. Just as she broke it, Carol came out of her room. She just stood and watched. Jane broke the kiss, said “Thanks for everything, see you tomorrow afternoon,” and turned to run upstairs. “Oh, hi,” she said to Carol, and was gone.Carol looked at me, and then the retreating Jane, then back to me, and smiled. “Glad to see your weekend wasn't wasted in my absence,” she said. Then she went out the front door.I was beginning to get the feeling life was going to get complicated..Back at University, this was Jane's ‘lady week' so I saw her in class and part of one evening as we worked on a project, but no romantic activity. I was thinking I was getting more and more romantically inclined toward her, but she made her attitude plain.To her, I was the only guy she had sex with at the moment, as no-one else had demonstrated the right, but she was not prepared to be exclusive, nor was she prepared to rule out having a girl-friend.Thursday night I got a mysterious text from Mum. “Can you come home alone after classes tomorrow for the weekend?” No please or thank you. No explanation of the cause of the drama. So on Friday, I drove Jane back to the house as I stopped in to pick up some clothes. She kissed me good-bye in a nice but not passionate way, and I was on my way home. “Give my love to your Mum”, she said.I got home and Mum had a plate of spaghetti Bolognese ready. As I ate she filled me in. Julie's daughter, who I thought was about 26 was actually 30, and had just found out her husband of 5 years, and longer than that as her partner, had come out as gay and as a cross-dresser, and was considering transitioning to a woman. This weekend she was leaving the marital home and moving back in with Julie, and I was wanted to drive a white panel van, and help load it of course, to help move the stuff.So as a result, we were up early Saturday and off to Donna's place, about two hours away. It took a couple of hours or so to pack the van, another two hours to drive back, and around an hour to unload, as she was not yet bothering to unpack anything but clothes. Julie's house was four-bedroomed, so clothes went in Donna's old room, the rest, still packed, into the other two.To be continued…By barry240646 for Literotica

Welcome to You Haven't Blanked That! This week we watched Alice In Wonderland directed by Tim Burton. Checking out on Tim Burton, Dark Shadows, an inconsistent sequel to the cartoon, Linda Wolverton, Lestat musical, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Deep Roy, waivers between a Tim Burton movie and a Disney movie, the Fudderwackit, Got Milk ads, Disney live action remakes, 101 Dalmatians remake, stupid tik tok theories, Corey Feldman, better versions of Alice in Wonderland, American McGee, The End of the World is Just Beginning, Ambulance, The Northman, the Lost City, Lightyear, Top Gun: Maverick, the Boys, Opening theme by the Assassins Closing theme by Lucas Perea  Email: Yhblankthat@gmail.com  Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/youhaventblankedthat/ Instagram: (@yhblankthat)   https://www.amazon.com/You-Havent-Blanked-That/dp/B08JJS7RSK  https://anchor.fm/blanked-that --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/blanked-that/message

Leaving Hitchcock (and Montreal) behind them, Andrew and Dave head to 1933 to take a look at the often overlooked Paramount adaptation of Alice in Wonderland! What do the duo make of the star filled bomb? Why didn't the film connect with audiences in 1933? And is the source material really meaty enough to sustain the various forms of analysis that it has undergone over time? Tune in and find out!Next Episode: The name's Price. Vincent Price.All music by Andrew Kannegiesser. Editing by Dave Babbitt

It's finally here! One of the most requested reviews since Sarah and I started covering versions of Alice in Wonderland back in 2017 has been the star-studded 1985 American miniseries starring Natalie Gregory, and we're finally doing it! And not only that, we're joined by Nicki from Trivial Theater! We're covering part one, Alice in Wonderland, this week, and next week we're doing Through the Looking Glass! Follow Sarah online! Redbubble: https://www.redbubble.com/people/TurnipWilson/shop Society6: https://society6.com/turnipwilson Follow Nicki online! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/trivialtheater Twitter: https://twitter.com/trivia_chic For links to my latest episodes & videos, social media, and more, check out my Link Tree! https://linktr.ee/jonjnorth Episode 132 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/iheartpodcast/message

It's finally here! One of the most requested reviews since Sarah and I started covering versions of Alice in Wonderland back in 2017 has been the star-studded 1985 American miniseries starring Natalie Gregory, and we're finally doing it! And not only that, we're joined by Nicki from Trivial Theater! We're covering part one, Alice in Wonderland, this week, and next week we're doing Through the Looking Glass! Follow Sarah online! Redbubble: https://www.redbubble.com/people/TurnipWilson/shop Society6: https://society6.com/turnipwilson Follow Nicki online! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/trivialtheater Twitter: https://twitter.com/trivia_chic For links to my latest episodes & videos, social media, and more, check out my Link Tree! https://linktr.ee/jonjnorth Episode 82 --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/everyversionever/support

Amanda chats with math teacher/author/pattern writer/fabric designer/book lover/mom, Angela Pingel.  The two discuss the ups and downs of life, parenting, owning your own business and everything in between. Angela recently released a new line of fabrics called Clueless with Windham Fabrics. Angela's love of books, more specifically stories, inspire her fabric design. The fun bright colors bring Nancy Drew's mysteries to life. Her previous line, Curious Dream, was inspired by Alice in Wonderland. Go check them out!  You can find Angela here:https://angelapingel.com/  Want more? You can also find Amanda here: IG: https://www.instagram.com/sweetpeadesigncompany Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/SweetPeaDesignCoShop Find us on YouTube!  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtEPHeSuFjeQNIUPfk78ynAJoin our Patreon and help us keep the show going! https://www.patreon.com/notyourgrannysquiltshow

Marissa chats with Sara Ella about her new Alice-inspired retelling - THE WONDERLAND TRIALS - as well as some of the unique challenges that come with writing retellings, such as deciding what liberties you can take with the original source material that will both surprise and satisfy your readers; keeping a checklist to ensure you're being true to your vision and including all the ideas and details you care most about; the simple joy of leaving "Easter eggs" in the text for readers to discover; why writing puzzles and riddles in book format (as opposed to the big screen) can be so bloody difficult!; the importance of putting restrictions and weaknesses into your worldbuilding and magic system, even when that world is based on nonsense and impossibilities; and a bonus non-writing topic: What it's like to play a beloved character at Walt Disney World!Books discussed in this episode can be purchased from your local independent bookstore or buy them online from the Happy Writer bookshop.org store (that benefits indie bookstores) at  https://bookshop.org/shop/marissameyer

Welcome to another episode of TMM…where you can also find us at “The Old Man-dot-show”... try it!  Also,  happy post 4th of July.  I have WAY too many tabs open in my browser most of the time.  It's as cluttered and messy as the rest of my house.  I leave these tabs open because I think they contain something I want ot share with you, which is another way of saying something I want to complain, rant or brag about.   I have a few items I'd like to complain about before hopefully getting to something hopeful. Item #1: Forth of July Message from California's Governor Gavin Newsome 4th of July message: In it he starts off by saying let's talk… translation: let me talk… about what's going on in America… translation: let me bag on Florida Governor Ron…ald McDonald Desantis.  Governor Newsome, don't start off saying you want to talk about America and then attack another Governor, the images contained Desantis and the graphics were about Desantis.  It's this kind of rhetoric that actually contributes to the divisiveness in our country and it is not taking the high road.  Mean what you say and say what you mean.  In other words, if you tell your citizens to wear masks, YOU wear a mask.  Even in Napa Valley. Don't get me wrong,  I am not defending Wrong Desantis.  I am NOT a fan of that egomaniac.  However… of the numerous laws Desantis has signed, the “Parental Rights in Education law, which prohibits discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade classrooms.”  This is going to sound like I'm a crazy conservative, but is that all that bad?  Kindergarten through 3rd grade.  Four and five year olds to what… eight years old?  There shouldn't be ANY sexual education talk of ANY kind in those grades, should there?  What a great bargaining chip to use to look for compromise.  And if there's a kid having sexual identity issues in those grades, can't we deal with it on a case by case basis with some compassion?  Do we need a law for that.  My recollection of grade school was a one night presentation with fathers and sons in attendance in the auditorium.  That was it.  My biggest takeaway from that was on the ride home I was able to get away with saying the F-word in front of my dad.  And I said it with a little pause before adding the “i-n-g” so it seemed like I didn't even now how to pronounce it.  And my dad said, “yes, yes.  This is fucking.”  Man, I felt so victorious that night.  I'd pulled a major coupe.   Back to Gavin Gruesome… at the end of his message talking about America… if America was Flrorida, he invites Floridians to join us here in California.  Hey Gavin, we've got 39 million people in this state plus a housing crisis.  And you want more people to come to California?  Seriously?  We're driving wealthy residents out of the state and you want to bring disenfranchised poor Floridians to California?  You think the rich ones that can afford housing on the beach in Miami are going to come?  No.  We'll have even more homeless….oops, unhoused people than we already have.  Why?  So you can win your reelection campaign?  That's who paid for the message by the way. Silicon valley isn't the only place where businesses are leaving California.  I'll get a Netflix, Stranger Things plug in here and I'm sure that if you've been watching Stranger Things you don't watch the credits.  You think that show was shot in Hollywood?  Even the scenes that were supposed to take place in Los Angeles were filmed in and around Albuquerque New Mexico where a LOT of productions take place as well as Wilmington, North Carolina and Vancouver, British Columbia for that matter.  And it's rarely for the landscapes.  I'm sure you know that Southern California can provide damn near any landscape you want, except maybe a rainforest. Heck that's what a soundstage is for.  So, there's a whole other industry besides high tech that has left California.   Okay, see how my rants just swirl around and don't' really go anywhere? (toilet)  I guess if I had a point, it's that California's Governor shouldn't be inviting a population to come to California when we can't house the ones we have already.  And if it was a political stunt for his reelection campaign and he's calling out Florida's Goofy Governor “Wrong” DeSantis, then I'd have to go with “Shame on You Gavin Gruesome”.  Chucking barbs at your opponent or the other party is just perpetuating the horrible divisiveness we're already bogged down in.  Find another way to craft your message. What was I talking about? See?  Okay, horrible politicians on the left and right. All that for only item #1! Item #2: C.S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll are not the same person. I obviously have way too much computer time.  I try to keep my daughter from it but at the same time I can spend hours sitting in front of my computer… accomplishing, what?  Am I fooling myself into thinking I'm educating myself? To what end?  So I can take some information that's little more than trivia, and regurgitate it in a conversation (or a podcast) to make people think I'm educated and worldly?  Please.  So here's how I went from C.S. Lewis to Lewis Carrol to the Beatles to The Animals to… what?  It really led to nothing. I was initially trying to find the origin of the saying, “Don't judge a person before walking a mile in their shoes.”  I still don't think I have it but it led me to some very random places.  The oldest origin I found was from a Native American prayer that goes: “Great Spirit — Grant that I may not criticize my neighbor until I have walked a mile in his moccasins.” While that rabbit hole didn't lead me to a satisfying end it somehow got me on to C.S. Lewis and the Christian metaphors he used in his books, specifically “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe”.  But instead of C.S. Lewis, I thought it was Lewis Carrol who wrote Alice in Wonderland, no… Through the Looking Glass.  And in that book, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, who would be perfect guests for this show, recite the poem, “The Walrus and The Carpenter” to Alice… The poem tells of the Walrus and the Carpenter luring young oysters out of their beds and on to the shore where they are all eaten by the Walrus and the Carpenter, even when one of the older oysters warns them.  In the Disney movie the Walrus eats all of the oysters and the Carpenter doesn't get any.  In the book it appears both eat some of the oysters but it appears the Walrus gets most of them.  Their untimely end comes when the Walrus says:  "The time has come," the Walrus said,  "To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot—    And whether pigs have wings." "But wait a bit," the Oysters cried,  "Before we have our chat; For some of us are out of breath,  And all of us are fat!" "No hurry!" said the Carpenter.  They thanked him much for that. Even there at the end of that stanza the Carpenter cuts them some slack.  Many have analyzed Carrol's work to look for hidden meaning an metaphor including the Walrus and the Carpenter represents Communism vs. Capitalism or that one represents Christianity and Western religion while the other represents Buddhism and Eastern Religion OR… that Lewis Carrol did drugs when he wrote Alice in Wonderland.  The general consensus on that is NO, he was simply writing for children to entertain them and their imaginations. If fact, one of the illustrators for a later edition of the book said that the original illustrator had the choice of a butterfly, a carpenter or a baronet (the holder of a rank of honor below a baron and above a knight, oh my god the rabbit holes people, I'm gonna break an ankle).  Because,  you see, butterfly, carpenter and baronet all have the same number of syllables and would keep the cadence of the poem. But what I did find interesting is that The Walrus from the poem is what John Lennon refers to in the Beatles, “I am The Walrus” from their Magical Mystery Tour Album, and if I play one second of that song this whole episode will get deleted from most platforms it's published.    Oops! Her is an excerpt from the 1980 Playboy magazine interview with John Lennon:  LENNON: "The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend. The second line was written on the next acid trip the next weekend…  PLAYBOY: "What about the walrus itself?" LENNON: "It's from 'The Walrus and the Carpenter.' 'Alice in Wonderland.' To me, it was a beautiful poem. It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles' work. Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, 'I am the carpenter.' But that wouldn't have been the same, would it? (singing) 'I am the carpenter....'" So this got me to thinking if John was the Walrus from a Lewis Carroll peom, then who is the eggman?  It turns out the Eggman is Eric Burdon.  Please don't say who is Eric Burdon.  Did you just say who is Eric Burdon?  Shame on you.  How about Eric Burdon and The Animals, does that sound more familiar?  How about the band WAR?  That Eric Burdon, who Rolling Stone named #57 on their list of top 100 Greatest Singers of All Time.   Why is Eric Burdon the eggman?  Apparently, Mr. Burdon had this sexual fetish that involved cracking a raw egg and I won't get into anymore details on that.  However, Eric relayed the story to John Lennon and Lennon nicknamed Eric “Eggman” as in, “go get it Eggman.” How's that for a rabbit hole? The rabbit hole continued by the way as I found an interview of John Lennon speaking of the Beatles songs he liked personally… It also led me to this bit from Lennon not long before his assassination on being 40, on not being the person his fans wanted him to be, on what it's like being in your 20's and having people hang on your every word Basically the message is that we all need the time to grow out of our misconceptions about life.  Many teens and twenty-somethings are full of energy and piss and vinegar and it lacks focus and direction because they haven't figured it out yet.  It comes with a lot of frustration and even anger.  And the last thing this age group needs, particularly males… particularly white males… are guns… particularly assault rifles.  I had to do it, didn't I?  I had to ruin a nice nostalgic romp by bringing in politics.   Here it is: you shouldn't be allowed to purchase a gun, particularly an assault style weapon until you are 25 and here's why: leave it to experts in assessing risk and see what they do.  The insurance industry.  They don't let anyone rent a car until they're 25 years old.  Why?  Because when it comes to a vehicle that travels at high speeds and can kill someone, they are relatively irresponsible, they make bad decisions and they are a bad risk when it comes to renting a car.  Bad risk, bad business decision, so they don't do it.  No one complains about that.  It's a fact of life and it's common sense.  So do the same with guns. And you might say: “Oh but I can get drafted and then they GIVE me a gun!  Very, very different situation. 1) they train you very specifically and thoroughly on the use of said weapon, 2)  You are not allowed to carry it around wherever you go unless, #3) You are going into combat where there will be many others with the same weapons.  It's called our military or militia which we did not have… at all, when the 2nd amendment was written, including all that stuff I said in another episode about how many shots could be fired per minute when the 2nd amendment was written.  It's 3 shots per minute by the way, maybe 4 if you're an expert at reloading a musket.  Not 40 or 60 or 100 or whatever number you come up with.  Okay, I apologize for ruining a nice story about a poem with politics.  Actually, the first story was about politics too only I was mainly bagging on the other party.  I try to be an equal opportunity offender. Well, I might as well make it three for three…  ITEM #3: the Saturday Night Massacre - What the heck was that?  I'm sure you guys know because you're not morons but I had never heard of it and it was brought up as a parallel to the January 6th shenanigans of our former idiot in chief Donald Dump.  On October 20th 1973 Nixon ORDERED his Attorney General AND his Deputy AG to fire the guy investigating the Watergate break-in.  Not only did they not fire him, they both resigned in protest which left the role of attorney general to the Solicitor General.  This poor bastard went along with Nixon's  request and fired the special prosecutor Cox. Less than a half hour later, the White House sent FBI agents to shut down the offices of the Special Prosecutor, AND the Attorney General AND Deputy Attorney General.  Can you believe that shit? Well, the 1970's version of the internet blew up, that being Western Union telegraph.  Have any of you ever sent a telegram?  Me neither.  Over 50,000 telegrams came in to Washington DC from citizens.  I wonder what the equivalent number of tweets would be?  Members of Congress, presumably democrats, called for Nixon's impeachment.  So… Nixon had to appoint another prosecutor for the Watergate scandal named Leon Jaworski, remember that name?  No, not the Eagles quarterback, that's Ron Jaworski.  Well, Jaworski pressed for the release of those tricky Dick tape recordings… the one's that mysteriously had like 17 minutes missing?  And he got them released and the following August tricky Dick took a final trip… home… Touching.  Well, it appears our favorite reality show president, how's that for irony,  literally held an episode of the apprentice in the oval office and considered pulling the same stunt.  He had his AG and his Deputy AG along with the nutty  environmental attorney Jeffrey Clark.  Clark is the one that was told to go back to his office and they would call him when there's an oil spill.  Trump was told he would face massive resignations and he knew this Clark guy would not make it happen for Donny boy.  But it's an interesting parallel between the teflon Don and tricky Dick. ITEM #4: NPR wants you to make them your only news source.  I heard this just a few minutes ago.  No Emmie Martinez No, Ari Shapiro.  And even a no to, “Oh goodness gracious It's Scott Simon”.  The days of trusting one news source is gone and if you are using only one news source, then shame on you.  Go and read some news from a site that's a little bit to the right or left of where you normally sit in your comfort zone.  But no single news sources anymore unfortunately. Wow, I got through that last one pretty efficiently. CLOSE - In closing, I think one thing is very obvious…  I need to find guests for this show.  Otherwise It's too much.  Too much of me, too much opinion, and way too much work.  At least twice as much work, probably more and it's not as enjoyable for either of us.   Also… an addendum to try and correct my moronoscity, did a quick search and it seems you can rent a car if you are under 25 these days, but you will pay a premium to do so.  Drivers under the age of 25 can expect to pay an “underage fee” and depending on the location that is around $25 to $30 a day which adds up.  But the rationale is the same: younger drivers are less experienced at driving (or life) and and are more likely to take risks and this holds especially for males as they are generally more likely to take risks in terms of health and the enjoyment expected from risky activities.  See the University of Pennsylvania research paper at the end of the credits… sorry to blather on so long, see you next time!   John Lennon Interview: Playboy 1980 (Page 3) - Beatlesinterviews.org  What Was the Saturday Night Massacre? -  History.com How Old Do You Have To Be To Rent A Car? -  jdpower.com Gender Differences in Risk Assessment: Why do Women Take Fewer Risks than Men? - University of Pennsylvania  Music by Coma-Media from Pixabay

Musical legends, creepy puppets, and more swearing than usual dominate the discussion as Christian and his companions cover the middle two (of six )1940s Disney package films. First, he and Emma measure the merits and minuses of Make Mine Music, the only entry in the Disney animated canon not on yet on Disney Plus. Then, Ian comes back to facilitate facing Fun and Fancy Free, which also marks the return of both Mickey Mouse and Jiminy Cricket.

[REBROADCAST FROM December 8, 2021] This past month legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz released her newest book, a collection of her long-spanning work in fashion photography, the first compilation of her work in the industry. In Annie Leibovitz: Wonderland, inspired by the story of Alice in Wonderland, Leibovitz journeys through over 300 photos from her career in fashion, including photographing models, designers like Tom Ford and John Galiano, to important political figures and athletes, though, as she would tell it, she never considered herself a fashion photographer at all. Leibovitz joins us to talk the new collection of her work.

Anna Luttenegger, Marlaina Lightkeeper, Eric Weirup, Elise Pederson, and Sarah Purdy with Union Street Players discuss their upcoming shows of Alice in Wonderland. Tickets are available on the Union Street Players website.

Crying while eating is mood! Join the Dead Beat Film Society as we discuss Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli, the first Japanese Best Animated Film Oscar, the confusing plot, heavy Alice in Wonderland vibes, delicious animated food, our love for the radish spirit, the John Williams of Japan, japanese folklore, nerds & band geeks, our cursory understanding of Shinto religion, possible human trafficking and child prostitution read (what!?), girl boss, the meaning of No Face, greed, anticapitalism, environmentalism, consumerism, other -isms, the power of names, pausing to take a breath, using kindness & compassion (wow what a concept), all the crazy background creatures, and the metaphor of saving the world your parents ruined. So jump in a tub and hit play for an in depth Spirited Away film analysis! (Special Guest: Ollie & Cass) Click here to folllow OLLIE and CASS on social media!  

Franne talked to me over the phone and discussed her first love being clothing; being sent home in high school for wearing jorts; seeing Guys & Dolls with her parents; not being married to Eugene Lee; her first productions in Philadelphia with Danny Aiello; touring with Alice in Wonderland; where she keeps her awards; how Lorne Michaels talked her into coming to SNL; drawing and creating the costumes for the Bees; her father engineering the antennae; Lorne not letting her copy write them which led to knockoffs; her typical work week; working with Gilda Radner; lack of budget actualy helped the show; Weekend Update blazers; $1500 budget made them work harder and smarter; today's SNL can do things the original could not; at 40th anniversary Franne could not believe the costume budget; most of SNL is shopped; as show progressed sketches got longer and took more time; Brooks van Horn costume house; Raquel Welch; Mick Jagger; not having much to do with hosts or musical guests; Dan Aykroyd; creating the Coneheads but not being able to apply them because they were classified as wigs; SNL versus NBC departments; being impressed with Christopher Reeve and Angela Lansbury; friendship with Laraine Newman; working with Garrett Morris; being serenaded by Chevy Chase; getting hospitalized with a collapsed lung the same week Chevy injured his groin in September 1976; working on SNL at the same time as Sweeney Todd and Gilda Live; how she helped save "Sweeney Todd"; costuming black and white sketches; appearing in the Bee Capades because she was one of the few on staff who could skate; teaching; painting; still designing sets; being out on Saturday nights

Today's episode is another extended episode of my Wonderland Wednesday series from 2018, Sarah and I are talking about the 1966 BBC version of Alice in Wonderland. And not only is this an extended cut of our original review, but we also came back to record a whole new segment, talking about some of the comments we've received about this one over the years. Follow Sarah Online! Redbubble: https://www.redbubble.com/people/TurnipWilson/shop Society6: https://society6.com/turnipwilson For links to my latest episodes & videos, social media, and more, check out my Link Tree! https://linktr.ee/jonjnorth Episode 81 --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/everyversionever/support

https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-62-the-double-bind/PART 1Ryder discusses Alan Watt's interpretation of the "tough-minded" and "tender-hearted" as "prickles and goos" that need each other, yet are confused by each other and lash out. Of course, like Alice in Wonderland, we can refuse to play the game: the competitive rules laid out by another in a grid, but Watts says to remember that life is a game... when our ego gets involved we tend to forget and become serious and demand "off with their heads." Using Buddhist insights may not help. It tends to be a meta-move, like a kid trying out some Marxism to attack their dad. It may be true, but will likely not change anything. Yet, what the kid is doing is practicing the utility of ideology: now a Pawn can check a King. It is local practice for the global revolution. PART 2The double bind is being told to "act natural": a paradox forcing performative conformity. Thus our identity is shaped by society. Slavoj Zizek cites the Paris riots of 2005 as a double blackmail, where the ghettoized citizens are called animals and treated as animals, thus in rage, they burn cars and part of their homes. To some this reinforces their barbarism (they can never be integrated into Paris society)  while to others it is an anguished cry or rage that is all too human. Capitalism and Bureaucracy tend to these double binds: where to be famous like Elvis, you sell out your rebellious rage. Capitalism utilizes and capital-izes on energy, converting any attack into sustenance for itself and punishment for you. It is claimed to be a hydra, but more accurately - as Foucault has said of power and its dispersal - it is amoeba-like slime with no head to lop off. PART 3Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" has many examples of contradictory, nonsensical paradoxes in the military making it into a dark farcical comedy. The primary paradox is you cannot escape the military: if you want to save yourself you are sane (it is sane not to want to fight or die) so to be declared insane you must want to stay and fight... in which case you would never claim you are insane. Eventually, the main character does go insane, and the military rewards his bravery. Insanity is the preferred outcome. In Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cockoo's nest" Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) trades prison for the mental ward, only to find by declaring insanity his welfare has been turned over to Nurse Ratchet, a petty tyrant who works to break this spirited man.  Her target: his head. As Foucault has stated, the body can be imprisoned in circumstances, but the goal now is to have you internalize the contradictions until our shared insanity seems sane. the escape: off with your own head 

A new but brief era dawns for the podcast as Christian and Emma dive into the first two of the six package-films Disney released between Bambi and Cinderella. This time, it's a Latin American double feature of Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. Discover which sibling has spent more time in Latin America, which one hates Donald Duck, and whether either of these forgotten films is a lost treasure or is better left buried.

Story Circle Theater returns with the second part of a chapter from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland read by John Bell from Bell's in the Batfry! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Co-op. Logic deduction. Shrubbery and flowers. Dylan and Bill discuss the new Alice in Wonderland-themed game, Paint the Roses. Is there a game you'd like to hear our thoughts on? Send us an email at innkeeperstablepodcast@gmail.com

Welcome back to The MinnMax Show! On this episode, Ben Hanson is joined by Leo Vader, Kyle Hilliard, and Jeff Marchiafava to unpack the biggest reveals from the Nintendo Direct Mini. While technically just a "partner showcase" focusing on third-party releases, there were several exciting announcements such as a collection of Mega Man Battle Network games, new gameplay from Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, a big farming RPG from Square-Enix called Harvestella, Persona 5 finally releasing on Switch, and more! Then we talk about a great parody of The Witness and what's happening to the developers of Pokémon GO. Then we answer a ton of great questions from the community submitted on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/minnmax Vote on The Deepest Dive here - https://bit.ly/3Adb5ql Watch and share the video version - https://youtu.be/jKNpHFlZluQ Help support MinnMax's supporters! https://www.iam8bit.com Ticket To Ride: San Francisco - https://bit.ly/3QnAe7l To jump to a particular discussion, check out the timestamps below... 00:00:00 - Intro 00:06:15 - The Nintendo Direct Mini highlights 00:10:48 - Doraemon Story of Seasons: Friends of the Great Kingdom 00:12:39 - Harvestella 00:18:44 - Disney Dreamlight Valley 00:20:49- Persona 5 on Switch 00:22:28 - Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope 00:28:20 - Little Noah: Scion of Paradise 00:30:49 - More Steamdeck impressions 00:34:24 - Return to Monkey Island 00:36:30 - Live A Live 00:39:58 - Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection 00:43:41 - PAC-MAN WORLD Re-PAC 00:45:53 - Even more Switch announcements 00:50:36 - Mario Strikers: Battle League 00:54:22 - Nintendo's 2022 release calendar 00:56:53 - The Looker 00:59:48 - Niantic's post-Pokémon Go challenges 00:00:00 - Community Kickoff 01:08:19 - Thanking MinnMax's biggest supporters 01:12:49 - Community questions 01:56:44 - Get A Load Of This 02:02:47 - Vote for The Deepest Dive 02:06:48 - The MinnMax Community Bike Ride 02:08:22 - New Patreon goal! JeffM's GALOT - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a6jt3Vufa9U Leo's GALOT - https://www.reddit.com/r/fallout76settlements/comments/v7fnyg/alice_in_wonderland_book_video_in_comments/ Hanson's GALOT - https://buzzaldrin.com/faq Kyle's GALOT - https://twitter.com/joshuayehl/status/1540409801284493312?s=21&t=sVtMSKsvyZf2Ceixi6pJOw Community GALOT - https://www.theverge.com/c/23055922/homeland-security-series KK Slider music via DistroKid - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqmwJTD6paM Follow us on Twitch - https://www.twitch.tv/minnmaxshow Subscribe to our YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/minnmax Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/minnmax Buy MinnMax merch here - https://minnmax.com/merch Follow us on Twitter - https://twitter.com/minnmaxshow Follow us on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/minnmaxshow Go behind the scenes on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/minnmaxshow Become a Game Champion by supporting MinnMax at the $50 tier on Patreon and lock in the game of your choice! https://www.patreon.com/minnmax Aaron Terrell - Final Fantasy X Otsego12 - The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker Logan Krause - Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords Clemens Zobel - Star Wars: The Old Republic 5eth - Star Wars Galaxies RichMclaughlin - HyperDot Charles McGregor - Opposwitch Jacob Tyler - Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen Dunder - Snoopy Flying Ace Miguel Medjai - Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest Patrick Polk - God Hand DominicCichocki - Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Ted Ryser - Footman Wars MattMini2008 - Lunar Silver Star Story Complete Spider_Dan - Illusion of Gaia Zachary Pligge - Superman 64 Andres Silva - Dark Cloud

This week's episode looks at “All You Need is Love”, the Our World TV special, and the career of the Beatles from April 1966 through August 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Rain" by the Beatles. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ NB for the first few hours this was up, there was a slight editing glitch. If you downloaded the old version and don't want to redownload the whole thing, just look in the transcript for "Other than fixing John's two flubbed" for the text of the two missing paragraphs. Errata I say "Come Together" was a B-side, but the single was actually a double A-side. Also, I say the Lennon interview by Maureen Cleave appeared in Detroit magazine. That's what my source (Steve Turner's book) says, but someone on Twitter says that rather than Detroit magazine it was the Detroit Free Press. Also at one point I say "the videos for 'Paperback Writer' and 'Penny Lane'". I meant to say "Rain" rather than "Penny Lane" there. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. Particularly useful this time was Steve Turner's book Beatles '66. I also used Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. Johnny Rogan's Starmakers and Svengalis had some information on Epstein I hadn't seen anywhere else. Some information about the "Bigger than Jesus" scandal comes from Ward, B. (2012). “The ‘C' is for Christ”: Arthur Unger, Datebook Magazine and the Beatles. Popular Music and Society, 35(4), 541-560. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.608978 Information on Robert Stigwood comes from Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins. And the quote at the end from Simon Napier-Bell is from You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, which is more entertaining than it is accurate, but is very entertaining. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of "All You Need is Love" is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Magical Mystery Tour. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I start the episode -- this episode deals, in part, with the deaths of three gay men -- one by murder, one by suicide, and one by an accidental overdose, all linked at least in part to societal homophobia. I will try to deal with this as tactfully as I can, but anyone who's upset by those things might want to read the transcript instead of listening to the episode. This is also a very, very, *very* long episode -- this is likely to be the longest episode I *ever* do of this podcast, so settle in. We're going to be here a while. I obviously don't know how long it's going to be while I'm still recording, but based on the word count of my script, probably in the region of three hours. You have been warned. In 1967 the actor Patrick McGoohan was tired. He had been working on the hit series Danger Man for many years -- Danger Man had originally run from 1960 through 1962, then had taken a break, and had come back, retooled, with longer episodes in 1964. That longer series was a big hit, both in the UK and in the US, where it was retitled Secret Agent and had a new theme tune written by PF Sloan and Steve Barri and recorded by Johnny Rivers: [Excerpt: Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"] But McGoohan was tired of playing John Drake, the agent, and announced he was going to quit the series. Instead, with the help of George Markstein, Danger Man's script editor, he created a totally new series, in which McGoohan would star, and which McGoohan would also write and direct key episodes of. This new series, The Prisoner, featured a spy who is only ever given the name Number Six, and who many fans -- though not McGoohan himself -- took to be the same character as John Drake. Number Six resigns from his job as a secret agent, and is kidnapped and taken to a place known only as The Village -- the series was filmed in Portmeirion, an unusual-looking town in Gwynnedd, in North Wales -- which is full of other ex-agents. There he is interrogated to try to find out why he has quit his job. It's never made clear whether the interrogators are his old employers or their enemies, and there's a certain suggestion that maybe there is no real distinction between the two sides, that they're both running the Village together. He spends the entire series trying to escape, but refuses to explain himself -- and there's some debate among viewers as to whether it's implied or not that part of the reason he doesn't explain himself is that he knows his interrogators wouldn't understand why he quit: [Excerpt: The Prisoner intro, from episode Once Upon a Time, ] Certainly that explanation would fit in with McGoohan's own personality. According to McGoohan, the final episode of The Prisoner was, at the time, the most watched TV show ever broadcast in the UK, as people tuned in to find out the identity of Number One, the person behind the Village, and to see if Number Six would break free. I don't think that's actually the case, but it's what McGoohan always claimed, and it was certainly a very popular series. I won't spoil the ending for those of you who haven't watched it -- it's a remarkable series -- but ultimately the series seems to decide that such questions don't matter and that even asking them is missing the point. It's a work that's open to multiple interpretations, and is left deliberately ambiguous, but one of the messages many people have taken away from it is that not only are we trapped by a society that oppresses us, we're also trapped by our own identities. You can run from the trap that society has placed you in, from other people's interpretations of your life, your work, and your motives, but you ultimately can't run from yourself, and any time you try to break out of a prison, you'll find yourself trapped in another prison of your own making. The most horrifying implication of the episode is that possibly even death itself won't be a release, and you will spend all eternity trying to escape from an identity you're trapped in. Viewers became so outraged, according to McGoohan, that he had to go into hiding for an extended period, and while his later claims that he never worked in Britain again are an exaggeration, it is true that for the remainder of his life he concentrated on doing work in the US instead, where he hadn't created such anger. That final episode of The Prisoner was also the only one to use a piece of contemporary pop music, in two crucial scenes: [Excerpt: The Prisoner, "Fall Out", "All You Need is Love"] Back in October 2020, we started what I thought would be a year-long look at the period from late 1962 through early 1967, but which has turned out for reasons beyond my control to take more like twenty months, with a song which was one of the last of the big pre-Beatles pop hits, though we looked at it after their first single, "Telstar" by the Tornadoes: [Excerpt: The Tornadoes, "Telstar"] There were many reasons for choosing that as one of the bookends for this fifty-episode chunk of the podcast -- you'll see many connections between that episode and this one if you listen to them back-to-back -- but among them was that it's a song inspired by the launch of the first ever communications satellite, and a sign of how the world was going to become smaller as the sixties went on. Of course, to start with communications satellites didn't do much in that regard -- they were expensive to use, and had limited bandwidth, and were only available during limited time windows, but symbolically they meant that for the first time ever, people could see and hear events thousands of miles away as they were happening. It's not a coincidence that Britain and France signed the agreement to develop Concorde, the first supersonic airliner, a month after the first Beatles single and four months after the Telstar satellite was launched. The world was becoming ever more interconnected -- people were travelling faster and further, getting news from other countries quicker, and there was more cultural conversation – and misunderstanding – between countries thousands of miles apart. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the man who also coined the phrase “the medium is the message”, thought that this ever-faster connection would fundamentally change basic modes of thought in the Western world. McLuhan thought that technology made possible whole new modes of thought, and that just as the printing press had, in his view, caused Western liberalism and individualism, so these new electronic media would cause the rise of a new collective mode of thought. In 1962, the year of Concorde, Telstar, and “Love Me Do”, McLuhan wrote a book called The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which he said: “Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…” He coined the term “the Global Village” to describe this new collectivism. The story we've seen over the last fifty episodes is one of a sort of cultural ping-pong between the USA and the UK, with innovations in American music inspiring British musicians, who in turn inspired American ones, whether that being the Beatles covering the Isley Brothers or the Rolling Stones doing a Bobby Womack song, or Paul Simon and Bob Dylan coming over to the UK and learning folk songs and guitar techniques from Martin Carthy. And increasingly we're going to see those influences spread to other countries, and influences coming *from* other countries. We've already seen one Jamaican artist, and the influence of Indian music has become very apparent. While the focus of this series is going to remain principally in the British Isles and North America, rock music was and is a worldwide phenomenon, and that's going to become increasingly a part of the story. And so in this episode we're going to look at a live performance -- well, mostly live -- that was seen by hundreds of millions of people all over the world as it happened, thanks to the magic of satellites: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "All You Need is Love"] When we left the Beatles, they had just finished recording "Tomorrow Never Knows", the most experimental track they had recorded up to that date, and if not the most experimental thing they *ever* recorded certainly in the top handful. But "Tomorrow Never Knows" was only the first track they recorded in the sessions for what would become arguably their greatest album, and certainly the one that currently has the most respect from critics. It's interesting to note that that album could have been very, very, different. When we think of Revolver now, we think of the innovative production of George Martin, and of Geoff Emerick and Ken Townshend's inventive ideas for pushing the sound of the equipment in Abbey Road studios, but until very late in the day the album was going to be recorded in the Stax studios in Memphis, with Steve Cropper producing -- whether George Martin would have been involved or not is something we don't even know. In 1965, the Rolling Stones had, as we've seen, started making records in the US, recording in LA and at the Chess studios in Chicago, and the Yardbirds had also been doing the same thing. Mick Jagger had become a convert to the idea of using American studios and working with American musicians, and he had constantly been telling Paul McCartney that the Beatles should do the same. Indeed, they'd put some feelers out in 1965 about the possibility of the group making an album with Holland, Dozier, and Holland in Detroit. Quite how this would have worked is hard to figure out -- Holland, Dozier, and Holland's skills were as songwriters, and in their work with a particular set of musicians -- so it's unsurprising that came to nothing. But recording at Stax was a different matter.  While Steve Cropper was a great songwriter in his own right, he was also adept at getting great sounds on covers of other people's material -- like on Otis Blue, the album he produced for Otis Redding in late 1965, which doesn't include a single Cropper original: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Satisfaction"] And the Beatles were very influenced by the records Stax were putting out, often namechecking Wilson Pickett in particular, and during the Rubber Soul sessions they had recorded a "Green Onions" soundalike track, imaginatively titled "12-Bar Original": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "12-Bar Original"] The idea of the group recording at Stax got far enough that they were actually booked in for two weeks starting the ninth of April, and there was even an offer from Elvis to let them stay at Graceland while they recorded, but then a couple of weeks earlier, the news leaked to the press, and Brian Epstein cancelled the booking. According to Cropper, Epstein talked about recording at the Atlantic studios in New York with him instead, but nothing went any further. It's hard to imagine what a Stax-based Beatles album would have been like, but even though it might have been a great album, it certainly wouldn't have been the Revolver we've come to know. Revolver is an unusual album in many ways, and one of the ways it's most distinct from the earlier Beatles albums is the dominance of keyboards. Both Lennon and McCartney had often written at the piano as well as the guitar -- McCartney more so than Lennon, but both had done so regularly -- but up to this point it had been normal for them to arrange the songs for guitars rather than keyboards, no matter how they'd started out. There had been the odd track where one of them, usually Lennon, would play a simple keyboard part, songs like "I'm Down" or "We Can Work it Out", but even those had been guitar records first and foremost. But on Revolver, that changed dramatically. There seems to have been a complex web of cause and effect here. Paul was becoming increasingly interested in moving his basslines away from simple walking basslines and root notes and the other staples of rock and roll basslines up to this point. As the sixties progressed, rock basslines were becoming ever more complex, and Tyler Mahan Coe has made a good case that this is largely down to innovations in production pioneered by Owen Bradley, and McCartney was certainly aware of Bradley's work -- he was a fan of Brenda Lee, who Bradley produced, for example. But the two influences that McCartney has mentioned most often in this regard are the busy, jazz-influenced, basslines that James Jamerson was playing at Motown: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "It's the Same Old Song"] And the basslines that Brian Wilson was writing for various Wrecking Crew bassists to play for the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)"] Just to be clear, McCartney didn't hear that particular track until partway through the recording of Revolver, when Bruce Johnston visited the UK and brought with him an advance copy of Pet Sounds, but Pet Sounds influenced the later part of Revolver's recording, and Wilson had already started his experiments in that direction with the group's 1965 work. It's much easier to write a song with this kind of bassline, one that's integral to the composition, on the piano than it is to write it on a guitar, as you can work out the bassline with your left hand while working out the chords and melody with your right, so the habit that McCartney had already developed of writing on the piano made this easier. But also, starting with the recording of "Paperback Writer", McCartney switched his style of working in the studio. Where up to this point it had been normal for him to play bass as part of the recording of the basic track, playing with the other Beatles, he now started to take advantage of multitracking to overdub his bass later, so he could spend extra time getting the bassline exactly right. McCartney lived closer to Abbey Road than the other three Beatles, and so could more easily get there early or stay late and tweak his parts. But if McCartney wasn't playing bass while the guitars and drums were being recorded, that meant he could play something else, and so increasingly he would play piano during the recording of the basic track. And that in turn would mean that there wouldn't always *be* a need for guitars on the track, because the harmonic support they would provide would be provided by the piano instead. This, as much as anything else, is the reason that Revolver sounds so radically different to any other Beatles album. Up to this point, with *very* rare exceptions like "Yesterday", every Beatles record, more or less, featured all four of the Beatles playing instruments. Now John and George weren't playing on "Good Day Sunshine" or "For No One", John wasn't playing on "Here, There, and Everywhere", "Eleanor Rigby" features no guitars or drums at all, and George's "Love You To" only features himself, plus a little tambourine from Ringo (Paul recorded a part for that one, but it doesn't seem to appear on the finished track). Of the three songwriting Beatles, the only one who at this point was consistently requiring the instrumental contributions of all the other band members was John, and even he did without Paul on "She Said, She Said", which by all accounts features either John or George on bass, after Paul had a rare bout of unprofessionalism and left the studio. Revolver is still an album made by a group -- and most of those tracks that don't feature John or George instrumentally still feature them vocally -- it's still a collaborative work in all the best ways. But it's no longer an album made by four people playing together in the same room at the same time. After starting work on "Tomorrow Never Knows", the next track they started work on was Paul's "Got to Get You Into My Life", but as it would turn out they would work on that song throughout most of the sessions for the album -- in a sign of how the group would increasingly work from this point on, Paul's song was subject to multiple re-recordings and tweakings in the studio, as he tinkered to try to make it perfect. The first recording to be completed for the album, though, was almost as much of a departure in its own way as "Tomorrow Never Knows" had been. George's song "Love You To" shows just how inspired he was by the music of Ravi Shankar, and how devoted he was to Indian music. While a few months earlier he had just about managed to pick out a simple melody on the sitar for "Norwegian Wood", by this point he was comfortable enough with Indian classical music that I've seen many, many sources claim that an outside session player is playing sitar on the track, though Anil Bhagwat, the tabla player on the track, always insisted that it was entirely Harrison's playing: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] There is a *lot* of debate as to whether it's George playing on the track, and I feel a little uncomfortable making a definitive statement in either direction. On the one hand I find it hard to believe that Harrison got that good that quickly on an unfamiliar instrument, when we know he wasn't a naturally facile musician. All the stories we have about his work in the studio suggest that he had to work very hard on his guitar solos, and that he would frequently fluff them. As a technical guitarist, Harrison was only mediocre -- his value lay in his inventiveness, not in technical ability -- and he had been playing guitar for over a decade, but sitar only a few months. There's also some session documentation suggesting that an unknown sitar player was hired. On the other hand there's the testimony of Anil Bhagwat that Harrison played the part himself, and he has been very firm on the subject, saying "If you go on the Internet there are a lot of questions asked about "Love You To". They say 'It's not George playing the sitar'. I can tell you here and now -- 100 percent it was George on sitar throughout. There were no other musicians involved. It was just me and him." And several people who are more knowledgeable than myself about the instrument have suggested that the sitar part on the track is played the way that a rock guitarist would play rather than the way someone with more knowledge of Indian classical music would play -- there's a blues feeling to some of the bends that apparently no genuine Indian classical musician would naturally do. I would suggest that the best explanation is that there's a professional sitar player trying to replicate a part that Harrison had previously demonstrated, while Harrison was in turn trying his best to replicate the sound of Ravi Shankar's work. Certainly the instrumental section sounds far more fluent, and far more stylistically correct, than one would expect: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Where previous attempts at what got called "raga-rock" had taken a couple of surface features of Indian music -- some form of a drone, perhaps a modal scale -- and had generally used a guitar made to sound a little bit like a sitar, or had a sitar playing normal rock riffs, Harrison's song seems to be a genuine attempt to hybridise Indian ragas and rock music, combining the instrumentation, modes, and rhythmic complexity of someone like Ravi Shankar with lyrics that are seemingly inspired by Bob Dylan and a fairly conventional pop song structure (and a tiny bit of fuzz guitar). It's a record that could only be made by someone who properly understood both the Indian music he's emulating and the conventions of the Western pop song, and understood how those conventions could work together. Indeed, one thing I've rarely seen pointed out is how cleverly the album is sequenced, so that "Love You To" is followed by possibly the most conventional song on Revolver, "Here, There, and Everywhere", which was recorded towards the end of the sessions. Both songs share a distinctive feature not shared by the rest of the album, so the two songs can sound more of a pair than they otherwise would, retrospectively making "Love You To" seem more conventional than it is and "Here, There, and Everywhere" more unconventional -- both have as an introduction a separate piece of music that states some of the melodic themes of the rest of the song but isn't repeated later. In the case of "Love You To" it's the free-tempo bit at the beginning, characteristic of a lot of Indian music: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] While in the case of "Here, There, and Everywhere" it's the part that mimics an older style of songwriting, a separate intro of the type that would have been called a verse when written by the Gershwins or Cole Porter, but of course in the intervening decades "verse" had come to mean something else, so we now no longer have a specific term for this kind of intro -- but as you can hear, it's doing very much the same thing as that "Love You To" intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] In the same day as the group completed "Love You To", overdubbing George's vocal and Ringo's tambourine, they also started work on a song that would show off a lot of the new techniques they had been working on in very different ways. Paul's "Paperback Writer" could indeed be seen as part of a loose trilogy with "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows", one song by each of the group's three songwriters exploring the idea of a song that's almost all on one chord. Both "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Love You To" are based on a drone with occasional hints towards moving to one other chord. In the case of "Paperback Writer", the entire song stays on a single chord until the title -- it's on a G7 throughout until the first use of the word "writer", when it quickly goes to a C for two bars. I'm afraid I'm going to have to sing to show you how little the chords actually change, because the riff disguises this lack of movement somewhat, but the melody is also far more horizontal than most of McCartney's, so this shouldn't sound too painful, I hope: [demonstrates] This is essentially the exact same thing that both "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" do, and all three have very similarly structured rising and falling modal melodies. There's also a bit of "Paperback Writer" that seems to tie directly into "Love You To", but also points to a possible very non-Indian inspiration for part of "Love You To". The Beach Boys' single "Sloop John B" was released in the UK a couple of days after the sessions for "Paperback Writer" and "Love You To", but it had been released in the US a month before, and the Beatles all got copies of every record in the American top thirty shipped to them. McCartney and Harrison have specifically pointed to it as an influence on "Paperback Writer". "Sloop John B" has a section where all the instruments drop out and we're left with just the group's vocal harmonies: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B"] And that seems to have been the inspiration behind the similar moment at a similar point in "Paperback Writer", which is used in place of a middle eight and also used for the song's intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Which is very close to what Harrison does at the end of each verse of "Love You To", where the instruments drop out for him to sing a long melismatic syllable before coming back in: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Essentially, other than "Got to Get You Into My Life", which is an outlier and should not be counted, the first three songs attempted during the Revolver sessions are variations on a common theme, and it's a sign that no matter how different the results might  sound, the Beatles really were very much a group at this point, and were sharing ideas among themselves and developing those ideas in similar ways. "Paperback Writer" disguises what it's doing somewhat by having such a strong riff. Lennon referred to "Paperback Writer" as "son of 'Day Tripper'", and in terms of the Beatles' singles it's actually their third iteration of this riff idea, which they originally got from Bobby Parker's "Watch Your Step": [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Which became the inspiration for "I Feel Fine": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] Which they varied for "Day Tripper": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] And which then in turn got varied for "Paperback Writer": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] As well as compositional ideas, there are sonic ideas shared between "Paperback Writer", "Tomorrow Never Knows", and "Love You To", and which would be shared by the rest of the tracks the Beatles recorded in the first half of 1966. Since Geoff Emerick had become the group's principal engineer, they'd started paying more attention to how to get a fuller sound, and so Emerick had miced the tabla on "Love You To" much more closely than anyone would normally mic an instrument from classical music, creating a deep, thudding sound, and similarly he had changed the way they recorded the drums on "Tomorrow Never Knows", again giving a much fuller sound. But the group also wanted the kind of big bass sounds they'd loved on records coming out of America -- sounds that no British studio was getting, largely because it was believed that if you cut too loud a bass sound into a record it would make the needle jump out of the groove. The new engineering team of Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott, though, thought that it was likely you could keep the needle in the groove if you had a smoother frequency response. You could do that if you used a microphone with a larger diaphragm to record the bass, but how could you do that? Inspiration finally struck -- loudspeakers are actually the same thing as microphones wired the other way round, so if you wired up a loudspeaker as if it were a microphone you could get a *really big* speaker, place it in front of the bass amp, and get a much stronger bass sound. The experiment wasn't a total success -- the sound they got had to be processed quite extensively to get rid of room noise, and then compressed in order to further prevent the needle-jumping issue, and so it's a muddier, less defined, tone than they would have liked, but one thing that can't be denied is that "Paperback Writer"'s bass sound is much, much, louder than on any previous Beatles record: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Almost every track the group recorded during the Revolver sessions involved all sorts of studio innovations, though rarely anything as truly revolutionary as the artificial double-tracking they'd used on "Tomorrow Never Knows", and which also appeared on "Paperback Writer" -- indeed, as "Paperback Writer" was released several months before Revolver, it became the first record released to use the technique. I could easily devote a good ten minutes to every track on Revolver, and to "Paperback Writer"s B-side, "Rain", but this is already shaping up to be an extraordinarily long episode and there's a lot of material to get through, so I'll break my usual pattern of devoting a Patreon bonus episode to something relatively obscure, and this week's bonus will be on "Rain" itself. "Paperback Writer", though, deserved the attention here even though it was not one of the group's more successful singles -- it did go to number one, but it didn't hit number one in the UK charts straight away, being kept off the top by "Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra for the first week: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, "Strangers in the Night"] Coincidentally, "Strangers in the Night" was co-written by Bert Kaempfert, the German musician who had produced the group's very first recording sessions with Tony Sheridan back in 1961. On the group's German tour in 1966 they met up with Kaempfert again, and John greeted him by singing the first couple of lines of the Sinatra record. The single was the lowest-selling Beatles single in the UK since "Love Me Do". In the US it only made number one for two non-consecutive weeks, with "Strangers in the Night" knocking it off for a week in between. Now, by literally any other band's standards, that's still a massive hit, and it was the Beatles' tenth UK number one in a row (or ninth, depending on which chart you use for "Please Please Me"), but it's a sign that the group were moving out of the first phase of total unequivocal dominance of the charts. It was a turning point in a lot of other ways as well. Up to this point, while the group had been experimenting with different lyrical subjects on album tracks, every single had lyrics about romantic relationships -- with the possible exception of "Help!", which was about Lennon's emotional state but written in such a way that it could be heard as a plea to a lover. But in the case of "Paperback Writer", McCartney was inspired by his Aunt Mill asking him "Why do you write songs about love all the time? Can you ever write about a horse or the summit conference or something interesting?" His response was to think "All right, Aunt Mill, I'll show you", and to come up with a lyric that was very much in the style of the social satires that bands like the Kinks were releasing at the time. People often miss the humour in the lyric for "Paperback Writer", but there's a huge amount of comedy in lyrics about someone writing to a publisher saying they'd written a book based on someone else's book, and one can only imagine the feeling of weary recognition in slush-pile readers throughout the world as they heard the enthusiastic "It's a thousand pages, give or take a few, I'll be writing more in a week or two. I can make it longer..." From this point on, the group wouldn't release a single that was unambiguously about a romantic relationship until "The Ballad of John and Yoko",  the last single released while the band were still together. "Paperback Writer" also saw the Beatles for the first time making a promotional film -- what we would now call a rock video -- rather than make personal appearances on TV shows. The film was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who the group would work with again in 1969, and shows Paul with a chipped front tooth -- he'd been in an accident while riding mopeds with his friend Tara Browne a few months earlier, and hadn't yet got round to having the tooth capped. When he did, the change in his teeth was one of the many bits of evidence used by conspiracy theorists to prove that the real Paul McCartney was dead and replaced by a lookalike. It also marks a change in who the most prominent Beatle on the group's A-sides was. Up to this point, Paul had had one solo lead on an A-side -- "Can't Buy Me Love" -- and everything else had been either a song with multiple vocalists like "Day Tripper" or "Love Me Do", or a song with a clear John lead like "Ticket to Ride" or "I Feel Fine". In the rest of their career, counting "Paperback Writer", the group would release nine new singles that hadn't already been included on an album. Of those nine singles, one was a double A-side with one John song and one Paul song, two had John songs on the A-side, and the other six were Paul. Where up to this point John had been "lead Beatle", for the rest of the sixties, Paul would be the group's driving force. Oddly, Paul got rather defensive about the record when asked about it in interviews after it failed to go straight to the top, saying "It's not our best single by any means, but we're very satisfied with it". But especially in its original mono mix it actually packs a powerful punch: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] When the "Paperback Writer" single was released, an unusual image was used in the advertising -- a photo of the Beatles dressed in butchers' smocks, covered in blood, with chunks of meat and the dismembered body parts of baby dolls lying around on them. The image was meant as part of a triptych parodying religious art -- the photo on the left was to be an image showing the four Beatles connected to a woman by an umbilical cord made of sausages, the middle panel was meant to be this image, but with halos added over the Beatles' heads, and the panel on the right was George hammering a nail into John's head, symbolising both crucifixion and that the group were real, physical, people, not just images to be worshipped -- these weren't imaginary nails, and they weren't imaginary people. The photographer Robert Whittaker later said: “I did a photograph of the Beatles covered in raw meat, dolls and false teeth. Putting meat, dolls and false teeth with The Beatles is essentially part of the same thing, the breakdown of what is regarded as normal. The actual conception for what I still call “Somnambulant Adventure” was Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. He comes across people worshipping a golden calf. All over the world I'd watched people worshiping like idols, like gods, four Beatles. To me they were just stock standard normal people. But this emotion that fans poured on them made me wonder where Christianity was heading.” The image wasn't that controversial in the UK, when it was used to advertise "Paperback Writer", but in the US it was initially used for the cover of an album, Yesterday... And Today, which was made up of a few tracks that had been left off the US versions of the Rubber Soul and Help! albums, plus both sides of the "We Can Work It Out"/"Day Tripper" single, and three rough mixes of songs that had been recorded for Revolver -- "Doctor Robert", "And Your Bird Can Sing", and "I'm Only Sleeping", which was the song that sounded most different from the mixes that were finally released: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm Only Sleeping (Yesterday... and Today mix)"] Those three songs were all Lennon songs, which had the unfortunate effect that when the US version of Revolver was brought out later in the year, only two of the songs on the album were by Lennon, with six by McCartney and three by Harrison. Some have suggested that this was the motivation for the use of the butcher image on the cover of Yesterday... And Today -- saying it was the Beatles' protest against Capitol "butchering" their albums -- but in truth it was just that Capitol's art director chose the cover because he liked the image. Alan Livingston, the president of Capitol was not so sure, and called Brian Epstein to ask if the group would be OK with them using a different image. Epstein checked with John Lennon, but Lennon liked the image and so Epstein told Livingston the group insisted on them using that cover. Even though for the album cover the bloodstains on the butchers' smocks were airbrushed out, after Capitol had pressed up a million copies of the mono version of the album and two hundred thousand copies of the stereo version, and they'd sent out sixty thousand promo copies, they discovered that no record shops would stock the album with that cover. It cost Capitol more than two hundred thousand dollars to recall the album and replace the cover with a new one -- though while many of the covers were destroyed, others had the new cover, with a more acceptable photo of the group, pasted over them, and people have later carefully steamed off the sticker to reveal the original. This would not be the last time in 1966 that something that was intended as a statement on religion and the way people viewed the Beatles would cause the group trouble in America. In the middle of the recording sessions for Revolver, the group also made what turned out to be their last ever UK live performance in front of a paying audience. The group had played the NME Poll-Winners' Party every year since 1963, and they were always shows that featured all the biggest acts in the country at the time -- the 1966 show featured, as well as the Beatles and a bunch of smaller acts, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds, Roy Orbison, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, the Seekers, the Small Faces, the Walker Brothers, and Dusty Springfield. Unfortunately, while these events were always filmed for TV broadcast, the Beatles' performance on the first of May wasn't filmed. There are various stories about what happened, but the crux appears to be a disagreement between Andrew Oldham and Brian Epstein, sparked by John Lennon. When the Beatles got to the show, they were upset to discover that they had to wait around before going on stage -- normally, the awards would all be presented at the end, after all the performances, but the Rolling Stones had asked that the Beatles not follow them directly, so after the Stones finished their set, there would be a break for the awards to be given out, and then the Beatles would play their set, in front of an audience that had been bored by twenty-five minutes of awards ceremony, rather than one that had been excited by all the bands that came before them. John Lennon was annoyed, and insisted that the Beatles were going to go on straight after the Rolling Stones -- he seems to have taken this as some sort of power play by the Stones and to have got his hackles up about it. He told Epstein to deal with the people from the NME. But the NME people said that they had a contract with Andrew Oldham, and they weren't going to break it. Oldham refused to change the terms of the contract. Lennon said that he wasn't going to go on stage if they didn't directly follow the Stones. Maurice Kinn, the publisher of the NME, told Epstein that he wasn't going to break the contract with Oldham, and that if the Beatles didn't appear on stage, he would get Jimmy Savile, who was compering the show, to go out on stage and tell the ten thousand fans in the audience that the Beatles were backstage refusing to appear. He would then sue NEMS for breach of contract *and* NEMS would be liable for any damage caused by the rioting that was sure to happen. Lennon screamed a lot of abuse at Kinn, and told him the group would never play one of their events again, but the group did go on stage -- but because they hadn't yet signed the agreement to allow their performance to be filmed, they refused to allow it to be recorded. Apparently Andrew Oldham took all this as a sign that Epstein was starting to lose control of the group. Also during May 1966 there were visits from musicians from other countries, continuing the cultural exchange that was increasingly influencing the Beatles' art. Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys came over to promote the group's new LP, Pet Sounds, which had been largely the work of Brian Wilson, who had retired from touring to concentrate on working in the studio. Johnston played the record for John and Paul, who listened to it twice, all the way through, in silence, in Johnston's hotel room: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] According to Johnston, after they'd listened through the album twice, they went over to a piano and started whispering to each other, picking out chords. Certainly the influence of Pet Sounds is very noticeable on songs like "Here, There, and Everywhere", written and recorded a few weeks after this meeting: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] That track, and the last track recorded for the album, "She Said She Said" were unusual in one very important respect -- they were recorded while the Beatles were no longer under contract to EMI Records. Their contract expired on the fifth of June, 1966, and they finished Revolver without it having been renewed -- it would be several months before their new contract was signed, and it's rather lucky for music lovers that Brian Epstein was the kind of manager who considered personal relationships and basic honour and decency more important than the legal niceties, unlike any other managers of the era, otherwise we would not have Revolver in the form we know it today. After the meeting with Johnston, but before the recording of those last couple of Revolver tracks, the Beatles also met up again with Bob Dylan, who was on a UK tour with a new, loud, band he was working with called The Hawks. While the Beatles and Dylan all admired each other, there was by this point a lot of wariness on both sides, especially between Lennon and Dylan, both of them very similar personality types and neither wanting to let their guard down around the other or appear unhip. There's a famous half-hour-long film sequence of Lennon and Dylan sharing a taxi, which is a fascinating, excruciating, example of two insecure but arrogant men both trying desperately to impress the other but also equally desperate not to let the other know that they want to impress them: [Excerpt: Dylan and Lennon taxi ride] The day that was filmed, Lennon and Harrison also went to see Dylan play at the Royal Albert Hall. This tour had been controversial, because Dylan's band were loud and raucous, and Dylan's fans in the UK still thought of him as a folk musician. At one gig, earlier on the tour, an audience member had famously yelled out "Judas!" -- (just on the tiny chance that any of my listeners don't know that, Judas was the disciple who betrayed Jesus to the authorities, leading to his crucifixion) -- and that show was for many years bootlegged as the "Royal Albert Hall" show, though in fact it was recorded at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. One of the *actual* Royal Albert Hall shows was released a few years ago -- the one the night before Lennon and Harrison saw Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone", Royal Albert Hall 1966] The show Lennon and Harrison saw would be Dylan's last for many years. Shortly after returning to the US, Dylan was in a motorbike accident, the details of which are still mysterious, and which some fans claim was faked altogether. The accident caused him to cancel all the concert dates he had booked, and devote himself to working in the studio for several years just like Brian Wilson. And from even further afield than America, Ravi Shankar came over to Britain, to work with his friend the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, on a duet album, West Meets East, that was an example in the classical world of the same kind of international cross-fertilisation that was happening in the pop world: [Excerpt: Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar, "Prabhati (based on Raga Gunkali)"] While he was in the UK, Shankar also performed at the Royal Festival Hall, and George Harrison went to the show. He'd seen Shankar live the year before, but this time he met up with him afterwards, and later said "He was the first person that impressed me in a way that was beyond just being a famous celebrity. Ravi was my link to the Vedic world. Ravi plugged me into the whole of reality. Elvis impressed me when I was a kid, and impressed me when I met him, but you couldn't later on go round to him and say 'Elvis, what's happening with the universe?'" After completing recording and mixing the as-yet-unnamed album, which had been by far the longest recording process of their career, and which still nearly sixty years later regularly tops polls of the best album of all time, the Beatles took a well-earned break. For a whole two days, at which point they flew off to Germany to do a three-day tour, on their way to Japan, where they were booked to play five shows at the Budokan. Unfortunately for the group, while they had no idea of this when they were booked to do the shows, many in Japan saw the Budokan as sacred ground, and they were the first ever Western group to play there. This led to numerous death threats and loud protests from far-right activists offended at the Beatles defiling their religious and nationalistic sensibilities. As a result, the police were on high alert -- so high that there were three thousand police in the audience for the shows, in a venue which only held ten thousand audience members. That's according to Mark Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Chronicle, though I have to say that the rather blurry footage of the audience in the video of those shows doesn't seem to show anything like those numbers. But frankly I'll take Lewisohn's word over that footage, as he's not someone to put out incorrect information. The threats to the group also meant that they had to be kept in their hotel rooms at all times except when actually performing, though they did make attempts to get out. At the press conference for the Tokyo shows, the group were also asked publicly for the first time their views on the war in Vietnam, and John replied "Well, we think about it every day, and we don't agree with it and we think that it's wrong. That's how much interest we take. That's all we can do about it... and say that we don't like it". I say they were asked publicly for the first time, because George had been asked about it for a series of interviews Maureen Cleave had done with the group a couple of months earlier, as we'll see in a bit, but nobody was paying attention to those interviews. Brian Epstein was upset that the question had gone to John. He had hoped that the inevitable Vietnam question would go to Paul, who he thought might be a bit more tactful. The last thing he needed was John Lennon saying something that would upset the Americans before their tour there a few weeks later. Luckily, people in America seemed to have better things to do than pay attention to John Lennon's opinions. The support acts for the Japanese shows included  several of the biggest names in Japanese rock music -- or "group sounds" as the genre was called there, Japanese people having realised that trying to say the phrase "rock and roll" would open them up to ridicule given that it had both "r" and "l" sounds in the phrase. The man who had coined the term "group sounds", Jackey Yoshikawa, was there with his group the Blue Comets, as was Isao Bito, who did a rather good cover version of Cliff Richard's "Dynamite": [Excerpt: Isao Bito, "Dynamite"] Bito, the Blue Comets, and the other two support acts, Yuya Uchida and the Blue Jeans, all got together to perform a specially written song, "Welcome Beatles": [Excerpt: "Welcome Beatles" ] But while the Japanese audience were enthusiastic, they were much less vocal about their enthusiasm than the audiences the Beatles were used to playing for. The group were used, of course, to playing in front of hordes of screaming teenagers who could not hear a single note, but because of the fear that a far-right terrorist would assassinate one of the group members, the police had imposed very, very, strict rules on the audience. Nobody in the audience was allowed to get out of their seat for any reason, and the police would clamp down very firmly on anyone who was too demonstrative. Because of that, the group could actually hear themselves, and they sounded sloppy as hell, especially on the newer material. Not that there was much of that. The only song they did from the Revolver sessions was "Paperback Writer", the new single, and while they did do a couple of tracks from Rubber Soul, those were under-rehearsed. As John said at the start of this tour, "I can't play any of Rubber Soul, it's so unrehearsed. The only time I played any of the numbers on it was when I recorded it. I forget about songs. They're only valid for a certain time." That's certainly borne out by the sound of their performances of Rubber Soul material at the Budokan: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "If I Needed Someone (live at the Budokan)"] It was while they were in Japan as well that they finally came up with the title for their new album. They'd been thinking of all sorts of ideas, like Abracadabra and Magic Circle, and tossing names around with increasing desperation for several days -- at one point they seem to have just started riffing on other groups' albums, and seem to have apparently seriously thought about naming the record in parodic tribute to their favourite artists -- suggestions included The Beatles On Safari, after the Beach Boys' Surfin' Safari (and possibly with a nod to their recent Pet Sounds album cover with animals, too), The Freewheelin' Beatles, after Dylan's second album, and my favourite, Ringo's suggestion After Geography, for the Rolling Stones' Aftermath. But eventually Paul came up with Revolver -- like Rubber Soul, a pun, in this case because the record itself revolves when on a turntable. Then it was off to the Philippines, and if the group thought Japan had been stressful, they had no idea what was coming. The trouble started in the Philippines from the moment they stepped off the plane, when they were bundled into a car without Neil Aspinall or Brian Epstein, and without their luggage, which was sent to customs. This was a problem in itself -- the group had got used to essentially being treated like diplomats, and to having their baggage let through customs without being searched, and so they'd started freely carrying various illicit substances with them. This would obviously be a problem -- but as it turned out, this was just to get a "customs charge" paid by Brian Epstein. But during their initial press conference the group were worried, given the hostility they'd faced from officialdom, that they were going to be arrested during the conference itself. They were asked what they would tell the Rolling Stones, who were going to be visiting the Philippines shortly after, and Lennon just said "We'll warn them". They also asked "is there a war on in the Philippines? Why is everybody armed?" At this time, the Philippines had a new leader, Ferdinand Marcos -- who is not to be confused with his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, also known as Bongbong Marcos, who just became President-Elect there last month. Marcos Sr was a dictatorial kleptocrat, one of the worst leaders of the latter half of the twentieth century, but that wasn't evident yet. He'd been elected only a few months earlier, and had presented himself as a Kennedy-like figure -- a young man who was also a war hero. He'd recently switched parties from the Liberal party to the right-wing Nacionalista Party, but wasn't yet being thought of as the monstrous dictator he later became. The person organising the Philippines shows had been ordered to get the Beatles to visit Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos at 11AM on the day of the show, but for some reason had instead put on their itinerary just the *suggestion* that the group should meet the Marcoses, and had put the time down as 3PM, and the Beatles chose to ignore that suggestion -- they'd refused to do that kind of government-official meet-and-greet ever since an incident in 1964 at the British Embassy in Washington where someone had cut off a bit of Ringo's hair. A military escort turned up at the group's hotel in the morning, to take them for their meeting. The group were all still in their rooms, and Brian Epstein was still eating breakfast and refused to disturb them, saying "Go back and tell the generals we're not coming." The group gave their performances as scheduled, but meanwhile there was outrage at the way the Beatles had refused to meet the Marcos family, who had brought hundreds of children -- friends of their own children, and relatives of top officials -- to a party to meet the group. Brian Epstein went on TV and tried to smooth things over, but the broadcast was interrupted by static and his message didn't get through to anyone. The next day, the group's security was taken away, as were the cars to take them to the airport. When they got to the airport, the escalators were turned off and the group were beaten up at the arrangement of the airport manager, who said in 1984 "I beat up the Beatles. I really thumped them. First I socked Epstein and he went down... then I socked Lennon and Ringo in the face. I was kicking them. They were pleading like frightened chickens. That's what happens when you insult the First Lady." Even on the plane there were further problems -- Brian Epstein and the group's road manager Mal Evans were both made to get off the plane to sort out supposed financial discrepancies, which led to them worrying that they were going to be arrested or worse -- Evans told the group to tell his wife he loved her as he left the plane. But eventually, they were able to leave, and after a brief layover in India -- which Ringo later said was the first time he felt he'd been somewhere truly foreign, as opposed to places like Germany or the USA which felt basically like home -- they got back to England: [Excerpt: "Ordinary passenger!"] When asked what they were going to do next, George replied “We're going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans,” The story of the "we're bigger than Jesus" controversy is one of the most widely misreported events in the lives of the Beatles, which is saying a great deal. One book that I've encountered, and one book only, Steve Turner's Beatles '66, tells the story of what actually happened, and even that book seems to miss some emphases. I've pieced what follows together from Turner's book and from an academic journal article I found which has some more detail. As far as I can tell, every single other book on the Beatles released up to this point bases their account of the story on an inaccurate press statement put out by Brian Epstein, not on the truth. Here's the story as it's generally told. John Lennon gave an interview to his friend, Maureen Cleave of the Evening Standard, during which he made some comments about how it was depressing that Christianity was losing relevance in the eyes of the public, and that the Beatles are more popular than Jesus, speaking casually because he was talking to a friend. That story was run in the Evening Standard more-or-less unnoticed, but then an American teen magazine picked up on the line about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus, reprinted chunks of the interview out of context and without the Beatles' knowledge or permission, as a way to stir up controversy, and there was an outcry, with people burning Beatles records and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. That's... not exactly what happened. The first thing that you need to understand to know what happened is that Datebook wasn't a typical teen magazine. It *looked* just like a typical teen magazine, certainly, and much of its content was the kind of thing that you would get in Tiger Beat or any of the other magazines aimed at teenage girls -- the September 1966 issue was full of articles like "Life with the Walker Brothers... by their Road Manager", and interviews with the Dave Clark Five -- but it also had a long history of publishing material that was intended to make its readers think about social issues of the time, particularly Civil Rights. Arthur Unger, the magazine's editor and publisher, was a gay man in an interracial relationship, and while the subject of homosexuality was too taboo in the late fifties and sixties for him to have his magazine cover that, he did regularly include articles decrying segregation and calling for the girls reading the magazine to do their part on a personal level to stamp out racism. Datebook had regularly contained articles like one from 1963 talking about how segregation wasn't just a problem in the South, saying "If we are so ‘integrated' why must men in my own city of Philadelphia, the city of Brotherly Love, picket city hall because they are discriminated against when it comes to getting a job? And how come I am still unable to take my dark- complexioned friends to the same roller skating rink or swimming pool that I attend?” One of the writers for the magazine later said “We were much more than an entertainment magazine . . . . We tried to get kids involved in social issues . . . . It was a well-received magazine, recommended by libraries and schools, but during the Civil Rights period we did get pulled off a lot of stands in the South because of our views on integration” Art Unger, the editor and publisher, wasn't the only one pushing this liberal, integrationist, agenda. The managing editor at the time, Danny Fields, was another gay man who wanted to push the magazine even further than Unger, and who would later go on to manage the Stooges and the Ramones, being credited by some as being the single most important figure in punk rock's development, and being immortalised by the Ramones in their song "Danny Says": [Excerpt: The Ramones, "Danny Says"] So this was not a normal teen magazine, and that's certainly shown by the cover of the September 1966 issue, which as well as talking about the interviews with John Lennon and Paul McCartney inside, also advertised articles on Timothy Leary advising people to turn on, tune in, and drop out; an editorial about how interracial dating must be the next step after desegregation of schools, and a piece on "the ten adults you dig/hate the most" -- apparently the adult most teens dug in 1966 was Jackie Kennedy, the most hated was Barry Goldwater, and President Johnson, Billy Graham, and Martin Luther King appeared in the top ten on both lists. Now, in the early part of the year Maureen Cleave had done a whole series of articles on the Beatles -- double-page spreads on each band member, plus Brian Epstein, visiting them in their own homes (apart from Paul, who she met at a restaurant) and discussing their daily lives, their thoughts, and portraying them as rounded individuals. These articles are actually fascinating, because of something that everyone who met the Beatles in this period pointed out. When interviewed separately, all of them came across as thoughtful individuals, with their own opinions about all sorts of subjects, and their own tastes and senses of humour. But when two or more of them were together -- especially when John and Paul were interviewed together, but even in social situations, they would immediately revert to flip in-jokes and riffing on each other's statements, never revealing anything about themselves as individuals, but just going into Beatle mode -- simultaneously preserving the band's image, closing off outsiders, *and* making sure they didn't do or say anything that would get them mocked by the others. Cleave, as someone who actually took them all seriously, managed to get some very revealing information about all of them. In the article on Ringo, which is the most superficial -- one gets the impression that Cleave found him rather difficult to talk to when compared to the other, more verbally facile, band members -- she talked about how he had a lot of Wild West and military memorabilia, how he was a devoted family man and also devoted to his friends -- he had moved to the suburbs to be close to John and George, who already lived there. The most revealing quote about Ringo's personality was him saying "Of course that's the great thing about being married -- you have a house to sit in and company all the time. And you can still go to clubs, a bonus for being married. I love being a family man." While she looked at the other Beatles' tastes in literature in detail, she'd noted that the only books Ringo owned that weren't just for show were a few science fiction paperbacks, but that as he said "I'm not thick, it's just that I'm not educated. People can use words and I won't know what they mean. I say 'me' instead of 'my'." Ringo also didn't have a drum kit at home, saying he only played when he was on stage or in the studio, and that you couldn't practice on your own, you needed to play with other people. In the article on George, she talked about how he was learning the sitar,  and how he was thinking that it might be a good idea to go to India to study the sitar with Ravi Shankar for six months. She also talks about how during the interview, he played the guitar pretty much constantly, playing everything from songs from "Hello Dolly" to pieces by Bach to "the Trumpet Voluntary", by which she presumably means Clarke's "Prince of Denmark's March": [Excerpt: Jeremiah Clarke, "Prince of Denmark's March"] George was also the most outspoken on the subjects of politics, religion, and society, linking the ongoing war in Vietnam with the UK's reverence for the Second World War, saying "I think about it every day and it's wrong. Anything to do with war is wrong. They're all wrapped up in their Nelsons and their Churchills and their Montys -- always talking about war heroes. Look at All Our Yesterdays [a show on ITV that showed twenty-five-year-old newsreels] -- how we killed a few more Huns here and there. Makes me sick. They're the sort who are leaning on their walking sticks and telling us a few years in the army would do us good." He also had very strong words to say about religion, saying "I think religion falls flat on its face. All this 'love thy neighbour' but none of them are doing it. How can anybody get into the position of being Pope and accept all the glory and the money and the Mercedes-Benz and that? I could never be Pope until I'd sold my rich gates and my posh hat. I couldn't sit there with all that money on me and believe I was religious. Why can't we bring all this out in the open? Why is there all this stuff about blasphemy? If Christianity's as good as they say it is, it should stand up to a bit of discussion." Harrison also comes across as a very private person, saying "People keep saying, ‘We made you what you are,' well, I made Mr. Hovis what he is and I don't go round crawling over his gates and smashing up the wall round his house." (Hovis is a British company that makes bread and wholegrain flour). But more than anything else he comes across as an instinctive anti-authoritarian, being angry at bullying teachers, Popes, and Prime Ministers. McCartney's profile has him as the most self-consciously arty -- he talks about the plays of Alfred Jarry and the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti (for magnetic tape)"] Though he was very worried that he might be sounding a little too pretentious, saying “I don't want to sound like Jonathan Miller going on" --