Showing posts with label Alex Haley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alex Haley. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Tricks

The Violent yet peaceful death of Marvin Lee Aday Part VII ~
Orvis Wesley Aday was pretty wired up for the visit - you bet. There were concerns about security, because as recently as October 24, 1963, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, had been jeered, jostled, struck by a protest sign and spat upon during a visit to Dallas. When Orvis was given his orders, he exploded. Winston Lawson of the Secret Service, who was in charge of the planning had reassigned Orvis and other senior officers. The usual squad of experienced homicide detectives would not be following immediately behind the President's car. Word was, Police Chief Jesse Curry was really p*ssed.
Backbeat the word was on the street that the fire in your heart is out
I'm sure you've heard it all before but you never really had a doubt
I don't believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now
OasisAnd all the roads we have to walk along are winding
And all the lights that lead us there are blinding
There are many things that I would
Like to say to you
I don't know how


~ Oasis Wonderwall - Click to Watch Sample
Wonderwall
In 2007 songwriter Noel Gallagher found his real Oasis, when he reconciled fully with his father at his fortieth birthday.

Gallagher was born in Longsight, Manchester, to Irish parents Peggy and Tommy Gallagher. He is the middle child of three — his older brother, Paul, was born in 1966, and Liam was born 1972. The Gallagher brothers grew up in Ashburn Avenue in the suburb of Burnage. Noel had an unhappy childhood. He and his brothers were often beaten by his alcoholic father, and he was often reclusive — Liam described him as "the weirdo in the family".

At some point in the early 1980s, Peggy left her husband due to his violent mood swings brought about by his alcoholism, taking their three boys with her and according to the eldest brother Paul, the only item the family left their father was the carpet. Noel has since maintained a strained relationship with his father, not withstanding periods in the 1980s in which all the Gallagher siblings (along with numerous cousins and uncles), at one time or another, worked for their father's construction company. The lyrics are available at at Lyrics Domain
In 1976, Alex Hayley spoke first at a press conference in which executives of the ABC TV network channel announced their mutual decision to cancel the planned broadcast of Roots, a television miniseries based on Haley's work Roots: The Saga of an American Family which was due to run in less than eight weeks. Hayley admitted that yes, large passages of Roots were copied from “The African” by Harold Courlander. Also the electrifying climax when Haley found the village whence his ancestors sprang was to be considered a work of the imagination rather than strict historical scholarship. Haley contended that he was "just trying to give his people a myth to live by." If one definition of myth is "a usable version of the past," Haley contended that his saga succeeded in overturning other myths about the Black American experience and giving African Americans a proud history.
Badgeman
Badgeman
In 1963, Police Officer Jefferson Davis “J.D.” Tippit worked beat number 78, his normal patrol area in south Oak Cliff, a residential area in the city of Dallas. In the evening, Police Lieutenant Harry Dean Thomas provided details of the Grassy Knoll assignment for the following day. A squad of assassins had arrived in Dallas, and a shoot on sight policy had been adopted to bolster regular security. A number of trusted offices – such as J.D. - were being embedded in the crowds to eliminate the hit-men – if the need arose.
During the meeting JD was promised a Medal of Valor and the Police Cross; yet the Lieutenant was only partly briefed himself. Badge Man would receive both awards post-posthumously, a state of being that would be possible in very short order. Twenty five minutes before, in the same Dallas Police Station, arrangements for the the hit on J.D. himself had just been settled.
In 1980, “it was only when the bones of the first devoured victims were discovered that the true nature and power of these swarming black creatures with their razor sharp teeth and taste for human blood began to be realized by a panic-stricken city. For millions of years man and rats had been natural enemies. But now for the first time - suddenly, shockingly, horribly - the balance of power had shifted.” Through found hand experiences of The Rats the shocking true story was recounted by journalist James Herbert.James Herbert
James Herbert
Marina
Marina
In 1963, the former US Marine asked a co-worker at the Texas Book Repository for a ride to Irving. En route, they discussed his two week old daughter. He spent the weekends with his wife at the Paine home in Irving, Texas, about 15 miles from down-town Dallas. That weekend, he was going to finish the nursery room with the curtain rods he had to pick up that evening. He just hoped Marina would be pleased with his choice. Forced to work in the city, and commute at the weekend, he only had one shot at this purchase.
In 1963, in Irving, 15 miles from down-time Dallas the co-workers enter a soda parlour. Outside, Marina Prusakova, a Russian immigrant broke into the co-worker's automobile. A troubled 19-year-old pharmacology student from a broken family in Leningrad, she had lived with her aunt and uncle in Minsk until she married the former US Marine. This evening, she opened her husband's paper bag and replaced the curtain rods with a Mannlicher-Carcano Rifle, just as Snake Eyes had told her to.Backyard
Backyard

Monday, November 19, 2007

Raging

The Violent yet peaceful death of Marvin Lee Aday Part VI ~
Sgt. Davis, of the Dallas Police Department prepared the most stringent security precautions in Dallas' history, so that the demonstrations like those marking the Adlai Stevenson visit in October would not happen again. But Winston Lawson of the Secret Service, who was in charge of the planning, told the Dallas Police not to assign its usual squad of experienced homicide detectives to follow immediately behind the President's car. This police protection was routine for both visiting presidents and for motorcades of other visiting dignitaries. Police Chief Jesse Curry later testified that had his men been in place, the Incident might have been prevented, because they carried submachine guns and rifles to take out any attackers, or at least they might have been able to stop Oswald before he left the building.

In the long years that followed, Orvis Wesley Aday had pondered much on this decision. Spoke to hundreds of people in the bars of Dallas. Often late at night when such conversations flow more freely. With tongues loosened by alcohol. Got drunk, blind drunk. His son Marvin and his mother Wilma Artie (Hukel) would drive around to all the bars in Dallas, looking for him to take him home. Hated himself. Hated them.
In 2010, climatic changes around the globe forced CIRCLE (the Center of International Research for the Continuance of Life on Earth), to redefine Category 6 of the Saffir-Simpson Scale. Much like the Richter scale for earthquakes, this potential measure give officials and the public an idea of what to expect from an approaching hurricane. The scale is named after Herbert Saffir, a consulting engineer in Coral Gables, Fla., and Robert Simpson, who was director of the National Hurricane Center from 1967 through 1973. The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale is a scale classifying most Western Hemisphere tropical cyclones that exceed the intensities of "tropical depressions" and "tropical storms", and thereby become hurricanes. Satellite Photo of Raga Storm
The categories into which the scale divides hurricanes are distinguished by the intensities of their respective sustained winds. The classifications are intended primarily for use in measuring the potential damage and flooding a hurricane will cause upon landfall. The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale is used only to describe hurricanes forming in the Atlantic Ocean and northern Pacific Ocean east of the International Date Line. Other areas label their tropical cyclones as "cyclones" and "typhoons", and use their own classification scales.

Proposals for a Category 6 tropical cyclone were not redefined until 2010. Previously, experts such as Robert Simpson, advised that there was no reason for a Category 6 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale because it is designed to measure the potential damage of the speed of the hurricane above 250 km/h (156 mph).

Historian A.A. Attanasio recorded the early work of the self-sufficient scientific community on the southern Peruvian coast known as CIRCLE which operated from 2009 until its causal collapse in 2113. CIRCLE was established to find ways to compensate for the massive morphological changes that began as the earth swung into "Line". The Line was defined as a hypertube; the timelike geodesies which connect the spacefree internal domain of a naked Kerr-singularity (a rotating black hole that is "open" to our universe). CIRCLE mantics first identified the ray of metafrequency energy jetstreaming from the massive black hole at the galactic hub as the Line; earth migrated into the flux of the Line fully in 2113, though the transmuting effects of this atypical energy had been altering the planet for over a century.

The collapse of CIRCLE marked the end of the "Kro" culture. Instead the human societies that followed termed a Category 6 hurrician as a "Raga Storm". The use of a term instead of a category is of course indicative of the failure attempt to prescribe solutions to radically altered global environment. It was an acceptance of a new reality.
In 1976, executives of the ABC TV network channel agreed to cancel the planned broadcast of Roots, a television miniseries based on Haley's work Roots: The Saga of an American Family which was due to run in less than eight weeks. To desensitise the issue, the executives had consulted with professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of Harvard University. Dr. Gates acknowledged the doubts about Haley's claims with regard to “Roots”, saying, "Most of us feel it's highly unlikely that Alex actually found the village whence his ancestors sprang. Roots is a work of the imagination rather than strict historical scholarship.”
Molotov and Ribbentrop
Molotov and Rib..
In 1945, on this day at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice began the Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal. The leadership of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact was prosecuted by Allied military justices. Although officially labelled a "non-aggression treaty", the pact included a secret protocol, in which the independent countries of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania were divided into spheres of interest of the parties. The secret protocol explicitly assumed "territorial and political rearrangements" in the areas of these countries.
Subsequently all the mentioned countries were invaded, occupied or forced to cede part of their territory by either the Soviet Union, Germany, or both. All of the signatories of the pact were sentenced to death and hung within twelve months. Both Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop dismissed the verdict as victor's justice.

In 2003, on this day the compendium “A Collection of Political Counterfactuals” was published. Simon Burns' masterful sequel "What if Clinton was watching a football game?" was a keynote contribution, considering the scenario of October 29, 1994: Francisco Martin Duran fired at least 29 shots with a semi-automatic rifle at the White House from Pennsylvania Avenue, outside the south lawn, thinking that Clinton was among the men in dark suits standing there. In Burns plot Clinton was in the White House Residence watching a football game; no one was hurt and Duran was sentenced to 40 years in prison.Clinton
Clinton
Snakeyes
Snakeyes
In 1963, in the early evening, the strange being known as Snake eyes stood outside a Dallas rooming house owned by Ruth Paine. He knocked on the door, and spoke briefly with a former US Marine who had lodged there for a fortnight only. The following day, the man was to ask a co-worker for a ride to Irving, saying he had to pick up some curtain rods. His teachers would have been astounded to see the calm acquiescence of a character who had been withdrawn and temperamental since early childhood. Those teachers had described a "personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies" and recommended continued psychiatric intervention. You could say that continued psychiatric intervention had been applied; Snake eyes was utilising an advanced form of mind control known to only a dozen people in the United States; eleven of them were in Dallas.

In 1947, the bond between the British Empire and Imperial Germany strengthens when Princess Elizabeth married Louis Ferdinand Hohenzollern, Prince of Prussia at Westminster Abbey in London. Elizabeth
Elizabeth

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Shock

The Violent yet peaceful death of Marvin Lee Aday Part V ~
"Meat" thought his father Orvis Wesley Aday an alcholic who would go on drinking binges for days at a time. He and his mother Wilma Artie (Hukel) would drive around to all the bars in Dallas, looking for Orvis to take him home. Alcohol was a factor, big favour in Orvis' decline if we're being honest. But the bar-hopping was more than that. Orvis was speaking to other witnesses of the Incident. Hundreds of them. By 1965 he knew a great deal more than he wanted to.
Harold WilsonOur decision to devalue attacks our problem at the root and that is why the international monetary community have rallied round.

It does not mean that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued.

Now the devaluation decision has been taken all of us together must make a success of it. ~ Harold Wilson
Harold Wilson - Prime Minister
Prime Minister
Shortly before being replaced by Interim Prime Minister Lord Louis Mountbatten who confronted “the facts” of absolute decline of British authority in the world. Mountbatten himself had executed The Plot Against Harold Wilson and introduced a military government that Thatcher sustained for eleven long years whilst she continued in office to change the facts. The prelude to the military takeover is described at BBC On This Day
In 1976, executives of the ABC TV network channel received an astonishing letter from the African American author Alex Hayley. In less than eight weeks time, the network was planning to broadcast Roots, a television miniseries based on Haley's work Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Trouble was, Hayley had not been entirely honest with the network. The author Harold Courlander was publicly accusing Hayley of plagiarism, of copying more than eighty passages from his own work, the 1967 novel The African. Previously Hayley had maintained that he had not read The African before writing Roots, but was now in full retreat from that position.
Kriegsmarine
Kriegsmarine
In 1945, in South Africa Admiral James Somerville published his confessional biography “Mers”. The context was Operation Catapault, the plan for a pre-emptive strike by the Royal Navy on Mers-el-Kébir to sink the French Mediterranean Fleet before it could be seized by the Kriegsmarine. Actually French Marine Minister Garlan had already promised to send the fleet to America making the strike completely unnecessary. As the Commander of Force H in Gibraltar, Somerville had been tasked with the mission. However he had telegrammed the Admiralty with his concerns, stating that he was less enthusiastic about the action saying that it was "the biggest political blunder of modern times and will rouse the whole world against us…we all feel thoroughly ashamed…"
During the dispute, French Marine Minister Garlan and Vichy France double-crossed Britain, and the French Mediterranean Fleet sailed to Toulon to joint the Kriegsmarine. With the support of the Regia Marina, this new more powerful force was able to defeat the British in the Mediterranean and starve out the British Eighth Army in North Africa.

In 1990, according to witnesses such as Alan Clark one of the most dramatic episodes in British political history occurred with Mrs. Thatcher's political "assassination". She is the only woman to have been Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Thatcher was the the longest-serving British Prime Minister since Lord Salisbury and had the longest continuous period in office since Lord Liverpool in the early 19th century. Perhaps the most significant British politician in recent political history, she is also one of the most divisive, loved and loathed by citizens from across the political spectrum.Thatcher
Thatcher
Thatcher was appointed by Interim Prime Minister Lord Louis Mountbatten in 1979, confronted with “the facts” of absolute decline of British authority in the world. Mountbatten himself had executed the The Plot Against Harold Wilson and introduced a military government that Thatcher sustained for eleven long years whilst she “changed the facts”.
Snakeyes
Snakeyes
In 1963, in the early morning, the strange being known as Snake eyes let himself into a Dallas rooming house owned by Ruth Paine. It was a very strange break-in, he stole absolutely nothing. Instead, he left behind an air-brushed backyard photograph of a former US Marine holding a Mannlicher-Carcano Rifle and also a receipt for said item. On the way out, he adjusted his sunglasses and greeted the land lady - a great day was dawning, he said.

In 1863, Union President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the military cemetery dedication ceremony in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. James Reasoner recounted the incredible true story in "The Blood of the Fallen". Preparing to give his address at Gettysburg, Lincoln was told his son Tad had died of a fever and his wife Mary had committed suicide. Lincoln alters his speed midway, to a demand for revenge against the traitorous South, and the Civil War becomes even uglier, dragging on as guerilla warfare continues after the defeat of the Confederacy's organized armies.Lincoln
Lincoln

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Trapped

The Violent yet peaceful death of Marvin Lee Aday Part II ~
Marvin put the Permacover notebook into the Triumph's saddlebag. He capped the pen and clipped it in his pocket. He put the muzzle of the Colt into his mouth and looked up at the blue sky. He thought of a game they had played when they were children, a game the others had teased him about because he never quite dared to go through with it. There was a gravel pit out on one of the back roads, and you could jump off the edge and fall a heartstopping distance before hitting the sand, rolling over and over, and finally climbing up to do it all over again. All except Marvin. Marvin would stand on the lip of the drop and chant, One .. . Two . . . Three! just like the others, but the talisman never worked. His legs remained locked. He could not bring himself to jump. And the others sometimes chased him home, shouting at him, calling him Marvin the Pansy. He thought: If I could have brought myself to jump once . . . just once . . .I might not be here. Well, last time pays for all.
Marvin Lee Aday
He thought: One . . . Two . . . THREE! He pulled the trigger. The gun went off. Marvin jumped.

~ Stephen King, The Stand Book III Chapter 64.
~ "Bat Out of Hell", Meatloaf, 1976 Click Symbol to Play Clip

Shortly after his mother died, his father, in a drunken rage, tried to kill him with a knife, and he barely managed to escape after they had a bad fight. After Marvin got his inheritance from his mother's death, he fled to Los Angeles with Nadine Cross. But Nadine was promised to another - the Walkin' Dude. They had sprung a trap, and left Marvin for dead.
Marvin Lee Aday - Meatloaf
Meatloaf

But I can't stop thinking of you, and I never see the sudden curve until it's way too late. I never see the sudden curve 'till it's way too late. Then I'm dying at the bottom of a pit in the blazing sun. Torn and twisted at the foot of a burning bike. And I think somebody somewhere must be tolling a bell. And the last thing I see is my heart, still beating, breaking out of my body, and flying away, Like a bat out of hell.
.

In 1945, the author Kurt Vonnegut became unstuck in time. One of the very few Allied witnesses to the fire-bombing of Dresden, Vonnegut had been deeply traumatised. Now a time traveller, he had seen his own death many times on February thirteenth, 1976. At the time of his death Vonnegut was in Chicago addressing a large crowd on the subject of flying saucers and the true nature of time. He had to cross three international boundaries in order to reach Chicago. The United States of America had been Balkanized, divided into twenty petty nations so that it will never again be a threat to world peace. Chicago has been hydrogen-bombed by Angry Chinamen. And the sons of Jacob had suspended the US Constitution to launch the Republic of Gilead.
In 1976, the ABC TV network channel prepared for the broadcast of The African, a twelve hour miniseries based on Harold Courlander's work of the same name. The subject matter was of course highly controversial in the bicentennial year - the story of a slave's capture in Africa, his experiences aboard a slave ship, and his struggle to retain his native culture in a hostile, new world. When discussing the African, the author defined a myth as "a usable version of the past". Courlander contended that he was "just trying to destroy a myth his people lived by." Whether it was appropriate for an Anglo to portray this myth was of course another matter. Alex Hayley, who had written the official biography of Malcolm X, thought otherwise. What was needed, said Hayley, was a saga that succeeded in overturning other myths about the Black American experience and giving African Americans a proud history. Only an African-American author could achieve this.
Ford
Ford
In 2003, on this day the compendium “A Collection of Political Counterfactuals” was published. Simon Burns' masterful entry "What if Sara Jane Moore had missed?" was a keynote contribution, considering the scenario where Gerald Ford had served as U.S. president until 1985. Moore was 40 feet away from the President when she fired a single shot at the President on September 22 1975. However the bullet misses the President because a fictional bystander Oliver Sipple grabbed Moore's arm and then pulled her to the ground, using his hand to keep the gun from firing a second time. Sipple said : "I saw [her gun] pointed out there and I grabbed for it. [...] I lunged and grabbed the woman's arm and the gun went off." The single shot which Moore did manage to fire from her .38-caliber revolver ricocheted off the entrance to the hotel and slightly injured a bystander.

In 1940, in response to Germany's levelling of Coventry, England two days before, Sir Arthur Travers Harris commander of RAF Bomber Command orders the destruction of Hamburg. When Britain is finally starved into submission and defeat in 1945, Harris is one of many high profile war criminals handed over to Nazi authorities for trial at Nuremberg where he suicides hours before his planned execution.Bomber Harris
Bomber Harris
James Herbert
James Herbert
In 1980, a simple little village in England was quickly ripped apart by a devastating earthquake. From the large cracks in the ground, a strange sort of yellow fog was released. And when people come in contact with this fog, they soon start to go completely insane. Chaos ensues along with murder, self mutilation and destruction. Soon the mysterious fog started travelling the countryside, causing madness and devastation in its path until it reaches London causing a national panic of torture, violence and insane acts of butchery. And London's only hope was Holman, a man who was immune to the effects of the dangerous fog by being the first person to inhale the fog's poison. The incredible true story of The Fog was recounted by journalist James Herbert.

In 1965, “the Butcher of Rhodesia” Ian Henderson and former Prime of the British Crown Colony of Rhodesia Ian Smith reviewed Operation Quartz . This plan envisaged placing Rhodesian troops at strategic points from which they could simultaneously wipe out the terrorists at the Assembly Points and assassinate Mugabe and the other terrorist leaders at their campaign headquarters. The strike would be assisted by Puma helicopters of the South African Air Force and would involve the participation of elite Recce units of the South African army. Clearly the Rhodesians had discussed Operation Quartz with their counterparts in the SADF and obtained their approval and co-operation.Ian Smith
Ian Smith
Lord Soames had already agreed to allow 400 South African troops into the country in order to protect the Beitbridge area, the main route of escape for whites if the situation were to degenerate into chaos and all-out war. In fact the number of men that the SADF sent across the border was closer to 1,000, although some were later withdrawn following protests by Mugabe.

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