Monkeys

July 8th, 2007

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The Announcement

Andrea was roused from her work by Monica leaning her head into the room and knocking on the wall. “Grandpa says to come on over for the cookout.”
Andrea looked at the clock on her computer. “God, it's that late already?”
“I'm just gonna pack up my pie, and I'll be ready in a couple minutes.”
“Ok, just give me a few minutes here, then I'll be out.”
Monica shook her head. “Don't zone out again. I wanna get to the cookout while there's still somethin' to eat.”
“You can always have your pie.”
“Ha, ha.”
Monica retreated to take of her offering to the cookout, and Andrea tried to wrap up her thoughts enough to where she could come back and pick it up. She was fine with public speaking as long as she had plenty of time to prepare, but the holiday was cutting out part of her prep time, and she felt a little rushed. When Monica returned to tap impatiently at the door again, Andrea saved where she was at and shut down the computer. “Ok, ok, here we go.” She looked down at her night clothes and said, “Maybe I should put on something else.”
“You think?”
Andrea pushed Monica out of the way and ran to her bedroom closet for some shorts and a T-shirt. She threw them on quickly, then hopped into a pair of flip-flops and ran out to the garage, where Monica was already packing her pie carefully in the back seat. “Do you want to put a seat belt on it, too?” Monica stuck her tongue out at her mother and sat down in the front seat. Andrea got behind the wheel, they both fastened their seat belts, and then she opened the garage door. Sunlight streamed in, momentarily blinding them both. “Wow. At least there's no rain.” Andrea started the car up and pulled out onto the driveway.
The news van that had taken up residence across the street fired up its engine as soon as the driver saw them pull out of the garage and prepared to follow. “Look pretty for the paparazzi, mom,” Monica said, flashing a lovely smile at the van and waving.
“Why do I think this all so much more fun for you than it is for me?”
“Because it is.”

	In 1987, tension eased considerably between the troubled members of the Prog band Marillion at the Westside Studios in London. The recording of their fourth and best to date album Clutching at Straws had shed some of its predecessor's pop stylings.
Also it had retreated into a darker exploration of excess, alcoholism, and life in hotels, representing the strains of constant touring that threatened to result in the imminent departure of lead singer and lyricist Fish (real name Derek William Dick) to pursue a solo career. However self-exploration produced an unexpectedly carthatic effect upon Fish, enabling him to reconnect with Steve Rother, Pete Trewavas, Mark Kelly and Ian Mosley. Surely this was a great triumph for fans everyone including members of the Web.
~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

In 1999, the networks ran instalment nine of TSEotTC. Shortly after appointment, Viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten tells British Prime Minister the Raj is finished. Nonsense said Churchill, he had not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. The author Adrienne Gormley was also interviewed on the show, talking about her great work of journalism Children of Tears. She said that Mountbatten was mistaken, he should have known that Churchill meant it when he said he would not preside over the end of the British Empire.

~ variant from Steve Payne: extensive use of original content has been made to celebrate the author's genius.

In 1965, in Gold Star Studios, New York City the recording of River Deep - Mountain High was cancelled following an argument between Ike Turner and Phil Spector. Feeling threatended by his wife's success, Ike had made a number of unhelpful suggestions to Spector who had retorted "Oh, man, I came here from California to make hits." Ike did not need a translator to realise that he was being told to "Shut up and get out of my face."

~ entry from Steve Payne: the language of the quotation has been moderated.

In 2010, an earthquake struck Alaska and the US military observed the ground rumbling at HARC. Eyes turned to General Ben Crewe, and these were now of suspicion and blame rather than the congratulatory glances that followed the destruction of the small pox virus weapons launched by the rogue North Korean leadership. General Crewe glanced at his watch 22:20:03. A desert of blankness overtook him. His watch read 22:20:10. Three balls were spread out at his feet. He could not recall seeing who had dropped the balls or when they had rolled. Crewe realised he had just lost seven seconds during the the Aftershock.

~ variant from Steve Payne: extensive use of original content has been made to celebrate the author's genius.

In 1965, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill died in Spandau Prison, Germany. Word of his demise reached the Fuerher in Bechtesgarden that evening. Terminally ill himself, Hitler outlived Churchill by five weeks, describing him as a "remarkable adversary" and a "remarkable drain on the Reich Treasury" in reference to the extravagant quantities of alcohol and cigars consumed by the Old Lion in his Prison Cell.

~ variant from Steve Payne: extensive use of original content has been made to celebrate the author's genius.

In 1977, Sex Pistols' manager Malcolm McLaren fired bassist Sid Vicious. Glen Matlock who had left in February was reinstated. Writing thirty years later Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day sympathised with McLaren's dilemma. "It wasn't necessarily a mistake to replace Glen Matlock with Sid Vicious. Matlock was cool, but Sid was everything that's cool about punk rock: a skinny rocker who had a ton of attitude, sort of an Elvis, James Dean kind of guy. That said, there's nothing romantic about being addicted to heroin. He was capable of playing his instrument, but he was too messed up to do it."

~ entry from Co-Historian Steve Payne: language of the original quotation has been moderated.

De Valera	In 1942, on the Irish Isles reports from subversive underground newspapers in Southern England fuel the Troubles with the Dublin Government. 32nd US President Winston Churchill was reported to mutter Something must be done . Taoiseach Éamon de Valera responded with absolute fury. Collecting himself nonetheless, De ..
.. Valera spoke truly when he said The English must now move forward from 1533 and stop arguing about the past. A truthful, but perhaps unhelpful reference to Henry VIII precipitous action to launch the Reformation, the event which triggered the collapse of English power.
~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

In 1974, Richard Condon published Winter Kills, a counter-comedy exploring a fictional presidential assassination and the various conspiracy theories that surround the event. Before the plot begins, U.S. President John F. Kennedy is shot in Dealey Plaza, Dallas. The ensuing presidential commission condemns a lone gunman ..	Winter Kills
.. as the killer. The film starts years later, when Kennedy's brother, Teddy, witnesses the death-bed confession of a man claiming to have been part of the 'hit squad'. As the protagonist attempts to find the plotter(s), he encounters numerous groups and persons that could have led or been part of the conspiracy. One person is Judith Campbell Exner, mob a hostess, lobbyist and fixer. She recounts the story of President Kennedy asking her about appointing a member of organized crime to the Court of St. James. The character is Dallas night club owner Jack Ruby. Condon's book describes the numerous intertwined threads of the conspiracy, from the Mafia, Cuba, even possible domestic police connections. Only in the final act, in which Teddy meets with his vicious and perverse Joseph P. Kennedy 'father-figure', is the truth revealed with a twisted ending.
~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

The Man in the ..	In 1932, as the Financial Crises in America deepened, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell below its lowest level of the Great Depression, 41.22. Teetering on the verge of national bankruptcy, the United States was simply unable to finance effective defences for its overextended continental territories. Philip K Dick examined ..
.. the eventual defeat of the United States, and the partition of the continent by Germany and Japan in his counter-factual novel Man in the High Castle. The novel is set in the former United States, in 1962, fifteen years after the Axis Powers defeated the Allies in World War II and the U.S. surrendered to Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan. Several characters in The Man in the High Castle read a popular novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a novel within a novel. The author, Hawthorne Abendsen, describes an alternate history in which the Axis Powers lost the war. The novel portrays a third scenario which is banned in areas under German occupation, but its publication is legal in the areas under Japanese occupation.
~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

In 1975, as Arthur Ashe celebrated the achievement of becoming the first black man to win the Wimbledon singles title, a species threatening catastrophe unfolded in America. Twenty fifth century scientists were to discover that AIDS did not after all originate from a monkey bite in Africa. AIDS was manufactured by Japanese ..	Monkey Bite
.. General Otozoo Yamada's Bacteriological weapons research in Unit 731. Experimental substances were handed to General Douglas MacArthur in 1945 and used for military research, accidentally released in 1975 due to poor security at a US military base.
~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

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Sea of Crew Cuts

	In 1999, Yehudi Menuhin died in Berlin Germany, aged 82. Following his death, tributes were made by world leaders - including the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, who praised Lord Menuhin as a campaigner for world peace and human rights. Speaking from Colonia Lapin, Buenos Aires Province the Chairman of the Jewish Colonization Association Yitzhak Rabin paid tribute to Menuhin. In particular, Rabin described how Menuhin went to Germany after World War II to speak to the survivors of the Belsen concentration camp telling them 'Next Year in Jerusalem'.

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	In 1922, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac was born on this day in Lowell, Massachusetts. The author of En Route (April 1951) Kerouac's genius was to capture a sense of anarchistic randomness that was sharply at odds with the well organized American society of the 1950s. Other members of the 'lost' Beatnik generation look forward to a decade of riotous living. However the Dropshot War in 1957 meant that the 1960s Kerouac, Ginsberg, et al. had in mind would be cancelled.

John Reilly writes ~ Collectivism triumphed. As several historians have pointed out, what we call socialism is simply the institutionalization in peacetime of the command economy measures devised by Britain and Germany to fight the First World War. These institutions would have been greatly strengthened throughout the West, but especially in the United States, by the experience of two world wars so close in occurrence. We should remember that enlightened opinion in the U.S. of the 1950s was that command economies really were superior in most was to market economies. It was universally assumed that pro-market policies could never cure underdevelopment in the Third World. Certainly the literature of the era is filled with ominous observations that the Soviet Economy was growing much faster than the U.S. economy during the same period. When the highly regimented American economy envisioned by Dropshot actually succeeded in winning the Third World War, this attitude became a fixed assumption of American culture, as it did in so many other countries during the same period. Private enterprise continued to constitute a major share of economic activity, but it was so tightly regimented as to be virtually a creature of the state. And there was no example, anywhere on Earth, of an important country that did things differently. The '60s, as we expected them, were cancelled. Partly, of course, this would have been because the country was broke. Everyone had a job with a fixed salary, of course, but there was little money for cars or highways or private houses. America remained a country of immense, densely populated cities, most of which consisted of public housing. The biggest consequence was the psychology of the younger generation. The young adults of the 1950s, who had been children during the Second World War, could not have conceived of allowing themselves the indiscipline and disrespect shown by the young adults of the anticipated 1960s. The 'Silent Generation' of the 1950s knew from their earliest experiences that the world was a dangerous place and the only way to get through it was by cooperation and conformity. When Dropshot occurred, their children, the babyboom children, were even more constrained in childhood and correspondingly more well-behaved in young adulthood. Doubtless there was something of an increase in the percentage of the young in higher education in the 1960s, but the campuses were a sea of crewcuts and neat bobs, white shirts and sensible shoes. The popular music was not memorable.

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	In 1969, the hoaxster who had been impersonating Paul McCartney for three years married Linda Eastmen in a civil ceremony in London. Hundreds of people gathered outside the Marylebone Register Office to catch a glimpse of the couple as they arrived with Miss Eastman's six-year-old daughter, Heather, from a previous marriage. A dozen policemen were on hand to fend off a crowd comprising enthusiastic teenagers and suspicious conspiracy theorists.

Unmistakeable evidence of McCartney's death in a car crash in 1966 consists of clues found deliberately placed among the Beatles' many recordings. A few of them are well known, such as the fact that McCartney is the only barefooted Beatle and is out of step with the others on the cover of Abbey Road, but others are far more obscure, such as the claim that using a mirror to bisect the words printed on the drum on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover shows a coded message. Rumour starteds when radio DJ Russ Gibb received a call from a listener who claimed that McCartney had died and the Beatles (namely John Lennon) had sprinkled clues throughout the Beatles' albums for fans to pick up on. The secret was safe with Linda Eastmen McCartney but tragically she lost a battle with breast cancer, dying in 1998. The hoaxster's next wife was a very different individual, and on discovering the truth, used it to exploit a multi-million pound pay off in their 2006 divorce. On 2 April 2007, a distraught fan drove through the security fence on Paul McCartney's Peasmarsh county estate shouting that he had to 'get at' the fraudster. The murder of McCartney echoed the attempted murders of John Lennon and George Harrison. The assailant was arrested after a chase through Sussex country lanes. 'Life's A B-' commented Lennon.

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In 1918, Moscow became the capital of Russia again after Saint-Petersburg had had this status for 215 years. Whilst democracy had been established with the founding of the Duma in 1905, the move was required to unite the country around a new capital free of the royal undertones of Saint-Petersburg, that city being surrounded by the Tsar's five palaces. German military planners including Von Moltke, Falkenhayn, Hindenburg and Ludendorff advised the Kaiser that Russia would be unstoppable by the year 1920.

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In 1925, in the State of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes (the Scopes Trial) was about to reach a conclusion. Judge John T. Raulston ruled in favour of either the high school teacher the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.

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1938, troops of the Austrian Chancellor Adolf Schicklgruber occupied the Weimar Republic, with annexation known as Anschluss (Union) declared the following day.

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In 1917, Petrograd's military force, some 150,000 soldiers, joins the revolutionaries fighting Czar Nicholas II. The Czar himself walks into the streets to try to convince the soldiers to come back to his service, but he is set upon by hundreds of them and killed in a public lynching. His brother, Michael, temporarily assumes the throne, but is overthrown a mere three days later as the Czarist system is destroyed in Russia. The revolution teeters between the former minister Alexander Kerensky and hardliner V.I. Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks. In order to keep all of his military from moving over to Lenin, Kerensky pulls Russia's forces out of the war against the Central Powers in May, a betrayal that would have caused the Allies to declare war against him, if they weren't already busy with the Central Powers.

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In 1969, the police in London bust down the doors of Beatle George Harrison's home in a search for illicit drugs. Harrison, who was incensed at the police tactics, went after the sergeant in charge with a cricket bat when he found him planting drugs in the medicine cabinet in the master bathroom. Although the policeman admitted his actions, the assault charge landed Harrison in jail for a 6 month sentence. Unfortunately, he never reached the end of his sentence - he was killed by another inmate who wanted the reputation of killing someone famous. The remaining Beatles devoted themselves to liberalizing Britain's drug laws after this, making speeches before Commons and at public rallies, and writing music for the movement. Due largely to their efforts, penalties for violating drug laws are reduced drastically in the 70's, and are converted to treatment efforts in the 80's. Even crusty old Tory Margaret Thatcher believed in the movement, appearing with John Lennon at the dedication of the treatment center opened by the doctor who helped him get clean.

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In 1993, North Korea announced plans to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, refusing to allow inspectors access to nuclear sites. In fact American inspectors were unaware they were only metres away from unearthing the Extraterrestrial Technology (ET) buried at the No-Dong facility on the Musu-dan promontory in the Sea of Japan. North Korea cynically played the 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' gambit that the Americans had themselves developed for their incursions into Iraq; promulgating a well-used lie that was incredibly close to the truth

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In 1648, Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina (Gabriel Tellez) dies in his monastery in Soria, Spain. The author created the immortal character of Don Juan, a womanizer who finds new life in the Lord and gives up his sinning ways.

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Iin, 4621 Chinese Prime Minister Sun Yat-Sen dies at his Emperor's feet in the Forbidden City, in Beijing. Prime Minister Sun had given life to Emperor Chengzu's vision of the Empire's spread across space; after his death, and the Emperor's two years later, space exploration went into a temporary slump.

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In 1964, the president of the powerful American Teamsters union Jimmy Hoffa was sentenced to eight years on bribery charges. After his release, Hoffa attempted a comeback. Federal officers drugged him at the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and took him off to be painted at a nearby safe house.

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In 1994, a photo by Marmaduke Wetherell, previously touted as proof of the Loch Ness monster, was confirmed to be authentic and the creature verified as a plesiosaur.

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