Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Paul in France

I was reading the Chronology section of Bill Harry's book, The Paul McCartney Encyclopedia, (Virgin, 2002), and I found it curious that he mentioned Paul visiting France three times in the fall of 1966:
               September 16 - with John and Brian Epstein for a weekend in Paris.
               October 13     - with John for a weekend in Paris.
               November 6   - visiting various chateaux in the Loire Valley.
If this was the real Paul, what was he doing there?
It's possible that Paul had negotiated an "out" from The Beatles and was thinking about settling in France.  My speculation is that he never made it.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Pressurize

In my research, the word "pressurize" has shown up twice.  In Cynthia Lennon's book, A Twist of Lennon (1978), on page 142, she was talking about John's fear of physically disabled people and how The Beatles were seen by some people  as "shining lights for those who were afflicted with any kind of illness or incapacity":
     "It really was too much for four young men to cope with. They were being pressurized into what people wanted them to be, not what they were.  Every single thing they did or said was repeated, reported and analysed.  Individual freedom had become a luxury of the past."  She talks about their turning to drugs for escape.

The second example was in a song by the English group, The MOVE, called Flowers in the Rain, released in September, 1967:
      So I lay upon my side
      With the windows open wide
      Couldn't pressurize my head to keep from speaking.

The Oxford Universal Dictionary, 3rd. edition (1964),[an abridged edition of the Oxford English Dictionary] gives a definition of pressure as:  "The condition of being painfully oppressed in body or mind; affliction, oppression" (definition II, 1).  That definition would seem to apply to Cynthia Lennon's example.

The MOVE's example seems to be more in line with a literal interpretation of "pressure":  "The force exerted by one body on another by its weight, or by the continued application of power, viewed as a measurable quantity, the amount being expressed by the weight upon a unit area" (definition I,2).  Without getting too technical, I again think this was a reference to the hyperbaric oxygen bed that I have been talking about in other posts.  The bed applied pure oxygen under pressure to persons enclosed in it, with the claim that it had therapeutic effects.  The pressure was to a level of 2 atmospheres, equal to the weight of air and water 33 ft. below sea level.

My point is that something was being done to Paul, and possibly the other Beatles, and the idea is to find out what REALLY happened to them, because the truth definitely has not yet been told.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Mark I

On April 6, 7, and 22, 1966, The Beatles recorded a song for the Revolver album called Tomorrow Never Knows.  The working title was Mark I.  I was trying to find the significance of the working title and I believe I've found it. 

The British Royal Navy carried out operations near the end and after World War II "to clear the ports and harbours of the Mediterranean and Northern Europe of unexploded ordnance and booby traps laid by the Germans" according to the website:  http://www.mcdoa.org.uk/ (Minewarefare & Clearance Diving Officer's Association.)  The divers were called Port Clearance Parties or "P" Parties and wore Mark I and Mark II self-contained diving suits developed by the British company Siebe, Gorman and Co. (Check image on left:  the bottom suit on right.)
Again, I think the song reference is connected to Paul and the Lotus hyperbaric bed.

Photographer Richard Avedon took a photo of Paul in 1965 in a "spacesuit."
Very similar to the Mark I diving suit!!

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Glass Onion

The lyrics of The Beatles'  Glass Onion contain PID/Paul was Replaced clues and have been interpreted several ways.  Instead of seeing esoteric, opaque, and obscure meanings to the clues, if you look at them in  more literal and punning ways---like working-class people would write them--- I think you will get closer to the truth of the meanings.

Three lines are instructive to this:
1.)  The line, "We're as close as can be"  can be read, "We ARE as close as can be" OR "We  WERE as close as can be."

2.)  "Looking through the bent-backed tulips" line could easily be a pun for "bent-backed TWO LIPS":   lips being pressed onto a clear surface.

3.)  And "The walrus was Paul" line could mean "Paul" was dressed in a walrus costume for the Magical Mystery Tour album OR that Paul died.

More on the All You Need Is Cash Clues

In my July 16, 2010 post, I discussed the PID clues in the satirical film about The Beatles, All You Need Is Cash.  To clarify two points:  1.)  When they said that Stig was rumored to have died in a flash fire at a water bed shop, I contend they were referring to a hyperbaric oxygen chamber (see my post of May 7, 2010.)     The flash fire part of the clue would be the fire risk in oxygen chambers caused by the volatility of pure oxygen.  In a Times of London article of June 21, 1968, they discuss a study made by the Royal Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine where "scientists ignited more than 100 full-scale dummies or dead pigs in various oxygen pressures to determine the characteristics of a clothing fire."  The scientists found:
    "Men usually take between five and 20 seconds to respond to an emergency, and conventional
     extinguisher systems take about two seconds to come into operation.  Within this time, the experiments
     suggest, a man working in a typical oxygen-rich environment and clothed in a denim overall would
     suffer third degree burns over at least half his body."
A man trapped in a hyperbaric oxygen bed could die.

2.)  I found an interesting amplification on the Limpet mine reference in the film.  According to the book, Underwater Swimming by George F. Brookes and Robert B. Matkin (1962), "wartime 'frogmen' had a self-contained diving apparatus . . . but this apparatus was complicated to use, required skilled maintenance and employed pure oxygen."  Like the Lotus hyperbaric oxygen bed.