Click here to read "Happy Holidays."
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"Everyone who was alive at the time remembers where they were when President Kennedy was assassinated."
That is the conventional wisdom.
Is it true?
Maybe.
For your favorite Blog, it is only true-ish.
I was a mere blogling of four years when it happened. So most of my memory of it is pretty fuzzy.
Here is what I remember for sure...
I was watching TV.
I remember other details, but cannot vouch for the accuracy of any of them. But, here is how I remember it.
I was watching the Captain Penny show, a daily children's show that featured The Three Stooges, The Little Rascals and Astro-Boy as well as puppies for adoption and Cedar Point's wild animal expert, "Jungle Larry."
I was eating lunch. (Bologna sandwich, "Dan-Dee" potato chips, an apple and milk.)
I may or may not have been soaking an infected toe in epson salts. (It fits the timeline.)
My show was interrupted for "A Special Report." My Mom came quickly into the room from the kitchen, because in those days news was actually news and "A Special Report" would not have been a mere high-speed police chase or a high-speed Kardashian divorce. In the atmosphere of 1963, "A Special Report" would most likely mean one thing... The Russians have launched missiles at Cleveland!
But no. The news was that the President was dead.
And, that's all I've got.
Again, it may not have happened, exactly, that way. But, it's how I remember it.
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Since that time, about a gajjillion books have been written about the Kennedy assassination. Most of them speculate on theories ranging from plausible to paranoid. Most of them are also pretty dull and dry.
So, this seems like an appropriate time for The Blog to recommend one of the best novels that he has read in recent years...
It is a great big recent history lesson on the subject, dressed up as an exciting and touching time travel story, with the added bonus of an ending that (unlike so many of King's epic novels) is as satisfying as the story leading up to it.
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In recent days, the right-wing noise machine has been busy rewriting history in an attempt to claim JFK as one of their own, in the same hilarious way that they have tried to co-opt Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jesus.
The smart, funny and, The PC likes to think, incredibly sexy Wonkette posted about this, today.
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Mere days before Kennedy was killed, The John Birch Society littered Dallas with the following...
Here's a fun game!
Replace the photos on top with pix of our current president and some of the specifics in the text with words like, "Benghazi," "Fast and Furious," "IRS," and "Obamacare," and take it for a spin. (Extra points for noticing that point #1 lists Cuba as a "friend," and another bonus for picturing Dubbya while reading point #5.)
They say that the world changed on this day in 1963.
But, some things never change.
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