Over the weekend I had another one of my T.V. ESP experiences. Actually, it was a rather ESP-rich weekend.
I know you’re wanting a definition for that. What I mean is that sometimes I’ll get a feeling that some old movie or t.v. show is coming on television in a day or so. I can get down to specific episodes of old reruns even.
For example, I’ll be sitting in my car and think, “That episode of Roseanne where young Darlene has to read the poem in front of her class and she doesn’t want to but Roseanne makes her was a really good episode.” The thought will come out of nowhere. I haven’t watched a rerun of Roseanne in ages. I can’t even tell you was channel it’s being run on. Then later that day or the next, I’ll be flipping through the channels and there it’ll be — that episode of Roseanne.
Lately I’ve been talking a lot about the Civil War. Not as much here as I could have been (you, my readers, should thank me), but I’ve been discussing it with other folks, particularly NG. (She likes it.)
At lunch on Friday I was telling her that I just got a copy of an out-of-print biography about Jesse James and I was explaining to her that I had become interested in him after watching a documentary on the History Channel or the Discovery Channel. According to the show I had seen, the narrator had suggested that he had fought in the Civil War and that he might have been involved in some secret group of Confederates who removed the Confederate treasury from Richmond before it’s fall. Ah, how I love a conspiracy. Then, of course, after the war, Jesse had become a terrorist outlaw. He had considered himself still fighting the Union and he was hitting Federal banks and was kind of a Robin Hood type character. Supposedly, the locals thought of him as a hero. He apparently was also incredibly bright and crafty and hid a lot of his loot all over the place and left clues carved into trees and other things. The documentary had some guy who’s found some of the loot in one or two places and who thinks there’s more out there. Then of course, Jesse settled down with his wife and there’s the whole conspiracy about him being shot from behind while unarmed while he was hanging a picture on the wall of his house by a friend. He sounds like an intriguing guy.
Anyway, I told you all of that because the conversation of the missing Confederate treasury led us to thoughts on where it might be. I said there were numerous theories, including the one that there was none because the Confederacy was broke. I also said that there were also suggestions that it had been put on a ship and that the ship had sunk in the Atlantic and I mentioned that such a theory had inspired the movie Sahara which is the extremely unrealistic movie about the two ex-marines looking for the Confederate Ironclad that made it all the way to Africa after the war and somehow ended up in the Sahara.
And since we were joking about conspiracies and that period in history, I told her how my mother had once made the comment about how unbelievable it was that when we went to the museum in Lincoln County, NM, where the Lincoln County Land War were that made Billy the Kid famous, I walked into the gift shop and found the one conspiracy book — Whatever Happened to Billy the Kid? which had to do with the theory that not only did Pat Garrett not kill Billy the Kid but he conspired to fake Billy’s death. There were a number of people who later claimed to be Billy or claimed that they knew someone who was Billy after Billy supposedly died. There are a number of places that claim to be his final resting place that isn’t where Pat Garrett supposedly shot and buried him. I told her about John Miller, the one I think was the real Billy the Kid, and Brushy Bill Roberts, the one the Young Guns movies are based on.
(By the way, several years ago, the Discovery Chanel once contacted me about answering questions as a Billy expert for one of their documentaries on Billy the Kid and I turned them down. I’m glad I did. I saw it and it was horrible. I don’t think any of them had even been to Lincoln. They used computer generated models to map out the town to show how the events took place and where people were when things happened, but not only did the models not even look like the real things — apparently the Discovery Chanel thinks all buildings in New Mexico are adobe — but they were all in the wrong places. It’s because of this documentary that I’m no longer allowed to watch Billy the Kid documentaries with other people.)
So…anyway, Friday night, I’m flipping through the channels and wouldn’t you know it, there’s Young Guns II and Sahara! So I ended up watching Sahara while I flipped through my old book of fairy tales trying to get an inspiring idea for NaNoWriMo and as I mentioned yesterday, I was surprised how gruesome they were. I really didn’t recall them being so bizarre and gruesome. I’m surprised my mother let me read them. No wonder I was terrified of dark, the monster in the closet, and the creepy things under the bed.
Anyway, the next morning, I woke up and decided to watch what I had DVR’d during the week. Well, apparently, last week’s episode of Supernatural was about how gruesome the original fairy tales were.
O.K. I’m willing to give the last one a bit of weird coincidence.
Still, I always think its weird when I think about To Kill a Mockingbird or Breakfast at Tiffany’s and it’s on AMC that night. I wish the ESP worked for other things, important things, like the lotto numbers or when there’s going to be pumpkin cheesecake at the cafe.
{ 0 comments… add one now }