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International Best Seller Colin Falconer
stories of romance and epic adventure
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We all know that tired old story about Shakespeare not writing Shakespeare.
But did Shakespeare freebase cocaine? Was that one of the reasons for his genius?
Or was it one of his neighbors in Stratford?
Take a look: ten things you didn’t know about Shakespeare.
Here’s something else you may not have known about Shakespeare: he had a cousin with the same name who came to stay at his lodgings in Bishopsgate in 1593 and went on to become London’s first private detective.
Well actually, he didn’t. But everything else in the books about Shakespeare is true.
And no, there isn’t a scene with him freebasing cocaine with Walter Raleigh.
Should there be?
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Stay weird.
That was the message from Graham Moore when he won the little bald naked man for his screen adaption of The Imitation Game.
It’s the story of Alan Turing, the man credited for inventing the first analogue computer - a machine that led to the cracking of the Nazi’s ‘unbreakable’ secret cypher during World War Two.
“Alan Turing never got to stand on a stage like this and look at these faces and I do - and that’s the most unfair thing I’ve ever heard.
“So I want to use this moment to say this - when I was 16 I tried to kill himself because I felt like I didn’t belong.
“And now I’m standing here, and I would like for this moment to be for that kid out there who feels like she’s weird or she’s different or she doesn’t fit anywhere: Yes, you do. I promise you do .’
“Stay weird, and when it’s your turn and you’re standing on this stage, please pass the same message to the same person who comes along … stay weird and different and when you’re up here, pass it along.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN1SaF5LNGs
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COLIN FALCONER
There are heaps of conspiracy theories out there. The moon landing didn’t happen; MI5 killed Princess Diana; Elvis is still alive and Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. Take your pick.
But just because some conspiracy theories seem bizarre, if doesn’t mean they’re untrue. Here are five loony-tune conspiracy theories that turned out to be REAL.
1. Operation Northwoods:
Here’s one to set you back on your heels.
In 1962 American military leaders were trying to think of ways to bolster public support for a war they wanted to start with Cuba.
The plans - get this - included committing acts of terrorism in U.S. cities, killing innocent US civilians and U.S. soldiers, blowing up a U.S. ship, sinking boats of Cuban refugees, and hijacking planes.
(Does this remind you of anything?)
“The desired resultant from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government …”
Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer formulated a plan to fabricate evidence that would implicate Fidel Castro and Cuban refugees in the attacks. The plans were approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but were rejected outright by President Kennedy and kept secret for nearly 40 years. (In fact not only did he reject the proposal, he sacked Lemnitzer. )
Don’t believe me? Go here.
2. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident
We were told there were two separate incidents involving the Vietnam and the US in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964. On August 2, 1964 three Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Only they didn’t. The Maddox fired first. In tandem with strikes from four Crusader jets launched from the USS Ticonderoga one torpedo boat was sunk and two others damaged. Ten Vietnamese sailors died. There were no American casualties.
President Johnson ordered the USS Maddox back into the Gulf two days later. He then received a report that it had been attacked again in international waters by the Vietnamese navy.
So he sent the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to Congress, who then granted him the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by “communist aggression”. It was this resolution that led to the massive escalation that became the Vietnam War.
In 2005, an internal National Security Agency historical study was declassified; it concluded that the August 4 incident actually didn’t happen: “It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night…”
In fact Johnson actually suspected that. In 1965 he commented to an aide: “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”
Robert J. Hanyok, a historian for the U.S. National Security Agency, admitted that the NSA deliberately distorted intelligence reports - but that the motive was not political but to cover up honest intelligence errors.
Of course, I am sure there are no parallels between the Gulf of Tonkin and the same wonky intelligence used to justify the Iraq War. They were both just honest intelligence errors, right?
No conspiracy theories there. As 58,000 dead US Servicemen will attest.
3. Bohemian Grove
If someone tries to tell you that the richest and most powerful men in the nation meet every year in the woods to worship a giant stone owl in an occult ceremony, feel free to laugh at them.
Only the thing is - they would be right.
4. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
How’s this for a loony conspiracy theory?
For forty years the US Public Health Service conducted a clinical study on dirt-poor African American sharecroppers in Macon County, Alabama who had contracted syphilis. Only they didn’t tell them they had a venereal disease and instead led them to believe they were receiving free health care.
They didn’t even treat them with penicillin when it became available ten years after the study started.
In fact they continued the experiment for thirty more years in order to study the untreated progression of the disease.
Couldn’t happen?
It did, between 1932 and 1972. By the time a whistleblower called time on the progam, 128 of the original 399 men had died of syphilis, forty of their wives had the disease and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis.
Don’t believe me? Check it out here.
5. There is a shadow government, ready to take over from your elected administration
It is also known as “Deep State”, but its official name is Continuity of Government and it’s a very reasonable idea, first developed by the British before and during World War Two to counter the threat of Luftwaffe bombing during the Battle of Britain.
It is essentially a shadow government that remains in waiting with the intention of taking control in response to some catastrophic event. Many countries, including Russia, China and those mavericks in Canada, have COG protocols.
In the US, provisions of the plans include executive orders that designate certain government officials to assume Cabinet positions and carry out primary office holder responsibilities in the event of an emergency.
But will this shadow government accurately reflect the government you elected, or that the US Constitution envisaged?
“One of the awkward questions we faced was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them,” said one of the COG planners in the 1980s.
The shadow government protocols were enacted on the 9th September, 2001.
They are yet to be reversed.
Just responsible government?
Well, here is the kicker. In 2007, Republican Peter de Fazio, a member of the US House Committee on Homeland Security, requested the classified and more detailed version of the government’s COG plan, to assist with the committee’s work.
The president refused to provide it despite repeated requests.
“Maybe the people who think there’s a conspiracy out there are right,” DeFazio concluded at the time.
When a member of the US House Committee on Homeland Security says he thinks there’s a conspiracy, that’s pretty frightening.
Think I’m just trying to scare you?
Check out this article from CBS news.
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Let’s start off this blog about the 23 most beautiful lines in literature by saying these are not the 23 most beautiful lines in literature.
They are just some of them.
I’m sure you can think of others; Feel free to contribute your own favorites at the end.
1. “She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
— J. D. Salinger, “A Girl I Knew”
2. “Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
3. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” - Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
4. “The half life of love is forever.”
— Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her
5. You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live - Natalie Babbit, Tuck Forever
6. “Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it yet.”
—L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
7. “I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
8. “Journeys end in lovers meeting.”
—William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
9.
“And the rest is rust, and stardust.”
- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
10.
“I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
11.
“Why don’t you tell me that ‘if the girl had been worth having she’d have waited for you’? No, sir, the girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
12.
“You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.
13.
“I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
14.
Give me my Romeo. And when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
- You Know Who, Romeo and Juliet
15.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep
Miles to go before I sleep
- Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Robert Frost,
16.
Teller, teller, tell me a tale
of love and fear and duty,
I want to die in the arms of love
I want to die for beauty,
For beauty is the only truth
and death the only lie,
I want to sing a final tale
and love before I die
-Troll Bridge, Jane Yollen
17.
“I have one thing to say, one thing only, I’ll never say it another time, to anyone, and I ask you to remember it: in a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.” - Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County
18.
“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.” Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me. “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
19
“Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.”
Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
20.
“Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit em, but remember that it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” — To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
21
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aurelio Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon that his father took him to discover ice.”
— One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
22.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
- Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
And my own particular favorite:
23. It’s from the short story Innocence, by Harold Brodkey
So who was the enigma behind the Enigma in that movie with Brendan Cumberbatch?
His name was Alan Turing and The Imitation Game portrays the seminal moments in the life of one of Britain’s top code breakers.
Turing led Hut 8, the team who cracked the Nazi naval secret cipher during World War 2, and in doing so, saved hundreds of thousands of Allied lives.
He is also considered the father of modern computer science.
Seven years after the war Britain repaid its debt of gratitude to the man with chemical castration.
But just how accurate is the movie?
The question itself raises a fundamental question about writing history: what is more important, making a good story or creating an accurate historical record?
Because if you understand the fundamental principles of story - you most often can’t have both.
The movie received huge critical acclaim - but its critics focused not on the film itself, but historical inaccuracies.
Writer Graham Moore defended his script this way: “When you use the language of ‘fact checking’ to talk about a film, I think you’re sort of fundamentally misunderstanding how art works. You don’t fact check Monet’s ‘Water Lilies’. That’s not what water lilies look like, that’s what the sensation of experiencing water lilies feels like.’
Director Morten Tyldum went further: “A lot of historical films sometimes feels like people reading a Wikipedia page to you onscreen, like just reciting ‘and then he did that, and then he did that, and then he did this other thing.’
I agree with both these gentlemen.
Are we writing stories or are we writing history?
Faction is not a story. People seem to get confused about this.
If The Imitation Game was a novel, and it had an afterword explaining the inaccuracies in the script, I would have given it 5 stars on Amazon. As a movie - well I can always look up the discrepancies on Wikipedia.
Which is what I did.
So if you’ve seen this wonderful film and you’re wondering how much was true, here’s the main points.
Joan Clarke, Turing’s one time fiancée actually looked nothing like Keira Knightley.
But then few women do.
Thousands of people - not just a handful - worked on the Enigma project. But then the decipher project was far too complex to encapsulate in a two hour film and if you think it could be, well more fool you.
The code-breaking machine was not called “Christopher”.
The Hut 8 team were never in a position to decide whether to use broken codes to stop a German raid on a convoy that the brother of one of the code breakers is serving on. Such decisions were made at much higher levels.
Turing was never quite as socially difficult as portrayed in the film. Turing actually had friends, a sense of humour and a good working relationships with his colleagues.
The scenes about how Turing found out about his schoolfriend Christopher’s death are fictitious.
The detective in the film who thinks Turing is a spy is pure fiction.
So is the interrogation in the police station. Yet what would the film be without that scene?
Turing actually committed suicide fourteen months after his chemical castration ended.
The inquest into his death ruled he had eaten a cyanide-laced apple, re-enacting the poisoned apple scene from Snow White, his favorite fairy tale.
The worst sin in my opinion was the depiction of Commander Denniston as a rigid and hectoring commanding officer, which his grandchildren have disputed utterly and for which there is no evidence.
The espionage subplot involving Turing and John Cairncross is also fictitious.
So there’s the truth about the enigma behind the Enigma.
How many liberties should we take with history?
You can have your say on that point if you’d like to.
For mine, I watched the movie on a warm summer evening at an outdoor cinema in Australia and I think if the writers had kept to the absolute truth I would have fallen asleep in my bean bag after fifteen minutes.
But the story they created out of Turing’s life kept me riveted.
I’ll leave the last word to Turing’s niece, Inagh Payne. After seeing the preview she said: “the film really did honor my uncle.”
It was also a brilliantly executed story.
And surely that was the whole point.
Wasn’t it?
In 1938 Louis B Mayer called her the most beautiful woman in the world.
She herself said there was nothing to being beautiful; all she had to do was stand there and look stupid.
But that wasn’t her secret.
Her secret wasn’t even that her name was Hedwig Kiesler and that her husband was one of the Nazi’s major arms suppliers.
So then - what was her secret?
Was it that five years before becoming a Hollywood star she had achieved a different kind of fame for her role in a low budget Czechoslovakian film where she appeared swimming in a lake, naked. Another scene featured a close-up of her face in the throes of orgasm.
The film - ‘Ecstasy’ - was banned everywhere, of course, which made copies of it extremely valuable.
Even the Italian dictator, Mussolini, used all his clout and his contacts to get a copy.
So who was she?
The most beautiful woman in the world was the only child of a prominent Jewish banker from Vienna. At school she displayed a brilliant mathematical mind.
It wasn’t her intelligence but her beauty that caught the eye of the third richest man in Austria, Friedrich Mandl, an arms dealer. He soon became her first husband.
But once he married her, he was less than enthusiastic about his new wife’s past, and tried to buy up as many copies of ‘Ecstasy’ as he could.
Apparently she tried to placate him by insisting that her on-screen orgasm was simulated, achieved with the aid of the director stroking her butt with a drawing pin.
That must have put his mind at rest.
Or perhaps not, because Mandl was a man with many things on his mind. At the time he was developing a new technology for radio-controlled torpedoes for the Nazis.
His wife, cute bottom now drawing pin-free, sat at his dinner parties looking stupid and beautiful while her husband entertained leading Nazis, including Hitler himself, and explained his new invention.
But she wasn’t stupid. She understood everything.
Also, Hedwig Kiesler was Jewish and, unsurprisingly, she hated the Nazis.
So in 1937 she decided it was time to stop being a trophy wife. She sold her jewelry, drugged her maid, put on her servant’s uniform as disguise, and escaped from Austria.
It was a good decision.
The following year the Nazis seized Mandl’s factory. Mandl, who was himself half Jewish, was forced to flee to Brazil.
Hedwig was now living in Paris and it was there that she met Louis B. Mayer, the Steven Spielberg of the age. Mayer was struck by her beauty and promised to make her a star.
The Most Beautiful Woman in the World signed a long-term contract with Hollywood’s Biggest Producer. She went to America and appeared in more than 20 films with stars like Clark Gable, James Stewart, Judy Garland, and even Bob Hope.
But Hedwig soon got bored with just standing there and looking stupid.
Because she was still hiding something that many people, dazzled by her beauty, could not see.
Her secret was that she was smart. Very, very smart.
In 1942, at the height of her fame on the silver screen, she decided to do her bit to help the war effort; she developed a unique direction-finding device that could be used to help torpedoes find their targets.
At the time both the Nazis and the Allies were using single-frequency radio-controlled technology. The drawback was that the enemy could find this frequency and “jam” the signal.
Hedwig, remembering all the things she had learned at Mandl’s dinner parties, collaborated with her Hollywood neighbor, musician George Anthiel, on a system to solve the problem. Anthiel had just found a way to synchronize his melodies across twelve player pianos, producing stereophonic sounds no one had ever heard before.
Applying this same technology they found a way of encoding a radio message across a broad area of the wireless spectrum. If one part of the spectrum was jammed, the message would still get through on one of the other frequencies - in effect making it unjammable.
On August 11, 1942, U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 was granted to Antheil and “Hedy Kiesler Markey,” Kiesler’s married name at the time.
But the U.S. Navy would not listen. The technology was not adopted until 1962, after the patent had expired, when it was finally used by U.S. military ships during the blockade of Cuba.
So what has this got to do with you?
Well, despite what the US Navy thought back then, it was one of the most important patents ever issued by the US Patents Office.
Today, Hedy’s invention is the foundation of ‘spread spectrum technology,’ YOU USE IT EVERY DAY when you log on to wi-fi or make calls with your Bluetooth-enabled phone. The next generation of cell phones would not be possible without it!
You couldn’t take selfies in Time Square, sext your boyfriend or post Facebook pictures of your cat without the woman still only remembered for being beautiful.
Not bad for a girl who only had to ‘stand there and look stupid.’
So what happened to her?
Hedy was married six times - the last time to her divorce lawyer - and claimed to have made and lost thirty million dollars during her life.
In 2014 she was finally inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame.
I wonder if you have even heard of her.
Her name was …
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The one thing I have learned from history is that we never learn from it.
I’m not an historian. I’m a story teller. But if I am going to write an historical novel, then I can’t just make stuff up. I have to research my period. It’s essential.
And what comes through to me, time after time, is that human history is not a straight line. It’s a circle.
Let’s talk about Charlie Hebdo.
Religious nuts trying to enforce their uneducated opinion on everyone else and being prepared to kill anyone who doesn’t agree with them - this is not a 21st century phenomena.
Ladies and Gentlemen I give you the Holy Inquisition circa the thirteenth century.
The Catholic Church made Dominic Guzman a saint. But in philosophy and theological position he was a fundamentalist who spawned a terrorist movement that brought misery and torture to two continents and turned mass murder into public theater.
Sound familiar?
Terrorism and ignorance are not new concepts. Google the destruction of Constantinople in 1204 by the Catholic Pope’s Crusaders.
The storehouse of Greco-Roman and Byzantine art was looted by bogans, the Library of Constantinople utterly destroyed.
The Crusaders desecrated the city’s churches and monasteries and for three days they murdered, raped and looted on a scale that made Islamic State look like a bunch of sissies.
They even raped the nuns.
And this was a Crusade carried out in the name of God.
I am currently researching the Reconquista in Spain. In simple terms, this was a six hundred year period when the Christians recaptured the Iberian peninsula from the Moors and re-established Christian rule and a universal Catholic orthodoxy.
It was also the period when the Jews, persecuted at the hands of the Holy Inquisition, fled to countries under Islamic rule because they found sanctuary there under a far more tolerant administration.
It was known as the Islamic Golden Age.
The sack of Granada in 1492 is viewed by many as the end of this era, which had begun with the establishment of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad around 750 AD. The inspiration for its founding was drawn from the Q’ran: ‘the ink of a scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr.’
Mohammed wrote that. Or God did. Whoever you believe scribbles all this stuff.
But for six hundred years Baghdad, Cairo and Cordoba were the leading intellectual centers in the known world for science, philosophy, medicine, trade, and education.
Mohammed ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi played a significant role in the development of al-jebr (algebra); Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi first identified the Andromeda constellation, the nearest spiral galaxy to our own; it was only through 12th-century Arabic translations that medieval Europe rediscovered Hellenic medicine, including the works of Galen and Hippocrates.
Islamic states were the first to establish free medical health care and license doctors. The university of Al Karaouine, founded in 859, was the world’s oldest degree-granting university.
Islam has as much in common with Islamic fundamentalism as a snake handling church in Little Catfish Up The Creek with a Catholic Mass in Saint Peter’s in Rome.
Islamic fundamentalism actually began with the Wahhabi movement in the eighteenth century, and by then Mohammed had been feeding the daises for almost a millennia. It was the brainchild - if you can call it that - of Mohammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, a goat botherer born around 1700 in a small oasis town in the Najid region in central Saudi Arabia.
The Wahhabis developed - and still have - very close family ties to the Saudi ruling family.
The first terrorist assault took place against other Muslims in Karbala in 1802. The first systematic terror campaign was conducted against the British Raj around the time of the Indian mutiny.
So - history is not a straight line and it is not simple.
Six hundred years ago the Catholic church were the fundamentalists and the Islamic world was the haven for the poor and the downtrodden, the place where education and knowledge was valued.
Fast forward to 2012 and a Taliban gunman tried to assassinate Malala Yousafzai on her school bus because of her advocacy of the rights to education for women in the Swat valley of Pakistan.
So what we are living through now is just history, what Winston Churchill called ‘just one damned thing after another.’.
The sad thing is not that people are ignorant, violent and stupid. It is the human race is not moving in a straight line.
We’re going round in circles and telling ourselves it’s progress because we can blow each other up with smartphones instead of Mills bombs.
Really - God would have done better giving the Holy Word to goldfish.
Bob Mayer and I have written two very different books about the JFK era, THE KENNEDY ENDEAVOUR and NAKED IN LA!
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Last night at dinner my sister in law accused my brother of being lazy.
‘I am not lazy,’ he said. ‘I AM NOT LAZY! … I just can’t be bothered.’
I hope that clears up any confusion.
Oh bro, you’re a classic.
And here are two more classics …
Bob Mayer and I have written two very different books about the JFK era, THE KENNEDY ENDEAVOUR and NAKED IN LA!
I’m offering all my subscribers a chance to win both as a bundle this week and all you have to do is be on the mailing list to have the chance to win!
SO DON’T BE LAZY!!! JUST CLICK HERE TO JOIN!
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