It's About Time (#BOTB)

        God created everything except that man created the artificial construct we know as "time."  And as though that weren't enough, government stepped in and created Daylight Savings Time.  If it were up to government, they would meddle with all of God's creation and screw up everything.  Hmm--come to think of it......--said by me after the time changed. 

 The Clocktower, West Parade, Bexhill, Sussex
. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Linear versus Nonlinear Time
     
      There are many variants concerning what time is and how it is comprised, but generally speaking I think most of us commonly think of time as being linear; that is a series of events or points in a line that presumably have a starting point somewhere in the past, continuing to where we are in the present, and heading to some point in a future.  Then there is nonlinear time which is the impression of time cumulatively as viewed from a far vantage point.

        Scientist/theologian Chuck Missler provides what I think is an excellent analogy of the two ways of viewing time.  He says to think of a parade.  If you are sitting curbside watching the parade pass by then that would be like experiencing linear time.  The past is represented by the part of the parade that has already passed by your vantage point, while the present is that fleeting part of the parade that is immediately in front of you soon to enter into the past.  The future is that part of the parade that is still to come.

        To view the parade from the nonlinear aspect, you might think of yourself hovering high above in a helicopter from which vantage point you are able to see the entirety of the parade from the staging area, then winding through the streets below, and finally dispersing at the end of the parade route.  Missler reasons that this nonlinear view is how God would view the time line while we humans are limited to merely experiencing the passage of linear time.

         The linear view has immediacy and greater subjective meaning to a viewer while the nonlinear view is more impressionistic where the spectator has no direct connection to singular parade parts, but instead a feel for the entire parade all at the same time.

          My Battle of the Bands offering this time around represents to me two distinct ways of assessing time:  linear and nonlinear.  See if you agree and more importantly, let us know which song you like best...


Battle of the Bands

Battle of the Bands is the blogging event started by Far Away Series and now hosted by StMcC Presents Battle of the Bands.   This event happens twice each month on the 1st and 15th.   The premise is simple:  Listen to the songs presented below and then in the comments vote for your favorite and tell us why you liked it.  Then visit the links listed near the bottom of this post for more Battle action.

This Time Battle

        This Battle came upon me just a couple weeks ago as my wife and I were eating lunch at the Sizzler Steak Restaurant near our house.  As we dined, the background music being piped in seemed to be primarily deep tracks from the seventies so that made for a pleasant dining experience for me since that is a musical era that I particularly enjoy.  My attention perked when I heard a familiar old Fleetwood Mac song begin playing and it was not long before a Battle was born, pushing all of my other Battle songs in my line-up to some indefinable future time.  Not only did hearing this song change my schedule for Battle of the Bands, it influenced the topic of my current series--"It's About Time".  

        Funny how things like that can happen when you're just sitting one afternoon eating a steak dinner while a life soundtrack provided courtesy of the dining establishment plays in the background.  And to think my wife and I went there on a last minute whim.  We hadn't been to that restaurant in many months.   And that song was just waiting there to happen to me at that one particular moment in time...

Fleetwood Mac  "Sands of Time"  (1971)

        "Sands of Time" is one of my favorite Fleetwood Mac songs from the 1971 album Future Games, which I would call my favorite album by the group and consider perhaps their best.  Though the later addition of the team of Buckingham/Nicks certainly added a greater commercial appeal to the group, I tend to prefer the songs that came from the teaming of Danny Kirwan, Bob Welch, and Christine McVie.  Kirwan lasted about five tumultuous years with Fleetwood Mac until his mental disorders forced his removal from the group--another one of those sad troubled rock and roll genius stories.

         The Kirwan penned "Sands of Time" is a wonderful piece of music with somewhat confusing disjointed lyrics that might be a reflection of his mental state of the time.  There is no precise focus to the song which to me might represent a more non-linear way to view time.  The message depicts a dichotomy between dark and light, apprehension and hope. The final destination is "the sea" without any precise indication of what will be waiting there, but there seems to be an expectation that something good might happen when that sea destination is reached.   The music wafts and rolls fading smoothly in and out, almost with a jazzy feel...





Alan Parsons Project "Time"  (1980)

          Alan Parsons Project was certainly more of a project than any actual band.  Consisting of the core members Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson and a parade of guest musicians and regular sidemen, the group cycled through a number of concept albums starting in 1976.  Sometimes mistaken for a song by Pink Floyd, the beautiful "Time" sounds like it could have been pulled off of Dark Side of the Moon.  This song is about as laid back as music can get.  Truly wonderful stuff.
     
      Though I can easily say that "Eye in the Sky" is my favorite song by The Project, "Time" is right up there among my favorite songs by the group.   Dreamy and relaxing, "Time" expresses a more linear view of time with the narrator suggesting a sense of resignation as he drifts from the present to eventual death.   As in the Mac song, the ultimate destination is the sea.   In the Parsons song the "sea" of "Time" is an ambiguous eternity...






Time To Vote!

        I hope you have time to vote!   And hopefully you have an opinion of some kind.  Which version do you like the best?   To me it's a somewhat tough choice, but how do you feel about it?

        Please vote on your favorite by letting us know your choice in the comment section and tell us why you prefer the version you chose. Then after you've finished here, please visit the other blogs listed below who may or may not be participating this time around. And if you've put up your own BOTB contest let us know that as well so we can vote on yours.


Here are some other places where you might find BOTB posts:

 StMcC Presents Battle of the Bands

 ‘YOUR DAILY DOSE’ 

  'MIKE'S RAMBLINGS'

'Curious as a Cathy'

Sound of One Hand Typing

The Doglady's Den 

Angel's Bark  

Cherdo on the Flipside  

Jingle, Jangle, Jungle 
  

Winner Announced on Wednesday March 22nd

         On Monday March 20th I'll be revealing my theme for the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge---yes, it's that time already.  Funny how time slips away.  Then on Wednesday I'll be back with the results of this current Battle.   Who will win?  Hope you help decide with your vote.

          Do you consider time to be a dimension?   What is your favorite combination of artists who comprised Fleetwood Mac?   Thinking of concept albums such as those recorded by Alan Parsons Project, do you have a favorite?

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Time Travel, Revisionist History, and the Liberal Agenda

 "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."    1984 by George Orwell

A mosaic stitched image of Stone Mountain, Georgia, United States. Taken with a Canon 5D and 70-200mm f/2.8L at 200mm. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

         When the CW television network debuted The Flash in 2014 I was enthusiastically on board from the first episode.  Since I had been a big fan of the first short-lived incarnation of The Flash in 1990 and sad to see its demise after only one season, I welcomed the reinvention of the superhuman speedster in a television era where special effects technology would be so much better.  The characters in the new show were well developed and fun and the story was not so far-fetched that I could reasonably buy into it.  But then, as will invariably happen with such genres, the writers of The Flash went into realms of the absurd that I could no longer accept.  I've stopped watching The Flash.

         Superhero stories like most science fiction and fantasy typically require healthy doses of willing suspension of disbelief and yet there can be limits to just about everything.  In The Flash I could accept the increasing array of super villains and even the alternate universe.  However for me the entire "flashpoint" concept--the changing of a timeline where the Flash entered a world where he had memories of another timeline that no one else knew with subsequent plots revolving around events connected with the new timeline with plot points interjected from the previous timeline--this concept annoyed me.   To me an ability for someone or some power to be able to change the past or create an alternate past has no logic and becomes downright silly.

        Oddly over the past few years we've seen a number of television shows and films with similar past-changing plot devices.  This past TV season alone I've gotten caught up in Frequency (derived from the 2000 film of the same name) and Timeless.  In both, the element of going back in time in order to change the timeline of history does bother me, but the stories have been so engaging and are so well written that I was able to forgive the illogical premise.   I also recall seeing other films and shows that used the device of changing time (Looper comes to mind) but I can't name any others at the moment, but I've been less forgiving of most of them.

        Time travel happens to be a favorite fictional genre of mine, but I have a hard time accepting the stories where someone goes back to change history.  To me that's like the story that has the "it was only a dream ending".  It's a gimmick that usually doesn't work well for me unless it's something on a less serious note such as the Back to the Future films.  If time gets changed to the point of a new outcome then was the outcome as remembered by the time traveler comparable to being only a dream?  And what does that traveler do with that memory and once returned to a future with a new outcome does that traveler have the memory of the new history line somehow implanted in their mind?

       For me there becomes an almost conspiratorial suspicion that this type of change plot line is a sort of liberal leftist agenda, whether it be purposeful or subconsciously devised, to become a part of the revisionist history movement that is becoming more popular in recent U.S. thinking in circles of academia and new progressive socialism.

        More often a tool of dictatorships and radical governmental change agents, the concept of historical revision is being seen in the movements to remove symbols such as statues of former heroes, primarily associated with the Confederacy, or the names of historical figures that offend certain people in new movements taken off of schools and other public buildings.  Many early explorers, founders, and shapers of the United States are now being looked upon with disfavor and gradually being eliminated from this nation's history or relegated to roles where they are deemed essentially unsavory.

       The agents of social change and certain academicians unable to physically go back in time in order to exert change seem to want to instead rewrite history books and change the landscape to no longer reflect an existence of anyone who engaged in anything that is now looked upon with an unfavorable eye.  The revolutionaries of the New Order of Thought would prefer future generations to understand a new and different history that is more reflective of the demographics of our time.

          Revising history is in the hands of educational institutions, politicians who exert the most power, social groups with the loudest voices, or whoever else becomes the victor in future struggles for dissemination of knowledge and lore.  The entertainment industry has been doing this for years as seen by theatrically released biopics and historical epics.

         More than once have I been disappointed after watching an interesting film and then, after being driven by curiosity to investigate further about the topic, to find that what I had seen was mostly a reinvention of actual history.  If in the future our textbooks and other references are changed to reflect the new history then who will know what the truth is.  Already we see a mythology of history appearing on the internet to the extent that we cannot always trust what we read.  This of course has always been the case to some extent in published materials, but with the internet it seems that revisionism could be getting worse.

         So George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were really jerks and not worth having a school named after them?   Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were part of an evil cause and should have their monuments removed from public view?   The United States legacy is really one of aggression and oppression?  Does the history of this country and the country as it now is deserve to be respected?  

         Oh, I'll still be watching the time travel shows and films.  I'll do my best to suspend disbelief as much as I can.   But nevertheless, this nagging fear will linger in my mind that maybe the trend to depict time travelers as being successful in changing history is really a nod of approval to the real history revisionists in our midst.  When society starts eradicating the truth, they might create an illusion that where we are now and where we are going in the future is wonderful, but they will also be building castles with foundations of sand.  

         What do you think of the revisionist history movements?    Do you like time travel stories in which history gets changed?   What is your favorite time travel television show or movie?  

          On Wednesday I'll be presenting a Battle of the Bands post which continues on the theme of today's post.  Two different songs from the seventies by two well known groups who went through numerous personnel changes over the years.  If you'd like to join the participants of Battle of the Bands to present your own musical battle then let me know so I can have your blog link added to the list.  It's great fun and we'd like to see some more musical tastes involved.   I'm sure you've got something you can add to the mix that will make things even more interesting that they are now.

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Meryl Streep Is Overrated

You don't always have to talk about politics or religion to piss some people off.   Any opinion you express will likely find someone on the opposing side--sometimes a lot of people.

Today

         Long before Donald Trump's notorious tweet and Streep's unnecessary acceptance speech at the Golden Globes ceremony, I've always said that I thought the multi-Oscar nominated actress was overrated.  Now do I not only think that she's overrated, but she's also an idiot.  But that's my opinion and I'm sure that I'll make some of you cringe with that statement.

         My sister and I have gotten into arguments every time I've said this over the years as she is a firm Streep adulator. Others have also found it a bit disturbing when I express this opinion of mine so I try to stay mum on the topic most of the time, but if her name comes up in a conversation I can't help but blurt out something like, "I can't stand Meryl Streep--I think she's a bore."

          Thinking that I might be wrong after hearing the floods of Streep accolades after her recent controversies and yet another Oscar nomination (oh no, not another stupid award nomination for Streep!), I decided that I should check her filmography to see if maybe I'd made an unfair assessment of Meryl Streep.

         Checking the IMDb site I discovered that Meryl Streep has been a part of  nearly 70 films and of those films there are 12 that I've definitely seen and maybe a few more that I might have seen and have forgotten that I've seen them.  Only one of these was a movie that I purposely saw because she was in it and that was A Cry in the Dark (1988) which I watched this past week-end mostly because it sounded interesting. It was good, but not necessarily because of her performance.

      I liked the The River Wild (1994) because it was a good story, but I actually didn't recall Streep being in it. I guess she did a fine job, but there are a lot of actresses who would have been good in this film. This is the case with many of the films I've seen Streep in--any actress would have been fine in the role that she played and some might have been better. Some of those films being Defending Your Life (1991) (she must have had a cameo in this one), Music of the Heart (1999) (I think I saw this, but it didn't make any impression I guess), Out of Africa (1985) (I don't remember this other than it being rather a bore as I recall--probably a suitable film for her style), and Holocaust (1978) (actually a TV mini-series that is one of my wife's favorite "films" that I bought her on DVD and I liked for the story--don't recall Streep's role that much).  

       Then there was the 1979 Woody Allen film Manhattan and that great film The Deer Hunter (1978), both which garnered early Oscar nominations for Streep.  However, if you had asked me before I had looked it up if Streep had been in either film, I would have said that I didn't think so.  In other words, the roles she played in those films made no impression on me.

        Streep also starred in two films that I absolutely hated.  The first is The Bridges of Madison County (1995).  I hated the movie and equally hated the book and didn't care for Streep's role in the movie that I hated.  This one is a big source of contention between my sister and I and will always result in an argument when the topic comes up so we usually don't discuss it.  Most women seem to love this dumb movie, but to me it's a rotten enough movie to make a case for disliking Meryl Streep period.

         Another "hate it" role I'll add is the one from the remake of The Manchurian Candidate (2004).  For one thing the role Streep played reminded me too much of Hilary Clinton of whom I'm no fan either.  The only consolation about that role is that Streep's character gets killed--oops!  Sorry for the spoiler, but if you haven't seen it, don't.  See the original from 1962.  In my opinion the remake is typical modern Hollywood liberal garbage.  Hated the film.  Hated Streep's role.

          So, I guess the argument I'm making is that I don't like Meryl Streep's acting and I don't particularly like the way she looks.  There is something about her that creeps me out.  And now she's added her political opinions to the mix and that's all the more reason for me to dislike her.

          For those who think I'm being superficially judgmental about looks and beliefs and that those things shouldn't affect my opinion of acting ability I'll offer another case--Sean Penn.  Can't stand the way he looks and hate his politics.  But every role that I've seen him in has been great in my opinion.  I can watch one of his films and forget his looks and his politics and walk away thinking he did a great job.  Too bad he's such a jerk.

        Of course, many will disagree with my assessment.  But then, many would likely ridicule some of my favorite actors like Nicholas Cage or Jean-Claude Van Damme--hey, my wife and I both like those guys and have enjoyed every film we've seen them in.  And we've seen a lot of their films.  We also think Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, Leonardo di Caprio, and Christian Bale are far better than Streep.

        Funny, but I tend to find actors more memorable than actresses.  There are plenty of actresses I like, but none that stand out as much as actors.   Of great actresses from the past you can give me Giulietta Masina over Streep any day.  I think the roles played by either Charlize Theron or Christina Ricci in Monster blow away anything Meryl Streep has ever done.  But that's just me speaking here.  Maybe you agree or maybe not.

         If you're a Streep fan and I've offended you then I apologize.  After all, I'm just expressing my personal opinion.  And if you're Streep and you're offended then I don't really care.  You shouldn't be spouting politics on a stupid  awards show.  If you really feel the need to shoot off about your political beliefs then start a blog or something.  The ABC Network daytime show The View would probably even give you a seat right there with Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar.  If you were on that show I'd have yet another reason not to watch it.

         On the other hand, Meryl Streep, send me some of your money and I'll delete this post and replace it with one telling how much I think you're the greatest ever and write glowing reviews of all your films.  I might even watch Mamma Mia! and give it a great review.  For that you'll need to send a lot of money.

         Have I been overly harsh in my assessment of Meryl Streep?    Is there any particular actress or actor that you think is overrated?    Do you think actors and other entertainers should be expressing their political opinions and causes on public forums like award shows and concert appearances?  

         Join me next Wednesday March 15th for the Battle of the Bands.   If you love music then why don't you join us with your own Battle post.  Let me know if you'd like to join in and we can add you to the participant list.

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