"Beatles, Mysteries, and Other Things"

A couple of weeks ago, my aunt from Martinsville, Indiana. came down (mom's youngest sister) and brought her a large sack full of various flower bulbs, like tulips, zenias, etc. So I finally got around to digging up mom's yard enough to plant all of those today. Started at around 1:PM and finished up around 4:PM. Around 2:30 it was pretty comfortable, actually, and I was wearing just a t-shirt having already gotten too hot using a grubbing hoe and shovel and come out of a toboggen and sweatshirt. But by 4:PM it'd cooled back down and I had to layer that back on. This also entailed hauling off wheelbarrow fulls of dirt (which I used to level some low spots in her yard), removing many large roots (which were around the stump where I planted the largest majority of them), adding potting soil and plant food and mulch, etc. I then added brick around the edges of the areas just so I knew "where" they were planted and not mow them down. My hands are sore and slightly numb from digging so much, but at least the ground wasn't too hard with the rain we've had lately.

I meant to take down her swing outside and store that in the garage along with her water hose and turn off the water to the outside hydrant, but forgot it, so I guess Saturday (when I'm off work again) I get around to that.

I re-did the crawl space entrances to my house this morning as well, recycling some old cardboard boxes I was going to toss in the garbage for insulation behind several sheets of plywood. Got a late start on that this year. The cold weather sort'a snuck up on me.(Wednesday: 11-107-07)


On the ABC-TV nightly world news tonight, they had a little report about why so many museums are re-doing their dinosaur exhibits because there's been so very much new information regarding them, they had dozens of things wrong in the way the skeletons were displayed. Most museums still show the dinosaurs in a position completely upright and dragging their tails, when that concept is now "old hat". More than likely they kept their tails up and usually horizonal with their heads, to use as a balance when walking and running. This information was fairly old to me anyway because I'd seen many a report on such on the History and Discovery Channels. But what I've always been curious about is, did all of the dinosaurs actually disapear before early man first arrived on the scene?

Supposingly, they perished 65-70 million years ago when a huge asteroid crashed into the earth off the coast of Central America. This caused huge amounts of debris and smoke and flaming material to be launched into our atmosphere, bloating out the sunlight and turning the world into something akin to a "nuclear winter". The debris came back down, still flaming and killed off some of these beasts, and the dropping temperatures and lack of sunlight killed off the plants. When the plant life died, the plant eating dinosaurs slowly starved to death leaving no food source for the meat-eating ones. Eventually, this caused the extinction of all gigantic prehistoric life, and only the smallest of mammals survived by being able to burrow into the earth (which makes me wonder if ALL of the plant life disapeared, from whence did the mammals get their food? And if the mammals lived on grubs and worms, from whence did THEY get their food as well?).

So, this extinction didn't happen just all at once; it was gradual, but I'd say that within less than a couple of scores of years, they were all gone. Or...were they?

Is it possible that some of the dinosaurs survived well into the age of man. That would mean that even at the earliest stages of mankind's developement, they'd had to still been around 6-7 million years ago at a time when mankind, if any, was still more anthropoid than human, but an upright creature with the elements of a conceptional mind.

This is pretty far-fetched, but there have been fossilized footprints of human tracks next to those of dinosaurs found. Some say that the human tracks were made at a much later date. However, these tracks are at the same level of fossilization, which would make one conclude that they were made originally at approximately the same time.

If it was possible that these creatures did indeed survive to a much later date, I'm sure than like all gigantic species of mammals (the royal bison, the wooly mammoth, the giant sloth, the mastodon, the smilodon, the dire wolf and prehistoric giant bears and giant birds, etc.) they were eventually killed out by mankind as a survival tactic, whether for food and clothing or just their own protection. But I think perhaps had mankind seen some large reptilian-type creature still about, it would have stayed within their subconscious and be told as stories around their campfires. So...did dinosaurs, that is, actual living ones create our mythology of dragons? Or was it indeed because of the skeletal remains that early man found? Even to this day there's always sightings of large, prehistoric-looking creatures seen in various inland lakes and seas (aka, "Champ" and "Nessie"). A gigantic snake was photographed in the African continent a few years back so large that the estimate of its head would have been equal to the size of an adult horse!

But then...ancient man had no idea of how old a dinosaur skeleton was upon its discovery. To them, it meant that such a creature might still be lumbering around. Dragon legends are almost the same on every continent, and the depiction of dragons are very similiar everywhere on this planet. As too are the fossilized remains of such creatures bones found on every continent. In China still to this day, "dragon bone" is used as a medicine. The bones used for this are ground-up dinosaur bones.(Thursday:11-08-07)


In next week's TV Guide (covering the listings of Nov. 12th. thru the 18th.), it features "Heroes" on the cover with 4 different comic book artists doing variations. I thought about just posting photos, but perhaps a link to this is better, so if you will just click Here you'll see the four cover variations, whose artists are (L to R) Michael Turner, Jim Lee, Phil Jimenez and Tim Sale. (I think I like the Tim Sale cover of "Sylar" the best.)

Found a neat "Beatles" book today at a yard sale for a couple of bucks. A discarded library copy of "We Love You Beatles" (1971) by: Margaret Sutton (see above scan). Drawn in a cartoonish style similiar to the way The Fab Four looked in "Yellow Sub-marine", this is probably a fairly scarce children's book from that time. The oddity is that this is a first printing, and shows The Beatles as a group even though they had already broken up. I'd never seen a copy of this before, but it's now in the DPuck Vault of my many collectibles regarding John, Paul, George & Ringo.

And today is mom's 82nd. birthday! Happy Birthday, Mom! And yes, I was a "good little son", buying her a card and gift and taking her out to dinner (along with my wife). Plus I got around to finishing up a few chores for her that I didn't get to do last Wednesday, since I got off a couple of hours early from work today.(Friday: 11-09-07)


Went down to the flea market today, as well as a "yard sale store" and some other set-ups people had, but bought nothing. Didn't see a single interesting thing anywhere. Back last week i saw an electric bass guitar at one place, but the guy had sold it. just as well since I can't really play it and have no amp these days.

Stopped by and filled up with gas and got some breakfast, then on to the grocery and back home.

And today I had thought I've finally solved a little mystery that's bugged me for years. As a child I lived about a mile from elementary school, and as long as it was good weather, I would walk to school every morning.

Many a time I stopped by one of the local drug stores either on the way to, or from, school, and they had a large magazine rack. Not a spinner rack mind you, but one of those tall and wide magazine racks that some stores use even to this day, and it was located about half way on the left side of the store before you reached the lunch counter.

They carried comics of all sorts, naturally, and even though I didn't have the money to purchase them, many a time I would pick up one and read through it (much to the dismay, I'm sure, of the store clerks). One such comic book I recall was of a guy fighting these giant stone heads such as on Easter Island (aka: Aku Aku). It seemed to me that he pulled a lever of some sorts, and the heads emerged from the ground with full stone bodies underneath and chased him all over the island.

It was just a memory, and nothing else, but it made a very large impression to my (then) 7-1/2 year old mind. So, I've been attempting to find out for a long time now just what comic that was in?

S'funny how your mind plays tricks on one. I figured it was some Marvel fantasy story (and there HAS been such ones about virtually the same subject), one of which is in a copy of Tales to Astonish (Marvel) #5 (Sept.,1959), ALSO drawn by Kirby. But years later when I bought one of those 1970's fantasy REPRINT titles Marvel did which had that same story, it wasn't it. Now I was pretty sure that it featured Kirby artwork, so that mystery deepened even more so for me.

Finally I saw that DC's House of Mystery #85 (April, 1959) had such a story featured in it as well. And I'd been trying to find a copy of that, either on eBay that I could afford, or in local comic shops, but with no luck. So looked it up on the Grand Comics Data Base, and noticed that it had a notation that this story was reprinted in DC Special #11 (April, 1971: exactly 12 years later to the month). THIS comic I have, so I grabbed it out of the "long box" and re-read this tale.

So then I was pretty sure that's the same one. It was indeed Kirby artwork, but at the time he was working for DC (and doing Challengers of the Unknown as well as various fantasy tales for both DC & Marvel, and super-hero stuff for Archie Comics, etc.). The staues are brought to life when a guy reads an inscrition off a stone tablet, but they defeat the creatures by pulling a LEVER!
"Mystery' solved???

WRONG!!
There was yet a THIRD such similiar tale, drawn by Kirby once again, that appeared in Tales to Astonish #16 (April, 1961). In this tale we have a story just like the one in the House of Mystery, where people go to easter Island, a guy finds a hidden room full of gadgets, and set these stone creatures loose! The archeologist isn't pulling a lever, but he is using a pick, plus there's a large cable which somewhat resembles a lever in the next panel in front of him, and this could have just got jumbled upin my memory, so THIS could also be a candidate for that tale I read so very many years ago, and it still fits into the same time line of my being able to read it on the stands in that drug store before we moved to Cave City (KY.; about 4 miles down the road) in 1961. We moved to CC in July of '61; this book is dated April, which means it was on the stands around February of that year.

So now, the hell with it. I've got reprints of both stories. It HAD to be one or the other, and the only way I could ever know for certain is if I had a time machione that'd take me back to that exact same place in time to know for sure. But I think my research shows the evidence leans much more towards the TTA 16, as I was purchasing/reading many other comics by then at age 8, and it was indeed a Marvel "fantasy" comic as I'd first thought.

In fact, it may not have even been when I was coming home from school. It may have been on a Saturday when I was off from school, and being in February there may have been lots of cold weather and snow when mom or dad was driving to and from the school each day. My mother would many a time (at least once a week) go to the local laundrymat (and always on a Saturday), located on the street behind the same drugstore, and I would usually have to tag along with her. Instead of staying at the laundrymat I'd walk around down town, almost certainly stopping in at the drug store and looking at the comic books.(Saturday:11/10/07)