Wednesday, October 21, 2009

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD!!!

Today is dad's 84th birthday!!! Sto lat (may you live 100 years), Dad!!! As you can see, he's looking pretty good for a guy who had surgery on Thursday.


Friday, October 16, 2009

THE GHOST OF JIM MORRISON

I saw this article on the Rolling Stone Magazine website today and I know it would have been a topic of conversation between Bill and I, so I share it with you...


“Unexplainable” Photo Snapped at Jim Morrison’s Grave

Here’s one for fans of the late, great Unsolved Mysteries (and the still-crankin’, not quite as great Ghost Hunters): A photograph taken in 1997 at the French cemetery where Doors frontman Jim Morrison is buried features a ghostly apparition that appears to be Morrison. Are you with us? We may lose you here: the photo has been deemed authentic, the U.K.’s Daily Express reports (via Spinner). The snapshot shows rock historian Brett Meisner standing next to Morrison’s grave at the Pere Lachaise cemetery, and in the background, there’s a white figure with its arms seemingly outstretched. Apparently, Morrison did break on through to the other side.

The ghostly image went unnoticed by Meisner until 2002, when he spotted the strange blur and had the photo analyzed. In a book called Ghosts Caught on Film 2: Photographs of the Unexplained, researchers say the photo was in no way manipulated, and also rule out any possibility that it’s merely a trick of the light. The image itself is “unexplainable,” researchers said.



Meisner says now that he regrets going to the Pere Lachaise cemetery because he’s been plagued by eerie events ever since. Meisner tells the Daily Express that his marriage broke down and a close friend died of a drug overdose, and now he’s haunted by people who approach him to say that Morrison’s ghost is haunting them. “At first it was sort of interesting to see how many people felt a spiritual bond with Jim and the photo, but now the whole vibe seems negative,” Meisner said.

As anyone who read one of the many books on Morrison or saw Oliver Stone’s The Doors would tell you, Morrison believed he encountered the ghost of a Native American after witnessing a car accident in his youth in an incident that deeply impacted the singer. In fact, the lyrics to “Peace Frog” feature the lines, “Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding, ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind,” which was Morrison’s account of the encounter. So it’s fitting that nearly three decades after his death, Morrison would appear as a specter in a photograph.

OK, OK, there’s absolutely no way to prove whether Morrison’s ghost is actually traipsing around his grave site, but we predict the Lizard King’s resting place is about to get a lot more visitors in the next few months.