IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT…

...and even though I say it myself, we rocked at this jam-packed, sold-out club in Brighton -- we being the legendary rythm section of Russell Hunter and Duncan Sanderson, the fine Tim Rundall on guitars, plus Judge Trev from the extended Hawkwind family, Jackie Windmill on extra percussion, Greg the electonics wiz and Steve on tenor. I understand that video and audio recordings will follow.

The secret word is Triumph

OFF ON THE ROAD AGAIN

Yes, friends, I seem to be on my travels again and Doc40 may be a tad irregular for the next two weeks, although I will endeavor to send bulletins from my laptop as I go. There will also be a live poetry and music performance in Brighton, England on Saturday, October 3rd, with, I believe, some Pink Fairies and other homeboys joining me. I don't quite have the exact details of location and stuff, but maybe someone could post them as a comment, or I'll fill in the blanks later.

The secret words are Be Seeing You

AUSTRALIAN GRAPES OF WRATH

As I sit here in this weeks unnatural heat in bloody Los Angeles, this news flash from down under makes for uncomfortable logic. Climate change isn’t going to be some gradual, uniform process across the globe. It’s going to be incidences of localized weirdness becoming more and more frequent as time passes, and heaven help Europe if the Greenland Pump goes out.

“A dust storm blankets Sydney's iconic Opera House at sunrise September 23, 2009. A huge outback dust storm swept eastern Australia and blanketed Sydney on Wednesday, disrupting transport, forcing people indoors and stripping thousands of tonnes of valuable farmland topsoil.”

The secret word is Bad

FRIDAY PICTURE SHOW

Twisty Smooch Dolls Cookbook? Click here
Or Star Maidens? Click here
Or, more seriously, Frank Schaeffer – "You cannot reorganize village life to suit the village idiot" – talking to Rachel Maddow? Click here

EVERYBODY LIKES MY ROCKET '88

"You may have heard of jalopies,
You heard the noise they make,
Let me introduce you to my Rocket '88.
Yes it's great, just won't wait,
Everybody likes my Rocket '88."
(Image lifted from Bedazzled)

PLUGS FOR PALS

Our pal Don (that’s him with his arm in the air) has released a DVD of his once and future band Imperial Dogs. Click here to learn more.

OH NO! AMERICA IS RUNNING OUT OF AMMUNITION!

Yes my friends, the news is dire. Obama becomes president and Middle America buys bullets.

“Bullet-makers are working around the clock, seven days a week, and still can't keep up with the nation's demand for ammunition. Shooting ranges, gun dealers and bullet manufacturers say they have never seen such shortages. Bullets, especially for handguns, have been scarce for months because gun enthusiasts are stocking up on ammo, in part because they fear President Barack Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress will pass antigun legislation - even though nothing specific has been proposed and the president last month signed a law allowing people to carry loaded guns in national parks.” (Click here for the whole absurd story)

The secret word is Blam!

COULD ANYONE FORGET TIELMAN BROTHERS?

Click here and thank Munz.

TRUTH OR IRONY?

PROLETARIAN PINUP (back by popular demand)

“Stay cool, comrades, and remember what Uncle Joe said, “When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use!”

DAVID LETTERMAN’S APOLOGY TO BILL HICKS

Some of you may have seen this at the time, but for those of you who haven’t – and those of you who might want to watch it again – here’s Letterman’s mea culpa from January of this year for cutting the late Bill Hicks from his show some sixteen years ago. Click here for part one.

AND AFTER BILL HICKS, WHO BETTER THAN CARL JUNG?

Again, some of you may have seen this story from The New York Times, but I found it fascinating so here it is…

“THIS COULD SOUND, I realize, like the start of a spy novel or a Hollywood bank caper, but it is rather a story about genius and madness, as well as possession and obsession, with one object — this old, unusual book — skating among those things. Also, there are a lot of Jungians involved, a species of thinkers who subscribe to the theories of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and author of the big red leather book. And Jungians, almost by definition, tend to get enthused anytime something previously hidden reveals itself, when whatever’s been underground finally makes it to the surface.” Click here for the whole thing.

OUR WHACKY AUNT AYN

Former acolytes recall Aunt Ayn as being paranoid, addicted to amphetamines, and obsessed with her belief that average people were "ugly, stupid and irrational."

HARDLY DRAMATIC BUT PROBABLY IMPORTANT

The following story may well be a victory for the good guys. It also makes a change to see that FCC actually doing something other than levying fines for saying “fuck” on the air.

“The top U.S. communications regulator plans to unveil proposals Monday for ensuring Web traffic is not slowed or blocked based on its content, sources familiar with the contents of the speech said on Friday. The head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Julius Genachowski, pictured in June 2009, is expected to outline rules on Monday requiring Internet providers to respect "net neutrality," the principle that all Web traffic should be treated equally.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski will announce plans to ask his fellow commissioners to adopt as a rule net neutrality and four existing principles on Internet access issued by the agency in 2005, one of the sources said.
Net neutrality pits open Internet companies like Google Inc against broadband service providers like AT&T Inc, Verizon Communications Inc and Comcast Corp, which oppose new rules governing network management.
Advocates of net neutrality say Internet service providers must be barred from blocking or slowing traffic based on its content.
But service providers say the increasing volume of bandwidth-hogging services, like video sharing, requires active management of their networks and some argue that net neutrality could stifle innovation.” (Click here for more)

IF IT NEEDED TO BE SAID…

Some of my friends are much bigger fans of those activist pranksters the Yes Men, but even I have to admit that the environmental protest they pulled this morning with their faux-edition of the New York Post was pretty damned audacious. (Click here to take a look.)

The secret word is Yup

SPACE OPERA

(Lifted from Adam Gorightly)

MO' CHAOS

This gorgeous piece of graffiti is in Barcelona, Spain, and (I believe) photographed by our amazing pal Valerie. In addition to being a great visual, it also provides a perfect if shameless excuse to plug Zones of Chaos, my new anthology of poems and short writing. Scroll back to last Monday (Sept 14th) for details.

AND ON THE SUBJECT OF CHAOS…

Doug the Bass sent over this very disturbing video clip of Glenn Beck’s march on Washington. His response is terse. “It's kind of strange to watch and listen to since I'd always been under the impression that we had universal public education in this country. It's obviously not just children that get left behind...” My own response is rather more Sunday sad. How the hell did these people become so terminal deluded? Especially as many of are probably on Medicare, disability, or otherwise survive because of some legacy of New Deal socialism? It all resembles some hideous twilight of rationality.

Click here for the show.

The secret word is Hefty

DON’T YOU MISS THE OLD TIME MAGAZINES?

I mean, wouldn't you be just fascinated to know why divorced gals become lesbians? I could offer some suggestions, but maybe I'll just leave that with you gentle, Doc40 readers. I gotta get me some dog food.

IT’S 1969, OKAY?

No. It’s not. It’s not 1969 and it’s far from okay – and I have to confess that I am more than a little weary of all the anniversaries of everything that occurred forty years ago, back in the days of my youth, when the measures of hope and insanity, at least now and again, seemed to achieve a few moments of insane balance. Woodstock? The moon landing? The Manson murders? The last few weeks has been a parade of memories and things past. A couple of days ago I was informed that it was the fortieth anniversary of The Doors on Ed Sullivan. Poor Jim is dead and gone left me here to sing his song. Pretty little girl with the blue dress on, do you want to fill me in on how far we’ve come and what all that singing might have achieved? The bloody red sun still shines on LA. The engine still runs on glue and tar. The butterfly still screams, but the blue bus left long ago. Is you hair still burning? I cannot see for the smoke – and the miasma of ignorance and stupidity that rises from the modern slime-slurry of rotting, knee-deep, biomass-corruption. But what the hell? It’s Friday. Am I still able to run with the hunt?

Click here for Jim, long time passing. And click here for James Brown (by way of a bonus) doing “Please, Please, Please”, also on Ed Sullivan and in multiple capes.

The secret word is Gone (real gone)

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

When Rosamund (China) Frozdick smoked opium she could become extremely demonstrative. (And also hand tinted.)

SPACE OPERA

Stormtroopers stole my donuts.

(Pic supplied by Valerie.)

CLICK (You are a Person of Interest)

THE WOLVES OF CHERNOBYL

I have serious reservations about some of the ideas presented in this story, but I’m posting it because I find it totally fascinating and also extremely poignant…

“We walked out into a wasteland, grey and desolate. The buildings had deteriorated, windows had been smashed. Trees and weeds had grown over everything: it was a ghost town." It reads like a passage from a post-apocalyptic novel, such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road; in fact, it's how Tim Mousseau describes his first visit to Chernobyl. In 1999, this Professor of Biological Sciences from the University of South Carolina travelled to the site of the world's most horrific nuclear accident, alongside Professor Anders Møller, an ornithologist and evolutionary biologist from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris. Their on-site research has sparked an intense controversy over the effects of radiation on humans and animals – one which they hope their latest trip into the fallout zone, which sets out in two weeks, will help to resolve.
In the wake of the accident, more than 300,000 people were evacuated and an 800 square mile exclusion zone created around the reactor. Yet recently it has been reported that the abandoned town of Pripyat has become a wildlife haven. There have been sightings of wolves, bears and moose wandering through the deserted streets, and swifts swoop round abandoned office blocks. The implication is that if wildlife can return so soon, nuclear radiation – and nuclear power – might be less dangerous than has been suggested. James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia theory, has even written that the natural world "would welcome nuclear waste as the perfect guardian against greedy developers… the preference of wildlife for nuclear-waste sites suggests that the best sites for its disposal are the tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by hungry farmers and developers". Click here for the rest.

OH YEAH?

I also have serious reservations about coincidence, especially when Microsoft are changing me fifty bucks to tell me about it in a customer service email…

“I understand from your e mail that Word 2000 is working fine without any problems after you did a system restore. You informed that the updates to MSN messenger have been removed. I would like to inform you that the MSN messenger would not affect the working of Word 2000 and the issue might have been a coincidence. You can try to install the updates for MSN messenger.”

OUR WHACKY AUNT AYN

It turns out that the old broad actually has her own comic.

(Click pic to enlarge)

EVERY DAY CAN'T BE WONDERFUL

I'm right now sitting here unable to write or access files after a goddamn MSN update crippled my Word programme. I await bloody Microsoft and hope tomorrow will be a better day. In the meantime here's a note on 13th century healthcare. Seemingly little changes.

"Then along comes the Black Death, mowing down the sinful and the sinless indiscriminately. ... You can be healthy on Monday, infected on Tuesday, and a corpse on Saturday, leaving precious little time to wipe the sin slate clean by confessing and repenting in preparation for your personal judgement day. The biggest hurdle of all might have been luring the priest, any priest, to one's deathbed of contagion in order to perform last rites, the final cleansing. If a cleric does show up, he might charge an outrageous price for mumbling a few prayers. Stories of deathbed fee-gougers also abound, adding to the popular perception that extravagance and greed motivate more often than not." -- Susan Squire, I Don't

BUT...

We do have additional information for ordering Zones of Chaos by regular mail. (See last post.)

Borderlands Books, 866 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94110. Phone (415) 824-8203. Toll free (888) 893-4008. Fax (415) 824-8543.

WADDA YA KNOW? WE GOTTA A NEW BOOK!

The long awaited collection of my poetry and short prose is finally here. You’ll probably be hearing more about this in the days to come, but here’s the basic how-to-get-it information…

"Available now: ZONES OF CHAOS, a maelstrom of poetry, prose, essays, lyrics, commentary and fiction from the legendary Mick Farren, featuring an introduction by Michael Moorcock! The book is $14.95, with free shipping in the US (and reduced cost shipping to the UK at $4 per copy). Contact Borderlands Books, toll-free 888 893-4008, or via email at orders@borderlands-books.com . When you order, they'll just need to know the address you'd like the book sent to, the number of copies you'd like, and how you would like to pay for your order. For payment, you can call, fax, or email your Visa or Mastercard information (card number, expiration date and three-digit security code to orders@borderlands-books.com ), or you can send a check or money order made out to Borderlands Books to the address below. Don't miss this mind-blowing collection, which includes a previously unpublished Victor Renquist story. Order now and you'll receive your copy signed by the Dark Prince of Pop Fiction (that's Mick) himself. (For wholesale enquiries or other questions, email office@borderlands-books.com.)"

CLICK (Your soul is captured.)

WADDA YA KNOW? WE GOTTA A SHOW!

No, my friends, that was forty years ago. (Sweet Jesus H. Christ, 40!!!??) The day after tomorrow (Tuesday) I will be doing a live reading here in LA that will probably be slightly more sedate. As the flyer tells it….

“In conjunction with the street date of our third volume, Three, Penny-Ante will be hosting a night of readings and music at Stories Books & Cafe,
1716 W. Sunset Blvd (in Echo Park),
Tuesday September 15th, 7.30 PM (sharp).
Readers include Penny-Ante Three contributors MICK FARREN, LARRY FONDATION, DREW TEWKSBURY, and TOYLIT from the Crap-Poetry Movement. Readings will be begin promptly at 7:30pm, music to follow. This event is FREE to the public and will also feature a live music performance by noise artist SHARON CHESLOW accompanied by JULIA HOLTER, and TEARIST, the musical project of performance/artist and musician Yasmine Kittles and Will (Silver Daggers)."

There’s also mention of “refreshments & beverages courtesy of Penny-Ante.” So maybe it won’t be so sedate after all.

Jim Carroll – RIP

ASLEEP OR DEAD?

Our venerable homeboy Aeswiren crunches some grim numbers for us. He starts with a quote from Daily Kos…

“From 1979 to 1989, real median income grew $2,965, (from $45,498 to $48,463,) and from 1989 to 2000, it grew $4,037, (from $48,463 to $52,500). But for the first time on record, over the business cycle from 2000-2007, incomes didn't rise — they fell slightly from $52,500 to $52,163. And with the weak labor market over this period, the real median income of working-age households fell significantly, from $60,804 to $58,718. This means that working families are weathering the current economic recession without the cushion that a robust expansion prior to the recession would have afforded them. We find that the average income for the middle 20% of households will likely decline by $2,456 in 2009, and by an additional $601 in 2010, for a total decline of $4,813 from 2007 to 2010. This is a decline in income of 9.3% for the typical household over these three years. Given the decline in income over the weak business cycle from 2000 to 2007, this means that after reaching an all-time peak in 2000, by 2010 real incomes for the typical household will likely have declined by $5,729, or 10.8%.”

Then he speculates…

“Was the dot com boom the last gasp of American capitalism? Having hit the high tide mark, is it all going to ebb away now, slowly, but inevitably? Note that China's economy is rebounding rapidly from the recession, but in America spending was still down in August and over the year bankruptcies are up 24%. Is it possible that America is actually bust? That the potential for income growth has gone, except for the wall street gamblers and the very, very rich? That the world's greatest economy, built on petroleum and the fertile soil of the midwest, is succumbing to a failure of investment in non-petroleum sourced energy added to the globalised loss of manufacturing jobs. Globalization has been essential for the takeoff of China and India, and also for stability in Mexico (though that may be ending too), but globalization came at the cost of eviscerating the employment prospects of America's working class. Without good working class incomes can the Consumer Society prosper? Add in the first chilly touch of Peak Oil and rising energy costs and perhaps we really are witnessing the end of the American dream. Considering the political temper of a large stratum of Americans, this could be a very dangerous development for the rest of the world.”

Then, in subsequent emails, he also notes…

"Did you see that item about youth unemployment in US? Up to 40% now. Like a 3rd world country, yeah? And now even Time mag, this week, is saying "10% unemployment-- get used to it!" Of course 10% is a polite term for something more like 15-20%, when you factor in all the "discouraged" ex workers, guys who stay home and live off the wife or gf's pitiful waitress money and so on?”

The secret word is Hellbound

GRATUITOUS BARDOT

(It's Sunday, isn't it?)

AND DON’T FORGET THOSE KOOKIE NUKES…

OBAMA-NATION – COMING TO YOUR TOWN

Since September 12th has apparently been designated as Glenn Beck Paranoia Day, I thought I’d go with the general flow, although the real purpose of this post was to offer a link to the website of NARLO (National Association of Rural Landowners) which seems to be where Republican yahoo extremists play patty-cake with the dreamers of ultra-right revolution. Click here and learn what your right hand is doing. (Jerking off or reaching for your throat?)

OUR WACKY AUNT AYN

Aunt Ayn decides the hat was an error, but will never admit it.

(Shall we make this a series?)

SPACE OPERA

In tune with the slightly fascist tone of the day, here’s a reminder to all you aliens out there that you fuck with Earthmen at your peril. I had never previously seen the entire sequence of Mars Attacks cards, and I didn’t know that it ended with humans kicking Martian ass. (And not led by Tom Jones and – no – the Martians of the original bubblegum cards weren’t vulnerable to Slim Whitman.) Click here to peruse the complete Mars Attacks.

IT’S ALL IN THE MIND

I have definite reservations about the kind of simulated electronic telekinesis as described in this story contributed by MrMR. I’m highly distrustful of allowing any third party – human or machine – access to my synaptic activity. What I think hardly matters, however, since these toys will be on sale in time for Christmas, and, to be totally honest, I can’t wait to play with one.

“Brain-control interface technology is in the midst of a big coming-out party this year as it reaches the mass market for the first time in the form of a handful of games and toys.
The ability to trigger physical actions with your mind - can now be had for a couple hundred bucks. San Jose's NeuroSky is leading the charge with a half-dozen products, while rival Emotiv of San Francisco plans to start selling a mind-control headset in time for the holidays. The basic technology, which has been around for decades, involves reading a wide spectrum of brain waves and isolating patterns to understand moods and psychological states. From there, applications can be written to help understand the brain-wave profile and turn certain mental functions like heightened attention or meditation into catalysts for real-world actions. Brain-control interface has far-reaching applications beyond entertainment, potentially transforming the way we train our attention-deprived minds to how we communicate with machines and broadcast our feelings to other people.”
(Click here for the rest)

The secret word is Neuron

FRIDAY FUNNIES #1

In the ancient days, when my Panic In Year Zero column ran in the old LA Reader, Tom Tomorrow was always a few pages away. Now I only see him when I stumble across him on the web. (Click here for more Tom)

FRIDAY FUNNIES #2

CLICK (We own your image.)

SOMETHING ELSE TO WORRY ABOUT

Every day, this fine service called Delancey Place sends me a random piece of information. Today’s is reproduced here, since, when I read it, it gave me a moment of serious pause, but then I got to thinking, what’s 30 thousands years one way of another?

"In the 1960s, while studying the volcanic history of Yellowstone National Park, Bob Christiansen of the United States Geological Survey became puzzled about something: ... he couldn't find the park's volcano. By coincidence just at this time NASA decided to test some new high-altitude cameras by taking photographs of Yellowstone, copies of which some thoughtful official passed on to the park authorities on the assumption that they might make a nice blow-up for one of the visitors' centers. As soon as Christiansen saw the photos he realized why he had failed to spot the [volcano]: virtually the whole park - 2.2 million acres - was [a volcano]. The explosion had left a crater more than forty miles across - much too huge to be perceived from anywhere at ground level. At some time in the past Yellowstone must have blown up with a violence far beyond the scale of anything known to humans. Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano. It sits on top of an enormous hot spot, a reservoir of molten rock that rises from at least 125 miles down in the Earth. The heat from the hot spot is what powers all of Yellowstone's vents, geysers, hot springs, and popping mud pots. ... Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of. Since its first known eruption 16.5 million years ago, [the Yellowstone volcano] has blown up about a hundred times, but the most recent three eruptions are the ones that get written about. The last eruption was a thousand times greater than that of Mount St. Helens; the one before that was 280 times bigger, and the one before was ... at least twenty-five hundred times greater than St. Helens. "The Yellowstone eruption of two million years ago put out enough ash to bury New York State to a depth of sixty-seven feet or California to a depth of twenty. ... All of this was hypothetically interesting until 1973, when ... geologists did a survey and discovered that a large area of the park had developed an ominous bulge. ... The geologists realized that only one thing could cause this - a restless magma chamber. Yellowstone wasn't the site of an ancient supervolcano; it was the site of an active one. It was also at about this time that they were able to work out that the cycle of Yellowstone's eruptions averaged one massive blow every 600,000 years. The last one, interestingly enough, was 630,000 years ago. Yellowstone, it appears, is due." From A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Click here for more on Delancey Place.

The secret word is Finished

SPACE OPERA

“What happens to levitation, one of the great imaginative figures of art and literature, in the transition from a religious culture to the disenchanted universe of modern science? What becomes of ecstasy, rapture, ascension, transcendence, grace wh­e­n these give way to “space oddity”: man enclosed in a tin can floating far above the world? Is the cosmonaut a prophet of the erotic future, avatar of man’­s stellar renaissance, as Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke once imagined? Or is he like Nietzsche’s madman, proclaiming as Gagarin himself was rumored to have said: “I don’t see any God up here”?

This a comes from the excellent Dangerous Minds, of which our pal Richard Metzger is a regular contributor. Click here to check it out.

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Pangaea Frozdick had a tendency to leave bodies on the sidewalk.

WHO NEEDS THE EGG?

I am always pleased when scientific theory sneaks up from behind and confirms what science fiction has been taking for granted for years. I’m even more pleased when the science fiction is my own and the theory is of the kind outlined in this article from a recent New Scientist. (And kindly sent by Valerie.) I have played around with the idea of multiple universes for decades – in psychedelic mode (The DNA Cowboys and Necrom), in theological mode (Jim Morrison’s Adventures In The Afterlife), and in demented short-form (The Adventures Of Marilyn). Now it all proves to be not only highly rational but also on the cutting edge where math meets physics, I find myself unduly and irrationally smug.

“Nothing in the most fundamental laws of physics says that time should only move in one direction. Yet many events are irreversible – shattered eggs do not spontaneously reassemble and ice cubes do not form from pools of tepid water. A new study suggests this arrow of time is the result of quantum mechanical amnesia that erases any trace of such events.
Our sense of time is captured by the second law of thermodynamics, which says that any closed system - from particles in an isolated box to the entire universe - can only become more disordered. The measure of this disorder, known as entropy, can only increase.
In the world of large-scale objects, increasing entropy is associated with the flow of heat, which always goes from a hot object to a colder one. Change in entropy can also be described as a flow of information: the higher the entropy of a system, the less information it contains.” (Click here for more.)

There was also a link in the body of the story to a 2007 piece on parallel universes, but that was an archive article and there’s a fee.

“If you think of yourself as unique, think again. The days when physicists could ignore the concept of parallel universes may have come to an end. If that doesn't send a shudder down your spine, think of it this way: our world is just one of many. You are just one version of many. David Deutsch at the University of Oxford and colleagues have shown that key equations of quantum mechanics arise from the mathematics of parallel universes. "This work will go down as one of the most important developments in the history of science," says Andy Albrecht, a physicist at the University of California at Davis. In one parallel universe, at least, it will - whether it does in our one remains to be seen.”

The secret word is String

THE ADVENTURES OF MARILYN (Supplemental)

In which Marilyn comments to the mirror on the wall. “I frankly don’t understand a word of this. All I know is that it happens. And it happens to me. All the time. So much so that many versions of me went into hiding.”

Click here for The Adventures Of Marilyn

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S # 64

"Sometimes there's just no other alternative."

I GOTTA SIT DOWN FOR A MINUTE

I don’t know how anyone else felt, but I found this last week in Los Angeles verging on brutal. By Thursday I was flagging, and when the Labor Day weekend rolled around, I was more than ready to simply turn off the computer for 48 hours, go into hiding, and remain prone. Still feeling a little queasy, I have sat up and managed to reestablish communications, and will doubtless be back fighting the plutocrats by tomorrow, but, in the meantime, I must catch my breath.

The secret word is Fatigue

THIS BLOG IS STILL PROTECTED BY...

KILLED STONE DEAD

I don’t really know how I feel about this BBC news story sent by Valerie. Brian always seemed to have kind of a death wish, and maybe he should just be left to rest in peace. On the other hand the power of prurience is hard to resist …

“The death of former Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones is to be reviewed following new evidence, it has been revealed. Police in Sussex were handed new information connected to the musician's untimely death 40 years ago. Mr Jones, was found dead at the bottom of a swimming pool at a house in Cotchford farm, Hartfield, East Sussex. An inquest recorded a verdict of death by misadventure but speculation continued that he was murdered. A spokesman for Sussex Police said the force had been handed documents connected with Jones's death, prompting the review. But he added it was too early to launch a fresh investigation. He added: "These papers will be examined by Sussex Police, but it is too early to comment at this time as to what the outcome will be."

The cops do not say if this is another go-round of building contractor Frank Thorogood’s 1993 deathbed confession to Brian’s minder Tom Keylock, (also a key figure at Phun City) that was the basis of Terry Rawlings book Who Killed Christopher Robin? and the movie Stoned. Thorogood is reported to have told Keylock “It was me that did Brian. I just finally snapped.”

A somewhat ugly comment in the online edition of Rolling Stone, however, takes a far more sinister tack...

“This is news to me. i feel as if I’ve stepped into a 1969 time warp. Really, did you say! Murdered, did you say!I’ve believed Keith opted for a murder for hire. I’ve read other stories that Richards had people he didn’t like killed.”

WHILE ON THE SUBJECT OF DEATHBED CONFESSIONS, THOUGH…

...I would find a supreme satisfaction and consummate theory closure if the shooter on the Grassy Knoll decided to confess all at the moment of his or her death.

The secret word is Triangulation