Tag Archives: All You Need Is Love

Love Makes The World Go Round ► Unpacking The Writer

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Reflections on the last month

Whew!!! It’s been a whirlwind couple of months and it’s long past time for another Unpacking The Writer.

As longtime readers of Not Now Silly know by now the Unpacking The Writer series is a monthly look at what’s going on inside this writers head. This month I’ll include my heart.

Last week, for Throwback Thursday, I wrote about my Nuptial Nostalgia Tour, a 2-week road trip in which I visited Toronto and Hamilton, cites I have lived in. Meanwhile, Pastor Kenny Responds to my latest Pastoral Letter called The Trunk Lost In Transit, which means all my gentle prodding to have a dialogue about God, Atheism, and the LGBT communities has paid off. There will be more to come in that series.

My numbers for the past 30 days. Click to enlarge.

Since the last Unpacking The Writer I’ve also written about Tuli Kupferberg, U-Roy, Yma Súmac, Arthur Godfrey, and Linton Kwesi Johnson for my newest series A Monday Musical Appreciation. Under the rubric of politics I’ve also written More Proof the Palin Family Are Liars and Grifters; taken a well-deserved slap at Bill “The Falafel King” O’Reilly; written about the day Frederick Douglass Escaped; and concocted a little thing called Donald Trump, Demagoguery, and The National Shrine of the Little Flower.

I’ve also written A Message to Facebookers, an effort to vanquish the trolls on my timeline; reported that Don Knotts Is Back in a highly anticipated Morgantown update; written about Murder and Morning Television; and launched Throwback Thursday with The Westerfield Journals.

It’s been a very productive month. 

One of the statistics the Blogger platform returns to me is what search terms people have used to arrive at the Not Now Silly Newsroom. I always find this a weird, but interesting list. In the last month 2 people have arrived here by searching for “harris faulkner tit pictures.” I’m sure they arrived disappointed, since there are none. (Not that I wouldn’t want to see said pictures myself.) Two people have arrived here by searching “headly westerfield” and 2 by searching “where thevsidewalk [sic] ends headly wersterfield [sic],” which links to one of my more popular series on institutional racism in Coconut Grove.

I’m also celebrating an anniversary, of sorts. I’ve been writing Friday Fox Follies, my weekly column for PoliticusUSA, for a full year now. It’s a challenge to write because it’s carefully crafted by using the actual headlines found on the interwebs and put in prose form. It’s a lot of fun (for me, at least) when it all comes together, but there are times it has to be forced more than others. In fact, as soon as I publish this post, I’ll begin the next FFF column.

However, I’ve saved the biggest news for the very end: I fell in head over heels, madly, crazy in love. Incomprehensibly, it’s been reciprocated and I am happier than I’ve been in many years.

TO BE CONTINUED . . . 

Music Brings Our World Together For The First Time

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Dateline June 25, 1967 – Our World is broadcast to the entire world, via the very first live, global, satellite hookup. Taking part in the broadcast were creative artists from 19 countries around the globe, including Maria Callas, Pablo Picasso, Marshall McLuhan and The Beatles. More than 350 million people tuned in.

According to the WikiWackyWoo, it took more than 10,000 technicians, producers and translators to pull off the two and a half hour broadcast. The project took 10 months to plan. The countries that participated promised that their segments would be 100% live and no politicians or heads of state could appear. A last minute problem came close to scuttling the project, when the entire Eastern Bloc, directed by the Soviet Union, pulled out in protest over response to the Six Day War.

More from the WikiWackyWoo:

The opening credits were accompanied by the Our World theme sung in 22 different languages by the Vienna Boys Choir.

Canada’s CBC Television had Marshall McLuhan being interviewed in a Toronto television control room. At 7:17 pm GMT, the show switched to the United States’ segment about the Glassboro, New Jersey, conference between American president Lyndon Johnson and Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin; since Our World insisted that no politicians be shown, only the house where the conference was being held was televised. National Educational Television’s (NET) Dick McCutcheon ended up talking about the impact of the new television technology on a global scale.

The show switched back to Canada at 7:18 pm GMT. Segments that were beamed worldwide were from a Ghost Lake, Alberta ranch, showing a rancher, and his cutting horse, cutting out a herd of cattle. The last Canadian segment was from Kitsilano Beach, located in Vancouver, British Columbia’s Point Grey district at 7:19 pm GMT.

At 7:20 pm GMT, the program shifted continents to Asia, with Tokyo, Japan being the next segment. It was 4:20 a.m. local time and NHK showed the construction of the Tokyo Subway system.

The equator was crossed for the first time in the program when it switched to the Australian contribution, which was at 5:22 a.m. Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST). This was the most technically complicated point in the broadcast, as both the Japanese and Australian satellite ground stations had to reverse their actions: Tokyo had to go from transmit mode to receive mode, while Melbourne had to switch from receive to transmit mode. The segment dealt with Trams leaving the Hanna Street Depot in Melbourne with Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Brian King explaining that sunrise was many hours away as it was winter there. A scientific segment, later on in the broadcast, was also included that dealt with the Parkes Observatory tracking a deep space object.

For the Beatles segment John Lennon wrote All You Need Is Love specifically for the broadcast (though like all their Beatles’ songs it’s credited to Lennon-McCartney). The song premiered that night to the entire world at the very same time. Watch:


The Beatles – All You Need is Love from gledson_adriel on Vimeo.

All recordings of All You Need Is Love were in black and white. This colourized version is from The Beatles Anthology series. Watch it while you can because EMI & The Beatles seem to remove any copies found on the innertubes.

The Beatles released All You Need Is Love as their next single, on July 7, 1967. However, it wasn’t the exact performance from the satellite broadcast. John had been unhappy with his vocals, so he re-recorded them and Ringo fixed a few of the drum tracks, including substituting a drum roll for a tambourine shake during the La Marseillaise section of the tune. The single went straight to the top of the charts, where it stayed for 3 weeks.