by Austin Washington
There is this famous story by Ray Bradbury, in which someone goes back in time. It's a dinosaur hunting expedition. But they're cautious. They realise that if they change something in the past, they change the present. If they kill the dinosaur that evolved to a poodle, they'd get back, and - no poodles! (That's my example, not theirs...)
So, they set up a metal path of some sort, above the ground, so they don't even step on anything.
A scout goes back ahead of time (so to speak!), and looks for a dinosaur dying. Notes the precise time. The direction he falls! (He might have crushed/killed things when/where he fell...)
They get their wealthy clients to go back to that same place/time, and shoot the dinosaur. In the same direction he'd be falling anyway. Not much of a sport, but neither is golf. Since they shoot it at exactly the time he was dying anyway, and it falls in the same direction they figure they've not changed the past, so won't change the present. (Except for befuddling paleontologists, wondering why they're finding 200-million year bullets. But, y'know, it's just a story - with a point.)
Once, on one their hunting expeditions, one of their wealthy clients steps off the path.
He steps on, and kills, a butterfly.
No biggie, they think. Just a butterfly, right?
The point is...
Think about it - what would the electric guitar be like had Jimi Hendrix been hit by a bus when he was seven?
Elvis had a twin brother who died as a baby (?) - well, died when young. I know I could google it, but I like to just write from memory. You get the point. What if both twins had died? Or it had been the other way around?
What would pop music have been without Elvis?
If Mark David Chapman had shot John Lennon in 1964, rather than 1980?
Look at Australia. Just a few generations, a couple of centuries - and there was always travel, and today there is modern communication - and yet they speak with a far different accent than the English. Even neighbour New Zealand has a different accent than Australia.
What if you have one egg, rather than two one morning? Will that make you fall in love with a different person?
Supposing you re-tie your shoe on the way out the door.
Will that save your life? Or get you killed? You might be, or not be, in some kind of accident, based on...1/100ths of a second difference in time...
Thinking of those thoughts, I put below, the first two videos I've found that were like videos might be if someone, at some point in the past, stepped on a butterfly.
The more I find, the more I'll post...
Stairway to Help
Speaking of Austrialia....
This is an Australian Beatles cover band - the funny thing is, once this song gets into your head, you can't get it out!
Answers the question - what would happen if Jimmy Page and Robert Plant had been in The Beatles?
Sopho, Eurovision
Non europeans and europeans alike know Eurovision as being - God, I hope this is right! - I don't like googling when I write - I'm PRETTY sure it's what launched Abba!? It's this song-writing contest. It is known for having lots of really cheesy music.
Anyway, in The Butterfly Effect - the story - when they come back to the present, things are slightly more...fascistic. Kind of like if the Nazis had won World War II, I guess. Also, words are spelled differently...funnily enough, exactly like the world this video seems to come from.
Dancing with swords?! (Please don't get me wrong - I think this singer kicks ass in all ways - I'm a total supporter, and in no way disparaging her.) It's just that she clearly comes from a totally different culture. So different from western Europe...
Description: This is so insanely cool, but you've got to wait 'til about half way through for it's true weirdness - in the best sense -to come out.
It's like the daughter of some fascist general in a repressive country with thinly veiled s&m tendencies (the country? the girl? the general? all three?!?) has amazing talent but used nepotism to represent a Borat like country, and, um...it's just the dancers dancing with swords, and - the kind of manic energy she gets, yet wearing a ball gown. I just find it TOTALLY rocking. (I don't mean to cast aspersions on Sopho - I'm sure her father really ISN'T a fascist general...it's just...)
Y'know that story by Ray Bradbury (I think?!) "The Butterfly Effect"? Some guy goes back in time, and only changes one thing - steps on a butterfly. And he returns, and everything seems the same at first...but just, different. It's like that. A manic, beautiful, girl sings a song backed by people with weapons, in a ball gown...it rocks my world, is all!
Austin Washington
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