Tonight on CNN.com I came across a story about how Peter Gabriel was involved with this company that had created some software for your iTunes called The Filter. It creates playlists from your iTunes songs along the lines of, if you like this, you’ll like this. I dunno. Maybe I’d download it if I weren’t down to less than 2 GBs on my hard drive. I sort of create my own playlists, but...

Anyway, this led me to a pretty cool blog called Bruce Eisner’s Vision Thing. Eisner talked a bit about The Filter.

Now, Eisner started out writing for underground papers back in the day, later for High Times and Omni. Later, IFYBW (if you believe Wikipedia), he was a leader of Linkage, a group that “brought Albert Hofmann to UC Santa Cruz in 1977 for his first public lecture in the US at a conference called "LSD: A Generation Later." The conference was attended by both counterculture figures such as Timothy Leary Ph.D, Alan Ginsberg, Ram Dass,” and others.

So I surfed on to another Eisner blog in which he posted a video from a 1996 episode of Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Originally, Timothy Leary had been scheduled to appear. He was dying. If you recall, Leary treated his death as a sort of Happening. But, as happens with the dying, he had a bad day and couldn’t make it. Among those who did were Robert Anton Wilson, the lovely former Mama Michelle Philips, and Bob Guccione, Jr., and they talked about Leary. One delightful highlight came from Wilson:

Well, technically he went to prison for one joint of marijuana, fow which he got 37 years--a very strange penalty, considering it was six months in those day. The judge, on sentencing him, said his ideas were a danger to society, which is why the Swiss government gave him asylum after he climbed over the wall....They gave him the Leary Interpersonal Diagnostic Test, which he had designed back at Stanford. It’s a test to measure 64,000 personalities, and he answered all the questions so that he came out as docile, easily led, looking for leadership, so they put him in a minimum security prison, and he climbed a rope and went to Switzerland.

--Robert Anton Wilson, on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher



A begin being blog.