GNF & Apocalypse & WAAGNFNP Posted by Bill Benzon, 10 Aug 2007 06:30 am
Portents of the GNF: A Mystery
This post is about the GNF. That is to say, it is at one and the same time, silly, serious, sacred, and utterly beyond mortal comprehension. It tells about a remarkable event that became manifest on 4 December 2006 in the sacred habitat of 3Tops.
As you know, her most sublime visage is outside the East portal of Bergen Tunnel in Jersey City. Here’s a shot of the tunnel I took just s few days ago:
I was in that area on 4 December taking photographs just before sundown. I was standing near the mouth of the tunnel and looked in, as I had done many times before. This time I saw, to my great surprise, a yellow light shining some undetermined distance inside the tunnel, like this (note also the white light coming in from the far end of the tunnel, the Western end):
Please excuse the blur. I was far enough inside the tunnel that the light was fairly dim. I had no tripod to steady my hand for a long exposure, so things are a bit blurry. But the essential phenomenon is clearly visible: There is a light shining within the tunnel at some undetermined distance. I’d been to this tunnel several times, walked inside it too, and this was the first time I saw that light. Couldn’t figure out what it was, but guessed - against all logic - that there might be some kind of air shaft through which light was entering. (If THAT was it, then why hadn’t I seen it before? That question didn’t occur to me.)
So I walked into the tunnel to investigate, figuring that when I got below the shaft I would take a shot up through it. No shaft appeared. I did take this shot once I’d gotten well inside the tunnel to the point where the light seemed to hit the tunnel floor - say 50 or 60 yards.
You can see my shadow in the middle. Look how long it is. Count the number of ties my shadow crosses. Well, doing that’s difficult, they blur together further out and, of course, the shadow doesn’t start with my feet, more likely somewhere near my knees. But there are a goodly number of ties there, at a distance of, say, 16 inches from center to center. Whatever light that is, it’s hitting me at an oblique angle. It can’t possibly be coming in from an overhead shaft. It must have been coming in from behind me. But what light could that be? There are no street lights or other artificial lights in the area.
I turned around to look at this light, whatever it was, and I was momentarily blinded by it. I aimed the camera straight out the eastern end of the tunnel, or as straight as I could manage without really being able to see much of anything. This is what the camera caught:
Notice that the light doesn’t appear to be streaming in from the entire tunnel opening. Rather it seems concentrated in part of the opening, to the upper right of center. What could that be? The sun? Well, the problem is that I’m facing East and it’s later afternoon, when the sun is setting in the West. The sun isn’t in that part of the sky at this time of day.
By this time I had a pretty good hunch about what was going on and managed to take some photographs that confirm it, though they’re not particularly good as photographs. This photograph, taken at 4:08:00 PM, shows more specifically where the light is coming from:
This photo, taken three minutes later at 4:11:12 PM, shows a tall building at that spot:
The sun, the building, and the tunnel were at relative locations such that, at the very moment I was taking photographs, the sun reflected off the building and deep into the tunnel.
How cool is that? I ask, how cool is that?
Is that not a portent of the GNF? occurring? After all, it happened in 3Tops’ sacred territory.
In miraculous confirmation of this portent, our Esteemed and Illustrious Chairman for Life, the only Seven-Star Generalississimo (sic) in the Known World, Michael Bérubé, showed up only two days later to paint the sacred diagrams upon the wall:
And beat the sacred rhythms on the sticks:
And, above all, to receive the blessed counsel of 3Tops on how to conduct himself when ushered into the Divine Presence of the GNF:
Who, or what, is that black figure that casts no shadow? Is it a hole in the time-space continuum? Is it the GNF itself? And where is Maximum Leader’s ball going?
These are mysteries that I now humbly lay before the assembled wisdom of the WAAGNFNP faithful.
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Responses to “Portents of the GNF: A Mystery”
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 11:25 am 1. James Killus said …
Clearly the dark figure is someone who has outrun the shockwave of the GNF, and, as a consequence, has yet to have the light of his own appearance catch up to him/her/it.
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 11:41 am 2. Bill Benzon said …
Think that person could outrun a Bonds homer?
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 12:12 pm 3. JP Stormcrow said …
They Grim Reaper is on steroids? The hell if I’m going to be party to that kind of cheating. So I guess it’s just gotta be immortality.
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 12:23 pm 4. Oaktown Girl said …
That’s nothing! I’m still outraged to find out that ass rockets (#24,#25) don’t come with a “ball cancer” warning lable on them.
See? This is what you get with Rethuglican deregulation and de-funding the inspection departments. What’s next? Tainted meat? Bad spinach? Poison pet food?
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 12:42 pm 5. Kiera PSI said …
The Grim Reaper isn’t on steroids, but the Archangel Michael is. How do you think his crew defeated Lucifer?
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 1:09 pm 6. JP Stormcrow said …
but the Archangel Michael is
Shit, he’s already Chairman for Life and Seven-Star Generalississimo, and for one measly post on race and ‘roids (de la “ster” not de la “hemo”) he gets a promotion to Archangel? Standards are indeed slipping.
The time has come for someone to put his foot down. And that foot is me.
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 1:20 pm 7. JP Stormcrow said …
Oh, and very good detective work and presence of mind to document your investigation Bill. I can recall a few times that I was fooled for a while by “sprites” (on a much smaller scale - like the wall of a room.) In particular I like the two pictures 3 minutes apart that are so different, a good object lesson for people who are convinced that they have seen “unnatural” phenomena.
A great book on all manner of strange effects “lighting” effects is The Nature of Light and Colour in the Open Air. It is at least 40 years old and lacking in good pictures, but it is the best book I have found for puzzling through things such as why the light “blobs” in dappled shade tend to circles, moon looking bigger on the horizon etc. in a clear and insightful way. -
on 10 Aug 2007 at 1:38 pm 8. Bill Benzon said …
It was an odd and fun experience, JP. Seeing that light in the mid-tunnel was striking and compelling. I didn’t even bother to try reasoning it out, I just starting walking into the tunnel to investigate. But that’s not really it. It’s like I both knew there couldn’t be light streaming in from some shaft – because I’d looked in there before and never saw anything – and I was also curious to take a picture looking up that shaft. Both things were on my mind.
And getting pictures was tricky above and beyond stability issues. It’s an auto-everything camera – these days they all are – so unless you put it on manual, it’s not going to snap the shot until the auto-focus beam returns and the distance is calculated. But in that strange light and aiming a camera where there isn’t anything, it took awhile to get it pointed where it got the enabling return signal. And, I couldn’t see for some seconds, etc.
So I didn’t have much time to hang out in logical deductive mode. I just took the shots I felt would be interesting and managed to squeeze in a little thinking time here and there.
And then . . . when I walked the tunnel with SLuGS (coming through the opposite direction) I discovered there is some kind of shaft coming into the tunnel about half-way through. I tried to snap a picture of it, but it didn’t work. At that point my major concern was keeping my feet below me.
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 1:52 pm 9. Oaktown Girl said …
Love the story and photos, Bill. Glad you called our attention to the length of your shadow and how to use the railroad tracks as a scale to get an idea of just how long a shadow you cast!
3Tops told me a while back that the shadow figure is just Astaroth having some fun and seeing how well our Chairman for Life was gonna do hitting the ball out of the rough. She also said Astaroth used the mysterious word mulligan when describing the scene. (I had to look it up myself).
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 4:10 pm 10. Seattle said …
How long have you had this need to hang out on railroad tracks near and in tunnels? We have this lovely park in north Seattle called Golden Gardens which lies on Puget Sound:
http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=47.690584,-122.402544&spn=0.021435,0.039911&t=h&z=15&om=1
If you look closely, you’ll see the railroad tracks cut between the hill portion of the park and the beach. There is a tunnel under the tracks but it seems like every year we lose someone who decides to walk across the tracks rather than under them. CAll me a parent, but golden light on the tracks in the middle of a train tunnel urges me to say “Don’t go into the light! Stay away from the light…” ; )
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 4:30 pm 11. Oaktown Girl said …
Seattle, your comment’s got me thinking about how railroad tracks are kind of like a steel and wood siren song for humans. They are almost irresistible - kids want to play on them, adults think they can always safely walk across them.
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 4:45 pm 12. Seattle said …
And we all start humming the songs from “Stand By Me”, a film in which it seemed like half the action took place on railroad tracks….
Me, I’m the child of a trucker…and you know how the whole railroad vs truck thing goes down….
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 4:48 pm 13. Bill Benzon said …
Ah, but this was a golden light that hadn’t been there the previous dozen or so times I’d been there. I just had to investigate.
Plus, of course, I was just dying for a (laughably) good reason to walk deeper into the tunnel than I’d previously gone.
Besides, it’s justified by sacred precedent. Don’t you see that picture of Seven Star Generalississississimo Bérubé playing clave as he comes out of the tunnel (from who knows where)? If the Blessed Bringer of the GNF can do it, then is it not the sacred duty of all WAAGNFNP members to imitate him?
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 4:54 pm 14. Bill Benzon said …
These days it’s about containers, Seattle. They go by sea, truck, or train. Makes no difference.
BTW (I cannot resist oh Astaroth, Anancy, and Gojira, I cannot), be you a Mother-Trucker?
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 4:57 pm 15. Seattle said …
“If the Blessed Bringer of the GNF can do it, then is it not the sacred duty of all WAAGNFNP members to imitate him?”
Um. Um. Ok, I’m outta here! Have a great weekend. I’m off to the cloudy Olympic Peninsula beaches and will report on in Monday.
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 5:00 pm 16. Seattle said …
LOL Hell no. My father was not your normal trucker. He only took loads that had scenic routes he could dink along. So I’m very familiar with the ferry ride to Sidney BC, the route through Idaho up to Banff, etc. Not to mention the lovely Columbia River Gorge route to Pendleton OR….
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 5:05 pm 17. Oaktown Girl said …
If the Blessed Bringer of the GNF can do it, then is it not the sacred duty of all WAAGNFNP members to imitate him?
Yea, verily.
Have a fantastic weekend, Seattle! See you on Monday, when, rumor has it, Brother James will be bringing the HEAT!
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 6:06 pm 18. Oaktown Girl said …
Official Declaration of weekend Open Thread begins here now. (Because Bill’s WAAGNFNP posts are always so much fun).
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 6:16 pm 19. Bill Benzon said …
Gee, it’s almost like Arbitrary but Fun Friday.
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 10:22 pm 20. Porlock Junior said …
A book that owes a great deal to The Nature of Light and Colour in the Open Air is Color and Light in Nature by David K. Lynch and William Livingston (Cambridge, 1995). What’s more, it’s full of good pictures, huge numbers of pics of remarkable effects, plus good diagrams, of course. Not to be missed.
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on 10 Aug 2007 at 10:34 pm 21. Porlock Junior said …
Aha! I found the quote I thought I remembered from Bradley Schaefer’s review of C & L in N, Science 14 June 1996, p 272.
“Statistics from careful obserers show that any location has some rare or wonderful phenomenon every third day on average.”
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on 11 Aug 2007 at 3:01 am 22. Bill Benzon said …
If that insn’t evidence of the coming of the GNF, I don’t know what is. Sing it like you mean it:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming G N F;
It will sear the souls of running jackals, smite them right and lef;
It will cleanse the earth of varmints, let the gamma rays be swiff;
The chain reaction’s on!
Gojira! Gojira! Kabloom! Kabloom! Gojira! Gojira! Kabloom! Kabloom!
Gojira! Gojira! Kabloom! Kabloom! The chain reaction’s on!I have read a fiery message writ in glowing flames so bright;
“As ye deal with pesky GAWDSTERS, so your soul my breath shall smite”;
Let Stix Bérubé with his poly-rhythms play all Night,
Gojira’s marching on.
Gojira! Gojira! Kabloom! Kabloom! Gojira! Gojira! Kabloom! Kabloom!
Gojira! Gojira! Kabloom! Kabloom! Gojira’s marching on.Gojira’s like the glory of the morning on the wave,
She is wisdom to the mighty, She is honor to the brave;
So the world shall be her furnace, and the soul of wrong her slave,
Gojira’s marching on.
Gojira! Gojira! Kabloom! Kabloom! Gojira! Gojira! Kabloom! Kabloom!
Gojira! Gojira! Kabloom! Kabloom! Gojira’s marching on. -
on 11 Aug 2007 at 6:42 am 23. JP Stormcrow said …
“Statistics from careful obserers show that any location has some rare or wonderful phenomenon every third day on average.”
Nice.
Thanks for the book tip Porlock, sounds like a usefulcomplement to the earlier one.Objective/subjective reality riddle of the day. Standard line is that rainbows aren’t “real”, they are perceptual illusions for an observer in a particular position in regard to the sunlight and raindrops. Phenomena such as Bill observed or dappled shade seem more “real” even without an observer - it appears that we are simply making direct observations of the world when we see them. But then again the particular trajectories and patterns of light (or different wavelengths of light) that will cause someone to see a rainbow are measurable by photometers - no need for human to be there to detect that the conditions for a rainbow exist. Bottom line, the other phenomena (and our whole visual world for that matter) are really no more or less substantive than the rainbow. [After reading what I wrote, this seems a bit of a pedestrian observation.]
Gojira reveals enough of the glimpses of the truly wonder-ful nature of the world for those who are willing to just look for them.
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on 11 Aug 2007 at 9:58 am 24. Porlock Junior said …
I think it was Lama Govinda (Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism) who said that the reality we perceive is like a rainbow: an ilusion, but not a hallucination.
I’m not sure about so-called reality, but I like the simile. I take it to mean that the perception of a rainbow as a Thing out there is, of course, an error; but it is out there; so beware of how you perceive life & death & separateness and all that.
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on 11 Aug 2007 at 11:49 am 25. Oaktown Girl said …
Bill - thanks for posting that rousing WAAGNFNP Gojira anthem. What a wonderful way to start the weekend! And it’s also timely because I was just about to ask if you could please create some fresh WAAGNFNP Gojira images from the Ministry of Visual Propaganda when you get a chance.
I got to bed waaaayyy too late last night for my brain to be sharp enough to contribute anything to the intelligent discussion that began up at #20. I wansn’t going to leave a comment just now, but you people sucked me in. I only turned on the computer to make sure Porlock hadn’t broken the blog, and that JP hadn’t dragged the discussion down with his pedestrian observations.
Well, at least the blog ain’t broke.
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on 11 Aug 2007 at 1:48 pm 26. Bill Benzon said …
Well, there’s a whole bunch of stories for Young Pioneers of the WAAGNFNP over at Mostly Harmless. They’re jam-packed with pictures of Gojochan, Gojirasan’s polygendered neice-nephew.
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on 11 Aug 2007 at 11:28 pm 27. JP Stormcrow said …
[railroad tracks] They are almost irresistible - kids want to play on them, adults think they can always safely walk across them.
As a kid, I loved to lie in bed and listen to the ocassional trains at night. We lived a number of blocks from a moderatly-used track that went by the junior/senior high complex and was the fastest way from there to a small commercial area. As Bill noted in an earlier post, it is awkward to walk along RR tracks, the ties are the wrong distance and the ballast is often loose etc. One solution is to walk on the rails. We got quite good at it, some of the more nimble kids could literally run down the rails, and even someone like me could make it the whole way without stepping off. (But put that rail up any reasonable distance in the air and I could not have made 10 ft.) Fortunately no gruesome accidents that I ever heard of (there must be no more helpless feeling in the world than an engineer of a train running someone down) just a number of flattened coins (always rumored to be a heinous federal crime). But I do find that the trains and tracks loom much larger in my childhood memory world than they did in actual fact (I was not there that much - they were still a bit of a distance from my house.)
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on 12 Aug 2007 at 2:37 am 28. Bill Benzon said …
flattened coins
On one of my graf expeditions I caught some writers in action near some tracks. When we heard a train approaching one of them put a penny on the track. Five minutes later — it was a long train — it took awhile to find the flattened coin, which didn’t stay on the rail but managed to slip off.
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on 12 Aug 2007 at 9:48 am 29. Kiera PSI said …
What I’d like to know is how some of the AmTrak engineers even see if someone is on the track when they’re running the damn things at full speed backwards.
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on 12 Aug 2007 at 1:18 pm 30. JP Stormcrow said …
Report from another one of the GNF Sacred Locales. (State College PA edition)
I reckon the others are:
Erie Cut - Jersey City NJ, aka 3Tops Land, The Land That Time Forgot, One Man’s Buttcrack, One Man’s Photo-Op
Northern New Mexico - Los Alamos etc.
Bay Area/Northern California1) Spent ~26 hours Thursday through Friday without power in preparation for post-apocalyptic living. (I know survivalism is against doctrine … tough - I intend to be ready for anything)
2) Friday night attended the concert I first mentioned back here - “Hippiefest, with Badfinger, Mitch Ryder, Rascals, Country Joe, Zombies/Argent, Turtles & Mountain”. It was interesting, entertaining and a maybe a bit pathetic at the same time. Country Joe emceed it, I will say that The Turtles showed enough inventive humor in their brief set to let me see a world beyond “Happy Together” so James and spyder don’t have to come kick my butt for dishonoring them. Although the crowds was mostly filing out after a long night and The Turtles, Leslie West may be a bit self-indulgent, but he certainly does know his way around a guitar.
3) Traveled to the land of Nittany in a U-Haul which was graced with the following:
It ain’t quite 3Tops, but pretty close for corporate graffiti. It is a Teleoceras found at this great place, Ashfall Fossil Beds in Nebraska.The Ashfall deposit preserves the fossilized remains of 10- to 12-million-year-old (Miocene) animals that perished in a dense volcanic ashfall; the animals had come to a waterhole seeking relief. The fall of ash drifted downwind from the Bruneau-Jarbidge supervolcano eruption (in present-day Idaho), nearly 1,000 miles (1600 km) west of the Ashfall site
I think we can give the Ashfall at least secondary sacred status. (GNF geography post coming some time in the future.)
4) Cormac McCarthy’s The Road made an appearance back at the very beginning of the WAAGNFNP.
Just as long as we all perish by being vaporized in the bombs’ total destruction radius, and are not left to wheel shopping carts around the ashen, blasted post-apocalyptic landscape like something out of Cormac McCarthy’s latest. Because that would suck.
After spending the day moving contents of said U-Haul into an apartment with the aid of some handy available shopping carts (somehow neglected to get a dolly with the rental), I am more impressed than ever with McCarthy’s genius in recognizing the all around utility of those contraptions. (Or I guess I should be sending mad props to the shopping cart inventor people, as well as the many street people who seized on them before McCarthy got to it.)
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on 12 Aug 2007 at 3:59 pm 31. James Killus said …
I believe it would scan better (and be more singable) if the chorus were to be
Kabloom! Kabloom! Kabloom! Gojira!
Kabloom! Kabloom! Kabloom! Gojira!
Kabloom! Kabloom! Kabloom! Gojira!
Gojira’s marching on.That’s with the emphasis on the second syllable of Kabloom, which is the preferred pronunciation. If one force-fits the Kabloom! to match “Glory” (first syllable emphasized and stretched) then it would be
Ka-bloom Ka-bloom! Go Gojira!
Ka-bloom Ka-bloom! Go Gojira!
Ka-bloom Ka-bloom! Go Gojira!
Gojira’s marching on.However, that’s nearly a tongue twister. Better to just cut to the boom:
Boom! de Boom! de Boom! Gojira!
Boom! de Boom! de Boom! Gojira!
Boom! de Boom! de Boom! Gojira!
Gojira’s marching on.This conjures the image of Hervé Villechaize, Tattoo, crying out “Boss! de Boom! de Boom!” Then all islands, and all fantasies vanish into the Giant Nuclear Fireball.
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on 12 Aug 2007 at 10:00 pm 32. Oaktown Girl said …
JP - sounds like you had an interesting weekend. Interesting - if someone told me about a concert called “Hippiefest”, Badfinger would not be the first group that sprang to mind.
I refuse to get sucked into this Open Thread so I can actually get to bed at a decent hour. I just want to say that I was all set to put up a nice, topic-relevant YouTube, but the damn thing was in German. German! (christian h is playing games with me from a distance. I hope The Trunk is nice and warm for him when he gets back).
Why I’m irritated is because all the descriptions for the video were in English and there was no clue at all that the clip was going to be in German. It’s an American TV show. WTF? And to mock me even more, I could not find that exact same clip in English (and it really needed to be in English for my purposes). For an American TV show. Again I ask: WTF?
christian’s lucky he’s not here because I’d smack him good.
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on 12 Aug 2007 at 11:10 pm 33. JP Stormcrow said …
Badfinger would not be the first group that sprang to mind.
the first four “groups” were actually just frontmen/surviving members playing front of the same backup band. Joey Molland of Badfinger qualified as “not dead yet” - and I think he had actually was billed as “Joey Molland and the music of Badfinger”. Not a high point of the show. Felix Cavaliere of The Rascals on the other hand actually did a good job even in that format.
Some Badfinger trivia:
The Iveys decided it had to change its dated name which had often led to confusion with The Ivy League. The group changed their name to Badfinger, which was suggested by Apple’s Neil Aspinall. This was a reference to ‘Bad Finger Boogie’, an early working title of “With a Little Help from My Friends” (from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band) after Lennon devised that melody on a piano using a solo finger due to having hurt his forefinger.
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on 12 Aug 2007 at 11:24 pm 34. JP Stormcrow said …
Badfinger song at the end of this clip from The Magic Christian, a seemingly forgotten ex-underground classic. And it caught me in a false memory, I would have sworn that Come and Get It was playing during the “money in the waste vat” scene, but it was Thunderclap Newman’s Something in the Air, then Come and Get It played over the credits. Not the most subtle of scenes.
