Speaker 1: I'm Jason Colvin, I'm d Graves.
Speaker 2: Give us five minutes and we will give you the fire.
Speaker 1: Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Surely You Can't
Be Serious Podcast Special Edition five Minutes of Fire. We
are here talking about the lyrics of We Didn't Start
the Fire by Billy Joel. We're covering only five minutes
at a time, which is about to link with the song,
so it works out kind of nicely. So please join
us as we dive into some new lyrics today.
Speaker 3: All right, guys, so here are the topics that we're
going to be covering today.
Speaker 1: Emingway, Aikman, stranger in a Strange Landway, tell me about Hemingway. Okay,
we are talking about Ernest Timingway, and I would just
like to note he was my favorite author in high school.
He is famous for his Iceberg theory of writing, which
is a minimalist style that he developed while he was
a war correspondent, a journalist who had to get to
the heart of the matter quickly. He carried that over
into his fiction writing, where he straightforward nuts and bolts
and let you see the deeper maining for yourself underneath Iceberg.
He wrote from the mid nineteen twenties on through the fifties.
Ultimately was awarded the nineteen fifty four Nobel Prize in
Literature for Old Man and the Sea. Unfortunately, that same
year he was also in a series of accidents, injured
in two plane crashes on successive days, leaving him in
pain and ill health.
Speaker 3: Two Blaine crashes on successive days.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was a bit revived when he remembered that
he had buried some writing in some trunks and went
and found those trunks like he buried in the nineteen twenties,
went and found them, and they had all these writings
that he had done. And so for the next couple
of years he worked on putting those writings together as
a memoir. It was ultimate released as The Movable Feast.
But he still continued to sink into depression. Nineteen fifty nine,
he bought a house in Ketchum, Idaho. Wife caught him
holding his shotgun in a very suspicious way, had him
taken to the hospital because she knew of his depression.
He was sedated, he was given electroshock therapy. He was
ultimately released, but then he downstairs to the basement kicked
out his favorite gun, his favorite shotgun, sat down on
the porch and on July second, nineteen sixty one, committed suicide.
Speaker 2: Okay, tell me about this Eikman Guy Otto Adolph Eichmann
was a member of the Nazi Party, officer in the SS,
and a major organizer for the Holocaust.
Speaker 3: He's known for implementing the final solution to the quote
unquote Jewish question.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: He was tasked by the SS with managing the logistics
of mass deportation of millions of Jews to Nazi ghettos
and to Nazi extermination camps. Is also responsible for collecting
information on Jews, organizing the seizure of their property, and
scheduling them on the trains. So at the end of
the war, he was actually captured by US forces, but
he had a false identity and so that allowed him
to escape to Argentina.
Speaker 1: Probably invited there by one pron probably yeah.
Speaker 3: Several Holocaust survivors and Nazi hunters dedicated themselves to finding
this guy. On May eleventh, nineteen sixty he was captured
in a daring kidnapping attempt by a team of Nazi
hunters and smuggled out of the country. He was tried
and hanged in nineteen sixty two. Okay, de what can
you tell me about Stranger in a Strange Land?
Speaker 1: Okay? Stranger in a Strange Land was a book that
had been written by Robert Heinlein, who we've talked about before,
a co sci fi writer with Philip K. Dick and others.
He had actually been working on a book for about
a decade, but didn't feel like that the world was
ready with its social mores for what he was about
to present. But sixties were happening and he thought, Okay,
I guess now is the time. It was an award
winning book. It was about a Valentine, Michael Smith, who
was born during the first manned mission to Mars and
was the only survivor. He gets raised by the Martians
and when he gets taken back to Earth, he doesn't
have any knowledge of anything about the planet Earth and cultures.
In fact, he had never seen a woman. But he
happened to be the legal heir to an enormous financial empire,
and the book is about him exploring human morality, the
meanings of love, sex, other taboo things like religion and cannibalism,
and he ultimately founds his own church preaching free love
Because of this free love, many of the hippies of
the nineteen sixties selected A Stranger in a Strange Land
as their quote unquote Bible. Among these, Charles Manson. He
was apparently just a petty criminal until he read this
book in prison and then started his cult. After leaving
it many years later, when asked about Stranger in a
Strange Land, he said, I don't think I've ever read
the book. However, his son was named Valentine Michael, the
same name as main character in the book, so that
seems a little bit strange. Also, the Manson family practiced
several of the cult things in Stranger in a Strange Land. Okay, guys,
that does it for today's episode. Next time for five
minutes a fire
Speaker 2: Mmm,