{"id":303,"date":"2015-04-10T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-04-10T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yule-tide.generalsemiotics.net\/index.php\/2015\/04\/10\/post-296-it-came-out-of-the-sky\/"},"modified":"2015-04-10T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-04-10T00:00:00","slug":"post-296-it-came-out-of-the-sky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/2015\/04\/10\/post-296-it-came-out-of-the-sky\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-296: It Came Out of the Sky"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"paragraph\" style=\"text-align:left;\">\n<span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\">Towards the end of 1969, a few months after the first human moon landing, an album was released in the USA called &#8220;<a title=\"\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Willy_and_the_Poor_Boys\">Willy and the Poor Boys<\/a>&#8221; which featured the now iconic song &#8220;Fortunate Son&#8221;. Another song on the album was<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span> <strong>&#8220;It Came Out of the Sky&#8221;<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Below is that song, its lyrics, and some comments on it that occur to me. (As of now, for copyright reasons Youtube blocks the song on mobile devices but it can be heard on desktops.)<br \/><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"wsite-youtube\" style=\"margin-bottom:5px;margin-top:5px;\">\n<div class=\"wsite-youtube-wrapper wsite-youtube-size-medium wsite-youtube-align-center\">\n<div class=\"wsite-youtube-container\">\n<iframe src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/VuPtOtGF4TY?wmode=opaque\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"paragraph\" style=\"text-align:left;\">\n<span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\">I see the song as saying this: People tend to react to new, unknown phenomena or developments based narrowly on the way they already see the world, the way they&#8217;ve always done things. Few, if any, can really break free of this mental constraint. (I think this makes the song a<\/span><\/span> <span style=\"\"><span style=\"\"><span style=\"\"><span style=\"\">musical version of Plato&#8217;s &#8220;Allegory of the Cave.&#8221;)<br \/><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div id=\"439782531754806968\" align=\"left\" style=\"width: 100%; overflow-y: hidden;\" class=\"wcustomhtml\">\n<a name=\"continue\" id=\"continue\"><font color=\"white\">.<\/font><\/a>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"paragraph\" style=\"text-align:center;\">\n<span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.yuletyde.com\/a-blog\/post-296-it-came-out-of-the-sky#continue\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><font size=\"4\"><strong><font color=\"#0B00FF\">Read More<\/font><\/strong><\/font><span class=\"rangySelectionBoundary\" style=\"line-height: 0; display: none;\" id=\"selectionBoundary_1428715273517_7672541263619467\">\ufeff<\/span><span class=\"rangySelectionBoundary\" style=\"line-height: 0; display: none;\" id=\"selectionBoundary_1428715272494_5157214153292482\">\ufeff<\/span><span class=\"rangySelectionBoundary\" style=\"line-height: 0; display: none;\" id=\"selectionBoundary_1428715272381_9235582661771367\">\ufeff<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<!--BLOG_SUMMARY_END-->\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"paragraph\" style=\"text-align:left;\">\n<span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"text-decoration:none; font-style:normal; font-weight:400; color:rgb(62, 62, 62);\"><span style=\"\"><span style=\"\"><font size=\"5\"><strong style=\"\">It Came Out Of The Sky<\/strong><\/font> Lyrics<\/p>\n<p>Oh, it came out of the sky, landed just a little south of Moline<br \/>\nJody fell out of his tractor, couldn&#8217;t believe what he&#8217;d seen<br \/>\nLaid on the ground and shook, fearin&#8217; for his life<br \/>\nThen he ran all the way to town screamin&#8217; &#8220;It came out of the sky!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Well, a crowd gathered &#8217;round and a scientist said it was marsh gas [1]<br \/>\nSpiro [2] came to make a speech about raising the Mars Tax<br \/>\nThe Vatican said, &#8220;Woe, the Lord has come&#8221;<br \/>\nHollywood rushed out an epic film<br \/>\nAnd Ronnie the Populist [3] said it was a communist plot<\/p>\n<p>Oh! [Guitar]<\/p>\n<p>Oh, the newspapers came and made Jody a national hero<br \/>\nWalter and Eric [4] said they&#8217;d put him on a network TV show<br \/>\nThe White House said, &#8220;Put the thing in the Blue Room&#8221;<br \/>\nThe Vatican said, &#8220;No, it belongs in Rome.&#8221;<br \/>\nAnd Jody said, &#8220;It&#8217;s mine but you can have it for seventeen million!&#8221; [5]<\/p>\n<p>Oh, it came out of the sky, landed just a little south of Moline<br \/>\nJody fell out of his tractor, couldn&#8217;t believe what he&#8217;d seen<br \/>\nLaid on the ground a shakin&#8217;, fearin&#8217; for his life<br \/>\nThen he ran all the way to town screamin&#8217; &#8220;It came out of the sky!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>\n[Notes and Comments]<br \/>\n[1] The government often classified purported UFO sightings as &#8220;marsh gas&#8221; (whatever that is). The lyric is not &#8220;a government spokesman said it was marsh gas,&#8221; though, but rather &#8220;a scientist.&#8221; Scientists have always had an interest, on behalf of pride in their field, in insisting that all phenomena can be explained with presently-known information and theory.<br \/>\n[2] This is Spiro Agnew, Vice President at the time, under Nixon. Why they chose &#8220;Spiro&#8221; for making a speech about raising a &#8220;Mars Tax&#8221;, I don&#8217;t know.<br \/>\n[3] &#8220;Ronnie the Populist&#8221; must be Ronald Reagan, then governor of California (elected Nov. 1966, served till Jan. 1975) and conservative spokesman (from the 1950s), later president.<br \/>\n[4] Walter Cronkite, fatherly news figure many years ago. Who Eric was, I don&#8217;t know.<br \/>\n[5] &#8220;Jody,&#8221; a country-bumpkin figure here, is the only character in this song who <em>doesn&#8217;t<\/em> spin the UFO&#8217;s arrival for his own personal agenda. He just runs off to alert the others, attracts a crowd of locals, and then worldwide attention. Jody, though, seems uninterested in the UFO, and in the end all he cares about is this potential huge cash payout he asks for. An apparently genuine alien spacecraft (if that&#8217;s what &#8220;it&#8221; of the song is) should be in the national interest to study and understand. That they put in this lyric at all (&#8220;you can have it for seventeen million&#8221;) shows how confident the USA was in 1969 in itself and its institutions; Here we have this guy, Jody, a nobody, who comes across a UFO landing, would (it is implied) have his rights respected enough to be paid for the UFO, rather than having the UFO seized by the army and Jody punched in the stomach for protesting or jailed for a while (as might happen elsewhere). In the end, this is meant to be a comedic song, but comedy has to be plausible. I don&#8217;t think that implied respect for the rights of a &#8220;Jody&#8221;-like figure is as plausible in today&#8217;s USA.<br \/><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Towards the end of 1969, a few months after the first human moon landing, an album was released in the USA called &#8220;Willy and the Poor Boys&#8221; which featured the now iconic song &#8220;Fortunate Son&#8221;. Another song on the album was &#8220;It Came Out of the Sky&#8221;. Below is that song, its lyrics, and some [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}