I have a friend who's a couple of decades older than me. Recently, he happened to mention that his daughter, when a teenager in the Sixties, had been a member of a hippie commune in Oregon, the Family of the Mystic Arts. He recalled that Life magazine had done a photospread on the commune back then.
I remarked that all of Life's photos were now online.
We found several photos. (Alas, his daughter is not pictured.)
One is posted below.
For the other two, I'm directing you to the Life archives, rather than reproduce them here.
Why?
Because they feature bare-breasted female children.
Yes, that's right. Due to the prevailing cultural insanity, this blog cannot safely feature photos which a general-interest G-rated magazine that sold millions of copies each week could show forty years ago.
So here's a little tribute to a more innocent and less paranoid time, when "weird" was almost the dominant cultural mode.
This article in today's NEW YORK TIMES tells us about "Street Wars," a game played in urban environments by players determined to "kill" each other. Several precedents for this game are cited in the article, but the writer misses the most important and primal one: A 1953 story by famed and beloved SF writer Robert Sheckley, titled "The Seventh Victim."
The story was later filmed as THE 10TH VICTIM. Its most famous scene: Ursula Andress using guns concealed in her bra, as seen in the second clip below.
Here's another strange book I purchased but have not yet read. The real author is Joseph K. Heydon, using the pen-name of Hal Trevarthen. Time has swallowed up all details related to Heydon and his book, leaving us only with the text itself.
Here's the description from the amazingly ugly dustjacket.
Here's the title page, followed by a sample of the actual bafflegab inside.
Posted By: Paul | Date: Thu Sep 11, 2008 | Comments (11) 
Category: Eccentrics, Hermits, Family, History, Pop Culture, Yesterday's Tomorrows, Hair Styling, 1960's