Two LSD Stories from the Oracle (1967)

The San Francisco Oracle: The Psychedelic Newspaper of the Haight Ashbury (Oakland: Regent Press, 2005). CD-ROM.

“Ees Setisoppo with Dick Alpert.” [Interview with Richard Alpert.] The City of San Francisco Oracle, Vol. 1, No. 5 (January 1967), p. 10.

Or the story: as I was looking for real estate, a cat down on the lower East Side said, “Come on and have a drink. My scene isn’t LSD, it’s hash, but I’d like to talk to you anyway.” And he said, “The LSD people next door, they’re having a party up on the eighth floor and they were looking out over the terrace and one of guys said, ‘I think I’ll jump.’ And the other guy said, ‘Cool!’ And so he jumped and fell eight stories and he fell with his head against the curb broken and he was coughing blood out of his mouth and nose and this guy was watching out of his window, and the fellow on the curb, while the ambulance was coming, was blowing kisses at the people up on the eighth floor and saying, ‘Here I am, dying in the gutter, looking at my friends. Goodbye…Goodbye.’ And the ambulance came and he died.” And the guy said to me, “Isn’t that horrible. He was only nineteen. He had all that promise.” And I said, “Well, what’s so horrible about it?” I said, “His life made a pretty strong statement because you remembered it and you just told me and I am gonna tell lots of people.” But now, I dug like, how far out does my consciousness have to go to be able to break through and assess that act?

 “Changes.”  [Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg.] The City of San Francisco Oracle, Vol. 1, No. 7 (April 1967), p. 8.

WATTS: It’s like the guy in Los Angeles who had a bad trip on LSD and turned himself into the police, and wrote: “Please help me. Signed, Jehovah.” (laughter)

LEARY: Beautiful! (more laughter) It’s about time he caught on, huh? (more laughter)

The Burglars' Code (Camden, UK)

http://www.camdennewjournal.com/burglars-code

Camden New Journal [UK]

11 February 2015

The burglars' code: Camden residents told to look out for secret markings near their homes

By WILLIAM McLENNAN

MEMBERS of the public have been warned to be on the lookout for symbols scrawled on their property that are believed to alert would-be burglars to soft targets.

A table of markings, said by police to be a secret code used by criminals to “highlight potential targets”, was sent to members of tenants’ and leaseholders’ groups on Tuesday.

The symbols are said to denote observations about the security of a property, including “vulnerable female” and “good target”, but police said they were not aware of a “particular problem in Camden” at the moment.

One of those to receive the warning, Petra Dando, who chairs Camden Association of Street Properties, said she had passed the message to many of the association’s 6,500 members. […]

The War Profiteer

This legend was called “The Rebuke” in the California Folklore Quarterly (3: 319, 1944; 4: 86-87, 1945) and “The War Profiteer” by Jan Brunvand (The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story, 149-50). An item in Western Folklore (7: 60, 1948) noted a Civil War variant. Thanks to Bonnie Taylor-Blake for the CFQ and WF references.

Carleton B. Case, Funny Stories Told By the Soldiers: Pranks, Jokes and Laughable Affairs of Our Boys and Their Allies in the Great War (Chicago: Shrewesbury Publishing Co., 1919), p. 13.

TOO BAD SHE HADN’T MORE SONS

Two men riding in a street car were talking about the war. “Well, how much longer do you think this thing will last?” asked one of the men of his friend. “Pretty hard to tell,” was the answer. “But as for me it can go right on for years. I’m making big money out of it all right.” And he looked it!

A well-dressed middle-aged woman sat next to the man who had just spoken and, as he finished his speech, she took off her gloves, stood up and hit the man a stinging blow across his face. “That is for my boy in France,” she said; and before he could recover she hit him another one, and added: “And that is for my other boy who is about to sail.”

Then she sat down, while the red-faced man looked about at a carful of people whose approving glances of the woman’s act led him to feel that he had better leave the car. — Ladies’ Home Journal.