Rather than chase footnotes, I thought I would chase some trivia because that’s what we seem to be doing here lately. I had thought that once the body in the slides was identified as an unfortunate child from hundreds of years ago, we could be done with that discussion. What more could be said? Arguments about the number of ribs or the other deformities, which could be the result of a “natural” mummification, seem to be useless. It really doesn’t matter at this point because the mummy has been identified, its location has been identified, and what happened to it has been identified. It was returned to it ancestor’s as federal law required (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 for those who wish to know). All that seems to be a matter of record so that we could move onto other discussions, but we’re caught up in the trivia of number of ribs and other obscure deformities.
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| CAP Officer Robert Willingham |
And I hear that there are still discussions about the typeface used on the MJ-12 documents or more specifically, the Truman memo which was attached to the Eisenhower Briefing Document. It would seem that once the fatal flaw had been uncovered there that we could move away from the nonsense of attempting to determine who had what typewriter in the White House more than half a century ago. It matters little what typeface that typewriter used when the tale of the UFO crash in the El Indio area has been found to be a hoax told by a man who was never a fighter pilot nor an Air Force officer. It would seem that the shifting nature of his tale, from the number of UFOs involved, to the date of the incident and the area of the crash would be enough to sink his tale which is reported in the EBD. If that story is a hoax that wasn’t invented until the 1960s, or that the crash that is now claimed to have taken place two or three years after the EBD was written, that would be enough. But no, we’re still caught up in arguing over the trivia of typeface and other unimportant factors because these other things simply can’t be explained.
But the trivia of trivia seems to be the short and limited discussion of Brad Steiger’s real name. Seriously? Yes, he was born as Eugene Olson, and if you look at the copyright page of some of his earlier books, it lists the copyright owner as Eugene Olson. I knew that was his name in the 1970s, and I knew that he taught in Decorah, Iowa, so I called directory assistance (which is what you did in the days before online white pages and the Internet). They gave me the telephone number of Eugene Olson and we had a very nice chat.
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| Brad and Sherry Steiger |
He wrote under the name of Brad Steiger and sometime in the late 1970s, I believe, legally changed his name to Brad Steiger. So the point being made was moot because his real, legal name was Brad Steiger. In fact, for those searching for the real names of writers, sometimes all you have to do is look to see who holds the copyright because that will often be in the writer’s real, legal name… though not always. Thinner, which we all know was written by Stephen King is copyrighted in the name of Richard Bachman. My own books, Wings Over Namis copyrighted by Cat Branigan rather than Kevin Randle (hey, don’t blame me; I didn’t pick the pen name).
The point here is that we engage way too often in discussions of trivia rather than focusing on the more important, overriding issues. I don’t know if it is a desire to be right even if it is just one small segment of the discussion or if it is just stubbornness. Maybe it’s a way to keep a topic going or maybe it’s just to be contrary. Whatever the reason, it seems to me that we ought to let go of the trivia and confine ourselves to discussions of the more important points… and for those wondering who makes that determination… here, on this blog, it’s me.
