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Hello everyone.

Greetings from the Thunderbird in the desert, where the skies are blue and the air is warm and dry.

Comments, Poll Responses, and Emails

GERD Treatment

I received a lot of feedback from people about the GERD treatment that worked so well for me. Thinking about the whole thing got me intrigued, so I began to search for books on Amazon to see if I could come across the one I kind of mindlessly looked through up in NAPA while MD shopped. It took a while, but I finally came across the book I think it was. I’m not 100 percent absolute certain it is the book, but I’m pretty close to it. I’m a book hound and have a pretty good memory for how a book looks. Not so much titles, but just the look of the book. I also remembered the book was written by someone named John, which helped nail it for me.

The book is titled Why Stomach Acid Is Good For You and was written by Jonathan Wright, M.D. and Lane Lenard Ph.D.

As wrote last week, i just thumbed through the book and drew my own conclusions based on the info therein. I don’t think my exact regimen I used was actually written in the book the way I did it, but the information was there that tripped my trigger and the result ended up working great for me.

I ordered the book, which is the least I could do, given how much relief it has provided me. I’ll be curious to see if my particular adaptation of it is actually written there.

Funny thing is, before I found the book I had actually met Dr. Wright. I was doing a book signing at some kind of convention, and he was there doing the same. We had a friendly chitchat about our respective books. As I recall, he was promoting a book on natural hormones, which was not a particular interest of mine. Until MD outlived her natural hormones, in which case I became much more interested.

Little did I know that many years later, I would end up owing Dr. Wright such a debt of gratitude.

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Trump Physical Exam

Last week I did a pretty deep dive on President Trump’s physical exam, excoriating his physicians who put him on a statin and ezetimibe. I went on to discuss how his docs were looking at his blood pressure with an eye to medicating him if his numbers went up just a bit. An idea I thought was crazy. This is why people in their 70s walk around with a dozen medicines in their bodies, most of which they probably don’t need and would feel better without.

Of course, my discussion of the presidential physical flushed out a real hard lefty who doesn’t believe a bit of it. But I’m sure he believed Joe Biden was sharp as a tack.

He sent two emails. Here’s the first.

I obviously did not perform the physical on Trump. But I have performed many, many physical exams on men Trump’s age and body habitus, and I can tell you, you can’t tell squat from how they look. People who look like they are at death’s door can have perfect labs, and people who look like a million bucks can have labwork that is off the charts. I’ve seen it again and again and again.

I saw it even more so during the few years I was involved with a cardiac calcium scanning center. I’ve seen people come in you would swear would have a score of 500 and they end up with a zero score. Same going the other way. I’ve seen people come in, especially young, fit men who were so eager to get their perfect scans to gloat about end up with a 200 score. They were not happy campers.

Now, usually when I did a physical on someone built like Trump, I would find elevated triglycerides and the whole metabolic syndrome array of labwork. But not always. And not so frequently could you predict it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been fooled by ‘the book’s cover’.

I remember a guy who came into the CAC scanning center who kept saying he didn’t want to get scanned, because he knew he would discover he was on the verge of a heart attack. He was truly Humpty Dumpty-oid. He was as big around as he was tall, and looked like he might fall over dead before leaving the center. He ended up with a zero calcium score.

Which is why I always remind myself that I can’t know without checking. I always get the labs.

Now, for all I know, Trump is a train wreck health wise, and they are lying through their teeth about his health. But given my experience, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Here is his second email:

This one I might agree with. I’ve never seen Trump in the flesh, but I have seen plenty of 6’3” overweight guys, and they usually weigh more than 224 pounds. I have no validation on his weight, so I’ve just got to say, I don’t know. He always wears slacks, so he may have skinny legs. I have no idea. I just know that I’m almost Trump’s height (I’m 6’2”), and before I stared my NBS diet followed by my strict keto diet, I weighed in at 207 pounds. And no one would have mistaken me for Trump body-wise. (They certainly wouldn’t now.)

Maybe they didn’t weigh him. It happens. In a number of doctor’s offices I’ve been in, the nurse just asks the patient for weight and height and never measures it. Perhaps that’s what happed here. Maybe they simply asked The Donald how much he weighed, he old them, and they wrote it down.

What I wonder is did he get a coronary calcium scan? And if so, what was it?

Diamond Princess

I received an inquiry via email from a reader asking why I was so quick to accept the results of the Diamond Princess yet wouldn’t accept the results of climate change modeling.

The answer is that the data from the Diamond Princess is actual data, not modeled data. The Diamond Princess was a real life situation. People trapped on a ship from which they couldn’t escape were exposed to a novel virus. What happened is what happened. And those results were replicated in the US in terms of overall deaths. There was no modeling in the Diamond Princess, just nature doing what nature does.

Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist from Imperial Collage London, used a model he created to predict about ten precent total deaths from Covid instead of the well under 1 percent figure shown by actual people who were infected. Ferguson’s overblown prediction set the world on edge and precipitated many of the mandates, closures, etc. that were a part of the massive Covid overreaction. The world would have been vastly better off had the various public health agencies considered the Diamond Princess data.

Let’s look at the difference between a model and a live experiment.

Assume you are an extremely wealthy entrepreneur and you decide that reindeer milk has properties that will help those who drink it avoid disease. You’ve got 500,000 acres of Texas prairie land and you want to know if reindeer will survive there. It’s not cold, in fact it’s a lot hotter than they’re used to, and it also is crawling with snakes and all kinds of other predators reindeer don’t face in their native climate.

If you’re smart, before you invest the funds to ship 500,000 reindeer to Texas and stick them on pasture, you would probably instead move, say, 500 reindeer down there just to see what happens. If the reindeer survive and thrive for a year, then you might feel more comfortable moving the whole herd. If the majority of the 500 head ended up falling pray to all the nasty weather, snakes, coyotes and other Texas predators, you might think twice about moving the whole 500,000.

This is not modeling—this is testing. The accuracy is much greater and the input is not determined by the modeler’s preconceived notions.

People use modeling when they can’t control the conditions like you could in your reindeer experiment.

In climate change modeling, people guess at what the cloud cover might be, estimate the rainfall that will occur, and hundreds upon hundreds of other things, any of which might or might not occur. Then, when all the guesses are put in the computer and the button is pushed, an outcome pops out. If it doesn’t look right, then someone goes back in and changes one or more of the inputs. Then they run the model again. If it doesn’t look like you think it should, then it’s back to fiddling with the inputs until the output is what you expect or want.

There were no inputs that were changed to get the outcome of the Diamond Princess saga.

As all good statisticians say, models tell you what the modeler wants them to tell you.

Here is a great example using AI. Journalist and attorney Glenn Greenwald posted this tweet back during the election asking a specific question about Trump and about Harris. It’s easy to see what the modelers wanted you to know.

One other note on these outrageous modeling predictions… If you recall, both Neil Ferguson and California governor Gavin Newsom got caught not obeying their own dictums to the public. Both blathered about how dangerous the SARS-CoV-2 virus was and how it was necessary for not only your safety, but the safety of the public not to gather in public places or with other people you didn’t absolutely have to meet with. And definitely not without a mask (or two).

Newsom, of course, was caught having a big unmasked dinner at the très chic and très expensive French Laundry in Napa. Ferguson got caught shacking up with his girlfriend, who was actually someone else’s wife.

They both made groveling apologies for their errors, and the public laughed it off as the elites getting caught out. But if you think about it, these peccadilloes tell a deeper story.

Do you think for an instant that either Newson or Ferguson would have done what they did had they really thought in their heart of hearts that Covid was going to kill one out of ten people as Ferguson had predicted? I doubt it. That would have doomed at least one member of Newsom’s little dinner party to death! If they really thought it was deadly enough to kill that many people, I’m sure they would both have been cowering in their homes. Since they weren’t, you know they didn’t believe their own BS they were slinging at everyone else.

Bobby Takes Aim

Wednesday President Trump held the fourth (so far) of his ask-your-entire-federal-government-questions-ad-infinitum Cabinet Meetings, open to the whole press corps. The Cabinet Secretaries provided a quick update on what their departments were doing, what had been accomplished, what they planned to do in future, and took questions. Trump, himself, answered a hundred questions (really a hundred). Many answers merited press coverage, though virtually nothing has so far appeared in any mainstream publication or network.

But the lack of coverage on one astounded me. HHS Secretary Kennedy dropped the bombshell that HHS in the Biden years was involved (not discovered and knew about, but was involved) in child trafficking and had ‘lost’ over 300,000 children that the current administration vows to find. So far, they’ve found 5,000 of them and reunited them with parents or family. The press reported zip on it. You’d think that would be headline news or merit at least a 100 word squib in a side bar on page 37, but nope.

Then the HHS Secretary delivered a second bombshell that I, for one, have been praying we would hear: he ordered all new vaccines to be tested against placebo.

The Washington Post did cover this ‘shocking’ announcement with the following headline:

Let that soak in a minute. ‘Experts’ are ‘alarmed’ that injectable medications intended to be given to all infants and children (and some to the rest of us) will be tested against an inert placebo to prove not just efficacy but long-term safety before they green light them.

How could the Post write that headline with a straight face?

Their ‘alarm’ should be cause for alarm in the rest of us. Who wouldn’t want rigorous scientific testing? What are they afraid we’ll find? Inquiring minds want to know.

The Post went on in the usual non-journalistic vein with name calling RFK: he’s a vaccine-skeptic dispensing misinformation, an anti-vax activist promoting a debunked theory, etc, etc.

According to the Post’s reporting, Kennedy’s order to alter the way vaccines are tested — ie, making the purveyors of vaccines properly test their products against an inert agent instead of comparing them against a previous iteration of themselves, or against other vaccines, or against heavy metal adjuvants as is commonly done now — is going to ‘limit access to vaccines and undermine the public’s trust in immunization depending on its implementation’.

So…then what? We’ll just continue to push out vaccines that haven’t been properly tested and simply declare them safe and effective based on a couple of weeks’ follow up? Approve vaccines that we don’t know the long-term consequences of giving? Continue giving vaccines to babies and children and seniors that, even if effective at preventing the disease in question, may be causing other issues that current methods don’t/can’t uncover?

Said the Post’s writers:

“The HHS statement raised concerns among medical and public health experts who said the move could be a significant shift in how the country has ensured the safety of vaccines for decades, as well as cast doubt on vaccines that are safe, effective and key to public health.”

All I can say is I hope to heaven there will be a significant shift in how the country has ensured the safety of vaccines for decades. Like since about 1986, when the vaccine makers got a total Get Out Of Jail Free card when they were indemnified against all risk of legal reprisals for harm done by their products, codified into law by Reagan’s signing of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. And in a true display of the Law of Unintended Consequences led us to jabbing babies and toddlers with dozens of inadequately-tested, immune-modulating injections.

Here’s the current standard list by age 5. Thirty-six doses of something if you do the top end recommended here.

IMHO, it’s time and long past time that the shoddy, self-serving, pseudo-scientific methods of Big Vax were scrutinized and corrected. As a physician, I am appalled at what they’ve done.

Said one expert:

“You are watching the gradual dissolution of the vaccine infrastructure in this country,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “The goal is to make vaccines less available and less affordable.”

No, Paul. The goal is to make sure they work and they’re safe. But God willing, it will be the rapid dissolution of a corrupt and unscientific vaccine infrastructure that has enriched Pharma (and Big Media and various politicians) at the expense of our children.

If the vaccines are actually tested against a true placebo and found not to be safe, then for pity’s sake we shouldn’t be giving them to — let alone mandating them for — our kids. But if they’re tested appropriately and found to actually prevent the disease they’re intended to prevent—meaning fewer cases, less severity, less transmission, fewer hospitalizations, not just ‘raises a measurable marker of immune response’— and if they don’t increase the incidence of other problems down the line then ‘Hot Diggity Dog!’ I’m all for ‘em. But only if they pass rigorous, scientific testing first. Like other classes of medications are required to do.

The ‘medical experts’ interviewed for pull quotes for the Post article argued that it’s impractical to require true placebo testing for vaccines. Too costly. Too time consuming. It will delay getting new vaccines to market! (Heaven forfend!)

But most especially, they say, it’s unethical to require it of all these previously ‘proven safe and effective’ vaccines, because that would deprive half of the study participants from receiving the ‘safe and effective’ vaccine and they might fall ill with chicken pox or mumps or measles. Like MD and I and virtually all of our peers did in our misspent youths.

Jesus wept!

A big step, IMHO, toward stopping the ever-upward spiral of vaccines on the immunization schedule would be for Congress to rescind the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 and let Big Pharma tote its own note on the consequences of injury from their products. Perhaps if their own profits were on the line (rather than a taxpayer funded, difficult to navigate Federal Compensation Program) they’d be a sight more eager to rigorously ensure their products were actually safe long-term before loading up yet another syringe.

Long time readers will know it already, but for new readers, if you’re skeptical that things could possibly be as bad as RFK, Jr says they are regarding vaccine testing, I’ll recommend again one of the most well-researched and eye-opening books I’ve ever read on the subject, one that really draws back the curtain to expose the decades of shoddy vaccine science: Turtles All the Way Down.

Springtime Brings Snakebites

It’s spring time everywhere, which means the snakes are starting to rustle to life. And some of those snakes bite. I’ve written about this a couple of times before as a reminder, but that was back when I had way fewer subscribers.

I’ll first tell you about what happened to me while I was the only doc working a very busy hospital ER in Little Rock, Arkansas. I’ll follow up with a video and story of a cheerleader who got bit on the foot by a tiny copperhead. Then I’ll finish off with a humorous anecdote involving a huge rattlesnake and a friend of mine.

I was reminded that snakes are starting to feel their oats by an article I read about how an Alabama snake remover got careless and got bitten himself.

In this man’s case, he got careless. He is a professional snake remover, and he played a little fast and loose with one of his charges and got bit on his finger. He looks pretty happy, but let me tell you from having taken care of a number of snakebites, no one ever looks happy. To wit…

One day years ago, I was the only doctor on duty in a large hospital emergency room in Little Rock, Arkansas. I was working with a great nurse who was helping me triage patients. In emergency rooms, you never know what is coming through the door next, so having someone with good sense to alert you when something life threatening comes in really helps.

We had almost all the exam rooms filled, and I was running from one to the next dealing with all kinds of routine ER problems. As I came out of one room and headed for the next, my nurse pulled me aside and said, Dr. Eades, we just put a guy with a snake bite in room whatever. I asked my two questions of her: how long ago was he bitten, and did you see the bite?

She said he had been bitten about 45 minutes before. He lived out in the country and it took him that long to get in. She also told me the bite didn’t look bad. She said there was no swelling, but she could see the two little puncture marks.

I knew immediately that this patient had what was called a dry bite, which means the snake did not inject any venom when it bit. Dry bites are more common than bites that inject venom. Venom is vitally important to a snake, so they don’t just inject it every time they bite something. More often than not, they will just bite to scare something away.

I was aware of this fact, so I didn’t put any kind of rush on to get to the patient’s room. I had what is called the Curse of Knowledge. In other words, I had experience in dealing with snakebites, so I knew the patient had nothing to worry about.

What I didn’t know was that this patient’s brother had died from a snakebite. And I didn’t now what a terrifying ordeal this snake bite had been for this patient. He had walked out on his front porch, pulled a cigarette out of the pack in his front shirt pocket, and in doing so had dropped the pack down off the porch behind a bush. When he reached down to get it, the snake he hadn’t seen lying in the bushes struck him in the hand. The snake held on and he had to swing his arm repeatedly to knock the snake off against one of the porch posts.

Then he jumped in his car and raced to the hospital as quickly as possible only to be ignored for almost an hour because it was that busy.

My nurse pulled me out of a room and told me my snakebite patient was going crazy. She was afraid he was going to have a heart attack. I went in and saw him. I told him about dry bites and how they were harmless. Then he told me about his brother dying from a snake bite and described the experience he had endured with the snake not turning loose till he knocked it off.

I really felt bad about the whole thing and apologized effusively to him. And I’ve never since put a dry bite to the back of the line.

The next example I’m going to show you is what happens when a snake really does envenomate. The video below shows a high school cheerleader getting ready to practice some moves.

You have to look quickly to see the snakebite. It happens just as she steps on the plastic ground cover. She steps on with her right foot and pulls her shoe off with her left foot. You can see the snake strike right at that point as it bites her on the top of her right foot. It happens at about 0:05. If you miss it, don’t worry, it’ll be shown in slow motion later.

When you see this snakebite happen, you’ll notice that it hurts immediately. A real snake bite hurts the moment the venom is injected and does nothing but hurt worse as time goes on. She can’t figure out what happened, but you can tell she is in real pain that continues to get worse. She tries gamely to practice some of her routine, but just it hurts too frigging much. Finally, it hurts so bad she can’t go on, so she heads for the house.

So, when I say, you’ll know if you’ve gotten bitten by a venomous snake, now you know what I mean. There is no mistake. Head for the nearest hospital. And be prepared for a big bill. Anti-venom is not inexpensive.

The next saga I’m going to describe is a little embarrassing to me. I have never written this up anywhere, because I was kind of a shit.

As I’ve told you many times in these pages, I was not a normal high school and/or college student. Instead of dating and parties and fraternities and all the rest of what makes college worthwhile for others, I spent my spare time roaming around old ghost towns in California and in abandoned mines, looking for treasure and panning for gold. When I was in engineering school, I met a guy who was a chemical engineering student. His father was a big time Baptist preacher, and this kid had grown up in the church. He didn’t date or do any of the college activities because he always had church duties.

I got him to come out with me a few times to metal detect around old houses, and he ended up sort of liking it. He was the only person I could get to go with me, so he became my ghost towner partner.

One day we were out driving in the Walker Valley in the central part of California, which is crawling with history. I saw a set of old foundation stones set back off the road. Looked like a promising place to break out the metal detector, which I did.

While I was detecting around the boundary of the old house, my friend started screaming, Mike, Mike, Mike!!

I ran over to see what was going on, and he had the biggest rattlesnake I had ever seen coiled up in front of him. My immediate thought was that we needed to catch it.

By that time, I had had a long history of catching rattlesnakes and other poisonous reptiles. They did'n’t scare me like they scared most people. I was born terrified of spiders, but snakes didn’t bother me at all.

I told my friend to find me a strong stick with a fork in it, and I would catch it. He was not completely on board with the whole venture. So he told me after wandering through a forest for ten minutes that he couldn’t find a forked stick. I told him to keep the snake at bay while I found the forked stick. I told him all he had to do was poke the snake with a stick I gave him. As long as he’s rattling, he’s not going to run away.

While he kept the snake at bay, it took me about two minutes to find the forked stick I needed.

Once I got the forked stick close to the snake, I realized we might have a problem. The snake was so big that the forks had to be big to hold him. My intent was to stick the forked stick over his neck, press him to the ground, then reach down and grab his neck. I had caught countless snakes like that over the years.

But because the the forks of this stick were so thick, I was worried that when I pulled them away from the snake’s neck, there might be enough neck under there to turn around and bite me.

Then I had what I thought was a terrific idea.

I told my friend that I would insert the forks over the snakes neck, then he, my friend, would hold the snake to the ground. I would then grab the snake’s neck as close to the forks as I could. I would then get the snake’s body up under my right arm. Once so positioned, I would yell ‘Go!’ My friend would pull off the forks and at the same time I would pull the snake’s body (which I held under my arm) with my right shoulder, and the snake’s head, which was much larger than its neck, would slide right into my hand. Then I would have had my hand right around the thinest part of the neck, as close as possible to its head, where it would be safely away from being bitten.

The only problem was that the snake, which had been up to this time fairly docile, decided to go ape just as I was pulling his body up into my right arm pit. He started thrashing like crazy trying to pull himself out of my grip.

Meanwhile, my friend was trying to help by pushing down as hard as he could with his weight on the forked stick.

And it broke.

He fell right down on the thrashing snake. He didn’t scream or anything, but he let out this low-pitched sound that was like someone had punched him in the gut.

When he hit the ground—we were on a slight hill—he started rolling for all he was worth away from the snake. When he was about 20-30 yards away, he got up and inspected himself. Once he realized he hadn’t been bitten he began to call me every name in the book as I, having realized myself that he wasn’t bitten, laughed hysterically.

I realized this was not a snake I was going to be able to catch, so I dispatched it with my trusty pistol. We then took it home and cooked it up and ate it. Rattlesnake is really tasty, but you’ve got to know how to cook it. And it has lots and lots of bones.

In case you’re wondering, the guy and I are still friends. And every time we get together, this story gets retold.

Odds and Ends

• Best explanation I’ve seen yet for the blackouts in Spain, Portugal, and France.

• If you think people are going overboard in the US where anything Nazi is concerned, you ain’t seen nothing. Germany is beyond the pale.

• Millions of years-old dinosaur DNA to help build world-first T-Rex leather handbag. No mention of price in the article, but I doubt they’ll be giving them away.

• I debated putting this up, but I’ve been reading this guy for a long time, and he’s right way more than he’s wrong. All of Trump’s BS about Canada as the 51st state and the tariff threats were nothing more than tricks encouraging Canadians into voting against their best interests. And they fell for it hook, line and sinker.

• Canada will ‘never’ yield to Trump’s threats as Prime Minister Carney declares election victory. I guess we’ll see when USMCA renegotiation time comes around.

• How does your brain create new memories? Neuroscientists discover ‘rules’ for how neurons encode new information. How can we use these new rules of encoding?

• Tree-ring data suggest that horrific three year draught may well have brought about the collapse of Roman Britain in 327 AD, long before fossil fuels were in use.

• Bowel cancer Is rising rapidly in younger people, and bacteria could be why. I think this is gaslighting. There is another possible cause out there no one is talking about.

• New research suggest the macabre world of ancient Egyptian ritual sacrifice may have contributed to the domestication of cats.

• The guy in this tweet gets it right. I checked my military aviation contacts. The warrant office will get blamed for the Potomac crash. He should have taken the controls when the lady pilot refused to take evasive action.

• A new generation of Maasai warriors is born. 900 teenage boys are picked for an honor only given every 10-15 years, to adults, they’re expected to become change-makers

• Learning to control fire was a game-changer for ancient humans, who could use it to cook food, see at night, and endure cold weather, among other things. It didn’t take them long to become experts in its use.

• Just exactly what happens to the Sistine Chapel during a papal conclave.

• Independent bookstores from around the world, 16 of which I have not visited. I’ve been to Shakespeare & Company many times, but that’s the only one. I need to get busy.

• Finally US and Ukraine sign natural resources deal.

• Weird story connecting Scientology, The CIA, and MK-ULTRA. Strange, but the CIA has had bedfellows weirder than these, so who knows?

• Drug to extend dogs’ lives may be on the horizon.

• New study suggests combining these two drugs for T1DM may increase risk of falls. Their take away made me laugh out loud in its stupidity. (Hint: it’s not put them on a low carb diet instead.)

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

A friend, who was deeply tied in to the rock ‘n’ roll biz in his younger years, sent this video the other day. It’s a 2006 live performance recording of the late-60s English band Procul Harum playing their all-time greatest hit, “A Whiter Shade of Pale”, accompanied by the Danish Symphony Orchestra.

I love these orchestrated takes on rock music. They send my mind on a flight of fancy about what kind of music the great renaissance, baroque, classical, and romantic composers might have written had they lived in the days of rock ‘n’ roll instead of their own time.

The song was a huge hit on the pop/rock charts back in the day, but what is it about the piece that has given it such staying power? What would interest a symphony orchestra enough to perform it in concert in 2006, almost forty years after its release? Stay tuned — there’s more there than you might have thought lying in the grass on the Quad in 1967 the first time you heard it (or whenever it was for you).

"A Whiter Shade of Pale" stands out musically for its prominent Hammond organ line, which is heavily influenced by the Baroque style, particularly the works of J.S. Bach. (Band member Matthew Fisher, who plays that iconic organ melody, was a classically trained musician.) If you’re a Bach fan, you likely will recognize that the organ melody echoes the descending bass line and harmonic structure found in his "Air on the G String" (Orchestral Suite No. 3, BWV 1068), creating a classical, almost timeless atmosphere.

The song’s harmonic structure is sophisticated for pop music, with a repeating ground bass pattern (a stepwise descending bass in C major) that underpins both the verse and chorus, lending a sense of unity and hypnotic continuity.

The arrangement is more instrument-driven than most contemporary pop songs, with the organ providing not only background but serving as a melodic counterpoint to the vocals throughout the song, and the melody alternates between long notes and quicker passing notes, creating a unique ebb and flow that complements the song’s melancholic mood. The chord progressions feature interesting patterns that are rare in pop music, creating a complex, almost classical feel. And the phrasing is unconventional, lacking clear antecedent and consequent phrases, which enhances the song’s enigmatic character.

The lyrics, written by Keith Reid and sung soulfully and sorrowfully by Gary Booker, are famously enigmatic and allusive, filled with surreal imagery and literary references (such as the line as the miller told his tale, which some interpret as a nod to Chaucer, though Reid denied any conscious intention).

The language is evocative, painting vivid scenes – we skipped the light fandango; the room was humming harder; her face at first just ghostly turned a whiter shade of pale – that conjure moods rather than tell a straightforward story. The lyrics are intentionally ambiguous, allowing listeners to project their own meanings and emotions onto the song. This openness is a key part of its enduring appeal.

Time for the poll, so you can grade my performance this week.

That’s about it for this week. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back next Thursday.

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This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and should never be relied upon for specific medical advice.

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