Big Time Blood Moon Edition March 2025
In the midst of earthly mayhem, a celestial event comes along every so often of such spectacular impact it humbles the brightest among us and lights the dimmest stars. The full eclipse of the moon is upon us tonight, this a blood moon in colloquial terms, an event that throughout time has quickened the pulse and stilled the pace of virtually every living thing. When our back is to the light and our face to the full moon, our shadow shows that even our humble place in the heavens can blot out the sun.
It’s not especially rare, happening in full view from one spot or another on earth a few times each year, but it is magnificent. The moon lies in transit within the earth’s umbra for better than an hour while the sunlight diffused by our atmosphere haloes that satellite body in red.
In the U.S., it’s our turn this time to see it straight on and let it lift us from the morass of our days for an ethereal hour plus. It reminds us to look up because amazing things are happening overhead. Remembering to do that is rare. Tonight would be good.
Our friend Hale Milgrim brought the Freeform Radio Project (HERE) to John Kay’s attention and John was interested in talking about it. “I’d never thought about this before,” he said in an interview we did last week, “and I wanted to say some things about how important it was to us.” You can hear what he has to say (HERE).
Us is the band Steppenwolf, which John led to great success for over 5 decades, a remarkable accomplishment in a very tough business. They produced 6 gold albums, one platinum album, any number of Top 40 hit singles, and contributed two of the seminal songs to the soundtrack for Easy Rider, the 1969 film that so captured the zeitgeist of the late Sixties. Head out on the highway looking for adventure. Indeed!
John had a lot to say about the impact of FM radio and all those freeform deejays, the deep interest they manifested in the music and where it came from, cool background info about the band, all of which had such an impact on the audience. He spoke too of his experience on tour when he realized those stations preceded the band in bringing their music to town and helped to pack the venues where they played. He added we all owe them a deep appreciation for the experience they brought us, right up until the time the corporate overlords weighed in and things inevitably began to change.
John and his wife, Jutta, sold all the rights to their music a few years ago to fund the Maue Kay Foundation (HERE) and their work as defenders of wildlife, the natural environment, and human rights. John also has released a series of six podcasts that tell the story of his pathway from rock star to wildlife advocate (HERE). He’s a helluva guy we’re grateful to have met. Thanks to both John and Hale for their support.
Do you remember The Millionaire? A television show from back in the days when that was a lot of money. Unimaginable riches for most of us. The American Dream come true. An agent for a benefactor named J. Beresford Tipton would show up at your door and advise that you had been chosen as the recipient of one million dollars. No strings attached. Pretty cool day at the track, that one.
We saw a post recently that if we liquidated (and I believe the meaning was financially liquidated – not certain), if we liquidated the richest man in the country, we could give every citizen of the United States a million dollars from the proceeds. Like if he was a real-life J. Beresford Tipton himself and he actually gave a shit. Of course, we know he doesn’t and it won’t occur. But it’s fun to think of what it would be like if it did.
It would be a dazzling boost to the economy, of course, and that’s a good thing, but it might cause inflation (god forbid!) and that’s bad. It would make everyone much more financially equal and secure, which in theory sounds good but it’s never happened before in the USA, so we can’t be certain. Smarter people than we are can tell us why it doesn’t happen and shouldn’t happen, and anyway we’d have to give that former richest man a million bucks too so he could be like everyone else and that ignores the fact that he’d never deign to be any such thing. Maybe we should just forget it.