More Squidoo Stuff

As I start this post, it's just past midnight on the East Coast, which is the deadline for having enough lenses for either Giant Squid (I qualified 3 months ago) or Top 100 status. I got a Twitter tweet from someone pointing out a lens by Linda JM about a book called Messenger from the Summer of Love. I took a look at it. The author mentioned in the book that back in 1967 he decided to leave Los Angeles and go to San Francisco. The lens doesn't say whether he wore flowers in his hair, but the author did head up the coast in time to catch the 3-day Monterey Pop Festival.

That gave me an idea, so I went to YouTube and entered "monterey pop festival" to see if there were enough videos to create a video lens. There were, so rather than keep looking for other lenses of my own to alter, I decided to make lens #101. As is often the case, I ended up learning quite a bit about the festival, and a little more about the performers.

Wikipedia has a list of all the performers, and there were only two, Beverly and The Group With No Name, I'd never heard of before. That's not too surprising, since I'd just finished my freshman year at Becker Junior College in Worcester, MA, where I'd gotten very interested in the student radio station. (Well, it was really a PA system broadcasting to the student lounge from the second-floor studio, but it was outfitted so we could sound like a radio station, and a guy from Worcester Poly Tech who was interested helped enormously in building a console which made it very much like a real radio station's except for the lack of broadcast transmission facilities.)

It was fun getting all the videos in place, grouped mostly in the order in which they appeared in the Monterey Pop film, with a few other performer videos appended for those who didn't make it into the film, such as Buffalo Springfield, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and The Association. All the videos I used came from the festival. I ended up with about 26, not bad for videos from a 41-year-old event.

Once I had the videos in place, I added 19 Amazon modules. For most performers I only chose one CD, but for Jimi Hendrix and Ravi Shankar there were also DVDs so I included them. Most of the CDs I chose are "best of" collections. The Jefferson Airplane called their hits collection "The Worst of Jefferson Airplane." Hey, somebody had to. I was disappointed that their "White Rabbit" videos all are from Woodstock. Of course, one of the Amazon modules features the DVDs for the film and a CD compilation of the music.

Tomorrow I'll lensroll the Summer of Love lens to my Monterey lens. I might do that with The Health Lady's very extensive lens about Woodstock.