When I was a kid in junior high, two or three crazes a year would blow through our neighborhood. The craze would involve what all of the neighborhood kids were into at the time. Several are memorable .......
Mimicking Evel Knievel with a cinder block and piece of plywood. We'd make those 'ramps' and ride over them with our bikes. Another craze involved riding our bikes down to Cumberland Farms (a New England convenience story like 7-11 or Circle K) and buying Wacky Packages or Bazooka bubble gum. Another one comes to mind, when Cumberland Farms started selling 'Near Beer'. You could buy a six pack and the cans looked like real beer. Crack a can open and it smelled and tasted like real beer, but it wasn't .... it didn't have any alcohol in it.
A friend of mine and I had the bright idea of giving some to his little brother
(I'll name him Edward to protect his anonymity) . Our goal was to convince him that it was real beer. We gave Edward a couple of cans, which he guzzled down. He convinced himself that he was drunk! He acted drunk and silly and my friend and I were very amused.
Edward's antics reminded me of another craze that's become popular over the last few decades. This craze involves what has come to be called 'speculative history'. Many popular novels have been published in the last few decades that have some degree of speculative history in them.
Mimicking Evel Knievel with a cinder block and piece of plywood. We'd make those 'ramps' and ride over them with our bikes. Another craze involved riding our bikes down to Cumberland Farms (a New England convenience story like 7-11 or Circle K) and buying Wacky Packages or Bazooka bubble gum. Another one comes to mind, when Cumberland Farms started selling 'Near Beer'. You could buy a six pack and the cans looked like real beer. Crack a can open and it smelled and tasted like real beer, but it wasn't .... it didn't have any alcohol in it.
A friend of mine and I had the bright idea of giving some to his little brother
(I'll name him Edward to protect his anonymity) . Our goal was to convince him that it was real beer. We gave Edward a couple of cans, which he guzzled down. He convinced himself that he was drunk! He acted drunk and silly and my friend and I were very amused.Edward's antics reminded me of another craze that's become popular over the last few decades. This craze involves what has come to be called 'speculative history'. Many popular novels have been published in the last few decades that have some degree of speculative history in them.
There have been novels written about the pilgrims who landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts that suggested that they were promiscuous. Other speculative historians (with an agenda) have suggested that Abraham Lincoln was gay. Another novel suggests that Daniel from the Old Testament was able to resist Potopher's wife because he also was gay. Dan Brown's DaVinci Code is a speculative history that ignores real, early church history. The Discovery Channel documentary 'The Jesus Family Tomb' which will be broadcast Sunday evening is another speculative history which gets a lot of mileage off of a teaspoon of spurious historical evidence. The documentary claims that Jesus did not rise from the dead physically.
But there are folks who buy into these tales and they remind me of my 'drunken' friend Edward. They're buzzin', but for all the wrong reasons!
Here is a 'must read' article on speculative history and the alleged 'Jesus Family Tomb' on time.com: Rewriting The Gospels
Here is a 'must read' article on speculative history and the alleged 'Jesus Family Tomb' on time.com: Rewriting The Gospels
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