Bird of A Feathers: (The Bird Are Coming! Part 3: Now With PRIDE Jooszh!)

Let's bonk two birds with one stone.  Or three.  Or more.  It's time for LGBTQ+ PRIDE X FINE FEATHERED FRIENDS COLLAB:  And speaking of little birds...
LADIES AND GENTLEPERSONS!  MISS ANNIE LENNOX!!!
WILD APPLAUSE!

That's the first time I've seen that video.  It's fascinating.  You whippersnappers might need a bit of explanation.  Annie is in the bowler hat (on second look, a classic top hat) and the other "women" are "characters" she played in many of her music vids.  Like drag queens, Annie has always embraced her "otherness" and did her own kind of drag by putting on these personas in her videos.  This is where the time-space continuum gets weird.  The video for the song "Little Bird" was from 1992.  The characters on stage with her, starting with the "Sweet Dreams" persona (with the orange hair) originated in 1983.  That's not even ten years.  And now 1992 was 33 years ago.  Weird!
But before I move on with the cuckoo bird theme; I wanted to suggest a movie for y'all for Pride Month.  It's called: God's Own Country from 2017.  Let's look at the trailer!

Some refer to this film as the British Brokeback Mountain; and yes, it has quite similar themes and story elements.  And as fine a movie as I think Brokeback Mountain is; I think this one is better.  Or perhaps I should say, more realistic. Or maybe more honest?  I felt like Brokeback Mountain was actively trying to jerk my...tears.  With this one, I was trying to keep myself from bawling.  It stars Josh O'Connor before he was a STAR, which he seems to be fast becoming.  Speaking of Josh: he's played a lot of gay roles thus far so the logical question is: Is he gay?  But our immediate, preemptive follow up question should be: should we care?  I point you to my questions about these questions in my blog: Gay for Pay...  Here's a link!
www.christopherfreidy.com/blog/playing-gay-gay-for-pay-gay-today-gone-tomorrow

And our next question should be: Who Cares?  He's played gay, straight and bi and I've been transported by his performances in all.  And don't necessarily need to see him naked (but in never hurts!).  And he will give you ding-ding! I thought the sexiest scene in Challengers was the one where Zendaya was mostly clothed and he was in baggie underpants and they were more or less having a conversation:

IMHO, "SEXINESS" is really all about the ratio between covered and exposed skin.  Total nudity is too TMI, I think.
So, anyways...
At the top of this first blog, I was talking about conspiracy theories and Alice In Wonderland and making something up so stupid you would never think anyone would believe it; but are shocked to find that people will.  Not that I've ever made up a conspiracy theory.  However, being something of a "magical thinker" with a "highly active" imagination; I am quite prone to, let's just say, "falling" for them.  And isn't "The Rabbit Hole" now the culturally collective term for conspiracy theories?  And of course, where did we get the term?  Alice et. al. are connected pretty firmly to something called "MK Ultra."  We all know what "MK Ultra" is, even if we don't know.  Basically, it's brainwashing.  More specifically; brainwashing at the hands of some shady political agency to create a person who will do your bidding without realizing it, after you've, shall we say, pressed their button.  It's a cultural concept.  An entertainment trope:

Gilligan's Island taught a whole generation about a lot of things.  Apparently, Psy. Ops too!  And apparently, "MK Ultra" was a real thing.  Here's a link to a Wikipage about it, if you're interested:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra

If you've seen the film The Manchurian Candidate, it pretty much gives you the rundown on how the whole thing supposedly worked.  Here's an interesting video all about it:

But of course, it gets darker.  Supposedly there was an off-shoot of the program to turn young women into "sex kittens" for various and sundry nefarious purposes.  And like the playing cards in The Manchurian Candidate, supposedly characters, ideas and images from the Alice books were used in a similar fashion.  I don't know if this is true (and I truly hope it's not); but it sure kind of wrecked the books for me!
So how does this tie into birds, you might ask; and why are you going down this rabbit hole?
Well, since I brought Alice up and I was looking into what FOX celebs thought about birds, I came across all this stuff about FOX News apparently being duped (and decidedly trolled) about a conspiracy theory called: Birds Aren't Real.  After watching a bit, I quickly decided that the dude from the Anti-Bird group was yanking Pete Hegseth's chain pretty hard.  This patently abusurd "theory" apparently got far enough to get an "expose" on FOX Nation, whatever that is.  Here are some videos if you want to go further down this rabbit hole.  Or should that be bird's nest?

And I guess to be fair and balanced and give equal time...here's a link to the hardhitting Fox Nation expose:
nation.foxnews.com/birds-are-fake-the-conspiracy-nation/

And this:

I hope Mr. McIndoe (as I haven't listened to his Ted Talk) points up the actual real threats to birds whilst he's being satirical.
But I think we can all agree that Pete Hegseth is something of a bird-brain.  No, wait...that's not fair to the birds.
And here, to play us out, are The B-52's with one of their more obscure songs (and weirder too, which is saying a lot!): 
​BIG BIRD!

HAPPY PRIDE 2025!

MWAH!
Ciao for Now!

CFR   6/22/25