Neil Cassidy had several party habits whose fame has long outlived the man. I'm not so much concerned with his sledge hammer tossing, as I am with a little game he played in the late 50s and early 60s when he was the darling of the San Francisco party crowd. He called his game, Radio I Ching. By the way, there is a band with this name, who you should check out. I used to listen to the song, "Streets of Laredo" all the time before I misplaced their album.
To play Radio I Ching, Cassidy would commandeer some poor soul's AM radio. I'm not sure, but I don't think that FM was available yet, so I guess calling it "AM radio" is a bit redundant. Once he had the radio, he would ask someone from his audience, and he always had an audience, to pick a word, any word, any word would do. Within five minutes, Cassidy's self-imposed time limit, he would have tuned the dial to a station where that word would be heard. Legend has it, he was never stumped.
Can you imagine the probability involved in such an endeavor? I don't know how many radio stations he could pick up in the Bay Area, maybe a dozen to a score, I guess depending on the time of day. Invariably, the first few words would be cuss words, so I guess if he knew the stations, he might pick "the" one for that kind of language. But, as his notoriety grew at playing Radio I Ching, audience members must have come up with some pretty uncommon words. Considering how much alcohol, pot, speed and acid everyone was purportedly doing, I'm not even sure that all of the words would have been real words.
I've always wondered if this legend is true. I have no doubts that many people believe it to be true, and maybe even some of them were actually at one of these parties where ol' Neil did his trick. I kind of think that it was one of two things. Either he did a trick that was as much showman and schuckster as prognosticator and convinced people that they had picked a word just said or maybe that a mumbled word was the target word. Hell, with as much static as there is on the radio, that could happen a lot. I know first hand, that people doing any one of the above mentioned substances, or any combination of them, can be made to believe many things taht are not true. I bet he could get a lot of the more common words, such as pronouns, slang of the day, political or religious words, just by knowing his local stations. I'm willing to grant a generous one third efficacy rate under this scenario.
The other option is that Cassidy delivered as tales have it he did. It could be that Neil was psychic, or that he had expanded his awareness to the point of picking up, like a radio receiver, thoughts around him before they were vocalized. Or, Neil might have been able to tap into the superconscious mind, or cultural zeitgeist if you will.
So, every day while I"m exercising, I play the new centuries version of Radio I Ching. I have an Ipod with about 3000 songs on it. I only listedn to it on random for the whole catalog and then mentally pick songs I want to hear. I give myself a half an hour, and no fast forwarding is allowed.
For the last three months, I've been doing this pretty religiously, at least six days a week. I have a 40% (roughly) success rate. Which, let me tell you means nothing, other than I enjoy certain songs coming on slightly more than I otherwise would. It does make the time seem to pass by a bit faster if I'm hearing a good mix, or a bit slower if a song I don't particularly want to hear comes on.
What I don't know is if 40% is a good score. I think the averege day of playing this game leads to about 8 songs being played. So, it would seem that if I can one out of 3000 with eight tries, 40% of the time, I'm beating the odds, so to speak. But there are some knowns and some unknowns that mitigate the results a bit. A big known, is that if I haven't plugged the Ipod into the computer, I'm not going to hear one the previously plaed songs again. The biggest unknown is how Apple's software weights songs for random play. I know it keeps track of how many times I play each individual song, both on the Ipod and on the computer, but I don't know if it's likely to choose higher listened to songs over lower.
I recommend that each and everyone of you go and give this a try for a week and then let me know how you did. I guarantee this is more entertaining than any of the Facebook quizzes relating to Ipods or music.
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