Thanks to the hard work of the Association of American State Geologists, the second week of October has been officially declared "Earth Science Week" every year since 1998. So we decided to have Jeopardy!'s rarest gem, Ken Jennings, school us on the hardest rock of them all: diamonds. Are they really forever? Are they a girl's best friend? Let's shed the cold, hard light of 10-carat truth onto some of these semiprecious superstitions.
The Debunker: Does "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" Stand for LSD?
In the spring of 1965, John Lennon and George Harrison and their wives were having dinner with a friend, the cosmetic dentist John Riley. (When you're the biggest rock stars in the world, you can hang out with pretty much any dentist you want!) Riley wanted the Beatles to try the newest craze in swinging London, so he laced their coffee with a still-legal lab chemical called lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. John wasn't crazy about the surprise, but ended up loving his first trip, which he described as "a very concentrated version of the best feeling I'd ever had." Acid became a big influence on John's songwriting, leading to Beatles classics like "She Said, She Said" and "Tomorrow Never Knows."
When Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in 1967 to instant acclaim, fans quickly pegged "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," with its tangerine trees and kaleidoscope eyes, as one of the record's trippiest songs. The initials told the whole story: LSD, wink wink. Nobody thought Lennon was being very subtle about his psychedelic influences.
To this day, many music fans take it as a given that the title of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is a nod to the songwriter's favorite drug (at least until he discovered heroin in 1968). But John Lennon, who was always very candid about his personal life and drug use, always told a different story. The title, he said repeatedly in interviews, came to him from his four-year-old son Julian, who had brought home a crayon drawing of his schoolfriend Lucy O'Donnell—in the sky, surrounded by diamonds. The verses, about a dreamy riverboat trip, were inspired by Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. "It's not an acid song," insisted John. Paul McCartney and John's friend Pete Shotton corroborate that story: the title was Julian's, not a drug reference. In fact, the smoking gun here—the classroom drawing itself—still exists. According to Julian Lennon, it's now owned by David Gilmour of Pink Floyd!
Quick Quiz: The famous hominid skeleton Lucy, named for the Beatles song, is now owned by the National Museum of what country, where it was discovered?
Ken Jennings is the author of eleven books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.