Cult of the Lepus

Interesting Christmas Present

2011-12-25T00:45:00.004-07:00

Haven't tried this yet. I'm guessing it takes somewhat like saltwater, semen, and bitter bitter tears.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

Book Review: The Hunger Games

2011-11-17T13:43:00.012-07:00

I seldom read books that are trendy. At least, I don't read them while they're trending. But the hype around Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy sucked me in, somehow, and now I'm hooked.
It seems I'm reading more young adult fiction in my thirties than I ever did as a young adult. I think that's because editors, parents, and educators have finally stopped talking down to older teen readers. Gone are the days when a mere mention of menstruation or masturbation in a book can lead to school library bans and PTA scandals. Gone, too, are the days when authors could keep teen girls happy by churning out tales of horses and chaste cheerleaders. It's time for what teenagers really want in their fiction: Sex, angst, heroism, tragedy, magic, and gore. I found myself wishing this stuff came out when I was twelve, until I realized that some of it is highly readable at any age.

So, I gave the Hunger Games trilogy a chance, even though the books have a post-apocalyptic setting that normally wouldn't appeal to me much. A series of catastrophes has reduced the U.S. to twelve zones, governed by a fascistic central capitol ensconced in the Rocky Mountains. Three-quarters of a century before the story begins, some kind of armed rebellion so unnerved the Capitol that its leaders decided to introduce a terrible blood sport that will keep everyone in line: Every year, 24 children between the ages of 12 and 18 are selected by lottery, given some rudimentary training, then thrown into a wilderness "arena" to fight for survival against the elements and each other. The sole winner returns home a hero, and his/her home district is showered with gifts. The event, known as the Hunger Games, is televised.

Katniss Everdeen, a 16-year-old, narrates her own entry into the Games alongside a baker's son named Peeta. Each district offers up two "tributes" per year, one boy and one girl, and Katniss and Peeta are residents of the poorest, outermost district in the nation. Their chances of winning are slim to none, and their mentor/coach is a falling-down drunk (in the second book, Catching Fire, readers learn that many former winners have turned to drinking or drugs to cope with the emotional fallout of the Games).
Katniss has been her family's sole means of support since her father's death in a mining accident. Using a homemade bow and arrow, she illegally hunts for small game in the woods surrounding her district in order to feed her mother and delicate 12-year-old sister (in the film, Katniss is played by the same girl who starred in Winter's Bone. Is this girl ever going to get a role in which she doesn't have to kill squirrels to feed her siblings?).
My only real beef with the character of Katniss is that she's a little too capable and tough. Her vulnerabilities and flaws come out more in the second book of the series, Catching Fire, but throughout The Hunger Games we're dealing with a girl who can do no wrong. She's like the spawn of Joan of Arc and Robin Hood.

The outermost district, #12, is Appalachia. It's still Appalachia as we know it now, full of desperately impoverished coal miners, but its population has been reduced to that of a single small town. It is implied that the other 11 districts, while wealthier, don't have much to offer, either. The Capitol, on the other hand, is a futuristic playground where residents eat well, drive cars, and sport wacky Fifth Element-style fashions.
The author cites reality TV as one of the inspirations for these books, and that shows in the preparations for the Hunger Games. Each contestant gets an extreme makeover as soon as he/she reaches the Capital. Then stylists outfit them in extravagant costumes so they can be paraded and interviewed in high fashion before the blood sport begins. Project Runway meets The Road Warrior. Also, à la American Idol, TV viewers can boost their favourite player by sending gifts of food, medicine, or other supplies. So in addition to foraging for food and water and engaging in combat with the other tributes, players have to make themselves desirable to the TV audience. Peeta and Katniss boost their appeal considerably by pretending to be in love with each other, though Katniss can't be sure that Peeta is pretending, and her own feelings are far from clear.

The whole premise seems a little silly, until you remind yourself that it wasn't so long ago (relatively speaking) that gladiatorial combat was the entertainment.
What makes The Hunger Games different from Battle Royale, a similar teen-gladiator manga series and movie, is that the kids aren't juvenile delinquents. The Hunger Games also lacks the tongue-in-cheekiness of Battle Royale. It's bleak, bleak, bleak. In most stories of combat, we are given a side to champion. In this book, there are no good or bad sides. The arena is a lawless world without any criminals; there are only children.

Collins deftly prevents the bleakness of her characters' circumstances from taking over the story, though. She combines compelling outdoor survival scenes with well-paced action, hints at the events that will begin to unfold in the second book, and creates a unique world that blends Depression-era poverty with quirky sci-fi innovation.

Like reality TV, the world of The Hunger Games is reality exaggerated. We see a vast gulf between the super-wealthy and the nearly-starving, though both groups exist on the same landmass and theoretically could have access to the same resources. The lottery system used to select tributes hints at the draft. The delight Capitol residents express when an unfavoured tribute is slaughtered echoes our own glee when celebrities spiral into addiction or lunacy. And the survivors' ability to assert their humanity when so many people are trying to squash it? I like to think that is reflective of our reality, too.

Reason to Smile #21: Happy Videos

2011-10-21T13:49:00.004-07:00

Going through a low-level funk at the moment. These three vids cheer me up immensely...

Communique 2011

2011-10-18T11:49:00.002-07:00

Last week we made our second trip west this year to be part of Communique 2011, hosted by the delightful Bad Tempered Zombie (who is not at all bad-tempered, and certainly not a zombie!). I finally got to meet one of my very first blogbuddies, Wandering Coyote, which was awesome. You just never know if "real life" meetings are going to be disastrous or not, but I can say that this experiment was wholly successful. The bloggers and "Blippers" blended with very little effort (not that it's hard to get along with folks who appreciate Radiohead and The Smiths even more than I do).
We had to deke out a bit earlier than the rest of the gang, but spent a night and a day enjoying the gorgeous autumn, the wackiness of downtown Vancouver, and some excellent company. We also had a chance to spend time with my friend Rebecca and her little girl, whom I hadn't seen since they departed Edmonton.
Driving through the Rockies in the fall is almost too gorgeous to describe. Our little Fiat handled the trip beautifully, without guzzling up the gas, and we thoroughly enjoyed Richard's iPhone playlist and the satellite radio. Our hotel rooms were excellent (artwork nothwithstanding), particularly the rustic Best Western in Vailmont. We shut our cable off a month or two ago, so of course I had to subject myself to SNL and gawdawful reality TV just to remind myself why we did that.
All in all, an ideal vacation. I'll post some pics soon. Right now I have to catch up on a few home-again tasks.

Yee-haw

2011-10-02T14:41:00.002-07:00

My Troy Davis post is up at Swallowing the Camel. It's not as detailed as I would like it to be, but I just don't have the time to devote to it right now. I did what I could in a week.

Oh, I'll just do a quick post on Troy Davis...

2011-10-01T01:28:00.005-07:00

...or maybe I'll rip my hair out at the roots and run screaming into traffic.

For the past week, I've been working on a post about the Troy Davis case for Swallowing the Camel. It's stressing me out massively. I just wanted to give people an objective overview of the case that answers some of the most persistent questions and misconceptions that are floating about online, but of course to simplify something you have to know it inside-out, and I was not as familiar with the Davis case as I thought I was. To make matters much worse, court documents and other vital information are scarce.
So if I haven't visited you much on blogs or Facebook recently, or answered an email, that's probably why. I'm hoping to be done with this thing by the end of the weekend.
It turned out to be more work than it will be probably be worth, but live and you shall learn, right?

Princess Diana conspiracy theories make a lot of sense...

2011-09-20T21:15:00.002-07:00

...until you think about them for a while.

The Good & the Bad of Thursday

2011-09-15T14:33:00.004-07:00

The bad:
Zynga, the monster corp that has been lowering the bar on gaming from its inception, has ended Scramble, the only Facebook game besides Scrabble that actually requires brain cells. I've been playing it for over 3 years, had a high score of 375, and was up to the level of "master scrambler" (whatever that means). Bastards.

The good:
Got the bunny booked for our trip to Vancouver for Communique 2011, organized by Barbara (Bad-Tempered Zombie)!

Bonus! The ugly:
Ron Paul.

My Friday

2011-09-09T18:28:00.003-07:00

- Browsed the art gallery, finding nothing of particular interest.
- Returned monstrously huge library books and wondered why I don't read paperbacks like a sensible person.
- Considered cooking, looked at the temp, and grabbed a Subway sammich instead.
- Tried to lure the bunny out from her hiding place with bread crumbs, only to learn that even rabbits find Subway food less than totally appealing.
- Watched part of Synecdoche, New York not exactly because I wanted to, but because it was already in the player.

True Crime Binge

2011-09-07T11:21:00.004-07:00

In a bit of a funk lately, so I've just been reading seedy true crime paperbacks instead of doing anything of any value whatsoever. Here's the first review:

Crazy bitch is crazy.

Like Amelie in reverse (they even have the same haircut!), Dr. Amy Bishop sowed death and discord everywhere she went. But because she was a successful, Harvard-educated researcher and a mother of four, her severe emotional problems were usually politely ignored by colleagues, friends, and superiors (even when they became the brunt of her anger).
In 1986 she "accidentally" killed her teen brother by shooting him in the chest, then attempted to carjack a neighbor and a garage mechanic before being disarmed (reluctantly) by police. Incredibly, no charges were filed against her at the time.
In 1993, right after Bishop was dismissed from a research project, the head of the project received a potentially fatal letter bomb. She and her husband became the prime suspects, but there simply wasn't enough concrete evidence to lay charges.
Last year, Bishop attacked a young mother in a screaming rage at an IHOP for "stealing" the last booster chair. The charges were dismissed on the condition she stay out of trouble.
Then, most famously, Bishop murdered three of her colleagues and injured several others during a staff meeting at the University of Alabama last year. She was enraged that she had been denied tenure.
A Professor's Rage doesn't give us a great deal of insight into Bishop or her family dynamics, but McPhee does ably pinpoint flaws in the justice system that allowed a dangerously unbalanced woman to wreak havoc throughout her life.
It would be interesting to see a more psychological approach to the Bishop case. Why did her mother vouch for her in '86, when it was so painfully obvious that the death of her brother was no accident? How did she go through life without receiving any form of therapy? Why did colleagues tolerate her psychotic hissy fits, without once complaining about her behaviour? Was her desperation to gain tenure tied to guilt over her brother's death, as Bishop indicated in her unpublished novel? Most importantly, how can society help people who are blazingly intelligent yet profoundly disturbed, and prevent tragedies like these?
Hopefully, another author will pick up this bizarre story where McPhee left off.

Reason to Smile #21

2011-09-03T08:07:00.001-07:00

Kawaii food erasers!

What to do on a Friday night?

2011-09-02T16:13:00.003-07:00

1. Finish watching that Soviet miniseries.
2. Pop the last of the stale popcorn kernels and read creepypasta.
3. Go out for a refreshing evening stroll (translation: walk the gauntlet of Friday night bums who "just need a dollar for the bus", even though any Friday night bus driver in his/her right mind will let them ride for free just to avoid debating with their smelly drunk asses)

The WM3 are free

2011-08-23T14:18:00.005-07:00

This is a beautiful day: The day that I remove the "Free the West Memphis Three" posters from this blog and Speak of the Devil. After spending the entirety of their young adulthoods in prison, Jessie Misskelley, Jason Baldwin, and Damien Echols have been freed after a plea deal. Sadly, the deal prevents them from suing for wrongful prosecution or anything else related to their false convictions, and it is incredibly unlikely that West Memphis investigators will ever admit their mistakes and search for the real killer or killers.
Not just three, but six boys' lives were destroyed by the murders of Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers. Now that the West Memphis Three have some justice, let's see some justice for the three boys who lost their lives. Enough time has been wasted.

I'm dismayed by some of the media coverage of this. For instance, ABC News posted a video with the sub-headline "Three men convicted of killing three boys in a satanic cult ritual are set free." Really? The prosecution couldn't present any evidence of a Satanic ritual, because there wasn't any. At all.

Sophie chillin' in the grass & soaking up attention

2011-08-21T22:19:00.001-07:00

Lazy Saturday Thoughts

2011-08-20T15:32:00.002-07:00

Just reading, blogging, and watching pigeons do their thing. I wonder, who decides when it's time to fly around in circles and when it's time to land? Does one guy just take off on his own and the other pigeons think, "Hey, good idea", or is there an authoritarian pigeon in charge who tells everybody else what to do? Are there Nazi pigeons?

Bookwormy

2011-08-10T13:47:00.003-07:00

I'm mostly over my cold, but I'm still in reading mode. I decided to reread Reclaiming History in its entirety, which will take some time. I'm picking up on a lot of things I missed the first time.

Buggy

2011-08-03T14:00:00.003-07:00

"Sick" by Axel-desu

I have one of those miserable summer colds. Time to dig into my stack of library books and unread magazines. I'm still picking my way through JFK and the Unspeakable (see my last post), comparing and contrasting passages with a library copy of Bugliosi's Reclaiming History (which is so heavy you can't really take it out of the house, without coming off as a pretentious my-book-is-bigger-than-your-book jerk).
I've also been digging into some strange witchcraft cases: The Timble Witches, the Paisley Witches (a tragic case - two young brothers went to the gallows clutching each other's hands).

What I'm Reading

2011-07-24T23:00:00.005-07:00

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass

So I'm reading this book on the JFK assassination "cover-up" just for the hell of it, since Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History answered all my questions already.
For the record, I'm 99% convinced that Oswald acted on his own. The 1% consists of the possibility that CIA and/or Mafia elements were involved. But the shots definitely came from Oswald, and there's nothing magical about the "magic bullet". Before you spam me with "BUT WHAT ABOUT....?" comments, please do yourself a ginormous favour and go to your library and get a copy of Reclaiming History. Read all of it - no skimming! - then come back and talk to me. I'm serious. It's an important book and I think anyone seriously interested in JFK should read it. I was extremely annoyed when my local bookstore told me it's "ancient by publishing standards" (2007) and they couldn't possibly be bothered to order a copy for me.

Douglass's thesis is that a militantly anti-Castro cabal within the CIA arranged for JFK to be killed. Not so much because of the Bay of Pigs disaster, but because he was secretly angling for peace with the Soviet Union and Cuba.
He apparently brings some new evidence to the table, but I haven't gotten to that yet. Right now it's the same old stuff, like Rose Cheramie. Not to insult the lady's memory or anything, but when people use the term "coked-out whore", they're talking about someone like Rose Cheramie. She was thrown out of a Louisiana bar by one of her pimps, staggered into the road, and was hit by a car. As a police officer was driving her to a state hospital for rehab, she blurted something like, "Me and my friends are gonna go to Dallas, get some heroin, pick up my baby, and kill Kennedy." She wasn't all distraught about it, like in Oliver Stone's JFK. According to Douglass, the bar owner identified her two pimps as guys with CIA affiliations, but I'll have to check into that before I accept it at face value. I remember how excited I got when a dude named Shane O'Sullivan told the BBC he had identified three CIA agents in photos taken at the Ambassador Hotel the night RFK was killed, only to find out that one of the CIA agents (Gordon Campbell) had died years earlier.

Admittedly, I still don't know quite what to make of the E. Howard Hunt deathbed confession. I tend to think he might have been pulling one last epic prank, or was hoping to make some money from it. Or maybe he was senile and his son coached him on what to say.

B:C. Vacation: Bigfoot & Synchronicity

2011-07-12T19:50:00.012-07:00

Whew, that was the longest vacation ever!

Okay, not really. We only went to the coast for a week, and I've been sloughing off blog-wise ever since. Unless you count my series on "former Satanists" at Swallowing the Camel.

Anyway, thought I'd share a few pics of our trip to lovely Prince Rupert, B.C. My favourite memento is this card Richard found in the men's room at a rest stop:

A bizarre thing happened on the way home. I was reading Robert Graves' book The White Goddess, which deals with Celtic lore and the Arthurian legends, when we pulled into an average-looking rest stop. It had one of those tourist cairns, marking the spot of something-or-other. I usually ignore them if they're in an unremarkable spot like this one, but for some reason I felt compelled to get out of the car and read the plaque on the cairn. It turned out this cairn contained a stone from castle Tintagel, rumoured birthplace of King Arthur...

On Vacation!

2011-05-29T23:00:00.001-07:00

I'll be gone for about a week.

Reason to Smile #20

2011-05-18T13:12:00.000-07:00

DOMO!!

Reason to Smile #19

2011-05-16T13:39:00.002-07:00

The goose who hangs out by our car for no apparent reason.

Reason to Smile #18

2011-05-15T14:01:00.003-07:00

A cheer-me-up cup!

This does not make me feel better

2011-05-15T11:03:00.004-07:00

The stomach issues have improved, but a bout of depression threatens to bring them back. I have to be extraordinarily careful about how and when and what I eat (which excludes whole grains, sugar, dairy, raw veggies, coffee, non-herbal tea, and just about everything else I normally consume).

On this beautiful Sunday, Richard is going to a Palestinian rally. I will not be attending, because while I'm sympathetic to Palestinians and disapprove of some Israeli actions against them, I am not anti-Israel. Nor am I anti-Palestine. To be at a rally for either side would be an exercise in frustration for me.

What I would like to do today is go to comic book shops and browse through anime DVDs. Does that make me a total asshole? Eschewing noble, important causes for...um...weird Japanese entertainment? I suppose it does.

I am SME's a**hole stomach

2011-05-11T13:46:00.000-07:00

My stomach has been a complete jerk for the past week and a half. It won't accept any dairy, it flat-out rejects sugar, and it despises my multigrain bread. Coffee? Forget about it. So it's been an *exciting* week of simple carbs, almonds, oranges, and fennel tea. I hate fennel.

You know what, stomach? I'm having half a cup of coffee with creamer. Deal with it.

What I Have Learned from My Mom

2011-05-08T03:37:00.007-07:00

Okay, so maybe some of those lessons didn't take very well. But we did grasp one very important lesson: How to be ourselves!

Happy Mother's Day! I love you!

Springtime for Edmonton: Royal weddings, family visits, and hippie death threats

2011-05-06T13:06:00.016-07:00

Sophie's first walk of the spring

Mother of gawd, what a crazy spring it's been so far. Canadians lived through a solid week of 24/7 royal wedding coverage and a federal election, closely followed by 24/7 coverage of bin Laden's death. That's a trippy combo. One minute it's "What kind of shoes will the guests be wearing?" or "Why is Ignatieff even here? Is this a joke?", and the next it's "We might be showing you some photos of a double-gunshot head wound, if the government will let us."

But in between, we had a lovely visit with Richard's parents. His dad wanted to see as many grandkids as possible in celebration of his 80th birthday, so they hopped a cross-country train and made a dizzying circuit: Victoria, Edmonton, Yellowknife, back to Edmonton, then back to Ontario. They weren't thrilled about squeezing into what Richard's son David calls our "Mr. Bean car", but other than that we all had a fine time. We saw the Emily Carr exhibit, relished the first spate of summery weather, and enjoyed some delicious meals.

Me and Richard's parents at the art gallery (I'm trying to figure out why there's track lighting 50 feet above the floor)

Wait, I forgot about the closet. While Richard was fetching his parents from Jasper, I stayed behind with the bunny and tried to stash the clutter that Richard has slowly been accumulating all winter. Papers, activist paraphernalia, gadgets, and whatnot. I thought it would all fit neatly into the bedroom closet, but I was so wrong. I swear it was like Fibber McGee in reverse. Finally, I hauled everything out of the closet just to make room for the clutter. I was finding stuff I couldn't even identify, stuff I didn't know Richard still had, and stuff we clearly don't need. I mean, an apple peeler? In the past 10 years, I have made exactly one apple pie. And that was when we lived in a building that had an apple tree in the yard.
After stuffing and unstuffing and restuffing the closet every which way, I gave up in total frustration and just piled the clutter on the bed for Richard to sort. Never again, I tell you, never again!

Dude would still be alive if he'd hidden in Richard's clutter.

Then there were the hippie death threats.

On 4/20, Richard stopped by a cannabis rally to give his pot activist buddies a bit of good news: An NDP candidate had said, on the record, that he supports legalization. Richard isn't a cannabis aficionado, himself, but over the years has forged ties with pot activists who support peace/anti-war efforts and the 9/11 Truth movement.

Now as you can imagine, 4/20 rallies tend to be casual affairs. This particular one had a small stage-like setup, but no PA system and no schedule. Through the crowd, Richard spotted a fellow he has encountered many times in the past few years, a medical marijuana activist who was once head of a provincial Marijuana Party. We'll call him Steve.

Steve looks and sounds like your stereotypical granola-lovin', tree-huggin' socialist, and in some respects he is. He claims to be a peacenik and an admirer of Gandhi.

Artist's crappy rendering of "Steve"

Anyway, back to 4/20. Richard saw Steve standing on the edge of the stage, hollering something. Steve didn't seem to be addressing the wandering, distracted crowd, though he later insisted he was making a VERY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT.
Richard wandered over to the stage and called out something like, "Steve! Hey, Steve! I have some good news!"
Steve didn't respond, but a few seconds later he hopped off the platform, stalked directly up to Richard, and tossed a sheet of paper in his face. He growled something along the lines of, "Don't you ever do that to me again. I was making a VERY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT." Then he stomped away without a word of explanation.

Richard told me about this later in the day. I said, "Well, you shouldn't have interrupted someone who was on a stage. That was kinda douchey."
He said, "I didn't even know he was making an announcement. I thought he was just yelling at somebody." Undoubtedly, he would have apologized to Steve the next time he ran into him. It was one of those minor misunderstandings that happens all the time.

Fifteen hours later, we received an e-mailed death threat from Steve. I won't repeat 98% of it here, but the gist was that Richard had deliberately interfered with a VERY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT, and in so doing had "dishonored" Steve. One line was "Notice the abundance of scars on my knuckles. You will keep your f***ing mouth shut whenever I speak" (emphasis in original). Another was "I'll wipe your blood up with your family." Another was "Stay the f*** out of this visionary genius's way or you'll get walked on." You get the drift. It was a rambling, paranoid, two-page screed about all the ways and means and desires Steve has to inflict violence on those who disrespect him. You know, like Gandhi.

This letter was followed by a spate of other bizarre emails and messages, like, "The dishonoring stands until you honor me again." We also had two close encounters with Steve. He walked within an inch of my face at a Jack Layton rally, and two days later he strolled past us in the city centre with a creepy, faux-friendly grin on his face. It's hard to take a fat epileptic hippie as a serious threat, but we'll definitely have to keep an eye on this guy.

So that's my spring. What will summer bring?

Anime Review: Red Garden

2011-04-20T02:09:00.021-07:00

It's a little unfair to review a series after watching just 7 episodes, but Red Garden is (so far) one of the most disappointing anime series I have ever seen, and I feel compelled to share that with the world before you waste a precious second of your life on it. Once you start watching, of course, you have to finish just to find out what happens. [NOTE: I've updated this review, so disregard that.]

To be judgy-wudgy for a moment, I don't think it's terribly difficult to put together a decent anime horror series (aside from the animating). You come up with a surreal and bizarre and horrifying scenario, throw a motley pack of teenagers into it, add some kawaii moments to leaven the bloodletting a bit, and let the magic happen. As long as you keep the tension going and the characters strong, you can't really screw this up.

So, what went wrong with Red Garden?

Let's start with the title sequence. I'm something of a connoisseur of these things, my favourites being Serial Experiments Lain, Paranoia Agent, and the first series of When They Cry. But essentially any opening is fine with me, so long as it's a mesmerizing blend of music and imagery. Sadly for me, the opening credits of Red Garden are a blend of girly psychedelic flowers, an '80s commercial for ladies' razors, and peppy disco-funk Muzac. It's like the Sex & the City credits in some alternate cartoon universe full of puppies and rainbows. How very appropriate for a Gothic horror series.
The end sequence is worse. We'll get to that later.

The Premise
So. Um. You're a teenage girl living in New York City. You go to a posh private school and live in an apartment that's bigger than some countries. One day you wake up feeling really weird. You can't remember what you did the night before, but you're pretty sure it involved being kidnapped, drugged, taken to a mysterious mansion, then returned to your bed by a group of strangers. At school, you learn that a classmate has been found dead in the woods. She apparently committed suicide, like four other girls who died recently.

After that day, you start to see clouds of red butterflies hovering over your head late at night and you feel compelled to go to an abandoned alley. There, you run into several girls from school who also see the butterflies. Then a creepy pair of adult siblings, Lula and J.C., show up and tell you that in order to survive, you must fight a man in a suit who acts like a dog. Or maybe it's a dog that looks like a man in a suit.

He's an insurance adjuster.

Without any weapons, you and the other girls manage to kick this guy's ass night after night. Or maybe it's a bunch of different guys who all look the same. Not really clear on that.
You don't tell anyone about the butterflies or Mr. Cujo. You don't say, "Hey, screw you, butterflies," and go home. You just keep fighting night after night after night.

The part of Lula is played by James Woods.

One night, Lula takes you back to that mansion and shows you a room full of caskets. Inside one of them is your own body, looking a little peaked but otherwise OK. You're not putrefied or anything. The other girls' bodies are in the other caskets. Lula tells you that the bodies you and your friends are currently occupying are new bodies given to you on the night you were drugged and abducted. But if you fight Old Yeller successfully every night, you might get your old body back. That's really important to you, even though your "new" body doesn't seem to be any different from the old one. The only problem is, you're really thirsty all the time. You develop a taste for sucking on lemons.

Oh, and sometimes you break into these melancholy, off-key songs for no reason at all. And then the other girls join in, and all of you waste five minutes of my life on this shit.
And in the end credits, you and Lula and the rest of the girls headbang to a freaking awful song that starts out "Rock rock the LMC", which turns out to be the initials of some awful band. This chick makes you fight dog-men or man-dogs with sticks, and you ... party with her? WTF, girls?

But hey, you still live in New York and your families are still super-gazillionaires. At least, you would live in New York if any of the animators had ever been to New York. Or looked at pictures of New York. Or watched movies set in New York. You're actually living in Japan and pretending you live in New York, basically.

Your school is dominated by a battalion of female hall monitors in bizarre Victorian uniforms, collectively known as Grace. Grace gives you tickets for being late to class, disrespecting Grace, having poorly manicured nails, and just about anything else. There doesn't seem to be any point to this. At all. Yet one of you girls, Kate, is proud of her Grace membership and doesn't want to be kicked out. Which is unfortunate, because she's very tired from secretly battling dog-men or man-dogs all the time.
I'm pretty sure that Kate's best friend is somehow related to Moaning Martle. Too bad you don't all go to the same school.
Still, Kate is at least smart enough to follow Lula and J.C. to find out more about this whole butterfly-beckoning, body-replacement, dog-fighting thing. But she's too timid to ask any serious questions, and the whole encounter is completely wasted.

The "Characters"

The other girls are just as boring as Kate. There's Rachel, a poodle-haired hipster who's spoiled, but not in an interesting, bitchy way. There's Rose, a sweet kid who looks after her younger siblings a lot. There's a butch chick named Claire who works at a diner.

Then there's Herve. Who the hell is Herve? Dunno. He just shows up in scenes unconnected to any others, looking very Scandinavian and singing a sad song about his dead mother, who suffered a congenital disorder that turned her into that kid from The Exorcist. This probably has some link to the man-dog/dog-man, but instead of exploring that, Herve spends all his time and all his family's money trying to find a cure for his young nieces. These two creepy-looking tots are kept in what appears to be a giant hamster cage decorated like Romper Room.

So that's the set-up. Gawd, I hope this gets better.

Herve's nieces. I think this is what would have happened if Josef Fritzl had a better job.

UPDATE: Happily, Red Garden does get better. The second half of the series is song-free, character-oriented, and reasonably compelling. Turns out the girls are caught up in an age-old battle between two "clans", not unlike the one in Wild Palms. One clan is cursed with Cujo disease and needs some new blood. The other clan desperately requires the services of the Dog Whisperer, but has to settle for teenage girls. That guy is really busy.

We finally learn more about the girls' weaknesses, fears, and desires. Rachel's nastiness and vulnerability come out as she realizes her old life is over. Herve, the caring brother and uncle, begins to look pretty twisted; he starts "dating" shy little Kate just to mess with her head. The head of Grace knows more about the feud and Kate's role in it than Kate does. In short, things get interesting.

The "Rock rock the LMC" mess is replaced by an edgy J-pop tune with a delightfully bizarre animation of reflections on a curved, rotating surface that turns out to be a spinning teacup. Unfortunately, though, the title sequence remains the same.

True Confession:

2011-04-11T15:34:00.001-07:00

I like Polyphonic Spree.

Non-Lucid Lightbulb Moments

2011-04-07T14:39:00.005-07:00

I often come up with my best ideas and the solutions to minor-but-sticky problems just as I'm drifting off to sleep. The trick is dredging them up again in the morning.

Last night, my half-conscious brain popped out the following half-brilliant notions:

You do not have to write a 320-page first draft of a novel. Start out with a novella-sized draft and expand it. If Chuck Palahniuk can pass off longish short stories as actual novels, then there's sure as hell nothing wrong with a thin first draft. In fact, expanding a thin first draft is probably easier than weeding out a monstrous diarrhea-of-the-word-processor draft.
I want to open up a new YouTube channel solely for my Sims "films", but couldn't figure out how to swing this, since I already have all my email accounts attached to YouTube accounts. Duh. There are a like a million obscure email services out there, just use one of those.
Sometimes, half an hour at the gym is perfectly OK. Just go.
Always, always, always take your camera everywhere. You just never know what beauties, horrors, and curiosities you might find.

Things I Do Not Want

2011-03-31T19:30:00.005-07:00

An ass shelf

This is simply unhygienic...

Weird things found in the bike room of our building

2011-03-25T12:49:00.002-07:00

SME's Bizarre Book of the Month: The Satan Seller by Mike Warnke

2011-03-18T13:12:00.006-07:00

When you see this kind of book at a garage sale or in the discount bin at a used bookstore, you might wonder, "Who reads this shit?".
Well, I do.
But I have my reasons. This particular book is key to the anti-occult paranoia and fearmongering that swept America in the '70s, '80s, and early '90s. In its mildest manifestations, this hysteria simply led to a few parents forbidding their children to watch the Smurfs because Papa Smurf was some kind of little blue Satanic warlock or whatever. In its worst manifestations, entire communities were ravaged by false accusations of child abuse and ritual murder, and people went to jail for a very long time. The town of Gilmer, Texas, offers just one chilling example.

And it all started with a relatively small group of Christians who were concerned about '60s New Age fads, heavy metal music, and drugs. For the first time, Christian hegemony seemed to be threatened in the United States of America. Who would step forward to staunch the rising tide of ouiija boards, Yoga classes, and fantasy role-playing games? Who would lead America's jaded youth back into the wholesome realm of Stryper and Bible school exorcisms?

Mike Warnke, that's who. Because he'd been there. He'd seen it all. Back in the mid-'60s, this Catholic California boy had been hand-picked by Satanists and lured into a secret, nation-wide witchcraft coven with all-you-can-eat drugs, sex, and magic. Within a year, he was Master Counselor of the coven, overseeing gang rapes and chopping off fingers. He smuggled enough pot, mescaline, and peyote into California to keep Timothy Leary and Bill Burroughs supplied for a year. He was one bad-ass Satanic mofo, and he had the bullet scars to prove it. Well, sort of. No one has actually seen his bullet scars.

Anyway, all this changed when Mike Warnke, Boy Satanist, joined the Navy.

No, he didn't become gay. He became a Christian. Someone left a Bible lying around in the Navy barracks, and Mr. Hardcore Satanist was transformed after just one peep at it. Talk about an easy convert.

From that day on, Mike Warnke did everything he could to convince the world that Satanists and witches are evil drug fiends in the sway of demons. He knew. He'd been there. He even suspected the Satanists were just one level of the Illuminati, that elusive uber-organization that controls the world:

"A world-wide, super secret control group with perhaps as few as a very dozen at the top...with key men controlling governments, economies, armies, food supplies...pulling the strings on every major international event...and not just now, but for generations, centuries, since the beginning of civilization...manipulating men by their egos and their appetites, rewarding and depriving, enraging and pacifying, raising up first one side and then the other, maintaining a balance of frustration, bitterness, and despair?" (p. 93, ellipses in original)

He heard other Satanists talking about demons that controlled the worst dictators of history: Nero, Hitler, Stalin. A light went on in his head, showing him that demonically inspired Satanists and their human puppets were the force behind international finance, politics, war, industry, and everything else.

"I laughed, a little hysterically, but the light show wouldn't shut off. So that was how it was done! The global-conspiracy buffs were right, after all. Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan B. Sirhan - they were the pawns of a much bigger plot."

Keep in mind that Warnke was supposedly having this epiphany in 1965 or '66, before anyone had ever heard of Ray and Sirhan.

Warnke promptly left the Navy, got married to a solid Christian gal, and started his own ministry. He published this book in 1973. Then he formed his own special niche as a Christian stand-up comedian, blending comedy routines with his Satanic testimony and some good old-fashioned preaching. Yes, it's every bit as awful as it sounds. But evangelical and Charismatic Christians loved it; Warnke cranked out album after album.

Then things got a little wonky. Shortly after entering an Oklahoma Bible college in '74, Warnke began boinking a fellow student named Carol. They ran off together to live in Nashville the following year, leaving Mrs. Warnke and her two sons to figure out WTF went wrong.

Warnke's days in Christian stand-up and ministry were far from over, though. For the next decade and a half, he preached and guffawed and elbow-rubbed his way to the top of the fundamentalist pile. He went through three wives and a few changes of address, but he made it. At the end of the '80s, his ministry was receiving over $1 annually in donations. In 1985, 20/20 interviewed him as an "occult expert" for their show on devil worship.

And that's when things finally went wrong for him. Some writers at the Christian magazine Cornerstone had been observing his goings-on for quite some time, and they were more than a little suspicious about the "Satanic high priest" story that launched Warnke into Christian stardom.
Jon Trott and Mike Hertenstein interviewed Warnke's family members, ex-girlfriends, college friends, and early associates, and the story they pieced together had nothing to do with Satanism. It turned out that Mike Warnke had been a squeaky-clean Christian long before he joined the Navy. His high school and college buddies had never seen him take a drag, much less move hundreds of kilos into the Inland Empire at the behest of Satanic kingpins. While Mike "Judas" Warnke was supposedly lopping off the fingers of devil-worshipers and sipping blood from a chalice, the real Mike Warnke was bowling and sharing hot fudge sundaes with his Catholic girlfriend. Trott and Hertenstein published their findings in '92.

Warnke responded to the Cornerstone allegations the way most preachers respond to scandal: He lied his ass off and accused everyone but Christ himself of being aligned against him.
Later, he still insisted that he had been a Satanic high priest in '66, but conceded his coven was a wee bit smaller than The Satan Seller indicated. Instead of 1500 members, it had maybe 13. But other than that, the book was totally true!

Warnke's ministry took a bit of a shit-kicking for a few years, but in the grand tradition of American preacher scandals, he was rehabilitated and welcomed back into the arms of the Christian community. The born again are born again.
His fellow preachers skirt around the whole Satanic thing these days, focusing instead on his trials and triumphs as a temporary Christian pariah. During Warnke's appearance on The New Jim Bakker Show, Bakker asked, "Say, weren't you into Satanism or something?".

For the morbidly curious or the very-very bored, here's the website of Warnke's current ministry, which he runs with Wife #4.

St. P Day

2011-03-17T12:49:00.002-07:00

With apologies to any Irish readers, today is not a big deal for me. I'm not very Irish, my sweetie is "black Irish", I don't like beer, and frankly leprachauns and that guy who killed a lot of snakes are a bit freaky.

Witches Who Switched and Former Satanists

2011-03-03T18:07:00.012-07:00

Harmless nuttery, or dangerous smear campaign?

One minor but fascinating aspect of modern fundamentalist Christian culture are the testimonies offered by "former Satanists", "witches who switched", and born-again New Agers. For decades, these stories of miraculous conversion were passed reverently from hand to hand via audio recordings made in church basements, grainy VHS tapes shot from the back rows of churches, fireside tales told at Bible camps, and pamphlets Xeroxed by church secretaries. The simple but powerful message imparted by these testimonies is that if God can save a devil-worshiper, He can (and will) save anyone. He'll snatch you into His arms even as you kneel at a Satanic altar, dripping with the blood of a freshly sacrificed virgin. Before you even know what's happened, you're wearing sweater vests and homeschooling your kids so they won't have to learn about dinosaurs. It's like Extreme Home Makeover: Jesus Edition.

It seems to have started with Doreen Irvine. In the late '60s, this mundane-looking English spinster revealed that she had once been "Queen of the Black Witches of Europe", presiding over thousands of Satanic witches. Her master "Diablos" [sic] granted her powers to levitate, render herself invisible, kill birds in midair just by looking at them, and walk through roaring bonfires without so much as a blister.
However, being Queen of the Black Witches brought absolutely no material benefits to Doreen. She continued to work as a hooker and a stripper until her conversion in 1964. That's quite unusual, because in most of these testimonies the Devil bestows enormous wealth and influence on his minions. Naturally, they renounce all the goodies after being saved, which makes the testimonies even more powerful.
Anyway, Doreen's story was published in 1973 as From Witchraft to Christ, and since that time she has been revered in fundie circles as The Witch Who Switched. She gave her testimony on 100 Huntley Street, appeared in Caryl Matrisciana's documentary Devil Worship: The Rise of Satanism, and became the UK rep for Campus Crusade for Christ.

It didn't take long for others to follow in Doreen Irvine's cloven footsteps. And with each testimony that emerged from a Christian publishing house or the office of a recovered-memory therapist, the details got darker and weirder. Irvine's cult, which supposedly encompassed the whole of Western Europe, took part in nothing hinkier than some rooster sacrifice and the occasional bisexual orgy (who doesn't, amirite?). But the cults described by Satanist-turned-Christian-comedian Mike Warnke in his 1973 book The Satan Seller routinely sacrificed unwilling human victims. And the African megacult depicted in Emmanuel Eni's 1987 tract Delivered from the Powers of Darkness pretty much defies description. Eni's story contains more blood, guts, and WTFery than a horrorcore convention.

Yet not one born again Satanist has been charged with being an accessory to murder, and no one in their faith communities is concerned about that. While this speaks to the beauty of forgiveness and redemption, it would sure as hell make me feel queasy on Sunday mornings. Didn't that guy in the third pew eat babies and rape corpses a few years ago? Didn't that lady stab somebody with a crucifix while screwing a goat? And now I'm supposed to eat cookies and drink coffee with them?
Fortunately, as most of us can plainly see, these monstrous cults never actually existed. Whether they were brewed up in the stew of troubled minds or stitched together from B movies seen on late-night TV, we may never know - but we do know there is no empirical evidence for the existence of widespread, homicidal Satanic sects of the sort described by Irvine, Warnke, and Eni. In fact, Warnke's autobiography was roundly debunked by other Christians.
The value of ex-Satanists' testimonies lies not in their truthfulness, but in the way they make you feel. Sure, Mike Warnke wasn't literally a Satanist, but didn't his epic tale of conversion to Christianity give you a ton of warm fuzzies? Well, then, it's good enough for God. Let's not let truth get in the way of Truth, folks.

This tradition carries on today. Take, for instance, the testimony of Mike Leehan (below). It's quite typical of ex-Satanist testimonies. We don't know where Mike Leehan resides, where he grew up, or which Satanic group he joined. He vaguely mentions sacrifices, bloodletting, and Satanists' unquenchable thirst for "power" (in these testimonies, explanations of Satanic beliefs rarely go beyond "power"). Then he tells us the Devil once commanded him to shoot the pastor who is filming the testimony. Testimonials are often custom-tailored to appeal to a specific audience in this way, perhaps unintentionally or perhaps with great guile. For instance, spiritualist-cum-Adventist Roger Morneau claimed in his testimony that his high priest frequently spoke of the sanctity of the Sunday Sabbath. Why? Because Seventh Day Adventism, with its Saturday Sabbath, was deemed as Satan's greatest enemy.

It would be nice if we could just relegate all these ghoulish, implausible stories to the netherworld of the born-again fringe and forget all about them, but these testimonials unfortunately have a real-world impact on Pagans, Wiccans, Satanists, and other faith communities. Thanks to Doreen Irvine and her successors, millions of Christians believe that witches and Satanists abduct, torture, and sacrifice unwilling victims (including infants and children); that witches and Satanists target Christian leaders for death; that Satanists and witches infiltrate churches to subvert believers; etc. The dissemination of unsubstantiated testimonies like Michael Leehan's amounts to a smear campaign against millions of law-abiding Pagans, Satanists, and Wiccans. This smear campaign undermines their freedom of religion, their freedom of expression, sometimes even their careers or their standing in their communities (look at the endless ordeals of Michael Aquino for a chilling example). In many ways, the anti-Satanic testimonials of today differ little from the ancient Jewish blood libel that refuses to die among religious supremacists and anti-Semites. The cult stories are just as groundless, just as prejudicial, just as damaging as tales of Jewish ritual murder. In accepting the testimonials as either factual accounts or harmless fabrications, we are helping to brand unknown Satanists and witches as criminals without a fair hearing.
The consequences can be brutal. In many parts of the world, witchcraft hysteria has resulted in the torture, internment, and murder of suspected "witches". In Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana, elderly women and children are confined to gulag-like "witch camps". In Papua New Guinea, an unknown number of women and girls have been mutilated, tortured, and killed by their neighbors because they were supposedly possessed by the spirits of evil witches. These panics are sparked and fostered, in part, by fundamentalist teachings that sanction the expulsion and/or mistreatment of "witches" as an act of spiritual warfare.

I'm sorry, Mr. Leehan, but until you produce more evidence of your involvement in "Satanic" crimes, I'll have to view you as part of the problem.

More information:

- Doreen Irvine's testimony (YouTube)
- Emmanuel Eni's "Delivered from the Powers of Darkness"
- Cornerstone magazine's series on Mike Warnke

Awful, Awful Books Part II

2011-02-11T15:19:00.009-07:00

Like The Alienist and The List of 7, The Interpretation of Murder takes a famous personage and plops him into the centre of a gruesome murder mystery for our enjoyment. Sadly, it just doesn't work this time.
Sigmund Freud, while on his famous first-and-only trip to America, is pulled into a series of crimes involving New York society girls. He assigns the fictional protagonist, Dr. Stratham Younger, to psychoanalyze a victim whose hysterical amnesia hides the identity of a killer. Meanwhile, Freud's disciples gossip and bicker among themselves like PMSing schoolgirls.

The most serious flaw in The Interpretation of Murder is that Jed Rubenfeld makes his admiration of Freud and his hatred of Jung painfully obvious. The Jung of this novel is borderline insane; sexually insatiable, erratic, duplicitous, sadistic, joyless, perhaps delusional. Freud, on the other hand, is paternally patient and incomparably brilliant. This simplistic approach to two flawed yet fascinating men mars just about every paragraph of the novel. Some of the villains - real people who in no way resemble the characters created by Rubenfeld - were notable Jungians.
We get it, Mr. Rubenfeld: You really, really like Freud.

The entire premise of the novel is flawed. Rubenfeld is attempting to answer the question "Why did Freud hate America so much?", and he goes to great creative lengths to craft a solution. But anyone familiar with Freud will tell you that his reasons for despising the U.S. were mundane: He didn't like the "dominance" of American women, the food gave him indigestion, his hosts weren't as worshipful as he expected them to be. Quite simply, America wasn't Vienna. It lacked the over-polished manners and quaint traditions of Viennese society, the crystal bubble in which Freud had spent most of his life.
In other words, Freud wasn't actually subjected to any "savagery" during his visit; his lifelong disdain for Americans stemmed from his own issues.

There are a few scenes that can't fail to impress, particularly one in which a pneumatic caisson is used very creatively by a villain, but the rest of the story is padded with Jung-bashing, quasi-philosophical musings gleaned from Freud biographies, and extraneous historical detail about New York architecture. And like any true Freudian, Rubenfeld can't seem to prevent a creeping misogyny from saturating his story. There are exactly two major female characters, and both are profoundly disturbed.

Awful, Awful Books Part I

2011-02-11T14:28:00.005-07:00

I read this as part of my research into witch hunts and Satanic Panic, as diabolic feasts involving babies and whatnot are such a huge part of myths of the sabbat and devil-worship. I wanted to know more about actual religious cannibalism, and this book seemed like a decent place to start, since Carole Travis-Henikoff is a paleoanthropologist with a deep interest in the subject (according to the intro, she spent 7 years researching it). But Dinner with a Cannibal was not helpful. It's focused heavily on endocannibalism (funerary cannibalism), but worse yet it's full of digressions and lengthy anecdotes and events that didn't actually happen. For instance, Travis-Henikoff tells us that in 1933, the Russian ship Dzhurma was trapped in ice while ferrying 12,000 prisoners to a slave labor colony in Siberia. The guards survived by cannibalizing the prisoners.
This didn't happen. In his 2003 book Stalin's Slave Ships, Martin J. Bollinger explains that Dzhurma wasn't even in commission until 1935, and no other passenger ship experienced such a disaster. Note that Dinner with a Cannibal came out in 2008.
Travis-Henikoff also uncritically accepts the fantasies of Marco Polo, the highly questionable revelations in Zheng Yu's Scarlet Memorial, and dodgy British accounts of leopard societies. All in all, though it contains a few interesting tidbits, this book is a waste of time and paper.

World's Shortest Movie Review: The Rite

2011-02-02T15:54:00.001-07:00

This movie sucks cocks in hell.

SME's Bizarre Book of the Month: Occult ABC

2011-01-28T15:37:00.014-07:00

In the world of anti-occult zealotry, Dr. Kurt Koch is something of a legend. A Lutheran pastor and doctor of theology in Germany, he traveled the world addressing churches of nearly every denomination for over half a century, spreading his peculiar brand of superstitious crapola. He claimed to have counseled about 20,000 people by the late '70s.

I was *lucky* enough to score a copy of his most famous book, Occult ABC, at my local secondhand bookshop.

While it's hard not to admire Koch's deep religious devotion, it's pretty easy to hate this book. Originally published in 1978, it reads like it was written in the early '50s and consists almost entirely of anecdotes - mostly secondhand stories told by missionaries and pastors. You know the kind: "You wouldn't believe what these savages are doing!" Koch even includes the old legend of the Hippie Babysitter and the Roasted Baby, substituting devil worshippers for the hippie. He also promotes the b.s. stories of "former Satanists" like Doreen Irvine and Mike Warnke. A big part of the reason Koch falls for this blarney is explained on p. 229: "When people have been convicted of sin by the Holy Spirit and have received Jesus Christ as their Lord, they generally speak the truth."

As you've probably guessed, damn near everything that doesn't involve Bible-reading and praying to Jesus is "occult" in Koch's eyes. He devotes sections to acupuncture, homosexuality, porn, yoga, meditation, "descent from the ape", Freemasonry, and of course rock music. And Koch believes that any degree of occult influence can afflict multiple generations (the "sins of the father"), causing everything from skin diseases to demonic possession.

The wisdom Koch dispenses is often wildly contradictory. For instance, he maintains that all precognitive powers come from Satan, yet implies several times that it can be 100% accurate and that only a fool would ignore a warning from a psychic.
He stresses that some mental illnesses have natural causes and can be treated by psychiatry, while others are occult in origin and must be treated spiritually. But then he states that occult involvement isn't the cause of mental illness; it just paves the way for mental illness to develop.
He describes many cases in which occultists changed their evil ways because a spouse or parent prayed for their salvation for years. Later, he tells us never to pray for occultists unless they have explicitly expressed a desire to change, because it simply won't work.

Some of his examples are just plain creepy. Koch boasts that Mirin Dajo died because some Christians prayed for his sword-piercing trick to fail onstage, and it did. (Actually, it didn't. Dajo died after slipping into a coma, and he was not performing at the time.)
In another example, Koch writes of a man who foolishly yoked himself to a non-Christian wife and spent the rest of his life regretting it. His poor son-in-law got so tired of the woman's nagging that he boxed her ears until she shut up. The lesson seems to be that it's A-OK to smack your mother-in-law around if she's a non-Christian.
Once, when a woman with a nasty skin disease consulted him, Koch asked her "how she ever got married in such a condition." Nice.
Then there was the little girl who become "dreadfully depraved" after being treated by a nature healer. "At the age of ten she seduced a married man - not vice versa." Where have I heard that before? Oh, right, from child molesters.

Here are just a few choice bits from Occult ABC:

Christian Scientists ganged up to psychically murder a man who left the church, giving him a skin disease that caused him to shed his skin "like a snake."
Sorcerors in East Timor engage in "criminal activity" by projecting parts of their spirits into owls, which fly to the homes of enemies to steal pieces of the enemies' livers.
After signing a pact with the Devil, a German woman become possessed and was repeatedly squished by a giant, invisible snake. Koch recorded about 100 cases of such blood pacts, and states that in the previous 20 years, "tens of thousands of young people have signed their souls to the Devil in their own blood." As with every other statistic in the book, we have no idea where he got these numbers.
Elves are real.
All hypnosis is dangerous, even stage hypnosis. If you allow yourself to be hypnotized by one, you may become a drunk like this one chick in Argentina. Stage hypnotists are criminals.
If you go to an iridologist, you might become a wife-beating drunk like this one dude.
If an occultist becomes a Christian, the Devil will be pissed off. So you might become a wife-beater anyway, like this other dude.
UFOs are heralds of the Antichrist.
Gospel singer Henry Drummond, before becoming a Christian, could hypnotize people at a distance of 50 miles.
A woman with legs of unequal length went to a "spiritist healer" for healing, and the shorter leg magically grew. But when she became a Christian, it shrank.
You must never collect bric-a-brac from non-Christian cultures. "A minister's wife on Prince Edward Island had collected a whole table-full of figures of gods and cultic objects from the mission field. Today she is in a mental institution."
About 50% of the compulsive neurotics Koch counseled had connections with spiritism or magic in their backgrounds, hence these things cause compulsive neuroses.
Uri Geller is really psychic, and everyone who found their cutlery bent after one of his TV broadcasts had some psychic ability, as well. "Only the ignorant make fun of these things."
"Voodoo" practitioners drink blood and sacrifice children.
In his chapter on Freemasonry, Koch writes that "French historians like Abbe Barnuel maintain that the French Revolution" was engineered by Masons. First of all, it's Barruel. Secondly, he was not a historian. He was a conspiranoid priest who later rewrote his anti-Catholic thesis, shifting blame to the Jews.
Koch takes the view that porn is a Communist device to weaken the morals of Westerners. Perversion for Profit, anyone?
Anonymous psychiatrist: "The ouija board is filling our pyschiatric clinics in New York."
Koch on the manufacturers of ouija boards: "If the American government knew how much evil this one firm in Massassachusetts has brought on the American people, they would prohibit the production of these devilish boards at once."
Some Africans can turn themselves into leopards.
"I go to the dentist when it is necessary. But I always pray when I go, for dental treatment can last six months and cause much pain."
"Undoubtedly many diseases can be diagnosed by examination of the blood. I have had a blood test myself."
In the Arctic, archaeologists found bones that were said to be 20,000 years old. "I am somewhat skeptical about this claim."
At a Black Mass in West Germany, the Satanists placed bottles of schnapps on their altar. LOL.
On astrology: "There really ought to be a law prohibiting this and all other forms of fortune-telling. Astrology has been responsible for a number of suicides and murders."
You must not touch a practicing medium. You might get an electric shock, like this one guy.

And so on. From what I've seen, all Koch's books are like this one - so I won't be reading any of them.

2011 Wish List

2011-01-26T01:14:00.004-07:00

I didn't make any predictions for 2011. Instead, I have a list of things I wish wish WISH will happen this year...

1. Andy Rooney will retire at last. Never again will I have to hear how his socks don't quite fit, how "people on airplanes are funny", or how ballpoint pens don't seem to have balls or points.

2. Ice cream will save the economy. I don't know how, but it will.

3. People will stop pretending that James Frey's books are actually pretty good.

4. As a result, James Frey will stop writing books and do something good for the economy, like making ice cream.

5. No new sports stadiums will be built unless the old ones are struck by avalanches or tsunami-scale floods. And all athletes will be ordered to drink out of metal bottles instead of plastic ones. And you don't get a new uniform until your old one gets holes in it.

6. The aliens will get here, and they'll be way cooler than we expected.

7. My rabbit will finally realize that not everything in bowls involves granola, and stop sticking her nose into them.

8. Ricky Gervais will give a performance that wins him a Golden Globe next year.

9. The music world will decide that Depeche Mode covers are generally a douchey thing to do.

10. Someone will tell Justin Beber, with utmost kindness and tact, that he isn't really that talented and it's time to go back to school.

11. Everyone on the planet will realize, simultaneously, that war is basically just large-scale, government-sanctioned murder and KNOCK IT THE HELL OFF.

Happy

2011-01-24T14:58:00.003-07:00

I can feel my depression of the past week lifting. Late last night I just knew I would feel better today, and I do.
Strange that I would perk up on everyone's least favourite day of the week, though.

:):

Magritte

2011-01-24T04:10:00.007-07:00

Every Day is Like This Day

2011-01-23T16:40:00.002-07:00

Rather typical Sunday. Richard's hanging posters or whatever. The library closes early so I have nowhere to go and not much to do, except laundry.

2011-01-22T17:37:00.005-07:00

Still in a lot of pain over the whole Natalie thing. Not much more to say. She patched things up with Richard - they did their activism side-by-side today - but apparently whatever the hell I did is unforgivable.

Viral Video. Haw Haw.

2011-01-09T17:30:00.002-07:00

So far, my new year has been taken up by nose-blowing, coughing, and ripping Satanic Panic notes out of notebooks to be filed. I'm a little bored with all three of these things and could definitely use some entertainment. Where's that grumpy red Kleenex unicorn baby when you need him?

It Is the Year of the Rabbit

2011-01-04T17:33:00.003-07:00

This will be a year of fuzzy wrath. Interspersed with long, comfortable naps.

The Bulls Fight Back

2010-11-13T12:40:00.003-07:00

Choke on it, Hemingway...

"Bull Jumps Into Crown at Edmonton Rodeo, Injuring 4" (CTV Toronto)

Book Review: The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock's Shower

2010-11-10T11:47:00.008-07:00

Spoiler alert: At the end of this post, you'll find a blank space. If you mouse over it, you'll be able to read the spoiler.

Thanks to an early Christmas present from Richard's wonderful sister, Kathy, I finally read Robert Graysmith's latest book, The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock's Shower. As I'm both an unsolved-mystery freak and a Hitchcock geek, this one would be nearly impossible to pass up. It tells the story of the young dancer-model who served as Janet Leigh's nude body double for the shower scene in Psycho, as well as the story of a warped mama's boy named Sonny Busch, dubbed "The Pyscho Killer" because he stabbed two women and abducted a third immediately after seeing the movie.

Marli Renfro was the Girl in the Shower. When the knife wielded by Norman Bates (also a female body double) seems to pierce Marian Crane's belly, Hitch himself was holding the knife and the belly was Marli's. She spent hours in that bathtub, pruning and shivering in the buff as the most infamous scene in American cinema was shot from nearly every angle imaginable. Her role in the film was uncredited, and for years Janet Leigh claimed she did the entire scene herself. Graysmith spends the first several chapters on the film set, shivering and pruning along with Marli through every re-take (delightful for Hitchcock fans, but perhaps tedious for everyone else).
In the late '50s and early '60s Marli Renfro appeared on countless men's magazine covers, starred in Francis Ford Coppola's grad-school "nudie cutie" film The Peeper, waitressed at the first Playboy Club, appeared on Hef's TV show, danced in Vegas, and made a supremely corny, nudie cutie Western that eventually became Coppola's first credited feature film (Tonight for Sure). But when she wasn't nekkid in front of a camera, Marli Renfro had a full and healthy life. She was a dedicated nature-lover and nudist, a painter, a filmmaker, a devoted daughter, and ultimately a wife and mother who sold real estate and traveled the country in an RV. After 1963, she began raising up a family with her first husband, and gave up the modeling and acting.

Marli Renfro depicted as a puzzle, shortly before Psycho's release (Playboy's editors knew she was Janet Leigh's body double, but like everyone else at that time they kept Hitchcock's secret.)

Meanwhile, the Norman Batesian serial killer Henry "Sonny" Busch was dating his mother's elderly friends and quietly working at an eyeglass-manufacturing shop. One night in the summer of '57, he took his mum's septuagenarian neighbor to a screening of Psycho, accompanied her back to her apartment, and murdered her. He left her body in the apartment while he killed another woman - his own aunt - and kidnapped a co-worker. Graysmith intersperses the two stories, Marli's days of carefree nudity and Sonny's tortured nights of deviance, with colourful tales of the early days of what you could call porn (though it bears little resemblance to today's variety), the painfully repressed sexuality of the American 1950s, and the first faint stirrings of the sexual revolution that would soon wash all the way from the California coast to splash nearly every town and city across the nation, from Midwestern burgs to bluenosed East Coast villages.
We see the rise of mammophile director Russ Meyer and the creation of the very first nudie cutie (The Immoral Mr. Teas), but Graysmith also shows us the darker side of California's awkward love affair with female beauty - obsession, violence, and murder.

After her heyday in the early '60s, no more was heard of Marli Renfro until 2001, when media outlets throughout the country announced that Janet Leigh's shower body double had ironically been stabbed to death in her own L.A. home by Kenneth Dean Hunt back in 1988. The murder had only recently been solved. Marli had been known as Myra Davis when she died at Hunt's hands at the age of 71.

Graysmith, who had been intrigued by Marli since she appeared on the cover of Playboy, was grieved - but also baffled. The reporting on Ms. Davis' murder didn't jive with what he knew of Marli Renfro. First of all, she was not 43 years old when Psycho was filmed, as Myra Davis would have been. Secondly, the woman's granddaughter told reporters that the knife in the shower scene had been held by a female body double, rather than Hitch.

He began to wonder: Were Marli Renfro and Myra Davis really the same person?

Spoiler below:

As it turned out, they weren't. Ms. Davis had indeed been on the Psycho set, but she was used only to work out some of the shower shots. She wasn't actually in the film. Marli was still living happily in the California desert that she had first fallen in love with during her modeling and acting days. She had heard of Ms. Davis' death, but had no strong desire to set the record straight until Graysmith came along with his "double body double" theory. A twist worthy of Hitchcock, no?

On Vacation for the Week

2010-11-02T01:34:00.001-07:00

See ya soon. Have an epic first week of November!

The Wisdom of TEOTWAWKI Man

2010-10-26T16:21:00.004-07:00

Supposedly the Hutaree lunatics were a fan of this guy, The End of the World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) Man. In this vid he teaches you how to hide from roving gangs and such. He's a *serious* survivalist, I guess, but frankly this is just hilarious. "Ponchos keep you dry when you use them as ponchos."

Christine O'Donnell & Witchcraft: We're Missing the Point

2010-10-14T22:58:00.004-07:00

When a clip of Republican senate candidate Christine O'Donnell talking about a teenage flirtation with witchcraft on a 1999 Politically Incorrect surfaced, her many critics pounced on it immediately. But they used it in the wrong way. They used it to embarrass O'Donnell in front of her Republican cohorts and the voting public, implying that her squeaky-queen Christian image is tainted by witchcraft. What they should have done was point out the real reason why O'Donnell spoke about witchcraft in the first place: To smear witches (presumably Wiccans) as shady, sinister people who engage in ritual sacrifice.

But no one has done that, because sticking up for witches is not politically expedient. It's much more effective, and much more fun, to crow, "She used to be a witch!" and watch her squirm.

Meanwhile, the truth gets left behind in the dust. The truth is that Christine O'Donnell is a stupid bitch who doesn't know anything about religions other than her own, and pretended to have some knowledge of witchcraft to give herself "insider status" that would make her slandering of Wiccans sound halfway credible to a few morons in the viewing audience. And to give herself more street cred.

Let me explain. By making an issue of her alleged adolescent interest in some form of Satanism or whatever the hell she was babbling about, we've actually done Christine a favour, because fundamentalist Christians loooooove stories about "witches who switched" and Satanists who came over from the dark side to join the choir. This witchcraft thing only boosts O'Donnell's standing in her faith community....and that was her intention all along. You fell right in line with her plans. Way to go.

I would also like to point out that on a 1998 Politically Incorrect, O'Donnell made a statement that is much, much worse than her inane bloody Satanic altar comment. She was having a debate with Eddie Izzard about lying, insisting that it is not OK to lie under any circumstances. Izzard asked her what she would do if she was hiding Anne Frank in the attic.
After saying something about God providing her a magical way out of the situation, O'Donnell replied that she would not lie.

Christine O'Donnell would hand a teenage girl over to Nazi thugs, to die in a camp, rather than say, "No, there's no one upstairs." She'll lie about her education and maybe about her spending, but she definitely will not lie to save a life. There you go. Cast your vote for her, morons.

SME's Book of the Month: Flying Saucers and the Three Men

2010-10-12T17:39:00.004-07:00

I was fortunate enough to snag this rather rare book for just $2.50 at a secondhand bookstore recently. It's famous in ufology circles for giving the first in-depth description of the Men in Black, those not-quite-human, not-quite alien dudes who show up after close encounters to tell witnesses, "You saw the planet Venus." The first book to mention them was was Gray Barker's They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956), and I doubt it's any coincidence that Barker was also the publisher and editor of Flying Saucers and the Three Men.

Albert K. Bender was a sci-fi and horror aficionado from Bridgeport, CT, who founded one of the first UFO organizations, the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB), in 1952. Just two years later, he shut it down with the cryptic explanation that the saucer mystery had been solved, and it would be dangerous to continue the IFSB's work. For over a decade, Bender refused to give more than a handful of tantalizing clues to why the IFSB had folded.

Then, in 1968, West Virginian ufologist and publisher Gray Barker released this book, a full account of what happened to Bender and the IFSB.
Barker remains an enigmatic and controversial figure in the world of ufology, the subject of two documentaries (Whispers from Space and the recent Shades of Gray) and much speculation. He undoubtedly staged a few hoaxes in his time, and allegedly confessed that he created the Men in Black out of whole cloth. So it should come as no shock that Bender's book props up some of Barker's own work. For instance, the three Men in Black who visited Bender were actually aliens in disguise, and their true form resembled that of the "Flatwoods Monster". Barker was the chief investigator and promoter of the Flatwoods incident.

YouTube user dslavin's Spore rendition of the Flatwoods Monster

Bender gives us a very detailed overview of the IFSB's formation and work, then delves into the reasons for its closure: Bender had an out-of-body experience, apparently caused by visitors from outer space, and in his astral body was taken to a spaceship stationed somewhere in the Antarctic. His escorts on this journey were three aliens with brightly glowing "lightbulb" eyes, disguised as floating men dressed all in black (black suits, black gloves, black Homburg hats). On board the ship, another Flatwoods-type alien disguised as a human gave him a brief history of alien visitation to Earth, and explained that the aliens were mining our oceans for some unnamed substance essential to their survival. The refining process they used on the saltwater produced a strange, stringy byproduct that was sometimes left behind (though Bender doesn't name this stuff, it was very common to early UFO reports and was usually referred to as "angel hair". After the '50s, it vanished from UFO stories).
The aliens expressed great concern about our use of nuclear weapons and energy, but they didn't seem too eager to help out in any way. They just wanted to mine our oceans, then return to their home planet without any trouble. For this reason, they warned Bender not to say anything about their presence. If he did, he might just become a hostage like a few other meddling humans. Once they were safely en route back home, the aliens told Bender, he could reveal everything they had told him.

Silly as all this is, Bender's book gives us invaluable insight into the early years of American ufology and the creation of the UFO mythos. Interestingly, it contains what may be the first mention of an alien implant; Bender experienced strange headaches both before and after his encounters with the "three men", and suspected that they had placed some sort of object in his sinus cavities. Of course, many of today's alien abductees believe this is exactly what the aliens have done to them (in Bender's case, an X-ray showed no abnormalities). The book also touches on other pseudoscientific theories that are still with us today, including pole shifts (a favourite topic of the 2012 catastrophist crowd). For anyone interested in the roots of ufology and the making of modern legends, it's well worth a read.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

2010-10-09T03:14:00.002-07:00

I can't make you another Sims vid until I master the moviemaker on Windows 7, so here's a cartoon for my favourite dinosaur! Heh heh. (don't worry about the sound, you won't need it)

Love you!!

Anime Review: Rozen Maiden

2010-10-01T18:01:00.005-07:00

I'm surprised at myself for even watching this series: Dolls creep me out big time. Their eerie porcelain faces, their stary little eyes, the stiff fingers that are probably just large enough to strangle you in your sleep...

But the dolls in Rozen Maiden are kinda cute. And since they seem to be magical automatons, they behave more or less like humans. Except they can enter dreams like J-Lo in The Cell and Leo in Inception, walk in and out of anything that has a reflective surface (mirrors, puddles), survive for centuries without getting their dresses wrinkled, and travel in flying suitcases. Yeah, this show is a little trippy. By the time the giant telepathic rabbit shows up, you think, "Well, I should've seen that coming."

The story is simple, if bizarre. Six dolls were created at some point in the distant past by a dollmaker known only as Rozen. He imbued each Rozen Maiden with an artifical spirit called a Rosa Mystica (oddly, one of the names of the Virgin Mary) and released them into the world to fend for themselves. The idea is that when all six dolls are "awake" at the same time, they will attempt to steal each other's souls in a series of magical battles called the Alice Game. The doll who collects the Rosa Mysticas of her five sisters will become Alice, the perfect doll that Rozen was unable to create himself.

Each doll may choose a human "servant", or medium, from whom she can draw energy. Rozen Maiden #5, Shinku, chooses a hikikomori boy named Jun. She is soon followed by three of the other Rozen Maidens, who arrive by crashing their suitcases through Jun's bedroom window (Jun and his older sister, Nori, are living alone while their parents are abroad, so there are no adults around to notice this). Jun and Nori become more or less parents to the dolls, providing them with meals and tea. The smallest doll, Hinaichigo, is incredibly annoying. Shinku is imperious and demanding. The "twins" Souseiseki and Suiseiseki are mismatched; one is aloof, the other won't shut up.

Jun and Shinku

The first villain to appear is a Gothic Victorian doll with black angel wings, Suigintou. While the other dolls are ambivalent about fighting each other, Suigintou is determined to collect their souls. She chases her sisters in and out of dream worlds that reflect the deepest fears and desires of the dreamers (Jun's dream world, for instance, is full of junked computers and insects shaped like toy cars). Each doll has some magical power or implement that can be employed in dreams: the twins have a magical watering can and giant shears, Shinku can blast her enemies with phosphorescent rose petals, Suigintou can shoot dart-like black feathers, etc. If you can imagine Samurai warriors as tiny white chicks in bonnets, you'll get the picture.

When all the dolls appear and some of them have visions of the man they call Father, the Alice Game becomes unavoidable. Weirdly, though, most of the action is crammed into the last two episodes. The final battle and its aftermath are quite anticlimatic, and we never really learn who or what "Alice" is. The series is mostly about the day-to-day lives of the Rozen Maidens, their growing loyalty to each other, and their relationships with their "servants". The moral dilemna of the Alice Game hangs over their heads. Is it better to fulfill Father's wishes and fight, or to retain the bonds of sisterhood?
Though sometimes overly cute, Rozen Maiden is ultimately a touching and enjoyable series with a dark twist. The dream sequences, in particular, are gorgeously animated and quite eerie.

Washing My Hands of "The Truth"

2010-09-17T22:20:00.009-07:00

(Please ignore any profanity in this post. I just saw Winnebago Man, and the rage is kinda contagious.)

So. I haven't posted anything about 9/11 Truther drama in a long time. Believe me, it's not because there isn't any. It's because I'm so motherfucking sick of the entire fucking movement and all its bullshit adolescent paranoid drama that some days I'll think I'll start hemorrhaging if I hear the words "inside job" or "building 7" even one more time. And since avoidance is a pretty reliable way to deal with shit, I went with it.

I'm not going to bore anyone with a lot of detail here. If you have friends or relations who are into any conspiracy theory or alternative belief system of any kind, I'm sure you can fill in the blanks easily. The bottom line is that Richard departed from the local Truth squad because he felt it was more or less taken over by people that like to harp on issues unrelated to 9/11. You know, tapwater sapping your precious fluids and whatnot.

But the local Truth website remains under his control alone, and our friend "Natalie" has an issue with that. She was under the mistaken impression that the site was some sort of group effort, even though Richard pays for it and has always been the sole moderator. So as soon as she saw something objectionable on the site, she fired off an email in ALL CAPS with just one sentence: "WE NEED TO TALK." No other info.

Naturally, being a friend to Natalie and knowing how incredibly stressful paranoid Truther drama bullshit can be for a kind and patient person like her, I gave her a call last night. She was very frustrated and ranted that Richard was perhaps trying to sabotage her group with the website. He hadn't posted something she wanted him to post. I couldn't speak for Richard, of course, but I tried to explain things for her the best I could and was sympathetic to her problems. Despite this, she really didn't calm down at all and the conversation ended abruptly when she shrieked, "He's trying to FUCK ME OVER!" and slammed down the phone.

I thought, okay, she's stressed. She's burned out. She's not herself today. That's understandable. So I sent her a short email completing my explanation of the website issue, basically telling her that if the group wants a website it can wholly control, it must get its own. I told her I just called to see how she was doing and to help in any way I could.
Then I had a good cry and went to Winnebago Man, which cheered me up a bit.

When I returned, this email message from Nataliewas waiting for me:

"OK...you phoned to see how I was doing. Fine. Pray tell, what did I need help with, that you felt the need to call and offer help with? Did someone tell you I needed help...or did you just have a 'gut feeling?'"

I was quite surprised by this. I knew Natalie was peeved with Richard, but this was the first indication that she was actually furious with me as well. What the hell did I do, except try to help?
I told her the truth: I called because she wrote a letter in ALL CAPS. I mean, that's a distress signal, is it not? Your friend starts emailing in ALL CAPS, and you check to see if she's okay or having a nervous breakdown or what. It's common courtesy.

Natalie was not content with this explanation. She sent another email, again demanding to know why I had called.

When Richard got home from work, I told him what Natalie was upset about and urged him to correct it ASAP. He did. It turned out to be a very minor issue; he had accidentally overlooked an email, nothing more.

So today Natalie sent an email of "apology":
"I still fail to see how if you knew nothing you felt the need to contact me and HELP me. With what? It seems apparent to me that you and [Richard] were talking.

Why didn't [Richard] contact me?

I will own up to the fact that I do need to apologize to you [SME] for my outbursts last night. I am so frustrated by this whole situation and I see it taking our group in a direction that is being labelled and dictated by one person. And we all should be careful of assumptions. It really muddies conversations and situations.

I am very sorry about last night [SME] and my anger should have been directed elsewhere, if indeed it was necessary. I also know anger is bad for the liver according to Traditional Chinese Medicine."

She went on to tell me that I should mind my own business. Which of course I will. I wash my hands of all this crazy crap. I do not need psycho bitchmonster from hell bullshit on top of all the other weirdness, drama, and abuse I have tolerated from Truthers over the past three years. They're on their own. I have shit to do.
In my opinion, Natalie and a lot of other people in the Truth movement need traditional Chinese psychiatrists to deal with this contagious paranoia disorder they have.

Worst Music Video Ever?

2010-09-09T22:50:00.003-07:00

What do cellophane, bamboo cages, lightning, and a creepy moppet have in common? Well, nothing. That's partly why this video sucks.

SME's Book of the Month: A Razor for a Goat (1962)

2010-09-06T17:55:00.004-07:00

The mysterious and rather creepy title caught my attention, but it was the subtitle that sold me on this book: "Problems in the History of Witchcraft and Diabolism". The author, Elliot Rose, was (is?) a history professor at the University of Toronto, and this book is (according to one of the blurbs on the back) "an analysis of witchcraft in the western European culture complex from the ninth to the eighteenth centuries" which "ends up shattering most of the positions held by the various schools of witchcraft theory". Other than that, I have no idea what I'm in for.

Geeking Out

2010-08-29T17:52:00.005-07:00

I haven't been blogging here much because when not maintaining my other blogs I've been taking advantage of the very short Edmonton summer. Now that the fall chill is starting to creep in, I'll probably be around more often.

This week I've been reading and watching ancient astronaut stuff for a future series of posts at Swallowing the Camel. I was bummed out that the History Channel is kind of rehabilitating Erich von Daniken's shredded reputation with this inane series called Ancient Aliens, and I think it's borderline racist to suggest that the cultures of ancient Mesoamerica, Africa, Mesopotamia, etc., couldn't possibly construct things like temples and time-keeping devices all on their own.

Another thing I've been doing this week is re-examining the Rendlesham Forest incident. This is arguably the most famous UFO event in British history, and it has always struck me as a strong case because it involved multiple military witnesses who recorded their observations in real time. I still think something odd was spotted, but I learned that the most spectacular aspect of the case (Staff Sgt. James Penniston's close-up examination of a landed craft with strange markings engraved on its surface) didn't actually happen. Penniston's orginal report, which you can read here, mentioned nothing about a landed craft at all. He added that bit later. And for some reason, his two fellow witnesses refuse to call him on his bullshit. Very disappointing.

On the less geeky side, I've been reading Peter Lance's Triple Cross and Jung's Red Book. But then I get geeky again by watching Rozen Maiden before bed.

WTF is with this video?

2010-08-27T00:51:00.004-07:00

Is it like The Ring? Will I be getting a phone call?

This creepy mess was posted to YouTube last year by a user calling him/herself "The Hounded Few". The implication seems to be that some monks at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota are abducting and drowning drunk college boys all over the world, then leaving spray-painted smiley faces as a calling card (the profoundly retarded Smiley Face Killers theory). I'm not sure, but The Hounded Few could be this guy, Pat Marker, who was abused by one of the monks. If so, then Mr. Marker is trying to blame the monks for pretty much every bad thing that has ever happened in the state of Minnesota. I guess this should include the bridge collapse, the Twins, and Tammy Faye.

Diagnosis: Funk

2010-08-25T19:04:00.002-07:00

Prescription: Funny, stupid shit.

The Nostalgia Critic reviews one of the worst movies ever made. The cameos by other reviewers are a little annoying, but the commentary is priceless.

The Boobah! segment is particularly hilarious.

The funniest/scariest children's show ever...

Sophie's Rainy Day Hop and Some Scarf-chasing

2010-08-16T19:38:00.004-07:00

Sophie had to hop around in a bit of rain today, but the fresh grass apparently made it worthwhile. She's very content (and very fluffy) right now.

Sophie's favourite pastime...

Hair Woe

2010-08-13T16:33:00.004-07:00

I would love to be checking out the Fringe right now, but every penny of my spending money for the month needs to go toward a haircut. How fair is it that men can still get $10-15 haircuts, but women are lucky to find a place that mangles your hair for $35-40?

Caribbean Fest

2010-08-07T15:07:00.008-07:00

I somehow manage to miss the Caribbean extraveganza every year (though it's right outside our door). This year I saw the entire parade. For the full effect you have to have the music, of course!

Drumheller (last of the vacation pics + a video)

2010-07-29T14:17:00.003-07:00

My Hometown (Vacation Pics #2)

2010-07-18T18:27:00.012-07:00

"Size matters"

The "Proud Redneck" is spelled out in duct tape.

Sculpture so badly in need of a paintjob, it's actually scary...

A peaceful spot.

Wild roses.

Richard & my grandparents with their dog, Shadow.

Summer Overhaul

2010-06-28T21:31:00.005-07:00

The reason I've been a near-total absentee this past week is that I've been doing a massive summer cleaning, or as I like to call it, summer overhaul. Rearranging the kitchen, reorganizing bookshelves, sifting through movies and asking questions like, "Why exactly do I still have Wellsville on VHS?", etc. I should've taken Before/After pics, but I didn't, so here's an artist's impression:

Before

After

Solstice Celebration 2010

2010-06-24T06:22:00.005-07:00

Richard and I were part of a Solstice celebration/silent peace walk organized by a few people from Awakening as One two days ago. Tuesday was not only Solstice (a time of renewal), but World Prayer and Peace Day, and Aboriginal Day - all highly meaningful for me.
It was my first time taking part in an organized Solstice event of any kind, but just before leaving the house I spotted the little plastic "worry stone" with a heart at its center that Richard gave to me two years ago, when life was particurlarly...challenging. I got a crazy idea into my head that I should take the stone with me and "charge" it with all the positive energy of the Solstice ceremony. I'm still not sure where this hippy-dippy, New Agey kind of impulse came from, but as you'll see I'm grateful it came.

The walk itself was simple. We congregated in Churchill Square, all wearing white shirts, then wrote our desires for the future on white balloons. In total silence we walked slowly in single file around the perimeter of the square, stopping to meditate at each side, facing an institution represented there (the media by CBC, learning by the library, government by City Hall, and the arts by the art gallery). This was followed by some lovely bowl music, drumming, dancing, and general joyous things. Throughout, I really did feel a sense of peace and purpose. I felt re-energized, and sensed I was helping to re-energize the others in their purposes as well.

At the very end of the ceremony, the man you'll see in the wheelchair in Richard's vid (below) explained that he is rolling across the country in his chair not only to raise money for MS, but for peace and to show others that we need to live each day fully while we have the chance. His name is Sonny Davis. He's on the first leg of his journey, having departed B.C. in the spring. He and his wife were selling calendars to raise funds, and I realized I hadn't brought a dime with me.

That's when I remembered the stone in my pocket. It's now on its way to the East Coast via wheelchair.

Here's some video Richard took of a few other participants, the walk, and the circle gathering at the end. You'll find a link to Sonny Davis's website on it. (I'm the chick with the braid, holding a "connection" balloon)

I'm not exactly sure what the "ant trap" thing at the end, which we filmed in Drumheller, means to Richard, but it made me think of the Tower of Babel. I've been reading Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (thanks to Z-Kid), which talks a lot about it. We usually think of the Tower of Babal as an example of mankind's hubris - trying to reach the heavens without the agency of God. But a more careful reading shows that the people of the world feared separation, and built the tower to avoid God's commandment to scatter across the earth. God was displeased because he knew that a united people could do anything they set out to accomplish, just as ants do. Now that the whole earth is populated, Auster's characters ask themselves, is it time to finally build that tower and reunite all the peoples of the earth, regain our collective strength and unity?

Metaphorically, I believe it is.

Vaca 2010 (Minnesota & Drumheller): Family Pics

2010-06-20T22:32:00.010-07:00

So we drove the trusty li'l Hyundai to northern Minnesota to be with my grandparents on their 60th anniversary. They wanted just a super-casual day with friends, potato salad and baked beans in their little screenhouse.
Rain rain and more rain during this trip, but as always we had a great time.

My grandparents

Me & Mom

Me & Z-Kid

Happy Father's Day!

2010-06-20T17:09:00.001-07:00

I love you, Dad. Enjoy your day and enjoy your video! ('cause it took me a day to make...)

On Vacation

2010-06-08T21:53:00.001-07:00

until the 20th. Have a good June, everybody!

lol wut

2010-06-03T05:59:00.004-07:00

Some seriously weird animation and cable access TV clips...

Two parts hilarious, one part terrifying...

The worst "singing" you'll ever hear. The girl looks sorta suicidal...

The title says it all.

Bike Time

2010-05-28T22:23:00.002-07:00

The bike is out of the closet and ready to go! I'll be taking it for the first ride of the year tomorrow. It's a Bromptom much like the one in the vid.

Recent Satanic/Heavy Metal Panic in Russia

2010-05-26T00:16:00.004-07:00

I hesitate to call these two examples "Satanic panic", because they're more like Satanic idiocy.

A teacher in Orenburg has been fired because kids in his "school of rock" afterschool club were recreating heavy metal music videos with Satanic overtones. The director of the cultural centre at which the club convened is quoted as saying the children displayed signs of "manic depression" afterwards, as though any religion or form of entertainment could cause bipolar disorder.
The city of Belgorod has issued requests to all live-music venues to stop putting on heavy metal concerts, reportedly "to promote suppression of satanic activity".

File this under "crazy b**** gets crazier"

2010-05-17T03:40:00.003-07:00

This is footage from the 2008 parole hearing of Diane Downs, the woman who shot her three children in 1983 and attempted to blame it on a carjacker who just happened to be standing on a deserted rural road in the middle of the night. As you'll probably guess after watching this, she's still in prison.
The book she's holding is All Night, All Day, Angels Watching Over Me, edited by Evelyn Bence. It has nothing whatsoever to do with State Department officials, so apparently the pictures were pasted into it. I have no idea if Susan Polk really have Downs this book or not, but they were in the same prison, and during her murder trial Polk tried to convince the jury that her late ex-husband was a Mossad agent (though he had never been to Israel).

WTFery on Tour

2010-05-14T13:30:00.003-07:00

Once again, the Found Footage Film Festival is comin' to town! And of course I'll be there tonight, because I am easily amused. The 2008 show had me laughing for a week even though the Mucous Man clip was sorta traumatic...

Happy 33rd Anniversary, Mom & Dad!

2010-05-09T21:40:00.000-07:00

Love you!

An Intergalactic Mother's Day

2010-05-09T04:44:00.001-07:00

Happy Mother's Day, Mom! Love you!

Lolitapalooza

2010-05-08T00:17:00.004-07:00

This Land, a short film about Lolita by "grumpybeyatch"

Chapter One (read by Jeremy Irons) in Kinetic Typography

Nabokov discusses Lolita

A Family Divided

2010-05-05T22:03:00.000-07:00

An unhappy ending to 1989 abductions motivated by Satanic ritual abuse panic

Twenty years ago, Marvin Maple and his wife Sandra somehow got it into their heads that their two grandchildren were being ritually abused by their parents (the Maples' daughter, Debbie Baskin, and her husband Mark). The Maples alleged that Debbie and Mark belonged to a Satanic cult in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, which practiced murder, child molestation, animal sacrifice, and other atrocities. So they sought, and were granted, temporary custody of 8-year-old Christie and 7-year-old Bobby. When a yearlong investigation failed to turn up even one indication of Satanic ritual abuse (or any abuse, for that matter), a court ordered the children returned to their home. At the time, far from being a Satanist, Mark Baskin was pursuing a degree in theology. He is now a Baptist minister.

Just before the Baskins were scheduled to regain custody of their children in March 1989, the Maples disappeared with the kids. For 20 years, they lived in California as the "Bunting" family; Christie was renamed Jennifer, and Bobby went by the name Jonathan.

Meanwhile, the Baskins never gave up on their missing children. They distributed fliers far and wide, gave interviews and made media appearances whenever possible, and appealed to the Maples to do the right thing. Their answering machine always contained a message for Bobby and Christie.

Then it happened. Early in February 2009, a cafe patron in San Jose overheard 73-year-old "John Bunting" recounting the abduction of his grandchildren. He was annoyed that a newspaper story about the children had described him as a kidnapper.

Police soon located Christie and Bobby. Christie, 28, was working as a nurse in San Jose, while Bobby was married with children of his own. The Baskins eagerly awaited a reunion, but feared that the kids might not feel the same way after being told for 20 years that their parents were abusive Satanists. Unfortunately, their fears manifested when they traveled to San Jose; both children refused to respond to phone calls or visits.

Sandra Maple died in 2006. Marvin faced kidnapping charges in Tennessee. In May 2009 he pled guilty to the lesser charge of custodial interference and was sentenced to just four months of probation for depriving his daughter of her family for two decades. He, too, refuses to speak with the Baskins. He says he is innocent. According to the report below, Debbie's two sisters seem to support their father.

The Baskin abduction bears a striking similarity to a 1990 grandparent abduction in Hobbes, New Mexico. This case has a happier ending, and the underhanded method used to induce stories of Satanic ritual abuse is transparent:

As described in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, Ladonna Morrow had a strained relationship with her mom, Pat Farmer, but needed her to help care for her 4-year-old son, Jared Peters, after she divorced Jared's father. Pat disapproved of the divorce, so using televangelist-produced videotapes and coaching, she taught Jared to describe being molested and ritually abused by members of a Satanic cult. Then she encouraged Jared to report this abuse, and sought sole custody of her grandson.

Two months after custody was granted to Pat Farmer, Jared's father and the authorities came to the conclusion that there was no Satanic cult and no abuse. Ladonna regained custody of Jared, but Pat was allowed monthly, unsupervised visits. She simply didn't return Jared after one of these visits.

Pat was caught in Salt Lake City two years later, and Jared was reunited with his mother.

There may be no such reunion for the Baskins. They remain a family divided and ruined by the spectre of Satanic panic.

The Devil and Anna Nicole

2010-05-02T18:34:00.002-07:00

Immediately after her death in Febuary 2007, a note from Bob Larson, posted on his website, told us how/why Anna Nicole Smith was cursed and how we can avoid her fate by buying stuff created by (you guessed it) Bob Larson.

"Dear Friend,
Don’t let you and your family, and those you care about, suffer needlessly because Satan has the right to inflict pain and suffering through generational curses.
Remove the legal right of Satan to your life. Let me teach you the right kind of prayers and renunciations that will once and for all break Satan’s hold on you and your family.
The death of the buxom blonde Anna Nicole Smith was no shock. Frankly, I’m surprised she lived as long as she did. She died because of her self-destructive behavior, but there’s more to it than that.
The media has incessantly talked about her untimely death. Anna was a former Playboy Playmate of the year and, at age 26, married an 89-year-old billionaire. She starred in her own racy reality show, modeled for Guess? Jeans, and then touted a weight-loss program.
On February 8, she was found dead in her hotel room in Florida. We don’t know the full report on her autopsy yet, but her family, and all those around her, are convinced that drugs played a role in her tragic death. The real issue isn’t what killed her, but why she died so young while surrounded by money, fame and the attention of millions.
The autopsy will only tell what physically killed her, not the spiritual reason behind her death. Anna Nicole was set up by Satan. Generational and family curses were hanging over her head from the day she was born. These curses grew stronger the longer she lived.
How can I so positively say I know what killed her? After three decades of confronting the forces of darkness and performing more exorcisms than anyone on the planet, I have learned valuable lessons about the destructive way that demons operate through curses. Let me explain how Ms. Smith’s life was under a curse.
Although her life seemed to be rich and glamorous, it was not always like that. She hungered for attention. In one interview she said, "I love the paparazzi . . . I've always liked attention. I didn't get it very much growing up and I always wanted to be, you know, noticed." Why didn’t she get attention growing up? It probably had to do with the fact that her father abandoned her at a very young age. In a 2004 People magazine interview she said, “I don’t have any good memories from Christmas when I was a girl.” Her mother raised Anna (known then as Vicki Lynn Hogan) as a single parent. This curse of abandonment literally turned her over to the devil. If her mother had known what to do, she could have broken the curse. Anna’s life indicates that her mother did not break that curse.
On my DVD HOW TO BREAK GENERATIONAL CURSES I explain in detail how Satan continues his evil through the family bloodline, generation to generation. You must see this DVD to prevent Satan’s attacks on your children and grandchildren. You may not live a wild and immoral life like Ms. Smith, but you may still be cursed by your ancestors.
When she was a child, Ms. Smith declared she wanted to grow up to be like Marilyn Monroe. Well, she succeeded, down to the circumstances of her death. By wanting to be like Marilyn Monroe, Ms. Smith spoke a curse over her life and the devil used it to his evil advantage. Those who have seen our DVD HOW TO BREAK GENERATIONAL CURSES understand how unnecessary this tragedy was. The curse could have been broken. Also, notice that Anna’s 20-year-old son died just months before her, likely from the same cause—drugs and a destructive lifestyle. Nicole was born with a curse, so was her son, and so was her new baby daughter that lawyers and ex-lovers are fighting over.
Family curses can be broken! Generational curses can be stopped!
In addition to the DVD HOW TO BREAK GENERATIONAL CURSES I have especially prepared a message using the death of Ms. Smith to explain exactly how curses work. It’s called, THE CURSE OF ANNA NICOLE SMITH.
For your gift of $50 or more, I’ll send both DVDs, plus one of the most important documents you’ll ever hold in your hands: THE LAWSUIT AGAINST SATAN. This spiritually legal transaction will teach you how to legally confront the devil and file a lawsuit against him in the courts of heaven. Thousands have done this and have begun a journey to health, prosperity, and blessings they had never known.
Just print out the form below, or email me immediately to get:
● DVD - HOW TO BREAK GENERATIONAL CURSES
● DVD - THE CURSE OF ANNA NICOLE SMITH
● THE LAWSUIT AGAINST SATAN
We leave for Africa in a couple of months and we need to start right now raising the $50,000 missions budget for this outreach. Your gift of $5000, $500, $150, or at least $50 or more will bring thousands to Christ and plant healing & deliverance teams across the continent.
Call, write, or email me today with your gift of $50 or more and get on the way to breaking every curse of the devil over you and your family.

Doing What Jesus Did,
Pastor Bob Larson

P. S. Make sure to sign up for our April 18-20 DWJD Training Institute on the subject “Last Days Deliverance - confronting the demons of pop culture.”

Soon after Larson offered his handy DIY curse-removal kit for sale ("like Jesus did"), the host of the Austin, Texas anti-occult cable access TV show The Freeman Perspective offered up the theory that infant Dannielynn is a Moonchild summoned by Anna Nicole's Satanic Illuminati mind-control handlers. I won't comment on Larson's motives - I think we can all guess what they are - but it seems that "Freeman" believed every word he said. According to him, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s eccentric husband, Prince Frederic von Anhalt, really is the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s daughter Dannielynn, as he insisted (DNA testing revealed Larry Birkhead to be the father, but never mind that; facts must never get in the way of a good conspiracy theory). Von Anhalt was the result of Nazi experiments in breeding perfect Aryan specimens who could take over the world (clearly unsuccessful). Anna Nicole was a mind-controlled slave programmed through Satanic ritual abuse to have multiple personalities (he points to the infamous Mushroom Clown video as evidence that she had a little-girl alter personality). Lawyer/partner Howard Stern was her primary mind control handler. And Dannielynn is a Moonchild.

The Nazi breeding part of Freeman's theory is drawn from a rumour that German Chancellor Angela Merkel is the biological daughter of Adolf Hitler. This shouldn’t even be considered a possibility, as Merkel was born 9 years after the Fuhrer's death, but the explanation is that the horrifically sadistic Auschwitz doctor Carl Clauberg was able to freeze some of Hitler’s sperm and inseminate Eva Braun’s younger sister, Gretl, with it years later. The rumour has it that Clauberg was “the father of artificial insemination”, but in actuality his Auschwitz experiments centered around forced sterilization of Jewish women. Robert Jay Lifton, in his 1986 book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide , noted “Clauberg is reported to have told prisoners he planned artificial-insemination experiments, and there is one report of his admitting to two assistants that he had future plans for experiments in both natural and artificial insemination.” (272) There are no reports that Clauberg actually achieved any success with insemination; he is by no means the father of the procedure, which is derived from much older methods of animal husbandry.

Gretl Braun did have a daughter, Eva Barbara Fegelein, named after her Aunt Eva, but she was born on May 5, 1945, and committed suicide in 1975 - during the same period Merkel was studying physics at the University of Leipzig. Clearly, the Merkel-Hitler rumour is a fantasy aimed at defaming a controversial and much-maligned public figure: G8 member, first female chancellor of German, proponent of EU expansion. She’s ideal fodder for anti-Illuminati conspiracy theories.

The Moonchild was a concept introduced in Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law. It was described as something like an AntiChrist and/or an incarnate god, a child "resembling man, and possessing those qualities of man which distinguish him from beasts, namely intellect and power of speech, but neither begotten in the manner of human generation, nor inhabited by a human soul." Rather than being conceived and born, the Moonchild would apparently be summoned through magick ritual.

In 1946, California rocket scientist/occultist Jack Parsons attempted to summon a Moonchild into the womb of his girlfriend following a complex set of rituals he called The Babalon Working. His assistant in this endeavor was, believe it or not, L. Ron Hubbard. The intended vessel/mother of the Moonchild, Marjorie Cameron, never manifested any signs of pregnancy, but to the end of her life she believed that she really was the incarnation of Thelema's Mother of Abominations, the Scarlet Woman of The Book of the Law. The “birth” of the Moonchild was a metaphysical event, taking place on the ethereal plane. After Parsons' untimely death, Marjorie Cameron performed a ritual to conceive a posthumous child with him a la Osiris and Isis, whom she christened Wormwood. This "child", too, manifested only on the ethereal plane.

Freeman's theory is, essentially, that genetically engineered Nazi Satanists are trying to take over the world by impregnating their mind-controlled robotic priestesses with antichrist Moonchildren.
Crowley’s Book of the Law described the Moonchild as "mightier than all the kings of the earth".

So, if you can imagine that the daughter of Anna Nicole Smith will someday rise up to rule over us all, this may be the conspiracy theory for you.

Changes

2010-04-28T20:58:00.002-07:00

So as you can see, I've made some changes to this blog. I've merged it with my "high strangeness" blog, Uqbar Calling, and with my "Satanic panic" blog. That means you'll be seeing lots of weirdity and information about anti-occult nonsense in addition to the usual movie reviews, bunny pics, and gripes. ;)

Thank You, Sheldon

2010-04-28T20:03:00.005-07:00

Two years ago a Charismatic Christian named Sheldon shared with me some of the goofiest, weirdest examples of Satanic panic I have ever heard. And that's saying something. As you peruse the Deep Thoughts of Sheldon, remember: He believed every word of this stuff, and I doubt he's the only one. It's folks like Sheldon who make me realize that the work of combatting anti-occult misinformation is far from over. We've got a lot to do. So in a way, I should thank him for reminding me.

- As "explained" in a YouTube slideshow that has since vanished, the Jonas Brothers (Evangelical Christian teens who sing for Disney) could be demonic entities. In the '80s and '90s, they were an obscure Scandinavian black metal band called The Sanoj Brotherhood. By the power of Satan, they morphed themselves into wholesome American "brothers" in order to entice young girls to the dark side. The dark side of what? Shitty pop music?
The only "evidence" for this is that that Jonas is Sanoj spelled backward. Oh, and the music of both bands sucks some very serious ass.
Saturday Night Live spoofed this on Valentine's Day by having Andy Samberg confront the Jonas Brothers with videos of an '80s hair band. "This is you guys, isn't it? Are you Highlanders?"
The Sanoj Brotherhood theory seems to have died, but playing J.B. songs backwards to decipher Satanic messages is now very popular on YouTube.

- Criss Angel is probably using demonic powers granted to him by the Devil. I asked Sheldon why he only suspects Criss Angel of making a pact with Satan, and not, say, Doug Henning. Sheldon's reply: How else could he lie on broken glass and be run over by a steamroller without being harmed?
This theory might have come from a very strange anti-occult site called Satan's Fake Apocalypse , which asks such questions as "Criss Angel: Black Magician or Illusionist?" and "Was Bertrand Russell Possessed?". Other articles include "Programming Kids for Satanism with Video Games", "SRA: the appalling and pervasive reality hidden in plain sight", and "Demonic possession: sociopathy on steroids".

- Sheldon claimed he has worked with people from seven different Satanic covens operating in our province (which is overwhelmingly conservative and Christian, by the way). He knows Satanic breeders in our area. Also, a local man told him he was allowed to wander through a local Mormon "temple" (presumably a ward house) and discovered a room draped in black, adorned with an upside-down crucifix. My Mormon friend interrupted at this point in the conversation, for obvious reasons. He even offered to take Sheldon through the ward house in question to satisfy himself that no such room exists. Sheldon declined.

- Todd Bentley, the preacher who blessed Sheldon and his girlfriend, is a legitimate healer. Bentley's the guy who made a name for himself by leading a spectacle-laden revival down in Florida in 2008, healing the sick and elderly by kicking, punching, and kneeing them. Sheldon informed me that God asked Bentley to smack people around just to test him; God prevented actual physical contact from happening (the numerous YouTube videos of Bentley using his "knee of God" indicate otherwise). Sheldon believes Bentley's claim of raising a dozen people from the dead during the revival; this is a routine occurrence in the Chinese underground church, he said.
At any rate, Sheldon no longer believes that Bentley is a righteous man, because he was caught having an affair with a staffer. But the staffer was probably a plant, hired to lead Bentley astray.

- It's good that California's Proposition 8 passed, according to Sheldon. This will avert earthquakes. 'Cause we all know that gayness, rather than seismic activity, creates earthquakes, right?

lol wut

2010-04-27T19:01:00.001-07:00

Apparently there's a whole series of these things. Trippy, no?

Did You Save Your Receipt?

2010-04-09T15:34:00.004-07:00

I originally posted this in November '08, but Russia's recent call for a moratorium on foreign adoptions, spurred by an American couple's rejection of their adopted son, makes it bear repeating.

-----------

I saw an immensely disturbing story on 20/20 tonight. Well, actually stories...the stories of American couples who adopted Russian children, then had second thoughts.

The program focused on Michael and Tanya Mulligan, a Florida couple who adopted three Russian children, two girls and a boy. The boy suffers mild brain damage and sometimes acts out violently. The girls are better-behaved, but have sibling rivalry issues and some minor behavioral problems. The Mulligans are currently suing their adoption service because, as Michael Mulligan so delicately puts it, "When it comes down to dollars and cents, you're basically buying a child." And they feel that the three children they "bought" are defective merchandise. Unable and/or unwilling to parent these children as they agreed to do, they've dumped them off at a Montana ranch run by a woman who takes in adopted children and teens (mostly Russian and Eastern European) that other people don't want. The ranch accomodates 40 children at a time, and it's always full. It's like the SPCA for Russian adoptees. Foreign adoptees whose "parents" can't afford the boarding fees at the ranch or at boarding schools end up in an already overtaxed foster care system, in federally funded programs like Job Corps, or back in Russia.

If you think I'm exaggerating by comparing this ranch to the SPCA, here's a quote from the journal of Amy Thompson: "We discussed how much we would love to get rid of them like dogs at the pound, and even contacted a ranch in Montana about taking them to other homes." Amy and her husband Gary had adopted two Russian children. In 2003, Gary intentionally lowered 3-year-old Liam into a tub of scalding water, and both Thompsons refused to treat his second- and third-degree burns for two days. Liam died.

One Russian child at the ranch, a 9-year-old, was placed in psychiatric care after only 5 weeks in the U.S. because her family was alarmed by the way she ran around their house "touching everything", and by her temper tantrums. She is now appears to be a wholly socialized and normal child.

Would you place your 9-year-old in a psych ward for "touching things" and having tantrums? Probably not. Even if you wanted to do so, the system doesn't make it easy for biological parents to cop out on their responsibilities. So why do we make it easy for adoptive parents?

Faced with the fact that her youngest adopted child is brain-damaged, Tanya Mulligan whines that she'll have to take care of him for the rest of his life. She also whines that non-adoptive parents can't understand her situation, "People don't understand. These kids come at you every day … many times a day. It's like a battering ram and they just keep at you and keep at you and keep at you." She wonders where things went wrong.

Well, let's break it down for you, Mrs. Mulligan...

1. You "buy" children from a foreign country, probably with the expectation that they will be extremely grateful to you for "rescuing" them from a life of squalor.

2. You don't bother to learn a single word of Russian. The children, of course, do not know any English. Why would they? They didn't know they were going to be purchased by Americans.

3. You encounter situations (rebellion, tantrums, brain damage, sibling rivalry) that can and do arise in biological families. Rather than accepting such travails as challenges of parenthood, you see them as evidence that you aren't getting your money's worth. Much like those fat middle-aged men who order desperate 20-year-old wives from Russia, then can't understand why they're dumped after the ladies' green cards arrive.

I think I might know where things went wrong, Mrs. Mulligan. And it's got nothing to do with your children.

This is not to say that some adoption agencies/agents aren't unscrupulous, dishonest, or even criminal. Some are, and should be held accountable. But shouldn't there be some accountability for adoptive parents who abandon their children when things don't go their way? And isn't it time we teach people to carefully weigh the merits and downsides of foreign ~~child-buying~~ adoption before encouraging them to jump into it? Should books like Adoption for Dummies really be on our library shelves?

The program mentioned that 15 Russian children have been murdered by their American adoptive parents since the early 1990s, and described the death of Nina Hilt in 2005. The 2-year-old was severely beaten by her alcoholic adoptive mother, who became enraged when the toddler tried to "attack" her other adopted daughter. Nina died during a Fourth of the July vacation the following day. Peggy Hilt gave police and prosecutors a sob story about being so overwhelmed by caring for a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old that she simply had to drink a 12-pack of beer every day.

Rather than making an example of Hilt, a court recently reduced her sentence. A Newsweek story on the murder actually begins, "Peggy Hilt wanted to be a good mother". Would anyone say this about a woman who pummeled, shook, and kicked her biological toddler to death? God, I hope not.

This list of Russian-adoptee murders shows that in every case, the child had been in the U.S. for less than a year. In most of the cases, the murderers were middle-class, educated people with no history of violence, yet the abuses are appalling. Brenda and Bob Matthey sadistically punished and tortured their adopted 6-year-old Russian son, Viktor, whom they froze to death by locking in an unheated crawlspace. The Mattheys were outwardly religious people who insisted that Viktor's Reactive Attachment Disorder and tantrums drove them to duct-tape his mouth, lock him in a crawlspace without access to a toilet, and force-feed him uncooked or salty food without water as a punishment. They also whipped their six children (4 biological sons, plus Viktor's 4-year-old twin brothers) with a cat o' nine tails. According to one website, Viktor might have been a victim of controversial "attachment therapy" techniques.

Renee Polreis tried to convince a court that her 2-year-old Russian adopted son, David, beat himself to death with a wooden spoon while her husband was out of town. When that failed to convince, her attorney produced a pathologist who said the bruising could have been caused by pneumonia. Polreis insisted David had severe Reactive Attachment Disorder, despite a psychologist's testimony that he had watched David hug and kiss her a month before his murder.

I don't know how many Russian mail-order brides like Anastasia Solovieva have been slaughtered by their husbands, but I fear that number isn't good, either.

The murders of foreign adoptees pass quickly out of public consciousness. At this time, a mere handful of websites honour the dead children and call for increased oversight in the adoption industry.

Why is this happening? Is it possible that some people don't feel the same empathy for their adopted children than they do for their own children? Some of these cases remind me of the torture death of Sylvia Likens at the hands of other teens and children, egged on by her guardian. This woman, Gertrude Banishewski, was not known to abuse her own 7 children, yet she had no difficulty beating, burning, starving, and molesting another child in her care. Similarly, the Mattheys did not lock their own children in unheated rooms when they misbehaved. Is it really the children who have attachment disorders in these instances?

While people like the Mulligans aren't abusive toward their adopted children, I wonder about the emotional trauma that could result when children are forcibly removed from their home countries, made to live in households in which no one speaks their languages, and abandoned if their reactions to their new environments become bothersome. It is painfully obvious that many adoptive parents aren't prepared for any sort of parenting, much less foreign adoptions.

Some choices are meant to be permanent. If you can't live with their consequences, then you shouldn't be making them.

Ah, I get it...

2010-04-07T12:42:00.005-07:00

At long last, someone has explained the gripes of the Tea Partiers in a way I understand. And by "understand", I mean "I get that you're a racist toolbox". It's all so clear now.

nataliedee.com

The Song That Still Always Makes Me Cry

2010-03-27T23:07:00.004-07:00

After a Janis Ian concert tonight, which was just awesome, Richard insisted on sticking around to get a book signed. So I had to tell her that a song she co-wrote makes me cry every time I hear it, and she said she'd tell that to Jon Vezner. Then she asked, "What's the other song that makes you cry?" and I realized I must have told her that "This Old Town" is one of two songs that always makes me cry. And I had to admit the other one was "Under Pressure". That could've been embarrassing, but she just hummed a little of it and said, "Well, I'm in good company."

Cool.

Sleepy/Grumpy Bunneh

2010-03-26T16:35:00.006-07:00

I'm in a bit of an end-of-winter slump and have been totally neglecting this blog and all my good blogbuds, but hopefully I'll snap out of it soon. In the meantime, a few bunny pics...

Important PSA

2010-03-05T03:36:00.001-07:00

I saw one of these at a cafe the other day and knew I had to share it, for the public good...

Non-Vampire Bat

2010-02-20T23:55:00.001-07:00

Okay, I have to admit this is funny. I hope I don't sound too much like this guy.

nataliedee.com

Fun With Spam

2010-02-15T19:45:00.003-07:00

Some recent spam I found amusing:

Good day, sun shines!
There have were times of troubles when I felt unhappy missing knowledge about opportunities of getting high yields on investments. I was a dump and downright stupid person.
I have never imagined that there weren't any need in big initial investment.
Now, I feel good, I started to get real income.
It gets down to choose a correct companion who utilizes your funds in a right way - that is incorporate it in real business, parts and divides the profit with me.

I just found the website who discuss about Several home based business.

lovely, i just made lots of some other new emo backgrounds in my blog. (Greeeaaaat. Just what I need. God knows it's impossible to find emo pics online.)

Amiable post and this post helped me alot in my college assignement. Say thank you you on your information. (Thank you you.)

And here's a cartoon from The Brothers McLeod that's entirely "scripted" with spam!

Happy V Day, Everybody!

2010-02-14T05:53:00.000-07:00

nataliedee.com

Not Lost Yet

2010-02-03T11:43:00.004-07:00

Sadly, I won't be watching the final-season premiere of Lost tonight - I haven't finished watching last season, if you can believe it. I was saving it until very close to the final season, and I waited a bit too long. So no spoilers, puh-leeze!

Boy Explains the Parliament Perogue

2010-01-22T03:34:00.001-07:00

By SME

SME in the Movies

2010-01-20T10:07:00.005-07:00

Once in a while, I'll see something in a movie that is just so freaking stupid I want to hop onto the screen and correct it. I can't do that, obviously, but my Sim alter ego certainly can.
Here's what I think should have happened during the invisible ship scene in What the Bleep Do We Know?. ..

RIP Art Clokey

2010-01-09T18:17:00.003-07:00

The creator of Gumby died yesterday at the age of 88. Art Clokey was a fascinating guy, a spiritual traveler who immersed himself in everything from Lutheranism to Buddhism, created art films, and set the bar quite high in the time-consuming world of stop motion. The original Gumby series was, musically and artistically, far ahead of its time and infinitely more evolved than just about any other show in the history of children's television. Its dreamlike surreality has eased me into sleep more times than I can count.

Thanks so much for hours of trippy entertainment, Mr. Clokey. You were truly one of a kind, and will be missed.

Bombers and Bald Bunnies

2010-01-08T16:44:00.004-07:00

So Weibo Ludwig has been arrested for the pipeline bombing. The one the Edmonton Journal tried to pin on Al Qaeda and then on First Nations people. The one Glenn Beck attributed to the left-wing environmentalists he's been "warning" us about. The one conspiracy theorists have blamed on the oil companies; if they bomb their own pipelines, the theories go, taxpayers will have to foot the bill for increased security so that other people won't bomb the pipelines. Um, what?

Sophie's nesting again. Every time the temperature drops even slightly, she starts pulling out her fur and using it to line little burrows she creates with her towel. When I make her stop ('cause she'd be much colder if she was bald, and I'm tired of finding little piles of fluff everywhere), she gets huffy and sulks under her cage - easily the coldest place in the room. Go figure.

Hmmm....

2010-01-03T15:55:00.004-07:00

Check out a bizarre holiday mystery at Uqbar Calling. In 1945, five of the ten Sodder children of West Virginia died in a house fire. Or did they? I have my own thoughts on the case, but I'll keep them to myself for now. I'm curious to know what other people think of it.

The Last of '09

2010-01-01T15:38:00.002-07:00

This is Richard's video of New Year's Eve. I didn't want to venture out in the cold, and after hearing the band's selection I'm sooo glad I didn't...

Anyway, Happy New Year!

The Twelve Don'ts of Christmas

2009-12-25T19:23:00.000-07:00

By SME

"All I want for Christmas is old socks."

2009-12-25T01:39:00.001-07:00

Merry Christmas, everybody!