THE OLDER STUFF

-- March 27, 2023 --

Tales From Two Koreas

I've always had an interest in Korea, both North and South. When film buffs were telling me to check out Japanese films, I was always pointing out that South Korean ones were better. I've posted a number of interesting Korean stories here, such as the infamous "axe murder" incident of 1976 that almost sparked a war, and the North Korean film Dear Leader kidnapped a couple for, Pulgasari, so here's another two entries that are just as bizarre.
It's said that in North Korea, citizens are ruled with an iron fist, so they know not to step out of line. You'd think that those who are held in high esteem by the ruling class would be able to get away with more, but not so.
Woo In-hee was a North Korean actress, who reached stardom in the late 1960s, and was renowned for her beauty, once called "the most beautiful woman in North Korea".

Woo earned dozens of awards, as well as being given the title of "ko", or People's Actress, which allowed extraordinary freedoms, such as permission to travel to Czechoslovakia to study acting. In the late 70s, she began a secret affair with the country's leader, Kim Jong-il. Upon the death of another lover, she was interrogated, and let it slip of her affair with Kim. The dictator had her arrested, and immediately taken to the Kang Kon Military Academy shooting grounds, where she was tied to a post, and shot in front of 6,000 people - including her husband. Woo's name, and image were purged from magazines, and was even edited out of films she had performed in, rendering the movie plots impossible to understand.
Just like that tragedy, you hear a lot of wild ones about what goes on in North Korea, but things can get just as crazy down South. In January of 1968, North Korea launched a daring raid in an attempt to assassinate the President of South Korea, Park Chung-hee, at his compound in Seoul. It failed, and it's known as the Blue House raid. In response, South Korea attempted to counter with a top-secret assassination squad of 31 men, called Unit 684 stationed on Silmido Island, tasked with attacking the residence of North Korea's then-leader Kim Il-sung. It turned out to be a disaster, and it never even left South Korea.

According to the Defense Ministry, from 1968 to 1971, two men were executed for desertion, another was executed for threatening an officer, and three more were executed after they escaped the island, and raped a local woman. In 1971, things got much worse when the trainees turned on their commanders, killing 18 of them. Then the squad made their way to the mainland, and hijacked a bus to Seoul. There, they clashed with police, where dozens of security forces, and civilians were killed, or wounded. It took the military to end it by bombing the bus, killing 20 of the mutineers, leaving only four alive, but badly hurt. It didn't matter, as those four were later executed for treason.
I know that the Koreas are really no different than any other country. They all have their trials, tales, and tribulations. With that, there'll probably never be an end to the number of interesting anecdotes, hilarious history, and odd drama I can post about. Here's to humanity's never-ending deviancy, I guess.

-- March 13, 2023 --

This Post Has Gone Nuclear

I understand that -in many ways- when it comes to emissions, nuclear power is a better option than fossil fuels. Still, there have been a number of issues having to do with the cleanup, and disposal of radioactive material since the splitting of the atom. From long-lasting damage due to nuclear weapons testing, to nuclear reactor meltdowns, there are areas of our planet that are a testament to our hubris when it comes to atomic power. Of course, everyone is familiar with the infamous Chernobyl Incident, when in 1986 the meltdown of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant's reactor core destroyed the plant, and caused a massive evacuation that the city has yet to fully recover from. There are a few others that are less known, one of which is right in many of our own backyards.
Red Gate Woods in Willow Springs is the burial site for the world's first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, which ceased operation on the 28th of February, 1943.

The area also became the site of Argonne National Laboratory in 1946, with Chicago Pile-2, and Chicago Pile-3 (which once went critical on May 15, 1944) operating there for ten years before they outlived their usefulness, and shut down in May of 1954. After the nuclear waste (including the graphite fuel bars, and heavy water) were shipped to Tennessee for disposal. The rest was encased in concrete, and buried in a 40 ft (12 m) deep trench in what is now known as the Site A/Plot M Disposal Site, marked by a commemorative monument seen here. Surveys conducted in the 1980s found strontium-90 in the soil, plus trace amounts of tritium, plutonium, technetium, caesium, and uranium in the area. In 1994, the United States Department of Energy earmarked $29 million to rehabilitate the site. As part of the cleanup, 500 cubic yards (380 m³) of radioactive waste was removed, and sent for "proper" disposal. By 2002, the Illinois Department of Public Health had determined that the remaining materials posed no danger to public health, but that has yet to be proven right.
When one thinks of Pacific islands, they tend to imagine tropical beaches, and lush jungles, but there's more there than you can imagine, such as the Runit Dome (aka the Cactus Dome).

It's a 337 ft (115 m) diameter concrete sarcophagus, containing 95,000 cubic yards (73,000 m²) of radioactive debris - including plutonium-239, from nuclear tests conducted by the United States between 1946 and 1958. The dome is 18" (46 cm) thick, and holds loose waste, and topsoil debris scraped off from six different islands of the Enewetak Atoll tests. From 1977 to 1980, 4,000 U.S. servicemen were involved in this cleanup. Sadly, many involved have died of cancer, while others have become sick. The U.S. government denies there is any connection between the clean up work, and the health problems, while refusing to offer compensation for illnesses associated with the construction of Runit Dome. In 2013, a report by the U.S. Department of Energy found that the concrete dome had weathered, and there was minor cracking in the structure, with the soil around the dome actually being found to be more contaminated than its contents.
As if climate change wasn't bad enough, here are two more reasons to look into, and fund the changeover to renewable energy sources. Though it may look like it (especially by my wardrobe), I'm not all gloom-and-doom, and am certain humanity will do the right thing. I just hope it's in time.

-- February 28, 2023 --

Does Size Matter?

Sometimes, bigger is better. Other times, it really is best to be small, and -though rarely- it's even better to be the smallest.
This is a microscopic polymer statue by South African sculptor, Jonty Hurwitz, titled "Trust". It measures 1/100th of a centimeter, and is considered the "smallest sculpture ever made".

Engineers at Northwestern University have created micro-robots on an almost unbelievably small scale. The half-millimeter crab-like machines are now the world’s smallest remote-control robots. Smaller than a flea, they are able to walk along the edge of a penny (as in the image below). Bioelectronics engineer John A. Rogers was quoted in the journal Science Robotics, "You might imagine micro-robots as agents to repair, or assemble small structures, or machines in industry, or as surgical assistants to clear clogged arteries, to stop internal bleeding, or to eliminate cancerous tumors - all in minimally invasive procedures."

Travis Casagrande, an electron microscopy researcher in Canada, created the world's smallest winter home. The structure was carved out of silicon, using a beam microscope with charged gallium ions. The result was 10x smaller than the width of a human hair.

Since I mentioned ionic beams, this award-winning photo was taken in 2019, by Nick Moser and Chris Bakal, who shot an ion beam into a metastatic melanoma (cancer) cell in a patient's brain. Known as ion-beam milling, the process cuts through the silica substrate, and since melanoma attaches itself using structures called focal adhesions, this lets scientists, and doctors see how they form.

Simone Biles once said, "For me, I don't think about size. I focus more on being powerful and confident," and many of these artists, and scientists thought the same. Size only matters in the context of the goal striven for, so don't be a such a Size Queen.

-- February 14, 2023 --

How Statuesque

There are some odd monuments around the globe, and -since one of my favorites is no more (the Georgia Guidestones)- I thought I'd cover some of the other ones I find delightfully weird, before they're destroyed as well.
In 1988, citizens of Rio de Janeiro were so fed up with their local politicians, that when newspapers Casseta Popular and Planeta Diário ran a zoo chimpanzee for mayor, it received 400,000 votes. The ape, known as Macaco Tião (meaning "Tião the Monkey"), was infamous for his constant bad mood, and the habit of throwing mud and feces at zoo visitors. Tião (which is the nickname for Sebastião, Rio de Janeiro's patron saint, Saint Sebastian) died of diabetes at the age of 33, in 1996. When he died the city of Rio de Janeiro declared an official mourning of three days. The main avenue to the zoo not only carries his name, but a statue marks the start of the pathway.

In Spain's capital of Madrid, located in the gardens of Parque del Buen Retiro, is a statue that is 666 meters above sea level. Why there, because it is a dedication to Lucifer. Titled "Ángel Caído" ("The Fallen Angel"), it was created by sculptor Ricardo Bellver, and cast in bronze for the third World's Fair in Paris. Once the event ended, the piece was acquired by Madrid's Museo del Prado, and later donated to the city itself, where it -in 1885- inaugurated the work to its current location.

Kyoto, Japan's Mimizuka (meaning "Ear Mound") is an alteration of a 16th Century monument called a Hanazuka (meaning "Nose Mound", which were found throughout Japan), originally dedicated to the sliced-off noses of murdered Korean soldiers and civilians, as well as Ming Chinese troops, taken as war trophies during the Japanese invasions of Korea (1592 - 1598). It is believed the Mimizuka (which was constructed in 1597) enshrines the noses of at least 38,000 victims -mostly Koreans- killed during Toyotomi Hideyoshi's invasions. In the 1970s, the South Korean government asked Japan to level it, but many South Koreans requested that the mound should stay, as a reminder of past savagery. September 28, 1997 was the 400th anniversary of the Mimizuka, and Japan held a ceremony to respect those killed.

This last one isn't so much about the monument, as it's about what happens to it. The Duke of Wellington statue in Glasgow, Scotland always has a cone on its head, because -for the last 30 years- someone has been putting one there, and every time it's removed, a new one appears within days. The local government decided to leave it, seeing as it saves them the equivalent of $10,000 a year in labor to remove it.

Well, there's a few more, but I'll leave those for another post, as I don't want to give it all away in one shot. If there's one you know of, that you think I may find of interest -by all means- let me know.

-- February 02, 2023 --

Those Freaking Animals

As an animal lover, I enjoy posting stories about them, but I normally post tales about weird instances that happen to, or involve, domesticated animals; such as Lampo, the train-traveling dog, or the knighted penguin Sir Nils Olav. I don't think I've posted anything covering animals that are weird unto themselves. Well, let's change that...
One such animal is the Nycteribiidae, aka the Parasitic Bat Fly, which are flattened, spider-like flies without eyes, or wings. These flies are seldom encountered outside the bodies of their hosts (bats), which they co-evolved with for millions of years, feeding off their blood.

In the central African nation of Gabon, rivers are becoming overcrowded, so crocodiles are starting to go into water-filled caves. They are sustaining themselves on dead bats, but also on small amounts of bat guana, which is turning them orange, as well as stunting their growth. Also, with no light, they are losing their eyes. These crocodiles are in the process of becoming a completely new species.

When most look at an image of the Barreleye fish (Macropinna microstoma), they think the the two spots above its mouth are its eyes, but they are actually olfactory organs called "nares", similar to human nostrils. The fish's extremely light-sensitive eyes are within its transparent, fluid-filled forehead, and are capped by bright green lenses, that normally point upward, and only point forward when the fish is feeding.

The Mexican Mole Lizard, or Worm Lizard (Bipes biporus), is a species of amphisbaenian (meaning "legless reptile"), yet it is one of four species of amphisbaenians that have legs. Its forelegs are short, and paddle-like for digging, while its hind legs have disappeared, leaving behind vestigial bones only visible in X-rays. To permit it to dig more efficiently, the Mexican mole lizard evolved to lose open ears, in favor of having its skin transmit vibrations to the cochlea. It's only found in the Mexican states of Baja California, Guerrero, and Chiapas.

Osmia calaminthae, commonly known as the Blue Calamintha Bee, is a rare species of mason bee native to only two small areas of Florida (Lake Wales Ridge in Highlands County, and Ocala National Forest in Marion County). Its scientific name is derived from its favored host plant, Calamintha ashei. First discovered in 2011, attempts to study it were attempted in 2016, but it was not rediscovered until March of 2020.

I enjoyed making this list, and should probably do a lot more of these. Seeing as (with as many projects as I juggle) I have limited time, and there are literally thousands upon thousands of strange animals to write of, I may stick to this style of blogging, but -knowing me- if I come across a bigger story worthy enough to share, you know I will.

-- January 16, 2023 --

Dig This!

I'm back to blogging, and I thought I'd share some interesting (and recent) archeological discoveries.
First, we'll head to what is now Poland, where flint artifacts found in the Tunel Wielki cave are now thought to be the work of an extinct hominid species called Homo heidelbergensis (the last common ancestor of Neanderthals, and modern humans). The cave, along with the artifacts, were discovered in the 1960s, and the tools were thought to be around 40,000 years old. Recent aging of animal remains from the cave dated them far greater, so researchers took another look at everything in 2018. Digging deeper into the soil than previous excavations, they found layers of sediment that contained the bones of animals that lived between 450,000 and 550,000 years ago, including Lycaon lycaonoides, and Ursus deningeri - both extinct. More importantly, researchers uncovered 40 flint artifacts in the same layers of sediment, meaning the tools were produced during the same period. Neither Homo sapien, nor Homo neanderthalensis, lived in what is now Europe, at that time, therefore evidence suggests that the tools were made by Homo heidelbergensis.
Next, researchers believe they have deciphered markings as old as 20,000 years, as a type of "proto-writing". More than 600 images on cave walls, and objects across Europe, have dots, and lines on animals, which are now thought to be numerically recorded information, referencing some type of calendar.

The study, published in Cambridge Archaeological Journal, was led by independent researcher Ben Bacon, and involved senior academics from Durham University, and University College London. Archaeologists have always known the sequences of marks were storing some kind of information about different species, such as wild horses, deer, cattle, and mammoths, but they didn't know their specific meaning. Using the birth cycles of equivalent animals today as a reference point, the researchers were able to work out that the number of marks associated with the animals were a record, by lunar month, of when they were mating. The work shows that the sequences record mating, and birthing seasons, finding a correlation between the numbers of marks, and the lunar cycles in which modern animals mate, and birth.
Lastly, archeologists at Oregon State University have uncovered projectile points in Idaho, which are thousands of years older than any previously found in the Americas. The 13 projectile points, both full and fragmentary, range from about 0.5 - 2 inches (1.4 - 5 cm) long, and roughly date to 15,700 years ago, according to carbon-14 tests. That makes them about 3,000 years older than the Clovis fluted points found throughout North America, and 2,300 years older than the points previously found at the same Cooper's Ferry site along the Salmon River in present-day Idaho.
Well, I'm glad to be back, and hope to uncover more interesting stories throughout the year. At least, until my next break.

-- November 29, 2022 --

See You All in 2023

Today is my birthday, and I'm giving myself the gift of a month off from this blog, but it isn't without focusing on other work, as I'm wrapping up the Know-It-All Asshole Jerk book, Encyclopedia Obscurum. If you're a fan of this insanity, but are tired of reading it all online, then keep an eye out for the upcoming book. Over 250 pages, with almost 400 entries of bizarre true stories covering music, literature, lifestyles, and random weirdoes. With a cover designed by Iron Forge Press' Chuck Loose!

See you all back here in January! Oh, but until I'll still be posting shorter stories on the Know-It-All Asshole Jerk Instagram. I post there daily, so check out @knowitallaholejerk.

-- November 13, 2022 --

Crazy Boys and Their Big Toys

I believe the state of the world isn't all that much different than any other time - if anything it's all changed for the better. A 2020 study by the University of York says the world has become more peaceful in the last 30 years. The New Yorker wrote in 2018 how violent crime rates have fallen by over 50% in most major U.S. cities. Yet, since the late-80s, the constantly growing forms of mass media (social and other), as well as the 24-hour news cycle, has made many feel they're under serious pressure. This has led some people to commit acts of intense rage. Sadly, a number of those have ended in a high body count, while a few -though the perpetrator was killed in their commission- just left a whole lot of property damage. While I don't take pleasure in either, the latter has interested me because of the whole "fuck it" and "fuck shit up" attitude behind it.
Back in the early 90s, Shawn Timothy Nelson filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against Sharp Memorial Hospital for his mother's death, then a $2,000,000 damage claim against San Diego for police negligence, and false arrest. After that, the theft of plumbing equipment from his truck wrecked his business, and with no income, his utilities were cut off, and his house went into foreclosure.

Fed up, Nelson drove to the California Army National Guard Armory in San Diego, around 6pm on May 17, 1995. The gate to the vehicle yard was unmanned, and left open, so he just drove on in. He jumped into an unarmed 57-ton M60A3 Patton tank, and cranked it up. Guardsman noticed, and approached him, but with little chance of stopping a tank, they called police. For 23 minutes, he led the San Diego police, the San Diego County Sheriff's Department, and the California Highway Patrol on a televised chase throughout the streets of Clairemont. The tank easily tore through about 40 parked vehicles (including an RV), all the while toppling fire hydrants, traffic lights, road signs, and utility poles which knocked out power to around 5,100 San Diego Gas & Electric customers. Nelson drove the tank onto Interstate 805, and attempted to knock down a pedestrian bridge. Failing, he exited onto State Route 163, and while trying to cross from the southbound to northbound lanes, the tank became stuck on the concrete median. As he tried to rock the tank back-and-forth to free himself, policemen climbed onto it, and opened the hatch with bolt cutters. They ordered Nelson to surrender, but he ignored them, so one of the cops shot him through his neck. He was rushed to the same hospital his mom died at, and perished there as well. California had to dish out $149,200 (about $300,00 today) to cover the damage along Nelson's path of destruction.
Another similar, yet much more infamous rampage, was that of Marvin John Heemeyer, and his "Killdozer".

In 1992, Heemeyer purchased 2 acres (0.8 ha) of land from the federal agency Resolution Trust Corporation, for $42,000 to build a muffler shop in Grandy, Colorado. He then agreed to sell a portion of the land to builders of a concrete plant, but changed his mind on the selling price a number of times, even after it was zoned for the sale. This led to a number of disputes, and the city's zoning commission approved the construction of the concrete plant in 2001. Heemeyer appealed the decision, and lost. Whether out of spite, or not, the zoning board then fined him $2,500 for not having a septic tank on his muffler shop property. In a definite act of revenge, he modified a Komatsu D355A bulldozer with sheets of bulletproof metal. On June 4, 2004, Heemeyer drove his armored-vehicle through the wall of his muffler shop (which he sold off two months prior), the concrete plant, the office of the local newspaper that ran an editorial against him, the town hall, the home of a former mayor, and eight other local buildings. This lasted for two hours, with damage amounting to around $7 million, as police (including a SWAT team) followed him, occasionally firing with no effect. The authorities were about to call in the National Guard to use an Apache attack helicopter equipped with a Hellfire missile, but found they didn't need it when the homemade-tank became stuck in the debris of a hardware store. The tractor's radiator had been damaged, and was leaking various fluids, causing the engine to shut down. This was when Heemeyer took his own life with a handgun. In 2005, the town announced plans to send individual pieces of the machine to separate scrapyards in an attempt to prevent souvenir-taking.
Like I mentioned, I don't take pleasure in anything these two have done, but when you feel your back is up against a wall, I can kind of understand their methods of expression.

-- October 31, 2022 --

Off With Its Head!

The United States has a few things Canada does not, such as warm beaches, desert canyons, and 2nd Amendment rights. Still, Canada has a number of things Americans don't, like the metric system, socialized medicine, a day off for voting, and legalized marijuana. Oh, yeah! They also had hitchBOT.

hitchBOT was a Canadian learning-machine built in 2013 by McMaster University professor David Harris Smith, and professor Frauke Zeller of Ryerson University. The two had designed it to study how people interact with technology, as well as highlight the anthropomorphism of robotics, and the ethics involved in the treatment of automatons. Smith (who had hitchhiked across Canada multiple times) and Zeller made it so hitchBOT could not move on its own, and had to "ask" to be taken from city to city. From July through August of 2014, the machine made it across the entire country of Canada - from the Institute for Applied Creativity in Halifax, Nova Scotia, all the way to Victoria, British Columbia. It even had a stop at a First Nations' powwow, where it was given a name translating to "Iron Woman". It proved to be so popular, its publicly available GPS position was turned off, since crowds would gather to either see it, or bother those lucky enough to host it for an evening. After its success, a second model was made, and they took that hitchBOT to Germany in 2015, where it traveled for ten days, then it was off to the Netherlands, were it spent a whole three weeks crisscrossing the land.
That's when it hit the creators to have it visit the United States. They were hoping hitchBOT would make it from Boston, MA to San Francisco, CA. On July 17, 2015, hitchBOT left the Boston area, but -a little over two weeks later- on August 1st, the system went dead, and a photo of the robot was posted on Twitter. It had been dismantled, and beheaded in Philadelphia, PA. Its head has never been found.

Though Zeller also created other bots to research interactions with humans (including art critic robot, kulturBOT, and another hitchhiking robot, called TweenBOT), hitchBOT has become just another example of why we Americans can't have nice things. Oh, and if you're interested in seeing it for yourself, the original hitchBOT is on permanent display at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. While you're there, enjoy the recreation weed without consequence, and know that -if you get hurt- you're covered there too. O Canada, indeed.

-- October 16, 2022 --

Space Racists

I posted a shorter version of this story on the KIAAJ Instagram. It got me quite a bit of hate mail from cult members, and I thought I'd share it here as well, while going a bit deeper into this subject, so let's start at the beginning.
William S. Sadler (1875 - 1969) was born in Spencer, Indiana, but moved to Battle Creek, Michigan in 1889. As a teenager there, he began to work at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where he met physician John Harvey Kellogg, co-inventor of Corn Flakes cereal. Kellogg became Sadler's mentor, even marrying his niece, Lena Celestia Kellogg, and joining the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, which the Kellogg family were a part of.

He, and his wife, became public speakers in 1907, and -ten years later- the Sadlers became infatuated with the 1916, pseudoscientific book, The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant, which was based around the theory of Nordic superiority, soon making many of their speeches based around eugenics. In 1910, he moved to Europe, and studied psychiatry for a year under Sigmund Freud. Sadler glorified the value of prayer, and religion, but was highly skeptical of mediums, channeling, yet - in 1911- while Sadler treated a patient for his sleep condition, Sadler said the man spoke to him, claiming to be an extraterrestrial with messages for humanity. In 1925, Sadler "discovered" handwritten documents from this channeled being, and only showed them to those he trusted. In 1924, Sadler formed a private group to study these papers, as well as channeled messages, which were being called the Urantia writings. It wasn't until 1955 that The Urantia Foundation was formed to publish all the writings as the 2,000-page The Urantia Book. The book is filled with sci-fi religion, bad science, and a whole lot of racist eugenics. To note, from 1906 to 1952, Sadler wrote over forty books on a variety of topics, such as psychiatry, sex, love, and faith, but he also wrote several on race, such as 1922's Race Decadence, and Long Heads and Round Heads; What's the Matter with Germany from 1918. Many of Sadler's detractors point out that the "channeled" writings in The Urantia Book are straight up word-for-word plagiarisms from many of Sadler's earlier books. Also, some of The Urantia Book was lifted from other authors, as researchers have shown its section titled "Paper 85" is mostly the first eight chapters of Origin and Evolution of Religion by Edward Washburn Hopkins, which was published by Yale University Press in 1923, and a bunch of the book's material on the evolution of humankind seems to have directly ripped off Henry Fairfield Osborn's Man Rises to Parnassus: Critical Epochs in the Prehistory of Man, released on Princeton University Press in 1928.
Flash forward to the late 1960s, where hippie Mo Siegel was looking to find his way spiritually, and came across The Urantia Book. While the book covers a lot of topics, one was natural diets, which -in 1969- influenced Siegel (along with fellow Urantia believers John Hay, and Peggy Clute) to start gathering herbs, and flowers around Boulder, Colorado, and selling them to local health food stores. Soon they established their company, Celestial Seasonings, which has since become the world's highest selling herbal tea, with annual sales of $100,000,000. Though Siegel retired from the company in 2002, he was still a big part of The Urantia Foundation, which helps spread the book's message (including its beliefs in eugenics). Mo Siegel is now the owner of Capital Peaks Investment, and throughout his life has served on five public company boards, and 17 private corporate Board of Directors, such as Whole Foods, Annie's, Chocolove, and the Colorado Impact Fund.
I get that the racist cult origins of the world's best selling tea might be pretty shocking, but there are a number of followers of Urantia that are just as surprising, such as Australian polar explorer, and photographer, Sir George Hubert Wilkins, or Kermit Anderson, who -for 30 years- worked in the fields of medical genetics, and genetic screening with Kaiser Permanente, which is one of the largest nonprofit healthcare plans in the U.S., operating around 40 hospitals, and over 700 medical offices. Actually, some notable musicians loved the book, basing some of their music, and lyrics around it, including Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jaco Pastorius, and Pato Banton. Well, you never truly know who's been inspired by some wacky stuff, until they admit so themselves.

-- October 08, 2022 --

It's the End of the World, As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Artist and musician Jonathan Canady has released his latest artists' book The Day Man Lost.

It’s an exploration of the apocalypse, with a limited run of 50 hand-numbered copies. The booklet contains Jonathan's art, along with a conversation between him and I about the End Times, as well as a story by musician Scott Candey. You can order it by contacting him at his website. Also, check out his newest music release, Empty Box, here.

-- October 01, 2022 --

Resuscitating Jane Doe

My last post was about a man with no name that few knew about, and this one's going to be about a woman with no name that many once knew about, but few do today. While much of it is legend -as there are no records of the actual event- an unidentified young woman's body was pulled from the Seine River near the Quai du Louvre in Paris, sometime in the late 1880s, thought to have passed by suicide. It's said that a pathologist at the Paris Morgue was so taken by her beauty that he felt compelled to make a death mask of her face, and she became known as L'Inconnue de la Seine (translated as "the Unknown Woman of the Seine").

In the following years, a number of plaster casts of her death mask were produced, and became a fashionable fixture in the French art underground. She soon found her way into literature, with the earliest mention being in Richard Le Gallienne's 1900 novella The Worshipper of the Image, where a poet falls in love with the mask. Albert Camus compared her smile to the Mona Lisa. The protagonist of Rainer Maria Rilke's only novel, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), mentions the mask, and critic Al Alvarez later wrote in his 1972 book, The Savage God, "I am told that a whole generation of German girls modeled their looks on her." The 1926 Ernst Benkard book on death masks, Das ewige Antlitz, includes her. Czech poet Vítezslav Nezval wrote a poem in 1929 inspired by her, titled "Neznámá ze Seiny". She is referenced in the 1955 William Gaddis novel The Recognitions, 1942's My Heart for Hostage by Robert Hillyer, and by Chuck Palahniuk in his story "Exodus", from Haunted (2005). In 1963, Bentley Stone choreographed a ballet around her story, with music by Francis Poulenc. Artist Man Ray made a series of surrealist mises-en-scène pictures of her in 1966. Documentaries have been made on this maiden, and L'Inconnue is sung about on a 2018 track by Beach House, as well as on Frank Turner's 2019 album No Man's Land. Most Americans may not know her story, but they may be familiar with her face -especially if they've taken a CPR class- as she has been the face of the first-aid mannequin Resusci Anne (aka Resuscitan Anne) since 1958.
Yet, her origin story may turn out to be all wrong. According to one version, the draughtsman Georges Villa was told by the painter Jules Joseph Lefebvre that her impression was taken from the face of a young model who died of tuberculosis around 1875. Another account says the mask was taken from the 16-year-old daughter of a mask manufacturer in Germany. Truth is, it's been questioned for some time whether the expression of her face could belong to a drowned person.
Her life, and her death, may remain a mystery, but her face lives on. Had her story been better known, I'm sure it would be an inspiration to many a social media influencer today.

-- September 23, 2022 --

Hear Me Roar

The new season of the Lux Occult podcast (@luxoccultpod) has begun, and I'm honored to be their first guest. Hear me go on about using human bones as instruments, writing poetry, finding art in discarded trash, intense rituals, and the positive aspects of therapy.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts; iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Audible, or magic portal.

-- September 16, 2022 --

A Real Loss

I'm sorry if I offend anyone here, but I don't understand the outpouring of grief for Queen Elizabeth II. Never mind that she cost British taxpayers about $368 million in expenses each year, how first cousins Katherine, and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon, were locked away in institutions because of learning disabilities, or the fact that she's actually German with the family name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (changed to Windsor during the First World War). There's the 1948 Batang Kali massacre in Malaysia; the Kenyan Chuka massacre in 1953, and later Hola massacre in '59; taking advantage of a military coup in Indonesia to call for violence against the Communist Party of Indonesia in 1965; and the rest of British colonial history under her rule.
Now, I'm not heartless. I do bemoan the death of those who have died - just not monarchs. I can even say my heart aches for some who have passed that I've never met, and didn't know at all, with the most recent death I felt sorrow for was a nameless Amazonian who was only known as The Man of the Hole.

The Man of the Hole was an indigenous person who was the sole inhabitant of the Tanaru Indigenous Territory, a protected area of the Amazon rainforest in the Brazilian state of Rondônia.
In 1996, word reached the Brazilian Fundação Nacional do Índio (a governmental protection agency for Amerindian interests) that a massacre had been committed against an uncontacted tribe by illegal miners the previous year. Their research proved horrifying.
It turns out that most of The Man in the Hole's tribe was slaughtered by cattle ranchers sometime in the 1970s, but he and a few others survived well into the 1990s. It was in 1995, that illegal miners put out poisoned sugar for the remaining members of the tribe, and all died but him. After the miners bulldozed the tribe's village, Fundação Nacional do Índio stepped in, and officially declared 31 square miles (8,000 ha) of his land as a protected indigenous territory. They had learned of the tribe, but it wasn't until they did some observations that they discovered he was all alone. No matter their research, it's not known what his tribe was called, what language they spoke, or what the Man of the Hole's real name was. Still, they kept their distance, and checked in every so often. In that time, they found that he built straw huts for shelter, but periodically moved, with over 50 huts since identified. His "Man of the Hole" nickname came from inspections of his abandoned huts, where a deep hole was found in each. It was thought the holes were used to hide in, or trap animals, but some speculate they might have spiritual significance. Despite protections, and observations, he was shot by a rancher in November of 2009, but survived.
Sadly, on August 24th of this year -after not being seen for some time- Fundação Nacional do Índio agent Altair José Algayer found The Man of the Hole had died in his most recent hut. It was reported he was found "lying down in the hammock, and ornamented [with macaw feathers] as if waiting for death". His body was taken to the state capital of Porto Velho for autopsy to establish cause of death - thankfully, there were no signs of violence. It's estimated he had died in July, at around 60 years old. Marcelo dos Santos, an indigenous peoples expert, said The Man of the Hole should be buried in the same place he had lived.
Rest in peace, warrior. Damn it! Who's cutting up onions in here?

-- September 04, 2022 --

Trust No One (Especially Anyone In Government)

In case you haven't noticed yet, I'm a bit of a conspiracy theorist. Not your newfangled flat-Earth, adrenochrome, anti-vaxx kind. I'd say I'm the more sensible, realist type. Well, at least all the conspiracies I've ever believed in turned out to be real: MK-Ultra, Project Paperclip, the fake Gulf of Tonkin incident, misinformation on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Project Sunshine baby corpse thefts, and so on.
I'm not sure about chemtrails, but there are plenty of experiments the U.S. government performed over cities from planes. In 1950, the U.S. Navy sprayed large amounts of Serratia marcescens bacteria over the city of San Francisco in Operation Sea-Spray; Operation Big Buzz had the U.S. military drop 300,000 mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti) in 1955, over parts of the state of Georgia to determine if they could survive to take meals from humans; twice in 1956, Operation Drop Kick had the Army Chemical Corps drop mosquitos over Savannah, GA, and a third time over Avon Park, FL in 1958; in 1949, the U.S. government released radioactive fission products (iodine-131, and xenon-133) over three small towns in Washington state for Operation Green Run. Then there's also "cloud seeding", a type of weather modification to change the amount of rainfall by dispersing substances into clouds (something almost every major country on Earth has performed several times), but also "solar geoengineering", which involves spraying particles into the stratosphere to help cool the planet, sometimes known as "stratospheric injection", or "stratospheric aerosol scattering" (Russia performed these experiments from a helicopter in 2009). Combine these two facts, and I can partly understand why some people believe nefarious groups are filling the skies with poison.
Chemtrails aside, true or not, there are literally hundreds of instances of governments doing bizarre tests on their unsuspecting citizenry. While many are familiar with the United States' Tuskegee syphilis experiments on black Americans (conducted by the United States Public Health Service, and the Centers for Disease Control, between 1932 and 1972), there are so many more folks are unaware of.

In the 1940s, prisoners of Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois were infected with malaria by the University of Chicago's Department of Medicine (now the Pritzker School of Medicine), in conjunction with the U. S. Army, and the U.S. State Department. This experiment was so egregious, the Nazis used it as a defense of their actions during the Nuremberg Trials.
From 1946 to 1948, U.S. researchers in Guatemala used prostitutes to infect prisoners, patients of mental health wards, and Guatemalan soldiers with syphilis, so as to test the effectiveness of penicillin. About 700 people were infected as part of this study - including orphan children!
From 1963 to 1969, the United States ran Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense, which involved spraying several U.S. ships with different biological, and chemical warfare agents, without telling any of the military personnel aboard the crafts.
In 1966, the U.S. Army released Bacillus atrophaeus bacteria into the subway tunnel systems of New York City, as part of a field experiment called A Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert Attack with Biological Agents, and then tried it again in the Chicago subway system.
The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission ran a study at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine where they fed radioactive iodine-131 to healthy infants in 1953, then again at Detroit's Harper Hospital to premature, and full-term infants.
From 1946 to 1953, at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Massachusetts, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, along with the Quaker Oats corporation, fed oatmeal containing radioactive calcium, and other radioisotopes, to track "how nutrients were digested".
From 1960 to 1971, the Defense Atomic Support Agency performed whole-body radiation experiments on black cancer patients at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, where they forged consent forms.
From 1950 through 1953, the U.S. Army conducted Operation Large Area Coverage, spraying chemicals over six cities in the United States, and Canada, testing the dispersal patterns of chemical weapons, including zinc cadmium sulfide.
From 1951 to 1974 extensive dermatological research operations by the University of Pennsylvania, on behalf of Dow Chemical Company, the U.S. Army, and Johnson & Johnson, studied the health effects of dioxin, and other herbicides, on prisoners at the Holmesburg Prison in Pennsylvania (from 1964 to 1968, the U.S. Army paid almost $400,000 to perform experiments with mind-altering drugs there as well).
In 1950, the C.I.A. initiated Project Bluebird (later renamed Project Artichoke), to develop "the means to control individuals through special interrogation techniques", dosing over 7,000 U.S. military personnel with L.S.D., without their knowledge, or consent.
In the late 40s, Harvard University researchers performed experiments testing diethylstilbestrol (a synthetic estrogen) on unsuspecting pregnant women at the Lying-In Hospital of the University of Chicago, which soon experienced an abnormally high number of miscarriages.
In 1939, the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home ran an experiment where they used psychological torture to induce stuttering in 22 kids who had no speech impediments.
Now, I listed quite a lot, but it isn't even close to the full scope of (known) research, and studies, done on the innocently unwitting in the United States - many of which were only learned of after investigations, or the release of documents under the Freedom of Information Act. Who knows how many are unheard of, as well as the thousands of others done in other countries? Though there are documented accounts of disgusting Nazi operations, and knowledge of the infamous Unit 731, which Japan ran in China, it's not fully known what went (or is currently going) on in Russia, or China.
At least with those in power becoming more open to scrutiny, we can hopefully prevent things like this happening in the future. I'd love to say that I know mankind can do better, but if we could, we probably wouldn't of had a need for government in the first place.

-- August 29, 2022 --

Hush Now

My sold-out book, The Least Silent of Men, is being released in a second edition on the Fall Equinox. For those that missed out on the original, it's a chapbook on the subject of silence, and a detail of experiences during a 30-day vow of silence while living in New York City. Originally limited to 333 paperback copies, and 25 hardcovers, this edition will only be available in a run of 100 paperbacks, signed and numbered.

The work contains a foreword by artist George Petros, a lengthy article on my experience, as well as a transcript of the communication book carried for that month.
It's $15 with postage paid in the U.S. (with an additional $10 outside the United States), and you can purchase it at my Etsy.

-- August 23, 2022 --

A Story About Kid(ding) Rock

There's a lot of forgotten bands out there from the 1960s and 70s. Some never recorded, but had such amazing live sets, that they're still talked about 'til this day. Others -like the Detroit rock band Death- did record, but their labels shelved the albums, which hadn't seen the light of day until more recently. Yet, there are a few that get a bit of press years later, but never actually existed. Wait. What?
Yeah. In 2005, Dave Stewart of Eurythmics fame, was being interviewed in an issue of Rolling Stone, when he mentioned a project he was involved with in 1974, called Platinum Weird. As the story went: he, and an unknown singer named Erin Grace recorded a five-song EP, later titled Will You Be Around. Erin impressed a number of musicians, including a young Stevie Nicks, who liked her so much, she copied her style. After a few live shows, and the EP complete, Erin became distraught over the death of Nick Drake, and ran off with Elton John's boyfriend. She later turned up in L.A., and Don Henley introduced her to Lindsey Buckingham, which spawned a relationship that would be the inspiration for Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. In July of 2006, VH1 ran the documentary Rock Legends - Platinum Weird, which told the story of the short-lived act by host Dan Aykroyd, featuring clips of the band in 1974, as well as Mick Jagger, Ringo Starr, and Stevie Nicks recalling memories of the band.

The thing was, it was all a hoax. The songs were recorded in 2005, and released as digital downloads eight days before the fake VH1 documentary. Now, many might think this was all a moneymaking scam, but everyone involved admitted to the prank immediately after the show's premier in a Los Angeles Times interview - though Stewart claims the band actually did exist at one time, saying the doc was about 80% true. Still, they did keep up the facade, and whether that was to pull the wool over the eyes (or ears) of unsuspecting music nerds, or just thought it was fun to keep the gag going, is unknown, but they did release the five tracks with other "previously unreleased" songs as a full album, Make Believe, in October of that year. The electronic store Best Buy even got in on it, exclusively carrying a special two-disc edition, which had the standard "1974" album, plus a bonus disc of twelve "new" recordings.
With shades of The Masked Marauders band hoax pulled by Rolling Stone in 1969, it's still a wonderful slice of blurring the lines between fiction, and reality. Sure, it's fake news, but it's one of the more fun examples of it, I guess.

-- August 08, 2022 --

Man's Inhumanity to Man

John Steinbeck said people should really get to know one another, adding, "If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate, and almost always leads to love." I believe he made a great point. I mean, Daryl Davis has befriended Ku Klux Klan members for over 30 years, and -in getting to know one another- convinced 200 of them to quit the organization. We are all aware of the divides among race, or religion, and what some will do to any on "the other side" of their group. We even know about the cruelties of war, and what one human being can do to another in those circumstances, but what about hatred for another class of people that very few understand, and -in some cases- don't even know why a hatred exists.
There's the well-documented caste system of India, where for the last 3,000 years they've had a segmentation of society into groups whose membership was determined by birth - the Brahmins (priestly class), the Kshatriyas (rulers or warriors), the Vaishyas (artisans, and merchants), Shudras (laborers), and Varna (untouchables). Much of this stems from a Vedic society (circa 1500 - 500 BCE), having parallels with other Indo-European societies of the time, yet there is no mention of the "untouchables" in any Vedic literature. It's thought that the practice of shunning that class came from the Manusmriti, or "Laws of Manu", which is dated sometime between the 2nd Century BCE to 3rd Century CE, stating outcastes should be ostracised. So, just because of this text, an entire group of people are forced to spend their lives doing degrading work (such as, literally, toiling in human feces), or starve. Still, there are other countries that practice this system, which few are aware of. The Baekjeong were an untouchable caste in Korea, who originated from an unknown minority nomadic group, whose specific ethnicity is disputed. During the Goryeo period (918 - 1392 CE), this group settled in small communities, and were primarily butchers, tanners, or executioners - jobs no one else wanted. Soon, the term baekjeong meant "lowly person", and their communites weren't even recorded in censuses, or the national register, as many of them were seen as criminals. In the 19th and 20th Century, the baekjeong began to resist social discrimination that existed against them, starting with petitioning to be allowed something so simple as to wear the same clothes, and hats as other people, in 1900. Today, there is little prejudice against baekjeong, but it still exists in more rural areas. Other such discriminated groups include the Burakumin of Japan, and even the Melungeons of America's central Appalachia.
Strangely enough, India doesn't hold a candle to my ancestral home of Spain, which has six groups of hated peoples, some of which no one has a clue as to why. These groups include the ethnic minorities, Gitanos, and Maragato; a discriminated group of cowherders in northern Spain, called Vaqueiros de alzada; the Mallorca Spanish island's Xueta; with the most well known being the Cagots.

click on image for larger view

Some time around 1000 CE, this group of people show up in the Pyrenese Mountains between France, and Spain. The Cagots mostly live in Spain's Basque provinces, and Aragón, while in France they settle in Béarn, Aragón, Gascony and Brittany. It isn't even known where the word cagot comes from. Some scholars think it's because they might be descendants of Visigoths, with the name deriving from caas ("dog"), and the Old Occitan for Goth gòt. On the other hand, some think the word means "hunters of the Goths", and that the Cagots were descendants of the Saracens, and Moors, or possibly even Basque country Roma (aka Gypsies). The uneducated belived worse, such as that they were descendants of the carpenters who made the cross that Jesus was crucified on, or that they were all originally lepers known as pauperes Christi. Either way, this group was tremendously hated, being forced to live in completely seprate towns, and excluded from having political, and social rights. Cagots were not allowed to marry non-Cagots; were not allowed to enter taverns, or use public fountains; their baptisms could be held only at night; they were buried in separate cemeteries, with reports of riots occurring if bishops tried to have the bodies moved to non-Cagot cemeteries; Cagots were not given a last names in registries, and records; they had to enter churches by a special door, and a rail separated them from the other worshippers; Cagots were forced to wear a distinctive dress to which was attached the foot of a dead goose, or duck, while others had to wear cloaks with a yellow trim to identify them; they were prohibited from selling food, or wine, touching food in the market, or working with livestock, while often restricted to craft trades including those of carpenters, woodcutters, coopers, or rope-makers. Though the government tried to end Cagot discrinmination in the early 1800s, many small villages didn't care, and still ostrasized these people. By the 20th Century, very little of their culture exists, because most of their descendants preferred not to be known as being Cagot. Only a small handful of artists today express the struggle of being Cagot, such Iñaki Elizalde's 2012 film Baztan (were a young man fights the discrimination his family has suffered for centuries), or sculptor Xabier Santxotena, whose work explores Cagot histroy.
A lot of folks may just brush this off with a sarcastic, "Sucks to be you," but I prefer -if I can end this on another quote- to think like Martin Luther King Jr., and "Let no man pull you so low as to hate him." So, please, be good to each other.

-- July 25, 2022 --

Viewers Beware

I love mockumentaries, especially when a lot of people fall for 'em. I admit to having been duped by one, or two, myself (such as Joaquin Phoenix's I'm Still Here, 2010). There's nothing like approaching the end of what you think is a real documentary, and thinking, "Wait a second! This can't be real." There are a number of them that have people reeling a bit after they're done, but once the dust settles -and the hoax is exposed- everyone has a good laugh. Yet, there are a number of mockumentaries where some never catch on, and folks will swear it's the truth years later.
One in the first category is Ghostwatch.

Broadcast on BBC1, Halloween night of 1992 -as part of BBC Drama's Screen One series- the show was recorded weeks earlier, but presented as live television. The show was about poltergeist activity, and hosted by actual reporters, Michael Parkinson and Sarah Greene, who started off as if they were not taking the subject seriously. Soon they are joined by a "Dr. Lin Pascoe", supposed paranormal expert, who talks about a malevolent ghost nicknamed "Pipes" haunting a house in Northolt, London. The audience is asked to call into the show with ghost stories, and many callers claim that "Pipes" is manifesting in their homes, as they watch. Strange things start happening in the studio (like a crew member being injured by a falling mirror), and soon the Doctor believes the tv show is acting as a nationwide séance. The spirit of "Pipes" takes over the studio, and -after dragging Greene offstage- he takes control of the studio, as lights explode, leaving everyone in the dark. Parkinson stumbles around, asking if the cameras are still on. He begins to recite a nursery rhyme, and then starts speaking in the voice of "Pipes", as everything cuts to black, and it ends. The BBC was swamped with over 30,000 phone calls from a pissed-off, as well as frightened audience, including Parkinson's own mother. The British papers scorned the BBC for the disturbing nature of some of the scenes, especially Parkinson's possession scene. Ghostwatch was never again rebroadcast in the U.K, though there have been two UK home releases (British Film Institute's 10th Anniversary edition on VHS and DVD, and 101 Films' 2011 DVD release). Internationally, Canadian digital channel Scream ran it on Halloween in 2004, and the Belgium's Canvas Channel did the same in 2008. For a while, Ghostwatch was available on streaming services, but it's now available on the Internet Archive for free.
Now, for the second category of mockumentaries, in which (literally) thousands of people believe it's real, is Alternative 3.

Airing only once in the U.K. in 1977, Alternative 3 was originally meant to be shown on April Fools' Day, but was delayed, and broadcast on June 20th. Basically, the fictional story in this mock documentary is that reporters had uncovered a number of mysterious disappearances, and "deaths" of physicists, engineers, and astronomers, being due to a conspiracy to make the Moon, and Mars, habitable (in the event of climate change) by kidnapping said scientists, and secretly moving them to a base on the dark side of the moon. To this very day, many conspiracy theorists claim it was a real exposé, and the reason it's not rebroadcast is due to the U.S. government's anger that their dirty laundry was aired. Even UFOologist Jim Keith wrote a book on it (Casebook on Alternative 3: UFOs, Secret Societies and World Control, 1994) claiming that much of it was based in fact, and Bill Cooper would often say it was true on his The Hour of the Time radio show, though he made no mention of it in his infamous 1991 book, Behold A Pale Horse. Though there was a DVD release of the movie in 2007, it's currently out-of-print, and goes for $25 to $100 around the web.
None of this is a surprise, as the internet is filled with a handful of satire sites many take seriously, and even more social media misinformation memes that get passed around like candy at a child's birthday party. It's no wonder these well-produced pieces were taken to be real, when an image that takes less than five minutes to create will find its way around the world within seconds. I won't say, "Humanity is doomed," but a lot of it sure is fucked.

-- July 12, 2022 --

It's the New Zoo Revue, Comin' Right At You

The disgusting acts of imperialism never cease to appall me. Man's inhumanity to man is mind-boggling, and -though difficult to fully understand- I can see how strong feelings against atrocities are stifled by categorizing a group as having conditions and qualities of Otherness. This has led to unimaginable horrors, such as the Nazi concentration camps, and the Belgian Congo genocide, but also acts of cruelty that are on such a small scale they often go undocumented in history books. One good example are human zoos.

Beginning sometime in the late-1800s, it became rather fashionable for zoos to have a pen holding a family -though occasionally just a single person- from what was considered an "exotic population", with a lean towards stereotypes, and asserting Western superiority, though lauded as "educational". Cities such as London, Paris, Milan, Hamburg, Madrid, Chicago, and New York City all had them, and while they fell from popularity in the 1930s, some of them ran as late as the 1950s.
It is thought to have started in 1874 by Heinrich Leutemann, and Carl Hagenbeck, who decided to exhibit Sámi people (a Finno-Ugric group inhabiting the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia) with the "Laplander Exhibition" in Germany. Its success had Hagenbeck go on to launch a "Nubian Exhibit" in 1876, and an "Inuit Exhibit" in 1880. These types of expositions became so popular, that the 1878 World's Fair in Paris presented a "Negro Village", which was visited by 28 million people, and the 1889 Parisian World's Fair expanded to display 400 indigenous people.
To increase the number of visitors, the Cincinnati Zoo invited one hundred Sioux Native Americans to establish a village at the site in 1896, and they wound up living there for three months.
In 1906, Ota Benga, a 23-year-old Mbuti (aka Pygmy) was a human exhibit showcased every afternoon, during September, at the Bronx Zoo's Monkey House. First being exhibited at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, MO, throughout 1904, Benga was "purchased" from slave traders by explorer Samuel Phillips Verner, who was purposefully searching for African people to display.
The Scottish National Exhibition, opened by Prince Arthur of Connaught in 1909, held two human attractions. One was a Senegal village with the Senegalese living in beehive huts, and a group of Somali living in thatched huts.
The list of these are pretty long, and include the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair holding a large group of Filipinos; the 1906 and 1922 Colonial Exhibitions in Marseilles, France, both displayed nude human beings in cages; a display at Manchester, England's Belle Vue Zoo featuring an unknown company of Africans labeled "cannibals" in 1925; and the Portuguese World Exhibition of 1940 included a tribe from the Bissagos Islands of Guinea-Bissau, who were presented on an lake island in the Lisbon Tropical Botanical Garden.
While these barbarous shows are now illegal, they still go on in some form known as "human safaris", where tourists are taken to see groups of rarely contacted, isolated indigenous people. In 2012, a safari trip to the Bay of Bengal deliberately stopped to visit the Jarawa tribe of the Andaman Islands, who were asked to perform dances for the rubberneckers, and -though they were asked to not to "feed" the tribespeople- many sightseers brought food in attempts to get closer contact. This was all caught on video, upsetting the Indian government, and they banned these trips the following year.
With the current political climate, as well as heightening racial divide, one has to wonder what heinous acts our future brothers will arrange. I, for one, have hope, but we all know that hope springs eternal -not always, but normally- so let's see what tomorrow brings.

-- July 01, 2022 --

Frat House Blues

I'm pretty sure most of my readers hate frat boys. Their depiction in movies like Revenge of the Nerds, and Animal House aren't really that far off from reality. Fraternity houses across the United States are filled with well-to-do Caucasians whose parents helped them get to where they are, often leading to a mentality where they believe themselves to be better than everyone else. That's why in the previously mentioned movies the protagonists create confraternities - basically, establishing an anti-frat house. Yet, in real life, those confraternities rarely turn out so wholesome as they do in Hollywood. In Nigeria, they actually turned out to be pretty deadly.
In 1953, author, and future Nobel Prize winner, Wole Soyinka noticed his fellow University of Ibadan alumni were mostly wealthy students associated with the colonial government. Seeing that the few poor students who attended the college would often submit to them, he and six friends (calling themselves "the Magnificent Seven" or "G7") formed the Pyrate Confraternity in response, which is also known as the National Association of Seadogs.

The organization's motto was "Against all conventions", and they began using the skull and crossbones for a logo, as members adopted pirate-themed club names, like "Long John Silver" or "Cap'n Blood". Membership was open to all male students no matter their tribe or race, but most applicants were denied, as they were rather stringent in choosing new recruits. In 1972, accusations of illegal activities were leveled against the group, and it was discovered a smaller group within (called the Super Pyrates) were responsible for acts of violence against, and intimidation of, other students. This made local headlines, and students in other universities throughout the country picked up on the idea. By the 1980s, confraternities had formed in over 300 educational institutions, including the Neo-Black Movement of Africa (also called Black Axe) at the University of Benin, the University of Calabar's Eternal Fraternal Order of the Legion Consortium (the Klan Konfraternity), and then there was the Supreme Vikings Confraternity (the Adventurers), the Brotherhood of the Blood (aka Two-Two, or Black Beret), and the Family Confraternity (the Campus Mafia), which modeled itself after the Italian Mafia. Around this time, most confraternities turned away from colonial Christianity, and began practicing traditional religious practices, including Vodun, with some of the groups turning into full-blown cults, some of them Satanic in nature. Around the early 90s -due to the drug trade many members were involved in- these anti-frats began having turf wars against one another. This didn't stop them from setting their sights on other students in their own campuses either. The most infamous case of a confraternity attacking nonmembers happened in 1999, at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ife. Confraternities were banned there, but a student-led search discovered eight secret Black Axe members stockpiling assault rifles in a dorm room. This enraged the confraternity leader, who organized a machete-carrying murder squad, which hacked the student union Secretary General, and a few other students, to death as they slept.
Today, the situation isn't much better. Some of the groups intimidate professors into giving them higher grades by setting their cars alight, or temporarily snatching their kids. They'll murder other students they believe have stolen a member's girlfriend. Some of the confraternities specialize in cybercrime, money laundering, pay-for-release kidnappings, and some are even hired by politicians to harass rival government officials. A few of the cults actually offer opportunities to members after graduation, seeing as they have connections with political, and military figures - giving many of their alumni future networking opportunities becomes quite an incentive drive for new applicants.
This is all pretty harrowing stuff, and things aren't as bad in Western countries, but still: the next time you see an American frat bro, don't take them so lightly. They may not be directly involved in crime, but you can bet they're doing nefarious things in government. Just look at the U.S. Supreme Court.

-- June 21, 2022 --

Artsy Fartsy Phony Baloney

I enjoy a good hoax, especially in the literary, music or art worlds. One prankster I've recently discovered is Jamie Shovlin, a British conceptual artist whose artworks are hoaxes, and hoaxes are artworks.

In 2004, he held his first exhibition, Naomi V Jelish, which debuted at the Riflemaker Gallery in London. The exhibit contained the work of a schoolgirl named Naomi V. Jelish. As the story went, which came from the show's included newspaper clippings, Naomi won "the prestigious North Kent Student Art Prize" in 1990, but -after her father drowned the following year- the artist, her mother, and four siblings simply vanished. Though there was a police investigation, no one had seen the family since. The girl's drawings were recovered from the family's abandoned home by the late John Ivesmail, a science teacher at Naomi's school. Before his death in 1999, Ivesmail put up the artwork in a small gallery, which is where Shovlin discovered them. In attendance at this new show was Iraqi art collector, and businessman, Charles Saatchi. Saatchi bought the entire collection for £25,000, but halfway through the affair realized, both, Naomi V. Jelish, and John Ivesmail's names were anagrams for Jamie Shovlin. Instead of being upset, Saatchi realized its place in the art world, and moved the exhibit to his gallery, as well as released an accompanying catalog of the work.
In 2006, Shovlin opened his newest exhibit Lustfaust: A Folk Anthology 1976 - 1981, which consisted of memorabilia from a German glam rock outfit called Lustfaust, supposedly curated from the archives of Mike Harte (a Shovlin collaborator), and Murray Ward. The show's history, and backstory, was supported by a network of websites (created by Shovlin, of course), and fooled art critic Waldemar Januszczak into telling his readers the band had "cocked a notorious snook at the music industry in the late 1970s by giving away their music on blank cassettes, and getting their fans to design their own covers." Shovlin said this hoax (as well as his previous) wasn't made just to fool an audience, but to let them gradually come to the realization they were being hoodwinked, encouraging them to question preconceived opinions. Admittedly, he had included clues that it was all a joke, like the description of Lustfaust moving in a direction "dangerously close to Spinal Tap-isms". Later that year, Beck's beer Futures prize had this exhibit winning runner-up, and in September of 2007, Shovlin put together musicians to perform under the name Lustfaust, for the opening of the new Haunch of Venison Gallery in Berlin.
Much of these hoaxes-as-art posits a fiction as a way to develop conversation on authenticity, but I'm not sure if they work as intended. After the prank is exposed, many an art lover often just roll their eyes, while a handful actually get angry. Something tells me that a lot of what's intended gets missed by the crowd it's intended for, though folks like me love it, and laugh. Then again, maybe that's the bigger purpose: for all of us to laugh at the art world. If so, consider me giggling.

-- June 13, 2022 --

A Zine's End

Issue 9, The Secret Knowledge (with collage work, and paintings by Chilean artist Leonardo Casas), and Issue 10, Guaranteed Healers (featuring tattoo flash by artist Tim McGrath), of the Anima Animus Art Series Zine will mark the end of this two-year project on a nice round number, and they are out now.

If you want to pick up any others, Issues 1, 2, 6 and 7 are sold out, while there are less than four of Issue 8 (Dan Gorostiaga), with a little over five copies left of Issues 3 (Chuck Loose), 4 (Liorcifer), and 5 (Thaniel Ion Lee).
Visit my Etsy page for ordering info.

-- June 06, 2022 --

It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's A Satellite!

I've written of a few broadcast panics here. Of course, most people are aware of Orson Well's 1938 War of the Worlds fiasco, but few of my readers knew about the episode I wrote of in June 2019, which happened in Ecuador, back in 1949, and led to the deaths of a number of people. Well, here's another only a handful have read about.
Since 1955, Associated Rediffusion's ITV Television Playhouse produced hundreds of popular teleplays in the United Kingdom. On February 20, 1959, they presented Wesbrook Fuller's play, Before the Sun Goes Down. The television broadcast was directed by Robert Tronson, and starred Eddie Byrne, Moultrie Kelsall, and Anthony Nicholls, but -with such notable, and known, talent- one wouldn't think there could be a problem. However, the flick began with an extremely convincing news bulletin, reading, "We are interrupting the program for an urgent announcement. Tonight a new, and terrifying, satellite has been launched into outer space. Defying all previously held scientific theory, it hangs stationary over London." As the satellite is pictured on the screen, the announcer continues, "Here it is, seen from a camera on the roof of Television House. The question is, 'Is this an enemy space platform armed with H-bombs aimed at the heart of the City?' Before we know the answer, remember: there is no need for panic. There has been no ultimatum from any other Power. The Prime Minister has called an emergency Defense Council meeting. He has asked us to broadcast the following message: 'Fear is our greatest enemy, not bombs. Carry on as usual, but stay in your homes with your families. Our trust is in God'. In compliance with the Prime Minister's request, the Civil Defense has ordered all traffic, and pedestrians, off the streets at once." The Independent Television Authority had warned the producers that the broadcast might start a panic, and -boy- were they right.
Hundreds of people thought the melodrama was breaking news, and took shelter before the rest of the play could begin, bringing with them only a portable radio for updates from the outside world. Though none ran off screaming into streets, or rioted, many a household barricaded themselves indoors for safety's sake. A whole lot of them waited all night with no word on what was going on, riddled with anxiety throughout the evening. It wasn't until the next morning that those suffering a bout of fright discovered it was only an intro to a televised play. This led to thousands of complaints against the BBC, and the Independent Television Authority.
It was so bad that the March 16th sitting of the House of Commons that year had Labor Party politician Maurice Edelman gave a rousing condemnation of the broadcast, and believed the producers (ITV Television Playhouse and Associated Rediffusion) had abused the Television Act of 1954. While Edelman may have spewed a bit of hyperbole in his speech, he did pretty much hit it on the nose, when he stated, "...the purpose of commercial television is to make an immediate assault on the viewer's emotions, and it does so in the most direct way that an assault can be effected: by presenting violence as a means of holding the viewer's attention."
It's sad when you think about how such a large group of the public can be so easily mislead, but -then again- even more are duped by simple social media posts these days. The future looks dim, as the sun sets on our society.

-- May 23, 2022 --

Dog Gone It

Alright, this is a tough one to write about, but it's such a bizarre story, so... content warning! The following describes a despicable act committed on a innocent dog. Read at your own discretion.
Tom Otterness (1952 - ) is an American sculptor, and is one of the United States' most displayed public artists.

His work can be found in hundreds of libraries, parks, subway stations, plazas, museums, and even courthouses, around the world, but most are found throughout New York City, including Rockefeller Park, and the 14th St / 8th Avenue New York Subway station. He had an upside-down Humpty Dumpty balloon entered in the 2004 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and was made a member of the National Academy Museum in 1994. I'm not sure how he became so accepted after his abominable 1978 short "art" film.
In 1977, Otterness adopted a dog from a shelter in Golden, Colorado, and chained the dog to a stake out in the mountains. He then proceeded to film himself shooting the dog dead. Titled Shot Dog Film, it premiered -running as a loop- at a Times Square screening room in early '78, and as disgusted viewers left the theater they were flash-photographed. Though the work was not accepted in Washington Project for the Arts' Punk Art Catalog exhibition of that year (due to its offensive nature), Tom was still interviewed for their magazine. In it, he stated, "[the Times Square screening] as best as I could do it, was the most aggressive way I could think of to show a film, the most damaging thing that I could do to the audience by showing a film. I hired a photographer with a camera so when people were leaving the theater, they were assaulted by a flash, attacked."
Many artists turned their back on Otterness, but the episode was forgotten rather quickly. Some time after, he began to get notoriety for his sculptures, but in 2004, artist and art critic Gary Indiana, brought it up in an interview with New York Magazine. Otterness received tons of backlash, and in a 2008 interview with Brooklyn Daily Eagle said, "Thirty years ago when I was 25 years old, I made a film in which I shot a dog. It was an indefensible act that I am deeply sorry for. Many of us have experienced profound emotional turmoil and despair. Few have made the mistake I made. I hope people can find it in their hearts to forgive me." While much of his old work remained where it already was, Tom -rightfully so- lost a hell of a lot of new work, including a few that were under contract with the New York City Library, and San Francisco Arts Commission.
I used to say that I would defend an artist's right to express himself any way they saw fit, but after discovering this insane act of elicitation, I realized even I have my limits. While I understand that Otterness was young, and dumb, at the time, I will fully forgive him only once it's revealed how much Tom has donated to animal causes since his act of cruelty. Until then, fuck you, Tom Otterness!

-- May 13, 2022 --

I've Returned, And This Sucks

My move to Detroit is complete, so I'm back to posting at my regular schedule, and since the Philippine election is currently in the news (with ex-dictator Ferdinand Marcos' son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., winning), I thought I'd give you some CIA shenanigans from the Philippines.
After World War II, the Filipino's People Army had become rather marginalized, despite helping U.S. forces in the fight against Japanese occupation. Therefore, they began a peasant revolt, called the Hukbalahap (aka Huks) Rebellion. Inspired by Communist ideas, and the Philippines being a U.S. asset, the CIA wouldn't stand for it, so they recruited Air Force officer, and psychological warfare expert, Major General Edward Lansdale, to break up the party.
The country folk -who made up much of the Huks- believed in what is called an aswang, a type of shape-shifting, blood-sucking monster, which had a long straw-like forked tongue that sucked out a victim's liver, heart, or even a fetus.

The Spanish colonizers noted the aswang was the country's most feared mythical creature as far back as the late-1500s, and the CIA used that to their advantage. First, they began to spread rumors of aswang sightings. Then, as Hukbalahap units went on night patrols, Lansdale ordered his men to try to grab the last man in the group, puncture his neck in two places, hang him upside-down (so as to drain his blood), and place his body somewhere back on the trail. Of course, once the rebels returned, and found the body of the desanguinated corpse of their missing comrade, they would assume he was the victim of an aswang attack. It worked wonders, as frightened Huks would abandon the region, and the position would be taken over by pro-U.S. Manilan forces. In May of 1954, the Hukbalahap surrendered, and the rebellion ended, with Edward Lansdale credited as helping put an end to it.
While the CIA used a number of other tactics in the Philippines, this weird one is said to have been the most dynamic, which proves the power of psychological warfare, as well as highlights the deceptive influence it can have on unwitting minds. Luckily, none of that happens today, in our society. Right? I mean, we're all smart enough to know when we are being manipulated. RIGHT!?

-- February 14, 2022 --

Movin' On Up

Well, I've packed up my belongings, and I'm off to Detroit, so -until I get most of my life out of boxes- I won't be posting for a bit (possibly until early May).
Until I return, here's some fun reads on Wikipedia:

Anatoly Moskvin: A Russian grave robber who stole bodies to turn into dolls.

Underwater formation near Cuba: Could there be a sunken city off the coast of Cuba?

Catullus 16: Written around 50 BCE, it considered the world's filthiest poem.

Human mail:A list of people who have mail themselves, or been mailed by others.

Mellified man: A magical medicine made from a mummy and honey, said to cure almost anything.

Spite houses: A list of homes built to irritate neighbors.

See you all back here in May! Oh, but until then, check out the Know-It-All Asshole Jerk Instagram...

Since I have my phone on me all the time, I post there daily, so check out @knowitallaholejerk.

-- February 02, 2022 --

Turning Over An Old Leaf

A few folks who visit this (or my old This Hidden City) blog, know I not only have a thing for tree -yes I'm a literal "tree hugger"- but really enjoy checking out some of the oldest trees wherever I stay. When I lived in Brooklyn, I even posted about visiting New York state's oldest tree, an over-400-year-old Tulip Poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera), known as Queens Giant. I hope to one day come across Methuselah, which -at 4850-years-old- is currently the oldest living tree, and I say "come across", because the location is a secret to keep as many people away as possible. Why? Well, let's look into that.
The oldest known tree to have existed was called Prometheus, a 5000-year-old Great Basin bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva), which was located in Wheeler Park, Nevada. In 1963, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Donald R. Currey, was studying the bristlecone populations in the Snake Range mountains in NV. Basing a theory on the trees' size, he was convinced they were extremely old, and cored some of them. In doing so, he discovered trees exceeding an age of 3,000 years. Sadly (for the tree), Currey was not able to obtain a continuous series of cores from a tree he labeled WPN-114, which the locals dubbed Prometheus. In August of 1964, the student grabbed a chainsaw, and cut the tree down. Currey, who died in 2004, became a professor of geography, and while he became well known in academic circles for his extensive exploration of the Great Basin's Lake Bonneville, he never shook off the controversial felling of what was then the world's oldest tree.
While that's a pretty enraging story, I'm about to share one that's utterly infuriating, and that's the tale of The Senator.

In 1993, a Bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) tree was studied in Longwood, Florida's Big Tree Park, that was found to be 3500-years-old, making it the 5th oldest tree in the world. Given the name of "The Senator", it was not only the largest cypress ever found, it was the largest of any tree east of the Mississippi (even though -in 1925- a hurricane ripped off 47' [14m] of the tree top). Locals knew the tree was ancient, because tales of the area's Native tribes included it, so it had always held prominence, and a walkway was built for visitors as far back as the late-1800s. President Calvin Coolidge checked it out in 1929, and dedicated the site with a bronze plaque. Sadly (again for the tree) on January 16, 2012, a woman named Sara Barnes crawled into a hole in the tree, and lit a small fire, so she could examine a bag of crystal meth she had just bought. The fire got out of hand, and even though fire fighters tried their best, the tree collapsed. The 26-year-old druggie was sentenced to a measly thirty months, but nature lovers suffered more so, as the park closed for two years because of the vandalism. The oldest tree in the park is now a 2000-year-old cypress, known as Lady Liberty.
If you're interested in knowing some of the other oldest trees still around, read up on Chile's 3650-year-old Gran Abuelo, a Patagonian cypress (Fitzroya cupressoides), CB-90-11, a 2464-year-old Rocky Mountain bristlecone pine (Pinus aristata) in central Colorado, or Bennett Juniper, a Californian Sierra juniper (Juniperus grandis) that's 2200-years-old. One with a very interesting history is Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi, a 2308-year-old Sacred fig (Ficus religiosa) in Sri Lanka, which is the oldest living human-planted tree in the world with a known planting date. Turns out, a sapling from the historical Bodhi tree under which Gautama Buddha was said to have became enlightened, was brought to its current location, and planted around 288 BCE by daughter of Emperor Ashoka, Sanghamitra.
Why most people couldn't care about trees, let alone what we're doing to the environment, and man-made climate change is beyond me. And, no, I wouldn't have preferred to say, "I'm stumped."

-- January 17, 2022 --

Riddle Me This

For someone who loves a good mystery, I'm not much for solving puzzles. Still, there were two that had always fascinated me, both of which revolve around literature: Cain's Jawbone, and Fenn's treasure.
The first I mentioned was a hundred-page, loose-leaf book, released in 1934, and written by Edward Powys Mathers, under the pseudonym Torquemada. While Cain's Jawbone is a narrative story, it's also a puzzle - which the Laurence Sterne Trust called "one of the hardest and most beguiling word puzzles ever published." To solve it, the reader has to put the pages in proper order, and figure out which characters are the murderers, and which are the victims. The text includes a bunch of uncredited quotes, puns, references, and word games. The pages can actually be arranged in a number of orders, to produce a few intelligible stories, but only one is correct. The puzzle's solution (both the original print's, and its later, more-recent repress) have never been made public, and anyone who answers it is sworn to secrecy. Both, the 1934, and the 2019 editions had cash prizes for whomever was able to solve it. When the original book was released, the company Victor Gollancz Ltd. announced it would give £15 (which is about £1000, today) to anyone who could solve it. During it's original run, only two people had been able to collect the prize - a Mr. S. Sydney-Turner, and Mr. W. S. Kennedy, in 1935.

After its 2019 re-release, by United Authors Publishing Ltd. (aka Unbound), they offered £1000, and it was won by only one person in November of 2020 - comedian, and crossword compiler, John Finnemore, who worked on it over six months during his COVID lockdown. He told The Guardian, "The only way I'd even have a shot at it was if I were for some bizarre reason trapped in my own home for months on end, with nowhere to go and no-one to see. Unfortunately, the universe heard me."
The second puzzle, known as Fenn's treasure, was a bronze box filled with gold and jewels (said to be worth $2,000,000) hidden by Santa Fe, New Mexico, art dealer, and author, Forrest Fenn, somewhere in the U.S. section of the Rocky Mountains. After a diagnosis of terminal cancer in 1988, Fenn had the idea to hide the cache, and later self-published the book The Thrill of the Chase: A Memoir, which, while a collection of short stories from his life, also told of the treasure, as well as gave hints as to where it was. The chapter titled "Gold and More", contained a poem that held as many as nine clues to where the stash was buried.

Since the release of the book, as well as news stories covering it, there have been close to a dozen arrests of idiots digging up national parks such as Yellowstone, or running around with metal detectors through sacred Native American land. Worse, five deaths have been attributed to the search for it (Jeff Murphy in WY, Michael W. Sexson in UT, Pastor Paris Wallace, Eric Ashby, and Randy Bilyeu, all in different parts of CO). For years, many people believed the deaths were all for nothing, because they were certain the hidden trove was a hoax, but in June of 2020, Michigan student Jack Stuef discovered the box in Wyoming. Strangely enough, Fenn survived his cancer diagnosis for over thirty years, but died just a few months after the fortune was found. Before it was finally discovered, Fenn and his treasure were the topic of many a mystery tv episode, including Discovery Channel's Expedition Unknown, and Unsolved on Buzzfeed. Author Douglas Preston knew Forrest, and had seen the valuable box, crediting him as being the inspiration for his 2003 novel The Codex.
Well, writing about all of this makes me curious to see if I can figure out such a puzzling mystery, but I really don't know of any other infamous enigmatic games. I guess the best I can do is try my hand at an escape room, or something. Wish me luck, because I'm sure I'll be trapped for some time.

-- January 08, 2022 --

Choice Cuts

My industrial music outfit, 156, has a new release, Humanize / Dehumanize, and it's a 5" and 4" picture disc, plexi-glass lathe combo.

The records (as well as the digital download) come with the track "Humanize", which is meant to also be played backwards, as the track "Dehumanize", and are brief meditations on sickening tortures carried out by authoritarian regimes -and even supposed "democratic countries"- the world over. The set is limited to only 25 copies, and they all come with a signed, and hand-numbered photographic art pieces of dehumanizing cuts on skin, along with the (sealed) razor blade that made one specific cut.
The record set is $25 (or just $1 for the download), and can be ordered via the 156 Bandcamp page.
UPDATE: Physical copies are sold out.

-- January 03, 2022 --

This Info Is Arresting

When one thinks of California gangs, the images that come to mind are swathed in blue and red; Crips and Bloods. A few might think of Sureños (Mexican mafia), or even Hells Angels, but not many think of police officers. Well, a lot of my readers might refer to the cops as their own gang, but hardly any know there are actually real gangs within law enforcement. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department alone has about twenty, though they prefer the term "cliques" when referring to them. That's right, complete with matching tattoos, secret hand signs, and at least one murder under each member's belt, the first-known L.A.S.D. gang was The Little Devils, who were founded at the East L.A. Station in 1971, consisting of mostly white deputies who patrolled Latino and black communities. Currently, The Regulators at Century Station, and the Lennox Station's Grim Reapers are more recent gangs the FBI has been made aware of. While The Cavemen, 3000 Boys, The Posse, The Jump Out Boys, and Wayside Whites are just a few of the other cataloged police gangs, two of the most well-documented groups would be the Lynwood Vikings, and the Compton Executioners.
The first was based at the now-defunct Lynwood Station, and members included Paul Tanaka (also a Gardena city council member), and Lee Baca (30th Sheriff of Los Angeles County) -both of which are convicted criminals- plus Robert Norris (who later became 13th Sheriff of Kootenai County, Idaho). The clique's tattoo is the number "998" (which stands for "officer-involved shooting") on their ankle, meaning the cop has put a bullet in someone, with L.A.S.D. under-sheriff Jerry Harper calling it "a mark of pride".

In 1996, Deputy Mike Osborne was interviewed by Los Angeles Times, where he stated an invitation to join the Vikings was impressive among the ranks, but "you keep your mouth shut, and obey the code of silence" about illegal activity by others involved. It almost goes without saying, that after testifying against the Vikings, Osborne, his wife (Deputy Aurora Mellado), and their children were shot at in their home by what's believed to be disgruntled sheriff's deputies. Federal judge Terry Hatter called the group a "neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang", after litigating over several wrongful death suits.
The other infamous L.A.-based officer gang was, as their name implies, founded at the Compton Station. Formed in the 1990s by Deputy Andy Toone, after leaving another deputy gang, The 2000 Boys, they are considered one of the largest with over eighty members. Recruits are chosen based on past acts of violence against Compton neighborhood citizens, and cannot be women, nor of African descent. The gang's tattoo (which only members who have killed a civilian can get) is of a skeleton with "CPT" on a military helmet, and the Roman numerals for "28" on the magazine of an AK-47 - the letters stand for "Compton", and the number is for Compton being the 28th substation.

Last year, the gang came to the media's attention when Deputy Miguel Vega was said to have killed 18-year-old Andres Guardado, to impress the group in hopes of being initiated.
It's no secret that this isn't just an isolated phenomenon to the Los Angeles area, as retired Louisiana Chief of Detectives, Godfrey "Doc" Buquet, was once quoted as saying, "I was in a gang. It's called the police." Once you know, and investigate this situation, it's much easier to understand the calls to defund the police. In all honesty, as a complete Anarchist, I wouldn't mind doing away with law enforcement altogether. I understand having a justice system, but I'm fine with having no cops around. ACAB!

-- December 21, 2021 --

Cartoonishly Late

Most every year, around this time, I tend to post a seasonal story of high weirdness, but I think I've run out of Xmas tales to tell you. With a move from FL to MI coming up, I may also run out of time to post more often, until (at least) April. The idea of running out of time does bring up another interesting item I'd like to share. Imagine becoming so involved in a project that forty years of dedication doesn't even bring you to a third of the way to finishing it; a painstakingly tedious creative endeavor that you know you may not get to complete in your lifetime, but you trudge on anyway. That's the case of Yuri Norstein and Franchesca Yarbusova's animated film, The Overcoat, or -as it's known in Russian- Shinyel.
Based on a 1842 short story by Nikolai Gogol, the feature-length film began production in 1981, making it the longest running production time so far for any animated film. The project began as the work of only three people, Yuri Norstein as director and animator, his wife Franchesca Yarbusova as artist, and family friend Aleksandr Zhukovskiy as cinematographer. By 1975, the trio had gained fame for their animated short Hedgehog in the Fog. Each panel of that film was shot on three different planes, giving it an almost three-dimensional look, and the art was heavily detailed making every frame an art piece unto itself. By 1979, they had completed Tale of Tales, in the same style, and that animated film gained them, not only several awards (Jury Grand Prize at France's International Festival of Films, and winning the Best Film Longer Than Three Minutes Award at the International Animation Festival in Canada, both in 1980), it was deemed by an international jury to be the greatest animated film of all time, twice (Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival [1984], and Zagreb World Festival of Animated Films [2002]).

In 1981, Yuri had the idea to tackle -though it had been made into a feature film several times- Gogol's The Overcoat. Taking on the same style, and aesthetics, as their previous animated shorts, they knew it would take time, but not this long. Work began at Soyuzmultfilm (the main Soviet animation studio), where the trio had worked most of their careers. Around 1986, with only ten minutes complete, Norstein was fired due to his works not having enough of a Socialist message. Setting up an animation studio in their home, the husband and wife duo continued on. Though offered funding by many sources, such as from Sberbank (Savings Bank of Russia), the Soros Fund, and TNK Oil, they took very little, and only when they felt it completely necessary. While this delayed production more so, things were made worse in 1999 when the couple's longtime collaborator Aleksandr Zhukovskiy died. In 2003, one of AZ's students, Maksim Granik, took on the task of helping finish the enterprise. All along, Yuri took other jobs filming shorts, as well as commercials, which also stalled work on The Overcoat. It is said that, by 2010, only a little under thirty minutes of it had been done, with about five minutes of different segments surfacing. Have a look...

In 2007, the studio stopped again, so Norstein could finish a two-volume book, Snow on the Grass (Sneg na Trave), which consists of lectures on the art of animation. The last most have heard of the work on the movie is an interview in 2015, where Yuri has claimed they are moving along, gaining him the nickname "The Golden Snail". At this rate, many believe there will never be a finished product.
Next time you're being hard on yourself over finishing a huge venture: remember this story, and keep up your efforts. If it's worth it, you'll finish. Hopefully it won't take you over forty years to wrap it up, but -if it does take you that long- maybe I'll write a post about it, so lumber on.

-- December 08, 2021 --

Mating Song and Dance

I have no issues saying, "I hate musicals." While there are a small handful I kind of don't mind, there is one I actually would like to see: Let My People Come. Known as the world's first, and possibly only, "sexual musical", Let My People Come was originally written in 1973, by Earl Wilson Jr., with lyrical (and production) help from Phil Oesterman.

The show ran in New York City's Greenwich Village at The Village Gate Theater, from January of 1974, until July of 1976, with songs such as "Everybody Likes To Screw", "I'm Gay", and "Come In My Mouth". It proved to be such a hit that the pair released a twelve-track original cast album, on 12" vinyl via Libra Records, the year it opened, and it was actually nominated for a Grammy in 1975.

The performance was moved to Broadway at the Morosco Theater on July 7, 1976, running for 108 shows, until it closed on October 2nd, and featured E.R. and Orange Is the New Black cast member Yvette Freeman. Strangely enough, Wilson decided to separate himself from the production when it hit Broadway, saying to The New York Times, "I feel that the show has become vulgar." The reason it stopped running altogether was due to a lawsuit by MCA Music. The label took the duo to court because their number "The Cunnilingus Champion of Company C" was a play on Don Raye and Hughie Prince's "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy". The court deemed it "could not be construed as a burlesque of plaintiff's work per se", finding it to be a "commentary on an era," and not protected by fair use. The defendants were found liable for copyright infringement, with the show being halted, and the record no longer available for sale.
In 1985, producer Bernard Jay bought the rights (minus the sued song), and reran the show in NYC. Producer John Forslund then ran it in New York again in 2013, but revamped many of the numbers, and even wrote new ones. While the original cast also had runs in Chicago (1974), and London (1974), a different cast also ran at Grendel's Lair Cabaret Theatre in Philadelphia (for ten years), and at the Basin Street Cabaret Theater in Toronto (for eight years).
As much as I'd like to check it out, I wouldn't go see a remake of Let My People Come. Screw that! So unless an old video of the original book comes up on YouTube someday, I guess I'll just have to settle to listening to one of the deeply discounted 12"es one can currently find on Discogs. It may not be as sexy, but it'll have to do.

-- November 29, 2021 --

This Guy's Got A Lot of Balls

I was recently reading a piece on the world's most powerful radio station, Powel Crosley Jr's WLW, which began broadcasting in 1922. Though I laughed about how neighbors of the tower could hear the signal in their bed springs, pots, pans, and barbed-wire fences, it also brought to mind another hilarious story: that of John Romulus Brinkley. You'll have to follow a long path of weirdness to get to his transmission depot, but what a path it'll be.

J.R. was born on July 8, 1885, in Beta, North Carolina, to Confederate States Army medic John Richard Brinkley, and Sarah Burnett, though they never married. His mom died when he was five, then his dad passed when he was ten, and John wound up living with Sarah's aunt, Sarah T. Mingus. As a telegrapher, he moved to New York City to work for Western Union, but returned when Mingus got sick, and died. Brinkley was comforted by Sally Wike, with whom he fell in love with, and married. Together, they moved to Chicago, and after having a daughter, he enrolled at Bennett Medical College. After bearing an infant son that hardly survived birth, and mounting debts, Wike took their girl, and split. Two months later, John kidnapped his daughter, and hightailed it to Canada. Sally forgave him, and they reconciled, so he returned to Chicago. After another two years, she bore him another daughter, but left again. JRB returned to NC in 1911 to escape mounting school bills. Deciding to go back in 1913, no school would take him, due to owing money to his previous college, so he opted to buy a certificate from a diploma mill called Kansas City Eclectic Medical University. He and his partner, James E. Crawford, set up a storefront medical business in Greenville, South Carolina. Naming it the "Greenville Electro Medic Doctors", they would inject colored water into their patients for $25 a pop (about $700 today), saying it was "Salvarsan: electric medicine from Germany." The duo packed up, and split to Memphis , TN after the local paper wrote they had almost 40 unpaid bills with area merchants. In Tennessee, John took over the office of a doctor who was moving out of state, and made enough to pay back his first college. In 1917, he was conscripted as an Army Reservist, but didn't fight in the First World War, as he had a nervous breakdown, and was quickly kicked out of the military. The following year, his family moved to Milford, Kansas, where he opened a multi-room clinic, building a good name for himself by paying decent wages, propping up the local economy, and making house calls to patients hit by the deadly 1918 flu pandemic. It was around this time that he got the idea he is now known best for: transplanting goat testicles into impotent men's sacks. Yep! For only $750 (that's about $10,000 today), Brinkley would remove a man's testes, and put in some fresh goat gonads. He claimed it restored sperm count, and even cure almost thirty other ailments, including dementia, emphysema, and even farting. Now, mind you, animal nut transplants weren't really new, and another doctor, Serge Voronoff, had become well known at the same time for grafting monkey testicles into men. Still, with John's crappy medical training, many of his patients got infections after surgery, a number of patients died, and the doc was sued a dozen times for wrongful death. This didn't stop him, and he was one of the first to start massive mailing campaigns, sending junk mail to almost a million homes, with ads that told men they could become "the ram that am with every lamb". This quickly attracted the attention of the American Medical Association, and they began looking into his practice. That didn't even come close to stopping him, as he soon set up a radio station, and started peddling his own brands of fake medicines. That scheme brought in what would now amount to $10 million dollars! The U.S. government got tired of his shenanigans, and revoked, both, his broadcasting, and medical licenses. What's a doctor to do in this situation? Well, he ran for Governor of Kansas (a few times), hoping to appoint his own members to the medical board, which would help him regain his right to practice at least in that state. By 1931, his political bids all failed, so he went back into broadcasting. Without a license to do so in the U.S., he opted to get what was known as a "border blaster" in Mexico, calling his station XER. At 50,000 watts, it could be heard as far away as Kansas, so he tried running for political office there again. After his loss, the Mexican government allowed him to increase his signal to 150,000 watts, and then to one million, which could make the radio station heard even in Canada. Though Brinkley went back to selling snake oil (and even sold airtime to other peddlers of medical quackery), his station became known as "Hillbilly Hollywood" for helping promote the careers of musicians such as Gene Autry, Red Foley, Patsy Montana, and the Carter Family. Anyhow, Congress grew tired of his shtick, and passed the Brinkley Act, which banned broadcasters in the U.S. from being connected via telephone line to transmitters in Mexico. Also, under pressure from the U.S. government, the Mexican government revoked JRB's broadcasting license. Using a different diploma mill in Italy, he got another medical degree, and started up business again in Texas. Though still performing the occasional goat ball transplants, he mostly did vasectomies. By 1936, he had put away enough money to afford a mansion (complete with greenhouse, pool, and a fountain), a stable of Cadillacs, as well as exotic animal imports from Central and South America. In 1938, a whopping number of lawsuits were laid against him, the IRS began looking into his taxes, and the U.S. Postal Service investigated him for mail fraud. Brinkley filed for bankruptcy, then due to all the stress had three heart attacks, had his leg amputated due to poor circulation, and finally died in May of 1942 of heart failure, completely penniless.
Even with the downer ending, John Romulus Brinkley certainly had a wild ride through life, but I'm sure he enjoyed much of it. His story has been written of in close to a dozen books, documentaries have been made on him, and there's also an upcoming movie in the works, said to be written by director Richard Linklater, and starring Robert Downey Jr. His old mansion still stands at 512 Qualia Drive in Del Rio, TX, and was designated a Texas Landmark, so it all goes to show that sometimes you gotta be a little more nuts than the rest of them to leave a lasting legacy.

-- November 17, 2021 --

I Did Nazi This Coming

My last post sent me to one of my favorite places (down a rabbit hole), when I mentioned author Laurel Rose Willson, who wrote under the pen name Lauren Stratford. Willson wrote three books, all spinning tales of being a baby breeder for a satanic cult's sacrifices, with the most famous being 1988's Satan's Underground. In 1989, she even appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, where her story was presented as being true. Not long after, the Christian newspaper, Cornerstone, proved she fabricated the whole thing. She legally changed her name to Lauren Stratford, but the damage was done, and she fell out of favor with the evangelicals. Did this stop her from trying to get attention? Nope. Willson/Stratford then changed her name to Laura Grabowski, and claimed to be a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Wait! It gets wilder. Willson/Stratford/Grabowski then hooked up with Holocaust survivor, Binjamin Wilkomirski, claiming to have remembered him from the camps. At the time, Wilkomirski was riding high due to the popularity of his 1995 book, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, which was an autobiography about his life as a child in a concentration camp.

The book won a number of awards, including the Jewish Quarterly literary prize in Britain, the Prix Memoire de la Shoah in France, and the National Jewish Book Award in the U. S. Around 1997, the two began collecting donations intended for Holocaust survivors, but during investigations into Willson, it was discovered that Wilkomirski may also be a fraud. In August of 1998, Swiss journalist Daniel Ganzfried, writing for the weekly paper Weltwoche, exposed him as not being a Latvian Jew who was detained in Nazi camps, but Bruno Grosjean, the bastard son of a single mother from Beil, Switzerland, who grew up in an orphanage, until he was adopted by a wealthy couple in Zurich.
Turns out, he wasn't the first, nor the last, either. The year before that exposé, Misha Defonseca released her book, Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, which told the story of her search through war-torn Europe, looking for her deported Jewish parents, and being adopted by a pack of wolves. In reality, she was Monique de Wael, a Belgian-born Catholic bullshitter, but the truth wasn't uncovered in time to stop production of the French film based on her life, Survivre avec les loups (Surviving with Wolves). Recently a documentary has been released on her, titled Misha and the Wolves.
Another is Martin Grey, who authored eleven books, two of which -Au nom de tous les miens (For Those I Loved) and La vie renaitra de la nuit (Life Arises Out of Darkness)- were autobiographical accounts of his family being killed by Nazis (mother and two brothers in Treblinka, and his father during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943). He also wrote that he escaped from Treblinka, and became a soldier in the Soviet Red Army. In a 1979 New Statesman article, Holocaust historian Gitta Sereny uncovered that those chapters in Grey's books were the fictitious work of ghostwriter Max Gallo, written to help sell the publications.
In 1978, the Spaniard Enric Marco released Memorias del infierno (Memories of Hell), about his time as a prisoner in the German concentration camps at Mauthausen and Flossenbürg. He was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi by the Catalan government in 2001, but gave it back in 2005, when university researcher Benito Bermejo proved he was making it all up.
Oy vey, it just keeps going! Polish-born American author Herman A. Rosenblat wrote a "memoir", titled Angel at the Fence, about a girl who passed him apples and bread over the barbed-wire fence at the Schlieben section of Buchenwald, and how he later married her. Oprah called it "the single greatest love story" in 1996, and that got Herman a $25 million picture deal through Atlantic Overseas Pictures, until he came clean about his deceit. Donald Joseph Watt is an Australian Army soldier who authored another fictitious Holocaust memoir entitled Stoker: The Story of an Australian Soldier who Survived Auschwitz-Birkenau. Published in 1995, by Simon & Schuster, the book was praised by various Jewish organizations as the most important work written in Australia, but was later proven to be a hoax by historical experts from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Auschwitz Museum, and Professor Konrad Kwiet, chief historian of the Australian War Crimes Commission. Some are now saying that Denis Avey, who with Rob Broomby, who wrote the memoir The Man who Broke into Auschwitz, is faking a bit of it because there's a few things that don't add up. Though Avey was a British prisoner of war at subcamp E715, he claims to have constantly snuck into Auschwitz, after trading uniforms with a Jewish prisoner.
While I'm certain many commit these falsehoods just for the attention, there are certainly others who only want the money. One would think there has to be better ways to get it, but I guess some people tend to figure the best way to get into a bank must be to crawl as low as one can go. Whatever. Gut glik mit ale di meshugas.

-- November 10, 2021 --

Give You Something To Dance To

My new record label, Tequesta Records, which plans to showcase some of the best music acts from south Florida, is now up and running with its first release, the Vultures 10" EP from goth-punk / death rock outfit Obsidian!

Out now on 110-gram, blood-red vinyl, this record features five tracks of dark goth-punk, and death rock from the Land of the Sun, as well as hand-screen covers by Iron Forge Press.
You can now order it directly from the band, at their Bandcamp page.
The label name comes from the indigenous Native American tribe of the eastern south Florida, who inhabited the area from 3rd century BCE to mid-18th Century, and the logo I created uses the famous Miami Circle, which was unearthed in 1998, during construction of a high-rise tower in Miami's downtown.

-- November 02, 2021 --

The Fathers (and Mothers) of Deception

In 1987, my astronomy teacher at Hialeah-Miami Lakes Sr. High was a preacher. Seeing me wearing all black, and sporting a pentagram daily, he offered me a copy of Mike Warnke's 1972 book, The Satan Seller, at the end of the school year. I gleefully took it, and dove head first. In it, Mikey claims to have become a Satanic high priest, summoning demons, as well as committing acts of kidnapping and rape. Of course, it became a big seller in the Christian community, but was proven to be a load of bullshit after being exposed in 1991. It's no wonder he later became a Christian comedian.
If you're old enough, you just might recall the "Satanic panic" of the 1980s, which had over 12,000 cases of supposed Satanic ritual abuse in the United States in less than a decade. It was, and is, very similar to other moral panics, and conspiracy theories, such as the blood libel against Jews by Apion in 30 CE, the McCarthy "Red Scare" of the 1950s, and the current QAnon phenom. And, just like those, nothing has ever been proven to be real. Even with thousands of accusations of child sacrifice, torture, cannibalism, and incestuous orgies, no actual evidence was produced. The fever pitch culminated in 1988, when the awesomely hilarious two-hour documentary by Geraldo Rivera, Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground, aired on primetime NBC. Making matters worse was that after Americans settled down about it in the early 90s, the panic picked up everywhere else around the world. While books like The Satan Seller helped start the rise of this shared mania, the insanity didn't really begin until the release of one book, Michelle Remembers.

Published in 1980, and co-written by Canadian shrink Lawrence Pazder, and his patient Michelle Smith (whom he later married). The now-discredited tome chronicled Michelle's ritualistic abuse by a cult her parents had joined, revealed to her through the practice of recovered-memory therapy. The recollection ended in an 81-day ritual to summon the devil, when none other than Jesus, Archangel Michael, and the Virgin Mary barged in, and put a stop to the shenanigans. The authors claimed the group carrying out these pornographic acts of torture was the Church of Satan, but they backpedaled on that assertion when Anton LaVey threatened to sue them. Smith's father, Jack Proby, denied the allegations, but was haunted by religious lunatics disbelieving him until he died. Though debunking began as far back as a few months after publication (starting with an article in Maclean's magazine, by Paul Grescoe, October 27, 1980), Pazder was deemed an expert on the subject by many. He appeared on a May, 1985, broadcast of ABC’s 20/20 concerning Satanism, lectured to hundreds of police agencies about Satanic ritual abuse, became a head member of the Cult Crime Impact Network, and was even a consultant in the infamous McMartin preschool trial. In 1989, not to let Geraldo outshine her, Oprah Winfrey invited Michelle on as a guest -along with Laurel Rose Willson (aka Lauren Stratford), who authored the equally fictitious ritual abuse memoir Satan’s Underground- presenting those stories as incontestable fact.
Mike Warnke, Lawrence Pazder, Lauren Stratford, John Todd, Walter Martin; all of them Christian authors and preachers, who lied to sell dramas to their flock of sheep. Dolefully, none of that matters, because -not only has the damage been done- millions still believe their tales to be true. I would ask them all to stop accepting falsehoods, but that's a useless endeavor, so to all of them I say, "I am your adversary, and stand against you." Hail Satan!

-- October 18, 2021 --

Wild in the Streets Woods

As a few of my blog readers know, I planned on hiking all 2200 miles (3500 km) of the Appalachian Trail in 2020, but COVID-19 had it shut down. I threw the $2000 worth of supplies I bought into my closet, and rescheduled. I thought to go this year, but decided the bottleneck of hikers would be a nightmare, so I opted for 2022. Now that I'm moving to Detroit early next year, I've postponed yet again for 2023.
Anyhow, my girlfriend mentioned this to her dad, and he brought up a tv show he recently saw, the Discovery Channel's Expedition X (season 4, episode 1, titled "Terror In Appalachia"). In it, they cover sightings of feral people (which date back to 1896), and point to them as the possible cause of a number of missing hikers throughout the years. While this show is rather sensational, makes far-reaching claims, and doesn't really provide much in the way of proof, feral people really do exist. At least, there have been a number of documented cases of feral children: kids who have been raised by animals, including wolves, bears, and monkeys.
In 1982, three-year-old Robert Mayanja lost his parents in the Ugandan Civil War, surviving in the jungle with the help of vervet monkeys for three years until he was discovered by National Resistance Army soldiers, and reintroduced into society. From 1650 to 1700, there were three written cases of children found who were raised by Eurasian brown bears, but research showed that only one may have truly existed. From age seven, Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja lived with wolves in the mountains of southern Spain, until discovered at age nineteen. His life was made into the movie Entrelobos, which garnered Manuel Camacho a "Best New Actor" nomination at the 2011 Goya Awards. The best known case of a feral child is that of Dina Sanichar.

The then-six-year-old boy was discovered, among a pack of wolves, by a group of hunters exploring a cave in Bulandshahr, India, in February of 1867. He could not speak (but would growl), walked on all fours, and only enjoyed eating raw meat. He was brought to the local Sikandra Mission Orphanage, and named Sanichar (meaning "Saturday", the day he was found). Though Dina lived with people for almost thirty years, he never learned to speak, but did pick up a nasty smoking habit that complicated his tuberculosis, causing his death in 1895. After hearing of his story, Rudyard Kipling was inspired to write a story based on Sanichar, and he became the basis for Mowgli in his short story, "In the Rukh", which later became The Jungle Book.
Not to end on a sour note, but many of the documented cases of feral children actually stem from parental neglect. Eight-year-old Oxana Malaya was a Ukrainian girl raised by dogs in a kennel. Entered in his 1672 book, Observationes Medicae, Nicolaes Tulp wrote of an unnamed Irish boy who was brought up by sheep, when his parents left him out in a field to starve. In 1990, a boy simply called Daniel, became known as the "Andes Goat Boy" because he was raised by goats in the mountains of Peru for eight years, after his family left him. It's sad to know there are about two dozen similar stories, which help drive home the fact that not only is abortion a worldwide necessity, but most people should have to apply for a license to raise a child. Luckily, I'll never register for one, as the world is better off without my wild child.

-- October 09, 2021 --

In Support of Protests (Well, Not All of Them)

I'm a little shocked that, over the last two years, some of the biggest protests around the world were held by selfish idiots feeling their rights were being trampled, over having to wear masks, and stay home for a bit. Sure, we had some Black Lives Matter groups stand up to police brutality in the U.S., which flashed a much needed light upon law enforcement reform, but almost as many were held by Proud Boys weeping over the loss of a fair election. Back in 2011, I supported the Occupy Wall Street movement, but was upset when they failed to produce clear goals, and suffered conveying their message. Still, it started out with positive intentions, even though -seeing how the rich got so much richer during the 2020 - 2021 pandemic- their objectives weren't met. Actually, many protest goals aren't fulfilled in the earlier stages of demonstration, but most of them do begin with Panglossian design.
However, there is one movement that is believed by many to have started with idealistic and affirmative ambitions, though that couldn't be further from the truth: the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, or, as it's referred to in China, the June Fourth Incident. During mid-April in Beijing, Westerners saw students calling for democracy, due process, governmental accountability, freedom of speech, and a free press. While up to one million attended the rallies, they were met with violence by the People's Liberation Army using tanks and rifles, after the government declared martial law. What many in the United States, and Europe, didn't know was that the demonstrations stemmed from a much uglier protest movement a few months before, known as the Nanjing anti-African protests.
In December of 1988, two male African students, of Hohai University in Nanjing, entered an Xmas party with two Chinese women. A campus security guard found this offensive, and got into a heated argument with one of the black men. This erupted into a full scale brawl between African and Asian students, where thirteen Chinese men were injured. The next day, spurred on by rumors that several native men were killed in the incident, city residents set upon the African dormitories, lighting fires. As Africans began to flee to embassies, over 3000 students from several colleges began to riot, shouting slogans against race mixing. By New Year's Eve, anti-African demonstrations spread to other cities, including Shanghai, and Beijing. Many of these revolts were dispersed by city government, and local law enforcement. This enraged many students, who felt they had the right to dissent, and object to Africans, not only dating Asians, but enrolling in Chinese schools. This "groundbreaking dissidence" in China drove the ambition for freedom of speech, press, and assembly, which spawned the "democracy rallies" four months later. In fact, elements of the original demonstrations were evident during Tiananmen Square protests, and knowing this helps clear up for Westerners why there were banners reading statements such as "Stop Taking Advantage of Chinese Women".

Mind you, I'm not trying to put down the later students desire for a freer China, but I am trying to point out how little other countries know what's truly going on outside their own borders, how the media manipulates people's outlook on situations in other parts of the world, and how racism is prevalent in all countries around the globe. Either way, the outcome of it all was horrifying, as the Chinese Communist Party admitted to 300 deaths, while the Red Cross puts the number around 2600. Also, I hope none of this dissuades anyone from standing up to despotism and oppression. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a 1787 letter to William Stephens Smith, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Then again, he owned slaves, so maybe that's not the best example.

-- October 01, 2021 --

Let's Take A Ride

A new photo zine out later this month to celebrate the upcoming release of the Forgotten Rides photo book in 2023.

Forgotten Rides: the Fanzine is a full-color, glossy, 8.5" x 5.5" (21 x 14 cm) zine, limited to only 50 copies,containing 42 photos not found in the book. All copies will be hand signed, plus numbered, and will be available for only $8, with postage paid - add another $6 outside of North America. If you prefer a purchase link via Etsy, that's here.
UPDATE: All copies are now sold out.

-- September 29, 2021 --

Video Nasties

Since the dawn of game arcades, there has been with it a history of bad games. Once we traded going out to drop quarters into machines, for sitting on our own couches to play on our own tvs, we brought a bunch of those crappy games in with us. A lot of older folks remember the '82 home version of Pac-Man for the Atari 2600. The simplified graphics, modified layout, and overall poor quality of the game were due to the limitations of the 2600 system. Even worse was another game of the same year, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Though the game sold 1.5 million copies, Atari's expectations was to sell five million units, but word got out how terrible it was, and the company threw hundreds of thousands of them into a landfill. The game was so bad, it was thought to have caused the home video game market to crash the following year, as well as the bankruptcy of Atari. Much of this was covered in great detail in the excellent 2014 documentary Atari: Game Over. However, none compare to yet another release from 1982, Custer's Revenge, which was an adult video game.

The game was released by a company simply know as Mystique, who produced several unlicensed pornographic video games for the Atari 2600. Some of their other, more forgettable titles include Beat 'Em & Eat 'Em (where the player is a woman catching falling semen from a masturbating man), and Bachelor Party (a pornofied version of Breakout). Though the company had the games programmed in the United States, and manufactured in Hong Kong, they were marketed under the infamous "Swedish Erotica" banner, which was a high staple in the porn industry throughout the early 1980s. Custer's Revenge was universally panned by gaming critics, and it's considered one of the worst games of all time, due to the gameplay; consisting of a nude male player (General Custer), who crosses the screen while avoiding a hail of arrows, to rape his Native-American slave tied to a cactus. Had the plot caliber not been so deplorable, it wouldn't have helped matters much, as the game had low quality graphics, but it sold for $49.95 (about $130 today), and the negative attention helped it sell up to 80,000 units. Gaming magazine Ahoy! called it "an affront to common decency," and in a 2008 article about video game violence, University of Calgary professor Tom Keenan looked back on the game, labeling it "hideous". Australia's PC Magazine called it one of the worst games ever made, and Unified Gamers Online included it on their list of the most racist video games. Mystique sought to set the record straight soon after, by releasing General Re-Treat the following year, where the sex roles were reversed, but interest in home gaming had waned, and didn't pick back up until Nintendo released their entertainment system in North America in 1985.
Just as gaming picked up again, shitty games came around once more, and have stuck around ever since. There's been 1991's Action 52, Shaq Fu (1994), and Nintendo's infamous Superman 64 in '99. As a trucker, I had to try out Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing back in 2013, and see why it's considered one of the biggest programming failures in video game history. Though many have been entered on several "worst game" lists, not one of them has been considered as disgustingly low class as Custer's Revenge. Hell, if you know of any that can top it, hit me up, and let's play!

-- September 17, 2021 --

There's No Vaccine for These Viruses

I know we're currently in the Age of COVID, but we still need to talk about the health of your computer, too. Even though most of us are protected by strong cyber-security software, malware and viruses are still a thing. Hell, they still cause billions of dollars in damage every year.
The first-known computer virus is thought to be Elk Cloner, which was written onto one game floppy by a then-15-year-old programmer Rich Skrenta, as a joke in 1982. When bootleg copies of the floppy went around, so did the virus, and history was made. The first for personal computers was Brian (aka Pakistani Flu), which began its reign of terror way back in January of 1986, and originally passed around (unknowingly) via floppy disk. Originally written by two Pakistani brothers, it was meant to target copyright infringement of their medical software, but the program would save itself onto other non-related floppies, spreading it worldwide until 2001.
The worst computer virus outbreak so far has been the Mydoom worm (aka Novarg), which caused $38 billion in damage in 2004 alone (that's $52 billion today). The malware spread through mass emails, and was responsible for up to 25% of all emails sent that year. Seventeen years after its creation, it's still making over a billion copies of itself every year.
Now, while all computer viruses are malicious, it takes a certain type of dickwad to hit below the belt with them. One such case is that of the Pikachu virus (or Poké virus), a computer worm believed to be the first aimed at children, because it incorporated Pikachu from Pokémon. Released June 28, 2000, it spread through emails sent to kids, titled "Pikachu Pokemon", with the body of the e-mail containing the text "Pikachu is your friend." Luckily, it wasn't too bad, as it asked whether the user wanted to delete the two critical Windows folders it was supposed to attack. If the child wasn't stupid, and hit "cancel", the computer would be alright.
One that is often filed in the Annals of Scumbaggery would be the AIDS Trojan virus (otherwise known as the PC Cyborg virus), the world's first known randsomeware. But, it's actually a big misunderstanding, and the product of a misguided attempt to showcase the spread of AIDS, mixed in with a little user error - sorta. You see, the virus was created by evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Popp, who handed out 20,000 of the original infected disks (labeled: AIDS Information - Introductory Diskettes) to attendants of the World Health Organization’s AIDS Conference of 1989. The disks came with a pamphlet that warned one the software would "adversely affect other program applications..." as well as telling the user they "will owe compensation, and possible damages to PC Cyborg Corporation, and your microcomputer will stop functioning normally." Sadly, most people lost the leaflet, didn't understand it, or thought it was a joke, and ran the disk without realizing what they had done. Upon insertion, the screen would turn red, and read:

After the 90th time the computer was rebooted, the machine would lock up the directories, and encrypt files on the C drive. To regain access, one would have to send $189 to PC Cyborg Corp's PO box in Panama. Though upon arrest Popp claimed the money went to AIDS research, the Harvard-trained doctor was charged with eleven counts of blackmail by Scotland Yard. He was soon released, as he was declared mentally unfit to stand trial, and was deported back to the U.S. Before his death in 2007, the good doctor settled in upstate New York, and opened the Joseph Popp Butterfly Conservatory, as well as published a book, titled Popular Evolution: Life-Lessons from Anthropology in 2000.
Computers have become so much for us today. It's how many of us get our news, watch movies and series, connect through social media, as well as get creative, or even work. These machines need to be as healthy as we are, so we have to take into account the disruptive potential of viruses, alongside the stakes for effective cyber-security, whether desktop, laptop or phone. Just as people need to be vaxxed, computers need a bit of help staying fit, so contact a nerd today, and have them take a look at that hard drive - it could have cooties.

-- September 10, 2021 --

I'm No Leader, But Feel Free to Follow Me

Quick note just to say I have rejoined Instagram...

...so if you'd like to check out my travels, see more of my photos, or stalk me on the only social media I allow the public to view, feel free to visit @adelsouto.

-- September 06, 2021 --

Not the Best of Friends

Israel has been in the news lately, over all the shitty things they're doing to Palestinians. Many a United States citizen are asking why we're giving $3 billion a year (the largest recipient of American aid from 1976 - 2004, and the largest cumulative aid [$146 billion] since World War II) to a country that commits such atrocities. Well, while I don't agree with it, I do know why. They're our biggest ally in the region (GOP senator Jesse Helms once referred to Israel as "America's aircraft carrier in the Middle East"), they spend the most on U.S. goods (much of that $3 billion comes back in the form of weapons purchases, which helps Israel keep their -according to U.S. foreign policy- "qualitative military edge"), and lastly many politicians are religious idiots who think helping out "God's chosen" slice of desert will secure them a seat in Heaven. The craziest part of this is that the view of allyship differs on the other side. It is a well-known fact, even within our government, that Israel will do whatever it takes to achieve the security of the Israeli state. For instance, in May of 2014, a National Security Agency document obtained by journalist Edward Snowden, and published by journalist Glenn Greenwald, revealed the CIA had concerns Israel set up an extensive spy network within the U.S. government. A 2019 report even stated that the FBI concluded it "was pretty clear that the Israelis were responsible" for cellphone surveillance devices discovered near the White House. However, it goes further than spying. If someone gets in the way of Israel throwing a punch at an enemy, they're fine with striking whoever happens to be in that path. The thing is that the United States has been punched by Israel a few times, and very few people know about it. Take, for example, the USS Liberty incident.
The USS Liberty was originally the light civilian cargo vessel Simmons Victory (what was known as a Victory Ship - a copy of Liberty Ships that supplied Allied forces with cargo during World War II). It was acquired by the U.S. Navy, and was converted to an ACTR (auxiliary technical research ship), which is a now-admitted cover for NSA spy ships performing intelligence missions. During the Six-Day War of 1967, between Israel and several Arab nations (Egypt, Jordan and Syria), the USS Liberty was ordered to the Mediterranean area to perform a signals intelligence collection. It is claimed that Israeli Central Coastal Command had information the U.S. ship was shelling the coast of Israeli-occupied Arish, Egypt - even though the ship only had a few .50 caliber machine guns on deck. Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin ordered the sinking of any unidentified vessels in the area, but advised caution seeing as Soviet ships were being reported as operating nearby. Israel sent torpedo boats, as well as air force planes to inspect. Even though the Liberty hoisted a U.S. flag, sent out a distress call identifying themselves, and a cease-fire was given, Israeli Air Force planes attacked, using rockets, and 30-mm cannons, killing eight U.S. military men, and wounding seventy-five. Then the torpedo boats launched five torpedoes, killing another twenty-five U.S. servicemen. The USS Liberty was almost torn in two, but was able to stay afloat.

Around 4 pm, two hours after the attack started, Israel informed the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv that they had "mistakenly" attacked a U.S. Navy ship. Most didn't believe it, but a few took Israel's word for it. Then-Secretary of State David Dean Rusk sent a communication to Israeli ambassadors chastising Israel for knowingly attacking a U.S. ship, but President Lyndon Johnson accepted Israel's version of events. Several investigations were launched, including ones by the U.S. Navy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the House and Senate, CIA, NSA, and the Israeli government. All investigations blamed lack of communications, and found no one should face criminal charges. Even so, retired naval Lieutenant Commander James Ennes, a junior officer present at the time of the attack, says it was deliberate, as does survivor Joe Meadors (who runs an evidence-based website about the incident - visit here), and Captain Ward Boston of the U.S. Navy, and senior counsel for the Court of Inquiry, claims the Court's findings were intended to cover up a deliberate attack on a ship known to be an ally.
This all proves that you never really know who your friends are, especially when it comes to politics. Then again, hold back that annual $3 billion, and we'll see how long these two stay buddies.

-- August 25, 2021 --

Money-Making Brain Games

There's a whole slew of psychological tricks corporations use to trick you into buying unwanted stuff. There's even a jokey phrase people use to describe it, the "Target effect", which supposedly stems from running into the store to buy one simple item, and leaving with a half-dozen unnecessary ones. Places like Target, Walmart, and others of their ilk, have actually hired shrinks to peep into your brain, and let them in on how to make us pry open our wallets.
There's the ones we're all familiar with: placing cheap items by the register (lint rollers, lighters, etc), or marking items one cent below the whole number ($4.99, or $9.99), but there are quite a bunch many don't know about. One such is "anchoring", where a store will advertise that a product is originally, say $300, but they're going to sell it for $150. The store had never previously sold the item for, or was not going to price the item at, the listed $300, but it makes shoppers think they're getting 50% off. Another tactict is meeting your gaze. Not only do most stores place expensive items at eye level, cereal companies purposely create cartoon characters in a way that has them look as if they're making eye contact with children. Superstores have learned that playing music at the right volume suits sales, and that placing fast food vendors near the entrance produces smells that encourage shopping. More and more stores are keeping their isles a mess, because Proctor & Gamble learned of what they call the "endowment effect", where people are willing to pay more for items they had to touch. This has a two-pronged trapping: first, when we touch something, there's a subconscious sense of ownership, which promotes purchasing it, and secondly, it makes a shopper feel they may be holding quality, therefore they are saving money in buying it. Sometimes, the mess doesn't even need to be touched, as Lauren Collins related in The New Yorker how IKEA has a technique called "bulla bulla", where they chaotically pile merchandise into a din, creating the effect of volume, which in turn gives the impression of inexpensiveness. There is also the psychology of "guilt-free consumption", where companies help sales by reducing the sense of guilt a consumer might feel. British cosmetics store The Body Shop was one of the first companies to join environmental, and human rights campaigns, and that not only increased sales, but gave them lots of free advertising.
Guilt actually plays a huge factor in purchasing decisions. In 1956, General Mills launched their line of Betty Crocker cake mixes. The mix included all the ingredients, even powdered milk and eggs. All one needed to do was add water, stir it up, and put it in the oven. Even though it saved someone time and money, it sold poorly, so the corp asked a bunch of psychologists to find out why. Turns out the average U.S. housewife felt guilty using the mix despite convenience, feeling they were being deceptive. The company weighed its options, and rather than running expensive ads promoting the timesaving results, they opted to curb the guilt by removing the dehydrated egg, and adding the words "add an egg" to the box. Sales skyrocketed, because buyers felt doing a little more work made them feel less guilt, and that they had invested effort, which created a sense of ownership, giving the result more meaning, and the maker a sense of fulfillment.
Well, dear reader, keep all of this in mind the next time you go shopping, and with lots of will power, and perseverance, you may walk out of there with less items in your cart, and more money in your pocket. Good luck with that!

-- August 13, 2021 --

No Man's Land

Imagine being stuck in a foreign land, with little, or no way back to your native country. There are literally millions of people with that story, as the United Nations Refugee Agency sets the number of people currently forced to flee their homeland as high as 84-million. There are exiles from countries such as Syria, Palestine, China, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, and even Venezuela. Hell, I'm one from Cuba. Still, though many of those seeking refuge have tales of terror, some asylum seeker's predicaments are just downright weird.
One such person was Iranian national Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who preferred to be called Sir Alfred Mehran, as one of his parents was British.

From August of 1988 to July of 2006, Mehran lived in Terminal One of France's Charles de Gaulle Airport. While there is no consensus on the truth, Mehran claimed to not be allowed back into Iran since 1977, due to his criticisms of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In 1986, he tried to enter the U.K. from France, and was denied entry due to his passport being either stolen, lost or misplaced (stories vary on which), and was promptly returned. He decided to shack up in the terminal where his plane landed, and stayed there eighteen years. Having little money, and no way to work, MKN was fed by sympathetic airport employees, and visiting journalists in return for his story. Both Belgium and France offered Nasseri residency, but he refused, as the paperwork had him listed as being Iranian, and didn't use the name "Sir Alfred Mehran". In 2006, Mehran was hospitalized, and -in his absence- the airport tore down his makeshift quarters. Since 2008, he has been living in a Paris shelter. Don't feel too bad for him though. He released an autobiography, The Terminal Man (on Transworld Publishing), in 2004, and Steven Spielberg's production company paid him $250,000 for the rights to his story the previous year. His woes have been made a movie (Flight, 2006), a documentary (Sir Alfred of Charles De Gaulle Airport, 2001), a mockumentary (Here to Where, 2001), and was the inspiration for the previously mentioned 2003 Dreamworks' feature The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks.
Another, more recent case, is that of Chief Officer Mohammed Aisha, who was stuck on the abandoned cargo ship, the Motor Vessel Aman, from May of 2017, until April, 2021.

The boat was held by Egyptian authorities in the Suez Canal's port of Adabiya for lack of safety equipment, as well as missing shipping certificates. The captain -being from Egypt- left, and put the Syrian-born Aisha in charge, making him the legal guardian of the ship. While other crew members split, he had to take care of the vessel. Aisha watched as his brother, who inspired him to take the job, sailed by on another boat. In 2018, he learned his mother died. He ran out of food, and would illegally swim to shore for supplies. By 2019, he was alone, and the following year, a storm blew the ship eight miles from its anchored point, but luckily ran aground closer to shore. The ship's owners, Tylos Shipping and Marine Services, couldn't find a judge that would relieve the Chief Officer as legal guardian of the boat. Just as Mohammed was thinking of ending his life, the International Transportation Workers' Federation stepped in, and got him legal help to exit what he called a "floating coffin", and return to Syria.
These two were lucky, as they suffered, but had their issues (at least somewhat) resolved. Their stories are pretty strange, but there are many others whose accounts of being stuck outside their homeland are peppered with horror, so -if you can- help out groups, like World Vision, who give to those in crisis due to war, and natural disasters. It may help you feel a bit better in the luxury of knowing you're safe in your own home.

-- August 02, 2021 --

This Music Is Boomin'

Lucas John Helder, born the 5th of March in 1981, liked to be called Luke. He was a kid like most any other in Minnesota, growing up in a stable household; his mom working in the healthcare field, and his dad was an army higher-up. He did well in school, and was accepted into the University of Wisconsin-Stout in 2000, with his professors saying that -while he wasn't in the top of his class- he was quiet and polite. Later that year, he formed a grunge band with his friends, bassist Eric Hielscher and drummer Mike Stanton. They called the band Apathy, and Luke played guitar, as well as sang, and wrote the lyrics. In 2001, the band released a two-song CD, titled Sacks of People, which included the tracks "Black and Back" and "Conformist". They handed the discs out at shows, and the band started getting a bit of notice from the local music scene.

Around this time, Helder began to smoke a lot of pot, and trying his hand at astral projection. He told his friends of his new religious views, with beliefs that no one actually dies, and that the government was trying to repress people's spiritual growth. He soon left the University to go on a 3000-mile tour, but the 2002 road trip wasn't with the band, and it left quite a trail of debris.
Without anyone knowing, LJH made a butt-load of pipe bombs, and began placing them in people's mailboxes, along with anti-government propaganda. He packed the explosives with BBs and nails, and rigged them to go off when the mailboxes were opened. The bombs, eighteen in all, were found in Texas, Nebraska, Colorado, Iowa, and Illinois - some went off, others were discovered, and dismantled safely. While no one was killed, a number of people lost their hands, or were maimed. In Iowa alone, six people, including four postal employees, were injured. An all points bulletin was released, asking law enforcement to be on the lookout for a black Honda Accord, driven by a guy in a Kurt Cobain shirt. He was pulled over, and arrested in Nevada.
After the release of his name, his college newspaper, The Badger Herald, realized he had sent them a manifesto, Life on Earth, before the bombing spree (read that here). After his arrest, he admitted that he was planting the bombs in a smiley face pattern, but was caught before he could finish the smile. Once the media found out Luke was a musician, folks scattered to find the Sacks of People CD, and they started selling on eBay for as much as $200 a piece.
In 2004, a judge declared Helder to be incompetent to stand trial, as he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In 2014, he was reevaluated, but there's been no change in status, and he is still locked up at Rochester, Minnesota's Federal Medical Center, with no plans on releasing further material - musically, or explosively.

-- July 20, 2021 --

We Are No Longer the Music Makers

In most respects, there's nothing new to music being made by machines. I mean, it goes back a thousand years, with the first-known being made in Baghdad, Iraq. During the 9th Century, a familial trio of Persian inventors, called the Banu Musa brothers, created a mechanical musical instrument using a hydropowered organ that played interchangeable cylinders automatically. Being authors as well, they described it in their tome, The Book of Ingenious Devices. Sometime in the 13th Century, and unknown Belgian bell-maker creates a cylinder with pins that strike bells. Taking that idea, the music box is just a few centuries away when the Flemish clock-maker, Nicholas Vallin, builds a wall-mounted clock with a similar cylinder in 1598. In 1796, a Swiss clock-maker, Antoine Favre-Salomon, replaces the bells with a metal comb that has different sized teeth which produce several notes, creating the music box as we know it now. Today, one can see one of the first boxes created by AFS at the Shanghai Gallery of Antique Music Boxes and Automata in Pudong, China's Oriental Art Center. In 1870, an unknown German inventor creates a music box with a disc plate that helped produce greater sounds, and this spurred American inventors to create the self-playing piano just a few years later. Sadly, much of the progress halted when, not long after 1877, folks decided to stop innovating these devices since Thomas Edison began to mass-produce the phonograph.
Though your Average Joe would just go out, and buy a record, the rich (who could strangely enough afford orchestras) thought it cool to show off the latest orchestral gadgetry, such as the Phonoliszt-Violina (1900 - 1930), an automatic music machine containing piano, violin and banjo; Engelhardt Banjorchestra, a 1915 coin-operated mechanical orchestra made by Engelhardt Piano Company; and the J. W. Whitlock Automatic Harp (1900 - 1910), popularized by the Wurlitzer Company. The early 1900s were a time when musical robots seemed an idea not too far off, but, alas, they failed to materialize, and the automatic music-makers died out. By the the 1950s, interest in them reignited when avant-garde musicians began tinkering with electronics.
(to continue reading the full article, click here)

-- July 15, 2021 --

Music, Music, and More Music

Razorcake magazine's blog has recently posted my newest podcast, Episode #741, where I showcase all Spanish-language hardcore, punk, and indie bands. Also, don't forget my earlier Razorcake podcasts, such as Episode #726, which had all punk and hardcore with female-lead singers, Episode #688, featuring rare Cuban punk, hardcore and metal, and Episode #626, which was strictly bands from south Florida.
Speaking of music, 10 years ago, my industrial-noise outfit, 156, released their self-titled debut EP, in an edition of 156 copies on CD. To celebrate, I have released a cassette re-press, with all the original music, plus one extra track.

The tape is limited to 50 professionally-made copies, and I'm selling them at mere cost ($5 + $2 postage) because that's how I celebrate. They are now available, so drop by the 156 Bandcamp page to order.

-- July 09, 2021 --

Fifty Cent Words

There are two types of languages: those which have developed naturally (say, all the branches of Indo-European), and those engineered (such as Esperanto, which was created to "foster harmony between people from different countries" through an international language). Engineered languages themselves are split into three categories: philosophical (meant to reflect the potential of any given language, usually with compound words), logical (created to enforce unambiguous statements), and experimental (normally constructed to explore theories of linguistics).
While the words we speak seem natural to us, there are many problems with language. First, according to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, structures of language affect a speakers' cognition, and therefore that person's perceptions become relative to their spoken language. In short, linguistic categories influence decisions. Next is ambiguity of concept. Think of the word "blue". Now, try to explain to someone what it is, besides it simply being a color. Lastly is the wordy verbosity of periphrasis in circumlocution. Um, I mean: using too many words. Anyhow, imagine saying something as complex as, "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point," with only two words.
In an attempt to fix these issues, up steps John Quijada, an ex-employee of Los Angeles' Department of Motor Vehicles. After forty-five years of studying words, he developed Ithkuil, a language meant to be maximally precise, while also being maximally concise. In 2004, Quijada created a website to publish his thesis, Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language. The site, had it been a linguistic textbook, would have run about four-hundred pages, so he's definitely put some thought into this. When describing Ithkuil, John states its design captures the "morphophonology of Abkhaz verb complexes, the moods of verbs of certain American Indian languages, the aspectual system of Niger–Kordofanian languages, the nominal case systems of Basque and Dagestanian languages, the enclitic system of the Wakashan languages, the positional orientation systems of Tzeltal and Guugu Yimithirr, the Semitic triliteral root morphology, and the hearsay and possessive categories of Suzette Elgin's Láadan language."
After several complaints that much of it was hard to pronounce, JQ revamped it in 2007, calling the language Ilaksh. He shaved down the 65 consonants, and 17 vowels, to 30 consonants, and 10 vowels (though adding "tones"). In 2011, he changed things up again, and went back to using the original name, while transforming the script to morphophonemic principles, which allowed sentences of grammatical categories to be pronounced in a multitude of ways. On October 30th of 2017, he published that learners' desires for a more "agglutinative morphophonology" had convinced him to extended the use of adjuncts for shortened expression to further create phonaesthetics, calling it "Ithkuil IV".
Does all this translate well to music? Well, since 2015, Quijada has been producing prog-rock jams sung in Ithkuil, with his band Kaduatán (which means "renegades") as a way to promote the language.

The language's writing system is just as hard to learn, as it's a complex mix of principles from Ethiopian and Brahmin scripts, yet it employs some Hebrew, and various Klingon fonts. If you're still interested in translating that sentence above (about the mountain range) into two words, in Ithkuil it's "Tram-mlöi hhâsmarptuktôx," and it looks like this...

Sadly, John didn't create this language to be used in everyday conversations. Since it was meant to convey the most information in the most brief ways, it was designed for more profound fields, such as when discussing philosophy, science, politics and art. So, if you use it during tea time, make sure to extend your pinkie. It doesn't really matter anyway, I guess, because there is no known speaker of Ithkuil, including Quijada himself. Besides, due to its design to be so precise, it is almost impossible to be humorous in Ithkuil, so you know I'm out.

-- June 28, 2021 --

I'm So Tired of Pollution

I find it extremely odd that I grew up in south Florida, yet had never heard of this insanity until just a few months ago. Anyhow, let me share with you a rarity on this blog: a local tale.
In 1972, a group of private fishermen wanted to lure more game fish to the waters just off the coast of Ft. Lauderdale, and learning of artificial reefs constructed in the Gulf of Mexico, northeastern United States, Australia, Indonesia, and Africa, formed a group called the Broward Artificial Reef Inc. (or BARINC for short). Not wanting to spend a huge sum, and having a growing need to dispose of old used tires, they presented their idea to kill two fish with one stone to the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1974, and the ACoE endorsed it. The project was soon approved by the Broward County government, and the project got the green light.
In the spring of 1975, hundreds of privately owned boats, headed by the the US Navy's minesweeper USS Thrush, sailed out to dump bundles of tires into the ocean. Even the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company supported the project, now called the Osborne Reef, not only providing equipment, but also flying their Goodyear Blimp, and dropping a gold-painted tire into the sea at the opening ceremony. In all, these idiots dumped around two million used tires, in waters 65 feet (20 m) deep, about 7,000 feet (2,100 m) off the tourist-packed shores.

Though many of the tires were bundled together using nylon and steel bands, no one took into account the corrosive nature of salt water, and the tires were soon loose. With constant movement, wildlife never really had a chance to settle in the man-made reef, and the mess began to expand as the tires migrated. This movement actually caused damage to other nearby natural reefs, making an already bad situation much worse. By 1995, Hurricane Opal managed to spread over one-thousand tires all the way up to the Florida Panhandle, near Pensacola, then, in 1998, Hurricane Bonnie deposited several thousand of them as far up the U.S. coast as North Carolina.
Saying, "Enough's enough," several groups decided to clean it up - or, at least, try. In 2001, Nova Southeastern University filed for a grant of $30,000 for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to begin a tire removal program. Dr. Robin Sherman spearheaded the project, and was able to remove only 1,600, at an estimated cost of $17 per tire. In 2007, the U.S. Navy, Army and Coast Guard divers began Operation DiveExEast 07, and only got about 10,000, spending about $2,000,000. US Army Captain Russell Destremps, and his 86th Engineer Dive Team, tried again in 2008, and retrieved another 43,000 in just one month. On July 24th of 2009, thirty Army and Navy divers took on the task of trying to remove what scientists estimated to be 300,000 tires caught against the Hugh Taylor Birch State Park natural reef. They got a total of 1,400. Finally, in 2015, the state of Florida contracted Industrial Divers Corporation for $4.3 million, and - by 2019 - had removed an extra 250,000. Still, it is believed over two-thirds of the destructive trash is still under the Florida ocean.
Sadly, this is not the only man-made tire reef that failed. Two huge ones were in Malaysia and Indonesia, which also caused natural reef destruction, as well as beach pollution. Jack Sobel, the Director of Strategic Conservation at Ocean Conservancy said in a 2002 interview, "I don't know of any cases where there's been a success with tire reefs," after their International Coastal Cleanup removed close to 12,000 tires from beaches all over the globe.
Normally, I'd try to end these pieces on a high note, or even a joke, but this subject is dead serious. When it comes to fixing the messes we've made, we're really sinking.

-- June 16, 2021 --

A Story That'll Grow On You

As readers of this blog may have already noticed, I've posted a number of articles having to do with plants - from herbage that's nearly extinct, to trees that gave drunks a hard time. This is kind of a given for me, because I love greenery. I not only grew up in a home that respected a good garden, I worked in landscaping for several years. Many a friend has pointed out that I have quite the Green Thumb, so why not have that spill over onto this blog? Now, since I once wrote about a tree that was arrested, I should cover the other side of the leaf, and tell you about two trees that are totally autonomous, each one called "The Tree That Owns Itself".
The first is a White oak (Quercus alba), known as the Jackson Tree, and is found at the corner of South Finley, and Dearing Streets, in Athens, Georgia, USA.

click on image for larger view

Originally seeded sometime between 1500 and 1700, the tree grew on the property of Colonel William Henry Jackson, who was the son of James Jackson (a Congressman, U.S. Senator, and Governor of Georgia), as well as the father of another James Jackson (a Congressman, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of GA). It is believed Jackson had such fond memories of being a child playing under the tree, that he decided to deed an eight-foot squared plot of land the tree grew on to the tree itself. As the area expanded, properties were bought, and sold, but the section the oak lived on could not be put up for sale, so no mater the construction, the tree stayed. Funny thing is, no one knows if any of this is real, or not. Though the story appeared in a front-page article, titled "Deeded to Itself", in the Athens Weekly Banner on August 12th, 1890, there is no proof of the deed - besides local folklore. Still, the municipal government holds to it, and the tree is respected as being deeded to itself. On October 9 of 1942, following a lengthy period of decline, the tree fell, but the locals took an acorn, and grew a new tree. Therefore, the tree that grows there now is actually "The Son of the Tree That Owns Itself, Which Also Owns Itself". If you visit the area nowadays, you can spot the tree easily, as it has two stone tablets at its base, paraphrasing the "original deed".
The other self-governing tree, a Post oak (Quercus stellata) known as the Walker Oak, is in the next state over to the west, in Eufaula, Alabama.

click on image for larger view

This sprout's history is more fact, than legend though. In 1935, the town's mayor himself, E. H. Graves, gave the tree its own deed. In 1961, that poor sap was hit by a tornado, and fell. It was replaced by a new one, which also fell two decades later, but another was planted soon enough, and they too all have deeds to the land. If you ever find yourself in Eufaula, go to the corner of Highland and Cotton Aves, and you'll spot the plaque on an iron fence letting you know you're in a real shady place.
In 1972, biocentrist Christopher D. Stone (son of journalist I. F. Stone), wrote the paper "Should Trees Have Standing?", which stated that if corporations are assigned rights, natural objects such as trees should too. I'm glad folks in Athens and Eufaula seem to agree.

-- June 10, 2021 --

Even More of My New Series of Art Zines

I've been releasing a new line of art zines under my publishing arm of Anima Animus. While Issue 1 was my own work, and Issue 2 was the work of NYC artist Robet L. Pepper, I am now releasing the next three, this July. Issues 3 (Chuck Loose, graphic art), Issue 4 (Liorcifer, tattoo work), and Issue 5 (Thaniel Ion Lee, digital art) will be available soon.

As before, each zine is 5.5" x 8.5" (14 x 20cm), on glossy color pages, with heavy cardstock cover, and will is limited to only 50 copies. They are $10 (postage paid), and are available now for pre-order, with copies shipping in mid-July. You can contact me directly to pre-order, or visit my Etsy shop to see when they're available.

-- June 04, 2021 --

Sham Shaman

I've written about a few impostors before, such as Grey Owl (Archibald Belaney), but there are just so many more to cover. Mary Baker was an Englishwoman pretending to be royalty from an imaginary island, calling herself Princess Caraboo. Iron Eyes Cody claimed to be of Cherokee-Cree ancestry, and stared in the "Keep America Beautiful" PSAs of the 70s, but was actually Espera Oscar de Corti, an Italian American actor. Former Fox News military analyst, Joseph Cafasso, claimed to have been a highly decorated Special Forces soldier, and Vietnam veteran, but served in the U.S. Army for only 44 days in 1976.
One of the more interesting impostors was Baltimore, Maryland's Joseph Howard Lee (1877 - 1947). Not much is known about his early life, other than he grew up poor as the son of former slaves, and had a number of arrests for homosexual acts with minors. In 1910, he began dressing only in a sheepskin skirt, with a large brass ring through his nose, and started going by the name Bata Kindai Amgoza ibn LoBagola, claiming to be a black Jew from Dahomey (which is now Benin in West Africa).

In 1911, Lee (as LoBagola) had been invited by Frank G. Speck, Assistant Curator of General Ethnology at the Philadelphia Museum (and later founder of the University of Pennsylvania's Anthropology Department), to perform dances, and other African rituals for Museum visitors. Speck even interviewed LoBagola, and recorded him singing "African" songs on wax cylinders, some of which was transcribed, and published, in the museum's Museum Journal (Vol. II, Iss. 2). During this time, Lee had some articles published in Scribner's Magazine, where he would tell stories of his life in Africa. In 1929, still under his pseudonym, Lee produced an autobiography, LoBagola: An African Savage’s Own Story (released by New York publishing house A. A. Knopf), and was sold in Europe as The Folk Tales of a Savage. In it, he confusingly told stories about his life in Africa, yet apologized for misleading the museum's staff, and admitting he was merely an entertainer. After he was exposed, just like his early life, not much is known what he did, or where he went, except that he died of a pulmonary edema in Attica Prison, while serving eighteen months for petty theft, and is buried on the prison grounds.
I understand that some people have very few avenues to better themselves in life, and pretending to be someone of higher social standing can lead one to a better place, but in our current age, there are fewer, more popular phrases than "fake it, 'til you make it." Still, there's no reason to become a total phony.

-- May 23, 2021 --

Dig This

There are a number of archeological discoveries that have stumped scientists throughout the years. They mostly concern stone sites that don't have any obvious significance, such as the Diquis Delta spheres of southern Costa Rica, which date to around 600 CE, and are known locally as Las Bolas (translation: "The Balls"), or the 2000-year-old Nazca Lines of Peru, which were laid out by a pre-Inca civilization. In Jordan, there is also Khatt Shebib, a 93-mile-long (150 km), one-meter-high stone wall, and the equally confusing stone enclosures, known simply as "the Big Circles", which are 400 meters in diameter, date to 100 CE, and have no gates or openings - with eleven of these cataloged. What the purpose was for any of these constructs is a guess to any archeologist, but these are locations that leave a lot to the imagination. The people who built them are no longer with us, and left no written records of what they stood, or were built, for.
Now, imagine a culture that is still around in some form, where we have a huge library of available research material from their past, yet has left behind, not layouts in stone, but mechanical devices that baffle scientists to this day. You may think I'm talking about the ancient Greek gadget known as the Antikythera Mechanism. Though the apparatus was discovered in 1901, and has astounded those who have studied it since, it was actually scanned with Microfocus X-ray Computed Tomography (X-ray CT) in 2005, which has recently led to a new model of it, satisfyingly explaining the contraption (see that here). Even so, finding only one of these, scientists kind of always figured it was some sort of astronomical clock; they just didn't have enough evidence to say with confidence that it was so.
The doohickey I'm going to share here today, not a single person is sure what the whatchamacallit could have been used for, and over one hundred have been discovered. Let me introduce you to what are known as the Gallo-Roman dodecahedrons.

These thingamabobs were first found in 1739, numbering 116 so far, and have been dug up in England, Spain, Hungary, Germany, France, and - of course - Italy. They are hollow, twelve-sided (though one twenty-sided icosahedron has been found in Germany), and range in size from 1.5 to 4.5 inches (4 to 11 centimeters). Not a single word has been written giving account to what they are for, nor has any drawing of one been traced. Speculation as to what they are includes: dice; religious artifacts; survey instruments to estimate distance to (or sizes of) distant objects; fortune-telling device; coin measure to detect counterfeits; water pipe gauges; and (because wax was found in two units) a simple candlestick holder. Several dodecahedron have been found in coin hoards, which lends evidence that the original owners considered them valuable objects. While the oldest examples of the dodecahedrons are Roman, a few smaller, gold ones have been discovered in Óc Eo, Vietnam, and the Pyu city-states of Myanmar.
Though the idea is not popular with archeologists of the day, in 2014, history enthusiast Martin Hallett speculated that they were actually knitting frames for creating gloves. He pointed out the knobs could be used to catch wool in the same as a Knitting Nancy. Still, because of this hypothesis, knitting enthusiasts have taken to 3D-printing Gallo-Roman dodecahedrons as a way to help them make gloves.
If you have any guesses as to what these appliances might be, contact your local museum. Otherwise, keep digging.

-- May 10, 2021 --

Kabloowie!

Nuclear arms are the most dangerous weapons on Earth, so you'd think nothing in the world would have more precautions than them. If you think that though, you'd be wrong. There are numerous safety measures to make sure armaments don't fall into the wrong hands, as well as hiring leading scientists for when they want to perform tests with the explosive power of atoms, but even those two dimensions have innumerable breaches of protocol - whether unforeseen, or from outright absent-mindedness.
As many people know, U.S. Presidents carry a card with warhead launch codes, known as "the biscuit", and a Presidential aide, who is always by their side, has (normally handcuffed to them) a briefcase, known as "the football", to which the codes can be entered to begin a "party at ground zero". Well, both have been lost several times. Jimmy Carter once left the codes in a jacket pocket sent to the dry cleaners. Gerald Ford’s aide once left the football at a Paris peace summit. Bill Clinton once left his football-carrying aide at a 1999 conference, and then lost the biscuit for months without telling anyone until he rediscovered it.
The U.S. military doesn't fare that much better when working with bombs, and we have dropped two nuclear devices on our own country. The first was on March 11th, of 1958, when an 8,000-lbs (3630-kg) atom bomb called Mark 6 was being transported by Captain Bruce Kulka on a B-47 bomber. When checking the payload, the Captain accidentally pulled the wrong lever, and the bomb landed in Mars Bluff, SC. Luckily, the fission core wasn't armed, so - while it exploded, destroying seven buildings - the damage was nowhere what it could have been. The second time this happened was January 24, 1961, when a B-52G Stratofortress was carrying two Mark 39 thermonuclear bombs. The plane lost all of its fuel, and the entire crew ejected, sending the plane crashing down on Fargo, NC. Both bombs, which were released from the plane, were armed. Though one deployed an emergency parachute to land without incident (getting caught in a tree), the other did not, and plopped onto a mud field. All praise due to the Atomic Gods, an electric switch had a fault, causing the high voltage charge (needed to ignite the nuclear blast) to fizzle out.
So... Presidents = forgetful idiots. Military men = bumbling oafs. Then, atomic scientists = big brains, right? Nope. There have been a number of test failures, including Operation Plowshare, where the U.S. proposed using nuclear bombs to widen the Panama Canal, clear a path for a highway through the Rocky Mountains, and build a harbor in Alaska. Only after detonating over thirty warheads, did the government realize that, between the amount of radioactive fallout, and plutonium contamination of drinking water, it wasn't worth it. Even so, that didn't stop Russia from stealing the idea, and they undertook the Chagan Project, at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in January of 1965, where they set off 124 bombs for the Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy Program - all just to build a huge lake. Sadly, the water is still radioactive to this day, and is called "Atomic Lake" by the locals.
Computers aren't much help sometimes either, especially when you add in a human touch. On the 9th of November, in 1979, warnings erupted at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), and the U.S. Pentagon, shouting that the country was under attack. Data indicated that a whopping one-thousand Soviet missiles were flying towards major cities in the United States. Pilots scrambled to intercept, and the President was readied to retaliate. Six minutes later, reports came in that nothing was being detected on radar or satellite. Turns out, it was a false alarm, because a low level cadet accidentally uploaded a training simulation to the wrong computer.

click on image for larger view

I hope this read hasn't been too scary, but do know that there are currently 13,000~ nuclear warheads, managed by only nine countries - some of which don't get along. Though it's only been three-quarters of a century since there have been atomic weapons, these instances (plus the ones I haven't gone into) are actually a bit frightening. Still, I'll give a god damn atomic wedgie to the first person that says, "You can't hug a child with nuclear arms!"

-- April 28, 2021 --

When Publicity Stunts Your Growth

There's an old adage that "All press is good press," but that's not even close to being true. Sometimes, press gimmicks can go horribly wrong, and some even wind up costing a company way more than they bargained for.
There have been some great ones, like when Red Bull sponsored (and broadcast) Felix Baumgartner breaking the sound barrier by free-falling twenty-three miles from the stratosphere, in 2012; when Eichborn Publishers attracted visitors at the Frankfurt Book Fair to their stand by attaching tags on houseflies listing its name and booth number; or the April Fools' Day prank by Taco Bell buying the U.S. Liberty Bell, and renaming it "Taco Liberty Bell".
Still, for every dozen wild PR campaigns that work, there's one or two that not only fall flat, but get nothing but trouble in return.
In 2006, LifeLock CEO Todd Davis, was so confident that his company could protect a paying customer's identity, they posted his social security number in tv commercials, and on billboards, to prove how good their service worked. While there were 87 failed attempts, thirteen were successful, with one opening an AT&T Wireless account (racking up $2400 in charges), and another getting a $500 loan at a check cashing place. Those antics forced the Federal Trade Commission to fine the company $12 million, in 2010, for deceptive advertising.
It's not always a corporate fail either, as the U.S. Department of Defense thought it would be a great idea to fly a Boeing 747, flanked by two F-16 fighters, really low around Manhattan eight years after 9/11, all for a photo shoot. Another, was when Taylor Swift held an online competition in 2012 to which she would perform a free show at whatever school got the most votes. 4chan and Reddit users skewed the results to where the winner turned out to be Boston's Horace Mann School for the Deaf.
Since I just mentioned Boston, one grand fiasco - now known as the "2007 Boston Mooninite panic" - was on account of Cartoon Network. As part of a nationwide guerrilla marketing campaign for the Adult Swim movie Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, artist Peter Berdovsky (aka Zebbler) and marketing firm Interference, Inc., placed LED displays of an Aqua Teen Hunger Force character called a Mooninite, all around Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville.

These displays were mistaken by local idiots as possible improvised explosive devices. Both, the Boston Police Department, and Fire Department, were called to remove several of the displays, two people were arrested (though charges were later dropped), and CN's parent company, Turner Broadcasting, was fined two million dollars.
And, now that I'm on the subject of bombs, let's get into one of the worst promotional ideas ever. While the pervious one was a mistake, this publicity stunt was quite intentional. In 2012, filmmaker Nathan Todd thought the best way to promote his movie, A Belfast Story, which was set in an Ireland still marred by terrorist violence, was to send promo packs to movie reviewers containing bomb making materials, including a bag of nails, duct tape, and even a balaclava. Chris Hewitt, of Empire Magazine, called the press kit "the most distasteful freebie ever." The gimmick failed so badly, many writers refused to see, or review the film.
Well, you win some, and you lose some. Hopefully, none of your ideas are as bad, or at least don't cause as much damage as these. Promote yourself, just run it by others first. If jaws drop, you may want to rethink things. If you decide to still go through with it anyway, make sure you document it, so we can all get a good laugh out of you later.

-- April 16, 2021 --

Suckers, They Come A Dime A Dozen

We are living in an age of crisis, inequality, and absurdity, and many are pointing the finger for these injustices at late-stage Capitalism. There may be no greater proof of this than the commodification of status, best expressed by the rise of social media influencers, and YouTube stars, where every living moment is a gimmicky ploy to sell something. Here, the wertausdruck is related to your clicks and views, and it doesn't matter if it's an Instagram model holding a bottle of the newest volcanic-gas-infused water in her latest pic, someone calling themselves an indie blogger suddenly promoting the newest Hollywood blockbuster, or a leftist YouTube theorist interrupting their video on the Marxist critique of societal norms with a paid promotion for the newest earbuds.
Well, we've all become familiar with the online prankster getting interrupted by the law, during one of their malicious performances, and hearing them utter the excuse, "It was just a social experiment," but there are times when the script is flipped, and they become the unwitting dupe themselves.
In one case, YouTuber Josh Pieters, and magician Archie Manners, felt reality tv stars want to be on tv so bad, and that they would say anything if paid to do so. So, they hired Yazmin Oukhellou, and Bobby Norris, from The Only Way is Essex, Alfie Best from Absolutely Ascot, and Hayley Hughes from Love Island, to appear on a fake tv show, titled Technology from the Future. The stars were asked to read fake news stories stories, including one about leaving fridge doors open to combat climate change, a charity that taught African children how to ski called AfroSki, and the invention of time travel. Pieters told Insider that they tried to drop hints of their intentions to the players, saying, "You can't be complete fraudsters, and there has to be breadcrumbs along the way that give them a fair chance, but that makes it all the more thrilling when we pull it off." He claims not even their agents questioned the producers' motives.
Another great case was when the shoestore Payless, opened a fake boutique, calling it Palessi. The chain hired the promotional company DCX Growth Accelerator to invite hundreds of influencers to the store's opening. Stocking the shelves with their standard fare of $20 shoes, and $40 boots, they asked those who showed up how much they would pay for this new designer brand. Many partygoers praised the footwear's style, material, and craftsmanship, admitting they would pay hundreds of dollars for them, with one guessing the shoes had to cost close to $700. Chief creative officer of DCX GA, Doug Cameron, said, "Payless wanted to push the social experiment genre to new extremes, while simultaneously using it to make a cultural statement," and I think they succeeded.

The last example I'll give is the scariest of them, and it was when the BBC did an expose, for their show Blindboy Undestroys the World, on how influencers would promote anything, so long as they were compensated. The investigation focused on three British social media hacks, Lauren Goodger, Mike Hassini, and Zara Holland, who have a combined fanbase of 1.3 million followers. They were asked to help spread the word about a new diet drink, Cyanora, which was "a classy new weight-loss drink that contains everything you need to shed those horrible, ugly pounds," including the poison hydrogen cyanide, and no one batted an eye. When told they would have to promote it before actually trying it, they all agreed to. At the auditions, all three were given a script that clearly mentioned cyanide a number of times, including the line, "If you want to boost your weight-loss, try Cyanora, which contains all-natural extracts: calamine, magnesium, lemon balm, red clover, and hydrogen cyanide." Hassini even commented, "From what I know, that all looks pretty natural."
I'm not one to promote suicide, but if you base your life around what social media influencers tell you, maybe you should chug a bottle or two of Cyanora.

-- April 01, 2021 --

You're Nobody's Fool

Can you tell today's a special day for me? To regular readers of this blog, it might be obvious. I enjoy posting entries about hoaxes, as well as a number of April Fools' Day pranks. I also like posting a bit of history before diving into the main subject, and many might think that today's lesson is a bunch of bullshit, given my April 1st track record, but - I assure you - this is no joke. Well, not yet, anyway.
April Fools' Day started in France in 1582. Though the Council of Trent decided to switch Europe over from the Julian calendar, to the Gregorian calendar, in 1563, the French didn't get around to it until almost twenty years later. Like the Hindu calendar, the Julian method of counting down the days had the New Year ringing in on the Spring Equinox, which many just placed on April 1st. The "fools" who didn't know this, had paper fish taped to their unsuspecting backsides, and were called "poisson d’Avril" (or "April fish"). It is thought by some scholars that this new tradition was incorporated into European culture to sort of wash away the Roman celebration of Hilaria, which is Latin for "the cheerful ones", and was an equinox festival to honor Cybele, where participants would mourn, whip themselves, and perform not-very-cheerful rituals of castration. By the 18th Century, the practices surrounding what we now know as April Fools' Day, spread to the U.K. where it took a real hold. So much so, that authors (such as Jonathan Swift), and newspapers would get in on it. By the time television came around, they joined in with glee, and the first known broadcasted prank was pulled by the BBC, in 1957.

Known as the "spaghetti-tree hoax", The British Broadcasting Corporation ran a three-minute fake report on their current-affairs program Panorama, on April 1st. The segment showed a family in Switzerland harvesting strands of the pasta from a "spaghetti tree" farm. The idea came from cameraman Charles de Jaeger, who remembered how the teachers from his youth in Austria would tell kids that they were so dumb, they'd believe spaghetti would grow on trees, if told so. Panorama editor, Michael Peacock, loved the it, and gave Charles a £100 budget to produce the skit. They then hired respected broadcaster Richard Dimbleby (who also loved the idea), which gave the piece believability. An estimated eight-million people tuned in, with hundreds of idiots phoning in the next day to ask if the story was real, or for more info on how they could cultivate spaghetti. Operators at the BBC were told to reply with: "Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce, and hope for the best."
Well, I made it through a whole April Fools' Day post on April Fools' day, without fooling anyone. Like Abraham Lincoln once said, "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." Except he never actually said that, so as weak as it was, "April Fools!"

-- March 21, 2021 --

A Salute To Animals

It's not odd for an army to have animals trained for use in warfare. It may be cruel on many levels, but not odd. Greek and Romans had Molossian Mastiffs as fighting companions, elephants used in combat are mentioned in Sanskrit hymns dating to 1,100 BCE, pigeons were valued for communication in 20th Century wars, and horses have been tasked with mounted combat, and pulling chariots, as far back as written records go. What might be considered a little odd are animals receiving rank. It could be weird for a lowly Private to have to answer to Sergeant Fido, but that is the case for some military personnel. There are animals who hold (or have held) the position of an officer.
First, I'll start with the obvious ones: canines. Dogs have the highest number of ranked animals, and why not? They are truly mankind's best friend. Pups have done everything from fight in battles, to serve as mascots. Sergeant Major Jiggs was one of the first dogs to receive rank, and was the original Marine Corps bulldog mascot, as his owner was Major General Smedley Butler. Jiggs began his career in 1922 as a private, and advanced to the rank of E-9.

There's also Sergeant Major Fosco, who was one of the first military dogs to complete an airborne jump; Chief Dog Sinbad, an enlisted member of the U.S. Coast Guard for 11 years (and saw combat during World War II); and Sergeant 1st Class Boe, Sergeant 1st Class Budge, and Master Sergeant Maverick, who were all trained therapy dogs for veterans. Interestingly enough, when a canine receives a rank, they are always given one rank above their handler as a reminder that they are to be respected.
Next up are equine, such as Staff Sergeant Reckless, who was a Marine pack horse in the Korean conflict. She carried supplies and ammunition for the Marines of 5/1 Recoilless Rifle Platoon, and once made fifty-one, unguided solo trips for supplies, as well as bringing wounded men to safety. The horse has received two Purple Hearts, and a Good Conduct Medal. Plus, there's a long line of Master Sergeant mules named Big Deuce, the Army's official donkey mascot for the 2nd FA Battalion "Mule Soldiers" out of Fort Sill, OK. On a rather strange side note, Master Sergeant Big Deuce VI got demoted twice for attempting an AWOL, and assaulting the officer in his command.
A funny addition to this list are goats. Sergeant Short Round is the Army's goat mascot, who accompanies Big Deuce. The most recent being Short Round VI, who had her enlistment ceremony at Fort Sill, in 2018. There is also Lance Corporal Billy Windsor, a member of the British Army in the Royal Welsh Regiment, who must be saluted by subordinates. Like Big Deuce VI, he was demoted in 2006 after head-butting the drummer of the 1st Battalion.
Lastly are my two favorites, Nils Olav, and Wojtek.
Nils Olav is a badass King Penguin, who is Visekorporal (Lance Corporal), as well as official mascot of Norway's Royal Guard. On August 15, 2008, that beautiful bird was knighted by the Norwegian King's Guard, and was so approved by King Harald V.
Wojtek was a Syrian brown bear, adopted by Polish II Corps soldiers during a stop in Iran. The Polish army had him retrieving ammunition, during the 1944 Battle of Monte Cassino, in Italy. For his bravery, and loyalty, he was given the rank of Private, but greater rewards lay ahead, as he was was given to Scotland's Edinburgh Zoo, and not only lived lavishly, has five bronze statues made of him (three in Poland, and two in Scotland), plus a memorial plaque in Britain's Imperial War Museum.
This goes to show that animals not only play an important part in the natural environment, but in human history, so please be kind to our furry fellows.

-- March 16, 2021 --

New Series of Art Zines

This Spring Equinox, March 20th, I'm releasing a new line of art zines under my publishing arm of Anima Animus. Each zine will feature a new artist, with Issue 1 and 2 being released together (though sold separately).

Issue 1 is my own work, and is a mailart collection I did in 2012, titled Special Delivery. Issue 2 is the work of Robert L. Pepper, and compiles two separate art series he's done, titled Cotton Fetish.
Each zine is 5.5" x 8.5" (14 x 20cm), on glossy color pages, with heavy cardstock cover, and will be limited to 50 copies. They are $5 for Issue 1 (postage paid) / $10 (postage paid) for Issue 2 and beyond, and are available now for pre-order, with copies shipping on the Equinox. Issues 3 and 4, featuring the work of artists Chuck Loose, and Thaniel Ion Lee, respectively, will be available on the Summer Solstice.
You can contact me directly to pre-order, or visit my Etsy shop to order on, or after March 20th.

-- March 08, 2021 --

Leaf Them Alone

A lot of people, myself included, were pretty freakin' sad when the last male white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni), who was named Sudan, died in 2018, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia, Kenya. Though survived by his daughter, Najin, and his granddaughter, Fatu, once they're gone, mankind will witness the complete extinction of a species. It's not the first we've committed, and it probably won't be the last. Many other animals may soon follow, such as the North Atlantic right whale (~400 left), Tooth-billed pigeon (~300), Gharial crocodile (~200), Kakapo ground-dwelling parrot (~150), Amur Leopard (~60), and the Vaquita dolphin (less than 20).
While that's depressing enough, there's one lifeform on Earth that has some species facing annihilation, with few people talking about it, though we can't live without them: plants. Whether it's deforestation for construction, over-logging, over-expanding farmland, or the introduction of invasive animal species that wound up over-grazing, we have laid waste to certain areas of the world. With that, we have killed off a number of plant species that many not come back from the brink of elimination.
One such plant is Bois Dentelle aka Wood Lace (Elaeocarpus bojeri). It grows on the tiny island nation of Mauritius, just east of Madagascar, and there are only two known specimens left. Since the plant has no economic value, its environment has been overrun through the farming of commercially-attractive nonnative species, like the Guava tree.
There's also New Zealand's Three Kings Kaikomako (Pennantia baylisiana). Discovered in 1945, by Professor Geoff Baylis of the University of Otago, the plant grows only on the north face of Great Island, in the Three Kings group, off Cape Reinga. There is only one known plant in the wild. Efforts to save the plant's seeds have been successful, and a few have been propagated within nursery conditions.
Lastly, we have Wood's Cycad (Encephalartos woodii), which has no known specimens in the wild. The last known survivor of this plant species was a male plant found in the oNgoye Forest of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, in 1895, by John Medley Wood, who was the curator of the Durban Botanic Garden, and the director of the Natal Government Herbarium of South Africa.

The plant (which was a cluster of four stems), was uprooted, and replanted in Kew Gardens in 1899. Three of the stems were then removed in 1903, and planted in Wood's Durban Botanic Gardens. One of those three stems was later transplanted at the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland in 1905. Since the original was a male plant, all plants in botanical gardens today are clones of the original Cycad, as no seeds can be produced by the male. If you want one, you will have to obtain the required permits from South Africa's Nature Conservation to either move, buy, sell, donate, receive, or cultivate it.
Other known plant species which are now endangered are Yemen's beautiful Dragon's Blood Tree (Dracaena cinnabari), the Choje Tree (Aloe dichotoma) from South Africa, Brazil's Candelabra Tree aka Parana Pine (Araucaria angustifolia), and the amazing-looking Monkey Puzzle Pine, which is Chile's national tree, and has been found in the fossil record dating back to 200-million years.
I know many folks today see conservation efforts to be fruitless, as well as a little fruity by burly, manly men who'd rather fight you than try to understand you, but - still - please do whatever's best for our planet. You may not realize it, but you will be helping generations-upon-generations to come.

-- February 26, 2021 --

Me Right Good Enough, Write?

I always wonder if my poetry, and prose, is up to par. I'd hate to be fooling myself, and find that - in actuality - I'm seen as a joke among my literary compatriots. Worse, I'd hate to think that a hundred years from now, libraries collect my work simply because it's so god awful. If you can't tell: I'm not of the school of thought that believes it's better to be remembered for the wrong reasons, than to be forgotten entirely.
I would rather burn everything I've ever set to paper (or hard drive), than be seen as a modern-day Anna Margaret Ross. Better known by her pen-name, Amanda McKittrick Ros, she is considered by a number of critics to have written some of the worst novels, and poetry, ever.

McKittrick was born in Drumaness, Ireland, on December 8, 1860, as the fourth child of the Principal of Drumaness High School, Edward Amlave McKittrick. She enrolled in Dublin's Marlborough Teacher Training College in the 1880s, and was appointed Monitor at Millbrook National School, later becoming a qualified teacher there. Anna married a 35-year-old widower, Andrew Ross in 1887, and he financed her first novel, Irene Iddesleigh, as a ten-year anniversary present. She continued writing, and published two more novels (Delina Delaney in 1898, and Helen Huddleson, released posthumously in 1969), and two pamphlets of poetry (Poems of Puncture in 1912, and Fumes of Formation in 1933). Her work was ironically enjoyed by Mark Twain, Aldous Huxley, and C. S. Lewis. Twain said Irene Iddesleigh was "one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time", and humorist Barry Pain called it "the book of the century", while at the same time writing that he "shrank before it in tears, and terror." This didn't matter to Ross, as she thought her critics were too unsophisticated to appreciate her work. She believed that a "million and one who thirst for aught that drops from my pen", and predicted she would "be talked about at the end of a thousand years."
If you are curious as to how bad her writing is, but don't want to read an entire novel, this is a line from her last book: "She had a swell staff of sweet-faced helpers swathed in stratagem, whose members and garments glowed with the lust of the loose, sparkled with the tears of the tortured, shone with the sunlight of bribery, dangled with the diamonds of distrust, and slashed with sapphires of scandals." Never mind that everyone in that volume had a fruity surname; Lord Raspberry, Cherry Raspberry, Sir Peter Plum, Christopher Currant, the Earl of Grape, Madame Pear, and so on. Want more? This is the opening line from her first novel: "Have you ever visited that portion of Erin's plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?" Boy, oh boy.
Luckily for AMR, she died in 1939, and didn't live to see The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature described her labor as "uniquely dreadful". Still, the Belfast Public Library holds a collection of her manuscripts, and first editions; Irish playwright, Denis Johnston, wrote a BBC radio play about her, which aired in July of 1943; a biography was published in 1954, titled O Rare Amanda!; a collection of her most memorable passages was published in 1988, as Thine in Storm and Calm; in 2007, her life was honored at the Belfast Literary Festival; and, in 2013, Irene Iddesleigh became available in a modern edition.
Well, maybe it's not so bad to be remembered as bad writer, and I may just begin to set my keyboard afloat on that whimsy tide of perpetual remembrance, after I sway into the ether at such time of my passing, unto the great beyond, so emboldened by the heavy fingers that hit keys, setting down my thoughts, as I delight at visions of a future I will not get to see, but can imagine with great jubilation within a mind exhilarated by frivolity.
Scratch that! I'm good.

-- February 19, 2021 --

An Uncanny Valley

I am extremely proud to announce that my newest book, This Hidden City, will be available for purchase next month.

Are you visiting New York City any time soon? If so, you will certainly want to carry this book with you. Sixty-three entries, covering all five boroughs (plus two islands), mentioning over 200 sights and sites you have to see in the city that never sleeps - complete with photos, and maps. Weird art, odd locations, bizarre history, and morbid landmarks very few visit, or even know about. This is a must for anyone who loves the extraordinary, and New York City.
The book will be $25 with postage paid. You can contact me directly to pre-order, or visit my Etsy shop to order when released.

-- February 13, 2021 --

Do the Hustle

Back in 2013, I got an email from a Nigerian scammer. I wrote back that I knew what he was up to, and asked a few questions that peaked my interest. I was surprised that they wrote back, answering my questions pretty honestly, and we exchanged emails for about a week. I've have always been fascinated by the subject, but more about the scammed side, rather than the scammer. I've always understood the scammer, whether it's because I grew up around a criminal element, or was so poor that I sympathize with anyone trying to better their life, no matter how they go about it.
Now, in 2021, the Nigerian scammer seems to most people to be more myth, than reality. Well, I have news for a lot of folks. Not only do they exist, the heights they often strived for were lofty, and sometimes they reached them. In one case, they sold an entire airport for millions.
Emmanuel Nwude was once the Director of Union Bank of Nigeria, until he decided he didn't make enough in that position. In 1995, Nwude impersonated Paul Ogwuma, who was the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria at the time.

He reached out to a number of investors for the construction of a new airport in Nigeria's capitol city of Abuja. Nelson Sakaguchi, a Director at Brazil's Banco Noroeste, took the bait. Emmanuel hired five accomplices (four men, and one woman) to act out different players in this game for a whole year. They finally convinced Sakaguchi to invest $242 million dollars of his bank's assets ($191 million in cash, and the rest in outstanding interest), which the scammers placed in a Cayman Islands bank account. Knowing such a huge sum might attract prying eyes, they wanted to let it sit for some time, and live off a smaller amount, so they asked Nelson for $10 million as a commission fee for the transaction, which he paid. Though the funds were granted, one of the co-conspirators grew paranoid, and began to talk, so he was executed. Still, life was good for the crew after their heist, until December of 1997, when the São Paulo bank was taken over by Madrid, Spain's Banco Santander. During audit, the new owners found that two-fifths of Banco Noroeste's total value, and half of its capital, was sitting in an unmonitored Caribbean bank account. Further investigations discovered Sakaguchi didn't even ask to see blueprints for the supposed airport. It took a whopping three years to uncover everything, and charges could be filed.
By 2002, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo requested the Nigerian Parliament to set up the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to prosecute such offenses. Emmanuel Nwude, plus the four remaining collaborators, were all arrested in February of 2004, and charged with 86 counts of "fraudulently seeking advance fees", as well as 15 counts of bribery by the Abuja High Court. Judge Lawal Gumi threw the case out in July of that year, but everyone was re-arrested, and the case was brought to the the Lagos High Court. After weepy testimony from Sakaguchi, Nwude decided to plead guilty in hopes of a lighter sentence. All the scammers received 25+ years in prison, and $10 million in fines.
All didn't end well for everyone involved. The owners of Banco Noroeste, the Simonsen and Cochrane families, paid the $242 million bill themselves, and - even then - the bank collapsed in 2001. Emmanuel Nwude was released in 2006, and filed a lawsuit asking for some of the funds to be returned to him, as he claimed a few million of it was his before the scam. Though he reclaimed $52 million, he was arrested in 2016, and charged with being the ring leader of a terrorist attack on the Nigerian town of Ukpo, which killed one. Though he was released on bail in 2018, he was voted in as the President General of the Ugbene town union.
I hope this is a lesson to everyone out there that no scam is too big, or too small, and anyone can be duped. If you need further proof, send me $1000 via bank transfer, and I will provide more proof.

-- February 02, 2021 --

Video Games Be Illin'

One way to study how epidemics turn into pandemics are computer simulations. Scientists at organizations such as the Institute for Theoretical Biology at Humboldt University of Berlin, the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, and the Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-Technical Systems at Northeastern University are using a plethora of processes, like predicting commuting patterns among census populations, person-to-person transmission estimates, and modeling results of changes in public behavior, including government action.
Well, while there is no set method for computational forecasts, or predictive mathematical models, one such system that's gaining traction in the study of infectious diseases are "massively multiplayer online role-playing games" (aka MMORPGs), and more specifically: World of Warcraft.

The popular 2004 game from Blizzard Entertainment received notice from the field of medicine after three outbreaks within the game; two unintentional, with the middle one being purposeful.
The first instance happened in September of 2005, when the game developer introduced a new raid, called Zul'Gurub. Within it, the final boss, Hakkar the Soulflayer, would cast a point-draining debuff spell, called "Corrupted Blood", when players attacked. If hit, this debuff was supposed to last only a few seconds, and within the confines of the raid sector. Unknown to the designers, it was highly contagious, as an oversight allowed pets to become corrupted, and carry the effects of the spell outside of the intended area, killing off low-level players with ease. For a whole week, it changed game play drastically, as many attempted to stay away from the infected, while a few purposely tried infecting others. It was finally eliminated, when the company released a combination of patches, and performed a few hard resets of the virtual world.
Then in October of 2008, to promote the second World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard released a virtual infection, which they dubbed "the Great Zombie Plague of '08." It differed from "Corrupted Blood", as it didn't have the 100% transmission rate, and was only mildly contagious. Even so, once the product hype was done, the company ended it on the 28th of the month, with a pre-designed kill patch.
The last virtual disease only lasted for one day, and was known as "Green fire". On January 12, 2017, a status effect debuff, called "Burn", started in a final boss area, and was - again - released by a pet. It too killed off low-level players within seconds, and had to be fixed by the company with a hotfix engineering update.
The first to notice the importance of these virtual outbreaks, came a little after the 2005 episode, when epidemiologist Ran D. Balicer from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel, published a 2007 article in the journal Epidemiology, describing similarities between the game's epidemic, and the then-recent SARS, and avian flu eruptions. It was soon followed by Tufts University assistant research professor of public health Nina Fefferman, who called for research on the incident in August of that year. She gave lectures at Baltimore, MD's Games for Health conference in 2008, and the 2011 Game Developers Conference about how MMORPGs could help solve problems within already established traditional models.
This event even helped studies in other fields, as Deputy Director of the Center of Terrorism and Intelligence Studies, Charles Blair, believed the World of Warcraft incident could provide powerful new ways to look at how terrorist networks form, and operate, though Blizzard stated in a 2019 Wired article that World of Warcraft is "first and foremost a game, and that it was never designed to mirror reality, or anything in the real world."
No matter where you find yourself in these times, whether in the virtual world, or IRL, please remember to wash your hands, social distance, and wear a mask. Until they get this whole mess straightened out, it's the least you can do.
I don't want to have to go through a hard reset.

-- January 19, 2021 --

Fake (Music) News

There are a number of bands out there that have pulled off half-decent hoaxes: Platinum Weird, a musical collaboration formed in 2004, whose releases were promoted as being recorded in 1974, and the black metal band Ghost Bath, who claimed to be from China, but were actually from North Dakota. Very few gain a lot of traction, and the joke is exposed rather quickly, but some actually take off - whether people are let in on it, or not. One of which would be The Masked Marauders.
In the October 18, 1969 issue of Rolling Stone, editor Greil Marcus - being sick of the "supergroup" trend of the time, and inspired by a double album of unreleased Bob Dylan recordings, titled Great White Wonder (often credited as the first bootleg) - decided to write up a hoax under the pseudonym T. M. Christian. With the collaboration of record reviewer Bruce Miroff, they created a review of a nonexistent double record, which supposedly captured a secret session of leading rock musicians, including Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, and Paul McCartney. They claimed the recording was produced by Al Kooper, in a small town near the Hudson Bay Colony in Canada. The piece contained lines such as:
"Dylan shines on Side Three, displaying his new deep bass voice, with 'Duke of Earl'."
"Paul showcases his favorite song, 'Mammy', and while his performance is virtually indistinguishable from Eddie Fisher's version, it is still very powerful, evocative, and indeed, stunning. And they say a white boy can't sing the blues!"
"It can truly be said that this album is more than a way of life; it is life."
Calls and letters poured into the magazine. Fans were asking how they could find it, as well as distributors wanting to carry it. So what's the next logical step? Put the damn thing out! Marcus, and another Stone editor, Langdon Winner, hired the Berkeley, CA act The Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band to play it out in the studio. After recording three tracks, M & W leaked the tapes to local radio, and then started looking for labels to release it. A bidding war began, and Warner Bros won, with a $15,000 advance. The label, under the name Deity Records, released a single disc, self-titled LP, in November of that year; selling more than 100,000 copies, spending 12 weeks on the Billboard album chart, and peaking at No. 114.

Buyers were only let in on the ruse when they opened the record to find a reproduction of the review, with added remarks from critic, and Rolling Stone cofounder, Ralph J. Gleason, declaring the joke a "delightful bit of instant mythology." The dream was further dashed on the album's last track "Saturday Night at the Cow Palace", which also made it clear it was all a gag.
In 2003, Rhino Records (under its Handmade label), remastered the record, and released it as The Masked Marauders - The Complete Deity Recordings, in a limited edition of 2,000 copies. It contained the same track listing as the original LP, but had the additional song "I Can't Get No Nookie". Have a listen...

So, let this be a lesson to everyone! If you think you shouldn't take a joke too far, remember that you can at least take it all the way to the bank.

-- January 05, 2021 --

Happy New Fear!

2020 is finally over, but a change in calendar doesn't mean much to the progression of historical events. In fact, not much will change, but do know that a few of our hardships connected to the Novel Coronavirus pandemic will be over soon enough, as the new vaccines reach around the world. Still, the last year was a testament to those who research the spread of diseases, but also a challenge for the ones that study mass hysteria, and crowd psychosis (such as people affected by belief in a "Plandemic", or QAnon) - what they now call Mass Psychogenic Illness.
Throughout the narrative of the human saga, plenty appearances of mass sociogenic disorder have popped up, and some may have even been the foundations for certain religions. When I was a lad, schools taught the Salem Witch Trials of the early 1690s were a simple mistake by uneducated people. Nowadays, they're handled as a serious case study in group delusion. While most everyone is familiar with that situation, there are a bunch of others that are as interesting, as they are baffling.
In Strasbourg, Alsace (which is now modern-day France), there was a crisis of what became known as The Dancing Plague. In July of 1518, one woman began dancing in the street, and when asked to stop, she refused, saying she could not, even if she wanted to. Within days, it was recorded that somewhere between 50 and 400 people were stricken with the impulse to dance wildly in public - many of them for days on end. Though it's often stated that a number of them danced until their death, no evidence of any fatality exists.
Another really interesting incident happened for only several minutes on October 13, 1917, in Fátima, Portugal. An estimated 30,000 and 40,000 people gathered due to three shepherd children (Lúcia Santos, and Francisco and Jacinta Marto) claiming the Virgin Mary would appear, and perform miracles that day. Instead, witnesses said the sun "danced" and zigzags across the sky, until it finally appeared as if it was descending upon the crowd, causing some to panic. Many stated they did not see the sun move at all, but it blasted radiant color rays, while a whole bunch said they saw nothing at all out of the ordinary.
A little more recently was 1962's Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic in Tanzania, Africa. There, in January of that year, three unnamed girls broke out into a fit of laughter at a boarding school for girls aged twelve to eighteen. By the end of the day, 95 (of the 159 students) were also cracking up, and this lasted for up to sixteen days. By March, it had spread to nearby Nshamba, and then Ramashenye Girls' Middle School, in Bukoba, strickening 48. It took a year and a half for it to completely die off, and it afflicted over 1000 people.
Many of these occurrences happened from one person being in contact with another, but there are cases where epidemic hysteria was spread via mass media. In 1997, over 700 children in Japan were rushed to hospitals after the airing of the "Denno Senshi Porygon" episode of the Pokemon cartoon. It was believed that flashing lights in that particular show brought on flu-like symptoms in kids who may have had very mild forms of epilepsy, but nothing of substance was proven. Again, in 2006, after a Portuguese soap opera Morangos com Acucar ("Strawberries with Sugar") aired an episode where a deadly virus spread throughout the characters’ school, viewers began to exhibit symptoms matching those of the fictional virus.
Coming into this New Year, we've now established with certainty that many diseases evolved from poor hygienic interregional contact between animals, and humans, as many outbreaks have had similar modes of transmission. Yet, we may never truly understand how one passes a psychosomatic illness to another. I just hope we don't treat it like many other mental illnesses, and simply ignore it.
Here's to your health!

-- December 21, 2020 --

Stealing the Stars (and A Director, Too)

For a time there, when you wanted a fresh take on a story, or watch a film that might blow your mind, you'd pop on a movie from Japan. Around the early '00s, I had started telling people that South Korea was "the new Japan" when it came to motion pictures. Barking Dogs Never Bite, A Tale of Two Sisters, (the original) Old Boy, Memories of Murder, and Natural City were some of my favorites from that time. More recently, we have Parasite, I Saw the Devil, Train to Busan, and The Wailing. All of these are great features you should check out, and cheers to South Korea for being recognized as a powerhouse in the film industry, but what about their brothers to the north? Yeah, North Korea makes moving pictures, too.
The Communist nation of North Korea, or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, started their cinema library with a modest film in 1949, My Home Village (directed by Kang Hong-sik), only one year after its division from what became known as South Korea. The country released a little over a dozen flicks until 1966, when Kim Jong-il joined the Propaganda and Agitation Department, and then became director of the Motion Picture and Arts Division. He felt the nation's cinematic style was flat and a bit lifeless. He revamped production, and -in 1972- his feature Flower Girl won the Prix Special at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Still, this was small potatoes to what Jong-il believe his country's movie studios could produce. He didn't feel any local directors could handle his vision, and most involved in film elsewhere were banned from taking part due to U.S. embargoes, so Kim did what any normal, film-lover would: kidnap a bunch foreign greats to do his bidding.
In the late 70s, Choi Eun-hee was one of South Korea's most famous actresses, so KJ set his sights on her, and she was snatched while on a visit to Hong Kong in 1978. Next up was her ex-husband, director Shin Sang-ok, who was known as "The Prince of South Korean Cinema". He was caught when he visited Hong Kong to investigate Eun-hee's disappearance, as fingers were being pointed at him for her possible murder. The following year, Choi and Shin were forced to remarry. After a few years, North Korea's MPAD finally got them to work, starting with 1984's An Emissary of No Return, based on a play from the country's first leader Kim Il-sung, titled Bloody Conference. Though CE acted in three movies for the dictator, and SS directed six for him, they only worked together on one, Salt (1985), which Choi won Best Actress for at the 14th Moscow Film Festival.
In 1986, while the two were in Vienna, Austria, at a film festival to promote the North Korean movie industry. Shin and Choi obtained political asylum at the US embassy there, and Kim Jong-il immediately sent out a press release that the couple was being kidnapped by the U.S. to destroy his newly built film empire. The actress and director were flown to Reston, VA, where they lived in hiding for two years. Strangely enough, the kidnapping rekindled each other's love for one another, and they moved to Los Angeles together in 1990, where Shin returned to making movies, under the pseudonym Simon Sheen, with 3 Ninjas Knuckle Up (filmed in 1992, but released in '95). The couple returned to South Korea in 1999, where Shin passed away in 2004, and Choi in 2018.
Though Shin Sang-ok made over 25 features, he is probably best known for one of his North Korean flicks, 1985's Pulgasari.

The movie is a knockoff of the Japanese Godzilla series, and centers around rebellion, and sacrifice. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it for its silliness, as well as its historical significance in the annals of oddity. Spoiler alert: In the movie, peasants try to overthrow a tyrant king in feudal-era Korea. To help them in the fight, one asks the gods to create a powerful ally out of a doll he made. The gods answer by turning it into a giant monster, the metal-eating Pulgasari. The beast helps the peasants win their battle, but the creature's ever-growing appetite for iron turns on the rebels, and they begin to run out of weapons, and farm equipment to feed it. A girl from the village understands what she must do to stop him, and hides in a bell. After eating it, he cannot handle her presence in his system, and he explodes. Too kooky! Too cool!
As is most everything weird, and at-one-time obscure, the movie is available on YouTube - complete with English subtitles.

If you're all like, "Man, interest in North Korean cinema is so passé," might I interest you in some Ugandan flicks? I mean Pulgasari is no Who Killed Captain Alex? (2010), which cost a whopping $85 to make, but that's another blog post for another time.

-- December 10, 2020 --

I Think I'm Going To Puke

We all know there are some weird, and gross, foods out there. Most of us are familiar with the infamous Haggis (a Scottish dish of sheep entrails cooked within a cow's stomach), Blood Sausage (congealed blood and bread crumbs in sausage lining), and -of course- Hormel Foods' pork cube, Spam™. While there are a dozen dishes we all know that are served with tripe, there are another two dozen very few have ever heard of, and are only popular in their native country. Lets take a trip around the world, and gag at their grody grub.

Our first stop is China, where they have a number of peculiar plates. There's Drunken Shrimp, which are live shrimp dying in a vat of a strong liquor called baijiu. One is to bite the heads off as they squirm from the alcohol, and then chow down on the body. They also eat a snack called pinyin, or Century Egg, where an egg is wrapped in a clay mixture, and buried in a rice hull for several months. The yolk turns green due to hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, and the whites become a dark brown jelly. We mustn't forget Bird's Nest Soup, which is made from the nests of cave swiftlets - prized not for the nesting material, so much as for the taste of the bird's solidified saliva.
Japan is no stranger to yucky foods, as many there enjoy shirako (meaning "white children"), which is the sperm sacs of several different fish, served raw. Another is tuna eyeballs as an hors d’oeuvre. They are eaten raw, but can also be steamed, and served with soy sauce. There's also a delicacy known as Cherry Blossom Meat, which is raw horse meat, as well as fugu, which is a sashimi of puffer fish, that may kill the diner -if not prepared correctly- due to the fish's tetrodotoxin poison.
In the Philippines, a common street food is Balut, a still-developing baby duck boiled alive in its shell, and eaten raw.
Many Icelanders like Hákarl. That's a Greenland shark left to rot in a hole in the ground for several months, then cut into sections to be hung dried for a few more weeks. In one of his shows, Anthony Bourdain described it as "the single worst, most disgusting and terrible tasting thing".
France has a number of disgusting dishes, such as their Escargots à la Bourguignonne (snails cooked in white wine and garlic), Steak Tartare (raw ground beef, and raw egg, with Worcester sauce), and Sautéed Cuisses de Grenouille (aka Frog's Legs). Next door in Italy, there is the Sardinian treat of casu marzu, made from Pecorino cheese that has gone sour, with the addition of Piophila casei maggots, and the Turks enjoy Khash, a stew of cow's feet and head, complete with the entire skull thrown in.
Hey, Americans eat gross stuff, too (like Rocky Mountain Oysters, which are actually bull testicles), and some Canadians get a hankerin' for jellied moose nose (which is exactly what it sounds like). Those south of the border aren't innocent either, as there is a Mexican meal called huitlacoche (meaning "sleeping excrement"), made from corn infected by corn smut fungus, turning normal corn kernels into tumor-looking growths covered in black spores. They also serve Escamol, also known as "insect caviar", because it's made of bug larvae and ant pupae, collected from tequila agave plants.
Speaking of creepy crawlers, I don't think there's a single country that doesn't have some kind of insect on the menu. In Thailand, they eat jing leed (grasshoppers), as well as Tom Kati Kai Mod Daeng (a desert made from weaver ants). Japan has Wasp Crackers. Cambodians fry tarantulas. Koreans eat Beondegi (steamed and seasoned silk worms). In some parts of Central Africa, they make Stinkbug Stew, while in South Africa, many eat mopane worms. In Laos, there's a soup called Gaeng Kai Mot Daeng, made from the eggs of white ants. Colombians enjoy fried fat-bottomed ants as a street food. Lastly, chef Andy Holcroft opened a restaurant in Wales that serves a burger made from locusts, cricket crepes, and mealworm hummus.
If this post hasn't made you want to reach for a puke bucket, or you have a cast-iron stomach, then you should travel the world, and get a taste of these treats yourself.
Me? I'm fine, right where I am.

-- December 03, 2020 --

I'm Your Art Whore, Baby

If you'd like to help support independent artists this holiday season, instead of giving your money to Jeff Bezos, I have a few new items for sale. Feel free to tell your friends, or share this handy link to my new Etsy shop.
First off are two new art prints of some of my digital photo collages, Crown of Thorns and Tree of Life. Both are matte prints, available in sizes of 16" x 20" (limited to ten copies) or 24" x 36" (limited to five copies), and either print, at either size is $50, with postage paid in the U.S. (adding another $10 outside the country).
Next up is a ten postcard set from the Ad Removal As Modern Art series.

The collection holds ten different 5" x 7" postcards, with full color UV-protected fronts, and uncoated matte backs, so you can use them as actual postcards, but also frame them, seeing they really do look like modern art pieces. The set is $20 with postage paid for in the United States, but add another $6 if you're outside of the country.
Speaking of sets, lastly, there's two new photo zines, which are sold together as a set.

Vertical and Horizontal showcase 68 of my photographs (34 in each zine), on glossy, full-color 8.5" x 5.5" pages. Released in an edition of only 50 copies, they are $10 postage paid for the set (add another $8 outside North America). Please note that neither zine will be sold separately.
I have a number of other items still available, so check out the update page for them, or the Etsy link. Happy holiday shopping!

-- November 25, 2020 --

To Sing the Praises of A Bad Singer

No matter how much passion some have for their craft, they can do little with either - their passion, or their craft. That's why we have so many outsider artists. Most of them could not care what others think. Their drive to create is all that matters to them, whether others like it, or not. Still, there are a few outsiders who can't handle the critics. During a screening of The World's Greatest Sinner (a must see, so-bad-it's-good movie) someone laughed, and director Timothy Carey pulled a gun on them. Some don't get mad though, they just drop dead. Such was the case for American socialite, and amateur soprano, Florence Foster Jenkins.

Florence was born in Wilkes-Barre, PA, on July 19th of 1868. She often stated having developed a passion for performing around seven years old, and was actually a pretty talented pianist, going by the stage name of "Little Miss Foster" (even playing at the White House for President Rutherford B. Hayes). Sadly, after breaking her arm sometime in her thirties, she had to give up the piano. In 1909, her father died, leaving her a hefty sum, which helped her move to New York, where she took up singing lessons. Soon after, she joined a number of social clubs, took on the role of music chairman for many of them, and began producing lavish musical shows, which she -of course- cast herself as the main character. All the while, Florence would also hold private vocal recitals for friends. In 1917, she establish her own society, The Verdi Club, giving herself the title "President Soprano Hostess". It actually became quite popular, with a membership of over 400, including Enrico Caruso, Cole Porter, Lily Pons, and Geraldine Farrar. In 1930, her mother died, leaving her more money, which she spent on huge galas, each having a live concert where she would perform. All of this sounds great, except for the fact that she was thought to stink up the joint, as critics said she had problems with as pitch, rhythm, and sustaining notes. While friendly to her face, she was often mocked behind her back. Her vocal instructor once wrote to a friend, "There's no way to even pedagogically discuss it. It's amazing that she's even attempting to sing that music." In a piece after her death, Opera News magazine quoted impresario Ira Siff as saying, "Jenkins was exquisitely bad, so bad that it added up to quite a good evening of theater. She would stray from the original music, and do insightful and instinctual things with her voice, but in a terribly distorted way. There was no end to the horribleness. They say Cole Porter had to bang his cane into his foot in order not to laugh out loud when she sang. She was that bad."
In early 1944, she produced a five-record set of 78 rpms (containing eleven tracks), which she sold to friends for $2.50 - about $40 today. FJ thought people loved her so much, she -at 74 years old- finally booked a general admission concert at Carnegie Hall for October 25, 1944. The event sold out the 2800 seats, with an estimated 2000 turned away. During her set, the audience lost it, and it was said a few had to be carried out from laughing so hard. The next morning, she read the terrible reviews in the papers. The New York Post wrote "Lady Florence indulged last night in one of the weirdest mass jokes New York has ever seen." She was heartbroken, swore to never sing again, and suffered a heart attack five days later. Bedridden for almost a month, she refused to leave her room, and died there on November 26th.
Now, she might have taken it better if she knew Meryl Streep was going to play he in a movie (Florence Foster Jenkins, 2016), as well as the other number of plays and movies based on her life, but not sure how she would have felt about the RCA Victor 1954 10", and 1962 12" re-release of a few of her tracks under the title The Glory???? of the Human Voice.
Well, if you're at all curious about this matter, then have a listen...

Now, don't let this be a cautionary tale in the sense where it may keep you from doing something you might enjoy - especially a form of art. If anything, take away from it that you should never listen to the critics.
Fuck the naysayers, and just have fun!

-- November 13, 2020 --

This Is A Junk Post

They say, "One man's trash is another man's treasure." In this entry, it's another man's castle.
Howard Solomon grew up in Rochester, NY, as the son of Russian immigrants. Tired of the cold, he moved down to the Bahamas, and began work as a cabinet maker. Then, in 1972, he bought 40 acres in the swamps of Ona, FL, and asked his neighbors to dump their large unwanted junk items in his yard. Being skilled in a number of trades, including welding, carpentry, electrical, and plumbing, he used everything they gave him to make art. After some time, he began to build a freaking castle, which he covered in discarded aluminum printing plates, and added over 80 stained glass windows he made himself. Then, he constructed a full-sized 16th century Spanish galleon within one of the ponds (complete with masts, and cannons), followed by a half-sized replica of the Alamo, and finally a lighthouse - all the while still working on his art.

Solomon’s Castle now sits on 93 acres, and even has a restaurant on the premises (inside the ship), as there isn't a place to eat for miles. It's an amazing place to visit for tourists and locals alike, so I dropped by last month.
I’m sad they don’t allow photography during the indoor tours, because his 200+ pieces of art are out of this world. Their website showcases his ironwork (see that here), but his replicas of famous paintings made using only wood were pretty astounding. Speaking of the tour: before Solomon's death in 2016, he wrote a script each guide sticks to. It is packed with puns, and made the whole experience as corny, as it is surreal.
Howard was a true outsider artist that needs to be known by more people, and I hope this post helps spread his name a bit.
For more of my pictures of the castle grounds, click here.

-- October 31, 2020 --

Let's Talk About Me, Yet Again

Two wonderful videos have recently popped up on YouTube, which cover my work.
First we have Feral Publication's vlog, Zine Hustle, which covers a lot of zine-related topics, including reviews. For Episode #49, Rich takes a look at three of my fanzines.

Then, my newest photo book, Ad Removal As Modern Art, received a great review in Episode 7 of Dr. Vanessa Sinclair, and Carl Abrahamsson's 23rd Mind TV.

These two YouTube channels talk about a lot of cool projects, some of which you may not be familiar with, so subscribe, and stay in the know.
Lastly, Steve Cammack over at MuhMur Radio in the UK played a bunch of 156 tracks on his newest show (Oct 29th), so check that out.

Take it all in, folks, and enjoy!

-- October 23, 2020 --

Rock On, Star Child

Imagine a band that only existed for one summer, almost forty years ago, was only seen by a few hundred kids, in only one city, and never put out any material; yet has a huge fanbase, and sells more memorabilia today than ever before. I don't know of any acts which can brag about that, but one, and after I tell you all about them, you might want to check them out yourself.
In 1979, Disney Records executive Gary Krisel was tired of putting together kid's flip-book records, and got the bright idea to form a glam rock band around the newly developing Star Wars craze. He recruited the Grammy and Emmy award winning composer of tv theme songs Mike Post, to write some music, and started to audition musicians. He hired a husband and wife duo (Thom Miller and Lora Mumford) to handle the synths, and vocals, respectively. Seeing Lora had, as Krisel put it, the looks of "a punk-rock Snow White", he dressed her up in leather, while Thom was dress up in what looked like an Imperial Stormtrooper, inside a rolling spacecraft that held his keyboards. Up next was the bassist Roger Freeland, who was draped in a huge white suit resembling a Wookie. Tony Coppola was brought on as a percussionist, and he was donned up as an acrobatic amphibian. They added Bruce Gowdy on guitars, and Brian Lucas on drums, who they let keep their human personas, but gave them uniform-like costumes. Hence was born... HALYX!

In the summer of 1981, the band was given the stage at Disneyland's Tomorrowland Space Stage, just under Space Mountain. Twice a day, for 30 minutes, five days a week, park attendees would be treated to what everyone called "the Star Wars Cantina Band meets KISS". After some time, the band noticed that adults would ignore them, but the kids went nuts. A handful of them returned to the park on a regular basis, just to catch their shows. Some of them even made their own band merchandise. Disney, on the other had, didn't care for them. They complained that the band was too loud, and too raunchy for the family affair that was Disney Parks. To think, Disney didn't even allow male patrons to enter the park if they had long hair, and here was this guitarist getting snide looks from security every time he had to go to work. After the summer was over, Disney snubbed the band, and didn't even let them record material. Elektra / Warner Brothers was showing interest, but just before the demos were to be cut, they were bought out, and the rep that was going to sign them was let go. Sadly, they weren't invited to return the following year, and the whole concept was scrapped, only one month after Mtv first aired. With costumes returned, and the little footage Disney had of the band thrown out, not much remained, but memories.
Those who remembered would not let it die, and in the age of internet bidding wars, and rare videos popping up all over the web, people started trading, selling, and hunting down everything Halyx. It reached a boiling point to where the story had to be told in full, and producer Kevin Perjurer (creator of Defunctland, a YouTube channel I highly recommend) hooked up with director Matthew Serrano to crowd-fund a documentary on the act. Recently released, Live From the Space Stage: A Halyx Story is a great, in-depth look at a band that should have been more famous. You can watch the whole thing below, for free...

It's wild to think this group of costumed misfits were the black sheep of a corporation that now puts out material which owes a debt to it, and the pop culture of the past affects the popular tastes of the future in stranger ways than we know. It's far out!

-- October 13, 2020 --

I Wanna Give You the Creeps

The newest 156 release is a ten-track CD LP, titled An Accidental Exorcism, which has been released on Seattle's No Part Of It.

Of course, I made a music video to go along with one of the tracks, titled "Red Rooms".

All the music on this newest release is based around my love of minimalist horror movie soundtracks, and was recorded in the Florida Everglades from June to September of 2020.
Released on professionally printed CDs, with awesome collage artwork by Bradley Kokay on the cover, and within, they are only $7 (along with accompanying download), or $5 for just the digital version.
To order, please visit the No Part Of It Bandcamp.

-- October 08, 2020 --

Chop Chop

Since the Korean War (June, 1950 to July, 1953), North Korea, South Korea and the United States have had a few spats along the border, but none so violent, yet strangely as unknown, as 1976's Korean Axe Murder Incident, which was all over a poplar tree.
Located in the Korean Demilitarized Zone is the Joint Security Area (often referred to as "Panmunjom", or "Truce Village"), and it's the only portion of the DMZ where North and South Korean forces stand facing each other. Near the infamous "Bridge of No Return", that crosses the Military Demarcation Line between the two Koreas, grows a poplar tree, said to be planted by the founder of North Korea, Kim Il-sung. While bare throughout autumn and winter, it blocked the view of, both, the United Nations Command checkpoint (CP No. 3), and an observation post (OP No. 5) in the spring and summer. The U.N. was tired of losing this vantage point, so on August 18, 1976, they sent out a group to trim the tree. The U.N. sent out a group to shear it, consisting of five South Korean Service Corps personnel, and escorted by U.S. Captain Arthur Bonifas, First Lieutenant Mark Barrett, a South Korean ROK Captain, and eleven enlisted personnel from South Korea, and the U.S. As they began to prune the poplar, a troop of five North Korean soldiers appeared, led by North Korean Senior Lieutenant Pak Chul, who -due to a history of being confrontational- was nicknamed "Lt. Bulldog". At first, the Northerners just watched, but after about fifteen minutes, Pak insisted to Bonifas they cease their activity. Bonifas turned his back on him, and commanded his men to continue. After a few minutes, a North Korean guard truck crossed the bridge, with another twenty North Korean soldiers, all carrying crowbars and clubs, and joined the previous group. Again, Pak told Bonifas to stop, and the Captain turned his back to him once more. Pak calmly removed his watch, wrapped it in a handkerchief, and after placing it in his pocket, yelled "Kill the bastards!" The North Koreans set upon the U.S. and South Korean soldiers, quickly picking up the axes dropped by the South Korean Service Corps workers. Bonifas was knocked to the ground, and bludgeoned to death by surrounding North Koreans. Barrett jumped over a wall, and fell injured on the other side, where several North Korean soldiers took turns walking down to beat him with an axe they shared, killing him. The United Nations sent in more soldiers to break it up, and the entire schism lasted less than a minute. A guard at CP No. 3 recorded the incident with a movie camera, and this is the only evidence of the skirmish left today.

Kim Jong-il soon addressed the Conference of Non-Aligned Nations (in Colombo, Sri Lanka), presenting the case as an unprovoked attack on North Korea, led by American officers. The C.I.A. claimed it was a premeditated assault from North Korea, with the Pentagon planning to launch missiles in retaliation.
On August 21st, a United Nations group, led by Americans, launched Operation Paul Bunyan. In a huge show of force, they sent -unannounced- a convoy of twenty-three U.S. and South Korean vehicles, carrying two eight-man teams of military engineers, two thirty-man security platoons from the Joint Security Force, and a sixty-four-man task force from South Korea's Special Forces Brigade, while a U.S. infantry company circled twenty utility helicopters, and seven Cobra attack helicopters, as U.S. F-4 Phantom IIs, South Korean F-5 and F-86 fighters flew across the sky. The military engineers, armed with chainsaws, jumped out of their vehicles, and sawed that tree to smithereens.
Tensions were high afterward, but -luckily- a full-scale war did not break out again. One of the axes is said to reside in North Korea's Peace Museum. From 1984 to 1987, General William J. Livsey (who was the commanding general of the Eighth United States Army in South Korea during that time), carried a stick carved from wood of the tree, and ceremoniously passed it to General Louis C. Menetrey after retirement. Today, though relations are still strained between all three countries, no one talks about "the incident".
I recently posted about stupid wars, and the dumb shit that started them, and this story is no different. In those first few days, both sides refused to see it for what it really was: a bunch of angry soldiers disrespecting one another, until all hell broke loose. If you read my previous post, you know wars have started over a lot less.

-- September 23, 2020 --

Some Real Spacey Art

Back in August of 2015, I posted about how astronaut David Scott placed a statuette by Belgian artist Paul Van Hoeydonck on the moon, without NASA's knowledge, during the Apollo 15 lunar mission of 1971. That piece isn't the only object of art up there. Our satellite actually boasts six more works by 60s artists, all in one tiny museum, also placed there without permission from NASA.
The project was thought up by sculptor Forrest W. Myers in early 1969, who contacted five other artists; Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, and David Novros. All five submitted works, with Myers including one of his own. He then reached out to the Experiments in Art and Technology group, which is a nonprofit linking artists with engineers, and was then introduced to scientists from Bell Laboratories, including Fred Waldhauer. Together, they created small ceramic plaques that would withstand radiation, and intense temperature fluctuations, where the work of all six artists were etched onto.

He titled it Moon Museum, had about 20 made, and gave one to everyone involved. Saving one extra, he called NASA to see if they were interested in adding the project to the upcoming Apollo 12 mission, but they gave him the run around. Not wanting it all to go to waste, Waldhauer came up with another plan. He knew a Grumman Aircraft engineer working on the Lunar Module Intrepid, so he asked him to sneak it onto a section of the lander that would remain on the moon. The worker agreed, and two days before takeoff, Fred received a telegram saying "ALL SYSTEMS GO". On November 14, 1969, the Apollo 12 mission launched from Florida's Kennedy Space Center, successfully landing on the 19th. Earth's moon now had its first art museum.
Going clockwise from top left, we have Andy Warhol with a drawing of a penis (Myers would later comment in an interview, "He was being the terrible bad boy."), a single line by Robert Rauschenberg, a black and white square by David Novros (made to resemble circuitry), John Chamberlain's contribution (also made to represent circuitry), Claes Oldenburg's playful variation on Mickey Mouse, with the last being a computer-generated symbol called "Interconnection" by Myers.
With all this, Hoeydonck's previously mentioned piece on the moon, as well as the Golden Records on both Voyager spacecrafts, it's neat to know there's a handful of human artworks in space. Not that something so beautiful needed sprucing up.

-- September 09, 2020 --

A Real No Man's Finland

I've been sharing weird stories about Finland with friends on social media lately. Stuff like the study they did at the University of Kuopio, which found that peeing on plants yielded 4.2x more fruit, and tomatoes had more beta-carotene and protein than ones from plants no one pissed on, or that Finlanders (before refrigeration) used to keep a live Russian Brown Frog in their stored milk, because secretions from the animal prevented dairy from spoiling.
Well, none of that matters, because I've only just discovered that Finland does not exist. At least, according to some conspiracy theories anyway.

So, the story goes that, during the Cold War, Russia discovered an area of the Baltic Sea -between the Soviet Union, and Sweden- was ultra-rich in fish. Not having the time to devote resources into building a fishing enterprise, they shared the information with Japan. Together, they concocted a scheme to keep it a secret by making up a land mass, called Finland. This way no other trawlers would enter the zone, thinking there was land in that direction. Japan was to fish the space, and give a percentage of their catch to Russia for the help. The booty was to be sent back to Japan via the newly built Trans-Siberian railway, under the guise of shipping hardware from a shell company they called Nokia, explaining why Japan is the largest importer of the brand, and it having a seemingly Japanese-sounding name. The theorists propose the name "Finland" even derives from the "fin" of a fish, not realizing the country's English name stems from the Old English word finna, a term used to describe people from Scandinavia - to Finlanders its actual name is Suomi. They also claim the nearly-six million Finnish people believe themselves to be living there, are actually in towns and cities peppered about parts of what's called Eastern Sweden, as well as the Baltic Sea shores of Estonia, and Russia. Never mind the centuries of Finnish history, and art, not to mention the millennia of the developing of the Finno-Ugric language. There's also that pesky film footage, and photography from space, but like the hiding of flat Earth evidence, it's all doctored for sure.
It just goes to show you there's a conspiracy theory for everything, and no matter how much proof you have for something, there will always be a handful that will even deny scientific data. Ugh. I need a vacation from people. Maybe I'll just visit "Finland", and hang out with the fish.

-- August 25, 2020 --

The Dumb Dumb Wars

In an 1864 retort to a woman holding Confederate sympathies berating him for the destruction of Mississippi, Union General William Sherman, responded "War is cruelty," and later in a speech to the graduating class of the Michigan Military Academy in 1879, he said, "War is hell," but he never acknowledged that war can also be pretty stupid. Never mind that the United States military-industrial complex had us engaged in the 2nd Gulf War over flimsy evidence, or flat out lied about an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin to pull us into Vietnam. Those are wars over stupid reasons, but now I'm about to list off wars that were just plain stupid (and which you may never have heard of).
In 1896, Great Britain and the Zanzibar Sultanate had a conflict that lasted all, but 45 minutes (thought to be exactly 38). After the death of Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini, Sultan Khalid bin Barghash took the throne, but the Brits preferred Hamud bin Muhammed, so they sent in troops. After a little over a half-hour of fighting, Barghash fled, and the Sultanate as a sovereign state was terminated, starting a period of British rule.
El Salvador and Honduras had a short war, known as the Football War, or 100 Hour War. In July of 1969, El Salvador sent bombers on an air raid mission over Honduras, because the two countries were battling it out in a two-leg qualifier of the FIFA World Cup. Yep, all over a soccer game. The Salvadorian Army then invaded using tanks and all, forcing Nicaragua to step in on the Honduran side. Honduras soon bombed targets in El Salvador. Fighting continued until August, when El Salvador backed off due to world pressure, leaving close to 5000 troop and civilian casualties.
In 1838, the French went to war with Mexico, because some Mexican officers looted a French pastry shop in Tacubaya. The chef, only known as Monsieur Remontel, demanded 60,000 pesos as reparations for the damage. Mexican citizens were pissed, as many believed the shop was only worth 1000. This lead to the destruction of French-owned stores by angry mobs, so French forces invaded. Known as the Pastry War, peace was not achieved until the following year, when the Mexican government agreed to pay 600,000 pesos for damages to French citizen's property.
The rival Italian states of Bologna and Modena went to war in 1325 because a Modena local stole a bucket from a Bolognese well, causing 300 years of tensions to finally boil over in the War of the Bucket, while the U.S. and the U.K. had a skirmish in 1859, due to an American farmer (Lyman Cutlar) shooting a pig (owned by Irishman, Charles Griffin), which he found rooting in his garden.
In 1835, the U.S. state of Michigan went to war against the state of Ohio over varying border interpretations near Toledo, due to poor geographical understanding of the Great Lakes.
Greece invaded Bulgaria in 1925, thanks to the shooting of a Greek captain, and his sentry, when they ran into the Bulgarian town of Petrich, after a stray dog.
Western Australians were sick of the emu population by 1932, as many felt the giant flightless birds to be a pest on farmlands. They sent out military troops in two campaigns to exterminate as many as possible. Known as the Great Emu War, it didn't work, and it's hilariously sited that the emus won, as farmers didn't notice a drop in flocks, and requested the military return in 1934, 1943, and 1948.
Lastly, there's the Battle of Karánsebes, during the Austro-Turkish War of 1787-1791. That took place in 1788, and was the cause of 1200 wounded, and 150 deaths, all of which came from one side. It all started when the Austrian drunkenly fought themselves over bottles of schnapps, and when reinforcements arrived they thought they were fighting Turks, and joined in the killing of their own men.
Damn it, if war wasn't already stupid enough, this is just plain imbecile. Sadly, with human evolutionary history already rolling up to the 2,000,000 year mark, and modern humans at 35,000 years, it makes me wonder if we'll ever really cast off the hides of being nothing more than simple beasts. Many people can't even stop themselves from committing violence against someone over mere words, yet we're expected to be civil to one another over more important matters such as race, gender, and religion. I can only hope we will one day shed our animal skins, and ascend towards something greater, treating all humans as equals. Until then, what can I say, except: don't be dumb?

-- August 13, 2020 --

O, Holy Moon

When the Catholic Church solidified itself as one entity (thought to be around 110 CE, when Saint Ignatius of Antioch used the term "katholikos" [Greek for "universal"] to distinguish itself from other churches), they were spread out far and wide throughout Europe and Asia Minor. To wrangle up the commoners living in those regions under Catholic command, the church established what became known as dioceses (or eparchies in eastern areas), and each one is divided up into parishes. Those diocese are governed by a bishop, of which the Catholic Church has about 2900 of them today, and they supervise the priests and deacons that administer each parish.
Now, each Catholic diocese has ecclesiastical jurisdiction over a major city, and its surrounding area, but one covers a little more than normal. Thanks to the Code of Canon Law, the Diocese of Orlando, officiates over 400,000 Catholic residents of hundreds of towns within nine counties in and around the city of Orlando, Florida, as well as -drum roll please- the moon, too. That 1917 church edict states any newly discovered territory falls under bishopric rule of the diocese where the expedition came from. In 1968, William Donald Borders became the first bishop of Orlando, and when the astronauts of Apollo 11 stepped on the moon the following year in July of 1969, his spiritual rule extended there as well.

It seems no one really thought about it, until Borders himself met Il Papa in the early 70s, as bishops have to all perform an obligatory visit to Rome every five years, known as an ad limina visit, where they pray at the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul, and meet up with Vatican officials. It was during his first visit, that Bishop Borders brought up to Pope Paul VI the fact that he was also the Bishop of the Moon. It was said the Supreme Pontiff thought William was a kook, until that section of the Code of Canon Law was explained, and everyone has a good laugh.
Chancellor for Canonical Affairs for the Diocese of Orlando, Father John Giel, says the whole affair just showcases "Border’s good and humorous nature that allowed him to be such a good first bishop for central Florida," because it "means nothing if there is no one to have jurisdiction over." In other words: If no little boys up there, we don't care.

-- July 30, 2020 --

Use Your Illusion (To Cash In)

Pareidolia is a cognitive process where one's judgment and evaluation tend to perceive an object with a pattern, or meaning, already known to the observer. There are many examples of this, which include seeing faces in abstract patterns, or hearing messages in music. The oldest known example of this is also the world's oldest known manuport. Known as the Makapansgat Pebble, this beauty was found lying among the bones of an Australopithecus africanus skeleton. It seems, three million years ago, an ancient hominin found the rock, and possibly thinking it looked like a face, carried it back three miles from where it was quarried to their group's living site.

A famous case of pareidolia happened in 1877, when Percival Lowell viewed the surface of Mars through a telescope, and saw what appeared to be a number of straight lines, which were interpreted as canals, and it was then theorized they may have been created by intelligent life. A few years later, the canal theory was scrapped as the lines seemed to fade away with clearer views from stronger telescopes. There are other less interesting, but much weirder instances of pareidolia, such as when 52-year-old Diana Duyser, of Hollywood, FL, made a grilled cheese sandwich, and saw the face of the Virgin Mary staring back at her from her lunch. She then sold the meal to the internet casino Golden Palace for $28,000 on eBay.
To me, the strangest of all is one I recently came across, when scouring said online auction site: odd-shaped Cheetos. Yeah, that Frito-Lay corn snack that turns your fingers orange is deemed a highly marketable item, so long as it looks like something else to someone. Sure, there may be few buyers, but there are certainly a lot of sellers. Hundreds of pages on eBay, show chip after chip of a pareidolia-induced selling frenzy. One Michael Jackson look-alike Cheeto = $700. A Mario Bros. Cheeto is going for $500. Several Donald Trump-looking pieces - around $2000 each. One Harambe the Gorilla-shaped Cheeto, which started at $12, sold for -drum roll, please- $99,000! It's believed these became a hot commodity after body builder Andy Huot started the Instagram account @CheeseCurlsofInstagram, when -in 2013- he found a Cheeto that formed a perfect number seven. It didn't help matters when Frito-Lay decided to launch a search for entries into a "Cheetos Museum", in 2016, and contestants could win $10,000 to $50,000 prizes for unique shapes. Artist Jack Koloskus even got in on the action by making small statues out of Cheetos.

Don't feel bad if you think you have a bad case of pareidolia, because it turns out that computers get it, too. New York University researcher Greg Borenstein found that the facial recognition system FaceTracker does the same thing, enough to where he started a project called "Hello Little Fella", where photos are posted of faces the computer saw in everyday objects. So, you don't need to get your eyes (or brain) checked, because -to paraphrase philosopher Robert Anton Wilson- seeing isn't necessarily believing.

-- July 23, 2020 --

Free Stuff!

My new photography art book - Ad Removal As Modern Art - is out now, and I'm celebrating by giving one away. Limited to only 200 copies, this full-color beauty holds over 180 of my photographs on glossy 9" x 7" pages, and is regularly $50 (postage paid), but one lucky punk will get one at no cost.

All you have to do is email me your mailing address, and I will pick one winner on August 13th to receive a free copy.
Everyone else gets FREE STICKERS, so there are no losers! You can email me from now until August 12th to be entered. Good luck to each of you!
UPDATE: The winner is Lorrie K of Dayton, OH, but thanks for everyone who sent in entries.

-- July 13, 2020 --

This Music Is The Cat's Meow

Cat lovers: have you ever left your home, and turned on the radio, or some music, so your pet doesn't feel alone? Not sure if you're aware, but music doesn't really register in the feline mind. To them, it's just another noise out in the world. Well, that is until now. Let me introduce to you, and your kitty, to cat music.
David Teie, a cellist with the U.S.'s National Symphony Orchestra, and music professor at the University of Maryland, teamed up with professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Charles Snowdon, as well as other researchers to produce music for meowin'. In 2015, DT launched a Kickstarter campaign in hopes to get the project off the ground. His goal was to reach $20,000, but when pussy freaks heard about this interesting project, donations reached a whopping $241,000. Released by Teyus Music, Music For Cats (2016), and Music For Cats: Album Two (2018) contain tracks ranging from four to ten minutes long. Each tune has symphonic elements, such as David's cello, but also contain the sounds of a cat's purr, kittens suckling, and bird chirps. When asked why those sounds were included, Teie explained, "The brain structures responsible for our emotions are almost completely formed at birth, so the sounds of the womb are the bases for human music," and believing brain development for cats occurs outside the womb, for instance "the sound of suckling is a reward-related sound that all cats will have heard during that crucial period."
So far, reaction to the effects of "cat music" has been overwhelmingly positive, with many who tried it (including several reporters at Today, and The New York Times) claiming their cats loved it. Both Teie, and Snowdon, point out that the greatest reactions come from fur balls adopted from shelters, as the music seems therapeutic for animals that had been previously neglected.
When you get back to your lair, put this ditty on, and check out your mouser's impression.

David Teie's two albums have been successful enough to the point where he's now trying his hand at music for other pets, such as dogs, though he fears theirs is a more difficult code to crack because so many different pooch breeds have different vocalization patterns, and composing a soundtrack geared to all of them may be a tough assignment.
Either way, this give me hope that maybe, someday, someone will write music that will calm those prone to violence. We could pipe it into police stations, or sneak it into Fox News segments.

-- June 29, 2020 --

It's In Our Genes

DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid), which was first isolated by Friedrich Miescher in 1869, is an amazingly complex molecule of two strands, which carries the genetic instructions for the development of all known organisms. Those two strands (commonly called "the double helix") are polynucleotides composed of simpler monomeric nucleotides, and each of those are composed of a deoxyribose sugar, an organophosphate, and one of four nitrogen-containing nucleobases: cytosine (aka C), guanine (aka G), adenine (aka A), or thymine (aka T). An incredible 98.5% of DNA sequenced is found to be "junk", meaning it has no coding purpose, and though some of it may be useful for future medicines, Dan Graur, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Houston, believes 75% of it has no function whatsoever. So, why not play around with that three-quarters of all life?
Well, that's what some scientists are currently doing. Mixing digital technology and genetic science, researchers are converting the computational language of ones and zeros into the language of the DNA nucleotides, where the Ts and Gs stand in for 1s, and the As and Cs take the place of 0s.
In 1988, the Harvard Medical School, and Hatch Echol's laboratory at University of California Berkeley, stored a 35 bit image, titled Microvenus, into the plasmid of E. coli, and the same group then encoded the Bible's Genesis 1:28 in 1998. In 2003, Washington state's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory encoded lyrics from "It's A Small World", but -six years later- the same researchers found they could fit 1688 bits of text, music and imagery into the bacteria's genetic code. Then, in 2010, Craig Venter and colleagues actually encoded a watermark onto synthetic mycoplasma genome. Later, PhD George Church, and his Harvard Medical School team, encoded an HTML version of a book, in 2012. In an interesting act of self-promotion, the book, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves, was -of course - written by Church. Anyhow, in 2013, the European Bioinformatics Institute copied 739 kilobytes of sound, including a 26-second clip of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s "I Have a Dream" speech, while, the following year, Harvard Medical School, and Technicolor Research Group, stored, and retrieved, 22 megabytes of the French silent film A Trip to the Moon. In 2016, Microsoft, researchers at the University of Washington’s computer science and engineering departments, and Twist Bioscience, jammed a music video for the song "This Too Shall Pass" by the band OK Go. When asked why they would pick such a god-awful tune, principal Microsoft researcher Karin Strauss said, "They’re very innovative, and are bringing different things from different areas into their field, and we feel we are doing something very similar." Maybe to make up for that idiotic decision, they also crammed in the Top 100 books from Project Gutenberg, the full list of seeds in the Crop Trust Seed Database, and copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in different languages.
All of this sounds pretty amazing, but one thing I haven't covered much is that most of this was done within synthetic strands of DNA, but, in 2017, Jeff Nivala and other Harvard researchers, used the CRISPR System to edit the genes of living E. Coli bacteria. And what did they install? A moving gif image of the galloping horse from Eadweard Muybridge’s 1877 photographic study, Human and Animal Locomotion.

On the left is the original source file, on the right are frames pulled from the E. Coli bacteria after multiple generations.

Now, you're probably asking, "Why?" The answers are pretty easy to understand, and quite reasonable, too. Data is currently stored onto magnetic strips on substrate platters of aluminum, ceramic or glass - all of which degrades (or breaks) over time, and DNA can be recovered over a thousand years. Secondly, it's a dense storage system, where one can now fit a zettabyte of information (one trillion gigabytes) per gram / milliliter. Plus, if science can ever work it out, we might be able to walk around with all the world's knowledge within us, rather than on a computer we carry around in our pockets. Just think of it! There may never be another stupid human being on this planet, and -with the current state of affairs- that's a time that can't come soon enough.

-- June 16, 2020 --

A Vision of Beauty

Available now: limited edition retro photo viewer in two editions! Two sets of seven photos each; one set of color photos, and another in black/white.

Color set comes with a blue plastic viewer in pink box, along with color photo wheel. Black/white set comes with black plastic viewer in white box, along with black/white photo wheel.
Limited to 33 copies of each set, all signed and numbered. $50 each (or $80 for both), with postage paid, anywhere in the world. If you'd like to order one please contact me.
UPDATE: Both sets are now sold out!

-- June 09, 2020 --

Rip It Up, Tear It Down

Coming soon! Ad Removal As Modern Art, with over 180 photos of the inadvertent art created by trashing NYC subway advertising.

This collection of my photographs will be released in a full-color, 9" x 7" book, with glossy pages, and will be limited to only 200 hand-numbered copies!
The book will be $50 in the U.S. / $60 outside the country (postage paid), and you can preorder by contacting me.
Check out some of the pics!

click on images for larger view

-- June 02, 2020 --

Not-So-Breaking News

Conspiracies concerning secret societies have probably been around since the formation of the first Freemasonic lodge. Your typical account of creepy cabals infiltrating the government to control the populace often have them worming into the media, so as to blind the citizenry to their nefarious schemes. While I don't think this is true anymore, seeing as private organizations - such as the Bilderberg Group and Trilateral Commission - are actually pretty open about their plans, I do know of one shadowy bunch who quietly plant a veiled code into their news stories. They are known as the Order of the Occult Hand.
The club began in the fall of 1965, when a journalist for North Carolina's The Charlotte Times, Joseph Flanders, reported on a man who came home late one night, and was mistakenly shot by a family member. In the story, Flanders wrote the sentence, "It was as if an occult hand had reached down from above, and moved the players like pawns upon some giant chessboard."

Joseph's colleagues at the paper were so taken by this flowery line of what's known as "purple prose" that they held a meeting at a local bar. The gang presented JF with a banner depicting a bloody hand emerging from a purple cloud, and crowned him as their high priest. Thus the Order of the Occult Hand was formed with the objective to sneak that line (or some form of it) in whatever news story they could. Some of the original members include editorial writer Stewart Spencer, city editor John Gin, and associate editor R.C. Smith, who would also squeeze the line into some pieces he wrote for jazz magazine Down Beat. Soon, the association spread to other papers in the area, and later the entire United States. The Charlotte News only exposed the group, and their shenanigans, after it ceased publication in 1985, but the story didn't gain much traction. It wasn't until 2004, that the clan gained notoriety when journalist James Janega published an investigation about them in the Chicago Tribune. Two years later, Pulitzer prize-winning editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Paul Greenberg, announced the cartel had chosen a new secret phrase at an annual editorial writers' convention to resume their work clandestinely. To this day, there are sixty-four known and acknowledged members of the Order.
With so many stories about press manipulation, it's nice to know that there's one secret organization that's not out to bamboozle you. Even so, trust no one, and treat every story as if an occult hand has reached down from above, and moves players like pawns upon some giant chessboard.

-- May 24, 2020 --

¡Cuba Libre Para Los Punks!

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Razorcake Podcast #688, hosted by yours truly, where I play Cuban punk, hardcore and metal.

That's right! An hour's worth of music pulled straight from illegally traded tapes, smuggled out of a repressive island regime.
Enjoy your listening, and please share with the rest of the world!

-- May 18, 2020 --

Such Haunting Music

I believe most people who claim to be mediums are some of the lowest forms of human life. They're not murderer (or rapist) low, but they're down there. Many of them prey on the weak minded, and those seeking hope in emotionally difficult times. That said, there are some interesting types of mediums; the ones who don't necessarily vulture people, so much as claim to possess the ability to speak to the dead so as to gain notoriety. While they still do it for money, they at least don't target grieving families. I've already written about a few in the word of literature, such as Emily Grant Hutchings, who swore she could contact Mark Twain from beyond the grave. In this post, I'll be covering a musical medium: Rosemary Brown.

Mrs. Brown was born Rosemary Isabel Dickeson, in London, on July 27, 1916. She lived her early life without any musical knowledge, until 1948, when she bought a secondhand piano, and took three years of lessons. In 1952, she married Charles Brown, and had two children with him. He died in 1961, and - three years later - Rosemary must have been pretty bored, because she began telling some fanciful tales to anyone who would listen. She insisted a spirit first revealed itself to her at seven years old, saying she would be a world renowned musician, before disappearing. Supposedly, it wasn't until she was seventeen that she realized it was the ghost of composer Franz Liszt (1811 - 1886). She professed that he had finally returned, to dictate to her some new tunes he had been writing since his passing. Within a year, she was also "contacted" by, and publishing "new" pieces from: Bach, Brahms, Debussy, Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, and many others. In 1970, Philips (which was bought out by PolyGram in 1972) released a seventeen track LP, A Musical Seance, where she and pianist Peter Katin, perform many of these arrangements.
It goes without saying that the critics were skeptical. Many thought they were nice works, but some wrote they contained "no striking themes, complex structures, depths of feelings, or harmonic, tonal, or rhythmic innovations." In their 1989 book, Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking, Warren Jones and Leonard Zusne wrote that Brown's compositions were "passable works, entirely in the style of these composers, but appeared to be simply reworkings of existing pieces."
Want to judge for yourself? Here's a "communication" she received from Frédéric Chopin in 1966, titled "Nocturne in A flat" (played by pianist Phillip Sear in 2010).

If you are interested in playing some for yourself, all the sheet music is available in her three books, Unfinished Symphonies: Voices from the Beyond (William Morrow, 1971), Immortals at My Elbow (Bachman & Turner, 1974), and Look Beyond Today (Bantam Press, 1986). Though not taken very seriously, a handful of concert pianists, such as Howard Gordon Shelley, Cristina Ortiz and Philip Gammon, have performed her work. Her life story has been the subject of the 1974 BBC documentary Music from the Beyond: The Mediumship of Rosemary Brown, as well as a BBC Radio 4 drama, The Lambeth Waltz by Daniel Thurman, in 2017. By the time she passed away in 2001, she hadn't become the world renowned musician that liar Franz Liszt told her she would be, but maybe she'll get that fame after she spooks a new medium to dictate the works she's penned from beyond the grave.

-- May 05, 2020 --

Doom Jazz

Politics has found its way into music as far back as musical history reaches. Beethoven's third symphony was originally called "Bonaparte", until the commander crowned himself emperor, and the dedication was rescinded. The Hebrew slave chorus in the Verdi opera Nabucco was a call for his country to rise up, and end Austrian and French dominion over Italy. In the 1700s, African-Americans transformed psalms sung by Presbyterians of the Scottish Hebrides into early gospel music as a way to transmit messages of hope to those who otherwise could not read. The Industrial Workers of the World used folk music to spread the message of labor movements throughout the early 20th Century. Of course, there's the protest rock of the late 1960s, as well as almost the entire catalog of punk. While much of this means nothing to the average listener, some of it has been quite fruitful in the realms of resistance, so it should be no surprise that music can sometimes bring about actual revolution. Hell, in Africa, one band alone lead two military coups.
The aptly named Tout-à-Coup Jazz, which means "jazz from out of the blue" or "sudden jazz", was a band formed in 1976 by guitarist Captain Thomas Sankara, and lead singer Captain Blaise Compaoré, when they met in Morocco, as both were serving in the Republic of Upper Volta's military. Though it was said that the band rehearsed more than they played out, those who witnessed their gigs claim they were "magical". In 1982, the act reached the peak of their popularity, when it was suddenly halted by both band leader's political aspirations. Compaoré headed an armed coup against the country's President, Major Jean-Baptiste Ouédraogo. Blaise placed his bandmate Sankara as President of the country, changing the name to Burkina Faso the following year.

During his rule, Thomas promoted the politics of Marx and Lenin, plus the idea of pan-Africanism; denying foreign aid, as he pushed to nationalize the land and all mineral wealth. For four years, TS was heralded as "Africa's Che Guevara". Using his musical prowess, he even wrote the new national anthem for his country, "Une Seule Nuit".
Sadly, being the typical lead singer, Compaoré couldn't stand not being in the spotlight. In 1987, with backing from the CIA and French intelligence services, he had Sankara killed, placing himself as the new ruler of the west African nation. The band was truly no more. Even sadder, if you're hoping for some instant karma, BC held power for twenty-seven years, and wasn't booted until the 2014 Burkinabé uprising, which was heavily inspired by the Sankara legacy.
So, if you're thinking of inciting revolution, at least start a band. Who knows where it might lead. Just keep an eye on your vocalist.

-- April 29, 2020 --

Let's Talk About Me

My musical, poetic and photographic work got a really nice mention in the third episode of Dr. Vanessa Sinclair, and Carl Abrahamsson's 23rd Mind TV.

They talk about a lot of cool people, and projects, you may not be familiar with, so tune in, and check this out, as well as past episodes.

-- April 21, 2020 --

Sacred Secretions

Some people become so constipated, they pray the Good Lord will help give them a bowel movement. In some religions, people don't just pray in hopes they'll crap, but every time they go.
In the Hebrew Talmud, as well as the Mishnah, there are tractates called berakhot (translated as "blessing"), and they discuss rules of prayers for a number of circumstances. One such is the asher yatzar, which translates to "who has formed man". It is a prayer recited whenever someone has finished excreting or urinating - though observant Jews also recite it during the Shacharit service. This blessing is supposed to thank The Almighty for their health, and for being able to poop, because they believe existence would be impossible without a good dump.

Only after washing, and drying your hands, outside of the bathroom, one is to recite the following: "Blessed are You, Adonai, our God, King of the universe, who formed man with wisdom and created within him many openings, and many hollow spaces. It is obvious, and known before Your Seat of Honor, that if even one of them would be opened, or if even one of them would be sealed, it would be impossible to survive, and to stand before You even for one hour. Blessed are You, Adonai, who heals all flesh and acts wondrously."
This prayer is believed to have influenced the code of Islamic hygienic jurisprudence, known as Qadaa' al-Haajah (meaning "relieving oneself"), which is found in the Hadith. When a Muslim steps into a bathroom, they are supposed to enter with the left foot. While on the toilet they are to remain quiet. Once finished they are to wash their anus - or genitals - with water, using the left hand; a process known as istinja. When leaving, one is to step away with the right foot, and then utter, "Praise be to Allah who relieved me of the filth, and gave me relief."
The Buddhist religion doesn't have any prayers or blessings for the act itself, but the Vinaya Pitaka (the Buddhist guide to conduct, whose title translates to "basket of discipline") does mention that monks are to line up to use the john in order arrived, not by seniority, and should not have anything in their mouths, or audibly grunt during. The Hindu's also don't do hoodoo when they visit the loo, but in chapter four of the Manusmriti (an ancient legal text of the Hindu Dharmasastras tradition), it covers a huge list of where not to pee or poo. Places you should not go are listed as the road, a cow-pen, plowed fields, holes inhabited by living creatures, the bank of a river, a temple, the top of a mountain, when facing the wind, or looking towards a Brahmana, the sun, water, or cows - all while facing north during day, but south at night.
Well, with the rash of toilet paper shortages that hit the western world the past few weeks, I'd thought it was a perfect time to show you that all religions are full of shit.

-- April 06, 2020 --

Dial 1-800-Musique

There are currently quite a number of music streaming services. We have the choice of over thirty to choose from, including Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and Tidal. It's gotten to the point where Google, Amazon and YouTube have gotten in on the game. I find it odd to know that, even with this boom in online listening, there are close to thirty that went belly up, like Radical FM, Groove Music, and MixRadio. You'd think that all these services would kill off radio, but it was radio that actually killed off the first music streaming service. No, I'm not referring to Rhapsody; they just bought out Napster, and started using that name instead. The streaming service I'm about to touch on goes back even before the 20th Century.
In 1896, Thaddeus Cahill, a New York City lawyer who studied the physics of music at Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, had the bright idea to create a dail-in service where you could call up, and listen to some music. He called it The Dynamophone, and had it patented the following year. By 1900, he changed the name to Telharmonium, and opened up a small warehouse on 39th and Broadway, where he set up shop. Packing the place with over 200 tons of gadgets and wires, he christened the building Telharmonic Hall. The service cost callers twenty cents an hour, and music played all day, and all night. By 1906, the Telharmonium was being channeled into restaurants and hotels. The next year, it was available to be piped directly to your home.

While the business model was pretty fascinating for its time, the musical aspect was just as amazing, as Cahill didn't use an orchestra, or a band, to play the tunes. He hired, and trained, two musicians to play one specially constructed keyboard. Predating synthesizers, the console, which was set up a floor above all the machinery, played eerie tones using electricity. Every cog in the machine represented a note, and - when levers were pushed- cogs spun near magnetic receivers, making the teeth of the cogs act as sine waves.
Mark Twain read a piece on the Telharmonium in The New York Times, and - after hearing a performance of it - said, "Every time I see or hear a new wonder like this, I have to postpone my death right off. I couldn't possibly leave the world until I have heard this again and again."
By 1915, two major issues had been slowing the expansion of Telharmonium (which costs about six million dollars today). First, was the aforementioned preeminence of music radio broadcasting. Secondly, was that with the growth of the company, more electricity was needed to generate sound, and the more it used, the more it interfered with telephone service. Sadly, these two factors hurt Cahill's company, and it closed operation in 1917. Thaddeus passed away in 1934, without further developing anything of note, though his invention was the inspiration for the Hammond organ, which functions on very similar technology. From there came analog systems like the Moog, so if you're a fan of electronic music, you can thank Mr. Cahill, and his invention.
Now, unsubscribe from that music streaming service, and go make some music yourself.

-- March 23, 2020 --

Just A Little Get Together

I love the idea of a micronation - whether it's a group, or just a single person, getting their feathers ruffled, and saying, "Fuck this! I'm establishing my own country." There are a number of reasons to start your own country, and many of them were covered by comedian Danny Wallace as part of his 2005, six-part, BBC series, How to Start Your Own Country. In it, Wallace investigated several other micronations, set up his own country called Lovely (in his flat in Bow, London), developed a system of currency (the Interdependent Occupational Unit), applied for international aid (failed), tried to enter his country into the United Nations (also failed), and attempted to enter the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest 2006, with a little ditty called "Stop the Muggin', Start the Huggin'".
Admittedly most micronations aren't taken very seriously, and some are admitted jokes, but there are a few that gain -at a minimum- respect from the actual country they're established in. For instance, there's Freetown Christiania, which is a 19 acre commune in old military barracks in Copenhagen, Denmark. Established in 1971, it's currently made up of about a thousand squatters. Their lax drug laws caused relations with the local Danish authorities to become strained in 2004, but a sense of normalcy has since returned.
A border section of Sudan and Egypt, called Bir Tawil, is so inhospitable, that neither nation lays claim to it. Along comes father, Jeremiah Heaton, who flew from his U.S. state of Virginia to plant a flag, naming the area the Kingdom of North Sudan - all just so his daughter, Emily, could be a princess. While no one really takes him seriously, neither country has denied that little girl's dream, either.
My hometown of Miami has a micronation nearby; the Conch Republic. It's basically the city of Key West, and was founded in 1982, after the U.S. Border Patrol set up a roadblock inspection point on US 1, just north of the island chain, on mainland Florida City. When attempts to file an injunction against the roadblock failed, Key West Mayor Dennis Wardlow and the city council declared their independence on April 23, as a protest. On September 20, 1995, the 478th Civil Affairs Battalion of the U.S. Army Reserve conducted a training exercise simulating an invasion of a foreign island. They landed on Key West, conducting military exercises, without notifying city officials. The Conch Republic mobilized local citizens for a defensive battle strike, sending the schooner Western Union out to attack incoming soldiers with water balloons, conch fritters, and stale Cuban bread. Since then, the Republic has expanded to all of the Florida Keys within the defined boundaries of Monroe County.
Some micronations are art projects, such as Elgaland-Vargaland, which was conceived by Swedish artists Carl Michael von Hausswolff, and Leif Elggren, in 1992, and consists of the borders of all nations, or Celestia, founded on January 1st of 1949 by James T. Mangan, and comprising the entirety of the Universe (except Earth) to stop other countries from claiming land in outer space.
Of all the micronations, and even as a huge fan of Conch Republic, I'd have to admit my favorite is Other World Kingdom.

Set up as a commercial BDSM resort, and femdom facility, this country was founded on June 1, 1996, by Queen Patricia I, whose coronation took place in May of 1997. The boundaries circle the grounds of a 16th Century chateau, located in the district of Cerná in Ždár nad Sázavou in the Czech Republic, and the matriarchy has its own currency, passports, police force, courts, flag, coat of arms, and national anthem. To become a citizen, any woman can apply, so long as they are the age of consent, spend a minimum of five nights in the Area of Queen's Palace, and own at least one male sex slave. Men can also become citizens with "freedom to travel, own property, and deal with such property, have children, change employment, and state his opinion," but have to pay taxes, and cannot own sex slaves. Apparently, the Queen must have grown tired of ruling, as the property has been on sale since 2008. It's still up for purchase, so if any of you ladies want to have a bunch of men under your boot, the price is only eight million euros. Any takers?

-- March 13, 2020 --

Suck It!

A certain streaming service got themselves in some hot water recently after carrying a movie by the Brazilian YouTube comedy group Porta dos Fundos, titled The First Temptation of Christ. The flick portrayed Jesus as homosexual, and sent Christians into a fury. Two million people signed a petition demanding that the service remove the film, and the production company even had Molotov cocktails lobbed at their HQ on Xmas Eve. A Rio de Janeiro judge, Benedicto Abicair, ordered that it be removed from the service for that country (admittedly only as a temporary decision to appease religious fanatics), but a high court later ruled in the feature's favor. In reality, the movie is rather tame, as it only depicts Christ bringing home Orlando, his new boyfriend, to meet Mary and Joseph, while they plan him a surprise party for his 30th birthday. This movie has nothing on Him.

Released in 1974, Him is a feature-length gay porno film. The movie centers on a young man who develops a sexual fixation with the life of Jesus Christ. It was directed by Ed D. Louie (which is thought to be an alias), and stars Gustav von Will, under his porn name Tava. It premiered in New York City's 55th Street Playhouse (later known as the Europa Theatre), on March 24th. This run lasted until late May, but the movie was re-run for -of course- Christmas season throughout December of that year. In 1976, it was picked up by a distributor, and played NYC again, as well as Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Atlanta. The movie didn't garner protests, or even infamy, and was largely forgotten until 1979, when the book The Golden Turkey Awards listed it as the "Most Unerotic Concept in Pornography". Yet, Al Goldstein, in his magazine Screw, reviewed it, saying, "The sex is exciting!" Here, I'd normally say that you should judge for yourself, but you can't. The movie has been forever lost to time, and not even brief scenes have popped up anywhere. The flick was one of the most sought-after lost films by the magazine Film Threat. Many thought Him didn't even exist, and was a hoax by The Golden Turkey Awards' authors Harry and Michael Medved, because they admitted in the very same book that one of the films listed was made up. The real fake was Dog of Norway, which was featured with a pic of the Medved's own dog.
Anyhow, though no one has succeeded in digging up a print, this shouldn't stop any of you perverts from trying to hunt it down. When you think that Francis Ford's 1913 lost film When Lincoln Paid was discovered in 2006 in a barn that was to be demolished, or that the 1928 Carl Theodor Dreyer masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc was found in 1981 in a freakin' closet of a Norwegian psychiatric hospital, you know this film has to be out there somewhere.

-- February 29, 2020 --

Big, Big Monkey Man

Many people think war is a product of modern man, dating back only a few thousand years. A lot of these same people believe in what is called the "noble savage", the idea that an uncivilized man has yet to be corrupted by civilization. One of the earliest attributes of this falsehood comes from 1672 in the play The Conquest of Granada by John Dryden, and later backed by Anthony Ashley Cooper, and his 1699 book Inquiry Concerning Virtue, where he believed a moral sense was natural. In 1964, the earliest known evidence for warfare dates to a Mesolithic cemetery site in Sudan (Africa), called Jebel Sahaba, which is about 14,000 years old, and holds the skeletal remains of forty-five people who met a violent end. Even after this find, there were those that believed war didn't date much further back than this, but as we now know, the horror of war recedes into our evolutionary timeline as far as earliest primates. Now known as the "killer ape theory", Raymond Dart first proposed that war was one of the driving forces behind human evolution, in his 1953 article article "The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man". This hypothesis was further developed in African Genesis (1961) by Robert Ardrey. Quite a few scoffed, but Jane Goodall helped prove it in the late 70s.
Though she had no degree at the time, Goodall began studying ape behavior at Gombe Stream National Park (Tanzania) in 1960, thanks to grants from archaeologist and palaeontologist Louis Leakey. By 1962, she attended the University of Cambridge, and even though her thesis was completed in 1965, she continued researching primates. From 1974 to 1978, she witnessed what is now referred to as The Gombe Chimpanzee War.

It began in 1973, when two groups, who were once unified as the Kasakela community, began to splinter over a span of eight months. A group of chimpanzees (six adult males, three adult females and their young), renamed the Kahama community, separated themselves, and set up camp in the south portion of Kasakela. The original Kasakela community was now left with eight adult males, twelve adult females and their young. In January of 1974, six of the Kasakela males ambushed a lone Kahama male, killing him. It was not only the first time chimps were witnessed to have deliberately killed another chimpanzee, but also first witness to a sort of celebration of this murder, where the six males ran around screaming, and throwing branches. By 1978, all the rebel males had been killed, and several females had been beaten, and kidnapped - forced to join the Kasakela community (one female who refused was killed). With the Kahama vanquished, the Kasakela expanded into their territory. This caused trouble with a larger neighboring tribe of chimps, known as the Kalande. After a few violent skirmishes with them, the Kasakela abandoned their new lands. When they moved back north, the neighboring chimpanzee community of Mitumba, raided their colony a few times, but there were no casualties. Eventually, all hostilities settled, and order was restored by 1979. At the time, there were a number of academics who did not believe these events, because scientific models of human and animal behavior hardly superimposed, but further research proved Goodall was describing the natural state of things.
As someone who believes we are basically animals, I also know that it is no longer so simple, and we have become more than that. I hope we can one day surpass our primal instincts, and lead ourselves to a future where war becomes not only unnecessary, but unheard of. Sucks we'll probably destroy ourselves before such a thing happens.

-- February 13, 2020 --

When the Road Sings

It's an awesome thing to be driving down the road, and finding an interesting spot along the way - whether historic landmark, unusual tourist attraction, or amazing landscape scenery. To really enjoy any of those, you'll have to exit your vehicle, but there's one travel oddity that you have to stay in a moving vehicle to experience, and it's known as a "musical road". Made up of bumps (such as Botts dots) or grooves (like rumble strips) on the road's asphalt or pavement, driving over them causes tactile vibration where the audible rumbling forms music. There are a little over forty around the world, with thirty of them in Japan alone.
The first was created in Gylling, Denmark, by two artists, Steen Krarup Jensen and Jakob Freud-Magnus, in 1995. It's an extremely short original tune composed by the artists as an arpeggio in the key of F major, and lasts but two to three seconds, depending on your speed.
South Korea has four of them, with their most famous being near the city of Anyang, and it plays "Mary Had A Little Lamb".
The Ngawi–Kertosono section of the Solo–Kertosono Toll Road in Java, Indonesia, has a segment that plays the first six notes of "Happy Birthday To You", and it is credited with reducing the number of accidents in that area.
The Japanese roads play many tunes, but unless you're a huge anime fan, most may only be familiar to the locals, such as the opening track from My Neighbor Totoro, the theme song from Spirited Away, the GeGeGe no Kitaro theme, and the theme from Neon Genesis Evangelion, "A Cruel Angel’s Thesis".
The Netherlands used to have a musical road near the village of Jelsum in Friesland, but the residents complained they could hear it throughout the night, and it was removed.
The one in Hungary is the first memorial musical road, on Road 67, and was created after the death of the lead singer, Cipõ, of popular Hungarian band Republic - that strip plays the first few notes of the band's song, "67-es út".
There are three in the Unites States. The musical road in Tijeras, New Mexico, installed on a stretch of Route 66, plays "America the Beautiful". In Alabama, as one approaches the Auburn University stadium on South Donahue Drive, you can hear the first seven notes of the Auburn Tigers' fight song "War Eagle". Saving the best for last, Lancaster, California's musical road is a whopping mess. Originally built on a quarter-mile stretch of Avenue K, between 60th and 70th Streets, in 2008, it was supposed to replicate the finale of "William Tell Overture", but was paved over within a mere two weeks after noise complaints. The following month, it was recreated two miles away on Avenue G, between 30th and 40th Streets, and called The Civic Musical Road, because many Honda Civic commercials were filmed there. Sadly, the designers made a miscalculation by not including the width of the groove in relevance to the spacing - both times! - so it sounds nothing like what it's supposed to. If you'd like to hear this audio disaster, here's a quick little documentary on it.

Next time you travel about, and the road starts to sing to you, hopefully you're not falling asleep at the wheel, but are instead driving over a groovy tune.

-- January 28, 2020 --

Don't Bother With the Border

There are a number of places on Earth with border disputes. Japan and Russia have never signed a WWII peace treaty over who owns the Kuril Islands. There is no officially recognized border on Lake Constance, which sits in the Alps between Switzerland, Austria and Germany, because a number of treaty agreements have set up differing rules for different activities on the waters. Navassa Island is a landmass in the Caribbean, claimed by, both, Haiti and the U.S., though there's no real argument over it as it's uninhabited due to lack of water. Still, none have more issues with borders than Spain.

The island of Gibraltar is off the coast of southern Spain, but it's under British control. While Spain has disputed British sovereignty over Gibraltar, the residents reject Spanish rule, and have had several referendums voting to keep their autonomy. The island is technically connected to mainland Spain by a half-mile-long isthmus, which is in more of a gray area, as Spain claims that it never officially ceded the strip of land to the British. Gibraltar's airport, stadium, and a few housing developments are located on the isthmus, but England claims that Spain never rejected its use, and it controls the land by the law of prescription.
Another interesting border dispute is between a town, and the country of Spain. Llívia is a small Spanish town, that's actually located within France. In 1659, the Treaty of the Pyrenees ceded the area to the French Crown, but the wording made it that only villages were to change hands, and Llívia was considered a town (as it was the ancient capital of Cerdanya), hence it kept its Spanish status. The citizens feel quite differently, and want to become French nationals, because they believe Spain does nothing for them, except collect their taxes.
The city of Ceuta is quite similar, in that it's actually outside of Spain, except it wants to stay Spanish. The enclave can be found within Morocco, and many Moroccan nationalists want its return, but Spain argues it had controlled the area since the 15th Century, well before Morocco's independence from France. Even so, the United Nations sides with Spain, probably because it's a duty-free shopping destination for Europeans (and even local Moroccans), who may favor retaining it for economic reasons.
My last example is a small island which also fell victim to the Treaty of the Pyrenees of 1659. The French call it Île des Faisans, the Spanish: Isla de los Faisanes, and Basques know it as Konpantzia - in English this all translates to Pheasant Island. This landmass changes administration every six months. From February 1st until the end of July, the island is under the governance of the naval commanders of San Sebastián, Spain, and from the first day of August through January 31st, it is run by the naval commanders of Bayonne, France.
This is all pretty interesting, and it brings up a lot of questions about national borders, sovereignty, and even identity, yet I'll admit it isn't all that bizarre. The only case of a disputed border I'm aware of, which falls into real kooky territory is that of Dahala Khagrabari - the world's only third-order enclave. Dahala Khagrabari is a small piece of India, which sits within Upanchowki Bhajni, Bangladesh, itself sitting in the village of Balapara Khagrabari, India, that is actually inside of Debiganj, in the Rangpur Division of Bangladesh. In short, it's a piece of India, inside Bangladesh, inside India, inside Bangladesh. It is The Twilight Zone of border disputes.

-- January 15, 2020 --

Art For Prank's Sake

When it comes to abstract art, so many have uttered the words, "My 5-year-old could do that," without realizing that it really does take some schooling, a bit of practice, and touch of talent to produce modern art. In 2011, Angelina Hawley-Dolan of Boston College, and Ellen Winner from Harvard, performed a study where they showed groups of people paired images of works by abstract expressionists against those of a child or animal. In one grouping, the paintings were not labeled, and in another they were credited, but the labeling was purposefully reversed as to mislead who had created the work. Overwhelmingly, the participants chose the work of the actual artists, over those of children or animals, proving that people find a work more pleasing when there is artistic intent behind it.
Of course, that's not to say that there aren't those who cannot be fooled. Seeing as there are always people willing to dish out a lot of dough, so as to be able to have a work by the next big thing hang in their living rooms, you're likely get a bunch of idiots, trampling one another, for the most basic of artworks. Now, this isn't exactly a shot at Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan's "Comedian", which was no more than a banana, duct-taped to a wall, selling for $120,000 at Art Basel Miami Beach a few months ago, but it's close. There are tales after tale of the art world being fooled into legitimizing (and art patrons throwing money at) the work of pranksters.
The first Salon des Indépendants was organized by Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, and Paul Gauguin in 1884, and showcased the works of many fine artists, but in 1910 it included a painting, titled "The Sun Fell Asleep Over Adriatic", by Joachim-Raphaël Boronali. Writer Roland Dorgelès, and a few accomplices, tied a brush onto a donkey's tail, dipped it in paint, and moved a canvas near it, whenever the animal wagged his tail. To parody of the manifestos of other art schools, they also produced The Manifest of Excessivism, to go along with it.
Paul Jordan-Smith once wrote that, "the modern critic in literature and art was a coward, so afraid of being out of step with his generation that he hesitated at giving honest opinion concerning art values, especially where those values were not perceptible," in 1924. To prove he was right, he created the fake Russian artist Pavel Jerdanowitch, and a school of art called Disumbrationist. Creating an elaborate back story, he entered a child-like painting, titled "Exaltation", into an exhibition at the Waldorf Astoria Gallery in New York.

The French art magazine Revue du Vrai et du Beau loved it, and after their review of it ran, "Jerdanowitch" was invited to submit more work to the No Jury Show in Chicago. That piece, titled "Aspiration" was exhibited at Marshall Field's Gallery in 1926, reproduced in the Chicago Evening Post, the French journal La Revue Moderne, and a full-page reproduction appeared in The Golden Book of Modern Art. He confessed to his hoax to Los Angeles Times in 1927.
Swedish journalist Åke Axelsson, and artist Yngve Funkegård, helped premier the work of French painter Pierre Brassau in 1964. The paintings were hailed by art critic Rolf Anderberg, who wrote in Posten, "Pierre Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clean determination. His brush strokes twist with a furious fastidiousness on the canvas. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer." It was later revealed that the artist was actually a chimpanzee, named Peter, from the Borås Zoo.

More recently (2007), Estelle Lovatt, a lecturer at Hampstead School of Art, posted her son's work to collector Charles Saatchi's online gallery, claiming Fred was a well established art critic, who studied American abstract expressionism. His pieces sold under the name Freddie W. R. Linsky, and he was soon invited to have his own show in Berlin. That is, until it was discovered he was only two years old.
Many of these pranks take advantage of the fact that when you buy a work of modern art, you are not really paying for the piece, but for the name. At the rate those names come-and-go nowadays, not all the art sold at insane prices will stay respected, nor appreciate in value. Let's be real here, someday, Maurizio Cattelan will probably just be known as "that banana guy", and the fool that dished out $120,000 for his piece will have a hard time at the auction house. Maybe rightfully so, too.

-- January 04, 2020 --

!.?!?!.,.,!?!.,!?!?,.

I love kooky characters, like Emperor Norton of San Francisco, or even Waco's David Koresh, but I also love weirdoes who put out weird lit, such as Ernest Vincent Wright (releasing an entire book without using the letter E), or William Boyd (who put out a biography on a nonexistent artist, Nathwell Tate). Of course, this post is about the latter, and that guy is Massachusetts' business man Timothy Dexter.
Dexter was born in 1747, to folks so poor he was sent to work as a laborer by the age of eight. He was seen as a dunce by many of his neighbors, and was somewhat disliked, often to the point of open ridicule. On numerous occasions, Timothy was purposefully given bad advice so as to scorn him. One such instruction was to buy large amounts of depreciated Continental currency, which was worthless after the Revolutionary War. It actually turned out to be a blessing, when the U.S. government made good on them, and he amassed a small fortune. He used that money to build two ships, and began an import/export company. Even though he banked, people still messed with him. Pranksters joked that he should send coal to England. He did so, just as a miner's strike happened, and became richer. Another joked he needed to sell gloves in China. His ships arrived right alongside boatloads of Portuguese workers in need of handwear. Yet another yuckster told him to send stray cats to the Caribbean. Lo and behold, the islands were suddenly infested with rats, and people paid a premium for his felines. Sadly, as he got richer, his contemporaries snubbed him more and more. He built a mansion in New Hampshire, held parties, and tried to socialize, but the elite had none of it. After some time, he realized he was his own best friend, and kept to his garden, which he decorated with forty wooden statues of famous men - including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Napoleon Bonaparte. The largest statue was of himself, with an inscription reading: "I am the first in the East, the first in the West, and the greatest philosopher in the Western World". Soon, his wife began to dislike him, too. He had enough, and wanted to know exactly how everyone felt about him, so he faked his death. He was thrilled when 3000 people attended his wake, but was furious seeing that his wife didn't shed a tear. He stormed out of his hiding place, and beat his wife with a cane for not properly grieving. Timothy really died in 1806, at the age of 59. While his mansion became a hotel, his statues rotted away with time. Actually, most of his legacy would have been forgotten, if it wasn't for his book.

When T.D. was 50, he decided to release a 40-page booklet, titled A Pickle for the Knowing Ones or Plain Truth in a Homespun Dress. In it, he ranted - without pause or punctuation - about politicians, priests, and his unemotional partner. It was a huge success, though people complained about the random capitalizations, as well as lack of punctuation. In the book's second pressing, he included an extra page with thirteen lines of punctuation, and instructions to the reader that they should put them wherever they feel it's needed. The damn thing went through eight editions in his lifetime. Hell, reprints are still available today.
Edith Sitwell once said, "The man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd." It wasn't until Timothy Dexter lost his care for the opinions of the crowd that his eccentricities made him the aristocrat he longed to be in the first place, which might help prove that we usually find what we're searching for, when we stop looking.

-- December 23, 2019 --

Merry Coltmas To All

There's quite a few weird Christmas traditions. The last I wrote of covered Sweden's Gävle Goat (a giant straw goat effigy that is constantly destroyed by unknown assailants), and previous to that was the Caganer from Spain (a shitting elf placed in nativity scenes). Ones I haven't covered, but deserve mention, are the web decorations Ukrainians put up for Xmas (similar to Americans during Halloween), how the Japanese flood KFC every Dec 25th (popularizing the phrase "Kurisumasu ni wa kentakkii!", which means "Kentucky for Christmas!"), Venezuelan citizens going to Christmas mass on roller skates, and the hiding of a pickle on the Yule tree in Germany (a tradition that dates back to the 1600s, where a special gift is given to the child that finds it). While I don't really celebrate the holiday, I do like some of the oddities surrounding it, and one of the kookier ones - called Mari Lwyd - revolves around a horse's skull.
Though it was first recorded in 1800 by a writer only known as J. Evans, in his A Tour through Part of North Wales, in the year 1798, and at Other Times, it is thought by folklorist Iorwerth C. Peate to "no doubt [be] a survival of a pre-Christian tradition". This Welsh folk custom is thought to have once been part of the Feast of the Ass, a January 14th commemoration of the Virgin Mary and husband Joseph's flight into Egypt on a donkey. Many believe the name Mari Lwyd translates to "Holy Mary", but there is evidence that it means "Grey Mare", seeing as an older horse tradition in Ireland is the Láir Bhán, which translates to "White Mare".
No matter how or why it began, what it entails is the crazy part. Basically, a horse's skull is placed on a stick. Usually glass beads are placed in the eye sockets, and a spring with a pull chord is attached to the jaw, so it can mimic speech. The head-on-a-stick is carried by a celebrant, who is draped by a white sackcloth. Then, he (and a party consisting of four to seven men decorated in ribbons and colorful clothing) visits houses singing holiday carols on Christmas morning, or sometimes on New Year's Day.

click on image for larger view

So, yeah, if you live in Wales, you could wake up from a nightmare, only to get more nightmare fuel, thanks to this bizarre scene just outside your front doorstep.
Happy holidays, you weirdoes!

-- December 09, 2019 --

The Island of Misfit Toys

There have been quite a number of children's playthings that were seen as pretty dangerous, and had the public asking, "Who thought this was a good idea!?"
One such case was lawn darts. As a kid, I had a set, and actually enjoyed it as was intended. It was only years later when I realized their danger, after using them in twisted games of children's Russian roulette with the neighborhood kids, by launching them sky-high to see who would lose their spot running from certain death from above.
Another, which I wasn't familiar with, was Aqua Dots Design Studio (also known as Bindeez, Pixos, or Beados). A creative game that simply consisted of beads, which had a coating that became sticky when wet, and glued themselves to one another, so you could create little three-dimensional figures. Problem was that the bonding chemical was partly made from a date-rape drug, and some kids who swallowed them went into comas.
There is one game though that really makes you wonder, and when a lot of people hear about it, their first impression could only be described as: WTF. That game is A. C. Gilbert Company's U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory.

Developed by American athlete, and inventor, Alfred Carlton Gilbert (1884 - 1961), who had released a number of toys with educational significance, one of which was the famous Erector Set. Gilbert was also known as "the man who saved Christmas", after convincing the US Council of National Defense not to ban toy purchases during the holidays throughout the First World War.
Released in 1950, the Atomic Energy Laboratory was similar to your average chemistry set, and was an educational kit made to help teach kids about science. Only, this thing contained four glass jars of radioactive uranium-bearing ore samples, including autunite, torbernite, uraninite, and carnotite. The "game" also came with a battery powered Geiger counter, an electroscope (a device that detects the presence of electric charges), a cloud chamber (which allowed a child to watch alpha particles travel), and a spinthariscope (a mechanism used to observe nuclear disintegration caused by ionized radiation). Of course, the set also came with booklets of activities, with one suggesting to play "hide and seek with the gamma ray source", where a kid is supposed to use the Geiger counter in helping to locate a hidden radioactive sample.
Believe it or not, while it's currently labeled "the world's most dangerous toy" by many, the AEL wasn't taken off the market due to any of this insanity, but as a result of its unpopularity. Costing $49.50 (about $520 today), it was priced out of many a family's spending range, and only 5000 or so kits sold in its two years of production. In his 1954 autobiography, The Man Who Lives in Paradise, A. C. wrote that the Atomic Energy Laboratory was "the most spectacular of new educational toys", and that the government backed the set's development, as they believed it would promote a public understanding of atomic energy. Gilbert believed the lab was unsuccessful, not due to cost, but because it was for made for folks with an educational background, instead of the younger crowd his company usually sold to. While it was definitely due to the price tag, this may be true in small part, seeing as Columbia University bought five sets for their physics department back in the day.
If you're interested in collecting this atomic oddity, on the rare occasions they do pop up, sets now sell for about $2000 on auction sites. If you get lucky, and snatch one up... Hell, play away! Just far enough away from me, please.

-- November 27, 2019 --

Rise Write From the Grave

It's silly that so many claim a, basically, board game can help someone contact the dead. Though versions have been around since 1100 CE in China, the first publically-available "talking board" is the Ouija, which was patented by businessman Elijah Bond, in 1890. Around the same time, the Spiritualist Movement grew in the United States, and people all over began talking to the deceased via a toy put out by Parker Brothers (and later, Hasbro). While that's weird enough, it gets even kookier knowing the Ouija board helped some reach beyond the spirit world, and into the world of literature.
The first case of the departed dictating was in 1910, when Pearl Lenore Curran, and friend Emily Grant Hutchings, contacted one Patience Worth, while playing with the Ouija. Curran claimed Worth was born in Europe in 1649 (or 1694), and was killed by a Native American after coming to the States. Pearl typed what Patience told her, and produced two books, The Sorry Tale (1915) and Hope Trueblood (1915). Even though the Atlantic Monthly's Agnes Repplier reviewed the books as "silly as they are dull," PLC's best friend (the aforementioned Hutchings) wanted in on the action, but pushed the stakes further, by supposedly contacting Mark Twain. In 1917, she released the tome, Jap Herron: A Novel Written From The Ouija Board.

In hopes of stopping Emily from making money off Twain's name, his daughter Clara Clemens filed suit against Hutchings, and publisher Mitchell Kennerley, the following year. The lawsuit asked Hutchings to admit the book was fake, or surrender all profits to the Mark Twain estate, and Harper & Brothers. Hutchings did not retract, but the lawsuit was dropped when it was agreed to cease publication, and that all existing copies would be destroyed.
Exactly fifty years later, Mildred Swanson of Independence, Missouri, told the world Twain was now in contact with her, and published her conversations with him, titled God Bless U, Daughter. Unlike Hutchings, Swanson had to release the writing independently, as publishers got wise to the lawsuits putting Twain's name on a book might bring them. One might think they'd also be against such idiocy, but seeing how the name of American poet and author Jane Roberts is still used to peddle the currently-in-print Jane Roberts' A View from the Other Side (which is supposedly channeled writings about death to bullshit artist Mary Marecek), one gets the picture it's profit over principle.
Anyhow, if you'd like to read Twain's supposed words from the afterlife, one can check out the full text of Jap Herron at the National Archives' website. Just don't blame me if you piss off his ghost, and he gets all Tom Sawyer on your ass.

-- November 13, 2019 --

A Musical No-Man's Land

I posted about a handful of musical mysteries a few months back, but there is probably no greater musical mystery than this. There are songs that people have dug through crates of material to find, only to come up empty handed, such as the riddle surrounding DA's "Ready 'N' Steady". That case was finally solved in 2016 - a year after my article on it appeared. Even though no one knew the song in question, or had even heard the music, it was still tracked down. Yet, this mystery contains the full ditty, but no information on the artist, or even a song title, has yet to surface.
From 1982 to 1984, a music fan (who prefers to remain anonymous) would often tape songs off radio shows while living in town of Wilhelmshaven, in Germany. His favorite show was Musik für junge Leute (Music for Young People) on their public-radio station, NDR 1. One of those tapes from his last year of doing so, now infamously dubbed "Cassette No.4", contained tracks from bands like The Cure, XTC, as well as twenty-three other bands. Most groups on that tape are pretty familiar to lovers of alternative and underground music - except for one. He held on to the cassettes for twenty years, and then passed them on to his sister (who also wants to remain anonymous). Not knowing who that act was drove her nuts, so she digitized the track, and, in 2007, uploaded it to a forum for obscure 80s new wave. No one there could help, and she then tried a Canadian website. No go there either. Nicolás Zúñiga, of Spain's Dead Wax Records and Tres Calaveras Producciones (two labels that specialize in synthpop and postpunk), was intrigued, and uploaded the song to YouTube in 2011. Still no luck. Dark music nerd Gabriel da Silva Vieira of São Paulo, Brazil, got in on it, and posted about it on the one place where almost every mystery in the world gets solved: Reddit. Getting nowhere, even though it was shared on several different subs, the YouTube series Tales from the Internet tackled this enigma. 400,000 views later, and everyone's still empty handed. Rolling Stone Magazine posted an article about the song recently, and not a single comment proved to be helpful. People went as far as to contact the DJ that aired the piece, and he was stumped. Here we are, 35 years after the tune was first aired, and in an age where phone apps and website algorithms can detect a song in seconds, we are no closer to finding out who wrote this catchy chorale.
If you're interested in giving it a shot -by all means- have a listen...

If this leaves you, like so many others, banging your head against a wall in frustration: don't say I didn't warn you.

-- November 02, 2019 --

Computer God

I'm sure you're all happy with your Windows, Mac, or Linux operating systems, but they all fail in processing one pretty significant function: linking up with the Big Guy upstairs. That's right, your computer can't communicate with God, so -if you're looking for that sort of resource task- might I suggest TempleOS?

click on image for larger view

Created by Terry A. Davis in 2013, and released through his own website, when it announced "God's temple is finished. Now, God kills CIA until it spreads." Terry was considered by many a true programming genius, and was thought to be the next Steve Jobs by a number of computer engineers, but after being diagnosed as a manic depressive (and later schizophrenic) he had spiraled downward since. Davis began work on TempleOS in 2003, under its original name: J Operating System. In 2008, he changed the name to LoseThos, and then SparrowOS. Around the time of the second name change, Terry claimed to have received instructions from the Universal Lord to reprogram the system to be more biblically-themed. He claimed the OS would be the prophesied "Third Temple", which would usher in the age of the coming Messiah. The system he finally developed has 640 x 480 resolution, 16-color display, and single audio voice, as per God's instructions, and functions as a 64-bit, non-preemptive multitasking, multi-cored, public domain, open source, ring-0-only, single address space, non-networked, PC operating system for recreational programming. The system came with an original flight simulator, compiler (which translates computer code from one programming language to another), and a few games - one such was After Egypt, where a player visits a burning bush, and (using a stopwatch) a Ouija-like oracle generates text, meant to be some sort of fortune-telling. With over 100,000 lines of code, TempleOS was written by Davis in his own programming language, based off C and C++, which he titled HolyC. That alone blew the minds of many a tech nerd.
The last update for the operating system was in 2017, because Terry met a sad end the following year (after a few bouts of homelessness and incarceration) when he walked in front of a Union Pacific train, on August 11th of 2018. It is not known if he committed suicide, or if it was an accident, though most believe it was the former.
If you are curious to run TempleOS, you can visit the website dedicated to the system, and its creator (here), then let me know if you actually get in touch with The Almighty. I have some hard questions for that sumbitch.

-- October 21, 2019 --

Ready Player One

There's been a lot of unfounded speculation the last few years about how video game violence leads to real world violence, even though a number of articles in research journals state otherwise, such as Human Communication Research (2001), Journal of Adolescent Health (2001), Journal of Pediatrics (2009), and most recently in Psychology of Popular Media Culture (2015). Even so, this post isn't about violent games causing real world violence, but about real world violence causing a video game.
I'm sure most readers of this blog already know about the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult. Starting in 1984, in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in Tokyo by Chizuo Matsumoto, the cult mixed ideas from yogic studies, Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, the Christian Book of Revelation, and the writings of Nostradamus.

While the sect had several books out already, Matsumoto, in 1992, under his new name of Shoko Asahara, released Declaring Myself the Christ: Disclosing the True Meanings of Jesus Christ's Gospel. Around this time, the group began to really stress their belief we were entering the end times of a Biblical apocalypse. Seeing nothing special happening, they decided to try to hurry Armageddon along. In 1993, members stood on the roof of the cult's headquarters, and sprayed into the air large quantities of liquid containing Bacillus anthracis spores (aka: anthrax). Besides a few complains of a bad odor, no one got sick. The following year, the gang upped the ante, and drove around in a converted refrigerator truck, releasing clouds of sarin gas. Again, no one was injured. The clique backed off for a bit, and used their homemade chemical weapons to kill a few individuals, who they felt slighted them. In March of 1995, a number of members coordinated a chemical attack on five Tokyo subway trains, killing 13, seriously injuring 54, and affecting the health of close to another 1,000 people. Japanese authorities arrested Matsumoto/Asahara, along with another 11 cult associates. In July of 2018, Shoko and five more members were executed by hanging on the 6th, and the other six were hanged on the 26th.
During their heyday, Aum Shinrikyo published hundreds of books, tens of instructional videos, even music videos and cartoons, but they also released a video game. Titled Kamikuishiki-mura Monogatari, it was released during the 2003 trial by the sect's computer graphics arm, Aum Soft. The game is a poor quality life-management simulator, where a player attempts to successfully deploy chemical agents in targeted trains. As one plays, images of Matsumoto/Asahara in, both, real life, and cartoon form, pop up throughout. Random videos of cult members singing and dancing, cut in and out, here and there. If you make it to the end, you get to watch an Om symbol, and hear the Aum Shinrikyo’s official theme song for three whole minutes. Hell, if you're curious about it, why not watch someone play it in its entirety here...

In the year 2000, Shoko's sons took over the small religion, changing its name to Aleph (the first letter off the Hebrew alphabet), and claimed close to 1,600 members. In 2007, the Russian faction branched off, and changed its name to Hikari no Wa (aka The Circle of Rainbow Light). Both churches are branded as terrorist groups, and are heavily monitored by Japanese, European Union, Russian, Canadian, and even U.S. authorities. Even so, this didn't stop Aum Shinrikyo sympathizer Kazuhiro Kusakabe from ramming a car into a crowd of people on New Year's Day of this year, injuring nine.
Video may have killed the radio star, but a cult following helped a video game memorialize their leader.

-- October 09, 2019 --

Freakishly Flashy Fish

During the mid-1800s, French physicist Edmond Becquerel (1820 - 1891) became an early experimenter in photography, and discovered a number of treatments and techniques, which propelled the science behind taking pictures.
In 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen (1845-1923), a German mechanical engineer and physicist, ran a high voltage of positive and negative electrodes through a glass vacuum bulb. He noticed the tube would give off a fluorescent glow when he did this. Röntgen then shielded the glass with black paper, and noticed only one specific spectrum of light would pass through it. When he waved his hands near it, Wilhelm could see his bones. He then had his wife, Bertha, place her hand on a sheet of photographic film, and shined the greenish rays upon it, taking the world's first X-ray photograph.

Later, in 1896, Edmond's son, Henri Becquerel (1852 - 1908), through his love of his father's work, and an interest in Röntgen's then-recent discovery of X-rays, helped discover radiation. Originally, Henri set up wrapped photographic plates out in the sun, with phosphorescent uranium salt crystals atop of objects, such as keys and coins. When he developed the plates, the objects shined. The younger Becquerel, believing the crystals absorbed radiation from the sun, he attended the French Academy of Science to show his findings. The skies were overcast on that February 24th, so he placed the plates in a drawer, with some of the uranium crystals, overnight. Curious, he developed the plates anyway, and discovered - completely by accident - that even though left in the dark, the uranium cast bright spots on the plates. On March 2, Henri reported to the Academy that the uranium salts emitted radiation themselves, with no help from sunlight. Though photographer Abel Niepce de Saint Victor, actually made the same mistake forty years earlier, in 1857, and even reported his findings to the French Academy of Science, no one followed up on it, so Henri Becquerel, along with Wilhelm Röntgen, are now known as the fathers of radiographic photography.
Fast forward to 1946, and the United States blasts two fission bombs, named "Able" and "Baker", over the Pacific islands of Bikini Atoll. The following year, biologists from the University of Washington (working for the Bikini Scientific Resurvey, who, in turn, were funded by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission) set out to see how the bombs affected the local wildlife, capturing and collecting biota, including wrasse, flounder and clams. The scientists then took the animals, and placed them on photographic plates, in an attempt to measure if they not only absorbed, but also retained, radiation. Those performing the experiments expected to see little, if any, thinking the ocean would disperse and dilute the radioactive material. No one liked what they found.

In fact, the photos showed there was a lot of radiation still in the area, and most of it in the animals were centered around the digestive system, due to them eating other radioactive animals.

This brings us to today, and what's happening to our oceans after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, which happened on March 11th of 2011, in Okuma, Japan. From that very day, when waters after a tsunami flooded back-up generators of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, large amounts of radioactive isotopes had spilled into the Pacific Ocean, nonstop, until 2013. Though reports from the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, and World Health Organization, say the fish pulled from the surrounding area contain levels lower than standards say is unsafe, millions of people are calling it quits on a seafood diet for now.
After seeing these pictures from the past, I'm positive I'm not quitting my vegetarian diet anytime in the near future.

-- October 01, 2019 --

Ready For (A Local) War

In case you missed the news on my updates page, Ready For War: The Florida Edition, is now available.

My new fanzine has never-before published photos, collecting 48 punk and metal battle jackets from my current home state of Florida. Beautifully done, with thick cover, and glossy full color interior pages.
Limited to only 100 (signed and numbered) copies, half the stock is already gone! The zine is $8 postage paid in the U.S., while adding another $6 outside the country.
UPDATE: All copies are now sold out.

-- September 26, 2019 --

False Flags From Flying Objects

Though in use for decades, the term "false flag operation" gained in popularity this decade. It's commonly used today to claim school shootings are the work of the government (so as to give reason in confiscating our guns), but the truth is that they do exist, big and small. I'm not an Alex-Jones-type of conspiracy theorist, but I do believe - scratch that - KNOW there are conspiracies, especially of this kind. The USS Maine, half of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and even the fact that someone in the U.S. government had the balls to propose Operation Northwoods, says a lot about what is going on in Western politics to begin with. There are even false flag operations against single citizens, such as the one perpetrated against UFO researcher Paul Bennewitz, Jr. (1927 - 2003).

Paul was a just your average businessman operating a small electronics company, until 1979, when he kept seeing mysterious lights above Kirtland Air Force Base, the Monzano Storage Area (then the U.S.’s largest nuclear storage facility), and the Coyote Canyon Test Site, all of which are around Albuquerque, NM. He began investigations, leading him to contact the Air Force, as well as the local government, to ask if anyone had noticed, or know of anything they could let him in on. Sadly, this put him on U.S. security services' shit list. He was visited a few times by agents of the Air Force, including their Office of Special Investigations. Then, it all took a turn towards insanity - literally. Soon after his queries, Bennewitz received a secret message on his computer. He claims he picked up a transmission, where a weird voice spoke about secret alien experiments 150 miles north of him, at Dulce Air Base. The message mentioned the aliens were going to enslave mankind in an upcoming war. He tried to distribute the information he had gathered, through pamphlets and professionally produced documents. Some of these reached Arizona's Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization, and they sent one of their investigators, William Moore, to befriend Paul, as well as look into all the data collected. Moore was well-known in the field of UFOology, as he had written, both, The Philadelphia Experiment, and The Roswell Incident. By 1981, William had not only convinced Paul he was on the right track, he began to share other documents with him, such as those on "Project Aquarius" (a supposed exchange between MJ12 and aliens from Zeta Reticuli). Bennewitz would then dispense this information throughout the UFO community. The only problem was that many laughed at him, calling his findings preposterous. Paul, not understanding why people weren't taking him seriously, quickly became paranoid. Within a year, he was hospitalized three times for exhaustion, and was once institutionalized in a psychiatric ward. To the UFO research community, this forever solidified Bennewitz as someone not to be believed, discrediting all of his previous work.
Here, many tend to ask, "What's the big deal about a crazy person going crazier?" Well, Paul Bennewitz wasn't mad, so much as he was driven there. Years later, William Moore was exposed as being an agent provocateur of sorts. It turns out Bill was being paid by the Air Force, as well as the Central Intelligence Agency, to distribute disinformation; admitting so himself, in 1989. Poor Paul had stumbled upon the testing of secret military helicopters, and - wanting what he already knew to be dismissed - made his earlier claims invalid, by making his newer claims seem insane.
This is just one of many confoundingly real conspiracies, that are hidden within a fake conspiracy, which only helps drive home the Socratic paradox of discovering that the more we learn, the more we learn we know nothing. So educate yourself as much as possible, because you can try not to be a victim of the system, but you still might get hurt somehow.

-- September 10, 2019 --

Accruing Massive Overdue Fees

There is a long-running internet joke known as "Rule 34", which states, "If it exists, there is porn of it." Though much less-perverse, there's another lesser-known rule, and that is: Anything you can think of, there is a "world's largest" version of it. In the U.S. alone, there's the world's largest chess piece (St. Louis, MO), wind chime (Casey, IL), cowboy hat (Seattle, WA), rollerskate (Beatleton, VA), and cuckoo clock (Sugarcreek, OH). Speaking of Ohio, Cleveland once had the world's largest of something, but lost it.
In the summer of 1936, the state of Ohio had a Worlds-Fair-like event, called The Great Lakes Exposition. It had a midway, with carnival rides, a freak show, and a multitude of exhibits (including the multiethnic "Streets of the World"). At the entrance to it all was The Golden Book of Cleveland, a 6,000-page, 5,000 lb (2,270 kg) book, where visitors could sign their name. It was 7 ft long, 5 ft wide and 3 ft thick (2 x 1.5 x 1 m), basically the size of a queen mattress, and, by the end of the exposition in October, it had collected a half-million signatures. The tome's cover was, of course, gold, and displayed the year, a portrait bust of a Native American, and an image of Cleveland's landmark Terminal Tower. But, strangely, though it was heralded as "the largest book in the world", it disappeared not long after.
While there are no surviving photos of the book itself, there are quite a few copies left of its 5 x 3.5" (13 x 9 cm) replicas, which were sold at the event.

Though no one knows what really happened to the book, one person claims to kind of know. After Cleveland Magazine ran an article about the missing tome in 2006, a 70-year-old artist for children's animation, named Al Budnick Jr., contacted the magazine to fill them in on what he knew. According to the illustrator, his parents bought a home in 1945 in the Cleveland suburb of Bratenahl, and inside the garage was The Golden Book of Cleveland. The family kept the book for some time, attempting to contact the mayors of, both, Bratenahl, and Cleveland. With neither responding, he placed a sign for its sale in 1953, after needing the garage space for a relative's living quarters. A doctor, whose name he can't recall, was moving from the area to Arizona, and wanted the book. Budnick Sr. said he could have it for free, but the man insisted on paying $200 for it. Al Jr. especially recalled this, because he said he had never seen a $100 bill before then. Sadly, the trail ends there.
For the few that might wonder how/why the book wound up in someone's garage: it turns out the house previously belonged to the late president of the W.M. Pattison Supply Co., William H. Smith Jr. The factory happened to be only a block away from the main gate of the Great Lakes Expo. It's thought that Smith was offered to store the book at his nearby company. After some time of local politics changing faces (and forgetting about the book), he saw its historic value, and decided to keep it, instead of throwing it out.
Many a sleuth (internet, professional, and otherwise) has tried to find this mysterious doctor who moved to Arizona, but none have had any luck. Therefore, the world's biggest book may still be out there, somewhere, so you should go check your garage now.

-- September 01, 2019 --

The Sounds of A Swarm

156 has a new release out, and it's a record on a postcard!

It's one song (from the Memento Mori sessions, where all sounds were produced using human bones) on a 5" x 7" postcard, with three track download.
$2 will get you two copies, $3 equals five of them, and for $5 I'll send you ten postcards.
These are limited to only 500 copies, with only a little over 150 left, and are available from the 156 Bandcamp page.

-- August 26, 2019 --

To Be Or Not To Beatles

I love a good mystery, but a musical one is tops in my book - solved or not. What happened to Q Lazzarus? Was the theft of Green Day's Cigarettes & Valentines album of demos a publicity stunt? Where is Manic Street Preachers' Richey Edwards? Did Pink Floyd write 1973's Dark Side of the Moon LP with The Wizard of Oz in mind? Who was Klaatu? Hadn't heard that last one? Well, lets get into that.
In September of 1976, Capitol Records released an album without any advertising for it, nor giving the disc a record release party, or other fanfare.

Besides the band name of Klaatu on the front sleeve, there was absolutely nothing else on the record to let you know anything about the act. No group pic, or band members were listed. No liner notes, recording information, or "thank you" list was found anywhere inside. Copies of the LP were sent to newspapers and magazines throughout the world with no onesheet or bio, yet many gave the disc a great review. Some compared the vocals and harmonies to The Beach Boys, but most thought it sounded just like The Beatles. This is where things took an even weirder turn.
Because of The Beatles' long hiatus from recording (their last being Let It Be in 1970), many began to believe this was a secret Beatles' album - starting with Steve Smith, who - writing for Rhode Island's The Providence Journal - ended his review with: "Klaatu could very well be an anonymous reunion album by The Beatles." Journalists and music fans began to search for clues, including watching 1951's The Day The Earth Stood Still, because Klaatu was the name of the robot in the movie, and the Canadian version of the record was titled 3:47 EST (the time in the movie the spaceship lands). When reached for comment, Capitol Records kept quiet, neither confirming nor denying. By the start of 1977, they began to advertise for the disc, with full page ads in Billboard, yet dropping no new hints. Other bands got in on the hype, and The Carpenters even did a cover of one of the album's tracks on their Passage LP (1977).
Sadly, it all ended just as quickly as it took off. Later that year, a program director at Washington DC's WWDC Radio, Dwight Douglas, decided to petition the U.S. Copyright Office for the record's paperwork. There, he found the names of the band members: Terry Draper, John Woloschuk, and Dee Long. Turned out Klaatu was actually a trio from Canada, who had never meet any of The Beatles. Once this was discovered, the record stopped spinning at radio stations, and sales plummeted. The band's follow up, Hope (1977), reached No. 83 in the U.S., but the next three records (Sir Army Suit [1978], Endangered Species [1980], and Magentalane [1981]) failed to chart outside of Canada. Members of the band claim that, while they enjoyed the comparison, they never had anything to do with referencing The Beatles. Even so, people stopped caring, and no one thought there was anything left in Klaatu.
If you'd like to check out what the band's debut album sounded like, here you go...

If there's any magic in this collection of songs, or at least enough to cause such as rumor, hype, and publicity, feel free to judge for yourself.

-- August 13, 2019 --

Rock Around the Block

A marathon is already a pretty long distance to run; 26.2 miles (41.1 km). Though I'd never run anywhere near that far, I get that they are a challenge many want to attempt to overcome. Even so, there are a few who see a simple marathon as a joke, and have joined races that go much, much farther, such as South Africa's Comrades Marathon, which measures at 54 miles (87 km). Still, that's not even close to the world's longest race. That record is held by Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race. You read that right: 3,100 miles (4989 km).

The world's longest certified footrace started in 1996, when Indian spiritual leader Chinmoy Kumar Ghose (1931 - 2007), better known as Sri Chinmoy, created a 2,700-mile (4,345 km) race. The following year, he extended it to its current distance. Chinmoy founded the race for runners to "transcend their own previous capacity ... gain spiritual insights ... overcome the entire world's preconceived notions of possibility".
Taking place every year for 52 days, from June to August, in the Queens borough of New York City, runners circle just one city block in the neighborhood of Jamaica. The whole race runs only along the sidewalk of 84th Avenue, Grand Central Parkway, 168 Street, and back up to 84th - a total of 5,649 times around and around. From 6am to midnight, racers can spend their time however they want; whether running, walking, skipping or crawling. With the "track" closed for a measly six hours, that's all many get to eat, sleep, and tend to their foot wounds.
Since it began, less than 50 people have finished this race. Ashprihanal Aalto, a postman from Finland has completed it 14 times (setting a record of only 40 days in 2015 = 77 miles per day), and the woman's record is held by Slovakian Kaneenika Janakova at 48 days. American Yolanda Holder was the first to walk the entire distance of the race in 2017. Plenty have given up mid-race, and some have even been sent to the hospital during. Participants are known to lose over 20 - 30 lbs (9 - 13.5 kg) in the race, as it burns up to 10,000 calories per day. While many think Sri just had a great sense of humor, most runners say they fully understand everything he said the race was for, as quite a few have reached altered states of mind while running it.
If you feel you need to run and run, by all means join in, as the race is open to all. Now, if you're running from inner demons, it might be best to just see a shrink, because this race will, literally, get you nowhere.

-- July 30, 2019 --

Another Log for the Fires of Love

Lots of people are looking for love. A few still go to bars, hoping to meet someone, but many others use the most modern of technology, like the internet, and all of its matchmaking websites. Still, there are those who rely on the use of more old-fashioned methods, such as the power of nymphs or wood sprites to hook them up with that one partner who is just right. Strangely, this method has a pretty good success rate, too. The most efficacious is a 500-year-old oak tree, in Germany, just outside the town of Eutin (about 100km northeast of Hamburg), deep in the Dodauer Forest, called Der Bräutigamseiche (or "The Bridegroom’s Oak").

In 1890, two love-struck locals, Minna and Wilhelm, were forbidden to see each other. They began to use the ancient oak as a secret spot to hide notes to one another. In June of the very next year, the couple was wed under its branches. Within no time, rumor had it that the tree was to thank, and other natives started leaving notes of their own, asking the tree for help in their love lives. By 1927, the tree received so much mail, Deutsche Post (the German postal service) gave the mighty oak its own postal code, and dedicated postman. They installed a ladder, leading up to a small post box, where folks could walk up, and, either place their own love letter, or grab, read, and respond to another's. While it's the only place known where you are allowed to open mail that isn't directly written to you, there is one rule: you have to put back the letters that didn't interest you.
There are other magical legends surrounding the tree; the most well-known is that if, under a full moon, a girl were to walk around the tree three times, thinking of her lover (without speaking or laughing), she will be married within the year. Although many of these myths are quite pagan in origin, Christian church services are held at the tree yearly, every Whit Monday, as a part of the Pentecost celebrations.
Today, Der Bräutigamseiche gets about a thousand pieces of mail a year, mostly during summer. The Bridegroom's Oak is said to be responsible for over one-hundred marriages, and even Karl-Heinz Martens, who was the tree's longest running postman at 20 years, once found a letter, and wound up marrying the writer.
If you are interested in trying to get the oak's blessing in all things amor and eros, write to:

Bräutigamseiche
Dodauer Forst
23701 Eutin
Germany

May the spirits of the forest look upon you with grace. I'm sure it'll work better than eHarmony, anyway.

-- July 18, 2019 --

Ship Ahoy

I'm sure many of you are aware of the laws of unintended consequence, popularized by sociologist Robert K. Merton. The three groups of such being: unexpected benefit, unexpected drawback, and perverse result. In this post, I'll be writing of the third type, and a story that many of you may not be aware of, which is how the RMS Titanic sunk another ship, years later.
The SS Eastland was already a troubled ship even before it sank in 1915.

Commissioned by the Michigan Steamship Company in 1902, and finished the following year by Jenks Ship Building Company, the vessel wasn't named until just before its inaugural voyage. Once in operation, a design flaw of being top-heavy proved to be problematic, and caused the Eastland to list (a nautical term for "tipping to one side") several times. It probably didn't help that the ark's stern was damaged when the tugboat George W. Gardner mistakenly backed into it. Hell, the Eastland even suffered a mutiny, where firemen (who claimed to not have received promised meals) stopped feeding coal to the boiler, and were later charged, and jailed.
Now, about the Titanic. One of the reasons so many died in that tragic 1912 disaster was that there were too few lifeboats. This, in turn, caused the U.S. Senate to pass the Seamen's Act (also known as the Act to Promote the Welfare of American Seamen in the Merchant Marine of the United States, or Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act) in 1915, which stated a number of provisions, one being that the number of lifeboats would be proportional to fit the amount of passengers carried by a ship. Can you see where this is going?
On July 24, 1915, the Eastland, along with four other vessels, was chartered to take employees of Illinois' Western Electric Company across Lake Michigan, to a picnic in Michigan City, IN. That morning, 2,572 passengers jammed aboard. With the number of added lifeboats, combined with the previous issue of listing, the Eastland, while still docked in the Chicago River, tipped over. Though the ark was only 20ft (6m) from the wharf, and despite a quick response from the nearby boat Kenosha, 848 people died.

By adding supplementary lifeboats, I'm sure the Seamen's Act of 1915 saved a number of lives, but it may have taken about as many - just like passenger-side airbags in cars actually led to an increase in child fatalities. Sadly, the fact that these consequences are unforeseen means we can expect many more similar circumstances in the future (from social to environmental). It also shows that when we make decisions, we have to take into account as much as possible. I hope this helps many understand other issues we're facing such as the opioid crisis or climate change, but I'm afraid many will just be overwhelmed by the growing number of factors that affect a situation, and just quit. Well, the truth is that quitting may be the best road for mankind to take anyway. Quit expanding, quit accumulating, quit the bullshit.

-- July 03, 2019 --

Pet Peeves

Before the last election, and a bit after, a lot of people were talking about Trump University (aka Trump Wealth Institute), and the inquiry opened by the New York Attorney General's office for illegal business practices. The case stemmed mostly from allegations that Trump U defrauded students. I'm no fan of Orange Asshole, but I don't see the big deal, especially when - in the U.S. and abroad - there are more than a hundred fake universities. As a matter of fact, there are so many, people often prank them by getting diplomas for their pets - including seven colleges/universities, three "high schools", and several other associations that hand out certificates of membership/completion of some type.

Albany, NY, tv reporter, Peter Brancato, applied to and received an associate degree for his dog Wally, from Almeda University in 2004.
In 2007, Australian comedy host Chas Licciardello, of the tv show The Chaser's War on Everything, got a medical degree for his dog Sonny from Ashwood University.
The Ledger, a Lakeland, FL newspaper, obtained a high school diploma, in 1973, from Washington High Academy for a cat named Spanky, under the pseudonym Kitty O'Malley.
In 2004, the British physician and science journalist, Ben Goldacre, wrote an article for The Guardian about how he received a diploma in nutrition from the American Association of Nutritional Consultants for his cat Henrietta.
The American University of London offered a four-year-old male pupper, named Pete, an MBA for £4,500 in 2013 (without asking for any course work to be done).
In 2004, Pennsylvania's attorney general, Jerry Pappert, sent Dallas, TX's Trinity Southern University $299, and got his cat, Colby Nolan, a bachelor's degree in business administration.
Time Magazine reported in 1984 that Sassafras, a female poodle belonging to a NYC physician, obtained a diploma from the American Association of Nutrition and Dietary Consultants, for only $50.
While these are some of the better known cases, there are many more. A tuxedo cat, Oreo C. Collins gained a high school diploma from Jefferson High School Online in 2009. In 2010, attorney Mark Howard received a degree for his dog, Lulu, from the US Virgin Island's Concordia College. A cat owned by Chris Jackson (of the BBC show Inside Out North East & Cumbria), had him registered in three professional organizations: the British Board of Neuro Linguistic Programming, the United Fellowship of Hypnotherapists, and the Professional Hypnotherapy Practitioner Association.
Now, those are just diploma mills that gave credentials to animals, but there are hundreds that didn't, and some still operate today. There is/was Saint Regis University (and its later incarnation James Monroe International University), Tri-Valley University, University of Northern Virginia, Herguan University, Oikos University, Silicon Valley University, and so many more that Wikipedia has a whole page listing "unaccredited institutions of higher education".
I get that - with the current cost of college - many look for ways to cheat the system, but if you pay for this type of education, and you're not out to run a scam yourself, you're no smarter than cats and dogs.

-- June 18, 2019 --

Attack of the Airwaves

Most everyone is familiar with the panic created by the 1938 airing of the War of the Worlds radio drama, broadcast on October 30th by CBS. Though the amount of fear and confusion the show actually caused has been disputed, the publicity of the event helped to launch the career of Orson Welles, who was the show's narrator.

What very few people know is that this event happened again, but the outcome was very, very different. On February 12th of 1949, Ecuador's most popular radio station, Radio Quito, decided to air a Spanish version of the H.G. Wells classic. Unlike the U.S. airing, the station made a, literally, fatal mistake. The broadcast company didn't air warnings that it was all fiction. The transmission began with a folk duo singing a traditional popular song, when they were suddenly interrupted by a "news bulletin" saying Martians had landed in Latacunga, Ecuador, and the city was being destroyed by powerful beams of light. The announcer claimed the aliens were now headed towards Ecuador's capital city of Quito, with another stating he was atop the tallest building there (La Previsora bank), and could see monsters coming, destroying everything in their path. Throughout the performance, actors playing government agents would give instructions as to what the citizens needed to do. By the middle of the show, the city's police and fire crews were setting up sites to tackle injuries, and fight the invaders. The military took positions of defense. Men and women ran into the streets with bags packed, and headed for the hills, as hundreds of others stormed churches thinking them to be safe havens.
Just before the end of the program, the producers realized what was happening outside, and issued a disclaimer, admitting it was a dramatization. This angered thousands, and crowds gathered surrounding the station. As most threw rocks at windows, a few poured gasoline about the building, which also housed the city's newspaper, El Comercio. Fires were lit, and the place went up in a blaze. Hundreds of innocent people inside the building trampled one another to escape the flames. Police and firemen were late to arrive, as they were busy waiting elsewhere to fight the nonexistent threat from space. Up to twenty people lost their lives that night, with many of them being employees of the radio station and newspaper.
The next day, many didn't even know what happened, as there was no radio broadcast, nor morning paper (the other daily in the city, El Dia, only printed evening editions). After some time, the producers were indicted on charges, with Eduardo Alcaraz fleeing to Mexico, and Leonardo Paéz, hiding out in Venezuela. Both, Radio Quito, and El Comercio were rebuilt, but established their headquarters in another town, where they remain to this day.
Since this tragedy (and another similar event in Chile), a number of conspiracy theorists, such as Daniel Hopsicker, claim they are psychological experiments funded by The Rockefeller Foundation, to observe the effects of mass hysteria. You don't have to be crazy to believe any of this, but it certainly might help.

-- June 06, 2019 --

No Man's Land

I like weird facts about small towns. I dig that there's a whole town for sale (Story, IN, for $3.5 million), and knowing there are ghost towns throughout the world (such as the infamous Pripyat, Russia, where the Chernobyl accident happened in 1986, and Centralia, PA, where a raging coal fire has forced people to leave town since 1962). I've written a bit about some, like Agloe, NY (a fake town that became real, then faded away), and more recently Crush, TX (which was built for a publicity stunt). Many of these strange little towns were built with a purpose, but when that purpose is gone, so goes the population. There are a handful that remain because their objective still carries direction and function, but that doesn't stop them from being quite odd.
One great example is the tiny town of Hogan's Alley in Virginia, which was established in 1987. Like many small towns throughout the United States, the primary road veins right through the middle of it, with a number of side roads connecting. On the main strip there's the Biograph Theater, a drug store, a bank, your typical post office, a laundromat, barber shop, pool hall, and The Dogwood Inn, which is the local motel. There are cars parked here and there, and a few homes scattered about, but not many, because not a lot of people actually live here.

I mean, there are residents, but they don't stay very long. It could be because of the constant bank robberies, movie theater shootings, terrorist activities, bar room drug deals, or any number of the major crimes that happen here every day. It may also be because those who live in the town are paid to stay only a little while, as all the citizens are merely actors. Crisis role players in fact, pretending to be either criminals, or innocent bystanders. If you haven't guessed it already, Hogan's Alley is a town built for F.B.I., D.E.A., U.S. Marine, and other law enforcement tactical training. The town sits on 10 acres (40,000 sq meters), in the city limits of Quantico. Owned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation Training Academy, the on ground scenarios involve investigations, evidence processing, arrests, searches, and full on shoot outs. The intelligence service hired Hollywood set designers to construct every facet of the town, including the furniture inside every working shop along the main street. The mailboxes were so real, they had to be legally sealed shut, in case anyone wanted to put mail in them.
Though Hogan's Alley is off limits to civilians, there are those rare times when the Academy holds tours, so if you find yourself in the area, see if they're holding one, because I'm sure it would be cool to tell people you got to walk around a little town no one is normally allowed to go in.

-- May 23, 2019 --

Write About That Funky Music, White Boy

For those that missed out on my well-reviewed, sold out fanzine, Musica Obscura, I have performed a massive labor of love, and uploaded every article in the zine, plus over 10 others to one page. Some works have even been expanded with extra tracks!

29 articles on bizarre and rare music from around the world, photo journals of odd music events, and written pieces on porn stars, murderers, and cults who released music.
Click here to check that out. Enjoy!

-- May 09, 2019 --

What's A Man Worth These Days?

Quite a number of people live unfocused lives to the point where they'll hire a life coach to help steer them in some direction, or other. There are plenty who might imagine life as a nightmare being under the control of someone else. Well, one person definitely didn't think it was all that bad, but he didn't give up his autonomy to just one. Mike Merrill has got to answer to a whole board of directors.

Mike was born and raised in the ultra-tiny town of Coldfoot, Alaska. Wanting to get out, and see more of the world, he joined the military, but found that wasn't his bag. A friend suggested he come with him on his move to Portland, Oregon, and Mike thought it a good idea. While living in the City of Roses, Merrill floated from job to job in the non-technical sectors of the tech sector, but found them all to be somewhat of a dead end. As 2007 was coming to a close, and tired of his life going nowhere, he landed on a plan. First, he tallied up the worth of his free time (nights and weekends), and came up with a figure of $100,000. Then, on January 26, 2008, he announced an Initial Public Offering for those interested in buying stock in... Mike Merrill. He would be dividing himself into 100,000 shares at only $1 a share. Though retaining a majority himself, he set his as nonvoting, and granted 100% of decision-making power to investors. He set up a website (see here), and they were allowed to vote "yes" or "no" on life decisions. In the first ten days, twelve of his friends purchased 929 shares. After an article in Hacker News about Mike's stock, San Francisco software engineering director Gordon Shephard bought over $6000 worth of his life, driving the share price up to $11.75. Once stories appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, and airing on The Today Show, Merrill's stock rose to $18 a share, though it's currently around $4. Mike has let his investors vote on whether he grew a mustache (resounding no), and become a vegetarian (okayed), to deciding if he would get a vasectomy (a close no), and switch to a polyphasic sleep schedule (big thumbs up). They even voted on his love life, and which political party he should register with.
Mike Merrill says he has no regrets, and has enjoyed the past eleven-year experiment; probably because the vasectomy vote didn't pass. Still, it's odd to lose control of your life choices , but many of us give it freely to people who haven't even paid for the privilege.

-- April 25, 2019 --

But... Priests Don't Lie

You know there are weird and interesting things in the vaults of the Vatican. Some are rare books, a few records of deeds and misdeeds, tons of religious and historical relics, the bones and body parts of saints, and, surely, an invention or two - one of which is, most certainly, the Chronovisor; a television-like instrument which can see into the past (and maybe the future).

Supposedly, it is the invention of a handful of priests, and scientists, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back in time to the beginning of the story.
While traveling across the Grand Canal of Venice, sometime in the 1960s, French priest François Charles Antoine Brune met Italian physicist-turned-priest Father Pellegrino Maria Ernetti. The two discussed Biblical miracles, and when Brune said it would be wonderful to actually see these events, Ernetti let him in on a secret he had been keeping since the mid-50s: it was totally possible to do so. Ernetti told him about an invention he worked on, called the Chronovisor, built by a team of top scientists (including Nobel honoree Enrico Fermi, and rocket scientist Wernher von Braun) led by Ernetti himself. The contraption consisted of a cathode-ray tube, hooked up to several antennas made of precious metals, and dials for selecting the time / location to be viewed. He claimed it worked by decoding electromagnetic radiation left behind from past events. Through the Chronovisor, Pellegrino told François he had witnessed Christ's crucifixion, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the founding of Rome in 753 BCE, and even got to read the original text of the the two stone tablets given to Moses by I Am That I Am. Then, the story goes that FCAB convinced PME to go public with this information, and he agreed to do so.
Though it took some time to get the word out, the first known article on the subject was printed on May 2, 1972 in the Italian weekly news magazine, La Domenica del Corriere. In the article Ernetti provides proof by giving the journal a photo he took of Jesus. Skeptics pointed out that the photo looked quite similar to a wood carving by the sculptor Lorenzo Coullaut Valera, so the priest produced a transcript of Euripides' lost play, Thyestes, claiming to have seen an entire performance in 169 BCE by the father of Latin poetry, Quintus Ennius. Dr. Katherine Eldred of Princeton University believes that Pellegrino actually wrote the play himself, as it has many Latin words that didn't exist at the time of the original.
Now, Father Ernetti went to his grave in 1994 claiming the Chronovisor was real, adding that "Pope Pius XII forbade us to do disclose any details about this device because the machine was very dangerous. It can restrain the freedom of man." Father Brune stands behind these claims, and even wrote a book on the Chronovisor in 2002, Le nouveau mystère du Vatican (The Vatican’s New Mystery), though he has yet to see it himself.
On an interesting side note, the Vatican issued a decree in 1988, warning "anyone using, an instrument of such characteristics would be excommunicated," which is odd for an invention they claim does not exist. Then again, they may just want to hold the monopoly on looking into the past. Still, what do I know? It's not like I have a crystal ball, or anything.

-- April 09, 2019 --

A Crash Course in Trains Purposefully Crashing

When William George Crush got word that some folks at the Columbus and Hocking Valley Railroad staged a well-attended collision between two old trains (at Buckeye Park, near Lancaster, Ohio, on May 30, 1896), he got the bright idea to do it again, but make it a spectacular spectacle. A few months later, his vision had gotten some traction. As general passenger agent of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, he had his bosses' ears, and was able to convince them to try out the publicity stunt.
First, they set up a temporary town in his honor, Crush, Texas, where the event would be held. The train company charged no admission, and reduced the price of travel to the celebration to just $2 from anywhere in the state. The locomotives used were two 35-ton decommissioned Baldwin engines, No. 999 (painted bright green with red trim) and No. 1001 (painted bright red with green trim), which were set on a 4-mile stretch of tracks, newly laid just for this occasion. In advance, the trains toured the state for two months to advertise the affair. An estimated 40,000 people showed up on September 15th, and were greeted by barkers, food stands and carnival games.
At about 5pm, the trains descended on one another at a speed of 45 mph (72 km/h). Upon impact, both boilers exploded, and sent debris into the crowd - killing three, and injuring six others. While there is no film of the crash, Waco photographer, Jarvis Deane, caught this image before losing an eye to a flying bolt.

click on image for larger view

William was immediately fired from M-K-T Railroad, but seeing there was little negative publicity, he was rehired the next day (where he continued to work until his retirement). Since they actually made a profit, the railroad company settled a few lawsuits with cash, and lifetime rail passes (photographer Deane alone received about $10,000). The following month, ragtime musician Scott Joplin composed a piano piece titled the "Great Crush Collision March".
Even though the M-K-T incident was a disaster, other railroads continued to stage collisions. Two locomotives traveling at 90 mph (144 km/h) were intentionally crashed for the 1913 California State Fair (see footage here), and again in 1932 for the Minnesota State Fair (see here). In 1984, to calm public fears about the transport of nuclear waste, British Rail launched a train at 100 mph (160 km/h) into a nuclear waste container at Clapham Junction in Glastonbury, dubbed Operation Smash Hit it was not the end of the line for staged train crashes, as others have been held in the U.S. and abroad, since.
Anyhow, if you happen to find yourself in Texas, the town of Crush is no longer there, but in 1976 the Texas Historical Commission posted a sign at the crash site commemorating the event, but good luck tracking down that exact spot.

-- March 25, 2019 --

Mere Ghosts of the Men They Once Were

In October of 2016, thanks to a lawsuit by attorneys Kel McClanahan and Emma Best of National Security Counselors, the Central Intelligence Agency said it would release all twelve-million pages of its declassified CREST (CIA Records Search Tool) files onto its own website for public availability. The complete library has been available since 2000, but only through computer terminals at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, which made it difficult for some researchers to peruse.
Since then, investigators have pointed out a number of bizarre documents within those files. Some of them include a list of jokes about the Soviet Union for the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (here), a 1973 document recording two men, Ingo Swann and Harold Sherman, attempting a psychic probe of Jupiter (here), a German recipe for disappearing ink (here), a 1954 internal memo about a shortage of Coca-Cola bottles (here), the 1995 book, Bloodlines of Illuminati, by Fritz Springmeier (here), and a 1974 flier from the National Caucus of Labor Committees claiming to have uncovered CIA schemes against them (here). While those are definitely odd, there is one that is a bit creepier than the rest.
Titled "Picture of A Man" (here), the file from November 1971 contains two bizarre images, labeled 1569 and 1572, without much more info.

click on images for larger view

The only thing that is really known about these "pictures" is that they stem from the collection related to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (and what was once the National Imagery and Mapping Agency).
If anyone can help solve this mystery, there are many who are interested in an answer, and I - for one - will thank you for ending a handful of nightmares.

-- March 13, 2019 --

The Wars of Goats and Men

First, I'd like to thank Razorcake Magazine (especially columnist Donna Ramone) for tipping me off to this story. It's always nice when someone hips me to an item that I'd like to cover here.
So, it turns out there's a war going on in Gävle, Sweden. Many think it's between the Establishment, and Anarcho-Pranksters. Others think it's between Pagans, and Christians. A few simply think it's just a twisted tradition. All of it, over a goat. Well, a huge goat effigy to be exact.

The Gävle Goat is an annual Christmas display, placed in the castle square of Slottstorget, which began in the 1960s. The goat is often a large straw version of the Scandinavian Yule Goat, which is believed to be connected to the pagan worship of the Norse god Thor, whose chariot was pulled by the goats Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr. In 1966, Swedish advertising agent, Stig Gavlén, got the idea to erect a giant replica of a Yule Goat to celebrate the Christian tradition of Advent (a four-Sunday celebration around Christmas having to do with Jesus' Second Coming). Since the very first year it was built, the Gävle Goat is almost immediately destroyed. In fact, of the fifty-two years it has been constructed, only fourteen have lasted throughout the entire season. Actually, fifteen, if you count 1997, when half of it burned down due to having fireworks too close.
Anyhow, though thirty-one of the goat's demolitions were by arson, a handful were done in other ways: once by crashing a car into it, and three times where a crowd tore it to pieces. Most years, the culprits were never captured, but there was one time when an American was caught, and he explained that his local friends told him it was a tradition to do so. By 1986, some locals had enough, and the Natural Science Club of the School of Vasa began to build a second goat, but it also began to get the same treatment. In 1996, the Gävle municipal government (since they were spending money on the goat's construction) was tired of it all, and set up cameras, as well as guards, but there were a few times even these didn't help, and the destruction raged on.
This past year, the Gävle Goat got lucky, but I'm sure a lot of us will tune in next year, because - as interest grows - I'm sure plenty of firebugs will get itchy fingers reaching for packs of matches.

-- February 28, 2019 --

A Dog's Tale

There are many amazing stories of lost dogs going across an entire country to find their owners, but one mutt has got them all beat.
Lampo, which means "flash of lightning" in Italian, was an American mixed breed doggo brought to Italy in 1953 by visiting U.S. soldiers. Not being able to take him back, the assistant-master of the Campiglia Marittima train station, Elvio Barlettani, took him in. As Barlettani worked, Lampo would use his free time to hop a train out of the city, and somehow find a return train home, before his owner's shift ended. The pooch knew the train schedules so well, he could distinguish between a local tram (that was normally slower) from an express train. Platform workers soon became familiar with the hound, and would often place tags on him reading: FREE PASS FOR LAMPO. Workers began applying tickets to the pup to let Elvio know where he had visited that day. Though he didn't travel terribly far from his home base, it is known that he visited every station in the northwest of Italy, and it's estimated that Lampo took over 3000 trips (missing only one train home). This one of man's best friend became so famous in the area, he had many local tv stations run segments on him.

Sadly, this beautiful dog died doing what he loved. On July 22, 1961, Lampo was hit by a freight train that he could not move out of its path fast enough, due to a previous illness. Two years later, Barlettani published the book, Lampo: Il Cane Viaggiatore, in his honor, and it was quickly translated for American and British readers, as Lampo, The Traveling Dog. Today, a statue stands at the Campiglia Marittima station in memorial, which faces the rails he rode.

Though Lampo now runs the Elysian Fields, I hope he can hop a train there, too. Ride on, ride fast, you magnificent mongrel!

-- February 14, 2019 --

Not Your Typical Valentine's Day Post

Pearl Lusk was a girl from Quakertown, PA, who moved New York City, hoping to make a name for herself in the world of acting. On New Year's Eve of 1946, she'd play a role many would never forget.

On Thanksgiving Day, she was approached by a man identifying himself as Allen La Rue, but - thinking he was only wanted sex - told him she wasn't interested in an affair. He approached her again the day after Christmas Day telling her that he had a special job for her. Detective La Rue was working on a case of stolen jewels, and he knew the culprit; a saucy dame by the name of Olga. He had a special type of X-ray camera that, if he could get a photo of her, would let him know she had the goods. His main problem was that the bird knew who he was, as well as most of the force, so they needed an unknown to walk up, and snap the pic. Whether it was the fact that she thought he was the most handsome, and best dressed, man she'd ever seen, or her sense of duty, she decided to help. The best part was they'd pay her (with an extra bonus if they confiscated the jewels), as Lusk lost her job on Christmas Eve, so she needed the money, too. La Rue gave her a package with a pull string. She was to approach the guilty party, and pull the string when she was at a distance no greater than five feet (a third of a meter).
The next day, she met Allen at a bar in Times Square, and he gave her a shoebox, telling her it was the camera. She was to take the picture, and return to give him back the box. Later that evening, Pearl saw her target hop a subway train in Manhattan, headed towards Brooklyn. On the F, she sat near this Olga character, and exited when she did. She then walked up behind her, and pulled the string. Rushing back to Times Square, she returned the box to the detective. He told her to meet him at an apartment in the city the next day to let her in on the case's progress, as well as payment. When she showed up the next morning, La Rue said the camera was faulty, and she'd have to try again, with payment being doubled.
On December 31st, Ms. Lusk tried again. She followed the criminal, and did exactly the same as before. Only, this time, when she pulled the string, the box erupted with a huge bang. Olga's leg was nearly ripped off. Pearl thought someone had shot the thief, as she took the picture. When police arrived, they ripped open the box to find a sawed-off shotgun inside. The coppers hauled her into the police station, and after she told her side of the story, they showed he a few photos. She pointed out Allen La Rue, and they let her know this supposed flatfoot was actually Brooklyn gangster Alphonse Rocco. Olga was his wife, and she was divorcing him, taking a large chunk of his earnings, as well as a laundry list of secrets. Pearl Lusk had been duped by a smalltime mafioso to do his dirty work.
Rocco died six days later in a shoot-out with the fuzz when they tried to arrest him. Though she lost her leg, Olga and Pearl became friends. In April of 1952, Olga Rocco sued the city's police department for $200,000 in failing to protect her from her ex-husband, but lost.
Not sure why Alphonse broke the first rule of Cosa Nostra: leave no witnesses, but - if he had - I'd have one less thing to post about.

-- February 02, 2019 --

When It's Hard To Just Be Yourself

There have been countless cases of impostors. Many do it for monetary gain, like Christophe Rocancourt, who pretended to be a Rockefeller. Some do it for prestige, such as Rachel Dolezal, who - born of white parents - pretended to be an African-American, and became head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP. There are a few who do it because they are simply sick and twisted compulsive liars, which brings to mind Alicia Esteve Head, who claimed to be a 9/11 survivor, though she lived in Barcelona, Spain at the time. Though it's rare, some of them actually do some good. One such phony was Archibald Belaney.

Archie was born in Sussex, England on September 18, 1888. At only 14, he left grammar school to work for a timber company, until fired for mistakenly blowing up the company's office. In 1906, Belaney emigrated to Canada to study agriculture, but was soon bored, and became a fur trapper. The following year Archibald married Angele Egwuna, and later enlisted (1915) in the Canadian military where he served as a sniper for some time during the First World War. Upon his return to Canada, he met a 19-year-old, Mohawk Iroquois, Gertrude Bernard (aka Anahareo), which he ran off with to live in the woods. Now calling himself Grey Owl, he started to pass himself off as an Ojibwa native. With encouragement from Anahareo, A. B. began writing, and his pieces on animal lore were picked up by Forest & Outdoors, a Canadian Forestry Association publication. Between 1930 and 1935, the magazine put out 25 of his articles, and he was asked to film a segment for the U.S. National Park Service. In 1931, he released his first book, The Men of the Last Frontier, where he stresses environmentalism, and animal conservation. This book was followed by three others, Pilgrims of the Wild, The Adventures of Sajo and her Beaver People, and Tales of an Empty Cabin, all of which became big sellers, promoting a naturalist view. By 1935, he began touring Canada, the U.S. and England, giving speeches, where he would appear in full Ojibwa traditional garb. Around this time, maybe due to having to hide his true identity, Archie began to drink heavily, and was arrested several times for public drunkenness. Fatigued by his tours, and alcoholism, he collapsed in early April of 1938, and died on the 13th from pneumonia.
Immediately after his death, the Ontario newspaper North Bay Nugget, and the British daily The Times, discovered the truth behind Grey Owl. His publisher, and friend, Lovat Dickson worked to prove Grey Owl's identity, but came to the same conclusions as the exposés, and admitted that he had been lied to all those years. At first, his books were pulled off shelves, and many conservation causes were affected, resulting in decreased donations. After some time, many looked past the impostor, pointing out that his concerns over the environment were rather important. Even The Ottawa Citizen wrote, "Of course, the value of his work is not jeopardized. His attainments as a writer and naturalist will survive."
Today, Archibald is practically forgiven for his trespasses. In 1972, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced a documentary on the Grey Owl story, and a movie, titled Grey Owl, was made in 1999, starring Pierce Brosnan. A commemorative plaque to Grey Owl now hangs on the old Belaney house in Hastings, East Sussex (32 St. James Road), as well as the ranger station in the U.K.'s Hastings Country Park, and one can still visit his log cabin (built in 1930) in Canada's Prince Albert National Park.
This may prove that, sometimes, pretending to be someone else can have some positive effect, but I doubt it will, so it's best to just be your own person.

-- January 23, 2019 --

Short and Not-So-Sweet

Many empires lasted lifetimes, such as the Roman Empire (503 years), the Zhou Empire (790 years), and the Empire of Japan (1743 years so far). Quite a few countries have been around as long, like Scotland (844 years), Korea (1242 years), and Ethiopia (2916 years). Still, there are some that come and go in the blink of an eye, and examples are Markovo in Russia (8 months), Azawad in northwest Africa (3 months), and Connacht in Ireland (12 days). Even so, a handful hardly lasted over a weekend. Two of those would be the Republic of Benin, and Carpatho.
The first was established in September of 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War, when a neutral, and ethnically diverse, group of several million residents (backed by the country of Biafra, which itself lasted all but three years) set up a separate state. Biafran forces placed American-educated Dr. Albert Okonkwo as the head of government, giving him the title of Governor, on the 19th of the month. The state pledged support for the Commonwealth of Nations, plus the Organization of African Unity. Benin won some recognition from a few other countries, and they even decided on its new flag.

The very next day, Nigerian federal troops marched into the capital city, Benin City, dismantling the government, and reabsorbed the state. The Republic of Benin lasted just one day.
The second I mentioned above, Carpatho, formed in the southwestern tip of Czechoslovakia. On March 15th of 1938, the indigenous population of Subcarpathia, placed the Reverend President Avgustyn Ivanovych Voloshyn as their head of state. By that afternoon, the government had set up an eight-point "First Constitutional Law of Carpatho-Ukraine", as well as created the new country's coat of arms.

The following day, Hungarian forces invaded (backed by the Nazis), and most of the ruling party fled. The area stayed under Hungarian control, until it was ceded by the Soviet Union in 1945, and it is now part of Ukraine.
Well, no matter the length of time, remember that all politicians are full of shit, and, like diapers, should be changed regularly, but don't let any of this stop you from setting up an autonomous state within your own bounds. Long live liberty, long live revolution!

-- January 08, 2019 --

Dirty Boy

In John Waters' infamous black comedy classic, Pink Flamingos, Divine becomes "the filthiest person alive". Without spoiling much, it ends with Divine scooping up real dog shit as a chewy snack. While eating it once is pretty freaking filthy, try lighting some up every time you wanted a smoke. That's only one of the things Amou Haji, known as "the world's dirtiest man", does on the daily.

Amou, an 80-year-old homeless hermit, lives in the Fars province of Iran, just outside the village of Dejgah. He has not showered in 60 years, and when he does lay his head, it's usually in a hole dug by animals. Haji cuts his hair by burning it, and "grooms" himself with the help of one of his few possessions: a car's side mirror. Believing cleanliness will make one sick, he once ran away from a crowd trying to give him a bath. He spends his days looking for food, which consists strictly of roadkill; his favorite being porcupine. Besides his car mirror, and shabby clothing, his only other possession is a 3" piece of bent-metal, plumber's piping that he uses to smoke animal feces.
Though many say Amou is a sick man, Haji claims to be very happy living like this, so let's not cast aspersions on someone living quite differently from us. If the world ever goes to tatters, he's actually one step ahead of all of us who'll be fighting over the scraps of the life we once knew. Here's to Haji, who - though I love Divine - is truly the filthiest person alive.

-- December 26, 2018 --

Worship the Glitch

Steampunk is nothing new. It's been around since the era it's based around, the 19th Century. While we have better known literary cases such as Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1869), and The Steam Man of the Prairies by Edward S. Ellis (1868), I'd like to bring up the lesser-known, mechanical work of John Murray Spear.
Spear was born in Boston, MA in 1805, and baptized by his namesake John Murray (who founded the Universalist Church of America). By the age of 25, JMS became the minister of a Universalist congregation in the nearby village of Barnstable. By 1840, he was deep into political activism, such as the abolition of the death penalty, equal rights for women, and was a huge part of New England's antislavery movement - managing the local division of the Underground Railroad (known as the Boston Vigilance Committee).
In 1852, he lost interest in the Universalist Church, and, after leaving, began to delve into Spiritualism, publishing the book Messages From the Superior State, where he claimed to be in contact with a group of higher intelligence called with "The Association of Electrizers" (a philanthropic ghost frat devoted to helping mankind through technology), which included the spirits of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Emanuel Swedenborg and John Quincy Adams. The very next year, he proclaimed to have received a message containing his life's purpose. He was to gather a group of his followers, and move to a small log cabin on High Rock Hill in Lynn, MA. There, they were to not just contact God, but build him. Naming his automated Robot Lord "New Motive Power", it was to be a machine-driven Messiah, who was to usher in a new Utopia. Working from the Electrizers' blueprints, the flock constructed their prototype; made of copper and zinc atop a common dinner table, costing them about $2000 (around $60,000 today).

interpretation by unknown artist

John then held a ritual, where the machine was given a mock birth by a member dubbed the "New Mary", so it could have life. Carefully-selected devotees of both sexes were then presented to The Great Gadget, one at a time, for their "vibrations" to raise its level of consciousness. The appliance made a few noises, and some parts moved a bit, but didn't do much else. They thought to build a bigger model, costing ten times the original amount, but Spear said he received a directive from The Association telling him to move to a place with cleaner air. The clan packed up, hauling the dismantled contraption to Randolph, NY. While no one knows what truly happened to their Mechanical God, it is said that a group of nonbelievers ransacked where the mechanism was kept, tore it to pieces, and threw the parts about the surrounding area.
Brokenhearted, JMS (without his flock, as many left thinking he had gone insane) moved to the UK for the next six years. Finding that the British spiritual community didn't care for his radical politics, he left to California, where John worked to help establish Socialism. In 1872, Spear said the Electrizers told him to retire, and upon moving to Philadelphia, PA, he did as they instructed. Spear joined his spirit communicators in October of 1887, and was buried in Mount Moriah Cemetery.
I find it sad that the original New Motive Power (or even a replica) no longer exists, as it would have made a wonderful piece of folk art. Oh well, rust in peace.

-- December 13, 2018 --

One Scary Village

Thanks to shows like Jonathan Ross' Japanorama, Japan is somewhat known for their odd customs, but some of them can make parts of that country seem downright creepy. One such place that gives me the willies is the village of Nagoro. Located in a remote mountain area on the island of Shikoku, in Japan's Tokushima Prefecture, Nagoro used to be the home to about 300 locals, but the population has fallen to a mere thirty people since the building of the Nagoro Dam in 1961.
In 2002, native Tsukimi Ayano moved back from Osaka to care for her father, and seeing how small the community had become, created a kakashi ("scarecrow") in her dad's likeness, which she placed in a field. Since then, she has made over 400 more in the image of other past and present residents. The town's citizens loved them so much, they began to create many of their own. The scarecrows now outnumber the humans 100 to 1, as there are about 3000 of them peppered about the landscape. While many are scattered about in fields, there are some depicted as fishing by the river, hanging out in front of the general store, leaning on phone poles, waiting at bus stops, and there are even classrooms full of "students" in the vacant elementary school that closed in 2012.

This slice of weirdness has made the hamlet a bit of a tourist attraction, and a few Americans visit just to punch their scarecrow version of U.S. President Donald Trump. To drum up a bigger influx of visitors to the region, the provincial government has begun to promote the Scarecrow Festival each October. Even so, I don't think I'll ever visit this little borough - especially alone.

-- December 01, 2018 --

Ending It All

I'm not going anywhere just yet, and as usual I'm staying busy with new projects. A new one I've begun is called END HUMANITY NOW!, which I have new bumper stickers for.

Two styles, one is 8.5x3" (21.5x7.5cm) and the other is 4x5" (10x12.5cm). They are $2 for two of each (4 stickers in total), with postage paid for anywhere on Earth. Contact me to order.
The climax of this project will be - drum roll please - when I run for mayor of Miami! More info on that to come soon.

-- November 22, 2018 --

Reaching Skyward

The Newby-McMahon Building, in Wichita Falls, Texas, pissed off a lot of folks in 1919. While it upset local residents, it infuriated investors to the point of lawsuit.

Thanks to the discovery of a huge petroleum reservoir near the neighboring city of Burkburnett in 1912, the area received a huge economic, as well as population, boom. Because of this, mineral rights, and stock deals, were being conducted out on the street, or in tents, due to the lack of office space. In steps structural engineer, and oil man, J.D. McMahon, who announced he would build a high rise office building on the corner of 7th Street and La Salle. McMahon collected $200,000 in investment money, which today amounts close to $3,000,000. He then distributed blueprints to his benefactors that read it was to be 480". Believing it to be 480', investors okayed the construction, and work began. Upon finishing it, the structure was a mere four floors. When lenders learned of the swindle, they took J.D. to court, but he won, as he never said how tall the building would be, and shareholders had all read the drafts stating the actual size of 480 inches. Not long after, Ripley's Believe It or Not! dubbed it "the world's littlest skyscraper", and the title stuck.
By the Great Depression of 1929, the building was abandoned as the oil boom went bust, and a fire gutted the place in 1931. By the 1970s, it was scheduled to be demolished several times, but a number of locals came to its defense, in part due to its kooky past, and nickname. Though still empty at that time, the city donated the Newby-McMahon Building to the Wichita County Heritage Society (WCHS) in 1986, hoping it to become part of the Depot Square Historic District. In 2000, the city council hired the architectural firm of Bundy, Young, Sims & Potter to stabilize it, and the building was entered in the National Register of Historic Places as a Texas Historical Landmark, with most of it currently holding a furniture company, though some floors are often leased to local artists.
While the building never met the criteria to be classified as a skyscraper, or even a high rise, "the world's smallest building" still has a big history.

-- November 09, 2018 --

A Rock-N-Roll Day Dream

Rod Serling (1924 - 1975) was a sci-fi genius, who is best known for his tv show, The Twilight Zone, which he produced, as well as wrote much of the story lines for.

A decorated WWII veteran, Serling began working in radio on New York's WNYC, acting, and doing odd jobs. His first three radio scripts aired in 1949, two on the Grand Central Station romance program, and the other on the drama series Dr. Christian. Believing radio show broadcasting was a dying art, he moved on to television, working for WKRC in Cincinnati, writing comedy. He soon gained fame after one script (titled "Patterns") for the tv show Kraft Television Theatre earned him high praise as a writer by critics in 1955. While working for CBS, his 1958 episode "The Time Element" for Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball's The Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse was so well loved, he was offered his own show, and he set The Twilight Zone into production, which ran from 1959 to 1964, airing 156 episodes.
Though he created another great show, Night Gallery (1969 - 1973), he never forgot about radio, and originated a drama series called The Zero Hour in 1973, but his wildest radio show was his very last. A few weeks before his death, Rod Serling played what was, basically, a prank on listeners. Titled Fantasy Park, the stunt was aired on close to 200 stations throughout the Labor Day weekend of 1975. The 48-hour program was a fake concert, where dozens of rock bands of the time "played", as well as having a Beatles "reunion", using crowd noise, sound effects, and mixing in prerecorded live gigs. Even though disclaimers were run every hour (such as "Hello, this is Rod Serling, and welcome back to Fantasy Park. The crowds here today are unreal," and "This is Fantasy Park, the greatest live concert never held."), every station that broadcast the show was swamped with phone calls asking where the concert was held, and how they could get in.
Well, as the famous intro to The Twilight Zone goes, "You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight, and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop..." a total crock of rock.

-- October 29, 2018 --

Smoke Break

While I definitely don't promote it, I don't hide the fact I'm a casual smoker. I write "casual" because I only pick up the habit a few months out of the year. In all honesty, I return to smoking because of cravings, and then quit due to health concerns, but if there was a safer cigarette, I'd smoke all the time.

The weird thing about wishing there was a healthier alternative is that there's been several for over 50 years, but the cigarette companies suppressed them.
In 1964, an American subsidiary of London's British-American Tobacco PLC, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation, applied for a patent to a test cigarette they named Project Ariel (after the spirit in Shakespeare's Tempest). Awarded the patent in 1966, this new brand held tobacco that was heated, instead of burned, creating a cig that conatined less harmful agents than regular smokes. According to documents stolen by a former employee of a lawfirm working for Brown & Williamson, the company reported two models of the safer cigarette were created, "one free of tobacco smoke, and one having a small amount of tobacco smoke." But, finding they both delivered smaller amounts of nicotine, researchers emphasized that B-AT Co was "in the nicotine, rather than the tobacco industry." To make matters worse, new studies were coming out showcasing the harmful effects of smoking, and British-American Tobacco felt they might open themselves up to lawsuits, as by releasing a safer cigarette might imply they already knew they were selling a dangerous product. Therefore, the project was shelved.
Even before Ariel, there was the lesser known Project X.A., which was run by Liggett & Myers, a tobacco company out of North Carolina. Also known as the "palladium cigarette", this product used palladium, as well as magnesium nitrate, to destroy cancer-causing agents in smoke. Testing ran from 1955, until 1974, with an estimated budget of $10 million, but, even though L&M knew the product would sell well, they shelved it after pressure from Phillip Morris and Brown & Williamson. According to Civil Action No. 99-2496 (aka The United States Proposed Findings of Fact in the case of United States v. Philip Morris), which was filed in 1999, Brown & Williamson threatened the "very existence" of Liggett & Myers if it marketed the cigarette, and further warned L&M they would be left out of joint defense agreements, as well as expelled from the Tobacco Institute if they continued.
These very threats are why R.J. Reynolds (who, strangely enough, bought B&W in 2004) did not market their Premier brand "smokeless" cigarette as a safer alternative to regular smokes, in 1987. They saw promoting one brand as "safe" would go against the tobacco industry's position that your standard cigarettes weren't unsafe. Claiming the Premier brand was released too soon, RJR removed it from the market the following year.
So, put all that in your pipe, and smoke it. Hell, it's probably less harmful.

-- October 15, 2018 --

One School You Should Drop Out Of

Imagine a school where the alumni are some of the scariest political figures you can dream up. Nevermind. There's no need to, because it actually already exists, and - of course - it was a product of the United States.

Founded in 1946, the U.S. Army School of the Americas was located at Fort Gulick in the United States' Panama Canal Zone. The school was established to train Latin American armed forces in the military practices of the U.S. Though it has trained more than 60,000 soldiers (from 21 countries) in the 54 years it had existed, a small number of those graduates went on to become some of the most despotic dictators, deadliest soldiers, and dangerous drug dealers, in the Western hemisphere. That list includes:
Colonel Alberto Quijano of the Colombian Special Forces, who provided security for Diego León Montoya Sánchez (aka "Don Diego"), the leader of the Norte del Valle Cartel.
Colonel Domingo Monterrosa of El Salvador, who is responsible for the El Mozote massacre of over 800 Salvadoran citizens.
General Luis Alonso Discua, who commanded Battalion 3-16, a Honduran military death squad.
Army Minister of Defense Vladimir Padrino Lopez, and SEBIN director Gustavo Gonzalez Lopez, who were both charged with drug trafficking, and human rights violations against Venezuelan protesters.
Naval officer Emilio Eduardo Massera, a leading participant in the Argentine coup of 1976, and masterminded behind The Dirty War, which resulted in over 10,000 deaths and disappearances.
General Raúl Iturriaga, former deputy director of Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (the Chilean secret police) under the Pinochet dictatorship.
Head of Intelligence Manuel Noriega, who ran Panama as the de facto leader from 1983 - 1989, as well as money laundering, and drug/weapons dealing from 1972 - 1989.
Heriberto "The Executioner" Lazcano, and Arturo "Zeta One" Guzmán Decena, both founders of the Zetas Mexican Cartel.
While this is a brief listing, the nonprofit organization called School of the Americas Watch has released another 25 names of serious human rights offenders.
In 2000, due to heavy scrutiny, the US Congress withdrew the Secretary of the Army's authority to operate the school. Under the National Defense Authorization Act, 10 USC Sec 2166, the name was changed to Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, and operations were moved to Fort Benning, Georgia in 2001. The "new" school has since trained 20,000 students from 36 countries. Though it now claims to have established considerable transparency, U.S. Army Major Joseph Blair, a former director of instruction at the school, was quoted as saying in 2002, "There are no substantive changes besides the name. They teach the identical courses that I taught; changed the course names, but use the same manuals."
On an interesting side note, many have wondered how Hillary could have lost to Trump by such a small electoral margin, but do know that one of the platforms the Democrats ran on was closing the school altogether. Now there's something for conspiracists to think about.

-- October 01, 2018 --

No Man Is An Island, But He Can Build One

When I lived in New York City, one of my favorite things to do was take long walks to snap photos for my many photography projects, one of which was visiting odd spots for my This Hidden City blog.
Though I covered Roosevelt Island in one post (see that here), I didn't write about nearby Belmont Island, also known as U Thant Island, which can best be seen from Roosevelt's south shore.

click on image for larger view

Belmont Island is an artificial isle, which developed out of Man-O-War Reef in the early 1900s due to construction. At only 100 x 200 ft (30 x 60 m), it is the smallest island in the Manhattan borough.
In 1891, William Steinway funded the planning of two tunnels for trolleys under the East River (now called the Steinway Tunnels, which carry the number 7 subway train line). Built to link Manhattan Island to Steinway's company town, Steinway Village (in Astoria, Queens), where his Steinway & Sons Piano Company was located. After William's death in 1896, the project was picked up by the founder of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), August Belmont Jr.
When construction reached the middle of the river around 1902, a shaft was excavated, leading to a small outcropping of granite called Man-O-War Reef. Thinking it was easier to shovel a tunnel to help remove excess landfill, rather than carry it back to the Manhattan shore, much of the rocks were dumped around the reef, fabricating the small island.
Though the islet has been managed by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, which named it Belmont Island, it had stayed a barren pile of rocks until 1977. That year, a group calling themselves Peace Meditation, who were United Nations employees, and followers of guru Sri Chinmoy (then the interfaith chaplain at U.N. Headquarters), got tired of looking out the building's windows at the tiny bare enclave, and decided to do something. They leased the isle from the city, and covered it in greenery, as well as constructing a metal arch, and renamed the island after then-U.N. Secretary General, U Thant.
Today, some of the flora still remains, but the arch has toppled, and the only other thing on the island is a 60ft (18m) metal Coast Guard beacon tower. The island is also currently off-limits to people, as it is a sanctuary for migrating double-crested cormorants. Still, that hasn't stopped quite a few explorers, such as artist and filmmaker Duke Riley, who rowed a small boat over to the islet under the cover of darkness in 2008. Riley proclaimed the pile of rocks a sovereign nation, hoisting a pennant flag (depicting two electric eels) atop the beacon, all the while videotaping it for a work titled Belmont Island (SMEACC).
If you're looking to visit, I propose bringing a pair of binoculars, because that's as close as you'll probably get.

-- September 21, 2018 --

Rhyme Time

This October, I release the 2nd edition of my poetry chapbook, Throne Out: An Attempt to Depose Prose, which collects some of my favorite "throwaways".

What better way to celebrate that on this blog, than to post about William "Topaz" McGonagall, who is often described as "the world's worst poet"?

Born of Irish parents, little is known about William's early childhood, mostly because he would often go back and forth on the particulars. Stating at one point to be born in 1825, he later said it was 1830. Scholars place his birth as possibly being in Ireland, though he claimed to have been born in Scotland, probably due to wanting to receive relief under the Poor Law of 1845.
What is known is that he, following in his father's footsteps, began working as a handloom weaver. In 1846, he married, and produced seven children (five sons, and two daughters). At one time, he attempted to become an actor, but would often fly off script, with the most infamous instance being when he played general Macbeth in the Shakespeare play, and he refused to die in Act V, thinking other actors were upstaging him.
Sometime in 1877, McGonagall wrote that a great feeling had washed over him, leaving him with the desire to write poetry. He wrote a number of poems, and - seeking funds to continue - penned a letter to Queen Victoria for her patronage. After receiving a reply of refusal, he walked 60 miles over mountains, and in thunderstorms, to her castle, announcing his arrival as "The Queen's Poet". The guards told him to piss off, but the act gained him some recognition in the local papers. For pennies, he often recited poems against the evils of alcohol in pubs, which usually ended with him being pelted with food. Much of the time, he would be found selling his poems in the street, but he was mainly supported by donations from friends, and - possibly to get William out of town for a bit - they paid for him to travel to New York City so as to peddle his poetry, but returned unsuccessful. Garnering a bit of notoriety for his bad poetry, he was hired by circuses to read his work, with the full knowledge that the crowd was permitted to throw eggs at him. His friends, again, got together in 1890, and paid for the publishing of his first book, Poetic Gems. The following year, his hometown of Dundee forced him out, and he packed up his family, moving to Perth. Later, he received a hoax letter, telling him King Thibaw Min of Burma had knighted him as "Topaz McGonagall, Grand Knight of the Holy Order of the White Elephant Burmah", of which he took seriously, and referred to himself as "Sir William Topaz McGonagall, Knight of the White Elephant, Burmah" for the remainder of his life. He died, without a dime to his name, in 1902, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh, Scotland, leaving behind over 200 poems.
Though forgotten for many years, he was rediscovered, and his legacy lived on in popular media. Peter Sellers often read William's poetry from 1951 to 1960 on BBC Radio's The Good Show. An episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus had a McGonagall-styled poet, called Ewan McTeagle, who wrote poems that were actually requests to borrow money, and in the 2003 novel, The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett, he appeared as Nac Mac Feegle, whose terrible poetry can defeat enemies. After gaining cult status, a gravestone was finally placed on his burial spot in 1999, which labeled him "Poet and Tragedian", and a broadsheet of 35 of his poems sold for £6,600 (US$8500) at an auction held by Scottish auctioneers, Lyon & Turnbull, in May of 2008.
Hopefully, my poetry isn't anywhere near as bad, and if you're interested in a copy of Throne Out ($10 postage paid in the U.S.), feel free to contact me.

-- September 10, 2018 --

The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Lawyers

A whole lot of people, myself included, find it odd that a corporation can be deemed a person. It's usually done so that a company can get a handful of the lawful rights a physical human has. It's mostly used so they could sue someone, or donate large sums of money to political parties, hence it's often seen as a nefarious legal maneuver.
Still, there have been times where legal personhood has been used for positive purposes. One such case is when a country gave a natural resource, a hilly area known as Te Urewera, its own legal identity.

This section of scantly-populated hills is located on the North Island of New Zealand's Hawkes Bay Region. It is the historical home of the Maori tribe of Tuhoe, and - due to the area's heavy isolation - stayed mostly untouched by British colonists, leaving it pretty much under Maori control up until the 1880s. Throughout the early 1900s, it became the home of a religious community run by self-proclaimed prophet Rua Tapunui Kenana, who dubbed himself the Maori messiah. In 1954, to help preserve Te Urewera (which means "burnt penis" in the Maori language), the government sanctioned it as a national park. The status was removed in 2014, but only to provide the location with stronger legal standing by becoming the world's first natural area to obtain legitimate rights as a person.
This worked so well in protecting the land, New Zealand opted to make another location the world's second natural resource to reach legal personhood, the Whanganui River. In March of 2017, the country's third largest river was also given the authority, commitments, and accountabilities of a proper person.
While this is a great way to protect land, it may leave some rather depressed to find that real estate in some countries have more rights than actual humans in other regions of the world.

-- September 02, 2018 --

You Can Finally Use This Blog As Toilet Paper

I have a new fanzine out next month, Know-It-All Asshole Jerk, based on this blog. It collects over 50 wild, wonderful and weird entries from around the world covering literature, hoaxes, art, religion and history.

It's only $5 - postage paid within the U.S. - for TWO copies (with another $6 outside the country).
Contact me to order.

-- August 28, 2018 --

It's Just A Smudge

Recently, Venezuela is a country with a really stained humanitarian record, but the stains I'm going to be writing about now are something completely different.
In 1986, the country's capital of Caracas began to have a mysterious black ooze appear on its roadways. Known as "La Mancha Negra" ("The Black Stain"), it first showed up as a 150 foot-long (46 meter-long) spot on the main road to the airport. By 1989, the slippery stuff was seeping through 8 miles (13 km) of highway. Nothing was known about what it was, beside the color, texture, and that it expanded in the heat, and shrank in the cold.

In 1992, and estimated 1,800 deaths were said to have been due to car accidents caused by the greasy goo. Fed up, the federal government stepped in, and threw millions of their dollars at the problem. Pressure cleaning, and even detergents failed to clear the mess; later re-paving the roads, only to have it surface again. The Venezuelan Ministry of Transport and Communications tried to pinpoint where it came from, with no results. Experts, using help from Europe, and North America, found out what it was made of (showing it to be a mixture of oil, dust, plus various synthetic and organic materials), but failed to get the why it was, and how it got there.
Weirdly enough, it still plagues the country to this day, and locals just live with it as another burden they have to bear, but, sadly, it currently seems the least of their worries.

-- August 13, 2018 --

A Fiery Sermon

Many people have heard of David Koresh, as well as what happened to his Branch Davidians, but what many don't know is that David probably just wanted to rock out.

David Koresh was born Vernon Wayne Howell in Houston, TX in August of 1959. Vernon was pretty much a bastard, as his parents were never wed, and his daddy ran off with another gal when Vernon was just two. He dropped out of high school due to problems with dyslexia, but he knew The New Testament well enough to quote long tracts of scripture by heart. VW became a born-again in at a Baptist church, but soon switched over to the Seventh-Day Adventists because of his mom's conversion to that faith. Howell was soon kicked out for constantly chasing after the preacher's daughter. In 1981 he moved to Waco, TX and joined the Branch Davidians (a group that had splintered from the Shepherd's Rod cult in the 1950s, who themselves broke off from the Seventh-Day Adventists in the 1930s). In 1983 Vernon started banging the prophetess and leader of the Davidians, Lois Roden, and they believed their son would be "the Chosen One". She quickly let him start preaching from the Good Book, and give sermons to the cult members, which pissed off Roden's son, George, who was promised the cult would be handed over to him. Soon enough, George chased Vernon away with gun in hand, and he set up camp with a few cult members in Palestine, TX. In 1987 VWH, and seven followers, armed and dressed in camouflage attacked the Mount Carmel camp, and its leader. Roden's son was shot, and all were arrested except for the injured George. Vernon's attempted murder trial ended in mistrial, and all other members were acquitted. In a strange turn of events George Roden was tried for murder the following year after axing to death a member of his congregation (Dale Adair) who thought Howell may be the coming messiah. Upon inspection of Mount Carmel a methamphetamine lab was discovered, and the property was seized. Place on police auction the Branch Davidians raised the dough to buy the place, and, in 1990, VW Howell changed his name to David Koresh.
The rest is history. Well, okay, if you don't know that history here goes: Koresh began to stock pile weapons, claiming the end of the world was nigh, and would occur with a battle against the Great Beast - meaning the U.S. government. In February of 1993 the government made good on his prophecy by staging a raid on Mount Carmel. A gun battle broke out leaving Koresh shot, six members of the cult dead (including Koresh's two year old daughter), and four agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were killed. This lead to a standoff that lasted 51 days, until April 19, when federal agents using tanks set the Carmel compound ablaze killing almost all inside (79 in total, of which 21 were children). A later incarnation of the group, known as the Hidden Manna, think Koresh, and all those killed, were to return from the dead in 2012 to give the government their just desserts.
A few years before all hell broke loose in Waco, Koresh took his guitar, and entered the studio to record some music he had written.

Much of his music was passed around in the underground tape-trading circuit by those who collected outsider music, or the few that knew he was a cult leader. After the tragedy, a few bootleggers cashed in by releasing much of Koresh's music, such as Florida's Malcolm Tent on his TPOS label (The Music and the Message cassette), and the Voice of Fire CD (on Junior's Motel Records).

-- August 03, 2018 --

Killer Jazz

You ever loved a certain type of music so much, you'd kill for it? I'm sure you haven't, but that doesn't mean others wouldn't. There was once a serial killer on the loose in Louisiana who tried to promote jazz music. Kinda.
In 1918 and 1919, a still unidentified madman, dubbed the Axeman of New Orleans, walked the streets late at night, killing entire families using an ax - usually the families' own - leaving six dead, and twelve injured. Robbery was not a motive, as he would eneter the home, murder, and not take a single thing. Due to the fact that many victims were Italian-Americans, or Italian immigrants, it was thought that the crimes were Mafia related, but that theory changed in the spring of 1919.
On March 13, 1919, a letter - with Satanic overtones - was recieved by a local newspaper, The Times-Picayune, claiming to be from the Axeman himself. It read:

Hell, March 13, 1919
Esteemed Mortal of New Orleans:
They have never caught me and they never will. They have never seen me, for I am invisible, even as the ether that surrounds your earth. I am not a human being, but a spirit and a demon from the hottest hell. I am what you Orleanians and your foolish police call the Axeman.
When I see fit, I shall come and claim other victims. I alone know whom they shall be. I shall leave no clue except my bloody axe, besmeared with blood and brains of he whom I have sent below to keep me company.
If you wish you may tell the police to be careful not to rile me. Of course, I am a reasonable spirit. I take no offense at the way they have conducted their investigations in the past. In fact, they have been so utterly stupid as to not only amuse me, but His Satanic Majesty, Francis Josef, etc. But tell them to beware. Let them not try to discover what I am, for it were better that they were never born than to incur the wrath of the Axeman. I don't think there is any need of such a warning, for I feel sure the police will always dodge me, as they have in the past. They are wise and know how to keep away from all harm.
Undoubtedly, you Orleanians think of me as a most horrible murderer, which I am, but I could be much worse if I wanted to. If I wished, I could pay a visit to your city every night. At will I could slay thousands of your best citizens (and the worst), for I am in close relationship with the Angel of Death.
Now, to be exact, at 12:15 (earthly time) on next Tuesday night, I am going to pass over New Orleans. In my infinite mercy, I am going to make a little proposition to you people. Here it is:
I am very fond of jazz music, and I swear by all the devils in the nether regions that every person shall be spared in whose home a jazz band is in full swing at the time I have just mentioned. If everyone has a jazz band going, well, then, so much the better for you people. One thing is certain and that is that some of your people who do not jazz it out on that specific Tuesday night (if there be any) will get the axe.
Well, as I am cold and crave the warmth of my native Tartarus, and it is about time I leave your earthly home, I will cease my discourse. Hoping that thou wilt publish this, that it may go well with thee, I have been, am and will be the worst spirit that ever existed either in fact or realm of fancy.
-The Axeman

That evening, music halls and dance clubs were filled to capacity, and, while some homes blasted their phonograph, others went as far as to hire their own band. No murders happened that night, but they resumed a few months later, and stopped as mysteriously as they began.
Later that year, a New Orleans songwriter Joseph John Davilla penned the tune, "The Mysterious Axman's Jazz (Don't Scare Me Papa)", which was published by World's Music Publishing Company, but never officially released on 78rpm.

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Let's have a listen...

Since then, the song has been covered by Reddie Whilling & Abel, as well as Squirrel Nut Zippers, while the Axeman's tale has been woven into short stories by Poppy Z. Brite, and Chuck Palahniuk, sufaced in Christopher Farnsworth's 2012 novel Red, White, and Blood, and even made it onto television through an episode of American Horror Story: Coven ("The Axeman Cometh" - November, 2013).

-- July 16, 2018 --

Going Underground in NYC

In Neolithic times, many of our ancestors lived in caves, and from then on some cultures have created underground dwellings, such as the city of Derinkuyu in Turkey, which had housed about 20,000 people, 200ft (60m) under the surface. So why not go back?
That's what designers Jay and Kenneth Swayze of Underground World Homes did in the 60s. Scared of impending nuclear doom, the brothers built bomb shelters that were full homes, complete with all the amenities needed for family living. After having two constructed for himself, investor Jerry Henderson loved the company so much, he bought half of it. Wanting to publicize the project, Jerry had a home produced at the 1964-65 World's Fair in New York City. The Fair, which was held in Queen's Flushing Meadows Corona Park, placed the exhibit between the Hall of Science and Terrace on the Park.

Here's where the story takes a turn for the weird(er).
After the fair ended, each exhibitor was supposed to take down their enterprise. It is believed that the trio felt it would be cheaper to just take down the exterior pavilion, and simply cover up the entrance to the underground lair. Therefore, though no one knows for sure, there could be an entire home still under the park.
Lori Walters, professor at the University of Central Florida, is interested enough to try to find out, but feels she needs more evidence the home might still be there before she petitions the New York City Parks Department, or drags her ground-penetrating radar equipment that far up north. Others, such as investigator John Piro, have slinked around the park with shovels and rods attempting to find the old entrance with no luck.
Sadly, this mystery may never be solved, as the Park Department's Sam Biederman believes the structure was not only demolished, but that excavations would disrupt park activities and visitors, so we may never know.
Still, there's a lot of interesting stuff to check out in the area. For other above-ground weirdness at Flushing Meadows Corona Park, visit my old blog post at This Hidden City to check out what I saw there.

-- July 02, 2018 --

Twinsies

Many people think twins are creepy, but some are way creepier than you could even think. Take the case of Jennifer and June Gibbons.

Born in April of 1963, the identical twins were the daughters of parents who moved to Wales (England), from Barbados. They happened to be the only black children in their school, and were picked on by the other kids. This caused them to stick to themselves, developing a language of their own, much of which consisted of a high-speed Bajan Creole. After a while, the sisters pledged that they would speak only to one another (as well as their younger sister Rose). This frustrated their parents, and angered the school they attended. In an attempt to correct this, the pair was sent off to boarding school, but every time they were separated, each would go into a catatonic state.
In 1979, the Jennifer and June received diaries as Christmas gifts. Instead of filling them with their daily activities, they began to write novels, after taking part in a mailorder creative writing course. Many of the stories took place in Malibu, CA, and most of the teenagers in these stories behaved oddly, as well as took part in crime.
Some of these stories are rather interesting, and - for the time - were pretty far out. In The Pugilist, by Jennifer, a doctor wants to save the life of his dying child. He kills the family dog, and uses its heart in a transplant for his son. The dog's soul then takes over the child, and murders his father. June wrote Pepsi-Cola Addict, where a high school boy is seduced by a teacher. When the school finds out, they punish the boy instead, and send him off to reformatory school. There a homosexual guard takes a liking to him, and starts to put on plays for the boy.
In a bid to win favor with their girls, the Gibbon parents paid to release many of their daughter's stories on self-publishing, vanity press New Horizons. Sadly, the girls didn't care, and spiraled downward, falling into crime. The pair committed break-ins, theft, and even arson. Once caught for their misdeeds, they were sent to the infamous Broadmoor Hospital. There, under heavy medication, they lost their will to write, but kept their silence.
Part of their pact was that one of them could only speak after the other died. In March of 1993, June claims that Jennifer sacrificed herself, so as to end their ordeal. Soon after being moved to Caswell Clinic, Jennifer fell into a coma, and later died of a swollen heart. Once she passed, June exclaimed, "I'm free at last, liberated, and at last Jennifer has given up her life for me." June currently lives a - no pun intended - quiet life in the UK, though she gives interviews every so often.
The duo had their life story told in a number of documentaries, and docu-dramas, including the BBC's The Silent Twins (1986), and Silent Twin: Without My Shadow (part of the tv series Inside Story in 1994).

-- June 21, 2018 --

When People Choose To Be Miserable

Ever wondered what's the most pleasant song to listen to? How about the most unpleasant? Turns out, there's a music act that just might help answer all this.
The duo Komar and Melamid, consisting of Russian-American artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, teamed up with neuroscientist David Sulzer (working under his composer alter-ego Dave Soldier) in 1997 to write the most annoying, as well as enjoyable, song.
In 1994, the artists hired a polling company to ask people what were their most liked and hated elements in artwork. The duo took the results, and turned them into a series of "most wanted" and "least wanted" paintings. These pieces were later published in the book Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art, in 1996.
That same year, the Dia Art Foundation decided to release a CD with a similar concept by the two. Sulzer/Soldier was recruited, and he polled around 500 visitors to Dia galleries, asking what instruments, themes, and genres people most/least wanted to hear.
In the "most" category, the answers were rather obvious, such as organic bass playing, piano, guitar, and drums, including lyrics about love. In the "least" category, the answers were much more specific: including tubas, cowboy music, advertising jingles, bagpipes, opera-rap hybrids, children's voices, accordions, and drum machines. The former was released as "The Most Wanted Song" (with guitar played by Vernon Reid of Living Colour), while the later became "The Most Unwanted Song". Both tracks were released on the CD, The People's Choice: Music, which was made available only at the Dia Foundation bookstore, until 2001, when it was re-released on Soldier's record label, Mulatta Records.

"The Most Wanted Song" is your typical pile of crap one might find on, say, a Celine Dion "best of" compilation, but "The Most Unwanted Song" is such a pile of crap, it needs a full 22 minutes of your attention. Enjoy!

-- June 09, 2018 --

Stop, Look, and Listen

The newest 156 EP, Good-Bye, Bed-Stuy, Ten Times is out now.
90 minutes of binaural field recordings of Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy neighborhood, along with a 12-page booklet with 15 photos, and text recounting the Brooklyn chapter of the 156 story. Limited to 50 hand-numbered copies.

Bandcamp purchases will get you the tape and booklet, plus digital download with three extra tracks. $8 postage paid in the U.S.
There are also new 156 screen-printed shirts with the DRI-meets-Neubauten "Dirty Rotten Buildings" logo - L and XL only. Also $8 postage paid in the U.S.

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For those still interested, there are just a few copies left of the Memento Mori 10" EP, where all the music was made using human bones. Check that out here. Still $20, with postage paid in the U.S.

-- June 01, 2018 --

A Call To Arms

My newest booklet, Ready For War, is out today.

Limited, and hand-numbered, to only 200 copies, it is a collection of 100 photos of my favorite battle jackets I've collected from 2013 - 2018 (107 if you count the front and back covers), on full-color glossy pages. The booklet comes with two 5x7" postcards, each with 8 different battle jacket pics.
UPDATE: The booklet is now sold out!

-- May 28, 2018 --

Time Marches On

I'm a big fan of conspiracy theories. I don't believe a whole lot of them, and even think most of them take away from the seriousness of what actually goes on in the political sphere, but I'm fascinated by them nonetheless.
One I find intriguing, though admittedly kooky, is Heribert Illig's Phantom Time Hypothesis, which proposes that the years 614 - 911 CE did not happen.

Illig began his quest into historical revisionism in the early 80s when joining the German group Gesellschaft zur Rekonstruktion der Menschheits und Naturgeschichte (Society for the Reconstruction of Human and Natural History). Later, he edited the journal Vorzeit-Frühzeit-Gegenwart from 1989 to 1994, and , in 1995, he left to start his own publishing company, Mantis-Verlag, which mainly promotes his journal, Zeitensprünge.
Heribert believes Otto III of the Holy Roman Empire, Pope Sylvester II, and Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII conspired to created the Anno Domini dating system, so as to set their year date to 1000 AD (i.e.: CE, or Common Era), therefore today's year would actually be 1721, and not 2018. According to Illig, Charlemagne (or the entire Carolingian dynasty) never existed, and was completely fabricated to give the Otto III legitimate claim to the Holy Roman Empire's crown.
While not as trippy as the Flat Earth Theory, and as easily debunked (using astronomical history, as well as history from other parts of the world), H.I. continues to push the idea. Illig even has a handful of followers, such as German aeronautical engineer, Dr. Hans-Ulrich Niemitz, who published the paper "Did the Early Middle Ages Really Exist?" in 1995. Niemitz might seem as just another weirdo falling for some nutjob's wacky theories, but do know that immediately after his article was released, he was given a chair as a Professor of the University of Technology, Business and Culture in Leipzig, up until 2009 - excuse me, 1712.
This all proves that even the smartest people can have, what philosopher Quassim Cassam calls, "intellectual vices" (a mixing of gullibility, cynicism, dogmatism and carelessness). We are all broken in some way, large or small, so next time someone hits you up with their conspiratorial thinking, don't argue. Just pat them on the back, and say, "To me, this idea does not define you," and go about your merry way.

-- May 15, 2018 --

A Dreamy Trip

In 1958, artist and poet Brion Gysin was getting some shuteye, while riding shotgun, when he began to have wonderful visions. He explained to his friend, writer William Burroughs, that he believed he was affected by the sun flickering through roadside trees. Burroughs let him borrow the book, The Living Brain, by neurophysiologist and brain wave researcher Dr. William Grey Walter, which pretty much laid it out that Gysin was correct. In February of the following year, they asked electronics technician and computer programmer Ian Sommerville to help them create a machine that would produce the same effects. The three developed a stroboscopic device they dubbed the "Hallucination Engine", later changing it to "Dream Machine".

Basically, it's a posterboard cylinder, with three different dimensional slits throughout. The cylinder is placed onto a simple record player, and then a lightbulb is suspended in the center, and viewed with the eyes closed. Gysin said it was "the first art object to be seen with the eyes closed." Early models had the player set to 78 rpm, but - with the fade out of that speed - many psychonauts developed cylinders that can be used on a turntable set to only 45 rpm. Once on, the light strobes at about 8 - 13 pulses per second, at a frequency of 20 Hz, which corresponds to electrical Alpha wave oscillations in the brain.
The first publicly known results of experiments with the "machine" were published in the second issue of arts periodical Olympia (January, 1962), and Sommerville patented it later that year. Since then, the Dream Machine has been heralded by Throbbing Gristle's Genesis P-Orridge, as well as covered in the 2003 book, Chapel of Extreme Experience, by John Geiger, and, in 2008, the National Film Board of Canada helped documentarian Nik Sheehan produce his feature, FLicKeR, on its history.
A little over eight years ago, I made one to celebrate the 2010 Spring Equinox.

From personal experience, I can say that the outcome is intense visions of color, shapes, and very mild hallucinations - much of it in a full 3-D effect. Afterward, I felt a burst of creative energy that lasted for weeks.
Feel free to experiment, and build your own, but do know that those with photosensitive epilepsy (plus a few other nervous disorders) should not try it, as it may produce negative reactions.
Enjoy navigating the dreamscape!

-- May 01, 2018 --

Student Body (or Lack Thereof)

Imagine a college student so well loved by his university, that he is mentioned in orientation as one of the finest pupils to graduate from the institution. The Georgia Institute of Technology (aka Georgia Tech) has one such graduate, and his name is George P. Burdell. Even though he finished his education with a Master's of Science degree in 1932, he continues to pop up around campus, and the school even named an area of their grounds after him, Burdell's Student Center. The only thing is: George doesn't exist.

In 1927, William Edgar Smith was working for his BS in Ceramic Engineering, when he was given two enrollment forms by mistake. He filled out one for himself, and another for the fictitious Mr. Burdell. Both were accepted into the university, so Bill signed "him" up for the same classes. When assignments were due, Smith made an extra copy of his work to turn in, as well as turning in two copies of tests - all with slight changes, so no one would catch on. When William finished school in 1930 with his Bachelor's degree, George continued on with the help of some fellow conspirators, until he received a Master's. It was only after this, that the school was informed of the prank, and though a bit embarrassed, they decided to make him a legend.
George P. Burdell contributed to the school's satirical magazine Yellow Jacket in the early 50s, as well as wrote some letters to locals papers, and a few articles for The Technique, in the 60s. He is listed as a staff member of Georgia Tech's radio station WREK, was once named as an alternate delegate for Georgia to the Democratic National Convention, and, in 2001, was in the lead (with 57% of the votes) for Time's "Man of the Year" (until the magazine realized it was a joke). In 1995, when Atlanta musicians performed, and recorded, their version of Jesus Christ Superstar, Burdell was credited with playing baritone on the LP, and was listed as a member of the choir on the Exalt Media Group's 2006 album There Is A Place. To this day, he is often paged at local sporting events, bars, hotels, the Atlanta airport, and when President Obama made a speech at the school's McCamish Pavilion (March 10, 2015), he joked that he was supposed to have an introduction by George P. Burdell, but no one could find him.
Normally, in school you are taught lessons, and then given a test. This school was taught a lesson, and stepped up when they failed miserably.

-- April 20, 2018 --

Art Brute

As readers of this blog know, I really enjoy posting about weird literary history, strange stories of the art world, and hoaxes. Well, this tale has all three.
In June of 1998, Scottish writer William Boyd released a biography on artist Nathwell "Nat" Tate, titled Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928 - 1960.

According to the book, Nat Tate was a New Jersey abstract expressionist, who studied under Hans Hofmann in Massachusetts from 1947 until 1950. He began to show his work in New York galleries in 1952, but, due to his alcoholism, became rather erratic by the end of the decade. In 1960, finally losing the battle against his inner demons, Tate reacquired most of his paintings, and destroyed them (an estimated 99% of his life's work), and then committed suicide on January 12th by leaping off the Staten Island ferry into the Hudson River's Upper Bay. It was said that his body was never found.
The book, which had a glorious endorsement on the dust jacket by Gore Vidal, and promoted by Picasso's biographer John Richardson, and editor of Modern Painters magazine Karen Wright, was launched at a party put together by none other than musician David Bowie on April 1st of 1998.
Throughout the evening well-known artists, critics, collectors, dealers, and historians alike, claimed to know of Tate's work (though no one said they knew him directly). This turned out to be great amusement for Boyd, Bowie, Vidal, Richardson and Wright, as they were all in on the joke that Nat Tate never existed. No one noticed the retrospective was being held on April Fools Day.
The joke was revealed a week later by journalist David Lister, reporting in London's The Independent, after realizing he was the only one at the party who never heard of Nat Tate. Upon later interviews, it turned out that the photographs of Tate were revealed to actually be of old friends from the personal photo collection of William Boyd, and the pictures of Tate's work were of paintings done by Boyd himself.
On an interesting side note: A painting by "Nat Tate" / William Boyd (titled "Bridge No. 114") was auctioned at Sotheby's in London in 2011. The winning bid (by British tv personality Anthony McPartlin) was well above the expected selling price, and fetched £7,250 (about $10,300), though the money was donated to the Artists' General Benevolent Institution.

-- March 26, 2018 --

Kiddie Corner

Helmut Kentler (1928 - 2008) was a German psychologist, who geared his work to help the young. Well, sort of.

In 1959, he released his first book, Jugendarbeit in der Industriewelt (translation: "youth work in the industrial world"), and from 1962 - '65 worked as a research assistant in the Protestant youth work group, Josefstal, in the small Bavarian towns of Neuhaus and Schliersee. In 1975, he earned his doctorate with his dissertation, Eltern lernen Sexualerziehung (translation: "parents learn sex education"). As an advocate for early sex education, he became president of the German Society for Social Scientific Sexual Research (1979 - 1982), and was later a member of the German Society for Sex Research. His studies became well known, and were well respected in the field of sexual education, that is, until hearings in 1981 exposed a bizarre experiment he ran.
In 1969, Helmut placed three 13- to 15-year-old orphan boys in the care of pedophiles (one of which had a lengthy criminal record for child abuse), all on the state's dime. The doctor believed that open sexual experiences might progressively impact the development of the neglected boys. While records of the experiment are sealed, Kentler wrote in his personal papers that it was all a "success", with one of the boys beginning the program as a drug user and prostitute, but afterwards was drug-free and set his life straight - though many news articles write of one participant suffering "lasting effects" without any citations where this fact came from.
In the 1999 book Täterinnen und Täter beim sexuellen Missbrauch von Jungen, by Katharina Rutschky and Reinhardt Wolff, Helmut Kentler is quoted as saying, "The vast majority of my experience with experience is that pederastic relationships can have a very positive effect on the personality development of a boy, especially if the pederast is a true mentor to the boy."
This is a rough subject, if you take an open-minded stance on it, but while I do believe sex education in schools is the smart way to go, I don't think kids taking those classes should be given homework.

-- March 16, 2018 --

Fake Reality TV

In 2001, with reality tv shows like Survivor and Big Brother gaining in popularity, a British man named Nikita Russian (born Keith Anthony Gillard) had gotten the idea to produce a show where contestants would live together, and - in groups - would try to amass £1 million through different business challenges, for what Russian called "Project MS-2".

Placing ads in papers such as London Evening Standard, Russian had an open call for "characterful, resourceful and energetic" people to apply for the chance to win £100,000 on a show produced by his Nikita Russian Productions (NRP). After receiving thousands of e-mails, he interviewed close to a hundred people willing to take part. Once auditions were over, he selected 30 applicants for his new show, which was to last one year. Those picked were given contracts to sign, which stated they would be provided food, accommodation and a little spending money. Many, seeing how long the filming would take, gave up their jobs, and even left their homes.
Separated into three groups of ten, the contestants were only told of the show's consequences and conclusion upon the first day of filming (June 10, 2002). Their 1st task for the show: find a place to live. After a few days of having trouble, and even having to buy their own food, many participants asked to speak to Nikita. Upon speaking to him, they learned that the tv show hadn't actually been picked up by anyone, and even the cameramen were unpaid trainees. This caused Teams 1 and 3 to disband, and leave production. Team 2 stuck it out, and slept on the floor of one of the cameraman's apartment.
By June, most of those still in had become disillusioned, and went off to find new work, as well as move back home. Upon further investigation, one candidate, Louise Miles, found that Russian's production company, NRP, wasn't even real, and the person answering the phones was Russian's mother. This caused challenger Debbie Leigh Driver to contact the production company Christmas TV & Film, and told them how all entrants had been duped. Caz Gorham and Frances Dickenson from CT&F proceeded to document the con, and it was aired on BBC Channel 4 in December of 2002.
Becoming known as the Great Reality TV Swindle, many felt the fault lay with Nikita Russian, but just as many thought the contestants were to blame, as they were gullible, and their desire for fame had blinded them.
It's quite ironic how a buffoon's appetite for stardom can put them on television, but not always in the way they'd like to be.

-- February 28, 2018 --

The Little Town That Wasn't, Then Was, Then Was No More

How does a company that makes maps know if other companies aren't just copying theirs, and passing them off as their own?
That's were a little extra ink comes into play, and that company creates what is known as a "paper town" (or "fictitious entry"), which is itself one version of a "copyright trap". Said company places a fake town somewhere on the map, and if that town is spotted on other maps, they know theirs has been duplicated.
One such town is Agloe, NY.

In the 1930s, the Convent Station, NJ, company General Drafting Corporation placed a town on their maps called Agloe (an amalgam of founder Otto G. Lindberg, and assistant Ernest Alpers' initials). Just north of Roscoe, NY, the faux town was placed on a dirt road in the Catskill Mountains, where State Road 206, and Morton Hill Road intersected.
In 1950, a general store opened in that intersection, and - based on a map made by General Drafting - they named it Agloe General Store, so the town became somewhat of a real place. Soon enough, the town was listed as a hamlet by the Delaware County administration, so Agloe then appeared on a Rand McNally map. The original map makers tried to sue RM for copyright infringement, but it was thrown out seeing as it had become a real place. By 1970, the store had closed shop, yet the town still appeared on maps as late as 1990, but with no population or established township it was ultimately deleted from newer maps.
Even so, Google Maps listed the town for a while, but removed it in 2014, which proves you can't believe everything you find on the internet.

-- February 16, 2018 --

Let It Be Known

My new fanzine, titled Musica Obscura, is out in a limited edition of 100 signed, and numbered, copies.

It collects over 15 different in depth articles on bizarre and rare music from around the world. Topics include the hatred against the early punk scene, the co-optation of underground ideas, postmodernist thought in contemporary music, plus brief histories to the Luk Thung music of Thailand, Cambodia's 60s scene, the transgendered in music, and sex records. It also comes with a free disc of 130+ mp3s, so you can listen as you read.
$6 with postage paid. Make contact for copies.
UPDATE: Sold out!

-- February 02, 2018 --

Bringing Down the Hammer

In 2005, a Boston, MA group claiming to be a branch of Fred Phelp's hateful Westboro Baptist Church opened a Yahoo Group "GodHatesGoths". Calling themselves The Church of the Hammer (after the 1480 anti-witchcraft treatise Malleus Maleficarum, which translates as "the Hammer of Witches"), they were led by a Reverend Green, and soon had a web presence with the URL godhatesgoths.com. Their message was simple, and laid out in their 16 point plan:

Kill people who don't listen to priests.
Kill witches.
Kill homosexuals.
Kill fortune tellers.
Death for hitting dad.
Death for cursing parents.
Death for adultery.
Death for fornication.
Death to followers of other religions.
Kill nonbelievers.
Kill false prophets.
Kill the entire town if one person worships another god.
Kill women who are not virgins on their wedding night.
Death for blasphemy.
Infidels and gays should die.
Kill people for working on the Sabbath.

This list set off alarms in the FBI that year, and agents were sent to investigate.

Though their website openly admitted many acts of terrorism (such as a night club arson, and poisoning an entire group shelter in the group's original home state of Colorado), law enforcement had trouble tracking down members. This shadowy group, who also went under the names Parents Against Goth Movement, and God's Hammer Baptist Church, was hard to trace. Even the nefarious Reverend Green was impossible to find, as records for the assault charges he bragged of were nonexistent. It almost seemed like the whole thing could have been one big joke.
Sometime in 2006, one of the agents decided to read the church's entire website, and found a disclaimer in the "About Us" page, stating it was all satire. The Bureau could take no chances, and kept working hard on the case, but a full two years after opening files on The Church of the Hammer (July, 2007), they shut down the operation, admitting they'd been had.

I wonder how much of our tax dollars went into this embarrassing operation?

-- January 18, 2018 --

Some Call Him the Space Cowboy

When Norman Odam was growing up in Lubbock, TX, he used to look up at the stars, and dream. Later in life, knowing he may never make it off this planet, he pulled out Plan 2: reach for stardom. While in college, he got the idea to write "a wild song that would captivate everybody". In 1968, he entered a recording studio in Fort Worth, and went to work on two tracks that helped pioneer the sound of psychobilly. Releasing 500 copies of a single under his new moniker, The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, on his own label, Psycho-Suave Records, the A-side was titled "Paralyzed", and was thought to be pretty intense, which got him picked up by Mercury Records.

The Mercury Records' push got him a spot onto the Billboard Top 200, as well as on NBC's Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In (where he ran off in mid-song when he thought the cast members were making fun of him).
Not long after, a copy of the original 7" wound up in the hands of NASA's John Kevin Watson of Houston Mission Control. He thought "Paralyzed" would be a great song to help the space crew get up and go. The ground crew loved it, and set it up for the next morning's play. Once the tune began, the astronauts jumped out of bed startled, and their performance was terrible throughout the day. This led to NASA "banning" the song from their rotation, and it is never to be played again for any mission. So check out the track that is no longer allowed in space...

Today, he is remembered fondly as a great outsider artist, and David Bowie even covered LSC's "I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship" on his 2002 Heathen LP. In 2011, "The Ledge" - as he is called by fans - release a retrospective double CD of his work, titled For Sarah, Raquel, and David: An Anthology, on Cherry Red Records, and if you're looking for a spaced-out wild time, he still plays out whenever he can.

-- January 04, 2018 --

Draining the Swamp Sea

In 1920, German architect Herman Sörgel (1885 -1952), had developed an idea to create huge amounts of cheap electricity for the entire continent of Europe, as well as create thousands of square miles of new land for development throughout the whole Mediterranean region. The project was called Atlantropa (also Panropa), and consisted of building five giant hydroelectric dams.
The first, and most important would be across the Strait of Gibraltar, separating the Atlantic Ocean from the Mediterranean Sea. The following four were to be placed across the Dardanelles Strait (holding back the Black Sea), between Sicily and Tunisia (which would also provide a road through the Mediterranean Sea), on the Congo River (providing irrigation to the Sahara Desert), and along the Suez Canal (to maintain the Red Sea). All of this would have caused the Mediterranean Sea to drop by 200 meters (660 ft), creating new land for development opportunities.

The Nazi Party loved the idea, and it became one of many reasons to conquer new lands, especially in Africa. It was to take close to 100 years for the completion of the project, so it was also seen as a way to create a Pan-European and African cooperation and (somehow) pacifism. After WWII, the Allies picked up the idea, thinking it would help create stronger ties with Africa, and help fight Communism.
Though many believed the scheme would have caused havoc on the climate, along with earthquakes, the propaganda produced by the architect's Atlantropa Institute spun those disasters in a positive light (such as Britain would get warmer winters due to a stronger Gulf Stream). Luckily for the planet, the idea died along with Sörgel, in 1952, as no one else pushed the idea as strongly as he did. Knowing what we do now, about how the rotation of the Earth was affected by China's Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, it is deemed that we're all better off for not trying it out anyway.

-- December 21, 2017 --

Rave Your Way To Sleep

Stressed? Anxious? Having trouble falling asleep? A Manchester, UK ambient music trio called Marconi Union may be able to help.
In October of 2011, the band worked with the British Academy of Sound Therapy, to produce an eight-minute single, titled "Weightless". The track is set at 60 beats-per-minute, which is said to synchronize your heartbeat to your brain's alpha waves. The song is eight minutes long, as it takes about five minutes for this process to begin. The harmonic intervals were set in such as way as to cause feelings of euphoria. Also, there are no repeating melodies, and this will allow the brain to switch off, since it's not trying to predict what's upcoming. High tones, which stimulate, went unused; while the music consists of many low tones that help induce trance states.
Have a listen (but not while operating heavy machinery)...

Later that year, Time Magazine included Marconi Union into their "Inventors of the Year" list for producing the track, though the song didn't hit the Billboard charts until 2017, when a few more articles where released about the music's creation.
If you want more to listen to, Marconi Union released a thirty-minute version of "Weightless", plus other tracks deemed as some of the world's most relaxing music include: Enya's "Watermark", "Pure Shores" by All Saints, "Strawberry Swing" from Coldpaly, and Mozart's "Canzonetta Sull'aria"
Nite, nite.

-- December 11, 2017 --

Pissing Off the Pope

Rarely has a drug ever been blessed by the head of the Catholic Church, but one in specific had the pontiff's people working overtime.
In 1946, chemical engineer, Piero Donini, while working for the Italian pharmaceutical company Serono Pharmacological Institute, was the first to purify and extract two urinary gonadotropins which stimulated ovulation (the hormones FSH and LH), speculating this could be used to treat infertility. Soon, he discovered that the highest levels of the hormones were produced in post-menopausal women, as the chemicals stimulate egg production, and women's bodies will produce much more after the ovaries stop this process.
Donini Pergonal called his new drug Pergonal, after the Italian phrase "per gonadi" (meaning: from the gonads), but didn't have the means to produce a large enough quantity to run tests. The drug was shelved for a little over ten years, until a Vienna medical student, Bruno Lunenfeld, was studying the effect of human hormones in fertility, and stumbled upon Piero's work. After contacting Serono executives, he convinced them to begin trials of the drug, but came upon a huge stumbling block. Seeing as it took a dozen women a dozen days to produce a little over one treatment, how would he get enough urine from menopausal females to continue experiments?
In steps Italian aristocrat, and Serono executive, Giulio Pacelli, who happens to have been the nephew of Pope Pius XII. Pacelli asked his uncle for help, and the idea came to use nuns in Vatican-run retirement homes. In no time, the golden showers rained down enough to fill tanker trucks. For years, the holy pee flowed from homes across Italy, and into Serono's headquarters in Rome.

In 1962, the first child (a girl) was born to a woman treated with Pergonal, by Lunenfeld, in Tel Aviv, Israel. Another twenty children were born in the following two years, but - by the 1980s - 8000 gallons (30,000 liters) a day was needed to keep up production. Finally, the good nun's bladders could rest in 1995, as a synthesized hormone, Gonal-F, was approved.
Though I'm sure this story has been a huge splash to my regular readers, it might seem like a bit of yellow journalism to many outsiders. Even so, I'm glad I leaked it here.

-- November 27, 2017 --

Donkey Goes Boom

I hate animal cruelty, but some acts are bafflingly bizarre.
As reported in a September 1881 issue of Scientific American, General Henry L. Abbot of the Engineer School of Application in Willet's Point, NY, decided to use an old mule giving him trouble in a photographic experiment. The exercise was to showcase the "remarkable sensitiveness" of the era's photo-gelatin plates, as well as the fact that cameras could take instantaneous photos (over setting them up to expose a scene for minutes at a time).
In June of that same year, Van Sothen, a photographer from the U.S. School of Submarine Engineers, rigged an electric trigger to, both, a camera, and a packet of dynamite attached to the donkey's head. Upon flipping the switch, this odd image was forever cataloged into the world of early photography.

click on image for larger view

-- November 15, 2017 --

Back To Hitting the Books

I love a good (read: weird) literary story, and this is another one that deserves to be posted of.
In 1966, Newsday columnist Mike McGrady believed any book with enough sex would hit the bestseller lists, and therefore the lists of his day were populated with basic garbage. To prove it, he recruited fellow Newsday writer Harvey Aronson, 1965 Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Goltz, journalist Marilyn Berge, and Robert W. Greene (who would later win a Pulitzer in 1970), to write the crappiest, most sex-filled novel they could.
Each author wrote a different chapter, filling it with the most inane dialog, scenes that made no sense, and - of course - packed it with tons of sexually explicit material. The book, titled Naked Came the Stranger, and credited to the nonexistent Penelope Ashe, was about two hosts of a NYC morning radio show, The Billy & Gilly Show, who thought themselves to be a perfect couple. The wife then finds her husband having an affair, and decides to have flings of her own, which include rabbis and mobsters.

Published in 1969, on Lyle Stuart, Inc. (who in the 90s became Barricade Books, infamous for reprinting the racist The Turner Diaries), the book quickly sold 20,000 copies. The authors soon appeared on TV's The David Frost Show, to expose the hoax, which helped the sale of another 70,000 - placing the book on The New York Times' Best-Seller List for 13 weeks. As expected, the book was made into a porno film in 1975, and, as of today, the novel has sold half a million units.
The following year, McGrady released Stranger Than Naked, or How to Write Dirty Books for Fun and Profit, which told the story of the creation of Naked Came the Stranger, which goes to show that even with the wool pulled over some people's eyes, they can still smell out sex when they want it.

-- November 01, 2017 --

When Lightning Strikes

Recently, I've passed some of the most interesting spots in the United States, yet rarely gotten to stop, and visit. Sometimes, luck is on my side, and I've pulled over to enjoy what I normally have been flying by.
One such case was when I stopped at Nevada's Thunder Mountain Monument.
In the late-1960s, WWII veteran Frank Van Zant took LSD one day, and suddenly believed himself to be a Native American. In 1969, he changed his name to Rolling Mountain Thunder, and began to construct bizarre monuments in the small town of Imlay, which were to supposed to be shelters for American Indians in the upcoming apocalypse, calling it Thunder Mountain. Off the side of I-80, be built a number of buildings (using rocks, cement and discarded junk), as well as over 200 statues. The site became home to hundreds of hippies throughout the 70s. In 1983, Nevada made Frank their "Artist of the Year", but soon someone tried to burn down Thunder Mountain, and destroyed a bit of it.
Sadly, in 1989, he put a gun to his head, and ended his career as an outsider artist. The buildings sat derelict, until the state made it a historic site in 1992.

For more photos of my visit, click here.

-- October 20, 2017 --

The King In Yellow

I think there is something terribly wrong with those who commit acts of art vandalism. Sure, there are a few people who've fucked up works by mistake, like the kid who tripped, and put his fist through Paolo Porpora's Flowers (a 17th Century painting, priced at $1.5 million). There are also ones who have done it purposefully, and without merit, such as the constant attacks on Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (an acid splash in 1956, as well as a rock thrown a few months later, plus red spray paint in 1974, and a souvenir mug thrown in 2009). A few executions are supposedly legitimate, such as artist Ai Weiwei dropping a million dollar Han Dynasty vase to protest China's human rights violations. There are so many deeds of art vandalism, Wikipedia has an entire page listing most of them (see here).
One of the odder ones would have to be the case of Russian-born art blogger Wlodzimierz Umaniec, who walked into London's Tate Modern in October of 2012, and vandalized Mark Rothko's 1958 piece, Black on Maroon. After stepping over the roped barrier, Umaniec proceeded to write on the Rothko's work, with a type of homemade black marker popular with graffiti artists, "A Potential Piece of Yellowism," then signing it with his tag-name, "Vladimir Umanets". It is believed Wlodzimierz performed the vandal operation to further his art career, and gain press for his art movement known as "Yellowism".

On his blog, he writes, "Yellowism is not art, and Yellowism isn't anti-art," explaining in an interview, "The main difference between Yellowism, and art, is that in art you have got freedom of interpretation, in Yellowism you don't have freedom of interpretation, everything is about Yellowism." Confused? No matter, because the action garnered the self-proclaimed artist two years in jail, not to mention several more years of scorn from art lovers.
Well, it's good to know that for most of these works of iconoclastic destruction, there is retribution. While this artist was put behind bars, in the case of the previously mentioned vase-dropping, an angry citizen, Maximo Caminero, walked into an Ai Weiwei retrospective in Miami, and smashed one of the artist's 16 vases on display. So, if you're looking for way to become famous, try creating something instead.

-- October 05, 2017 --

False Narratives

Keeping up with my posts on books, I'd thought to share this odd slice of literary history.
In 1955, Jean 'Shep' Shepherd, best known for his hilarious 1983 movie A Christmas Story, was hosting an AM radio show on New York City's WOR. He was peeved at how most books had gotten listed in many bestseller lists, which consisted, not only on sales, but also on requests at book sellers. To help change the process, he asked his listeners to go to book stores, and ask for a nonexistent book and author, I, Libertine by Frederick R. Ewing, even going so far as to set up a plot, and claiming it was banned in Boston. Fans of the show did so, with a few actually referencing it in articles of smaller newspapers. The fake book had gotten so much demand, it made in onto The New York Times' Best Seller list.
Later, Shepherd, along with publisher Ian Ballantine, and novelist Theodore Sturgeon, decided to actually write the novel. Sturgeon typed all day long, and when he passed out from the day's work without finishing it, Ian's wife, editor Betty Ballantine, finished the last chapter for him. The book, with a cover by science fiction and fantasy artist Frank Kelly Freas, was released by Ballantine Books in September of 1956, even though The Wall Street Journal had exposed the hoax a few weeks before. Not wanting to fleece folks, the profits from the sale of the book were donated to charity.

-- September 18, 2017 --

Lost In Translation, Literally

In 1855, Portuguese writer Pedro Carolino thought to help many of his countrymen learn the English language by translating an 1853 Portuguese–French phrase book, O novo guia da conversação em francês e português, written by José da Fonseca. The only problem was that Carolino didn't speak a word of English himself. He thought to fix that by using a French-English dictionary, and got to work translating the phrase book word by word.

The result, O novo guia da conversação em portuguez e inglez, became one of the earliest known examples of unintentional humor, as phrases such as "Quem cala consente" (Silence is consent") became "That not says a word, consent", and "Anda de gatinhas" ("He's crawling") were turned into "He go to four feet".
In 1883, a Boston publishing house reprinted the book, under the title English As She Is Spoke, and included an introduction by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), who wrote, "Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect."
The original helped spawn many other works of comedy, including L'Anglais tel qu'on le parle (French Without a Master), by playwright Tristan Bernard (Paul Bernard), and Eugène Ionesco's La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano), which both use lines from the book, as well as Ingglish az she iz spelt in 1885, by Fritz Federheld (Frederick Atherton Fernald), and Paul Jennings' 1976 British travel guide Britain as she is visit.
You can read an abridged version of this slice of hilarity here, or - if you're lucky - check eBay for an original.

-- September 07, 2017 --

Can Milk Make Grapes Sour?

Sometimes, it's better to just ignore a troublemaker. A lot of the time, if you take one on, you're just making bigger trouble for yourself.
Though mothers had known this for ages, the issue of breast-milk substitutes causing health risks for newborns was publicly brought to light by the International Baby Food Action Network, who encouraged the practice of nutrition through natural methods, and inspired a 1973 article in New Internationalist magazine.
In 1974, a British antipoverty charity, called War On Want, released a small booklet, titled The Baby Killer. The pamphlet attacked the Swiss food company Nestlé, and what WOW claimed was their "aggressive marketing" of breast milk substitutes in third-word countries.

Instead of letting a handful of malcontents talk shit about them, and having the headache go away in time, Nestlé decided to sue the group for libel. The case was brought before Judge Jürg Sollberger, who only sided with Nestlé because the company couldn't be held responsible for the death of infants "in terms of criminal law", and fined the fund a mere 300 Swiss Francs (about $400 US).
This caused a bit of a stir with the media, and the story began to gain traction. The boycott was soon picked up by Minneapolis, MN's Infant Formula Action Coalition, which helped spread the word in Canada, then Australia, and the rest of Europe. By 1978, the US Senate held a public hearing looking into the promotion of breast-milk substitutes, and wound up calling for a marketing code. The following year, the World Health Organization and UNICEF pushed for a marketing code in an international meeting, and the 34th World Health Assembly approved Resolution WHA34.22 which includes the International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes in 1981. In 1984, Nestlé finally gave in, and proved that there are times when the bigger guy should just take getting picked on by smaller folk.
If you'd like to read the now-infamous tract, The Baby Killer, click here.

-- August 21, 2017 --

Light Up the Sky

Since everyone is on an astronomy kick because of the solar eclipse, I'd thought I'd tell you about another great event that'll happen in our lifetime (supposing you don't die in the next five years).
In 2022, a "new star" will not only be visible, but possibly be one of the brightest stars in the night sky. Well, for at least six months, anyway.

Back in our 3rd Century, 1800 years ago, two stars in the Cygnus constellation (a binary system named KIC9832227) crashed into one another forming a Red Nova. The light from the two stars joining will reach us soon, and has been dubbed the Boom Star.
First discovered in 2013 by Professor Larry Molnar of Calvin College, who, using data dating back to 1999, noticed the orbital speed of the system decreasing as time went on. Though these types of explosions occur once every ten years in our galaxy, this one is close enough for us to see it with the naked eye. According to the work presented at the 2016 American Astronomy Association meeting in Texas, it should be one of the most visible stars for a minimum of six months.
The UK's Royal Astronomical Society's Dr. Robert Massey said, "Nobody has ever managed to predict the birth of a star before, so this is really unprecedented, and I think there will be a race among amateur astronomers, and members of the public to spot it first."
SAD UPDATE: According to a paper published in in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of researchers led by Quentin Socia of San Diego State University, took a look at Molnar's work, and found that this will not happen when specified. Professor Molnar reexamined his work, and found the error Socia pointed out. The event may still happen, but probably not in our lifetime.

-- August 11, 2017 --

When Bones Tell A Tale

Abel Folgar, over at Miami New Times, asked me a few questions concerning my recent 10" release for an online feature.

Click here to check it out, and enjoy the read!

-- July 28, 2017 --

Massacre of the Innocent

I'm a huge animal lover, and this is one of those stories that really got to me.
I understand depression, and that many can't control their actions when they suffer from it, but sometimes those actions boggle even my mind. Take the case of Terry Thompson. Terry was a veteran of the Vietnam War, but - more importantly - one of Ohio's best known exotic animal collectors. In 2008, he appeared on The Rachael Ray Show, and also supplied animals for photo shoots, but, in 2010, Thompson was arrested on federal gun charges, and was sent to prison. Soon, he was in debt, and then his wife had left him. Afterward, he decided to cut this mortal coil.

On October 18th of 2011, Terry decided to commit suicide by shooting himself in the head, but, before doing so, he set free all the animals at his Zanesville, OH private zoo, Muskingum County Animal Farm. He released 56 animals, including eighteen tigers, seventeen lions, eight bears, three cougars, two wolves, and a baboon. A neighbor, Sam Kopchak, noticed his horse freaking out, and then a lion creeping up to it. He ran for a phone, and called Terry to let him know one of his animals was loose. After no answer, he dialed 911, and the police visited Thompson's property, only to find all the cages empty. Springing into action, the cops put out warnings for the locals, and went on the hunt. 49 of those beautiful creatures were shot, and killed. Of those not gunned down by the pigs: one wolf was hit by a car, and six others (three leopards, a grizzly and two monkeys) made their way into Terry's home, where they were tranquilized, and later brought to the Columbus Zoo.

In the days after, Ohio governor, John Kasich, signed a temporary moratorium on the sale of exotic animals, and it is now illegal to own one in that state.
As I normally state after posts like these: if you ever find yourself in desperate times, and are in need of someone to talk to, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

-- July 11, 2017 --

The World's Most Dangerous Book

In 1874, S. George & Company released a book by a doctor from Michigan, Robert Clark Kedzie, titled Shadows from the Walls of Death.

Upon returning to Michigan from his service in the Civil War in 1863, he was offered a chair in the Michigan Agricultural College's chemistry department. There he he experimented with beet sugars, and is now remembered as the "Father of the Michigan Beet Sugar Industry". During his tenure, he found high arsenic levels to be a major issue in the local soil, and was later (1873) asked to head a Board of Health committee on "Poisons, Special Sources of Danger to Life and Health". The following year he released a paper titled, "Poisonous Papers", and got the idea to release a book on the wallpaper industry's use of arsenic.
His book, Shadows from the Walls of Death, contained 86 pages, but only six of those - a preface - contained words. What followed Dr. Kedzie's introduction were 22 x 30" (56 x 76 cm) wallpaper samples. The reason for the book, which was released in a very limited quantity, was to showcase the ever-growing use of wallpaper dyed using arsenic pigments, and it contained actual pieces of the poisonous wallpapers.
Currently, there are only two known copies, both of which are housed at Michigan State University's Special Collections Library. Strangely enough, contemporary interest in the book spawned a 178-page reprint (minus the arsenic, of course), in 2014.

-- July 07, 2017 --

Huge Apologies

I was struggling for a bit to find the time to update this blog, and that kind of depressed me.
Well, I've settled in, and feel I can now devote some energy back here. You'll start seeing new posts before next month.
On a side note, I am no longer writing for No Echo, but you can still find an archive of over 30 of my articles on the site (click here).
Check back soon for new posts!

-- February 25, 2017 --

Gone Again!?

Yep. I'm hitting the road again for a bit: traveling up to Green Bay, WI, and Atlanta, GA, for about a month. Though I plan to keep up this blog when I return, I'll have no new projects out for some time (except the upcoming 156 Good-Bye, Bed-Stuy, Ten Times cassette / booklet, due out this summer). I'll also be working on, and wrapping up, my newest issue of Exscind, but that won't be out until almost next winter. Still, I wrote some great music pieces for No Echo, which they will post throughout the next two-three months, so check them out until I return to regular posting here. Cheers!

-- February 17, 2017 --

Well Heil Be Damned

Christian socialist and novelist Francis Julius Bellamy (1855 - 1931) is best known for penning the most recent version of the U.S. "Pledge of Allegiance" in 1892. Immediately after writing the Pledge, he recalled a salute created by James B. Upham, which Bellamy found in the children's magazine The Youth's Companion, and thought it would fit perfectly. He called it the "flag salute", and it was demonstrated for the first time on October 12, 1892 for the National School Celebration of Columbus Day. It originally had an open palm facing up, but many found it uncomfortable, and it was soon switched to holding the palm down.

The salute was picked up by Italian Fascists in the 1920s (calling it the Roman salute), and it was later adopted by the Germans (known as the Sieg Heil). Once the Unites States got involved in World War II, Congress amended the Flag Code in 1942, replacing what became known as the "Bellamy salute" with the simple gesture of holding one's hand over their heart for civilians performing the "Pledge of Allegiance".

-- February 06, 2017 --

No Such Thing As Bad Publicity

In 1874, author Mark Twain (born Samuel Clemens, 1835 - 1910) got to watch a typewriter demonstration in Boston, and immediately bought a Remington Typewriter. Even though the entire globe was suffering from an economic depression, Twain spent $125 on his newfound contraption - what would be about three grand today. A few days later, he typed his first letter to his brother on December 9th, complaining that his daughter was using it more than he was. By 1875, he had given it away twice, and it was returned to him both times. The following year, after publishing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, he claimed it was the first novel to be written using a typewriter, but this was not true, and Twain probably made the statement only to be first at something.
The company who made his typewriter, Remington Typewriter Company, got wind of this, and asked him to help promote the machine, to which he replied:

Gentlemen:
Please do not use my name in any way. Please do not even divulge the fact that I own a machine. I have entirely stopped using the Type-Writer, for the reason that I never could write a letter with it to anybody without receiving a request by return mail that I would not only describe the machine but state what progress I had made in the use of it, etc., etc. I don't like to write letters, and so I don't want people to know that I own this curiosity-breeding little joker.
Yours truly,
Saml. L. Clemens

By the turn of the century, Mark changed his tune, and wrote in his 1904 autobiography, the "early machine was full of caprices, full of defects - devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues."
The Remington company got wind of those lines from then-unpublished autobiography (from an article in The North American Review), and used the previous letter, and a section of the book, in a full-page advertisement in Harper's Magazine in 1905.

click on image for larger view

All press is good press, I guess.

-- February 01, 2017 --

A Bone Shaking Good Time

Wednesday, February 8th, 156 will play a rare show at the 13th annual International Noise Conference in Miami, FL, @ Churchill's Pub (5501 NE 2nd Ave). The doors open at 9pm, but there are dozens of bands that night, so please turn up early to support all the artists. Others playing include Drowning the Virgin Silence, Erratix, Pain Appendix, Sloth, City Medicine, and Destructive Bodies.

click on image for larger view

It's been three years since the last 156 show, and - yes - this set will be based off the Memento Mori sessions. I will be using only human bones, hooked up to electronics manipulated by Brett Slutski of Destructive Bodies / Acid Casualty.

-- January 23, 2017 --

Put On Your Aluminium Foil Hats

Did you know there was a time when aluminium was more expensive than gold?
In fact, Napoleon III let most of his banquet guests use gold tableware, but he saved the aluminium cutlery for his most cherished visitors. Pure aluminium was so rare - even though it makes up 8% of Earth's crust - that whole bars were on heavily guarded display in most houses of European royalty. It even crowned the top of the Washington Monument in 1884 (a 6 lbs / 2.7 kg pyramid), because it was then the most expensive metal around.

Aluminium, element 13 on the Periodic Table, is never found in its pure metallic form, and is normally mixed with oxygen in rocks or clay. In the 1780s, many scientists thought alum salts contained an unknown metal, but it wasn't extracted until 1825, when Danish chemist Hans Christian Oersted developed a procedure to extract extremely small amounts of it. By 1845, German Friedrich Wöhler (using his own method) was able to produce larger samples. This still kept aluminium at around $1200 a kilo (current value would be at over $26,000). Wöhler's method was then improved in 1854 by Frenchman Henri Sainte-Claire Deville, which made its value drop to about $40 per kg ($900 today).
In 1886, American chemist Charles Martin Hall, and yet another French chemist, Paul Héroult, independently invented new processes (using electric batteries) to cheaply obtain aluminium oxide from bauxite ore. Karl Joseph Bayer, an Austrian chemist, further developed the practice in 1888, which is still the method we use today. Charles Hall established the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, producing 25 kilograms per day, but by 1909 the amount reached 41,000 per day, and this caused the price to fall to 60 cents per kilogram (just $10 in our modern economy).
On an interesting side note: the reason we Americans say, and write, "aluminum" is in part thanks to a small mistake. When Hall advertised his product, the "i" was erroneously dropped, and he thought that made it sound very similar to valuable platinum. While all his patents show the element as "aluminium", his company was soon named Aluminum Company of America, and it stuck in the States.

-- January 11, 2017 --

Active Again... Almost Radioactive

I'm back from my vacation, and although I have yet to find a place to settle down, I do have a story for you.
Remember a little over a year ago, a 14-year-old boy named Ahmed Mohamed was charged with a hoax bomb when bringing a homemade clock project to school? That scene has nothing on the case known as The Radioactive Boy Scout.

In 1994, 17-year-old David Hahn was in love with chemistry so much, that he decided to build a breeder reactor in his mom's backyard shed in Commerce Township, Michigan. Inspired by 1960 book The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments (by Kurt Saxon and Robert Brent), David had soon outgrown simple exercises, and began attempting dangerous procedures. For most chemists, these ventures were treacherous enough, but Hahn - being a poor student in school - was rather inept in this field. He once showed up to a Boy Scout meeting glowing orange, after creating a fake tanner that exploded in his face. Another time, he almost blew off his hand when he stupidly tried to stir a vat of pure potassium with a metal screwdriver.
One thing he was good at was subterfuge. In 1993, after receiving a merit badge in Atomic Energy (yep, it's real), he began to write to government officials as "Professor Hahn", saying he wanted to know of some atomic exercises his students could perform in class. Even though the letters contained several misspellings, and mistakes, many offered information that helped David begin to building a nuclear reactor. Hahn collected radioactive material from household products (radium from clocks, tritium from gunsights, and thorium from camping lanterns), as well as purchasing $1000 worth of batteries, to extract the lithium in helping to purify thorium ash using a Bunsen burner. If you're wondering where a minor could get that type of cash, I guess the children of divorced parents tend to get special treatment. So much in fact, that his mom and stepdad were hardly suspicious of why, every time David exited the shed, he would throw out his clothes and shoes.
It seems that Hahn was - even though wearing a dentist's lead apron - getting a bit nauseous, and decided to scrap his atomic trials a little before his home reactor reached critical mass. As he was dumping the goods, a passing officer thought the trash was a possible discarded drug lab, and called for backup. Once realizing they were out of their element, the fuzz called the FBI, who in turn turned to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which found over 1000x the normal level of background radiation. The Environmental Protection Agency designated the Hahn home a hazardous materials cleanup site, and later buried the shed in a Utah radioactive dump.
As you'd expect, things didn't go well for David after all this. Possibly due to the stress of the scandal, his mother committed suicide the following year. Hahn enrolled in community college, but soon dropped out. He followed it up with a stint in the Navy, and later the Marines, but was then diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with bipolar disorder. In 2007, DH was arrested for larceny, after being found with a large amount of smoke detectors from the apartment building were he lived. Due to his face being covered in sores, it was believed he was again exposed to a large dose of radiation from collecting the detector's americium.

Hahn died one year and 13 days after the Ahmed Mohamed clock incident, at only 39 years of age. It is believed his life was shortened due to his wild experiments with radioactive materials.

-- December 05, 2016 --

On Vacation, Sorta

I've decided to hit the road for a bit.
Packed up what little belongings I haven't got rid of yet, and am looking for a new home base. Brooklyn has been kind to me, and my seven years here have been filled with amazing days, and fun-filled nights, as well as nurturing one of the most creative times in my music and art career. I may return to the area, but may settle somewhere completely different, so I'm going to use this time to figure that out.
Orders are being filled by a few friends; if there is anything of mine you'd like to order, please feel free, and don't hesitate.
I hope to be back online a little after the New Year, so here's to posting again in 2017!
Until then, Razorcake's website should post the last collection of my "backpatch pics" pretty soon, plus music website No Echo has a few music articles of mine that should hold you over.
Otherwise, from here on down: read slowly.

-- November 23, 2016 --

Hijacked High Jinks

Allen Funt was once the host and producer of a tv prank show called Candid Camera. Predating Punk'd by half a century, the show actually began on the radio as The Candid Microphone in 1947 on ABC Radio. The show ran for three months, until Funt decided to film segments for theaters to screen before a movie, and their popularity led to a tv series on ABC Television. Still called The Candid Microphone, the prank show changed its name to Candid Camera when it was bought by NBC Studios in '49. After a three-year run, the show was canceled, but later became a segment on Jack Paar's The Tonight Show (NBC, 1958), and later on The Garry Moore Show (CBS, 1959). The idea for a tv show resurfaced, and new episodes began airing in 1960, and ran until 1967 on CBS. Even though off the air, the show's popularity supported Funt to produce a movie, What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?, in 1969.

During production of the film (February 1969), Allen and his family scheduled a trip on Eastern Airlines from Newark, NJ, to Miami, FL. In the middle of the flight, the captain announced the plane would land in Havana, Cuba instead. It turned out they were being hijacked by terrorists, but many on the plane didn't believe it, thinking it was all part of some tv stunt. Four different passengers approached him throughout the flight to commend him on this new work.
Writing of his experience the next day for an Associated Press article, Funt said, "Looking back at the experience, the unbelievable thing is the way everybody took it as one big joke. We saw the knife, but everybody was cool and calm, just a little annoyed at the delay. It is strange how you can be so close to danger, and not feel it. The biggest joke for me was how much the whole thing looked like a bad movie. Nobody looked the part. The hijackers were ridiculous in their business suits. The captain with super calm announced that we were going to Havana because two gentlemen seemed to want to go there."
In the end, no one was hurt, and all those aboard the plane were treated as guests upon arrival. For their eleven-hour stay, everyone was fed, and even given a guided bus tour of Havana. After racking up $5000 worth of expenses, the passengers were returned to the plane, and the flight continued back to Florida with no one laughing.

-- November 13, 2016 --

Ghost Island

There's an island out there, that exists in time, but not space, yet it's nowhere near the Bermuda Triangle. On maps, Null Island is located where the equator crosses the prime meridian, at coordinates 0°N, 0°E, in Africa's Gulf of Guinea. While described as a one square-meter island, on the physical plane, nothing is there, but a floating weather buoy (named Station 13010, also known as "Soul", an observatory for the Prediction and Research Moored Array in the Atlantic data system).

Null Island has been used on maps for only the last half of the 20th Century, but didn't gain wide acceptance until 2011, when it was entered into the Natural Earth public domain map dataset (with support from the North American Cartographic Information Society). The plot of "land" at those coordinates in the digital dataset was intended to assist analysts in finding errors in geo-coding. If using a coordinate / map projection besides the Global Positioning System (GPS) - being different frameworks to convert spheres, ellipsoids, and planes for mapping - the position of "0,0" could land you in one of thousands of places around the world, so it's a necessary nonexistent land.
Sorry if I spooked you.

-- November 04, 2016 --

156 Record Release Party

On Saturday, November 12th in Manhattan's West Village, my experimental industrial outfit 156 will celebrate the release of our new 10" vinyl EP with a party at SoHo Psychoanalytic (30 Charlton Street, Suite #1), hosted by psychiatrist Vanessa Sinclair, PsyD. As well as a listening party, I will hold a talk on the recording of the EP, with special guest poet and publisher Katy Bohinc presenting a brief lecture on the anatomy of the universe in comparison to the human skeletal system.

Copies will be available for purchase. Otherwise, feel free to drop by the 156 Bandcamp page for mailorder or digital.
A track off Memento Mori premiered on episode #225 ("Take the Information" - October 29th) of the :zoviet*france: radio show, A Duck In A Tree. Click here to listen.
Lastly, a new music video was made for the first track off Memento Mori's side two, "Me-Olam, Ad-Olam".

Hope to see you Saturday!

-- October 26, 2016 --

The Kooky World of Cult Music

I wrote a two-part piece for No Echo on music made, and released, by cult organizations such as the Nation of Yahweh, Church of Satan, Branch Davidians, Werewolf Order, and more.

Check out my earlier part one here, and part two was just posted here. Enjoy!

-- October 17, 2016 --

The Man, the Myth, the Monster

So you think the Dylan nomination for a Nobel Prize is an odd one? Then let me tell you a story.
Ever since reading a stack of Robert Anton Wilson books back in the early 90s, I have been obsessed with the criminal mastermind Licio Gelli.

Gelli was born in 1919, though little is known about his early personal or family life. A Fascist through and through, and as a member of Mussolini's Blackshirts, he went to Spain in support of the Falangists in the Spanish Civil War. It is believed Licio became a spy for both Nazi Germany and the US's CIA, playing each off the other. After WWII, he helped establish the Italian Social Republic with Giorgio Almirante, and then became involved in business as a textile manufacturer. Gelli was also a member of a secret Masonic lodge called Propaganda Due (aka Propaganda Two), which, under his Mastership, morphed into an ultraright think tank. In 1970, he was a key figure in the Golpe Borghese coup d'état, where he was to arrest Italian President Giuseppe Saragat. After the failed coup, he was exiled to Argentina for several years, even initiating dictator Juan Perón into Freemasonry there. During this time, the Masonic Master set up oil and arms deals between Libya, Italy and Argentina through the Agency for Economic Development.
In 1981, banker Roberto Calvi was discovered hanged under a bridge, and was found to have been laundering money for the Italian mob, and Propaganda Due, through Banco Ambrosiano, then known as "the Vatican bank". Further investigation led the Italian government to almost 1000 names of military and civil servants on the P2 membership list, which was illegal under Article 18 of the Italian Constitution (future Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was on that list), as well as many of the Catholic Church's Italian hierarchy. Arrested, Licio escaped, and fled to Switzerland. Gelli surrendered in 1987, and was charged with the 1982 collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, and in connection with the 1980 Bologna railway station bombing, that killed 85 people. He was sentenced to 12 years in '88, but again fled. Captured in Cannes, France, he sat under house arrest until an indictment was handed down, along with former Mafia boss Giuseppe Calò, for the murder of Roberto Calvi, and politician Aldo Moro. He was acquitted for lack of evidence.
I've only recently learned that, in 1996, in a move that defied any logic, the Swedish Academy nominated Licio Gelli for a Nobel Prize in Literature, a choice supported by both Mother Teresa and Naguib Mahfouz. In 2003, he claimed a "democratic rebirth plan" was being implemented by Silvio Berlusconi, and that "...all is becoming a reality little by little, piece by piece. To be truthful, I should have had the copyright to it. Justice, TV, public order."
On December 15th of 2015, Licio died in Tuscany, at the age of 96, a calm and happy man, caring little for the lives he played like pawns, while the shadows of those he helped put in power cast darkness throughout the world.

-- October 09, 2016 --

Classic Cuts From Cults

I wrote a two-part piece for No Echo on music made, and released, by cult organizations such as Scientology, The Process Church, Nation of Islam, Jews for Jesus, and more.

Check out part one here. Part two will be posted soon, so check back often.

-- October 01, 2016 --

Rattle My Bones

The Memento Mori EP is finally out! These sessions have been sporadically recording since 2012, due to the scarcity of the instruments, which include skulls, femurs, vertebrae, bone whistles, and Tibetan thighbone trumpets (kangling). While still in the spirit of the early industrial of Einstürzende Neubauten, Test Dept, and Z'EV, this release is 156's most primitive in sound. Nine tracks, playable at two speeds, with all the music being made using only human bones, or breath passing through human bones.
The new EP by 156 was mastered by James Plotkin for, both, the vinyl and digital release. The digital version is available for download on 156's Bandcamp page (for $8), otherwise contact me to purchase the bone-colored 10" vinyl version, which is limited to 489 copies ($20 postage paid in North America, $30 for the rest of the world). Physical copies come with a liner note placard, along with a postcard, and a free link to the digital download.

A music video has been uploaded for the first track, "Kokoro", off the Memento Mori EP.

The record was released to serve as - for those who cannot obtain one - the skull's replacement in the ritual room where a scholar contemplates death in the rite of ars moriendi ("The Art of Dying").
I have also made four artist editions, which include: one standard copy of the 10" EP, along with one test pressing (with hand-painted labels), and a human rib bone, with hand-painted lettering of the EP title. There is only one left (priced at $50), and is available by contacting me.

click on image for larger view

-- September 27, 2016 --

Not Lacking In Immortality

Henrietta Lacks died in 1951, but she's still growing. Huge, actually!
Lacks was an African-American woman from Roanoke, VA. She lived most of her life with her grandparents, as her father could not care for all the kids after her mom died during their 10th child birthing. Henrietta worked in the area's tobacco industry, until moving to Maryland. Not long after, she was diagnosed with cancer (adenocarcinoma of the cervix), and quickly died.

Doctor George Otto Gey noticed her cells reproduced at a uniquely high rate, and collected them, which helped scientists preserve, and work with, them for longer periods. Rather than the cells normally dying after a few days, they could be divided, and new cell groups formed almost infinitely, making Lacks the donor of the first Human Immortal Cell Line, now known as the HeLa cell line.
In the 1970s, a large sample had been contaminated, and to help further study it, researchers began to contact her family. Nervous of the many phone calls asking for blood samples, the woman's family looked into the matter, and discovered Henrietta's cells had been harvested without anyone's consent, though a court later ruled a person's discarded tissue is no longer their property.
The HeLa cell line is still alive today, and has since grown over twenty tons of cell life, along with collecting 11,000 medical patents.

-- September 16, 2016 --

Don't Get Tanked Around Trees

Readers of my New York blog, This Hidden City, know I'm a bit of a tree hugger - especially after my piece on visiting NYC's oldest living thing, the Alley Pond Giant (read it here).

I enjoy stories of old trees (like California's 4800-year-old Methuselah), weird trees (such as Somalian Dragon Blood, or Monkey Breads from Australia), flowering or poisonous trees (Wisteria and Manchineel), but here I'll share two quick tales where alcohol played a role in a tree's life.
First up is the Tree of Ténéré, thought to be an Acacia raddiana. It was the only tree for 250 miles (400 Km) in Niger's northeastern section of the Sahara Desert. For years it was the only tree located on maps, simply due to help in positioning oneself in the far expanse of the area. On November 8th of 1973, a Libyan trucker was driving drunk off his ass, when he hit the only thing for miles around. The dead tree is now on display in the capital city's Niger National Museum, and the spot is now marked by a metallic structure which represents the tree.

From sad to silly, we'll now learn that, in 1898, a drunk British officer (James Squid) was walking about a tribal area in Pakistan known as the Khyber Agency, when a he felt as if a certain banyan tree was about to attack him. Perceiving himself to be under threat, Squid ordered the arrest of the tree. A sergeant obeyed the officer's orders, and chained up the offender. Though many then said it was a joke to teach the locals about not obeying the British, today it's seen as a hundred-year-old testament to drunken stupidity, as well as nifty tourist spot.

All that's left to say is that if you are headed out to the woods any time soon, try to keep your spirits locked in the bottle, or you might find yourself on the wrong side of a plant's history.

-- September 05, 2016 --

Words To Battle Dreamless Sleep

I'm joining a handful of poets on Monday, Sept 19th, for Rendering Unconscious, a reading featuring automatic poetry inspired by chance, dreams, fantasies and other workings of the unconscious.
I've been asked to read some of my throwaways, as the project appropriately fits the evening's theme. I will be reading ten, with half the batch written before a life-changing event, and the other half after.

It starts at 8pm, and will be held at the Delancey's rooftop (168 Delancey St, Manhattan). Fellow speakers include Katy Bohinc, Katie Abbitt, Jason Haaf, Peter Milne Greiner, Vanessa Sinclair, and Jennifer Smith.

-- August 29, 2016 --

Reaching For the Sky

Mankind has always been fascinated with the stars, and we've been constructing observatories to watch them, track them, and worship them, since time immemorial.
The oldest known ground observatories are Goseck Circle in Germany (~5000 BCE), and Stonehenge in UK (~3300 BCE), which were built along to astronomic alignments, possibly for keeping track of dates to help with farming. Within a thousand years, monolithic calendars were to be found throughout Europe (such as Kokino in Macedonia), and Russia (Arkaim in the Urals steppe). By the general period of classical antiquity, they had changed from simple almanacs to laboratories, with record keeping, star catalogs, and instruments of astrometry, which soon helped humans develop geography, meteorology, astronomy, and furthering mathematics. Two notables worth mentioning are Hipparchus' observatory at Rhodes (Greece), and Chankillo in the coastal desert of Peru.
Throughout the Dark Ages, Islam and the East took a bigger interest in our place among those celestial bodies, and constructed some of the most beautiful observatories before the invention of the mega-telescope (Maragheh, Iran; Mahodayapuram in India; and Gaocheng, China). By 1600, Europe caught up, as they first appeared in Denmark, then outward from there.
Of course, holding a strange technological and metallic majesty, we have some beautiful ones today, too, such as ALMA in Chile, Arecibo in Puerto Rico, and Roque de los Muchachos in the Canary Islands.
Still, none compare to India's Jantar Mantar - in size, grand style, and proportion. This little-known location looks like a playground, yet everything looks like art.

Located in the city of Jaipur, in the Indian state of Rajasthan, the observatory was finished in 1734, and commissioned by the Rajput king Sawai Jai Singh. The grounds hold nineteen huge instruments, which operate in the three main classical celestial coordinate systems: horizon-zenith local, equatorial, and ecliptic.

Sadly, while the instruments are all made of brick, marble, stone, and brass, they are set with Ptolemaic positions (which are not heliocentric), so some of the sights will forever go slightly askew as time goes on.
Still, one of the most amazing tools there is the Vrihat Samrat Yantra (pictured tallest below). It is the world's largest sundial, and is accurate within 5 seconds or less.

Another real beauty here is the Jai Prakash Yantra (seen near bottom center below), which contains two half-bowl sundials, holding marked marble slabs with inverted images of the sky, allowing observers to move within the instrument; measuring altitude, azimuth, hour angle, and declination.

The name stems from the colloquial pronunciation of yantra (instrument) and mantar (calculate), and theories behind the instruments are found in ancient Hindu Sanskrit texts by Aryabhatta, Brahmagupta, Varahamihira, Lalla, Sripati, and Bhaskara (400 - 1000 CE, listed chronologically).
Though rarely known outside of India (it last served as the maze in Tarsem Singh's 2006 fantasy film The Fall), besides being an image chosen for the cover of electro-psych outfit Shpongle's 2008 DVD, Live at the Roundhouse, the west is far from recognizing this wonder of a king wise enough to stare at the stars, and dream big.

-- August 21, 2016 --

The Psychotropic Poetry of the Preternatural

My friend, and psychologist, Vanessa Rawlings Sinclair PsyD, has started a website (along with artist Katelan Foisy) for creative investigations into Dadaist cut-up methods, Surrealism, psychology, Burroughs/Gysin literature, and the occult, called Chaos of the Third Mind.

If her name sounds familiar to my readers, it may be because she wrote the foreword to my unique artpiece/article on the Dada poem (see here), which was reproduced in issue #3 of Abraxas: Journal of Esoteric Studies, as the article "Do Me Dada Style". Fulgur Press, who publish Abraxas, will also release a book by Sinclair this year, so drop by her website often to check up on that.

-- August 16, 2016 --

No Hasenpfeffer From This Hare

Many readers of this blog know I like to post of little-known works of macroscopic and microscopic art; such as Tom Van Sant's "Ryan's Eye", and the Marre Man geoglyph (artist unknown). Strangely, I've never written of my favorite art object of termendous proportions, but that's possibly because of the goofiness of the piece. Well, that was also part of its charm to me, so let me introduce you to Viennese art group Gelitin's 2005 design: Hase. It used to be found on a hilltop in the Piedmont region of Italy, called Colleto Fava. Hase - meaning "hare" in German - was a 200ft (60m) long, 20ft (6m) high, pink rabbit with its guts streaming out.

The work was completely knitted, and then filled with straw. After leaving it there, the collective stated the piece was meant to be as huge as it is so visitors feel as if they were Lilliputians when Gulliver dropped by. The work was meant to be climbed, and enjoyed as a rest spot or playground.
Now, I mention much in past tense because the design is hardly there anymore. Though the collective said their mountain bibelot should fully disintegrate by 2025, the objet d'art is already almost gone.

I had hoped to hop on by before it looked as it does now, but that's a true case of hare-and-tortoise I truly slept on.

-- August 08, 2016 --

Dig That Crazy Jazz

There is a quick mention in John Szwed's Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, on how much jazz musician, and Prince Hall Freemason, Sun Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, 1914 - 1993) believed music could heal the mind.
One story Sun Ra would love to tell in example was of back when still playing under the simple name of "Sonny" (late 50s), and Blount's manager got him a gig inside a Chicago mental hospital. The ward brought out some of their toughest cases of schizophrenia and catatonia, as he thrashed his keys, and tickled the ivories throughout the evening. It was said that a woman - who had not spoken in several years - got up in the middle of his set, and stood next to him at the piano. After a few minutes, she leaned over, and spoke into the composer's ear: "Do you call that music?"
In commemoration of the event, Sun Ra later penned "Advice to Medics" on his 1956 LP Super-Sonic Jazz.

Sun Ra's interest in mental health grew, and he later released Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy (recorded 1963, released in '67); an album he believe could bridge the gap between therapy and medication. Predating, and possibly inspiring psychedelia, Julian Cope said was as if "listening to a lost kraut/psych classic inspired by [Syd Barrett and Tangerine Dream]."

Well, what else could anyone expect from someone whose motto was "I use music as a medium to talk to people"? The man may have been from Saturn, but he certainly wasn't nuts.

-- July 28, 2016 --

Food Flop

I used to be part of the VHS tape trading circuit for a while. It wasn't just having your hands on something only a handful had seen, as I also loved watching the movies that were so bad they were forgotten. Films like Blood Freak, Liquid Sky, Skatetown USA, and Mondo Trasho are all great fun, but some movies are so terrible it was best they should have been left unmade.
Hollywood has the infamous cases of Ishtar and Gigli, but others out there are bad to the point of exhausting the viewer in a slow-mix blend of perplexity, embarrassment, and boredom. One of the best examples of this is Foodfight!, a 2012 computer animated feature, staring the voices of Charlie Sheen, Wayne Brady and Hilary Duff.

Sometimes, stars align, and the Universe tells you you're on the wrong path. Foodfight!'s producer, Larry Kassanoff, had all the signs, and still forged ahead. The idea came to him in 1999, and he talked backers into lending him a whopping 25 million dollars. In 2003, the hard drives containing original copies of the film were supposedly stolen. Years behind schedule, Kassanoff began round two in a haste. In the middle of the second animation, Larry had the idea to switch graphic and motion styles, then claimed the finish product was a result of mixed signals between him and the animators. By the time it finally wrapped editing (2011), he faulted on a loan, and the insurance company became the copyright owners of the entire movie. In 2012, it was released in the UK, grossing only 20 grand on opening weekend, until quietly being released on DVD soon after.
The film itself is amazingly terrible. The animation is awful, but the plot is even worse. Centered in a supermarket after closing, the product's mascots (ala Toy Story) come to life at night, most of whom are at war with a villainous Brand X. Entertainment website The A.V. Club rightly said that "the grotesque ugliness of the animation alone would be a deal-breaker even if the film weren't also glaringly inappropriate in its sexuality, nightmare-inducing in its animation, and filled with Nazi overtones and iconography even more egregiously unfit for children than the script's wall-to-wall gauntlet of crude double entendres and weird intimations of inter-species sex". When asked how Kasanoff could think to get away with such an extreme episode of product placement, he would always reply that no company paid him for the use of their logos.
Well, being the sadistic bastard I am, ladies and gents, grab some popcorn, and enjoy an hour-and-a-half of suffering (and corporate brainwashing).

-- July 18, 2016 --

A Double Shot

I have two new music articles over at No Echo.
The most recent, "They Hate Us, We Hate Them", is a musical trip into the anger aimed at the early punk movement, with a touch of politics, and some wild tv clips from the 80s.

Earlier, No Echo posted my brief history, "The Dio You Don't Know", on the 1960s musical work of heavy metal hero Ronnie James Dio.

-- July 10, 2016 --

Unidentified Fleecing Objects

As much as I love a good UFO case, I find great joy in a good UFO hoax. One of my favorites was the infamous UMMO affair in Spain.
In the early 1960s, the countryside surrounding Madrid had UFO sightings, with many recalling a symbol on the bottom of the craft, like a capital H with an I in the middle of it. In 1965, some physicists, artists and members of the Society of Friends of Space, were mailed highly scientific documents, the covers all carrying the same symbol as on the UFOs. The writer (or writers) claimed to be an alien race from the planet UMMO, and the documents became known as the UMMO Papers. The science in the reports showed to be pretty spot on, but the work also carried a warning message about where we were headed as an Earthly species. A number of UFO researchers felt this was something truly important. Contact, mostly via mail, was kept up until the early 70s, but many studying the case felt it was an elaborate prank by still unknown jokesters (though telecommunication expert, and UFO researcher, José Luis Jordán Peña claims responsibility). A handful in Spain still hold that the UMMO Papers, and the alien contact, are real, and important, while the rest of the world laughs.
Canada has its own version of the UMMO case, and it's called the Carp-Guardian case. In 1989, Canadian UFO Research Network member, Tom Theofanous, began receiving anonymous packages from someone simply calling themselves "Guardian". The first packages contained introduction letters, and documents, with the fourth, and final (in 1991), holding a video tape. On that VHS cassette was a supposed alien craft landing somewhere in Ottawa, from two different vantage points.

The documents were labeled from the Canadian Department of National Defense, and outlined how the Chinese were in league with an extraterrestrial lifeform known as The Greys, and they, together, were to attack the rest of the world sometime in the '90s.
The video tape made the rounds on UFO material of the day, and even aired on networks like Fox. It's thought by a majority of those in the UFO community to be one of their best pieces of evidence. The papers, on the other hand, were quickly found to be forgeries. Some pointed out the near-schizophrenic drawings that were often sent along with the paperwork, not to mention the delivery with the video cryptically contained three playing cards (a King, an Ace, and a Joker).

click on image for larger view

It's thought to be the work of UFO buff Bobby Charlesbois, who was hounded by UFO society members, as well as the cops. Private investigators were sent to surreptitiously obtain his fingerprints, to check against the mailings. Even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the Canadian Federal Investigations Unit, got in on it over the forged documents. Government officials reported the video was a model constructed for an AT&T ad campaign.
Odd cases indeed, but it's strange how, in both of these hoaxes, the accused perpetrator is someone who is heavily involved in his passion, yet attempts to defraud that passion's community.

-- June 27, 2016 --

Up, Up and Away

Father Adelir Antônio de Carli was a Brazilian Catholic priest, who became politically active in 2006 after - thanks to his protests - seven Municipal Guard agents were arrested in Paranaguá for human rights violations against beggars.
After a while he thought stunts were the best way to garner an issue attention. In 2008, he attempted to break the 19-hour flight record in "cluster ballooning", and claim a new world record.

On January 13th, using 600 helium-filled balloons, de Carli reached an altitude of 17,000 ft (5300 m), floating from Paraná, Brazil, to Misiones, Argentina. While the stunt was well documented, no one currently remembers what controversy was supposed to be exposed in the process.
He immediately set up his next adventure: 1000 balloons, with heights of 20,000 ft (6000 m), to help raise money for a Christian rest area for the truckers in the local port. He received survival training beforehand, and packed a parachute, waterproof clothing, a helmet, mobile and satellite phones, a flotation device, plus five days of food and drinking water. On April 20th he launched to much fanfare, but disappeared from radar within hours. By day two, there were thousands of pieces of balloons washing up along the shore.
As the flight took off, Padre Baloeiro (as he was known to the locals) made his last phone call, which asked ground control if they could relay instructions on how to use his GPS equipment, as he had been given instruction on subjects like mountain climbing, but not on how to operate the one item that could save him fastest.
The Brazilian Navy called off their search on the 29th of April, but on July 4th an offshore oilrig vessel found the priest's lower half bobbing in the current.
It seems the Portuguese have a weird connection between a sad death, and an obsession with air-filled flying contraptions. Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão was another Brazilian priest who asked kings and queens to fund his flying airship in the early 1700s. He died ill, being hounded by the Inquisition for his aeronautic investigations. Portugal-born, Cuban resident Matias Perez tried to open a balloon riding business, but disappeared during a promotional trip, and became the first person to go missing in flight. To this day, when someone goes missing, people in Cuba use the expression: "Voló como Matías Pérez" (meaning: "He flew away like Matias Perez").

-- June 17, 2016 --

I Got Your Back

I have a new project at Razorcake Magazine's website: The Backpatches of NYC.

While I've been collecting pictures of battle jackets at Maryland Deathfest for the last several years, I rarely took any in my current hometown of New York City. Well, that's all changed now!
A new image, with nine photos of the art people carry on their backs, will be posted every two weeks. Check back often.

-- June 13, 2016 --

Dead Horses Tell Many Tales

Using photographs, I have been documenting Brooklyn's Dead Horse Bay since 2011, but only recently had I decided to film the area, and put the footage together into a short documentary.

I hope this video can help many understand what we are (often unwittingly) doing to our oceans, and even our own neighborhoods.
Written, filmed and produced by me, with music by Ed Matus and I.

-- June 06, 2016 --

A Short Treatise On Contemporary Crappy Music

I wrote a joke philosophical piece on Postmodernism's influence on today's music, and decided to pick on a dozen tunes I love to hate.

It's posted over at No Echo, and will certainly make you scratch your head - even if you fully understand it.

-- May 30, 2016 --

The Strange Significance of A Virtual Rape

In 1991, Xerox's research and development company PARC created the online computer game and virtual community LambdaMOO, which is basically a cyberparty. Members met in a computer generated mansion, and could go from room to room, but could also travel outside, within a small surrounding neighborhood. In this text-based online reality system, "players" around the world (using anonymous avatars) could meet, and join in conversations, or go off on their own in search of starting new exchanges.

click on image for larger view

In 1993, a player going by the name Mr. Bungle developed a "voodoo doll" program, allowing him to do things that were wrongly credited to others in the community. For hours, he controlled the actions of players, mostly making one another perform sexual acts on each other. This caused many players to be outraged, and one claimed to suffer real life emotional trauma from what later became known as a "cyberrape".
Three days later, many users met in the LambdaMOO universe to discuss Mr. Bungle's actions. Under the username Dr. Bombay, writer Julian Dibbell was among them, and later penned the article "A Rape In Cyberspace", which was published in The Village Voice. While no conclusion developed as to how to move forward, one of the master programmers terminated Mr. Bungle's account, and creator, Pavel Curtis, set up a petition system using ballots where users vote on subjects requiring administrative powers. In one of the elections, LambdaMOO users voted for a command that temporarily disconnects disruptive users.
Though no one was physically hurt, this nasty episode has since helped raise questions concerning the line between virtual reality and real life. Political activist and attorney, Lawrence Lessig, became interested in the legal ramifications of online activity after reading Diddell's article, and, to this day, college professors ask students to join and participate in LambdaMOO to investigate the implications of online behavior.

-- May 17, 2016 --

All Hail Captain Midnight!

I was up, just past midnight, talking to my friend Franz (the only other kid in my high school - that year - who also liked punk music), on April 27th of 1986. I had the tv on in the background, which was set on HBO, as the movie The Falcon and the Snowman played with little notice. At 12:32am, I suddenly saw bars flash on the screen, and made mention that my system must have gone out. At least that's what I thought until I read the words on the screen.

I bolted upright, and began shouting into the phone that there was some wild shit happening. It lasted a full 4 minutes, but those few moments helped shape my life for years to come. I had just witnessed a rare occurrence few ever get to see: a live broadcast signal intrusion.
It seems one John R. MacDougall was upset at the price of cable television, and interrupted the company's Hauppauge (Long Island, NY) satellite feed to the entire east coast using a character generator, via a licensed transmitter at his job as a master control operator, at the Central Florida Teleport in Ocala, FL. He would have probably gotten away with it, if some tourist from Wisconsin hadn't overheard him bragging in a Gainesville eatery. The tipster called the FBI, MacDougall was arrested, fined $5000, and served one year of probation.
After this affair, I not only studied up on the case, I began to research other incidents of signal pirating. Some exploits of note include a similar barcode intrusion by a Christian fundamentalist (Thomas Haynie of the Christian Broadcasting Network) against the Playboy Channel in late 1987, and, a month later, the infamous Max Headroom signal hijack against a Chicago independent tv station WGN-TV by still-unidentified prank artists.

While there have been a few more comparable circumstances, before and since, these three events helped spawn my love of pirate radio, which, in the early 90s, led me to help create a short-lived illegal broadcast station, WACK Radio, that garnered me a fair share of harassment from the FCC/FBI.

It was permanently shut down less than three months from start-up, after I was visited at work by two agents (thanks to my ceaseless pamphleteering), and I warned everyone else. For years, I had dreamed of continuing my raid on radio, as well as hoping to one day begin a full-time pirate tv station, but it was not to be, and I opted to stick to fanzines, then switched to the internet - and here we are.

-- May 06, 2016 --

Turning Their Backs On Me

With this year's Maryland Deathfest coming up in a few weeks, I dug through my collection of unused and unseen backpatch photos from the last three years, and No Echo posted my pick of pics.

I'm sad I won't be attending this time around, especially with the killer line up for 2016, but I'm certain there will be more chances in the future.
Enjoy gawking at 100 battle jackets here.

-- April 26, 2016 --

A Modern Day Nero

Many identify the excesses of the Roman emperors to point out tyrannical rule, though there have been plenty of contemporary rulers whose cruelty and megalomania would put anyone in the past to shame. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot are the most named, but - while they were absolute despots - there are some who were even more vile, and, if left in power longer, could have scarred history for the worse.
One such is Francisco Macías Nguema.

Who? Well, here's a quick history lesson.
Born in Equatorial Guinea in 1924, Francisco became an orphan - along with ten of his brothers and sisters - at age nine, after his father (a witch doctor) was beaten to death, and mother committed suicide. Under the Spanish colonial government, he became mayor of Mongomo, even though he failed the civil service exams three times. Later, he served as a member of parliament, and was named Deputy Prime Minister for the transitional government, when Spain left the country in 1964. In what was the country's first free election (1968), he ran for president against Prime Minister Bonifacio Ondó Edu, and won.
In May of 1971, President Nguema issued "Decree 415", which abolished most of the 1968 Constitution, granting him "all direct powers of Government and Institutions". Five months later he made it a crime, punishable by death, to threaten him, and a 30-year imprisonment for insulting him. By July of ' 72, he proclaimed himself President for Life, and held a fake election the next July that gave him absolute power, making his political party the only legally permitted.
Around this time, he began to ingest a lot of marijuana, as well as a psychoactive plant called iboga. This led him into paranoid states, declaring anyone who wore glasses to be killed, and banned the word "intellectual". With a third of his country fleeing for their lives, he banned boats, and even fishing. Soon all Western medicine was made illegal, and the only road out of the country was heavily rigged with explosives.
On Christmas Day of 1975 he rounded up almost 200 of his opponents in Malabo's football stadium, having soldiers dressed in Santa costumes execute them, while Mary Hopkin's "Those Were the Days" played on loop. Also, after killing the nation's Central Bank governor, he removed the entire national treasury, and had it brought to his house. After changing his name to Masie Nguema Biyogo Ñegue Ndong, in 1976, the remaining population was forced to change any Hispanic names to something purely African.
By 1979, close to all of the country's educated were either executed or exiled, and two-thirds of the legislature, plus ten of his original ministers, were murdered. That year, Nguema had several members of his own family killed, including his own brother. This made his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo (Vice-Minister of the Armed Forces), fear for his life, and lead a coup against his uncle. In August of 1979 he was overthrown, but ran off with loyal forces to fight. Many quickly abandoned him, and he was captured in a forest on the 18th of August.
Macías Nguema, along with six defendants, was sentenced to death on September 29, 1979, and executed the very same day at Black Beach Prison by a hired firing squad from the Moroccan Army.
It is believed Nguema is responsible for the deaths of 80,000 to 400,000 of his own countrymen, which is (according to Penn State professor Randall Fegley) proportionately worse than what the Nazis did to Europe. Nguema is also the cause of a severe human capital flight (aka "brain drain") that his country has yet to recover from.
Sadly, Africa has quite a number of abhorrent rulers (Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, Robert Taylor, Sani Abacha, Sekou Toure, etc), but not many know about them because... well, it's Africa, and - face it - many just don't care about Africa.

-- April 18, 2016 --

Big Oops

In 1948, large trails of huge, three-toed bird tracks appeared all over Clearwater Beach, FL, as well as the banks of the Suwannee River. Within days, a couple claimed they were harassed by a giant creature that came out of the ocean. A little while later, some folks claimed to have spotted a 15 ft (4.5 m) tall penguin, at a distance, along the beach's shore, and Scottish zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson said he had spotted, from a plane, the same bird walking about the Suwannee River.

It wasn't until 1988 that the hoax was revealed in an article by Jan Kirby of St. Petersburg Times. Perpetrated by local pranksters, Tony Signorini and Al Williams, who found inspiration in photographs of fossilized dinosaur tracks. Though Al had passed away in 1969, Tony showed the reporter the iron feet used to make the imprints, but explained that only he and Williams were in on the prank, so the others making claims of sighting the animal were either mistaken, or just wanted to be a part of the growing story.

-- April 08, 2016 --

Babbling Bones

No Echo premiered the first track, "Kokoro", off the upcoming EP, Memento Mori, by my industrial-noise project, 156.

Read a short interview, about how I created music using only human bones, here.

-- April 01, 2016 --

A Fruitful Hoax

On April Fool's Day, 1957, the BBC tv show Panorama, aired a three-minute clip of a Ticino family yielding heaps of pasta from their crops of "spaghetti trees" in southern Switzerland.

While the segment was meant as a joke, most of the UK was unfamiliar with how pasta was made, and the station received a deluge of calls asking how they could import the trees for their own farming.
The idea came from one of the show's cameramen, Charles de Jaeger, when he recalled one of his teachers in Austria chastising another student as so dumb they would believe spaghetti grew on trees. Editor Michael Peacock loved the concept, and set up the cameraman with a budget of £100 to get it done. The cut seemed credible thanks to a voiceover by Richard Dimbleby, who was a respected broadcaster at the time.
In an April 2009 piece on pranks, CNN reporter Saeed Ahmed called the broadcast "the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled".
Happy April Fool's Day folks! Remember to have fun, but don't be cruel.

-- March 28, 2016 --

All That Jazz

The Ovechkin family were not the typical poor Russians from Irkutsk Oblast in eastern Siberia. Single mother, Ninel Ovechkin, once vowed "to have as many children as God allowed", and, with seven kids, one can say she tried well enough.
Though the government tried to ban jazz music at one time, all the kids in her household formed a Dixieland band. They were the country's first children's jazz band, becoming a huge success, with the state media even producing a documentary about them. They did well, but when the band toured overseas of Russia in 1987, the eldest brother, Dmitry, felt they could probably live better lives outside the Soviet Union, and hatched a plan.

Though their mother usually saw them off at the airport, they scheduled her to come with them on their next concert date. On the orders of Dmitry, the older children packed an upright bass with handguns, sawed-off shotguns, and a homemade explosive, and boarded Aeroflot Flight 3739 on March 8th of 1988. During the flight between Irkutsk and Leningrad, Dmitry handed a note to the crew, announcing the plane was now theirs. It read:

"Proceed to England (London). Do not descend. Otherwise we will blow up the plane. You are under our control."

Once air traffic control in Vologda received word of the hijacking, they alerted a response team, which threw into effect Operacija Nabat (Russian for "Operation Distress Call"). Tricking the family to thinking the plane landed in Kotka, Finland, they actually had it land at a military base in Veshchevo, Russia. When discovering the ruse, Dmitry shot and killed flight attendant Tamara Zharkaya. After threats of killing passengers, the tactical team burst into the plane, and a firefight began between the family and the military group. Alexander Ovechkin detonated the bomb, lighting the plane on fire, and injuring himself before he took his own life with a self-inflicted gunshot. The matriarch asked Dmitry to shoot her, and after turning the shotgun on her, also killed himself, followed by other family members Vasily and Oleg. Three passengers were killed in the melee's crossfire, and while many (20+) were hurt when diving out of the plane, fourteen suffered severe gunshot wounds.

The two oldest band members who made it through the terrorist plot, Igor and Olga, were tried, and sentenced to prison. Igor died in prison, and was murder by a boyfriend not long after release. Mikhail, who was only twelve at the time of the conspiracy-gone-wrong, is the only surviving family member, and now resides in Spain.

-- March 21, 2016 --

Stairway to Heaven

In Jerusalem's Christian Quarter of the Old City, just under a window at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, leans an old wooden ladder. In Hebrew, it is called "the status quo ladder", while, in English, it is known as "the Immovable Ladder".

It was mistakenly left there by a worker, who was doing restoration to the facade of the church, way back in the early 18th Century. The mason was thought to be hired by the Armenian Apostolic Church, which constructed the ledge where the steps stand. The first to publicly point the ladder out was an Ottoman Sultan, Abdul Hamid I, in an edict of 1757, but the the oldest image of it is an engraving by a monk from the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, and dates to 1728. Since its abandonment, it has only been removed twice: in 1997, during a conflict between leaders of the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church, and when moved under another window to fit scaffolding for the repair of the bell tower in 2009, though, in 1981, there was an effort to move it due to the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, but was stopped by local Israeli police.
Seeing that the Church is under shared control by several Christian denominations (including Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, and a number of others), the wooden rail stands as a symbol of ecumenism. It is to stay where it stands until all the kooky branches of Christianity are united.

-- March 15, 2016 --

Calling All Posers

I wrote a new artcile on how record labels tried to cash in on punk rock in the 1970s and 80s, and it's posted over at No Echo.

You can also see a list of other music-related pieces I've written for NE here.

-- March 01, 2016 --

Swing Heil

During the Second World War most U.S. soldiers were fans of the swinging sounds of jazz, and the big band sound from the likes of Glenn Miller, Dizzie Gillespie, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Artie Shaw. The Nazis had a problem with this "schwarzer und juden" music, but they certainly didn't mind trying to warp our G.I.'s minds with it.

Formed in 1940, Charlie and His Orchestra (also known as Bruno and His Swinging Tigers or Templin's Band) was actually a German propaganda tool. Around 9pm, every Saturday and Wednesday, these little ditties were broadcast towards the United States via shortwave radio, but mostly beamed into Britain, France and other parts of Europe by the National Socialist Ministry of Propaganda.
Conceived by Joseph Goebbels, and put together by lead gabber Karl Schwedler (who was "Charlie"), and conducted by Lutz Templin, the band - who broadcast their tunes from 1941 to 1943 - would take classic swing and modern jazz of the era, play it as written, but changed the lyrics to suit the Nazi mission, as well as German views on how they were winning the war. Each song would proceed with its rewritten lyrics, until a long bridge where Chuck would then monologue a bit of Hitler's views, or attempts to make the Allies sympathize with their German enemy.

It has been said that Winston Churchill thought the broadcasts to be rather funny, and enjoyed them.
After the fall of Herr Hitler and his Cavorting Cavalcade many of the musicians who played in Charlie's band actually went on to more popular acts throughout Europe, with Karl "Charlie" Schwedler supposedly moving to the U.S.

-- February 22, 2016 --

Trans Music Express

I recently wrote a short history of the transgendered in contemporary music, and it's posted over at No Echo.

Check it out, as you just might learn something. Who knows? Maybe some members of Whirr will read it, and lighten up.
You can also see a list of other music-related pieces I've written for NE here.

WAIT THERE'S MORE!