Link Proliferation: The Na'vi never drink . . . wine.

Gatorland

Chris Quigley fondly remembers one of the jewels in America's roadside attraction crown: Gatorland of Orlando, Florida.

The 100-acre park was established in 1949 and houses thousands of alligators and crocodiles, including some albinos. The animals can be seen from boardwalks and an observation tower, and high-jumping for chickens and being wrestled in live shows. The preserve also offers a petting zoo (not for the gators!) and an aviary.

Alien Vampires?

I've got no dog in the Avatar fight. I haven't seen it and most likely never will. Why? There's one blog reviewer who I've found has just about the opposite tastes I have. He's my fandom opposite. I can reliably trust him to develop carpal tunnel syndrome strokin' it over the largest steaming piles he can find. And this anti-me loved Avatar. In fact, he dusted off that classic bit of critical lameness "if you don't like Film X, you don't like movies." So that pretty much put paid to the whole thing. Then, lest I weaken, another blogger used the following analogy to defend the flick: "You don't ride the Coney Island Cyclone for plot." Which is true - but that's just one of several reasons I don't ride the Coney Island Cyclone when I want to see a movie. (Nor, to be fair, do I see a movie when I want to ride the Coney Island Cyclone. ) Anyway, that handily extinguished any interest I had in the film. That said, here's an Avatar bit.

Caleb Crain really hated Avatar. That's not particularly notable, but his odd nearly stream-of-consciousness essay ending comparing the movie's Na'vi to vampires is striking:

Why does the digital nativity bother me so much? I think the answer has something to do with the smug anti-corporate plot. In reality—in the reality outside the movie—the Na'vi, too, are a product of corporate America and are creatures of technology, not nature. Now there's nothing wrong with technology per se, and there's nothing wrong with fantasy, either. But Avatar claims that there is something wrong with technology, and that the Na'vi of Pandora somehow represent opposition to it. That's rank mystification, and one has to wonder about motive. I think there are aspects of being human that a movie like Avatar wants to collude with its viewers in denying—aspects of need and of unfixable brokenness. There are traces of this denial in the movie. We never see the Na'vi eating, for instance, except when the transcarnated Sully briefly samples a significantly pomegranate-like fruit. Yet they have high, sharp canines. Vampire-like canines. Indeed, Sully turns into a Na'vi after he lies down in his coffin-pod. Once he takes to his avatar, even his human body has to be coaxed to eat. Like a vampire's, Sully's cycles of waking and sleeping become deeply confused. In the unconscious of the movie, I would submit, all the Na'vi are avatars. That is, they are all digital representations of humans, lying elsewhere in coffin pods. And they are all vampires. They have preternatural force and speed, wake when others sleep, and feed on the life-force of mere humans—the humans lying in the pods, as a matter of fact. This, I think, is the strange lure of the movie: Wouldn't you like to be the vampire of yourself? Wouldn't you like to live in an alternate reality, at the cost of consuming yourself? Vampires have a culture, a community, feelings. They don't have bodies, but they have superbodies. The only glitch is this residue offstage, rotting and half-buried, that you won't ever be able separate from altogether—until, at last, you can.

It Seems So Obvious Once Somebody Points It Out

The only t-shirt more truthful than this is the one I have that says I'll never reveal the Wu-Tang secret. Seriously. Never. Don't ask me.

Link Proliferation: Eat yourself fitter.

"The Ultimate Revenge of the Art Nerd

The New York Times reviews the MoMA's upcoming "Tim Burton" exhibit and, sadly, finds it lacking.

Given the tremendous visual appeal of Mr. Burton’s movies, you would hope that “Tim Burton,” the Museum of Modern Art’s expansive retrospective of his noncinematic art, would be equally exciting. Alas, it is a letdown. Focused mainly on hundreds of drawings dating from his teenage years to the present and including paintings, sculptures, photographs and a smattering of short films on flat screens, it is an entertaining show and a must for film buffs and Burton fans. To see the raw material from which the movies evolved is certainly illuminating. But there is a sameness to all Mr. Burton’s two- and three-dimensional output that makes for a monotonous viewing experience.

I will most likely see it anyway, though it sounds like MoMA's basically installed three galleries worth of Hot Topic merch. The entrance to the exhibit (see above) looks fun.

Roll Save Versus Anxiety of Influence

The Escapist takes a look at the literary influences on the earliest iteration of D&D. Shocking, it isn't the name J.R.R. Tolkien written out 1,000 times.

Still, it's interesting that the game's original foreword, which Gygax penned in November 1973, long before any legal concerns entered into the picture, states: "These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find DUNGEONS and DRAGONS to their taste." There's no mention of Tolkien there and indeed, even with the aforementioned references to Hobbits and Balrogs and the like, there are probably even more references to the Martian creations of Edgar Rice Burroughs in the text of the game itself.

How Evolution Makes Some People Better Cannibals

Kuru is to cannibals what mad cow disease is to beef eaters. In Papua New Guinea, where the cultural traditions of once required some tribes to eat dead, the disease claimed more than 2,500 people before cannibalism was officially stopped in 1950.

The legacy has left a curious tag on the genetics of the some of the cannibals and their non-cannibal descendants: In the last 200 years, the cannibals evolved a anti-kuru gene that researchers now call the "most clear but evidence of human evolution in action."

Mead and his colleagues discovered the mutation after comparing stored DNA from 152 dead Fore victims of the disease with DNA from more than 3000 living Fore, including almost 560 who participated in the ritual eating of brains before it was banned.

In 51 survivors and their descendants, they discovered a hitherto-unknown variant of PRNP, the gene which makes prions, the proteins that spread the disease. These prions become malformed and in turn make all healthy prions they encounter malformed as well, in a chain reaction that ultimately destroys brains by turning them into a spongy mush.

The change in the gene comes at a position called codon 127. Throughout the animal kingdom, the codon contains the same amino acid, called glycine or "G", from each parent, giving the form G127G. To their astonishment, Mead and his colleagues found a variant of the codon never seen in nature before, in which one of the glycines has been swapped for a valine amino acid, giving the new variant the name G127V.

Initially, Mead and his colleagues thought that because the variant had never been seen before, it must have damaging rather than beneficial effects. "We thought we'd found the trigger for how kuru happens, that someone ate the brain of someone with the mutation and that's how the disease started spreading through the cannibalistic funeral feasts," he said.

"Instead, we found the complete opposite, which is that it was protective."

Link Proliferation: "To join a cuib, an initiate had to suck the blood from self-imposed slashes in the arm of every other member of the nest."

I totally flaked on this last Friday, but I meant to hip you to a great post by Zoe, the amazing blogger of the high strangeness that is Zoe in Wonderland. In the trademarked Zoe style, the post follows a single thread of thought through art, history, religion, and murder, excavating the twisted roots of a Bolivian religious tradition known as "La Diablada." I don't want to ruin it by stepping all over the post's content. Well worth the click. Read on, McDuff.

Link Proliferation: "When Grete Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, she found herself changed in her bed into a Halloween costume."

Whose Dad You Gonna Call?

The Daily Beast features a profile of Peter Aykroyd, co-author A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Seances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters, and his son Dan Aykroyd, comedian and eccentric vodka producer.

The story reveals that Dan's interest in the ghost stuff comes from his family's long-time involvement in psychic "research":

Peter Aykroyd, father of the famed comic actor Dan, isn’t afraid of ghosts.

Even when the long-deceased spirits of Ming Dynasty Chinese, ancient Egyptian princes, and the family’s 18th-century patriarch, Samuel Aykroyd I, called out to him as a young boy in Ontario, Peter says he felt no fear.

And why should he have? Ever since he was 8 years old, purported communication with the dead was a regular occurrence, part of a long series of séances conducted by his grandfather, Dr. Samuel A. Aykroyd, a dentist with a side career as a psychic investigator, and the family medium, Walter Ashurst, who would channel the spirits’ voices through his body.

“Even extraordinary things in life, experienced enough, become commonplace,” Peter, now 87, told me as we sat together with Dan in Manhattan’s Essex House. “If you see a ghost 10 times—”

“—it’s like the family pet,” the younger Aykroyd interrupted, completing his father’s sentence.

Monsters Have Their Uses

In the Chronicle of Higher Ed, there's a nifty little post discussing the use of monsters in the development of our "moral imaginations":

In a significant sense, monsters are a part of our attempt to envision the good life or at least the secure life. Our ethical convictions do not spring fully grown from our heads but must be developed in the context of real and imagined challenges. In order to discover our values, we have to face trials and tribulation, and monsters help us imaginatively rehearse. Imagining how we will face an unstoppable, powerful, and inhuman threat is an illuminating exercise in hypothetical reasoning and hypothetical feeling.

You can't know for sure how you will face a headless zombie, an alien face-hugger, an approaching sea monster, or a chainsaw-wielding psycho. Fortunately, you're unlikely to be put to the test. But you might face similarly terrifying trials. You might be assaulted, be put on the front lines of some war, or be robbed, raped, or otherwise harassed and assailed. We may be lucky enough to have had no real acquaintance with such horrors, but we have all nonetheless played them out in our mind's eye. And though we can't know for sure how we'll face an enemy soldier or a rapist, it doesn't stop us from imaginatively formulating responses. We use the imagination in order to establish our own agency in chaotic and uncontrollable situations.

You've Got a Day to Get Your Shit Together

Dustin at McNally Jackson (SoHo's finest purveyor of vendible books) posts ideas for down and dirty literary-themed costumes. Here's a sample:

A. Gregor Samsa’s sister from The Metamorphosis. What was her name again? Ah, yes, Grete. Thank you internet. I don’t really know what that would look like, but I think it’d be brilliant.

C. You could be A Film Adaptation of Your Favorite Book. So: shorter, dumber, but also sexier, with more kicks to the face, more explosions, and maybe a happier ending. (Don’t take the “more explosions” bit too literally, eh?)

E. A young John Ashbery, in a convex mirror. Wow, I love that one. Maybe I’ll do that. You can still do it, too. I think the more of us there are, the funnier it would be.

Link Proliferation: Don't be a slutagator.

Just a quick one today.

Gator Loving

Regulars of this blog know my love for all film crocogator-ish, so I thought it was about time we actually discussed us some crocogatorish loving news. According to a 10-year study of gator nests in Louisiana, some alligators monogamously pair bond.

The ecologists were surprised to find that out of 10 alligators' nests that were studied, seven females chose to mate with the same male over the course of many years. The open habitat and dense population of alligators in this area makes it likely that females encounter many males during the breeding season, further corroborating the idea that mating fidelity is by choice, not chance. As Lance said in a press release: To actually find that 70 percent of our re-trapped females showed mate fidelity was really incredible. I don’t think any of us expected that the same pair of alligators that bred together in 1997 would still be breeding together in 2005 and may still be producing nests together to this day.

Ain't it sweet.

Heads Will Roll

Over at Largehearted Boy, the regular "Book Notes" column features Marc Estrin's historical novel The Good Doctor Guillotin. The novel follows the different lives of five men, all of which meet at the gallows for the first guillotining of the French Revolution.

For fans of popular music (in the folk sense rather than the current mass cult sense) Estrin links to three revolution era songs beloved by the revolting masses.

The Marseillaise needs little explanation. The one intriguing fact is that it was written by C-J Rouget de Lisle on April 25, 1792, the very day our hero Nicholas Pelletier, the patient, the package, was executed. Claude-Joseph wrote it at his table in Strasbourg -- childhood home of the builder of the execution machine.

Ça ira is an enthusiastic, if bloodthirsty, tongue twister in which we find the aristocrats swinging from lamp posts and Marie Antoinette in hell. It was the most popular "people's song" during the Revolution.

La Carmagnole was a popular revolutionary song and dance again concerning Marie Antoinette who, by the way, was unpopular not only because of her "Let them eat cake" attitude toward the poor, but because her Austrian family was likely to attack France to preserve its own and Europe's monarchies. Listen at Wikipedia. There is a wonderful Kathe Kollwitz drawing and set of sketches ("Carmagnole") of a revolutionary crowd dancing around a guillotine in Paris.

Next time you're drunkenly stumbling down the streets of the Financial District, raging impotently at the self-appointed masters of the universe, and promising to wash the nation free of sins of their corruption in a tidal wave of their accursed blood, you now have a couple of songs you can sing at the top of your lungs.

Nifty.

This Is a Picture of a Mummy Monkey

Link Proliferation: "Many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore."

Somebody Might Get A Head, But Someone Might Get Hurt

Boston.com interviews Colin Dickey, author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius. Dickey's new book explores the wonderful world of 19th Century psuedoscience and some of phrenologies more lurid aspects.

From the interview:

IDEAS: Whose skulls made for the most inviting targets?

DICKEY: The three categories of individuals who were most interesting for finding out about the human mind were criminals, the insane, and geniuses, in the sense that they represented the extreme versions of the human mind .... It was easy enough to get the heads of criminals and the insane. Nobody wanted these, really. You could go to any asylum cemetery and root around and not be bothered, or hang out at the gallows and scoop up an executed criminal. Those two were pretty easy. Getting the heads of geniuses proved to be considerably more difficult.

IDEAS: Just how common was grave robbing for phrenology?

DICKEY: It was probably not too common, though significant enough to be a recurring theme. I think it was really more the fear that this was happening on a much more widespread basis, especially in Vienna, where phrenology began. Among detractors of phrenologists, there was something close to a panic about people’s heads being stolen from the grave. Franz Joseph Gall, the guy who invented it - he was very clear that he didn’t take heads illegally. He got them all through legitimate means, although he said at one point, “If I had Gabriel’s killing sword, Kant and Goethe would have to watch out.”

How Green Were the Nazis?

If you haven't yet discovered the joys of online book retailers AbeBooks' "Weird Book Room," then you need to check it out.

This weeks selections include such fabulous tomes as How Green Were the Nazis?, The Haunted Vagina, and The Waterless Toilet: Is It Right For You?.

Jung, Man, There's No Need to Be Sad

The NY Times has an interest piece on the publication of Carl Jung's "Red Book": the surreally mystical quest narrative/dream journal/psychadelic puzzle that's been locked away from general public for about a century. From the article:

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.

Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.

The story includes a beautiful multimedia slideshow of book.

Link Proliferation: Bad reviews, jumping Frenchmen, zombie math equations, and more.

Does "It's Better If You Don't See the Monster" Really Count as a Scientific Hypothesis?

The Science Daily site runs a story on a test that links voluntary eye closing to an increase in the scariness of scary music.

Here's the science:

In her new study, Prof. Hendler found that the simple act of voluntarily closing one's eyes — instead of listening to music and sounds in the dark — can elicit more intense physical responses in the brain itself.

Prof. Hendler's research suggests that, when our eyes are closed, a region in our brain called the amygdala is fired up. The experience of scary music becomes more emotionally and physically intense. And the converse of the scary music effect may be true: happy music could produce a joyous effect when our eyes are shut as well.

Listening to sounds with our eyes closed seems to wire together a direct connection to the regions of our brains that process emotions, says Prof. Hendler. "Music is a relatively abstract emotional carrier," says Prof. Hendler. "It can easily take one's subjective personal experience and manipulate it. Our new findings, however, suggest that the effect is not only subjective. Using a functional MRI (fMRI), we can see that distinct changes in the brain are more pronounced when a person's eyes are not being used."

According to the article, volunteers in Hendler's lab were subject to "spooky Hitchcock-style music" though it doesn't specify what songs were used.

Before There Were Bloggers

Over at Quigley's Cabinet, there's a nifty post comparing the critical reception of Shelley's Frankenstein to Stoker's Dracula. Guess which one got panned and was dubbed a "tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdities"?

Notably, Quigley points out that the critically drubbed book was an instant success while the well-received tome had to wait decades before popular opinion caught up.

Doing the Math, Zombie Style

Remember Robert "with a question mark" Smith?, the mathematician that showed that every hero ever depicted in a zombie movie is doing it wrong (hole up and aim for peaceful coexistence) and every kill-happy douchebag ever depicted in a zombie movie was doing it right (hit fast, often, and hard)?

For those who weren't here last time we covered this work of this oddly monikered mathematician, Smith? used analytical tools meant to predict the spread of diseases with latency periods to model zombie doomsday scenarios and formulate a response. The solution: Humans need to go on the offensive ASAP and press the attack until every zombie is dead. Smith? and co. call this strategy "impulsive eradication."

Though this flies in the face of just about every zombie work out there, a new article about Smith?'s theory drops the formula he used and some nice numbers.

Here's Smith?'s formula, where S = susceptible humans, Z = zombies, R = removed elements:

Get that? In plain English it states that, in a zombie crisis, if Z can be kept well under S, then a loop of zombies being removed rapidly depletes the value of Z. As Z approaches and surpasses S, the number of zombies grows rapidly and the number of humans shrinks faster and faster.

How fast? From the article:

If an infection breaks out in a city of 500,000 people, the zombies will outnumber the susceptibles in about three days.

So, as grimly as it plays in Romero's Night, the strategy that you should just arm every National Guardsman and redneck you can find and tell them to shoot every zombie they see is, mathematically speaking, the best strategy.

EVERYBODY PANIC!

Over at the Fortean Times, there's a review of the new tome Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behaviour.

This book is basic a giant compendium of large groups that freaked out in some way or other. The review includes a few nice entries from the dictionary:

FAINTING MARCHING BAND

Alabama: 21 September 1973



On 21 September 1973, 57 of 120 members of an Alabama marching band either fainted or felt ill shortly after performing at a high school football game. The incident occurred on a hot, humid evening after band members had travelled 100 miles (160km) to reach the away game. The game was particularly exciting as the favoured visiting team lost 7–6. The band successfully performed their seven-minute half-time routine, remaining on the field in a kneeling position while their counter­parts from the rival school performed. When the rivals’ drill was completed, the visiting band briefly stood to attention, marched to the grandstand, and were seated, when without warning a girl fainted. Over the next 10 minutes, five other girls suffered a similar fate. During the following 20 minutes, the girls rested on benches and several were sent to the hospital. During this period, many more band members reported feeling sick. Many of those affected seemed to be over-breathing, felt a tingling sensation in the limbs, and developed a choking sens­ation. Some also reported stomach pain or cramps, dizziness, nausea, and weakness. 



CONTEXT During an exciting football game, a group of musicians in a marching band were apparently dressed too heavily for the warm weather conditions. This appears to have triggered minor dizziness and fainting, which in turn generated extreme anxiety in other band members who subsequently succumbed to mass hysteria.



A second wave of symptoms occurred as band members were boarding buses after the game. Over the next three days, 10 more girls were stricken, with five experiencing relapses. Tests ruled out food poisoning. Heat stroke was also eliminated as the cardinal symptom, and fever was absent. While heat may have played a minor role, according to Dr Richard Levine of the United States Public Health Service who investigated the episode, mass psychogenic illness was the primary culprit. Levine states that “the discipline of a precis­ion marching drill, the discomfort of wearing heavy clothes in a hot environment, the excitement and disappointment at losing a close game – suggests that the setting… was appropriately tense for mass hysteria to occur.”

CAT GIRLS OF INDIA

Dolagobind Hamlet, Orissa, India: July–August 2004



Between July and August 2004, at least a dozen schoolgirls began to exhibit fainting spells. Upon regaining consciousness, they would behave like cats, meowing, walking on all fours, and clawing at their faces. The school, in the remote hamlet of Dolagobind in Orissa, India, was temporarily closed. The first sign that something was amiss was on 26 July, when Sasmita Mohapatra, a Class 10 student, fainted during prayers. Later that day, two more students fainted in a similar manner, only to regain their senses and start acting like cats. On other occasions, they would act like cats and then faint. School headmistress Manjubala Pande told journalists that the following day “some six–seven girls started crying, fell down on the floor making sounds like those of a cat. We immediately informed others in the vill­age but after the faintings and behaviour repeated, we were forced to shut the school.” The girls were between the ages of six and 12. Each of the school’s 75 students, including the affected girls, were then taken to a nearby hermitage where they were told to recite Vedic mantras in hopes of ridding them of the evil spirits. Other cleansing rituals were also being organised. Similar outbreaks were reported at other area schools. Pande told the Indian News Agency: “They get normal after a few hours.”



CONTEXT Possession states are a form of psychological defence mechanism against pent-up stress and reflect cultural beliefs. In modern India, cats are symbols of bad luck. In some places they are believed to be the incarnation of witches.

Soon after the strange outbreaks at Dolagobind Girls’ School, other schools within the region reported mass outbreaks of fainting, though there were no specific descriptions of meowing or other cat-like behaviour. Other outbreaks were reported at schools in the Oupada section. Over a two-day period, no fewer than 20 students from a variety of classes lost consciousness. Some were taken to the Iswarpur Primary Health Centre after complaining of nausea and vomiting, but were examined and soon released. Panic swept through the school – and the region – amid rumours that the same evil ghost or ghosts responsible for the closing of Dolagobind Girls’ School the previous month were at work again.


GOBLIN SCARE

Mhondoro, Zimbabwe: June and July 2002



In July 2002, a phantom goblin scare swept through the St Mark’s Secondary School in Mhondoro, Zimbabwe. The headmaster of the school, which is operated by the Anglican Church, reportedly fled the school and was hiding out amid claims by parents that he was in control of tiny creatures who were sexually harassing both girls and female teachers. Commotion surrounding the hysteria forced the school’s temporary closure. The community was in an uproar over the accusations and angry parents were turning up at the school, demanding to see the headmaster.

Several students and teachers told journalists that they had also been beaten by “invisible objects”. In all, at least 30 stud­ents said they had been attacked. One teacher, who did not want to be identi­fied for fear of being victimised, said that some of the students were possessed by evil spirits: “I witnessed one incident when a student went into a trance… He was demanding meat, threatening that after finishing with the students, the spirits would attack the teachers next. We are living in fear here.” The outbreak coincided with mid-term exams.

The strange turn of events left the school’s assistant headmaster in the “hot seat”, having to deal with the community. Somewhat “shell-shocked”, he was reportedly referring inquiries to the Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture. He also insisted that his name not be published in the newspapers, citing Public Services regulations. In trying to put on a “brave face”, he was quoted as saying: “Everything is now back to normal and I understand lessons have resumed.” Despite the reassurance, his words did not seem to be taken seriously and the situation seemed to be far from normal.

The first signs of trouble began six weeks earlier when some students claimed that “mysterious beings” were harassing them in their hostels at night. The creatures were known as zvikwambo and mubobobo in Shona, and tokoloshe in Zulu. According to one student: “About 30 students have been victims of the attacks and we can’t bear spending another night at this haunted place... A friend of mine was bitten on the arm after she wrestled with a ghost which wanted to sleep with her.”

Several of the school’s female teachers were said to be thinking about quitt­ing their jobs. Just like their students, the teachers said they were being sexually assaulted at night by strange creat­ures. A statement issued by some of the teachers read in part: “Sometimes we get up in the morning to find the bedd­ing mysteriously wet and we suspect foul play.”

THE JUMPING FRENCHMEN OF MAINE

Maine, USA: 18th /19th centuries 



The phrase “Jumping Frenchmen of Maine” refers to a famous condition in the annals of neurology and cross-cultural psychiatry, the origin of which remains contentious. In the north-eastern United States, along the northern fringe of Maine and New Hampshire, and in the adjacent Canadian province of Quebec, small pockets of people, especially in isolated communities and lumberjack camps, exhibit dramatic responses when suddenly startled. These include a combination of jumping, screaming, swearing, flailing out and striking bystanders, and throwing objects that may be in their hands. The most extraordinary feature of these displays is “automatic obedience” – briefly doing whatever they are told. “Jumping” is (or was) especially prominent among residents of French-Canadian heritage, and in Maine, hence their nickname the “Jumping Frenchmen” of Maine. There are two main theories to account for “jumping”. Some consider it a nervous disorder of probable genetic origin; others interpret the condition as a social phenomenon. 



CONTEXT The “Jumping Frenchmen” phenomenon was unique in the context of the environment of isolated logging communities in the north-eastern United States and Canada during the 18th and 19th centuries, and may have originated as a formalised response to “the kicking horse game”. 



The “Jumping Frenchmen” first gained public attention in 1878, when promin­ent New York neurologist George Beard boarded a train to the Moosehead Lake region of Maine to see the phenomenon first-hand and wrote up his observations in an 1880 edition of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. He encountered numerous “jumpers”. One 27-year-old man sat in a chair while holding a knife that he was about to use to cut tobacco. Sudd­enly he was struck hard on the shoulder and ordered to “throw it”. The knife flew from his hand and struck a beam. He again forcefully commanded the man to “throw it”. Beard wrote: “He threw the tobacco and the pipe on the grass at least a rod [16ft 6in/5m] away with the same cry and the same suddenness and explosiveness of movement.” Beard noted that the condition appeared to run in the family, began in childhood, lasted a lifetime, and was rare in women. Beard described the jumpers as physic­ally and mentally strong. He speculated that jumping was caused by temporary degeneration from exposure to their rustic environment, but made no conclus­ions about racial heredity, or a diminished capacity to make rational judgments.



Interest in “jumping” was rekindled in the 1960s and led to a debate as to whether it was a disorder or habit. Reuben Rabinovitch, a Canadian neurologist, wrote in 1965 about his childhood experience with “jumping”. He said that while growing up in Quebec, the exaggerated reflex was common to all of the children in his village. Each spring, lumberjacks came out of the woods and set up camp nearby, sharing their food, music, and entertainment. In this way, Rabinovitch was exposed to “the horse kicking game”, in which children snuck up on their victim and suddenly poked them while making the neighing sound of a horse. The “victim” then jumped up in the air and flailed out while blurting out a horse cry. A vital part of logging camps, the horses were often temperamental, and the lumberjacks could be badly hurt from being kicked when entering a stall. Typically, one lumberjack would sneak into the stall next to his intended victim’s horse and wait. When the victim arrived, the prankster would “reach over and sudd­enly and violently poke his victim and give vent to the loud neighing cry of an enraged horse. This would most often frighten the victim into jumping away from what he thought was his own horse about to kick him.” Dr Rabinovich’s anecdote sugg­ests that social and cultural factors were import­ant in the development of “jumping”.

Dr E Charles Kunkle, a Maine neuro­logist, also emphasised the influence of learned roles in analysing the game reported by Rabinovitch, noting that this game involved subjects who, when start­led, were “expected to produce a formalized response of jumping violently, flailing out, and shouting angrily, often imitating the cry of a kicking horse”. Kunkle felt that this represented a “socially condit­ioned reflex, reinforced by example and by repeated stimulat­ion” and a “part of regional folklore”. As a physician, he was able to talk to and examine 15 jumpers. Kunkle said that jumping seemed to develop and flourish in “relatively closed and unsophisticated communities and in entirely masculine work groups”. 



In 1986, two Canadian neurologists, Marie-Helene Saint-Hilaire and Jean-Marc Sainte-Hilaire, and psychologist Luc Granger, published their study of eight jumpers in the region of Beauce, Quebec, where men traditionally worked as lumber­jacks across the border in Maine. In six of those examined, the symptoms began with their work as lumberjacks. One man, when startled, “would run, swear, throw an object he was holding, strike at bystanders, or obey commands”. He said that one time he “jumped from a height of 10ft (3m) after a sudden command”. The researchers noted that all eight subjects would scream, most would throw an object in their hand or strike out, and half briefly obeyed commands shouted at them immediately after being startled, such as “jump”, “run”, or “dance”.



Is “jumping” nature or nurture? Some scientists believe these symptoms occur in rare individuals suffering from a dysfunct­ion of the human startle response known as hyperstartle, with local culture shaping the response. Others think it is more common and akin to a regional habit. It appears that “jumping” resulted from a set of social conditions that may be related to other examples of hyperstartle. There is probably a genetic predisposit­ion to excessive startle in the general population, but this does not explain the prevalence of “jumping” in isolated Maine commun­ities. While certain medical condit­ions can cause excessive startle, jumpers have no known conditions, suggesting a social and cultural linkage. Rabinovitch suggested that as lumberjacks were confined to the northern woods from autumn to spring, they invented distractions in their isolation and boredom involving the only contacts available, men and horses. The jumping syndrome then grew out of the lumber camps and moved to surrounding towns and vill­ages. “Jumping” appeared to die out with the passing of the traditional logging camp. Tractors replaced horses, lumberjacks became less isolated, and the incidence of “jumping” declined. Experts have noted that even severe “jumpers” lost their exaggerated responses as they were removed from the continual stimuli, which suggests an origin in operant conditioning in a closed community. According to the principles of operant condit­ioning, acts that are reinforced tend to be repeated, while those that are not tend to diminish in frequency. 



COMMENTS: A plausible explanation for “jumping” is that it began as a local idiom that became institutionalised among a select group of people. If logging camp inhabitants lived with the knowledge that they might be surprised by a sudden “poke”, and exaggerated startle was the expected response, then this conditioned social reflex became a normal part of social intercourse.

THE TEXAS EARTHWORM

Laredo, Texas: 1993 



In early March 1993, a newspaper hoax created excitement in Laredo, Texas (population 130,000), after the Morning Times of Laredo published a bogus account of a giant 300lb (136kg) earthworm measuring 79ft (24m) in length. The creature was reportedly found dead, draped across Interstate 35, tying up traffic. 



CONTEXT The incident highlights the influence of the mass media in the information age, and how susceptible society is to journalistic hoaxes. 



According to the story, entomologist Luis Leacky from Laredo State University had located a mucus trail along the Interstate, speculating that the creature had mutated from the nearby Rio Grande. Laredo police and US Border Patrol officers reportedly converged on the scene in rubber gloves, removing the mammoth worm with the help of two cranes and a large truck.



Local police were deluged with hundreds of calls from inquisitive residents as scores of people drove to the scene to glimpse the fictitious worm after the journalist who wrote the story, Carol Huang, wrote: “Because federal environmental guidelines do not outline the proper disposal method for large earthworm carcasses... authorities have left the creature in the Target store parking lot until Monday, when zoologists and EPA officials are expected to arrive from Washington.” Even before the store opened, a Target worker said that curiosity seekers kept asking if the worm carcass was inside the building. 



Huang, who was dismissed from her job the same day, said she wrote the account on her computer as a joke but was flabbergasted to see it appear on page 3A several days later. The news editor who allowed the story to appear, Thomas Sanchez, left his job shortly after the incident, but said the account ran “by accident”.

MARTIAN INVASION

Ecuador: February 1949 



On the night of 12 February, a radio play based on HG Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds sparked pandemonium in Ecuador. A reporter on the scene said the broadcast “drove most of the population of Quito into the streets” as panic-stricken residents sought to escape Martian “gas raids”. The drama described strange creat­ures heading toward Quito after landing and destroying the neighbouring commun­ity of Latacunga, 20 miles (32km) to the south. Broadcast in Spanish on Radio Quito, the realistic programme included impersonat­ions of well-known local politicians, journalists, vivid eyewitness descriptions, and the name of the local town of Cotocallao. In Quito, rioting broke out and an enraged mob marched on the building housing the radio station and Ecuador’s leading newspaper, El Comercio. Rampaging mob members blocked the entrance to the building, hurling stones and smashing windows. Some occupants escaped from a rear door; others ran to the third floor. Groups poured gasoline onto the building and hurled flaming wads of paper, sett­ing fires in several locations, trapping dozens inside and forcing them to the third storey. As the flames reached them, the occupants began leaping from windows and forming human chains in a desperate bid to reach safety. Some of the “chains” broke, plunging terrified occupants to their deaths. Twenty people were killed and 15 injured. Soldiers were mobilised to restore order, rolling through the streets in tanks and firing tear gas canisters to break up the demonstrators and allow fire engines through. Damage to the news­paper building was estimated at 50,000. Help was slow to arrive, as most mobile police units had been dispatched to Cotocallao to repel the “Mart­ians”, leaving Quito with a skeleton police and military presence. 



The tragic events began with the sudden interruption of a regular music programme with a special bulletin – “Here is urgent news” – followed by reports of the invading Martians in the form of a cloud, wreaking havoc and destruct­ion while closing in on the city. “The air base of Marisal Sucre has been taken by the enemy and it is being destroyed. There are many dead and wounded,” the announcer said. A voice resembling that of a government minister appealed for calm so the city’s defences could be organised and citizens evacuated in time. Next, the “Mayor” arrived and made a dramatic announcement: “People of Quito, let us defend our city. Our women and children must go out into the surrounding heights to leave the men free for action and combat.” At this point, a priest’s voice could be heard asking for divine forgiveness, followed by a recording of church bells sounding alarms throughout Quito. Positioned atop the city’s tallest building, La Previsora tower, an announcer said he could discern a monster engulfed in plumes of fire and smoke, advancing on Quito from the north. It was at this point, according to a New York Times reporter, that citizens “began fleeing from their homes and runn­ing through the streets. Many were clad only in night clothing.” The panic was not limited to Quito. In some parts of the country, hundreds of terrified Ecuadorians fled into the mountains to avoid capture, believing, according to the radio, that the Martians had already taken over much of the country. 



COMMENTS The rioting, murder and public unrest is the most extreme reaction to a War of the Worlds radio recreation, exceeding even the original 1938 episode.

Link Proliferation: The new needs friends.

Buried (Under the Fold) Alive, Part I

Like cheese and science, old comments tend to get tossed away. While the occasional post might get a few hits now and then even after it has dropped off the main page, comments are more ephemeral. Recently, ANTSS received two comments that I think deserve a little attention.

First, like many of you, I was approached by the men and women of the NYC-based Charred Oak Films about crowd sourcing their indie horror-comedy Always a Bridesmaid.

Clicky peeky and then come on back.

I don't necessarily want to shill for their flick, but I do think it has the potential to be a winner. Let's face it: Women-centric horror packs them in. The comedy angle makes its tent slightly larger. And another project on their docket, Satan Camp, suggests that these folks can tap into a popular retro vibe.

But, that aside, supporting something like Always a Bridesmaid is a blow against the Empire. Specifically, the Empire of half-assed remakes, follow-the-leader copy cats, cookie cutter, formulaic, Hollywood crappola.

We vote with our dollars. You may have written the most insightful, witty, and devastating critique of Halloween II to ever grace the Interwebs. But I'll tell you what, Skippy; they don't give a crap what you said so long as ponied up like all the other marks.

Imagine this: What if everybody who shelled out ten to twelve Washingtons had, instead, kicked it towards funding an indie horror flick? The estimated budget for Always a Bridesmaid is $16,5000 (nearly one hundredth of the budget for Halloween II). At this point Zombie's flick has made more than $25 million. With that kind of cash, you could fund more than 1,500 films on the scale of Bridesmaid.

Dig hard, babies. This blog gets about 120 visitors a day. For the cost of Manhattan movie ticket, we'd raise more than a grand in a single day.

Like the weather, everybody bitches about the lamification of horror at the hands of talentless bean-counting studio douches. But unlike the weather, we can do something about it.

I'm not silly enough to believe that every indie horror flick is a gem. Nor do I believe that taking big studio scratch is like touching pitch, it blackens the hands. But preserving the diversity of voice in the genre, specifically by acting as patrons and friends to independent and developing, ensures the long term health of the genre. More than any ranting and raving we do as critics, its our actions - specifically our spending - that define us as fans.

Will Bridesmaid be great? Will it suck? I don't know. I hope to find out though. Even if only because it would mean we were all good stewards of our genre.

So, anyway, I kicked 'em a few bucks.

Buried (Under the Fold) Alive, Part II

Speaking of preserving voices . . . The second comment I wanted to draw attention to was attached to the Sprites song I posted a couple days ago. Musician Zane Grant has a nifty musical treat for ya'll. I'll just repeat his intro:

My sister and I did a 'dawn of the dead' song for a cd that retold the stories of different horror movies from the narrative perspectives of people in the movies. I must admit, The Sprites 'Dawn' song is better than ours, but our 28 days later and (drunk) susperia were fun if people want to check them out:

"28 Days Later"

"Suspiria" (drunk take)

Thanks for stopping by Mr. Grant.

Wrap Yourself in Awesome

My favorite merch tie-ins have always been those pieces of swag that appear to have come from the fictional world of the work they promote. It would be all good and well to have a t-shirt with the poster image for Die Hard on it. But it's about a million times cooler to have a shirt that appears to be swag from the Nakatomi Corporation.

The utterly incandescently brilliant t-shirt shop Last Exit to Nowhere mongers just such coolness. Here's some more samples:

Bonnet Rippers?

Now this is non-horror (though perhaps a bit frightening depending, I guess, on your tastes), but it was too odd not to pass along.

Okay, so this isn't horror, but it is too delightfully odd to pass up. There's a survey piece on the new romance subgenre of "bonnet romance" in, of all places, The Wall Street Journal. They're basically Amish/outsider forbidden love tales.

From the article:

Most bonnet books are G-rated romances, often involving an Amish character who falls for an outsider. Publishers attribute the books' popularity to their pastoral settings and forbidden love scenarios à la Romeo and Juliet. Lately, the genre has expanded to include Amish thrillers and murder mysteries. Most of the authors are women.

Here's a sample, from Cindy Woodsmall's bonneter When the Heart Cries:

His warm, gentle lips moved over hers, and she returned the favor, until Hannah thought they might both take flight right then and there. Finally desperate for air, they parted.

Whew. Mother, hide the little ones!

Sure the Englishers dig on it, but what do the Amish think:

While there are no religious strictures against contemporary novels, the church has traditionally viewed fiction as distracting and deceitful, says Donald Kraybill, a senior fellow at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, a religious studies center at Elizabethtown College.

Some Amish have nevertheless become avid fans. An Amish woman in Lancaster told Ms. Lewis that "all the women in our church district are reading your books under the covers, literally," Ms. Lewis said. Ms. Brunstetter, who lives in Tacoma, Wash., said several Amish families in northern Indiana have played host to book signings in their homes for her "Sisters of Holmes County" series.

Link Proliferation: Humerus? No. It's dead serious business.

Parts Is Parts

Giving new meaning to "forced to sell you body," the German magazine Der Spiegel takes a look at the global market in human remains. Volunteer programs have pretty much put paid to classic resurrection men, but corpses remain a hot commodity: The tissues of the deceased are used to create spare transplant materials, provide demo bodies for medical tech firms, and create tech parts that the human body won't reject.

Plus, there's this hand graphic to make sure you don't get taken to the cleaners come time to sell your windpipe.

Horror Poetry, Automated

The fine folks at the Artic Chaos Gothic Off-Ramp website have created a Goth-O-Matic Poetry Generator. It's sort of a Mad-Libs for the white face paint set.

It's the Only Way To Live

Here's NIN backing Gary Numan on his post-punk classic "Cars."


Where's Lucien?

From the folks at Shelfari, here's some shelf porn from Neil Gaiman.

Follow-Up: Big damn bugs.

In the last Link Proliferation post, I included a link to a story about the Australian giant burrowing cockroach. The story claimed - and I passed along said claim - that the beast was possibly the world's heaviest bug.

Not even close, say Queen o' the Macabre Chris Quigley. She's got a post running down the biggest bugs and topping her list is the enormous Goliath Beetle (see above), which weighs in at 115 grams or about a fourth of a pound.

Link Proliferation: There will be bloodsuckers.

Okay Screamers and Screamettes. Even an "underemployed" hobo like yours truly gets to have a vacation – and by vacation I mean that I'll be spending the weekend in the Brooklyn jail as part of a slightly diminished sentence for vagrancy. ANTSS would like to thank the Honorable Victoria S. Lippmann for being a real sport and showing the sort of compassion for the Forgotten Man that is apparently well beyond the capacities of NYPD Officer Cedric Russert.

Sigh.

While I do my time in "The Brick, " as I think I'll try to convince the other inmates we call it, I leave you with the following links for your weekend amusement.

Vampire Economics

The Econocomics blog asks "Are Vampires Good for the Economy?". Although they don't get into the unlikely economics that drive HBO's voap opera True Blood, they do cover the comics continuation of the Buffy show, which has apparently gone semi-True Blood and started normalizing the vampires of their world.

The post starts with arguments from comedian Michael Ian Black:

In his book, My Custon Van, he argues that cape manufacturers, garlic farmers, coffin makers, and angry villagers (by this he means suppliers of tools such as torches, spikes and crosses) would see net growth. Furthermore, he discusses the notion of a "vampire tax" or the idea that vampires would be more likely to attack individuals of lower socioeconomic backgrounds, who have less adequate means of protecting against an attack. This, he argues, would serve to reduce spending on social welfare programs, such as Medicaid, since more lower-income individuals enroll in these programs.

Although he predicts net losses to the makers of fake plastic and wax vampire teeth as well as the travel and tourism industries, he concludes that a small to moderate vampire army would be beneficial for the economy in the long-run and offset any potential short-run losses.

From there blogger ShadowBanker goes on to discuss vampire insurance, changes in the entertainment industry, and the question of what happens to Social Security when a section of the eligible population is immortal.

We're Here, We're Insincere, Get Used to It

Over at the Daily Beast, contributor Michelle Goldberg takes up True Blood's queer/vamp metaphor and finds the show's vampires as gays conceit lacking.

From her post:

What’s fascinating and disturbing about True Blood are the weird, seemingly reactionary politics underlying much of the mayhem. True Blood doesn’t share Twilight’s Victorianism, but in a way it’s even more anxious about sex. Indeed, the show’s universe is like the right’s worst nightmare about post-gay-liberation America come to life.

Based on a series of books by the mystery writer Charlaine Harris, True Blood draws a clear parallel between vampires and gays, one that at first seems reminiscent of the X-Men. As the show begins, vampires have “come out of the coffin,” demanding a proper place in society after endless years of existing in the shadows. A Japanese company has manufactured a synthetic blood substitute—called True Blood—removing the need to hunt humans. But not everyone is willing to accept vampires as equals—in the opening credits, we see a sign saying “God Hates Fangs,” while throughout the series, newscasts and magazine covers reference the fight for vampire marriage.

This conceit is cheeky and clever, but it has troubling implications, because the vampires, political rhetoric aside, aren’t really interested in joining human society. Unlike the misunderstood X-Men heroes, most of the vampires we meet are arrogant, perverse, and cruel—everything the far right believes gays to be. True Blood is set in the marshy milieu of small-town Louisiana; the local vampire headquarters is tawdry, decadent nightclub called Fangtasia, where human tourists come for the kink and some are ensnared and corrupted. The vampire leaders are voracious and vain; in one of this season’s most darkly funny scenes, one of them dismembers a man while getting foil highlights, then frets about the blood in his hair.

She later proposes an alternate motivation on the part of the show's creator. Perhaps, she theorizes, the entire show is a bizarre satire of efforts to normalize homosexuality from the position of a romanticized notion of homosexuality's rebel/outsider status.

Underlying much antigay literature is the unspoken assumption that homosexuality, while disgusting, is also unbearably tempting. And so, in True Blood, is sex with vampires. Sookie aside, those who crave it are somewhat pathetic—they’re referred to, derisively, as fangbangers. Human-vampire carnality is often rough and humiliating. When there is love involved, it’s laced with darkness, tragedy, and pain.

It’s hard to tell what creator Alan Ball, who also made Six Feet Under, is up to here. He’s openly gay, so he could be simply tweaking conservative fears. Or, like Rupert Everett, maybe he’s reacting against the domestication of gay life. Speaking to The Daily Beast in April, Everett railed against gay marriage, saying, “I want to be illegal. I want to live outside the mainstream.” In this spirit, in True Blood, the attempt to mainstream the denizens of a nihilistic demimonde is, at best, a bit of a farce.

I'm not qualified to speak specifically to the issues Goldberg raises. After some initial attempts at watching True Blood, I found the series not to my tastes and haven't tried to keep up. However, I sympathize with the tone of the article. In fact, I would go even further and say that a vast majority of the political and social allegories in horror flicks are half-assed, shallow, fail to offer novel insights into the issues they purport to reflect, and are usually so poorly constructed that they force even less reflective viewers to assume the messages are simply insincere.

Why are the political messages in horror films almost always profoundly unsatisfying?

Sure, as Soon as There's Trouble It Suddenly Becomes MY Bloody Valentine

The music blog The Walrus has three mp3s of previously unreleased My Bloody Valentine tunes. From the post:

All 3 sound like they are from the Isn't Anything period, or the EPs in between that album and Loveless. As one member on the MBV forum points out, "Kevin Song" most likely never got past the demo phase. It’s a cool tune, nonetheless, as are "Bilinda Song" and "Cowboy Song". The latter of seems to be the most completed of the 3, and is reminiscent of "Feed Me With Your Kiss". Suddenly it's 1990 again!

Stay classy Interwebs. And all credit for the comic of a ninja doctor talking to Ben Franklin goes to the web comic Dr. McNinja.

(And don't worry, I'm really not going to jail: just Connecticut.)

Link Proliferation: Cows, bunnies, Nazi apes, and other lesser breeds of vampire.

Mad Science's Who's Who.

Wired runs trading-cardish profiles of some of the finest names in contemporary mad science.

My favorite bit of research is described thusly:

Aiming a beam of light at a glass slide in 2006 and 2007, Moddel asked test subjects to use their brainpower to increase the amount of reflected light. Expected reflection: 8 percent. Measured reflection: 8.005 percent. This represents a tiny but significant demonstration of mind over matter, Moddel says. Asked to decrease the amount of reflected light, subjects had similar success.

Apparently, the human mind can increase or decrease the amount of light reflected off a surface, though only in amounts well below the human threshold to perceive it. This must surely rank as the crappiest superpower ever.

Alternate Vampire Species

If you have not yet read B-Sol's excellent Top 10 Least Frightening Vampires list yet, go ahead and do that first.

Back? Groovy.

So thinking on the vampires I would have added to the list, it occurred to me that all my not-so-scary vampires made the list because they weren't human. So, without further ado, here's some non-human vampires I think deserve a little Interwebs love.

Zoltan: Hound of Dracula

In the Russia, more than 200 years ago, Dracula, Lord of the Vampires, attacked a woman only to be foiled by the dog of a local innkeeper. Furious at the presumptuous pooch's intervention, Dracula turned his fury on the hound and sucked its blood instead. This turned the dog into Zoltan: the Hound of Dracula!

Perhaps the finest vampire-dog horror flick ever made, Zolton not only features the titular dogpire, but also is notable for the appearance in of Zolton's vampire off-spring. That's right: vampire puppies!

Bessie the Hellcow

In 1670, a starving Dracula was unable to find a human victim to sustain him and opted, to Bessie's eternal chagrin, for a beef dinner. The cow died and rose again three nights later as Bessie the Hellcow.

On a 300-year-old quest to destroy Dracula, Bessie the Hellcow tracked the Lord of Darkness to the outskirts of Cleveland. There she crossed paths with Marvel's mightest hero: Howard the Duck. Sadly, despite being perfect for the miniseries, Marvel decided not to work Bessie into the newly reconstituted Midnight Sons, the monster-hero team at the center of their fourth Marvel Zombies outing.

Along with Zoltan, Bessie's story leaves a foul taste in the mouth of those vampire fans who fancy the idea that vampires represent a dark and seductive aspect of human sexuality. Without exploring the subject too deeply, let's all just agree that it's hard to be sexy when you're giving a cow the ol' Transylvania hickey, as vampire fans call it.

Pryemaul

The former commander of the Third Reich's sinister Primate Patrol, Pryemaul (pictured at the far right, standing in front of the ghost of J.E.B. Stuart) began his comic book career as your garden-variety fascist ape soldier. After Germany lost the war, this simian stormtrooper hid out in the Amazon with the remains of his ape army.

Eventually an encounter with the DC's Anne-Rice-ripoff, Lord Andrew Bennett of I, Vampire fame, turned Pryemaul into DC's only talking Nazi vampire ape. Practically tailor-made for use by Grant Morrison, I have no idea why he did not feature in prominently in DC's Final Crisis "blockbuster."

Bunnicula

This horrific hare appears on both B-Sol's original flavor list and the shameless ripoff you're reading now. The long-running vegetarian vampire bunny villain-turned-uneasy-hero of a popular children's book series, Bunnicula made his first appearance in 1979. He's appeared in seven books and one film – which is really a heck of a career for any horror character (he's two novels ahead of Lestat).

Count Duckula

A spin-off of the spy-spoof toon DangerMouse, Count Duckula's origins are handily covered by the show's intro.



He is, like Bunnicula, a vegetarian. He's also a bit of a doofus.

Okay, who'd I miss?

You know, looking over this list, I have to say that I think vampire fans protest too much about the Twilight phenom. I mean, really, are sparkly vampires somehow less canon than a cape-sporting bloodthirsty bovine? Is it really possible to desecrate a image of a monster that already boasts a talking ape proponent of National Socialism among its numbers?

Cave Diving

Regular readers may recall that we've been following along with Aquarium Drunkard's on-going series revisiting the first four albums of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. After the well-received From Her to Eternity, the Brit rock press savaged Cave and Company's sophomore effort, Firstborn is Dead. NCBS's next platter, the even more Americana-soaked Kicking Against the Pricks was the group's rejoinder. From the AD post:

“In the biblical sense, Kicking Against the Pricks means something like fighting windmills. This meaning is most important to me,” Nick Cave told Dutch rock writer Tom Engelshoven, explaining the title of his 1986 covers album. “But,” he went on, “if you ask me if the word ‘Pricks’ refers to certain people in a non-biblical way, then I answer: Yes. And I mean journalists.”

Following the release of 1984’s From Her to Eternity, Nick Cave was lauded as some sort of upside-down Return of Christ by the British music press. And of course, those same journalists would, one year later, trample all over the far superior The Firstborn is Dead. Kicking Against the Pricks came as part of Cave’s reaction to the letdown, a direct fuck-you to the journalists who, in their fervor to find a savior in rock ‘n’ roll, ended up crucifying anything that lets them down. It’s an ugly game, one that we Americans learned pretty well, and Cave’s reaction is admirable. And, rather than give the long-form writers something to muse over and get smug about, Cave played the trump in the ’94 interview: “There is no concept behind it,” he stressed to Engelshoven, “except maybe that we need not be ashamed of showing our influences.”

The post includes free downloads of the thematically consistent "I'm Going to Kill That Woman" and "Hey Joe."

UPDATE BONUS:

Regina's Spector's new video for "Laughing With," is packed with allusions to classic surrealists masterpieces. And it's got Regina Spector in it. She's easy on the eyes. Like a softer Tori Amos with all the "call me Titania, dear mortal rumpling" preciousness scraped off. And the curls. Those are nice. Um.

What was I . . .

Oh, yeah. A video. Here you go.

Laughing With