Music: Back in black.

Let's try this again. Blitzen Trapper's "Black River Killer."

Stuff: Torture was their business.

The NY Times has a disheartening profile on Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the contractors who created the C.I.A.'s guidelines for extreme interrogations. And what a well-qualified duo they were:

They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.

Former shrinks for the military's SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) program a the Air Force Survival School, these two gents parlayed their knowledge into a consulting business that reworked the torture techniques SERE training was supposed to help US troops resist into a suite of techniques C.I.A. operatives could use against suspected terrorists. From these to "experts," the C.I.A. received a bundle of techniques derived from Chinese tortures used on captured American and UN troops during the Korean War. These techniques included "slaps, stress positions, sleep deprivation, wall-slamming and waterboarding." The goal of these techniques, according to created "a comparable level of fear and brutality to flying planes into buildings."

When Abu Zubaydah was captured in March of 2002, Mitchell and Jessen were called in to consult with interrogators who had questions about the legality of the some of the techniques the consultants had endorsed. Mitchell and Jessen must have been very persuasive about the legality of their plans: Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in two weeks, an average of five times a day.

Torture pays the bills! Mitchell and Jessen made $1,000 to $2,000 a day. Just how much the C.I.A. paid them in total is classified, but the amount is estimated to have been in the millions.

Movies: Cliché misty for me.

Near the end of Frank Darabont's 2007 King adaptation (his fourth), The Mist, a small gang of humans on the run from a interdimensional spill of Lovercraftian beasties watches in stunned, mute awe as a several story-tall monster, covered in tentacles and towering well above them, walks over the road with a disinterested majesty. The beast is so large that it serves as a minor eco-system. The monster is surrounded by a nervous flock of symbiotic other-place birds, like nightmare versions of the Spur-winged Plovers that pick the teeth of alligators for sustenance. The beast is never named and the characters that witness it watch the great monster pass in a deep and silent wonder. They are pondering what the very existence of the this gigantic monster, and by extension the almost unfathomable shift its presence in this world represents, means for their immediate future and the broader future of humanity. In their silence, you're invited to ponder this as well. The quiet opens up space for viewers to think and be effected.

Unfortunately, the scene is a fluke. The image of the monster and the silence that greets it drives home the lesson that the power of big ideas is amplified when audience members are allowed to tackle the implications themselves in a space opened-up for them by the director. Acknowledge the giant's existence and let the audience think about it. By that's not Darabont's way. Instead, characters preach (literally), debate, toss out large chunks of exposition, and generally cannot let any incident or event pass without letting audience members know how to feel and think about it. The end result is that something genuinely cool gets buried under a mudslide of ham-fisted pop-sociology.

The Mist is 70 minutes of truly excellent classic monster movie magic. Sadly, it's total running time is just over two hours.

The central plot device of the The Mist is the classic Beau Geste situation that's a cornerstone of modern horror. Trap a microcosm of America in location and surround them with monsters. Keep adding on the pressure until the tribes either learn to work together or their lack of cooperation tears them apart.

In this case, three loose tribes of small town Americans get caught in a supermarket after an unexplained rash of creepy beasts traps them within. The first tribe, which we'll call the Reasonable People, is led by David, an artist who gets caught in the supermarket with his young son. David is played by a Thomas Jane who seems to be giving us a weird Christopher Lambert impersonation. The second tribe, which we'll call the African Americans, is led by an out-of-towner lawyer named Brent. Apparently Brent feels that the town's (almost entirely white) has a non-racially tinged problem with him because of the color of his license plate. He feels that, because he's not a native (and not because he's black), the natives team up against him. This is especially important in that he feels he lost a property dispute case to (the very white) David because of anti-outsider (but not racist) sentiments. The other members of Brent's tribe are also black, but that's a coincidence. They're all outsiders, apparently. But isn't that, you might ask, an indication of some sort of race divide? No. Of course not. There's no race issue in this movie. (Which is why it is okay that Brent's tribe dies first. Because there's nothing racial about any of this.) Finally, there's the tribe of religious nuts lead by the dubiously Biblical Mrs. Carmody.

Visually, the movie is a delight. Darabont ably handles the rapid tonal shifts between crisp realism within the supermarket and the mist-shrouded monsterland outside. Furthermore, despite the frantic action and heavy CGI, Darabont manages to squeeze in some nice visual touches that give the otherwise wild premise hints of real-world grounding. In one shot, for example, we get a bird's-eye view of the shop workers struggling to hold on to a rope that's being dragged out the front door. Darabont's shot let's us see the black scuff marks of their shoes on the supermarket's blue title floor: futile little smears of effort. There were many complaints regarding the CGI, but I dug the monster designs. Especially effective were those designs that managed to sneak human traits, like a full mouth of person-like teeth, on to some beast, like a spider, that just shouldn't have them. Finally, the action sequences had a sort reckless anarchy that drove home the characters mad, trashing efforts to survive.

The acting is uneven, mainly due to the absurd demands of Darabont's heavy-handed script. Marcia Gay Harden manages to breath some sinister life into her Mrs. Carmody, revealing the naked drive for power and wounded ego that truly fuel her Old Testament fire-and-brimstone faith. That nuance saves an otherwise stereotypical "all Christians are a pussyhair's breadth away from going Inquisition on ya" character. Otherwise, the actors are saddled with characters so bizarrely touchy, so weirdly ready to fight rather than cooperate, that they speak in editorials. This tendency to lecture is made unintentionally comic by the characters' habit of tossing off the "talking point" as it is just occurred to them. Typical is the scene in which character, literally walking out the door to face his almost certain doom, sticks his head back in to deliver a zinger about God and tolerance to Mrs. Carmody as if it had suddenly just occurred to him.

And there's plenty to zing about. Class conflict, religious intolerance, tribalism, and the thin line between civilization and savagery are all explored in this film – and don't worry that you'll miss these themes, the movie will be sure to tell you, ad tedium, when they're being explored. Sadly, for all the time and effort spent highlighting these issues, the film's conclusions are laughably trite. Which is more insulting, that working collar class resentments are dismissed as the sad byproduct of their own stupidity or that Frank Darabont thinks we need to be told that class conflict is bad. What's Darabont's position on religious fanaticism? Well sir, he's not for it. No, siree bob, not at all. The film concludes that, basically, white middle-class liberals - with their essentially good hearts, their love of family, and their lack of bitterness about perceived slights - are the last sane people on the Earth.

A recent review of The Mist favorably compared the film to Romero "at his best." The Romero comparison is half right, but it's not Romero's best tendencies as a filmmaker that one is reminded of. There's two versions of The Mist available. One's in black and white. Though, honestly, the film would be better served by cutting it up into a flick that ditched the preaching and emphasized the monsters.

Stuff: Portrait of a Victorian ghost hunter.

After the digital archives of the Brooklyn Eagle yielded up the odd story about a cult of blood-drinking faith healers, I decided to poke around some more. Subsequent poking around led me to the gentleman pictured above: Edward Drinker Cope, paleontologist and ghost hunter.

In 1894, the town of Mapleton on Long Island was caught up in a ghost panic. The public hysteria began on the first day of August. Passengers on a commuter train spotted the phantom near Woodlawn station. The Eagle quotes Richard Larke, superintendent of the road, who was a passenger on the train at the time:

We had just passed Woodlawn, the only station between Coney Island and Mapleton, without stopping, and had rounded the curve, when Fireman Van Pelt pulled my coat sleeve and pointed ahead, over to the left of the track. I saw what seemed to be a tall white figure. It seemed motionless at first, and you may believe me or not, but I'll take my oath that it was standing, or appeared to be standing, just where last Sunday's suicide occurred. It was tall and shadowylike. It had the appearance of a substance gradually melting into a filmy white nothing, and seemed to be covered with a long white, filmy veil. Two seconds after I saw it it began moving over toward the railroad track. It moved slowly at first, waving its long draped arms. I could see distinctly, as we approached nearer, that it motioned to us, gesticulating as one would do trying to stop a train. Engineer Mailon then saw it. He began to blow his whistle with a sucession of sharp toots and put on brakes. The thing didn't get out of the way, though it was careful to avoid the light of the head lamp, and the train was brought to a standstill. Just as the train stopped the thing glided off the track and skimmed along toward the woods, all the time gesticulating as if motioning someone to follow. It disappeared in the woods.

The same article includes a description of the phantom, though the source of these details is unclear.

It is about the size of a woman. It crouches. It has eyes of fire and is as big as a tree, but gets smaller when you look at it. It may have genuine feet, but perhaps they are imitation, for what use would feet be to a ghost? It can wail in a lonesome and despairing manner. Of course, it can glide. The most ordinary kind of a ghost can glide.

"Sunday's suicide" refers to Margaret Barning. She's a blank in the record. We know she killed herself with a pistol not far from the tracks. Witnesses, Mapleton residents, and reporters quickly linked the ghost to suicide and assumed the ghost was the restless soul of Barning.

After the initial report, Mapleton resident Jere Lott and his coachman came forward with their account of the apparition. They claimed to be the first residents to have seen the spirit. Mr. Lott describes the encounter:

I'm the first man, I believe, who ran against that ghost. Thursday morning, about 12:30 o'clock - and that was a whole twenty-four hours before the train stopped out here to let the thing get out of the way - I was awakened by hearing a tapping at my window pane. It was gentle at first. Then it got louder and oftener. I woke up with a kind of a start, but lay right still. I thought it was birds at first, but soon found it was no bird's sound. Then I began to get up, and, as I stirred about, the tapping stopped, and I heard a brushing sound against the window and then all was still. Next morning, when I had the ghost had been seen by the train folks I knew that's what I'd heard.

On August 11, just ten days after the first reported story, the ghost appeared to a rail work crew.

Saturday night the Sea Beach railway had a work train out in charge of Conductor Hilger and Engineer Kirk. A gang of laborers was along. This train was on a side track just below Mapleton, near Woodlawn, waiting for the 1 o' clock train from Coney Island to pass. The latteh [sic – CRwM] train was running in two sections to accommodate the crowd. After the first section of twelve cars had gone by, Mike Clooch, one of the laborers on the work train, emitted a blood curdling yell, pointed toward the woods, where the ghost had been seen to retreat, and made for the locomotive. Everyone divined at once the cause of his fright. The other employees caught the alarm and a general panic ensued.

Over the next couple of weeks, the number of sightings skyrocketed into the hundreds. These sightings, and others left unreported by the Eagle, were enough to attract the attention of a team of would-be ghost hunters. This crew was led by Edward Drinker Cope.

Edward Drinker Cope was a notable paleontologist whose fame in his chosen field of study has been stunted due to his occasional flights of theoretical fancy and his heroic capacity for engaging in reputation destroying rivalries. Cope's successes demand respect. He identified the Triassic class Archosauria, he was a brilliant taxonomist, a renowned field researcher, and the discoverer of two distinct dinosaurs. Even today he holds the record for scientific publications: Cope has more than 1,200 published papers. His theory that evolution tends towards increases in body size, known as Cope's Law, is still referenced in evolutionary theory, though its application is understood to not be universal.

Despite all those accomplishments, what Cope's best remembered for is his vicious feud with fellow paleontologist O.C. Marsh, a long running and mean-spirited rivalry that became known in as "The Bone Wars."

Both Cope and Marsh inherited a vast amount of wealth. Using their family's money, they launched on massively expensive fossil hunts that, over time, turned into a sort of bone-collectors race between the two deep-pocketed scientists.

More than professional jealousy was at stake in this mad race to accumulate specimens. Both men believed that accumulating data in the form of fossils would allow them an edge over their rival in solving one of the pressing scientific issues of the day: the historical role of evolution. Marsh was a Darwinian. Marsh's reconstruction of the evolution of the horse over sixty million years is widely credited as the first substantial fossil proof of evolution. Cope could not accept the absence of divine design in nature due to his religious upbringing. He became a leading exponent of the "Neo-Lamarckian" school of evolution, which relied on a proto-intelligent design premise. At the time, Neo-Lamarckian evolution was more popular in American than Darwin's ideas.

The two rivals also represented two differing paradigms of scientific endeavor. Cope was, in some ways, a throwback to the self-made polymath gentlemen scientists of the Sixteenth and early Seventeenth Centuries. A youthful prodigy, Cope was college educated, but disdained what he felt was the creativity-crushing organization and intellectually isolating atmosphere of university life. He never managed to score a degree (though he obtained honorary degrees from several institutions) and preferred to work as far on the fringes of academic life as possible.

In contrast, Marsh was educated in private schools, graduated from Yale, studied mineralogy in the US, learned anatomy in Berlin, an was an excellent example of a new kind of international, college-trained, theoretically-rigorous scientist-as-professional.

The first great fight between these two occurred in 1869. Marsh discovered a serious error in Cope's reconstruction of a Plesiosaur, a giant ancient sea monster. Cope had mistakenly put the skull of the giant beast on its ass-end, capping its long tail instead of its snake-like neck. This started a two decade-long tit-for-tat game of public corrections and humiliations between the two men. (Though Cope screwed up first, Marsh's biggest blunder is still with us. Marsh put the wrong head on an Apatosaurus body and dubbed the new species "Brontosaurus." Though the scientific community has long since debunked the bronto's existence, its popularity with lay people keeps the beast alive and well.)

From 1877 to 1892, the two men rushed to get new fossils discovered. In their dash to claim the next big find, Cope and Marsh's work led to the discovery of over 140 new dinosaur fossils. At one point, the rivalry got so fierce that Cope and Marsh's digging teams attacked one another with stones. The "wars" came to an end when Marsh's funding dried up and a financial crash dealt a blow to Cope's personal funds.

In 1892, Cope was given a position as the professor of zoology at the University of Pennsylvania. The small stipend helped stem the financial fallout of the Bone War, but it also tangled him up in the spiritualist movement. Since 1889, with the formation of the University of Pennsylvania Seybert Commission for Invesigating Modern Spiritualism, the school had thrown resources at some very unorthodox studies. Cope's 1894 ghost hunt was part of the same trend.

What Cope's stake in the study of spiritualism was is unclear. An 1888 article in Knowledge magazine summarized Cope's attitude to the is of life after death in the following terms:

Professor Cope seems to regard immortality as possible in spite of apparent evidence against it, but doubts the persistence of personality.

Still, Cope's skepticism did not rule out more general belief in the existence of a spiritual dimension to life and his own religiously influenced views of evolution were often described (as in an 1887 issue of Popular Science Monthly) as "spiritualistic conception of evolution." Perhaps Cope's sudden interest in the supernatural was a logical extension of his feud with Marsh. The Bone Wars had ended inconclusively for Cope. In sheer numbers of animals discovered, he'd actually come out behind Marsh. Though that wasn't as bad as the fact that the rapid accumulation of data did nothing to unseat Darwinism. However, evidence of the supernatural would seriously undermine the materialist basis of evolution.

Cope's ghost hunting expedition arrived in Mapleton on August 21, 1894. The team included Colonel John L. Burleigh, who, the Eagle claimed, was responsible for "offensive, defensive, and tactical movements." What sort of trouble they expected from the tree-sized specter of the late Ms. Barning is unclear from reports. Economist, statistician, and geographer Henry Farquhar took a short leave from his government post in Washington D.C. to join the expedition. In Mapleton, at the team's headquarters in the Clarendon Hotel, the team was joined by novelist William Hosea Ballou. Ballou had made a name for himself cranking out hack dime novels like A Ride on a Cyclone, before gain a reputation as a naturalist (though many felt that he was little more than a partisan propagandist for Cope in his long-running feud). Ballou's expressed reason for joining the team was to gather material for a new novel. Finally, an unidentified reporter from the The Brooklyn Eagle rounded out the team.

The team left the Clarendon Hotel at 10:00 and marched to the site of Barning's suicide. The site itself was in the middle of an untended field bounded by train tracks on one side. At the exact location of the suicide rested a "stone with a white cross on its face . . . level as a billiard table . . . it is the only stone in the field."

At 11:00, the team began searching a tree that, according to reports, was the site the ghost most frequently materialized from. To Cope's surprise, the team uncovered another team of would-be ghost hunters! Two members of the South Brooklyn Dramatic Society were conducting their own investigation in the hopes of creating a play from their research. If the sudden appearance of second Mapleton Phantom project upset Mr. Ballou, the Eagele did not report it.

Finding no evidence near the tree, the now seven-man team took positions in a nearby ditch to spy upon the haunted rock. Out of boredom, Ballou began making bad puns. He pointed to the gas-lamp glow of the nearby town of New Utrecht and questioned the newly-joined dramatists what town it was. When they answered New Utrecht, the novelist responded, "When was New Ute wrecked?" The Brooklyn reporter said that he didn't get it. Ballou repeated the joke several times. Professor Cope told everybody to ignore him.

The conversation turned to the question of personalities surviving after death. Cope expressed the opinion that it does not. He also stated he'd attended many séances, but all he'd ever witnessed was faked up stage gimmicks. Colonel Burleigh, however, claimed to have felt the presence of a departed spirit. According to Burleigh, he'd made a deal with five other soldiers that the first one to die would attempt to communicate from the dead. Burleigh claimed that he had been approached, in daylight and on a crowded city street, by the spirit of one of his dead comrades. He supplemented the story with several anecdotes from the Civil War regarding spirits and ghosts.

At 1:00, the members of the expedition grew quiet as, across the field, several dark figures approached the haunted stone. One of the figures rapped on the stone and the members of the expedition leap from the ditch and rushed them.

It turns out to have been a third ghost hunting party: several drunken ensigns from the ships the San Francisco and the New York. The ensigns were, it turned out, heavily armed. Only their inebriation had prevented them from firing on Cope's team.

Convinced that the ghost would not come out tonight, the all three groups of ghost hunters returned to town to catch the last train to Brooklyn. According to the reporter, the naval personnel remained roaring drunk and Ballou kept up the steady stream of awful puns.

Cope died in 1897. He suffered from gastrointestinal problems that were exacerbated by the fact that he was self-medicating with a derivative of formaldehyde. After he died, his brain was removed and given to the Wistar Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. Cope's bones were extracted and studied by anatomy students at the University. Many theorized that Cope had died of syphilis. However, in 1995, Dr. Morrie Kricun a professor of radiology declared there was absolutely no evidence of bony syphilis on Cope’s skeleton.

Comics: Take a number.

In Das Unheimliche, Freud's book-length mediation on everyday weirdness that popularized the term "uncanny," the father of psychoanalysis touches on the weirdness of unexpected numeric patterns.

If we take another class of things, it is easy to see that there, too, it is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds what would otherwise by innocent enough with an uncanny atmosphere, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of ‘chance’. For instance, we naturally attach no importance to the event when we hand in an overcoat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, let us say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on a ship bears that number. But the impression is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen close together — if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number — addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains — invariably has the same one, or at all events one which contains the same figures. We do feel this to be uncanny. And unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition, he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number; he will take it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted to him.

For Freud, the uncanny was an in-head toxic spill of grokked, but suppressed knowledge. (His theory works better in German, where the root word of "uncanny" can be taken to mean both "home" and "hidden.") When we encounter seemingly meaningful repetition, we dig for hidden meanings and approach all the nasty things we hide in our mental attics. Because we can't unearth any of those demons and remain sane, we project our feelings of uncanny recognition onto an external source, essentially scapegoating others for our odd sense of familiarity. In folkloric terms, these scapegoats become witches, fairy-folk, goblins, boogymen, or anything one can imagine Hellboy shooting. Less creatively, the conspiracy-minded use the appearance of false patterns to implicate the Jews, the Bush administration, the Gay Agenda, the Bohemian Grove bunch, the Federal Reserve Bank, the forgers who created Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate, those Papists that snuck a supposititious child in the birthing chamber of Mary II, Scientologists, or what have you.

In general, the march of neuroscience has not been kind to the theories of Freud. Like Bohr's model of the atom, the image of a clumpy nucleus and moon-like electrons traveling in neatly circular orbits that persists mainly because it is easy to explain and makes a nice iconic image, Freud's theories persist in the public imagination because they are easy to digest, have a poetic resonance with our personal understanding of the world, and have been embedded in key cultural landmarks by generations of creators who intentional created works off his philosophical template. Outside of English departments and philosophy courses, Freud doesn't get much love. Despite this general downgrading of Freud's ideas, modern research into how the brain works suggest Freud wasn't totally off the mark on the whole uncanny thing. In grotesquely simplified terms, the sense of import one gets around repetition might be an evolved reaction in our very sensitive pattern-seeking apparatuses in our brain. Pattern-recognition is such an important trait, the thinking goes, that false positives due to over-sensitivity would be an acceptable level of increased noise given the overall system's greater receptivity to genuine signals. Studies show that the uncanny sense of the irrational portentous is real, if unconnected to any notions of suppressed emotions or memories.

Ironically, the uncanny – the Fruedian concept that has the strongest scientific support – is the one least respected in the world of arts and letters. Instead of Freud's concept of the unfamiliar familiar, the term "uncanny" has come to mean something along the lines of "the inexplicable" or "that which should not be." The sense of eerie, but perhaps meaningless repetition, is hardly evoked anymore.

This makes Thomas Ott's graphic novel The Number: 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 an oddity: Ott's fashioned a noir-ish tale of fate, dames, murder, and madness that is, in the old Freudian sense, genuinely uncanny.

The plot of the The Number is a tight, elliptical, almost O. Henry-ish story about a schlubby state executioner who finds one of his victims, a murderer sentenced to death by electric chair, left behind a mysterious string of numbers: the titular 73304-23-4153-6-96-8. The executioner pockets the number and things nothing of it. Slowly, the numbers in the sequence begin to appear throughout his daily routine. At first, their appearance seems more benevolent than sinister. The numbers appear to lead him to a new love interest and, later, he makes a killing in a small gambling club by exploiting his knowledge of the number sequence. But the numbers giveth, and the numbers taketh away. Before the executioner knows what hit him, his new bird's flown the coop, she's taken the dough, and the numbers seem hell-bent on getting him into increasingly dangerous jams. The resolution, a phantasmagoric and sanity-questioning scene of revenge, leaves us pondering whether the numbers were, in fact, reoccurring or whether the execution was imposing the pattern on the randomness around him.

While the plot might not be the most original idea, Ott carries it off with a stylish confidence that gives the story real force. The art is rendered in a stark black and white, halfway between the gritty realism of the Ashcan School and the expressionism of Peter Kuper. This mix is especially potent near the end of the story, when the visuals grow more intensely surreal. Ott also mostly restricts himself to a stingy number of panels per page, all of which float in a deep field of surrounding black. These simple layouts – always a simple mix of quarter-, half-, or full-page rectangles that always keep a small amount of negative space between them – contribute to both the down-and-out, hardboiled visual aesthetic and the claustrophobic sense of fated repetition. Finally, Ott's "acting" is strong enough that his characters can carry the story without a single line of dialogue.

The finest moment in the whole book – and an excellent example of Ott's sly storytelling – comes when, searching for a sign, the executioner takes handful of French fries off of his plate and places them in a series on a table top, one after the other, in neatly aligned rows. Staring at that picture, I tried to puzzle out just what section of the sequence we were looking at. Unable to immediately grasp it, I added up the number of fries and then added up the digits in the repeated sequence. No dice; they didn't match. Had I missed something? Or was the executioner free of the numbers? Free or abandoned? But maybe there was something there and I just wasn't seeing the pattern . . .

And in that panel Ott's story went from being a story about the uncanny to being, itself, uncanny.

Music: Is your name Mary Kelly?

I posted a short live clip of Screaming Lord Sutch doing his big hit "Jack the Ripper" before a wonderfully terrified crowd of young Brit girls. It was disappeared not long ago. Good news though: Here's a longer clip of the same performance with even more crowd discomfort.



And here, just for giggles, is the White Stripes cover of the same song:



You may well ask, "CRwM, why are the lyrics so different?"

Good question. I'm glad you asked.

Screaming Lord Sutch would incessantly re-record his one big hit. Sometimes he'd redo it just to play with some new instrumentation. On some occasions he'd get obsessed with a new musical genre and recontextualize his hit to fit the new mode.

Yes, Virginia, there is a disco version of "Jack the Ripper."



The upshot of this is that there is really no canonical "Jack the Ripper" and the result is a sort of "open source" garage tune that everybody picks up and makes their own.

Here's The Horrors' version:



How do they walk on legs that skinny?

Sutch wasn't the only dude to dabble in Jack the Ripper songs.

Here's Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Though their "Jack the Ripper" isn't a cover in any real sense, the acoustic intro alludes to a Sutch original:



Morrissey has a bit of a thing for English true-crime slashers. His tune "Spring-Heeled Jack" is more famous, but he did a "Jack the Ripper" too. [Commenter Glass corrects me: Mozzer's tune is "Spring-Heeled Jim," not Jack - CRwM] Here you go:



Here's a late-career Link Wray, the rockabilly legend, doing "Jack the Ripper."



Isn't neat that we live in a world where rockabilly is a word that my spell-checker recognizes?

Here's the too-brilliant for words Japanese metal outfit Seikima II doing their "Jack the Ripper." Japan is the most awesome place on Earth.



Oddly, Saucy Jack played a curious role in the Golden Age of Rap. When LL Cool J decided he needed to officially produce a diss track aimed at Kool Moe Dee, he created a track called "Jack the Ripper." I kid not. (Dee's LL diss track was called "Death Blow," the video for which started with J's mom telling a prostrate LL in a boxing ring that she told him not to mess with Dee.)

Movies: Who would you have called?

Using dozens of classic and less-than-classic clips, youtube user whoiseyevan created this brilliant trailer for a fictional version of Ghostbusters - one that was made in 1954 instead of 1984.

Good times!

Link proliferation: The secret lives of horror-themed cereal mascots, sleep paralysis, and making psychopaths.

A Boo-Berry Shaped Hole in His Heart

My vocation as a bon vivant man of leisure requires I commit a certain portion of my day engaged in the aimless wanderings of the amateur flâneur. During yesterday's existential tinged meandering, I came across Artez'n, an Atlantic Avenue shop that sells creative products from Brooklyn-based creative types.

The shop's full of nifty stuff, but the following horror-themed postcards from Ghastly Greetings caught my eye.

Here's "Rise and Shine," by Mister Reusch.

Here's "Boo Hoo," by Bradford Scobie.

Not in Brooklyn? Das cool. You can snag Ghastly Greetings products over their webby site. You dig?

"It’s going to drag me down into an abyss . . ."

In the August issue of The Psychologist, Julia Santomauro and Christopher C. French survey the state of knowledge regarding sleep paralysis: a temporary an consciously experienced state of paralysis, occurring while going to sleep or starting to wake, often accompanied by elaborate and multi-sensory hallucinations.

The article author mention the most common forms of hallucination:

- Proprioceptive hallucinations: sensations of floating, flying, out-of-body experiences; feelings of being lifted up, of spinning and turning; and sensations similar to those felt when going up or down in a lift.

- Tactile hallucinations: sensations of pressure; touching or pulling on the chest, limbs or head; pressure on the bed; feeling the bedclothes moving; and feelings of tingling, vibrating, shaking, pain, smothering or choking.

- Auditory hallucinations: hearing footsteps, knocking, shuffling, breathing, talking, indecipherable whispering, mechanical sounds
(e.g. humming) and other noises.

- Visual hallucinations: seeing wisp of cloud or smoke-like substances or areas of intense darkness; seeing a human, animal or monster and possibly interacting with them.

- Olfactory or gustatory hallucinations.

The authors also run down various historical and cultural non-scientific explanations for the phenomenon. Here's a sample:

For example, in Newfoundland sleep paralysis is called the ‘Old Hag’. This is described as suddenly being awake but paralysed, usually just after having fallen asleep, and often feeling a weight on the chest and sometimes seeing a grotesque human or animal astride the chest (Ness, 1978). Newfoundlanders think it might be caused by either working too hard, the blood stagnating when they lie on their back, or hostile feelings from another person.

In Hong Kong a condition that seems identical to sleep paralysis is termed ‘ghost oppression’ (Wing et al., 1994). Chinese people have often thought that ‘the soul of a person is vulnerable to the influence of spirits during sleep’ (Wing et al., 1994, p.609) and, in a dream classification book written around 403–221bc, there are six types of dreams described. Wing and colleagues suggest that e-meng, dreams of surprise, are actually sleep paralysis and are distinct from ju-meng, fearful dreams.

Amongst the Inuit of Canada sleep paralysis is interpreted as attacks from ‘shaman or malevolent spirits’ (Law & Kirmayer, 2005). In Japan sleep paralysis is called kanashibari and is related to the magic of one of the Buddhist gods, Fudoh-Myohoh. Historically, it was believed that monks could use this magic to paralyse people in their sleep; more recently it is often believed that evil spirits cause the phenomenon (Fukuda et al., 1987). In St Lucia, sleep paralysis is termed kokma and is alleged to be caused by the spirits of unbaptised babies who haunt the area (Ness, 1978). In Korea, it is termed ha-wi-nulita which can be translated as being squeezed by scissors (Dahlitz & Parkes, 1993). Many other cultures have their own interpretation of sleep paralysis and often the cause is attributed to some supernatural force.

Throughout Europe, from the 1500s until the 1700s, sleep paralysis experiences were often considered to be the work of witches who were accused of using their witchcraft to terrorise sleepers who had offended them in some way. Such episodes were sometimes termed as being ‘witch-ridden’. In 1747, a woman testified at a witch trial that she found her husband in bed ‘lying there stiff, barely drawing breath’, and when he woke up he said, ‘My Lord Jesus help me! Oh! Fiery witches took me to Máramaros and they put six hundredweight of salt on me’(Davies, 2003, p.186)

Recipe for a Serial Killer

Jim Fallon is the Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience at the University of California Irvine. He's been studying the brains of psychopathic killers and believes that he's discovered some shared traits. The following is his TED talk on his studies in which he ponders the question "How do you make a psychopathic killer?"