More Signal, Less Noise
Halloween Issue
Volume 04, Issue 32Tuesday, October 27, 1998
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Halloween Issue
Volume 04, Issue 32 Tuesday, October 27, 1998 |
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Last week, Tom Maurstad of the Dallas Morning News (DMN) observed how, with
its Treehouse of Horror Halloween specials, "The Simpsons" has "made the
holiday its own and helped push Halloween onto pop culture's center stage."
We'd have to agree. Would NSD put out a Halloween special edition (the
hardest issue to do all year) if "The Simpsons" hadn't? It's hard to say,
but that show certainly had a positive influence. Tom further observed that
"Unlike Christmas, Halloween is a free-floating holiday. No cause for
somber reflection, just some vaguely pagan background and a contemporary
tradition of wearing costumes, eating candy - and don't forget the tricks."
We'd love to point you to a full text of that article, but since the DMN
charges for its archives, we can't. If you want, you can try to find it at
the DMN site yourself. Or there's the synopsis of this year's ninth
Treehouse of Horror.
DMN: http://www.dallasnews.com/ Treehouse: http://www.thesimpsons.net/season10/aabf01/
I'm a private dick, IGHS Union Chapter 13, The two people responsible for the International Ghost Hunters Society's Web site claim that "Spirits of the Dead walk among us!" (This can be verified at many offices around 8:30 a.m. any Monday, but that's another story.) A monthly ghost photography workshop teaches not only the pros and cons of film and digital cameras but also tips on the "ghost hunting tools used by professionals" and how to record the voices of the dead. (We ourselves have recorded one or two on an answering machine, but that's about all.) The one-day workshop costs $100 and includes lunch. Cheaper if equally laughable features of the site include more than 4,000 ghost photos with descriptions, stories, reports, and links. Apparently, "jpg files... may be faked in a paint program" but "actual photographs" are proof. Check or credit-card it out.http://www.webcom.com/ghostweb/ Visit Glancey's Gym in St. Paul, Minn. and you might bump into the ghost of a boxer pounding the bags who works out with such vigor that sometimes plaster from the ceiling breaks off and falls into the owner's bathtub. Afterwards, take a tour of the Twin Cities' most spooky places, from the State Fair, home to a bird believed to be the reincarnation of a ride maintenance worker, to the Ramsey County Courthouse, where a 3 a.m. visitor disappeared into thin air, prompting a guard to say, "I knew then it was somebody that wasn't really there." http://www.pioneerplanet.com/archive/haunted/ I was going through some old files New to NSD? Nostalgic for the days before we switched to HTML exclusively? Either way, you should take a look at our past Halloween issues. The one before you is our fourth. The ones below are our first, second, and third.First: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v01/nsd.95.10.23.html Second: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v02/nsd.96.10.24.html Third: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v03/nsd.03.35.html when this babe in stripes blew into my office. Some sites we save all year for this issue. Jail Babes is everything a he-man has ever dreamed of in a Web site: thousands of lovely, lonely, incarcerated single chicks just sitting around waiting for a letter and visit from you! No high-falutin', nose-in-the-air stuff here, sir. You can search for white girls, black girls, or other girls, and by age. We checked out AW26588 and found her bio touching: "I am a sweet, kind, loving and understanding woman. I enjoy movies, outdoor activities, camping, swimming and walking. I would like to find a sweet, understanding man who is not into playing games." She's willing to relocate, as are many of her peers. If you've been into the singles' scene recently, you'll get a kick out of Jail Babes. As the home page tells you, "Whatever you are looking for, you are going to find it here!"http://jailbabes.com/ >From the autoerotic fetishist to the Zagreb zoo keeper, some of us drop dead in strange, odd, and intriguing ways - and Ain't No Way to Go has them all. The site neatly presents hundreds of stories, snippets, and full length tales of the Grim Reaper, some wryly amusing but all macabre. Contemporary tales of death on the road jostle for space with the gruesome deathbed "treatment" of Charles II of England - who was undoubtedly very glad to go at the end. Nemesis comes in many guises, and well-written and morbidly fascinating tales of death fill this site, which merits its excellent URL. http://www.aarrgghh.com/no_way/ Paul Martrildonno creates Serious Silver jewelry, quite a bit of which is seriously twisted. Come here to pick up a vampire skull bolo for your next important interview. Drop in and buy a severed cyborg arm necklace to give the gift that says, "I love you because you're just as twisted as I am." One of the more innovative ideas on the site, if you don't count the whole erotica section, is a contest for tattoo jewelry. If you send in a unique tattoo design and they like it better than all the other entries, you'll win a piece of jewelry modeled after your tattoo. Then when folks ask to see your tattoo, hoping for a glimpse of flesh, you can just whip out your necklace. Or if they ask to see your necklace.... http://www.serioussilver.com/ Let Grave Yard Shift provide the spooky tales. Visitors drop off their favorite ghost stories, then the Webmaster edits them for grammar (oh, a thankless task!) and puts them online. As such, the stories are varied in quality and topic. Some tale-spinners use rather dubious points of reference. We're told a flying object "dropped like a dead cat" and, in another spot, that "the fog was thicker than snot." Which begs the questions: just how does a dead cat thud to the floor and how different is it, say, than a dead dog; and doesn't the viscosity of snot vary? We thought it clever that the site maintainer withholds each author's claim of fact or fiction. With over sixty stories at the site, you're sure to find one that tickles your skull and crossbones. http://users.itsnet.com/~peachy/ "My Wiccan daughter can't stay out of trouble," she answered, Rebellious young Wiccans! School suspensions! Transsexuals! A man whose name really is "Earl Lee"! This CNN report of a 15-year-old Baltimore girl suspended from school for casting spells has it all.http://customnews.cnn.com/cnews/pna.show_story?p_art_id=3068070 "I want you to keep an eye on her this Halloween." Spooky Joe goes all out to decorate his home every Halloween. He even installs a Web cam. We haven't yet viewed it, and at press time, we're still not sure Joe will turn it on (he's been sick, you see) come the end of the month. Still, it's worth keeping tabs on.http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Acres/3907/webcam.htm So, her daughter was a witch.... If you're doing the evil witch thing, lose the hairy wart and the pillow butt. Beauty and sexual charisma are de facto rewards for surrendering your soul to Satan to become a black witch. (The down side is that in your next life you'll return as a toad.) White witches are not slaves to such passions. High and Low magic are the purview of Veronica, the Devilish Lady (should you trust her?). She teaches some harmless sorcery at her site, such as How to Cast a Circle, but doesn't delve into Runes or Sanskrit incantations that could accidentally grow horns or hoofs. This site does its best work when it presents fascinating folk history of man's relationship with the natural and supernatural worlds.http://w1.303.telia.com/~u30305356/Witches.html This sounded like something out of a bad movie Forget the AFI hotsy-totsy list of the 100 best films. Make good use of your own thumbs. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) lists a running tally (updated weekly) of films garnering votes as the 100 worst movies of all time. You can add your nomination, your vote - and even your capsule review. (Run a spell check on your text, will you? IMDb plainly doesn't.) No, they're not all obscure B movies. The "Policy Academy" series takes more than one hit, as does the "Jaws" franchise. "Shanghai Surprise" may be in danger of dropping off the list, but "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies" seems secure in the 30s. Most listings include production details, cast lists, plot summaries, and some capsule reviews.http://us.imdb.com/bottom_100_films.html or, at best, out of James Ellroy's typewriter. James Ellroy's Los Angeles is noir-er than Raymond Chandler's ever was. And his 13 books are blacker than what you've seen on the screen. "L.A. Confidential" may have been simplified and cleaned up enough to please Hollywood, but the novel is theme-laden, moralistic, dirty rotten good stuff. This GeoCities site runs down all his books and all the movies in release and in development. It examines, as Ellroy has in much of his writing, his mother's unsolved murder, and the writer's struggle with psychotic tendencies. The French especially appreciate Ellroy, and this site is in both French and English.http://www.geocities.com/Paris/1906/ellroy.htm I was skeptical, but I took the case anyway. The Skeptic's Halloween comes with a good-natured sense of the absurd, smart design, and even smarter content. It offers visitors a look at the world of entertaining hooey (ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and zombies, for instance) and other hooey that doesn't even have the virtue of being entertaining (things New Age, for example). UFOlogy, though, doesn't rate as a traditional Halloween bugaboo. The Skeptic's Halloween actually seems quite fond of the pagan festival, but the real heart of the site is the Skeptic's Dictionary and Guide to the New Millennium - dozens of sly but no-nonsense hyperlinked, referenced essays.http://wheel.ucdavis.edu/~btcarrol/skeptic/hollow.html I staked out the girl's haunt. In a remote Essex valley a rectory bursts into flames, huge plumes of smoke and fire leaping up against the night sky. At the windows horrified onlookers can see faces pressed against the glass, the faces of people long dead: a nun who sinned with a priest; a coachman who lost his head; an 18th century man poisoned by his wife.... This is the story of Borley Rectory, not the end but the beginning for one young American. Searching for his ancestors he discovered through Internet conversations that his mother spent five demon-filled years at Borley Rectory, by then already known as the most haunted house in England. Catch the story of his search for the truth, the photos, the newspaper stories, and psychic reports that tell a tale of horror going back 300 years.http://www.borleyrectory.com/default.htm It looked like Grandma'd decorated it and left the stuff up 50 years. So you thought Halloween was pumpkin pie and ghost stories? Not for Richard Miller and his friends, who with the total obsession of collectors everywhere gather lamps, noisemakers, candy tins, and weird ornaments into huge Halloween collections filling entire rooms. Even throw-away treat bags become collectors' items if you keep them long enough. Evocative of the '50s and '60s, these atmospheric collections are more cute than scary. A retrospective of Halloweens long gone, echoes of trick or treating on crisp autumn nights, this is a charmingly odd Web site well worth a visit. Current prices for these Halloween bygones climb frighteningly high - maybe get a quote for that ugly old pumpkin-shaped lamp of yours. Stranger things have happened....http://members.aol.com/halween/index.htm
The witch seemed nervous - her hands kept twitching Folklore and mythology share themes and morals across cultures. One such plot common in central Europe is the undead hand that continues a life separate from (even if occasionally still attached to) its dead owner. Part of a masterful archive of myth and legends, the Hand from the Grave hosts a number of variations on a basic theme: a child assaults or kills a parent or two, and either falls dead immediately or is executed for the crime. Take a quick look here, then zip up to Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts, the home page, via the link at the top of the page.http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0779.html and she kept arranging and rearranging her Ed Wood collection Edward Wood Jr. is called the worst film director of all time. It's too modest an appraisal; he was also a scriptwriter, actor, and producer. But, as this site's author points out, Wood believed in what he did - and that's more than can be said for many film artists. The most famous of Wood's films, "Plan 9 from Outer Space", has aliens disguised in deep-sea diving helmets travel across the universe to reanimate a dead Bela Lugosi. More deeply committed to his art than to his continuity, Wood let dozens of bloopers slip into Plan 9, including one in which police leave one location in a plain black car, drive along a road in a black car with a red light on top, and arrive at their destination in a black car with white doors. The cross-dressing Wood, especially fond of angora, surrounded himself with people on the fringe, yet his own uniquely and persistently loony artistic vision stood out, even beyond the company he kept.http://hem2.passagen.se/mwrang/edold.htm Soon, a collection of freaks started showing up for a party. E.B. Spitler's Freak Show is an eclectic little gallery of the host's good naturedly grotesque and complex line drawings, best described as the relatives that the Addams family keeps locked in the attic. Look for the head with 15 faces, Mr. AMAZEing, and the Spider Man. There's also a smattering of archival material and links about the denizens of real side shows who exhibited themselves for gawking and credulous crowds. There's a blockhead, a genuine geek, and a "mule-faced woman". Exercise patience, though. The images move along fast enough, but the GeoCities ads will really get on your nerves.http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Museum/1766/ One pathetic goth thought he was a real vampire. Paul Barber's "Staking Claims" article was written for the Skeptical Inquirer almost three years ago. However, with the upcoming release of John Carpenter's "Vampires" and the hype over Anne Rice's newest novel, "The Vampire Armand", perhaps the timing of this review is just right. Barber investigates how the dicey marriage of accurate observation and inaccurate interpretation has polluted the vampires portrayed in folklore and fiction. Eastern European vampire folklore has transformed and has itself been transformed by American fiction and culture. His biting wit and incisive analysis make this a marvelous companion to any late-night blood-curdling tale.http://www.csicop.org/si/9603/staking.html Gotta admit, I was surprised to see a priest show up. A 35-year-old Wiccan priest (a gender-neutral designation), Lionrhod creates and administers Web pages and designs and sells jewelry from the comfort of her Orlando, Fla. houseboat. Apparently, pagans outnumber Catholics there. That figures.... Her page is filled with common-sense magic pointers as well as tips on how to find a coven in your area. No shoes curl up beneath wind-deposited houses here, nor can you find Sandra Bullock or Nicole Kidman, thankfully. Visit the page to meet a witch who does not come with a complimentary black pointy hat.http://members.tripod.com/~Lionrhod/ The motley crew watched some videos. We love B movies. Sure, we cringe at the naive scripts, tinny sound, and acting so bad that you can see it in the stills. But our appreciation of Bs pales compared to the love lavished on them at the Astounding B Monster site. Here are names we've never heard (and some surprisingly familiar ones, too), titles we've never seen, cheesy costumes we couldn't imagine. If you savor movies in which lighting and dialogue are equally dim ("Do you have to open graves to find girls to fall in love with?"), this is for you. About one of B's Screaming Violets, the endangered and/or predatory women of B horror, the site says, "Eroticized terror features in several key films starring exotic Luana Anders. Axed in her undies in Coppola's grisly 'Dementia 13', Anders was also tied up and forced to listen to the rantings of ego-monster Mickey Rooney in the bizarre 1971 obscurity 'The Manipulator'". Brrrrrr. Dontcha just love it?http://www.bmonster.com/
There were more corpses on the tube than you can shake a wallet at. Want to buy a corpse? Or just a head or arm? You might if you're shooting a horror film on a low budget or you want to send your in-laws a surprise. Di Stefano Productions has a grisly catalogue shop with plenty of photos of dressed-up cadaverous models. Someone in the "Corpse Gallery" looks like our sixth-grade teacher. Come to think of it, they all look like her! But we aren't paying $550 for a night with her. No way! For $19.95, you can buy a manual called "How To Build A Corpse". Hey, each of us is building one for free, day in, day out.... Maybe our own future portraits will one day grace these grotesque pages without our knowing it. Brrr!http://distefano.com/ The freaks bet on who would buy it in each flick Hey kids, Halloween is the most excellent night to start your ghoul pool top ten list for 1999! Aside from the obvious candidates (Bob Hope, Madame Chiang Kai Shek), have you seen any young, rich stars bobbing for apples in the toilets at the Viper Room on the world famous Sunset Strip? Remember, the younger the celebrity corpse, the more points you earn, and the most points takes home $1500. We can thank three embittered souls with a modem at stiffs.com for taking the ghoul pool out of the newspaper bullpen and letting us all take a shot at winning a blood purse. While your chance of winning may not be so great, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of tasteless, purgative, riotous laughter.http://stiffs.com/ and argued the value of horror movies. Buckets of blood (well, actually, the effect is more like crayon-red wax) drip from the Bloodlines banner. Beware the ghost of Halloweens past - because the latest date on this site is January 1998. Either John Powell hasn't revised it since then, or he's trapped in the past. At any rate, this site focuses on horror movies. You can read John's reviews of such classics as Creepers and profiles of such legendary horror meisters as Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. That's the good thing about videos - they keep dead undead flicks alive. Please pass the candy corn.http://www.interlog.com/~jpowell/home.htm The hostess got so wrapped up, she burned the roast beast What was it they sang about in "The Lion King" - the circle of life? We wonder whether that applies to this little gustatory delight. African crocodiles have been known to munch on humans, so why not return the favor? What better for a Halloween feast? According to this page, grilled croc-on-a-stick "tastes a lot like chicken". Hey, who doesn't?http://www.diginews.co.za/sonskyn/whatsup/w120906.htm
and the evening ended in disaster. In 1991, in the Australian Journal of Media and Culture, Alec McHoul wrote, "I want to know whether it's possible to photograph a disaster". Between war and tragedy, aided by prying videographers and paparazzi, aired and printed for mass consumption, we think we've satisfied British art editor Hannen Swaffer who, McHoul says, criticized photographers in 1908 for failing to be immediately at the scene of disaster. Not so now. As disturbingly, McHoul wrote, "It was almost impossible to set up the equipment precisely in a spot where a disaster was likely to happen.... Unless one is complicit in its occurrence." For those two observations, whatever else McHoul intended of his elegantly poetic photographic essay, our reviewer found this the most chilling site she reviewed for Halloween.http://kali.murdoch.edu.au/~cntinuum/6.2/McHoul.html The girl's shapely mummy returned the next day. This educational tool looks at the mummy of a pre-adolescent child from the Fayum Oasis District in Egypt. The Web site looks at how researchers have used the mummy to reveal details of its life, diet, and habits. We spent more time playing with the hieroglyphics here than reading up on the Egyptian history, but it's a useful resource nonetheless.http://www.cmi.k12.il.us/Urbana/projects/cybermummy/ I tossed my report across the desk. How I Spent My Halloween Vacation, by Jamie Zawinski (Netscape employee #5, or 17 or 23 or something like that), covers a buddy trip to New Orleans. They drank copious amounts of alcohol and wandered the streets looking at "Made in China" voodoo dolls and cheesy voodoo rituals. The group managed to secure invitations to famous horror author Poppy Z. Brite's party, frequented by a motley crew of weirdos. The embedded links will take you to Jamie's other essays. He's a good writer and his pieces may just keep you trapped for hours.http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/neworleans.html
"Nothing to report," I said. "No crime at all." Maybe next year. With sections called Helter Skelter, Mass Murderers, Serial Killers, and Killer Cults, you get the impression that someone is excited about death. We went to the one entitled Disneyland hoping for some family fun, but discovered that serial killer Richard Ramirez married his virgin bride there. With images of killers in jail with their "bitches", serial killers categorized by the number of victims, sound bites yelling "Satan, Satan, Satan", and the spine chilling sound of gun shots, not to mention the incessant bells, you wouldn't want to be home surfing this alone.http://www.mayhem.net/Crime/archives.html |
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