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NETSURFER DIGEST HALLOWEEN ISSUE!
1995: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v01/nsd.95.10.23.html
1996: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v02/nsd.96.10.24.html
1997: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v03/nsd.03.35.html
1998: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v04/nsd.04.32.html
I spent Halloween this year in the Eastern US.
If any Halloween directory on the Web beats Yahoo's, we have yet to find it. Drawn at once to the Special Effects Makeup links, we enjoyed Wild Eyes - Wicked New Contacts for Halloween (impress your friends with cat eye, hypnotica, red hot, etc.) and Bone Yard Effects (heavy-duty makeup and simulations for the entertainment industry in LA). Before we could explore heap-commerce further, however, voices from other Yahoo pages called impetuously to us - Ghosts, Haunted Houses, Horror, Recipes.... Every year the number of sites about this holiday overwhelms us, so you might as well suffer too. About as scary as Dr. Tongue's House of Pancakes....http://dir.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Holidays_and_Observances/Halloween/
Hushed, respectful, and decorous Death? Not on this Web site. At Restin' Pete's they laugh in the face of death, spit in it, stomp on it, sing "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain" at it. For down-home, country-flavored, banjo-playin' bad taste, this site is hard to beat. The bizarre idea of a cemetery with a petting zoo, free balloons for the kids and discounts on every third embalming you order may boggle the mind - but you have to laugh.
http://www.restin-petes.com/
and headed to West Virginia to visit my mummy.
In 1888, Graham Harwick bought a couple of female bodies from the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane and mummified them with a formula of his own devising. Graham, not as crackers as you might guess, wanted to test his theories about how the ancient Egyptians had mummified their dead. Hospitals nowadays are less free with corpses, so it is unlikely that such an experiment can be repeated, legally at least. Graham never revealed his formula, and, despite leaving instructions and a vial of the fluid for his own corpse, was buried in an ordinary tomb. His mummies traveled the world with P.T. Barnum, survived several floods, spent some time under - and it can't be proven not in - someone's bed, and now rest in the Barbour County Historical Museum.http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/WVPHImum.html
I thought of Iowa, but baseball ghosts scare me.
If they build the Web site, will baseball fans come? Nothing says forever quite like a deceased baseball player and the Deadball Era pages bill themselves as "the only site dedicated exclusively to the memory of deceased major league baseball players." The site is much more than a virtual tomb, however, as it contains not only photos of the late and great's gravesites, but pertinent stats as well.http://www2.crosswinds.net/~thedeadballera/
Miniature golf is a popular family pastime, but obstacles tend to take the form of windmills rather than coffins. You'll find this nine-hole course in the basement of a Chicagoland funeral home really does include such tasteful obstacles as coffins and headstones. There's a one-stroke penalty for bypassing the coffin on Hole 2. And, oh yes, we almost forgot to mention one other thing: the game is also offered as part of the standard funeral package. Would that be a Scottish wake?
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/ILPALgolf.html
If you don't feel like visiting a real cemetery this Halloween, maybe you'd be more comfortable virtually visiting one via the gorgeous photography of Cold Marble, which has captured the grandeur of a handful of Baltimore cemeteries. Many shots take in the lovely stonework and plots dedicated to individuals lost to time. You will, however, find a few familiar faces in the lineup. Most notable are the unmarked headstone of John Wilkes Booth and the stone monument to Edgar Allan Poe. With the newest addition to the site, visitors can send postcards from some of the graves, accented with that touching sentiment, "Wish you were here."
http://www.dgbn.com/coldmarble/
D.C. (though the place was dead)
They say a successful politician knows where the bodies are buried. For a twist on this idea, try a site that knows where the politicians are buried - hundreds of them. Carefully categorized - including sections for politicians who died in duels, by drowning, or in an elevator - the site catalogues the graveyards as well as the politicians, their lives, and, of course, their deaths. Macabre, fascinating, and a brilliant historical study thinly disguised as a hobby site, the Political Graveyard is an award-winning site well worth entering. Unless you're a politician.http://www.potifos.com/tpg/
NYC Goth is the self-proclaimed guide to the dark side of the Big Apple. For gothlings of all ilks, the site provides a calendar of local events for each day of the week, a list of shops catering to the bizarre, and a spot to chat with other denizens of the night. The active NYCgoth-L group site also makes this site its virtual home base. The site provides convenient online coupons for popular clubs and merchants, so you can land that Prince Albert you've been wanting for 20% off. Hmm. Perhaps that isn't the best way to express that.
http://www.nycgoth.com/
What do you get when you mix Tortelvis, Frankenstein, Liberace's willy, and liberal bad taste? Not much, unless you're making a movie. And if you are making a movie, you can bet your ass it'll suck. And if it really, really sucks, you'll get fans. Which brings us to "Rock 'n' Roll Frankenstein". An agent and a scientist try to assemble dead rock star body parts into a new sensation. Does it work? No, if it did, how would they put in the high jinks? Gotta have high jinks. Adjectives critics have used to describe the film include "juvenile and phobic", "deliriously demented", and "thoroughly unwholesome". Gerbil lovers may want to avert their gaze.
http://www.rrfrankenstein.com/
Which old witch? The Witching Hours presents a wonderful and quite authoritative history of witches throughout the ages. You'll find dozens of essays on the subjects including Documents of the Witch Craze, Magic, Spells and Potions, Modern Parallels: The Witchcraze Today, and the People of the Witchcraze. The subjects are covered with great care and detail. Spellbinding!
http://www.goth.net/~shanmonster/witch/
I realized the Y2K crisis was merely months away.
It's all connected, see? You think it's sheer coincidence JonBenet mysteriously died within a hundred miles of Columbine? Look carefully, and you'll find that fact confirmed in the Book of Revelation. And if you think the real bad stuff is history, you are pathetically deluded, our fey friend. Come the millennium in the New World Order, satellites shall fall from the sky like acid rain, computers shall execute their preprogrammed mind-control mission, banks shall fail, and the evil one shall seize power. Subscribe to The Watcher newsletter if you want to buy some land in Montana and propagate the species, unadulterated by alien seed.http://www.mt.net/~watcher/new.html
I vowed to spend the rest of 1999 on my boat.
The vanished crew of the Mary Celeste (the ship's name was supposed to be Mary Sellars, only the painters made a weird mistake) is a staple of Bermuda Triangle-related speculations about time warps and aliens and mysterious fate, despite its having vanished in the Azores. We know the story. Crew gone, uneaten dinner on the table, etc., as if they had been plucked from reality. And plucked from reality they were, by later commentators - including Arthur Conan Doyle, in a turn as journalist, who seems to be responsible for a lot of the story's staying power. In reality, it seems the crew, afraid the ship's cargo of alcohol might explode, retreated to a lifeboat and trailed their vessel on the end of a line that was somehow severed. Such exaggerated fear might have been their response to a seaquake, according to one theory. Mundane cause or not, the story is still a ripping yarn - and the boat's subsequent self-piloted course to Gibraltar eerily echoes the uncontrolled flight of Payne Stewart's Learjet.Story: http://www.gibnynex.gi/home/jimwatt/home/marie/marie.htm
Seaquake: http://www.seaquake.com/maryceleste.html
Stewart: http://fullcoverage.yahoo.com/Full_Coverage/US/Payne_Stewart/
Some evil geeks helped me stow my gear
Ghouls and goblins aren't the only ones up late at night. So is the system administrator on the graveyard shift. This network guru - often an underling - battles power spikes and outages, hardware conflicts, hackers and data thieves, and on and on, often in lonely isolation. Satanic Sysadmins conveys the bitterness, profanity, despair, and grizzled humor of these digital warriors with advice such as "How you can increase your servers' uptime with SATANIC rituals": "You can muck around with jumper and software settings for hours, but in our experience, the most simple and direct solution involves the ritual sacrifice of a domesticated fowl, i.e. the common chicken or duck." One page reveals something we think we all suspected: "David Hasselhoff is the AntiChrist... and I have the proof." We detect a little jealousy here. Even the title of the links page is tainted with testiness: "Places to Go! People to Condemn!" We've got to wonder: If life as a sysadmin is so hellish, how did the creators of this site find time to put it together?http://www.satanic.org/
T.S. Eliot told us that that old metaphysician Webster could see the skull beneath the skin, but the rest of us need to put a head in a drawer with some dermestid beetles for a few weeks. Luckily for us, the Skull Taxidermy site will sell you a colony of those flesh-eating beetles. They will also do the job for you, if you send them the head. They provide instructions on keeping the thing from rotting in transit. Um, we think they mean the head of an animal; avoid embarrassment. If you have trouble finding your own head (did you check your ass?) and you want to see the skull of almost any beast, DeLoy Roberts, of Skyline High School in Idaho Falls, Idaho, can show you, on a page with some charming skeleton animations.
Skulls: http://www.skulltaxidermy.com/
DeLoy: http://www.d91.k12.id.us/www/skyline/teachers/robertsd/skulls.htm
For provisions I could only find bad candy
The Page of Bad Candy is dedicated to the sweets that make you think "Well, I'll never buy this again" as soon as you put them in your mouth. This page is basically a public service announcement to keep you from biting into some confection that will in all likelihood make you ill, like the Double Zout, which we're pretty sure doubles as a stain remover here in the US. As the proprietors of the page proclaim, "this is stuff the FDA doesn't know about." Their mission is to rate the unsavory nuggets on appearance, smell, consistency, and taste and relay this information to you, the informed candy consumer.http://www.geocities.com/NapaValley/2066/
Somewhere in Thailand is a museum of human deformity, a throwback to older medical collections. Preserved human bodies float in jars, serenely unaware of the viewers pressing their noses against the glass. One, seemingly suffering from hydrocephalus, has had a chunk cut out of its head, and serves as the friendly logo of the museum. Conjoined twins (genuinely Siamese in this case) have their arms wrapped around each other. The explanations are mostly in Thai, but the pictures tell most of the story.
http://www.kt.rim.or.jp/~khaosan/geka.html
which I could warm up in my microwave.
Unwise Microwave Oven Experiments are not the sorts of things you want little Timmy trying for his science fair project. For instance, to preface a procedure that produces really hot coffee (the sort that gravitates to your lap), the author suggests, "Here's a simple, slightly hazardous experiment to try." Many of these trials involve light bulbs of various sizes and makeups. We all know better than to stick metal in the microwave, but few of us understand the physics behind why we shouldn't. Some Microwave Oven Myths clears up a few of these questions, but doesn't tackle the really big issue: why can't anyone manufacture tasty microwave brownies?http://www.amasci.com/weird/microexp.html
To help pass time, I took along a truly gruesome murder mystery
Half a century ago, a young woman named Beth Short was savagely murdered in LA, her mutilated body left in two parts in a vacant lot. The case, never solved, still exerts an eerie fascination, and she lives on known as the Black Dahlia. A number of people have fingered as the killer over the years, and these two sites each propose a different candidate. Set in a real-life noir Los Angeles, the story of Beth Short's last days, her death, and what happened after it keeps providing new twists. Everything from the foul contents of her stomach to the deformities of her genitals to the cruel way a reporter pretended Beth had won a beauty contest to trick personal information out of her mother for a newspaper story keep the story resonating. Check out documents, autopsy photos, and a mass of contradictory and ominous facts, and form your own conclusions.Hazelton: http://www.bethshort.com/
Harnisch: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Movie/6936/
and a collection of animated short films.
The Animated Deaths Webring links to sites devoted mostly to animation of fights between stick figures. It's scary as hell to think of all the hours of imagination, labor, and disk space devoted to this weirdness. Our strong impression is that the 78 pages of this Webring form an underground movement kept alive, if not out in the open and flourishing, by geeks with time on their hands and a bone to pick. The humor, not to mention the images, has a lot of fun with the minimalist approach. Sample dialogue, one stickman to another: "You know we're going to die, don't you?.... We're stickmen and this is a stickman death theater." Worthy of Camus.http://www.webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring=monolith07;index;index
I said goodbye to my animal pals
Being a chipmunk in Madison, Wisc. is not all fun and nuts. You stand a good chance of being plowed into the road by a car, or brained to oblivion by a golf ball. You also stand a chance of a fate far worse than mere death - having your blood-covered, battered body picked up by Sam Sanfillippo, a local funeral director. He lovingly cleans roadkill, has it stuffed and then mounts it in an animated diorama - playing cards with two dead squirrels and a deceased otter perhaps, or sitting on a clockwork rocking-horse accompanied by a passed-away albino squirrel on plastic dinosaur. He says mourners at his funerals enjoy the spectacle - it cheers them up.http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/WIMADdead.html
and left the haunted New World for the Old.
Those who pride themselves on their knowledge of American history might do well to visit American Hauntings: The Ten Most Haunted Places in America. It's a nice mixture of fact and folklore, although site author Troy Taylor seldom reveals his sources of information. Taylor, a Midwesterner, writes ghost books published by Whitechapel Productions Press, which has some connection with the American Ghost Society (as is apparent on the linked parent site, Ghosts of the Prairie). The top-ten list is his own. Two of the sites are icons in American culture: Gettysburg National Battlefield and Alcatraz. Stephen King might object that only one of the others is in New England. Even so, Taylor and King would probably agree that many of the scariest places you can think of are close to home.http://www.prairieghosts.com/hauntmost.html
My first stop was the UK, but it was haunted, too.
The UK is of course a place of great historical importance and with history comes a penchant for things ghostly. This impressive directory of ghosts covers the haunted of England, Scotland, Wales, and the Isle of Man. Also of note are the Top Ten Haunted Sites. Each citation contains a brief history of the ghost in question.http://www.haunted-isles.co.uk/
Humming a tune, I set sail for Spain
The Halloween Midi Jukebox is a MIDI compilation dedicated (almost) exclusively to the music of Halloween. The scary tunes include not only a few "traditional" tunes, but a slew of pretty darn original ones such as The Addams Family Theme, Twilight Zone, Werewolves of London, Bad Moon Rising, and The Monster Mash. Great fun.http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Station/9621/halwen1.htm
where I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition.
Halloween is supposed to give the devil his due. And this site does - in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The perverse torture techniques of the 14th, 15th, and 16th century Catholic Inquisition are so vividly described at this site, our Netsurfer went on a crying jag. Great graphics and razor-sharp literary devices, particularly irony, make the grizzly, fabulously ingenious methods of inflicting physical and psychological pain so palpable, you just might not be able to crawl through every single torture chamber. This ain't textbook facts and figures, it's a harrowing tale of hell on earth and one of those fascinating, ghastly reminders of the human predicament.http://www.shootingiron.com/chamber/
TombTown has a Halloween Cemetery that seems a cross between an abridged encyclopedia and an collection of baseball cards in Web format. It features thumbnail histories of Lizzie Borden, Jeffery Dahmer, Rod Serling, and other historic or artistic figures associated with the dark side. Here, too, are brief backgrounders on cyclopses, demons, fairies, ghosts, velociraptors (huh?), and other creatures dear to lovers of All Hallows Eve. We aren't sure what criteria (other than death of some form or another) lead to a listing in the non-Halloween TombTown Residents, but members include Attila the Hun, the Atlanta Braves, and Ann Frank. Our two favorite obits (in OBIT Runner's Up): "Here lies Bill Clinton.....and lies and lies and lies..... " and "Here is where I lie./And here is where I'll stay./Now go and live your life./'Cause you'll be here one day."
http://www.tombtown.com/worlds/tomb.htm
This site is a point-of-sale for the book "The Affordable Funeral: Going in Style, Not in Debt". To be sure, the authors don't give away all the book's secrets in the site. But, what they do tell you is more than enough to get you well on your way to making informed decisions about funerals and funeral expenses. The site's good advice, book or no, is to gird yourself with the best possible information now; the period of grief is no time to be learning the ropes. We're not recommending the book (but we're not not recommending it, either), but we do suggest that you poke around this site for a few moments. It could mean a lot to you and your family, financially and emotionally. Consider this your Halloween public service announcement....
http://dragonet.com/funeral/
During the years 1346-1350, people began to seriously wonder how God could play the evil trick of killing a third of the world's population with a hideous disease nobody understood. A fringe group of Eastern Europeans called the Flagellants came up with a great way to try to beat the wrath of God: whipping themselves with leather straps tipped with metal prongs. Others just blamed it all on the Jews - what else is new.... The Discovery Channel's Black Death site describes in text, images, and audio how Europe struggled through the epidemic. It suggests that the resulting upheaval of the medieval social order and the prevailing perception of God paved the way for the Renaissance's humanism a hundred years later.
http://www.discovery.com/stories/history/blackdeath/blackdeath.html
which made me ponder what life I might've led 500 years ago.
Is your brain picked clean of Halloween costume ideas? Maybe you should take this goofy, fun, little personality test to see what role thou wouldst have played werest thou born in Medieval times. The Kingdomality site deigns to analyze your answers to eight questions to interpolate the job you'd have been good for; our intrepid Netsurfer was delighted to fall into the Discoverer category. Our editor is a Black Knight - really. Happily, we didn't run into such occupations as scullery maid or dung collector, but we assume someone had to do it. This is a clever come-on comes from a corporate management consulting firm which does more contemporary personality testing.http://www.cmi-lmi.com/kingdom.html
Stomach-churning backgrounds of garish awfulness crawling with bluebottle flies and slimy things make up the ten caves in the Caverns of Blood game. The aim is simple - find the link somewhere on the page that will get you to the next one. This is not as easy as it sounds - the audio and visual effects are distractingly horrible, especially the chilling scream which makes you jump, and there are dummy links leading nowhere. Even worse, click on the wrong link and leap to a heart-stopping page with a terrifying scream sound-effect and be informed your arm was just wrenched off at the shoulder by a hungry troglodyte and you have to start again. The whole thing is mad - but addictive.
http://www.ioc.net/~kevcom/Main/Caverns2.html
December 31 found me back at sea and hallucinating,
You gotta love people who can't accept the world at face value - well, maybe "love" is too strong; perhaps "pity" works better. But enough editorializing. Dead bodies found suffocated in tent bags, odd lights in the sky and strange, very large footprints in the snow all have one thing in common: they are the Unexplained, at least to some folks. Garth Haslam, who deserves our respect for approaching these cases reasonably objectively, trawls through books, newspapers, and library records to collect all the evidence of such anomalies he can find and presents them on his Web site. Each incident or theme is fully described, down to the last decomposed fingernail, and supplemented with ancillary information and theories about the Truth. Which, allegedly, is out there.http://www.sonic.net/~anomaly/index.htm
my delusions cut short by rumbling booms in the distance....
Just to be on the safe side, you might want to add sunblock and a thermal blanket to the box of food, water, candles, and matches which you have set aside for New Year's Eve. If your idea of stocking up for Y2K is buying an extra bottle of champagne, this report by the British American Security Information Council isn't for you. "The Bug in the Bomb: The Impact of the Year 2000 Problem on Nuclear Weapons" was released in November of 1998, and states that the US's nuclear arsenal is not exempt from Y2K-related problems, and that the bombkeepers might be farther behind in assessing potential trouble spots and taking corrective action than we may be led to believe. If they're wrong, I hear an Oliver Stone movie. If they're right, somebody get Coppola on board. Boom!http://www.basicint.org/y2krept.htm