Still more from the Bob Pylant purchase, including two more Zelaznys that I thought I didn’t need, but it turns out I did.
Library Additions: Five More Books, Two Zelazny, Two Signed
October 27th, 2020Halloween Horrors: Three Bedrooms, Two Bathes And A Murder Tunnel
October 25th, 2020Many of the must-have homeowner amenities considered an essential feature are no longer to be found on modern homes. No longer are buildings including such once-essential features as coal cellars, lightning rods, fallout shelters or murder tunnels.
And remember: A murder tunnel is completely different than a corpse hatch.
Halloween Horrors: How Long Does A Decapitated Head Retain Awareness?
October 23rd, 2020Any schoolboy whose studied the French revolution has wondered: How long does a human head retain awareness after decapitation?
Here’s a roundup of information on that topic.
Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds … I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased.The face relaxed, the lids half closed on the eyeballs, leaving only the white of the conjunctiva visible, exactly as in the dying whom we have occasion to see every day in the exercise of our profession, or as in those just dead.It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: ‘Languille!’ I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions … Next Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves … After several seconds, the eyelids closed again, slowly and evenly, and the head took on the same appearance as it had had before I called out.It was at that point that I called out again and, once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids, but now less complete. I attempted the effect of a third call; there was no further movement and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead.
Snip.
My friend’s head came to rest face up, and (from my angle) upside-down. As I watched, his mouth opened and closed no less than two times. The facial expressions he displayed were first of shock or confusion, followed by terror or grief. I cannot exaggerate and say that he was looking all around, but he did display ocular movement in that his eyes moved from me, to his body, and back to me. He had direct eye contact with me when his eyes took on a hazy, absent expression . . . and he was dead.
“It is very possible that a head so removed may remain lucid long enough to know its fate.”
Blink once if you agree…
Halloween Horrors: Know Your Yokai
October 20th, 2020Yokai is a very broad category of Japanese supernatural entity that can include demons, ghosts, monsters, and just about any other creature from folklore, from microscopic monsters than infect your spleen to dragon-sized titanic snails. Many, but not all, are malevolent, and a goodly number are extremely specific, such as Karakasa kozo, the one-eyed, umbrella-shaped yokai that likes to sneak up on people and lick them with its long tongue.
Here’s a brief guide on identifying various yokai:
There’s also a live-action film featuring 100 of them:
Other Japanese Halloween topics:
Halloween Horrors: Ghostwatch
October 16th, 2020Back on Halloween in 1992, the BBC played a trick on its viewers by broadcasting a program called Ghostwatch. It was an early example of what we would call “Reality TV,” and like the overwhelming majority of Reality TV shows, it was fake.
It was supposedly a BBC camera crew staking out a home where poltergeist was said to be active. In fact, it was a scripted event where viewers intentionally caught glimpses of the malevolent ghost “Pipes” in the background while he was ignored by the cast, with planted on-air callers to the studio adding to the story, and during the course of the broadcast things got progressively weirder.
Like Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast, there were disclaimers that it was fiction, but the form in which in which it was presented (with real-world TV personalities like Red Dwarf‘s Craig Charles and presenter Michael Parkinson) convinced viewers they were watching the real thing.
And like Welles, they caught hell for it:
Five days after the programme’s transmission, an 18-year-old boy with learning difficulties, Martin Denham, hanged himself, having fallen into what his stepfather described as a trance. He had become obsessed with Ghostwatch and was convinced that there were ghosts in the water pipes of his Nottingham home.
In November 1993, a year after the programme’s one-off airing, two doctors from a child psychiatry unit in Coventry, Dawn Simons and Walter Silveira, submitted an article to the British Medical Journal (BMJ) recording the first cases of post-traumatic stress disorder caused by a television programme. Two ten-year-old boys had been referred to them. One was admitted to an inpatients unit for eight weeks; he would bang his head in an attempt to free himself from thoughts of Ghostwatch and its evil spirit, “Pipes”.
Consultants from Edinburgh came forward with four more children with similar symptoms. Martin Denham’s parents launched an inquiry into their son’s death. In 2002, his mother condemned the BFI’s DVD release of Ghostwatch, saying the programme had killed her son.
The show’s producers, Ruth Baumgarten and Richard Broke, were hauled on to BBC One’s consumer watchdog show Biteback to defend themselves.
Here’s a retrospective video on it:
And here’s writer Stephen Volk on creating it:
Today, of course, fake paranormal reality TV shows have proliferated so far and wide that you can rank over 60 of them and see them parodied on South Park:
More Austin Restaurant Closures
October 15th, 2020While no one was looking, a whole bunch of Austin restaurants closed:
There are a lot of Austin restaurant closures that aren’t getting covered by Eater or the Statesman because they aren’t downtown and/or hipster-frequented joints. I only noticed these because I discovered that two of the three restaurant pad sites near the Arboretum had no labels on them in Google maps.
(Cross posted to The Logbook of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy.)
Halloween Horrors: Fleischer Cartoon’s Swing You Sinners
October 13th, 2020In this one, Bimbo is menaced by a veritable legion of phantoms in a graveyard.
(Hat tip: Don Webb.)
Library Additions: Random Firsts, Some Signed
October 12th, 2020Non-Zelazny (mostly) hardbacks from my most recent Bob Pylant purchase.
The Bizarre Story Behind Space Mutiny
October 9th, 2020A perennial Mystery Science Theater 3000 favorite, Space Mutiny is a grade Z science fiction film feature bad acting, a bad script, bad direction, ludicrous sets, thoroughly incompetent continuity, and special effects licensed from the original Battlestar Galactica TV series.
Here the people behind The Bad Movie Bible (which I may need to pick up) take a look at the story behind the film:
I didn’t realize that ostensible director David Winters was also the choreographer for The Star Wars Holiday Special. While that’s an awful lot of evil to pack into one career, any teenage boy whose parents had The Movie Channel in the 1980s are certainly willing to forgive a lot of sins for producing late night “classic” Young Lady Chatterly. (In the “non-evil” department, he was also a Jet in West Side Story.)
The MST3K episode of Space Mutiny is available as part of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Vol. 4. BLAST HARDCHEESE says you should pick up a copy…
Library Additions: Zelazny Book Club Editions
October 7th, 2020Part 6 of my third purchase of Zelazny books from Bob Pylant. I previously listed signed Amber book club editions, today is signed (all but one) non-Amber book club editions.
This ends the Zelazny hardback portion of the purchase, which I needed to finish so I could move the Zelazny section down as part of putting in a new bookcase. I will get to the non-Zelazny hardbacks (including some anthologies with Zelazny stories), signed Zelazny paperbacks, and magazines featuring the first appearances of Zelazny stories, in due course.