Near Dark

Near Dark is right up there with The Hunger as one of my favorite vampire movies. It certainly is flawed, but I was more than willing to suspend disbelief for the overall effort. Psychopathic cowboy vampires in the 1980s? I'm all over it.













It seems like someone was cherry-picking at the set of Aliens to cast this, with Lance Henriksen (always a favorite), Bill Paxton and Jeanette "Vasquez" Goldstein starring behind two leading characters that are less memorable, but provide the hook that the rest of the overshadowing craziness hangs on. Best of show has to go to Homer, the child-vampire played by Joshua Miller, who also played Keanu Reeves's little brother in River's Edge, another one of my favorite films from the 1980s.














You can watch it on Hulu.

stray bullets

Getting A Story Made at National Geographic After talking with several National Geographic photographers about shooting for the magazine I became intrigued with the process of getting a story made. The collaboration between the photo editors and photographers and then the photographers involvement in all the steps along the way is unique and important to how they make stories. More magazines should spend this kind of time with their contributors. The few times I’ve had photographer come into the office and present their images to us have been incredibly rewarding and certainly I think made the story that much better. I asked David Griffin, National Geographic’s Director of Photography about the process of getting stories made and the rumored years it takes for a story to go from idea to printed page... (via)

Jacking into the Brain--Is the Brain the Ultimate Computer Interface? How far can science advance brain-machine interface technology? Will we one day pipe the latest blog entry or NASCAR highlights directly into the human brain as if the organ were an outsize flash drive?

From Silver Lake to Suicide: One Family's Secret History of the Jonestown Massacre A cache of letters hidden in the basement brings to life a house, a family and the tragedy that would change everything (via)

Love story: The librarian, the postal worker and their art Art takes up all the air in Herb and Dorothy Vogel's cramped one-bedroom on the Upper East Side. Minimalist and conceptual works cover every inch of wall and dangle from the ceiling. Because there is no other place for it, a Richard Tuttle painting clings to the inside of a louvered door that leads to the tiny kitchen. Other pieces crowd shelves and table tops. And the Vogels, who are giving the Miami Art Museum and 49 other institutions around the country gifts of 50 artworks each and are subjects of a documentary that will screen in December during Art Basel Miami Beach, say there is plenty more under the bed and jammed into the closets of this modest, rent-stabilized space they have called home since 1963.

Library Ghosts: Northeastern U.S. Last year about this time (just in time for Halloween), I posted on this blog a list of libraries that are said to be haunted. Now the library ghosts are back, by popular demand...

also:
Stanislav Petrov, the man who could have started a nuclear war, but didn’t (via)
Know Your Intelligence Agencies: National Reconnaissance Office
Biology in Science Fiction: Erasing Memory
The History of Some of Today's Most Common Phrases (via)
Recent additions to the Chambers Slang Dictionary
Punctuation Game
1000 artworks to see before you die (via)
Podcasts from the University of Oxford (via)
Haruki Murakami interview (via)
Wayne Coyne interview
Aerial Phenomena Research: Selected Papers - Jacques F. Vallee (via)
Casting the Runes by M.R. James
Oboe Bong

Futility Closet: Over the Moon Jules Verne earned his title as the father of science fiction. His 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon contains eerie similarities to the Apollo program that unfolded a century later. (read more)

viddy:
The Anti-Fascist trailer
Parallel Universes, Parallel Lives 1/6 (Eels frontman Mark Everett in search of his father's brain. Dr Hugh Everett III proposed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics.) (via)
Hog Hunting (A plague of feral hogs has descended on the American South. They've been spotted here in Savannah.) (via)
The Real Secret Of The Matrix: The Haunting Sound Of The Waterphone (You'll know it as soon as you hear it.)
Daily (kinda sorta) Weather with David Lynch (via)
Angkor Wat, Cambodia (1930s newsreel)

The Backyard Visitor

slightlywarped.com:

This picture was taken by an elderly lady in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee who told her relatives that there were "ghosts" in her back yard and that they would simply come out of the woods, walk around, and eventually disappear.

Seeing that no on(e) really believed her, she decided to take pictures the next time they appeared.

Reportedly, the lady lives alone, she's over 80 years old, and she gets around using a walker therefore she had no desire - or means - to fake the picture.

via Brand Upon the Brain!

Shirley Jackson

A Nook of Photos:

Photographer: Laurence Jackson. son of Shirley Jackson.

I had my first ghost experience in Hill House. It was a truly bizarre event, and terrifying. I was very disappointed with myself for running out of the house in a blind panic.

It would take a fair sized post to describe the details-- it's a somewhat convoluted tale with some backstory, so I'll skip it for now. However, if anyone is interested, let me know and I'll post it closer to Halloween.

Shirley Jackson

Places I Will Haunt: The Staircase

I was in high school before I ever slept with the lights off. It's not that I was afraid of the dark. I was afraid of what was in the dark. (read more)

toddland's photostream

via We know who we are and what we want to say.

stray bullets

How the Music Business Spent the Summer Killing Itself Labels Pull Albums off iTunes, RIAA Goes After Internet Radio -- When Will They Ever Learn? Idiots. I think this lunacy is driven by lawyers who convince behind-the-times executives that the world is ending in order to fatten their bank accounts with the fees they collect filing cease and desist notices, removing videos from YouTube, and prosecuting their customer base.

The mass graveyard of the blogosphere How many dead blogs do you think exist in the blogosphere today? Take a guess… A couple of million perhaps…? Try again. According to Technorati and PC Mag, in 2007 the number stood at 200 million! Yes, 200 million! Which means blogs are now officially abandoned more often than red headed step children. More research from Perseus on blogging abandonment behaviour found that 66% of blogs hadn’t been updated for two months. So why is it that the blogosphere represents a mass graveyard of unfulfilled intentions? (via)

Clueless smugglers find 'gold' is uranium One thing puzzled them. At night, a report on a local government website said, “they were surprised that, when the lights went out, the treasure sparkled and glittered”. One of the men, identified as Mr Wang, “chipped a piece from it and kept it beside his bed — sometimes playing with it”.... “To prevent the sample being lost or stolen on the way, Mr Wang used tape to stick the unidentified treasure to his body, and it never left him night or day.”

Do No Harm To Humans: Real-life Robots Obey Asimov’s Laws European researchers have developed technology enabling robots to obey Asimov’s golden rules of robotics: to do no harm to humans and to obey them.

Shadow analysis could spot terrorists by their walk By analysing the movements of human shadows in aerial and satellite footage, JPL engineer Adrian Stoica says it should be possible to identify people from the way they walk - a technique called gait analysis, whose power lies in the fact that a person's walking style is very hard to disguise. (via)

Dairy farmers: True IT pioneers The dairy industry was an early adopter of information technology, and dairy farms have been among the most aggressive businesses in the agricultural industry at applying IT. Dairy IT got its start in the 1950s, when an IBM mainframe was used to develop the first dairy records management system and a genetics database...

also:
Nazi-era photos surface in Bolivia
The Global Album Cover Map (via)
Psychic investigator looks into spooky painting (via)
Finding a new position as a mature job hunter
John Titor weighs in on the LHC (entertaining) (via)

stray bullets

America's Dreamtowns the small towns that offer the best quality of life without metropolitan hassles. 140 towns rated (via)

Snooping into a co-worker's e-mail? You could be arrested News anchor charged with e-mail break-ins shines light on line between a prank and a crime.

also:
Today is Stockhausen Day at the BBC Proms (via)
A Field Guide to Surreal Botany an anthology of fictional plant species that exist beyond the realm of the real... (via)
The (Next) 50 Most Inspiring Travel Quotes Of All Time good one: “One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.” – Alfred North Whitehead
Miskatonic University (apply now) (via)

viddy:
Buckminster Fuller World Game Interview (It gets better after the first few annoying minutes.)
"Don't Talk to the Police" by Professor James Duane (via)
The Real News (for real, no sponsors, not for profit)
3 Minute Wonders are commissioned as a series of four shorts from budding new directors who haven't yet had the opportunity to make a film for broadcast TV.

Futility Closet: Plying the Blue - Phantom ships, as they have been called, have repeatedly been seen by various observers. Mr. Scoresby, in his voyage to Greenland, in 1822, saw an inverted image of a ship in the air, so well defined that he could distinguish by a telescope every sail, the peculiar rig of the ship, and its whole general character, insomuch that he confidently pronounced it to be his father's ship, the Fame, which it afterwards proved to be. – Charles Kingsley, The Boys' and Girls' Book of Science, 1881

Phantom ships, ghost ships, even derelict vessels sailing the oceans rudderless and without a soul aboard have always intrigued and creeped me out to the highest degree.

Ghost Ships
Ghost Ships on Wikipedia

Abe's ghost

That's Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghost of her husband, as captured by "spirit photographer" William H. Mumler. (more)

More images at The American Museum of Photography

Sunday Excursions: Sunday Gumbo

Let's hit the ground running...

The Man is keeping me down, pt. 1













WebПарк.ру: Котейки (39 фотографий)
via not enough memory
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The Man is keeping me down, pt. 2












Article: Gas to Hit $7 a Gallon
thanks, Joanne
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4. Amorphophallus: means, literally, "shapeless penis." The name comes from the shape of the erect black spadix.

from Eight of the World's Most Unusual Plants (1-4) (5-8)
via Vitamin Briefcase
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Humanzee















From The Scotsman:

A LEADING scientist has warned a new species of "humanzee," created from breeding apes with humans, could become a reality unless the government acts to stop scientists experimenting.

"If you put human sperm into a frog it would probably create an embryo, but it probably wouldn't go very far," he said.

"But if you do it with a non-human primate it's not beyond the realms of possibility that it could be born alive."

RUMINT has it that humans have been "experimenting" with chimps for some time, though this has never been verified. A few beers, a lonely night, some local fauna...

Some even maintain that chimps are human.

For those of you that missed it, meet Oliver. Many thought he was a humanzee, but genetic tests showed that he was a "normal" chimp.

There's more here.



via Delicious Ghost
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Why do ghosts wear clothes?

Four nights a week, I give ghost tours.

To be honest, I have minimal interest in ghosts. I'm more into the folklore and history, but hauntings are a big part of life in Savannah. I have talked to over a hundred people in this town who have had ghost experiences. These are largely professional or salt-of-the-earth types and they're very matter-of-fact, almost bored, with it. (And let's forestall the "were they drunk?" quips. None that I know have ever seen anything of the sort while intoxicated.)

I usually don't tell people this, even on my tour, but I have seen many things here that I cannot explain. Not ambiguous maybes, but real, often 3-D, actualities. Fifteen years in New Orleans and I never had a single experience. Nearly eight years in Savannah, I've had at least two dozen. I won't go into too much detail here, but if you want to know more, contact me.

I do not believe that there is such a thing as paranormal. It's not that I don't feel that these phenomena are real, they are. I just strongly suspect that they are quite natural, normal and scientifically explainable. We merely lack the perceptual tools to measure them. Whether they are the spirits of the departed, psychic residue, time warps/loops, the product of a geomagnetic anomaly, some other type of entity or any combination of, or all of the above, the ones that are real are real and therefore, knowable. If it is merely some sort of sensory or psychological event or state, this should not dismiss anything. Even so, it warrants serious study.

But back to the matter at hand. One thing that has always puzzled me is, why do they wear clothes? This has always been a bullet point for skeptics. I'm not sure if any of the explanations in this article are sufficient, but it begs pondering. (One that I saw in a downtown cemetery was fully clothed in his authentic 19th century Sunday finest. He disappeared while I was standing about ten feet away from him. I saw another dressed in a Confederate uniform outside of the Bonaventure Cemetery. He walked behind a tree and when I went to look, he was nowhere to be found.)

via Mysterious Universe
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Hut, hut, hut, hut!













from TIME
via FFFFOUND!
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In brief:

The U.S. Civil War almost became an Iraq-style insurgency

Worry about the Daemon not Grand Theft Auto
via Danger Room

Weird Story of the Week: Con Man Reality TV
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Serve with a little...

Gotan Project - Triptico (live)


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Enjoy your week. Y'all come back now.