Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! from The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire. Verse One Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And auld lang syne? Chorus For auld lang syne, my dear For auld Lang syne, We'll tak a cup o kindness yet, For auld lang syne! Verse Two And there's a hand my trusty fiere, And gie's a hand o thine And we'll tak a right guid-willie waught, For auld lang syne Chorus For auld lang syne, my dear For auld Lang syne, We'll tak a cup o kindness yet, For auld lang syne!

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Podcast: C&L Interviews Joe Dante

25 minutes-worth of John Amato from Crooks & Liars talkin' with Joe Dante, here. MP3 format, with some of John's questions to Joe edited out in the interest of space...

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CSI: Kindergarten

So, what with this being winter break and all, we signed The Boy up for 2 weeks of science camp at the Pacific Science Center. Each week has been loosely organized around a single theme, and the second week's been mostly about light and sound. They're covering some basics about optics and acoustics, and part of what the camp does during the day is to go on mini-field trips to the part of the science center that most closely relates to whatever the topic of the day is. This week, they've been drawing largely upon the Whodunit exhibit:

Visitors walk into a robbery scene at the Memory Diner. When the police respond, the short-order cook is the only witness. How reliable is he? Are the crimes related? Did the suspect leave clues at the diner? Visitors gather evidence at the scene and visit hands-on stations to solve the crime. Stations throughout the exhibit have activities geared for all ages of visitors.

One of the stations within this exhibit is a virtual autopsy: an abstract, stark white mannequin lies on a table, while a video of a post-mortem being performed on a murder victim (small caliber gunshot wound to the chest) is projected upon its chest. It looks pretty cool, but the last time I was at the Science Center with The Boy, it was getting late, he was getting overtired, and I wasn't sure how he'd deal with the autopsy (I was pretty sure he'd be okay with it, but you never know) so I heeded the "Not recommended for small children" sign and gently steered him on to other things. So yesterday, I'm picking him up after camp, and as we're driving away, he says "Dad, I don't know why you didn't let me see the body being cut open - it was really cool." Well, scratch that parenting effort... "Oh? Did your teachers take you into it?" "No. But the older kids went in there, and I'm sure they had permission." Hmmm. I'm not, but, hey... okay. As a result of his self-selected learning experience, on the ride home we discussed (at his prompting):

Why people are squeamish about the insides of bodies

Why people are squeamish about the outsides of bodies (he didn't understand why the lower half of the corpse was covered by a sheet)

How guns work - what makes the 'bang', what pushes the bullet out

How bullets kill people if they're so small

Those were the in-depth discussions; we also touched upon ballistics and the forensics of tool marks (rifling on bullets). How's that for an afternoon discussion with a 5 1/2 year old? I'll say this - he certainly doesn't have a one-track mind... [x-posted from my blog, protected static]

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Vincent Schiavelli, RIP

One of the great character actors, Vincent Schiavelli, died Monday at his home in Sicily. He was in many of my favorite films, the George Zucco of my generation if you will. He was 57. Schiavelli played parts in Blade Runner, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Lord of Illusions, Lurking Fear, Corpse Killer, Ghost, Amadeus and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. But my favorite role of his was playing the alien John O'Connor in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. He was wonderfully quirky.

John O'Connor: They're only monkey-boys. We can crush them here on earth, Lord Whorfin.

Rest in peace, Mr. Schiavelli.

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Texas grass fire

From The Associated Press:

The hardest-hit community during Tuesday's blazes was Cross Plains, a West Texas ranching and oil-gas town of 1,000 people some 240 kilometres from Dallas. It lost about 50 homes and a church. One person was killed and at least three were unaccounted for after the flames raced through brush dried out by the region's worst drought in 50 years. "We had a tornado here years ago and we thought that was devastating. This lasted for hours and hours," said Patricia Cook, a special education aide whose home was saved by her 18-year-old son, J.D., and a friend. They saw the flames approaching the house from across a field and ran to save it. "The fire was literally nipping at their heels," she said. "He just picked up the hose and started watering things down." The fire spared a town landmark: the nearly century-old house, now a museum, of Robert E. Howard, author of the Conan the Barbarian books.

Here's the official Robert E. Howard web site. Condolences to the families of the dead.

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Blood: The Last Vampire

The Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald reviews the anime Blood: The Last Vampire:

eighing in at 45 minutes, this slim anime from the producers of Ghost in the Shell has impressive production values, with well-rendered 3D backgrounds and atmospheric settings. On the eve of the Vietnam War, teenaged slayer Saya hunts down the shape-shifting monsters that are haunting Japan, their latest target an American army base on the night of their Halloween party. Saya is deployed by an unidentified organisation and it transpires that she is the last of an original race of vampires. The plotline is way too short and linear to engender much suspense but hints at a curious conspiracy involving the American presence in post-World War II Japan.

Going into my Netflix queue.

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Blood-drinking robber nabbed

Paging Inspector LeGrasse. Inspector LeGrasse to the white courtesy phone please. From Mid-day.com of Mumbai, India:

He didn’t just loot homes, but also drank blood. Depending on his booty, the robber sacrificed animals before a deity, drank its blood and even feasted on its meat. This, he believes, keeps the gods happy. This is what 33-year-old Suresh alias Surya Baburao Shinde, leader of a robber gang, said in his confession to the anti-robbery cell police of Mumbai’s crime branch. snip The police have filed nearly 30 cases of against Shinde, including robbery and attempt to murder. Shinde was released from Arthur Road jail in 1997, after serving a five-year term for the murder of two constables and a watchman during a robbery in Santacruz.

I'm no crime expert, but a five-year term for the murder of two constables and a watchman does not seem like a long enough sentence.

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The Coylet Inn investigation

Ghost Finders Scotland has the report on The Coylet Inn investigation up. This sounds like one of the team's better locations. The Coylet Inn is a 17th century coaching inn about an hour west of Glasgow. Make sure you check out the team's report of using a communication board. But the most exciting events seemed to happen in bedroom 4.

This bedroom has had several reports of activity in the past, including unexplainable wet footprints that have been seen on the floor. We all got ourselves comfortable and began asking out for some communication. One of our team saw a greenish light outside in the corridor, but unfortunately this was not captured on camera. Several team members reported hearing loud bangs and also what seemed like a mumbled conversation going on nearby. We can verify that no other people were in the building at the time. Using voice recorders, we were able to pick up some responses to the questions we were asking. We captured a voice saying “Make the plan” (click here to listen) and another saying “We’re gonna get you” (click here to listen). We also caught some flashing lights on one our camcorders. We kept an EMF meter switched on during the entire vigil, but no unusual readings were detected and temperature readings remained unchanged. Several light anomalies (click here to view video file) and a bang (click here to view video file, speakers required) were picked up on a locked off camcorder in this area while we investigated another part of the building.

Is it just me or is "We're gonna get you" something you don't want to hear during a paranormal investigation?

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A milestone

One year ago today, I put up the first entry on The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire blog. When I hit "publish post" this will be the 1,297th post. I thought a lot about how I'd mark the blog's first anniversary. But when it came down to it, this is what I wanted to say: Thank you for visiting.

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The blog of a teenage ghost

Via Bella Snow, here's the blog of Horace Finkle: Teenage Life In Limbo.

A teenage ghost blogs a daily comedy serial chronicling his family's hilarious misadventures as they attempt to assimilate themselves into a small town neighborhood as the new family on the block.

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C&O canal towpath entity?

Leigh of the West Virginia Society of Ghost Hunters took this photo on a recent ghost hunt on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath. (Look to the right of the image.)

There was no one with me on the towpath when I took this picture. I also have another shot which seems to be an enitity also

The towpath was used by mules to pull the canal boats. It is long disused for canal boats, but is a National Park. The ghost hunt occurred on a wintry night. Here's how the group's founder and president Susan Crites described the event (reprinted with her kind permission):

HI Ben! I thought you might like to see this remarkable photo taken on last night's ghost hunt! It was cooooold and the snow/ice was deep but it was a remarkable hunt! Even our most experienced people were speechless! The short version is that first there was one set of ghostly foot steps crunching in the snow toward a knot of ghost hunters then, two sets, then ten sets, then twenty sets of clearly audible footsteps running at ghost hunters; sound exploding for more than a minute as ghost hunters stood still and, well, speechless and scared. Folks are writing up their experiences and we'll send a compilation to everyone!

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A mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes

From The Scotsman:

IN MARCH 2004, Richard Lancelyn Green died in mysterious circumstances. The wealthy Sherlock Holmes expert had been garrotted with a bootlace tightened by a wooden spoon. It was a great story for the press but, obviously, a tragedy for his family and friends. The Holmes angle trivialised the awful fact of his death, but it had also been the obsession of his life. The Man Who Loved Sherlock Holmes, narrated by Stephen Fry, traced Green's life while worrying away at his death. The coroner recorded an open verdict, though suicide was thought likely. Or was it murder? It's trite to suggest Holmes would have loved this mystery but, as my old gran never said, there's truth in trite. Two days before his death, Richard phoned the Times, a newspaper, to say his life was in danger. He'd been researching for a biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and had discovered the author was, allegedly, a plagiariser and adulterer who may have contributed to the death of his wife's mother. Hmm. Skeletons in the cupboard? Make no bones about it, this was dangerous knowledge (if knowledge it was). The family allegedly barred him access to crucial documents, whereupon he became morose. He spoke, too, of a mysterious American who wanted to bring him down. He thought his house was bugged and, with a friend on the night of his death, believed he'd been followed home. Bizarre theories abounded after his death. A rival Sherlock Holmes society had organised it. A curse on obsessive fans had caused it. The CIA, needless to say, was suspected. And there was speculation about auto-erotic shenanigans. One newspaper named an American Holmes enthusiast, who also happened to be a strategy adviser to Donald Rumsfeld, as a suspect.

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On the trail of Sherlock Holmes

The Christian Science Monitor, a fantastic newspaper, has a story about Sherlock Holmes that The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire covered on Dec. 3 (thanks to a tip from protected static).

Stanford University has a New Year's gift for you - and not just some virtual keepsake that disappears as soon as you move on to the next website, but a real, physical collection that can, if you so desire, be delivered to your mailbox and enjoyed in the relaxed solitude of your offline time. The Discovering Sherlock Holmes project wants to acquaint (or reacquaint) you with the life and times of world's greatest consulting detective, and it's making that introduction with the help of a few century-old stories - online and on paper.

Link to the Stanford project here.

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Faith of a vampire queen

The Los Angeles Times has a long profile on Anne Rice and her new novel on the young Jesus Christ.

WHEN bestselling novelist Anne Rice was a good Catholic girl growing up in New Orleans, she dreamed of becoming a leader of the church. Instead, she abandoned Catholicism at 18 and stopped believing in God. She joined the Haight-Ashbury hippie milieu and evolved into the bestselling author who elevated the sexually ambiguous vampire Lestat to cult status. She wrote pornography under one pen name and erotica under another. Now, she has come full circle — and in a weird way, may finally be getting her childhood wish. Rice has written a novel on the boyhood of Jesus called "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt." It is a bestseller. It has given her a high profile in the religious press and a platform for her ardently reformist views on the future of Christianity. Her views will not please all of the devout. Rice favors gay marriage. She believes the church position regarding birth control is a grievous error that is not supported by Scripture. She repudiates what she sees as intolerant, "sex-obsessed" church leaders, and says she does not find support in the message of Jesus for their focus on sexual orientation or abortion. She argues for a more inclusive church. snip In some ways, Rice's criticisms of religious fundamentalism are part of a wider backlash coming from such unlikely quarters as former President Carter, who, in his new book, criticizes religious fundamentalists' involvement in national politics and takes issue with the Catholic Church's exclusion of women from the priesthood. Rice believes that conservative Christian politicians are distorting Christ's message by politicizing such issues as abortion. While abortion is "tragic," Rice said, "Millions of women are having abortions. They have control of their reproductive powers, and they do not want to relinquish that control. Abortion is at the heart of that, because it's at the core of women having control of who they are. I think it's killing. But I think it's a woman's choice." Gay marriage, she said, "is another classic example. It can only strengthen our society to have gay people in committed relationships rather than going to bars." snip "People are always going to misuse things. And some Christians are going to misuse Christianity. They are going to use Christianity to hit someone over the head because they frighten them or threaten them," she said. "We Christians have to get back to our roots as a people of love. Now we're associated with a religion of intolerance and hate. We have to come forward and speak about love."

Rice and I share similar beliefs about vampires and Christianity. Pastor Dan should recruit Rice to be a front pager at Street Prophets.

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Happy Chanukah

Belated Chanukah greetings from The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire.

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The Dancing Valkyrie

This sounds fun.

The new novel,"The Dancing Valkyrie," is the story of a young woman who is an erotic dancer at a topless club in Schenectady, NY, who becomes a vampire while on a hike in the wilds of the Adirondacks. The novel follows her rapid acclimation into being what she was born to be - a vampire with a lust for both blood and sex, and draws to a conclusion when she meets with a vampire who lives to kill other vampires - and whose name is Van Helsing.

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King Kong Wenceslas

Happy Holiday Traditions To All! King Kong bellows atop the Christmas tree of Bruce and Risa Nye. Bruce obtained the toy for their very first tree, and the playful tradition lives on in their Oakland hills home. Chronicle photo by Katy Raddatz and to all a good bite!

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About.com's Top 10 horror list

Staci Wilson, about.com's horror guide, released her Top 10 list for horror shows. I don't agree with most of her picks, but there are some interesting selections and I always enjoy reading her work. Here's her honorable mentions. Her 10 least favorite. The 10 that almost made her terrible list, mostly straight to DVD releases. And 10 favorite and least favorite horror books.

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A 60-year-old Christmas mystery

NPR has a story on a 1945 mystery involving five missing children that still haunts a West Virginia community.

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Forget Bird Brains...

It's the Bird Bones that have scientific peeps squawking.

Scientists said they likely have found a complete skeleton of the long-extinct Dodo bird. (image courtesy of birds.mu) The Dodo was native to Mauritius when no humans lived there but its numbers rapidly dwindled after the arrival of Portuguese and Dutch sailors in the 1500s. The last recorded sighting of a live bird was in 1663. An international team of researchers said they found the bones of the bird on a sugar cane plantation on the island of Mauritius off the east coast of Madagascar, and presented their findings at the National Museum of Natural History in the Dutch city of Leiden Friday. No complete skeleton of a single Dodo bird had ever been retrieved before from an archaeological site in Mauritius. The last known stuffed bird was destroyed in a 1755 fire at a museum in Oxford, England, leaving only partial skeletons and drawings of the bird. "We have found 700 bones including bones from 20 Dodo birds and chicks but we believe there are many more at the site," said Kenneth Rijsdijk, a Dutch geologist from the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, who led the dig. - Chicago Tribune, AP and naturalis.nl

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Ghost helps collect Christmas toys

From The Scotsman:

HER plight has inspired hundreds of well-wishers to shower her with money and toys. The tragic story of a sick child has moved visitors at an Edinburgh attraction to donate more than £1000. But no amount of money will be able to help little Annie - because she has been dead for more than 300 years. The cash has been gathered from visitors to Mary King's Close who were affected by the story of Annie, a girl who is thought to have died of the plague in the underground streets beneath the City Chambers in the 1700s. And since a psychic claimed to have discovered the ghost of Annie, they have left gifts of money and toys in the room she is said to haunt. But the money will still benefit poorly children as it is being donated to Edinburgh's Royal Hospital for Sick Children. The ghost of Annie was "discovered" by a Japanese psychic in 1993, who claimed to feel a presence when she entered a small room off the part of the underground alleys beneath the Royal Mile known as Allan's Close. She "communicated" with the spirit and found her to be a young girl, heartbroken because she had lost her doll. The story goes that Annie had been locked in the room after she fell sick with the plague. The psychic put a doll into her room to comfort her and sensed that she was delighted.

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Q&A with Joss Whedon

In USA Today:

Looking back at Serenity's performance at the box office, do you think there's anything more that the fans, or you, could've done to get the word out about the movie? Honestly? Physically? No. I know there's nothing more I could've done, because I collapsed from exhaustion at the end of the publicity tour. And I know there's nothing more the fans could've done, because they were crazy all over themselves. Obviously, Universal could've spent more money on advertising, but I think that's the Catch-22: If you keep spending more, will you necessarily bring out more people? Ultimately, what didn't happen is that we didn't really manage to get a sense of the movie out to people. But that's a hard thing to do; it's a weird movie. And, you know, it crosses a lot of genres, and it's not an easy sell. ... Who knows? Ultimately, you can't really point the finger -- I mean, I'm sure there's plenty of people who are pointing plenty of fingers in every direction -- but it's just a crapshoot. snip Speaking of Buffy, in your mind, where is Buffy Summers today? I don't have to say it in my mind, because I'm gonna be saying it in a comic book. I'm actually going to be writing some Buffy comics to restart the comic book line at Dark Horse. I'm going to be writing the first four ... and basically play it as season eight. I'm going to tell exactly where Buffy went after she left Sunnydale. So you'll have to wait for that answer, but it will come.

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Holiday Wishes: Donner Party Special Edition

Factoid of the day, courtesy of The Scotsman:

Today in 1972, rescue finally came to the survivors of a Uruguayan Air Force plane which had crashed in the Andes 72 days earlier. The 16 survivors, members of a rugby team from Montevideo, kept themselves alive by eating the flesh of their fellow passengers who had died in the crash.

Mmmm... Tastes like chicken. So, remember, no matter how difficult or stressful your holidays seem, things could always be worse.

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Friday vampire cat blogging

Peace on Earth and goodwill to all. Merry Christmas from The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire. Hat tip to PhillyGal for digging up the cat photos for me.

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A pharoah's tomb

I should have been an archaeologist. From The Times of London:

FORGET ALL those newfangled video games this Christmas. Forget the enemy armies and drooling zombies. Block your ears to the Call of Cthulhu. Go back to the future of a far more profound adventure. Enter the tomb of Thutmose III. In his day (1479-26 BC), Thutmose was a great and glorious pharaoh. The Napoleon of the New Kingdom, he was a military genius, a judicious administrator and a wise statesman to boot. While his body was being mummified, the walls of his tomb were painted with a complete depiction of the Amduat: a key Egyptian text that chronicles the passage of the Sun god, hour by hour, through the darkness of night. His journey — made on a barque through a land of solar baboons, scarabs and serpents — is beset by dangers that must be overcome by incantatory magic if he is to be reborn the next day. It was this story, unspooling like some Ancient Egyptian comic strip around an underground chamber, that excavators discovered in 1868.

The rest of the article is about the exhibit in Edinburgh that I've written about earlier. But reading this reminds me that I wanted to be an archaeologist when I grew up. Or a pirate. Maybe I should combine the two.

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Modern-day resurrectionists strike... Alistair Cooke!

Evidently, the late broadcaster Alistair Cook's remains were harvested by, well, body snatchers:

When Cooke died of lung cancer that spread to his bones in March 2004, his body was taken to a funeral home in Manhattan. Two days later, relatives of the iconic broadcaster received his ashes, which were then scattered in New York's Central Park. Now they have been told that body snatchers allegedly surgically removed his bones and sold them for more than $7,000 (£4,000) to a company supplying parts for use in dental implants and various orthopaedic procedures.

And you thought this practice died in the days when the infamous Burke (of Burke & Hare) performed the hangmans's jig, eh? Wow... how gruesome is that? More on Alistair Cooke may be found on the BBC's homepage for Cooke's long-running radio program, Letter from America; more on some of the history of the resurrectionists may be found here. Update: courtesy of a link provided by Making Light, we find the NY Daily News' much more, uh, colorful commentary (wherein the word 'ghoul' finds (deserved) prominence), including some details about the body snatching operation:

Mastromarino ran Biomedical Tissue Services Ltd., a tremendously profitable tissue recovery business that sold body parts, including bone, skin and cardiac valves. After processing, Cooke's bones could have been used for dental implants or numerous orthopedic procedures including dowels for damaged spines. Cooke's remains were sold by Mastromarino to processing companies Regeneration Technologies Inc., of Alachua, Fla., and Tutogen Medical Inc., of Paterson, N.J. [...] [I]n paperwork given the two processing companies, Mastromarino allegedly changed Cooke's "cause of death" to heart attack and changed his age from 95 to 85, according to sources. Mastromarino, along with his former partner Joseph Nicelli, an embalmer, are being probed for allegedly forging hundreds of such records in their business, which ran from 2000 until October 2005, when The News first disclosed the details of the Brooklyn probe.

The News' past articles on these shady characters may be found here (paid archive); it includes such gems as these headlines:

Half-body snatched. Exhumed corpse has just pipe, not bones, below waist BROOKLYN DA'S GHOUL PROBERS MAKE A GRUESOME DISCOVERY

EASY PICKING IN CITY GRAVEYARD? Ghouls eyed in 'John Doe' grabs

THEY CARVED UP MY FATHER

Good stuff, wot?

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Joss Whedon on the future of Buffy, Serenity

From Anna Johns at TVSquad:

If I were fellow blogger Keith, I would be writing this article from a totally different angle. I would probably be doing cartwheels at the thought of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, written and directed by Joss Whedon. Alas, I missed the boat when it came to Buffy, so today's news breaks my heart. An article in the latest Entertainment Weekly with Joss Whedon says he has come to terms with the fact that there won't be any more Firefly movies. Serenity only made $25 million in the United States and it's not yet clear how well the DVD will do (it went on sale this week). But, that amount of money isn't enough for Universal to launch a franchise of films. Sigh.

However, here's what Joss says about the entire controversy here at WHEDONesque:

All right, now I have to jump in and set the record straight. EW is a fine rag, but they do take things out of context. Obviously when I said I had 'closure', what I meant was "I hate Serenity, I hated Firefly, I think my fans are stupid and Nathan Fillion smells like turnips." But EW's always got to put some weird negative spin on it. But so we're clear once and for all: If you read a quote saying "I'd love to do more in this 'verse with these actors in any medium" all I'm saying is that Nathan has a turnipy odor. It's not his fault, he doesn't eat a lot of them but everyone else in the cast noticed it and tht's not really something I'm prepared to deal with any more. And Jewel said outright she wouldn't do scenes with him except stuff like the SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER funeral scene which was outside in a high SPOILER wind. So if I do manage to find another incarnation for my beloved creation, it will have been totally against my will. I hope that clears everything up. Oh, and when I say I want to do a Spike movie, it means I have a bunion on my toe. -joss (by which I mean Tim) (no, actually me.) joss | December 21, 02:12 CET

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The 'Corpse Bride' riddle

From Reuters:

Peering through the glass at a mannequin's veined hands, sparkling eyes and eerie smile, the small crowd gathered outside a store in northern Mexico tries to settle a macabre riddle beguiling many. Is the tall, slender bridal figure in the window a richly detailed shop's dummy or, as a local legend says, the decades-old embalmed corpse of the former store owner's daughter?. The haunting figure known as 'La Pascualita,' or 'Little Pascuala' first appeared 75 years ago in the window of the bridal gown store in the city of Chihuahua.

Hat tip to Fortean Times.

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Victoriana resource: the 1911 edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica - online

Now this was a