Tuesday, October 30, 2012

The view from the rear view mirror

(This is the post I was writing while when the lights went out)

I never thought I'd play one but here is a commercial endorsing Gov. Mitt Romney: Joss Whedon On Romney  -



I never concerned the possible oncoming Zombie Apocalysce and it's impact on my presidential choices.


October 30, 1937 -
A good early Looney Tunes Halloween treat, The Case of the Stuttering Pig, was released on this date.



When the picture of Uncle Solomon is shown, it's a drawing of Oliver Hardy as a pig.


October 30, 1943 -
A very funny war-time Bugs Bunny Cartoon, Falling Hare, was released on this date.



In the early 1940s, Walt Disney was developing a feature film based on Roald Dahl's book "Gremlin Lore", and asked the other studios to refrain from producing gremlin films. While most of the studios complied, Warner Bros. already had two cartoons too far into production - this cartoon and Russian Rhapsody. As a compromise, Leon Schlesinger re-titled the cartoons to remove any reference to gremlins. The original title was "Bugs Bunny and the Gremlin".


Today in History:
October 30, 1863 -
OK kids, try to follow this ...


Danish Prince Wilhelm was a middle child of very famous siblings.


His older brother was to become the King of Denmark.


His older sister was married to Edward VII, making her the Queen consort of England.


His younger sister was married to the Tsar (czar? csar?) of Russia.


His parents didn't know what to get for him. They thought and thought about it and decided that he should become the King of Greece?


Wilhelm arrives in Athens, changes his name to a good Greek name and assumes his throne as George I, King of the Hellenes, on this date. As mentioned previously, Wilhelm/ George's grandson was a sailor named Philippos,


whose parents were related to themselves and half the other nobility in Europe. Philip had no real prospects of a career, so he did what any blue blooded aristocrat would do with no real prospects, he married up by marrying his second cousin (Elizabeth II of England).


October 30, 1938 -
The War of the Worlds was the Halloween episode of the American radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. Directed by the wunderkind Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells' classic novel The War of the Worlds (1898).



Welles's adaptation is arguably the most well-known radio dramatic production in history. Both the War of the Worlds broadcast and the panic it created have become textbook examples of mass hysteria and the delusions of crowds.



It has been suggested in recent years that the War of the Worlds broadcast was actually a news report of the Red Lectroids invasion of Earth by Orson as fact retracted as fiction. Another conspiracy theory has the Rockefeller Foundation funding the broadcast as a test to gauge the public's reaction.




There has been continued speculation that the panic generated by the broadcast inspired officials to cover up unidentified flying object evidence, to avoid a similar panic. Indeed, U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt wrote in 1956, "The [U.S. government's] UFO files are full of references to the near mass panic of October 30, 1938, when Orson Welles presented his now famous The War of the Worlds broadcast."

It's also possible that the aliens hypnotizing Welles and causing him to pass the broadcast off as a drama, when it was indeed factual.

You never know.


October 30, 1968 -
Silent film star, Ramon Novarro was brutally beaten and left for dead by his assailants, on this date. Novarro's life ended when two brothers, Tom and Paul Ferguson, whom he had paid to come to his Laurel Canyon home for sex, murdered him.


According to the prosecution in the Novarro murder case, the two young men believed that a large sum of money was hidden in Novarro's house. The prosecution accused them of torturing Novarro for several hours to force him to reveal where the nonexistent money was hidden. They left with a mere twenty dollars they took from his bathrobe pocket before fleeing the scene.



Novarro died as a result of asphyxiation, choking to death on his own blood after being brutally beaten. According to filmmaker and scandal monger, Kenneth Anger, Navarro actually died after suffocating on a wooden (or silver) dildo (a gift from Rudolf Valentino) the two brothers crammed down his throat.

A very unpleasant end, indeed.


October 30, 1990 -
Joseph W. Burrus, an aspiring magician, died while attempting a "buried alive" stunt. He was contained inside an acrylic glass clear box,or coffin, of his own construction. Lowered into a hole, his crew began filling the hole with dirt and cement around the coffin.



Apparently, Burrus didn't calculate the correct force the weight of the wet cement had on this coffin - he had only practiced the trick with soil. At some point, the crew realized the concrete had crushed the box, and when they pulled him out, he was dead.



And so it goes


Before I let you go: You have 1 day before Halloween. I'm dressing in the costume I've used for many a year - Sociopath (they look just like everyone else dammit.)

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