Mummified Body of Cult B-Movie Actress Found
This is creepy as well as tragic. Andrew Blankstein writes in the LA Times:
Vickers Yvette Vickers, an early Playboy playmate whose credits as a B-movie actress included such cult films as “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” and “Attack of the Giant Leeches,” was found dead last week at her Benedict Canyon home. Her body appears to have gone undiscovered for months, police said.
Vickers, 82, had not been seen for a long time. A neighbor discovered her body in an upstairs room of her Westwanda Drive home on April 27. Its mummified state suggests she could have been dead for close to a year, police said.
The official cause of death will by determined by the Los Angeles county coroner’s office, but police said they saw no sign of foul play.
Vickers had lived in the 1920s-era stone and wood home for decades, and it served as the background for some of her…
Horror Filmmaker Keeps Dead Mother’s Body
The house from Alfred Hitchock's "Psycho". Photo: Poco a poco (CC)
This story seems like it came directly from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It’s an interesting portrayal of life imitating art. Arizona Daily Star reports:
A Tombstone man was arrested Wednesday after authorities found the decomposed body of a woman believed to be his mother inside her home.
The Tombstone Marshal’s Office received a call Wednesday to do a welfare check on Jill Fattig, 68, at her home in Tombstone, said Marshal Billy Cloud.
A deputy went to the home but, when no one answered the door, he went to question the woman’s son, Timothy Fattig.
Fattig, 34, told the deputy that his mother was at a hospital in Tucson. When the deputy found this was not the case, he went back to Fattig, who eventually told him his mother had died about a year go.
After obtaining a search warrant, deputies found the skeletal remains of a woman…
Why Don’t Terminator ‘Killing Machines’ Have Better Manners? (Video)
From the geniuses (check out more of their videos) at OneMinuteGalactica:
Spotted via io9.com, thanks to Cyriaque Lamar for the post.
Small Nuclear War Could Reverse Global Warming for Years … (Video)
Charles Q. Choi writes for National Geographic News:
Even a regional nuclear war could spark “unprecedented” global cooling and reduce rainfall for years, according to U.S. government computer models. Widespread famine and disease would likely follow, experts speculate.
During the Cold War a nuclear exchange between superpowers—such as the one feared for years between the United States and the former Soviet Union—was predicted to cause a “nuclear winter.”
In that scenario hundreds of nuclear explosions spark huge fires, whose smoke, dust, and ash blot out the sun for weeks amid a backdrop of dangerous radiation levels. Much of humanity eventually dies of starvation and disease.
Middle School Children Expelled Over Fight Club (Video)
One of these kids obviously broke the first rule of Fight Club. Via Q13 FOX News:
A middle school ‘fight club’ has prompted administrators to expel a number of students. About 23 students were involved in the brawls. A parent tells Q13 FOX that nine children have been expelled.
Q13 FOX News got a hold of the cellphone video of the fights. It shows students roughing each other up in a boy’s bathroom at Steward Middle School in Tacoma.
The students were expelled Monday and now parents are outraged over the decision. A parent we’ll call Morgan says he thinks the move is absolutely ridiculous. He says he would feel differently if administrators had caught them in the act, but they didn’t. School officials say they knew nothing about the organized fights, until relatives brought them to Q13 FOX News.
Is Someone Tainting My Precious Bodily Fluids?
Mandrake and General Ripper discuss fluoridation of water and how it affects the bodily fluids…
Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown
A chronicle of the life, work and mind that created the Cthulhu mythos. Featuring interviews with Guillermo Del Toro, Neil Gaiman, John Carpenter, Peter Straub, Stuart Gordon, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Ramsey Campbell, S.T. Joshi, Andrew Migliore and Robert M. Price. (Official site)
Image at left: An interpretation of Cthulhu in the sunken city of R’lyeh via Wikimedia Commons.
Six Important Life Lessons From “The Twilight Zone”
The Twilight Zone turned fifty this week. Meredith Woerner on io9.com details some important lessons to be learned from this modern television classic:
Never trust an alien. Whether they want to trick us into coming home with them so they can cook us for dinner, gloating that they’re about to colonize our planet right under our noses, or just shooting us with tiny guns, aliens are always jerks. Even when they’re just dressed as aliens and from our home planet. They are not to be trusted, and nine out of ten times are merely just messing with you. Meet an alien? Turn the other way, or you may wind up in their zoo.
A Beginner’s Guide to Pub Rock
From Black Sun Gazette:
Despite the fact that it produced comparatively few good bands, everyone remembers punk rock. Somehow it became the be all, end all of youth counterculture, the “gold standard” by which all other cultural movements are compared. I’ve never been particularly interested in punk rock, though the leading lights (The Ramones, The Clash, The Heartbreakers) certainly are great and important rock and roll bands. But even at a young age the pretentiousness and fashion whoring that punk rock increasingly became known for really turned me off. For a music that set out to destroy rock conventions, punk sure picked them all up really fast- to say nothing of the turn that it took in the early-90s. Of course, none of this is terribly surprising. Punk came more than anything out of the harder edge of glam rock. But there was another strain in the mix. The monster hybrid…
David Cronenberg Will ‘Fly’ Again
Steven Zeitchik writes on Risky Biz Blog:
David Cronenberg is again buzzing with “The Fly.”
The auteur is in talks to develop a reboot of the 1986 classic with Fox, the studio that released that film, writing and potentially directing the new pic.
The move marks an about-face for the Canadian director, who in the past has said he did not want to be involved on a remake of the film. Cronenberg did work on an opera version of “The Fly” that was staged first in Paris and then in Los Angeles.
The 1986 title, itself a remake of Kurt Neumann’s 1958 sci-fi classic, starred Jeff Goldblum and became a huge hit for Fox, earning $40 million and turning into a phenomenon. It centered on Seth Brundle (Goldblum), an eccentric scientist who, after an experiment with teleportation goes awry, is transformed into a fly. Geena Davis starred as Goldblum’s love interest and partner, Veronica.
A…
