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 famous modeling pictures. But over time it had become dilapidated, exposed in some places to the elements.

Read More: LA Times

The house from Alfred Hitchock's "Psycho". Photo: Poco a poco (CC)

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 inside Jill Fattig’s home, Cloud said.

[Continues at Arizona Daily Star] ]]> http://www.disinfo.com/2011/03/horror-filmmaker-keeps-dead-mothers-body/feed/ 6 http://www.disinfo.com/2011/03/why-dont-terminator-killing-machines-have-better-manners-video/ http://www.disinfo.com/2011/03/why-dont-terminator-killing-machines-have-better-manners-video/#comments Sun, 06 Mar 2011 10:29:04 +0000 ralph http://www.disinfo.com/?p=48096 OneMinuteGalactica: Spotted via io9.com, thanks to Cyriaque Lamar for the post.]]> From the geniuses (check out more of their videos) at OneMinuteGalactica:

Spotted via io9.com, thanks to Cyriaque Lamar for the post.

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.

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.

More on Q13 FOX News

Image at left: An interpretation of Cthulhu in the sunken city of R’lyeh via Wikimedia Commons.

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.

More on io9.com

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 of rockabilly and r&b that came straight out of the British working class’s favorite social mixing spot, the pub.

Pub rock isn’t so much maligned by rock historians. It’s completely ignored. If mentioned at all, it’s a footnote in rock history, a sort of British proto-punk, or the thing that Huey Lewis and Elvis Costello were doing before they became big. But it’s a lot more than that. It’s the summation of twenty plus years of trends in working class taste in music. You can hear the sounds of a bear bones rock and roll band that knows from chops and roots in this classic track, “Coast to Coast” by the Ducks Deluxe:

The pub rock “movement” (such as it was) wasn’t just working class because its audience was. The first wave of bands were largely comprised of (American) working musicians who got the shaft during the late-60s. Bands like Eggs Over Easy and Clover relocated to the U.K. where work as a house band in local pubs was far preferable to chasing after elusive arena rock stardom.

While the first wave of bands tended to sound like a harder-edged version of American country rock, the second wave of bands gave a taste of the full-throttle sonic assault that laid ahead in punk rock, as well as the obsession with youth culture. The former was best exemplified by Dr. Feelgood. Named after heroin, Dr. Feelgood certainly created the template for a thousand lesser rock and roll bands with leather jackets and a “bad boy” image. But the band were more than just attitude and image. They were highly capable rhythm and blues musicians who took pub rock to the next level of filth and raucousness.

As far as the punk obsession with “youth” goes, the blame for that can be laid squarely at the feet of Eddie and the Hot Rods. More toward the rockabilly end of the genre, the Rods eschewed the normal topics of pub rock- drinking and other working class quotidia- for tales of youthful abandon. Eddie and the Hot Rods are the soundtrack to the cocaine-fueled, joy riding, juvenile delinquent youth you wish you’d had. Check out this live appearance with radically altered lyrics way before punk proper dropped:

Of course, the main historical interest of pub rock is a little band called the 101′ers who featured a pre-Clash Joe Strummer. Sounding a bit like the exact half way point between the Clash and Eddie Cochran, the 101′ers show Joe’s songwriting abilities at an early stage of his career. The bootleg CD Elgin Avenue Breakdown includes live tracks that also display his amazing ability connect with a live audience, another trait he frequently displayed during Clash live shows.

Pub rock had a lot of wind taken out of its sails by the nascent punk movement. In the first case, a lot of the musicians of the second wave weren’t as jaded on rock stardom, and quickly left for the greener pastures of punk. But more to the point, the moment in time was over. In a sense, the party had to end. Pub rock was utterly unpretentious and stripped of all artifice, flying distinctly under the radar, not for reasons of street cred, but because it didn’t know what else to do. The energy of the movement was preserved to some extent by pub rock, as show in the Boomtown Rats video (featuring a very drunk Bob Geldoff):

Here’s to hoping that pub rock is one undiscovered phenomenon in popular music that hipster fucktards don’t discover and strip mine in their quest to destroy everything beautiful in the world.

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 sequel three years later with which Cronenberg was not involved — it was directed by Chris Walas, who did effects work on the 1986 version — did not fare as well, and was panned by critics and largely ignored by filmgoers.