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Happy Repeal Day!

The 21st Amendment

Section 1. The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.

On December 5, 1933, Utah approved this amendment to the Constitution, becoming the last state needed to ratify it and thereby repeal Prohibition. So get out there and celebrate (safely, of course) your Constitutionally guaranteed Right to Party! Maybe the bars in your local community have a celebration planned (Charleston SC, Louisville KY, Tampa FL, Santa Barbara CA, and Washington DC are some of the cities where I’ve found festivities being scheduled). Or, just go to your favorite watering hole and buy a round for everyone.

Even if you personally do not drink alcohol, celebrate the fact that a minority of Americans, despite their best efforts and using every means they could, were in the end unable to restrict the rights of the majority.

A Christmas Mix for You – 2014

Over the years, I’ve been collecting Christmas music from all over the Internet. Last time I checked, I had over 3 GB of music. Most of it was obtained through the courtesy of other bloggers; some of it I have no clue where I got it.

A lot of holiday music is rather bland. There’s only so much you can do with “White Christmas”, after all. And radio stations don’t even try to have a little variety – they can’t even break out of the same three or four “novelty” songs. It’s a little sad, since there’s really a heck of a lot of good, fun stuff out there.

Here’s a sampling of some of my favorites, with notes where I have something to note.

If I were better at music editing, I’d probably merge these all into one single MP3 file where the volume levels are perfectly balanced. But I am not, so I beg your indulgence for any sudden shifts in tone.

By the way, the zip file also contains a couple of “playlist” files in different formats. I hope at least one of them will work for you.
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Dia de los Muertos

Because Halloween isn’t over until the dead have their day…

By the way, a tip of the warlock’s hat to all the other Cryptkeepers for sharing all their wonderful music, movie reviews, artwork, photography, commentary, and Halloween collectibles with us. It was a serious distraction at work checking in on everyone! I’d also like to thank everyone who stopped by here. I hope you will continue to do so – I’m hoping to be posting just as often during December for Christmas. And I am going to keep posting movie and book reviews, as well as my thoughts on baseball, and whatever else crosses my mind.

Vincent Price

Horror movies haven’t generally gotten any respect from the Oscars. Yeah, the Academy has tossed a handful of nominations to the genre over the years, but wins for anything other then technical matters have been few and far between. Back in 2010, they  attempted to make up for this with a montage of clips from classic horror movies. It was pretty decent – Jaws, The Blob, Nosferatu, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dracula, The Shining – but there was one colossal and unforgivable oversight….

Where was Vincent Price?

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The War of the Worlds – The Other Broadcasts

Orson Welles’ radio play based on H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds is arguably the most famous radio program of all time. The Mercury Theater’s 1938 dramatization was so effective that people thought it was an actual news broadcast, and panic ensued. Though there is much debate over how widespread that panic was, it cannot be denied that many people thought that the Martians were actually invading. Wells at first claimed it was just an honest attempt at giving listeners an entertaining fright that got out of hand. Years later, he changed his tune to say that it was a deliberate attempt to show that people shouldn’t always take what they hear, see, or read in the media at face value.

If it indeed was an experiment in mass psychology, the results were dramatic. While a major principle in scientific research is that any experiment must be reproducible, it’s likely that no one would want to reproduce this particular experiment. After all, who wants to deliberately cause a panic? And given the notoriety of the original broadcast, any scientist or radio producer would be hard-pressed to find virgin ears on which to conduct a follow-up.

No one is going to fall for the same stunt twice, right?
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The World Series

The Fall Classic. No other team sport has anything like it. The Super Bowl? Started in 1967. Basketball? The NBA didn’t have a championship until 1950. The first World Cup? 1930. While I admit that the Stanley Cup can trace its roots back to the 1890s, the format for determining the championship of professional hockey didn’t take its current form until 1927, after the last rival league to the NHL folded. Baseball’s World Series debuted in 1903 (and if you’re going to be picky about the beginnings of the Stanley Cup, the first baseball “Championship of the United States” was in 1884). There’s well over a century of legends and lore.

The World Series magnifies everything. The great players are greater. Bob Gibson strikes out seventeen Red Sox. Reggie Jackson hits home runs on three straight pitches. The fielding is more amazing: Wille Mays. Ron Swoboda. Al Gionfriddo. Unheralded players turn into heroes: Howard Ehmke. Dusty Rhodes. Edgar Renteria. And the errors and mistakes (Fred Snodgrass, Bill Buckner) are more painful.

There’s been a heck of a lot of drama in the hundreds of World Series games. I’ve got a list of the eight most exciting (in my opinion) games; and it’s not your ordinary list…

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The Six Types of Zombie

Judging by movies and television, everyone loves a good zombie. The walking, or perhaps shambling, shuffling dead, or undead, if you prefer…. Things that look like human beings but aren’t, so you can beat the crap out of them without any pangs of conscience.

Having done a bit of reading on the topic, I have concluded that there are actually six distinctly different types of zombie.

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