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 The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.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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MOVIE REVIEW: Panic in Year Zero! (1962)

Ah, the Good Old Days of the late 50s and early 60s…. The days of Civil Defense drills, fallout shelters, and missile gaps… When people lived in fear of nuclear war… With some justification, since the United States’ war strategy was essentially “Launch everything!” We wouldn’t see such paranoia again until the days of Ronald Reagan and his “Evil Empire” rhetoric. During the 80s, there were a number of films that tried to address what might actually happen to ordinary people in a nuclear war. Panic in Year Zero! was there first.

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Book Review: Hammer and Tickle

Hammer and Tickle: A History of Communism Told Through Communist Jokes
Ben Lewis
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009

First off, this is the book version of a 2006 documentary about political humor in the Soviet Union. The nominal idea is to show the tightrope dance of those who dared criticize the regime through jokes. Just how much would you be allowed to get away with? Lewis interviews historians, archivists, and even some of those who actually made laughter at Communism’s expense. He even considers the possibility that some of it was allowed in order to defuse tensions amongst the people. If they are chuckling, they aren’t massing in the streets in protest. It’s a nice idea, but Lewis can’t seem to decide whether he’s writing a history or a joke book.

Lewis rather clumsily includes stories about his girlfriend, which detract from his narrative and weaken the overall work.

Oh well. At least there are the jokes:

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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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Movie Review: Ghostwatch (1992, UK)

The British make the best fake documentaries. There was the BBC’s “Spaghetti Harvest” of 1957 (which resulted in a flood of phone calls from people asking how they could grow their own spaghetti tree), and “Alternative 3”, a show on Anglia TV in 1977 that purported to uncover a secret plan to set up bases on the Moon and Mars (which despite including easily disprovable “facts” and a cast listing at the end is still taken seriously by some conspiracy nuts).

Then there was Ghostwatch…

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