Happy Halloween

Drive safe! Lots of children and teens out there on the streets. Tonight of all nights don't be in such a hurry to get to the house/liquor store/bacchanal. For pity's sake, put down the bong long enough to get to your destination in one piece and without leaving a trail of destruction in your wake. I live and work in a college area so I know of what I speak.

Calling All Girls (October 1960).

No Halloween is complete without Hayley Mills!

It's hard to imagine someone so adorable as Hayley Mills being effective in suspense films but word has it that Hello Kitty is a harbinger of all evil, so what do I know? It's a credit to her WILD TALENT that Hayley is versatile enough to totally own any role.

So click the wide, witnessing eyes in the adorable picture above to check out The Horrors of Haley Mills at Horror-Wood!

What is really scary

Monsters and demons are not the real terrors in this world. What is really scary is having fire trucks, police cars and ambulances tear past your car at high speed down your street as you approach your final turn before arriving home.

Uncensored Detective

Great cover for what is a run-of-the-mill detective mag despite the teasing title and salacious come-ons.


Uncensored Detective (December 1946).

Want to see something really scary?

Monsters and demons are not the real terrors in this world. It is the gross and icky people that will doom us all.

Spotted in a popular family restaurant in San Diego, September 2009.

A question of simian survival

Dr. Zaius is celebrating an important milestone over at Zaius Nation! Drop in and wish him well. After all, he helped Obama get elected so now you owe him.

Not so fast

True Detective (June 1956).

Scorpion Moon

Detective Story (May 1938).

No Blood for Oyl

Helix magazine (October 23, 1969).
Art by Bob London.

Lola

Nugget (February 1956).

Good boy

Blackest Night: Superman #3 (December 2009).

Hoay!

Spotted a lack of spell check on a novelty newspaper at one of those seasonal Halloween costume supply outlets that open for about a month using the space of all those failed vacant retail shops in the malls.

What Hath Bernie Wrought?

An apparently never completed art contest from Web Of Horror #3 (April 1970). The contest promised to have a winner revealed in a later issue, but #3 was the final book of the series.

Horror is of course subjective. What some people find terrifying others snooze over. In 1987, there was no greater fear for a parent than having your child attest the Queen of England was a lesbian.

Found in the college area

One of the few positive aspects of being beaten down by life is that while you wander aimlessly about the streets because the thought of staring at the television another second is too much to bear, you usually hang your head down as you walk. While this has the danger of accidentally walking into poles, low-hanging signs and other stationary objects there is the rare benefit of finding interesting things on the ground that does not consist of pebbles, twigs, unconscious homeless people and soda cans.

Like the memory card out of a camera, for instance.

Like most discoveries of this nature the card is jam-packed with photos of cool music concerts, vacations I can't possibly afford, fun parties I will never be invited to, complete tools who need a beating and attractive women, one of whom is apparently the owner of the card. Don't get excited. Since I am over the age of twelve I will not be posting or sharing her personal photos, ever. So don't ask. Young women have enough to worry about without some tool who is way overdue for a whupping zapping her photos all over the planet. *

If possible I would like to find the owner and send her back her card as it undoubtedly contains some very special memories that may otherwise be lost forever. The card was found in a college area of San Diego in September 2009 and there are very few clues as to the identity of the owner. Perhaps the dazed and confused couple in the photo below are able to identify the owner and have her contact me.

I have found about six memory cards laying about on the ground in the last year. I usually find more flash drives and SD Cards than coins. Amusingly, with the exception of one that stored an elderly couple's Arizona vacation all of them contained photos or videos depicting drug use. The last one I found was full of photos of two guys doing nothing but smoking crack.

It is disheartening to see that kids are not any smarter than they were back in the late-1980s. During inspections of military housing I'd often find taped to the walls of service member's rooms Polaroids of the soldiers smoking a bong or holding huge bags of marijuana in that very same room. The photos were invariably mounted in plain sight. Usually the new photographic evidence of illegal activity would have visible in the background one of the older pictures of illegal activity.

For the record I'm currently against the legalization of the Devil's Weed. Not because it is allegedly harmful or hysterically designated as the first step to an inevitable heroin addiction but because people act like morons 95 percent of the time and our society hasn't proven itself mature enough to use it responsibly. People generally act stupid and I've never met anyone who was high that didn't act stupider from the effects of it, as shown in Exhibit A above. As a rule we can't even handle sugar, booze and trans fats much less recreational narcotics.

* Unless she is a entertainer, celebrity, politician or other public figure. In that case Perez Hilton can call me and we can discuss my awesome payday because finders are keepers.

Draw me!

One of the nicer illustrations used for an art correspondence course. Far superior in execution than those sketches of the Old Salt and the big-eyed baby deer.

Liberty magazine (February 1937).

Takedown Update Rundown

About a month ago my YouTube account was suspended. In brief, Dashgo/Audiobee filed a copyright violation claim against my YouTube account, causing it to be shut down and all my media and links were removed. You can read about the initial experience here: I Command Thee, Fellow!

Last week YouTube made the decision to restore the account.

Many of the amateur and even some professional internet publishers kind of lose their cool when they have their free or paid accounts that host or share media shut down. The most famous recent example being the now-defunct scans_daily forum. A lot of members and visitors went utterly bananas when scans_daily was closed by LiveJournal for Terms Of Use violations. FYI: Posting entire issues of newly published comics and graphic novels does not constitute a review in any context, fellers. That a relative few ruined an experience that many enjoyed is regretable but understandable.

Which brings me to comment on my situation regarding the claim that closed my media account.

Instead of anger, unhinged rants and casting aspersions of the gender-preferences of the various entities involved with the suspension of my account I opened a rational dialog with DashGo/Audiobee and YouTube. As YouTube recommended I filed a counter-notification to the claim. I also contacted DashGo/Audiobee. I defended the posting of the video as part of a review under fair use. The response was concern that the video was not viewable solely within the referring blog post which would further qualify it under fair use. The problem was that the clip could simply be searched for, viewed and even downloaded via YouTube bereft of any context.

So basically my use of the video on the blog was considered fair use but the manner in which it was posted to YouTube wasn't. Utilizing and perceiving YouTube only as a hosting site while ignoring that others will not use it in the same manner as I would created the conflict. That copyright holders feel the need to protect their property in that case is perfectly valid, hard to argue against though still remaining to me at least somewhat arbitrary. They have to draw a line somewhere and don't have the time or resources to review every clip and decide if it is diluting the value of the property or not. In the future there probably will be a way to determine that but right now the usual models fall short.

As of yet YouTube doesn't appear to have a setting to allow clips to be stored on their site and viewed only on another and that is another decision that seems wise on the part of the provider. Advertising, click-throughs and other revenue-generating internet thingies are all on their site and they don't want to become become some anonymous media host that fails and goes bankrupt because they are directing traffic away from their own site without compensation.

Whatever processes on the parts of DashGo/Audiobee and YouTube took place worked in my favor this time and my account was restored complete with the H.R. Pufnstuf video clip. Out of respect for DashGo/Audiobee I have disabled the clip for now and will try to have it hosted elsewhere and then provide a link to it, preferably one that leads the reader to an authorized outlet like the Krofft MySpace page. I don't know if they would be comfortable hosting it as one of their mini-clips as the site seems to be a pretty shiny happy place and the Matango-like theme of the Pufnstuf clip is dark, scary and somewhat out of place alongside Captain Kool and Magic Mongo.

My First Book of Noir

"He had been called "Sweat Weasel" for so long he had nearly forgotten his true name."

A page from the story Sweat Weasel in Big Town. Originally published in My First Book of Noir (1953).

Petite Mort

From Inside Detective magazine (July 1947).

Click each picture to make them easier to view as full-sized 8-by-10 color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining how each one was to be used as evidence.

Hell Froze

I don't expect I will be alone in noticing that DC Comics actually managed to make Terry Long, the long-deceased ex- husband of Donna Troy, less creepy as a rapacious dead incubus than when he was alive. Kudos!

Blackest Night - Titans #2 (November 2009).