Little Girl, Watching Movies

Imagine a young girl, tween, early teen, sitting by herself in front of the TV on an early or late afternoon, watching the station that showed a lot of old (and once in a while reasonably new) movies. Tarzan movies (Johnny Weissmuller, of course), sci-fi, horror, dramas, comedies, and weird movies that no one else, apparently, had ever seen.  

It was quite an education.  Here are some of the highlights:

Sci-fi Movies:

Forbidden Planet - One of the best of the lot (the other will be found further down). My first meeting with Robbie the Robot.  While it took me years to figure out it was a take-off of Shakespeare's The Tempest, I loved the whole "monsters from the id" line, and the invisibility of it.  Very exciting. 

Unfortunately, most of the sci-fi movies were schlock, and the worst was probably The Queen of Outer Space - Zsa Zsa Gabor and a lot of starlets in cone bras...  

NOTE:  Cone bras apparently were everywhere in the 1950s. Why they were so popular for so long, I have no idea...  See https://www.wmagazine.com/fashion/cone-bra-corset-trend-history.  

Probably second worst:  The Attack of the Giant Leeches - B&W 1959. Has to be seen to be believed, and even then...  Trivia note:  one of the stars of the Giant Leeches was actress Yvette Vickers who was the Playmate centerfold in the July 1959 issue of Playboy, just a few months before the movie's release, which I'm sure increased attendance.  

Lesson to be learned from old American B&W sci-fi movies is that every man, monster, robot and alien wants pulchritudinous white women.   

Japanese movies, however, were different:   

Matango, a/k/a The Attack of the Mushroom People - 1963 Japanese horror movie directed by Ishiro Honda (who directed and co-wrote the original Godzilla and many more).  A group of castaways on an island are unwittingly altered into monsters after they eat certain mutagenic mushrooms...  Although I didn't know it at the time, it was almost banned in Japan because they felt that the monsters resembled facial disfigurements caused by Hiroshima and Nagasaki; although of course, that might have been the whole idea.  Spooky, yet strangely moving, hard to forget.

Movies that scared me silly:

1984 - Made in 1956, starring Edmond O'Brien, Michael Redgrave, Jan Sterling, and Donald Pleasance. The scene with the rats was perhaps the scariest thing I'd ever seen, and it gave me nightmares.  Interestingly, I've never met anyone who actually saw this movie in a theater - I guess it bombed at the box office.  

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers - 1954, and set in a fictional California small town. You know the plot. You know the term "pod people".  But it still packs a punch as person after person is duplicated and replaced...  And they find the pods...  And Becky falls asleep...  Well...  

Trivia NOTE: Future director Sam Peckinpah played the bit part of Charlie, a meter reader.  

The Haunting - 1963.  Based on the Shirley Jackson novel, starring Julie Harris, and Claire Bloom. I think it's the most frightening movie* ever made, simply because you never see anything. You hear it. And by the time those two great actresses, Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, are done with you, you feel it.  And it has the scariest line I've ever heard in a movie:  "God! God! Whose hand was I holding?"   (*Spielberg agrees with me.)  

Not that scary, but one of my favorites:

Rear Window - I was a tween when I saw it, and I could hardly wait to be old enough to live by myself in Jeff Jeffries' (Jimmy Stewart) apartment, watching and listening and following all the crazies around me.  

NOTE:  Interestingly, I rewatched it a couple of weeks ago, and for the first time I noticed one fatal flaw in the movie:  Jeff, who's a professional photographer, has his left leg in a cast, from hip to toes, and is in a wheelchair 90% of the time, so no wonder he spends all his time watching the neighbors.  No problem there. And he figures out that one of them killed his wife, and he's trying to find evidence, long distance, using first binoculars, and then a massive telephoto lens on one of his cameras.  He finally sees Thorvald, after his wife supposedly went on a trip, with his wife's purse, pulling out jewelry, including the wife's wedding ring.  So what's the flaw?  WHY DOESN'T JEFF TAKE A BUNCH OF PICTURES OF THORVALD AND HIS WIFE'S STUFF?  He's a professional photographer.  He's got a telephoto lens which could pick out the feathers on a flying swallow.  Surely he's got film in the house.  I don't know why I never noticed that before...  

Still love the movie, though.

Movies that for years I couldn't persuade people actually existed:

We're No Angels - Still my favorite Christmas movie of all time, with Humphrey Bogart, Aldo Ray, Peter Ustinov, Leo G. Carroll, Basil Rathbone, Joan Bennett, and St. Adolph...  Read my love-letter to the movie HERE.

The Producers - Yes, Mel Brooks' classic 1967 film. I was old enough by then to get most of the jokes, and I nearly died of laughter at the line "don't be a dummy, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party!" My introduction to Gene Wilder, Zero Mostel, Dick Shawn (hilarious as L.S.D.), and Mel Brooks, as always, going over the top.  Loved him ever since.  

Harold and Maude - I saw Hal Ashby's 1971 classic in the theater, but most people didn't like it. I laughed so hard I was crying. After 10-11 years, it finally hit cult status, and I could finally share it with my friends.  Huzzah!

Highly Educational:

Tarzan and His Mate - 1934, pre-Code B&W, the 2nd in the series with Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan and Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane.  This is the film with the nude Jane/Tarzan swimming scene.  I remember it well...  You can see it on YouTube HERE.  

If I couldn't have Jeff Jeffries' apartment, I wanted Tarzan and Jane's treehouse.  And lifestyle. And I wouldn't have minded having THAT Tarzan...  

Sheer silly fun:

The Pickwick Papers - (1952)  I started reading Dickens early in life, and this adaptation is, imho, the most Dickensian I've ever seen.  B&W, with full throttle performances, perfect costumes, manners, mannerisms, everything.  I bought a copy of it years ago on DVD.  I love it.  

Mrs. Leo Hunter, reading from her own composition, 

"Ode to an Expiring Frog".

The Gods of Power and Money Are Back…

Well, actually, they never went away.  

A lot of people seem to be incredibly surprised by current capers by certain billionaire(s) (especially the guy with the chainsaw), and how/why so many corporations and other billionaires are backing these capers with all their might.  Well, my first response is, "They don't want the chainsaw to come for them."  

So I am going back to the past, about 9 years ago, to an old blog post I wrote called "Gods and Demi-Gods":  about how money and power are the real gods of America. Not only does it currently seem that they still reign, but now it's on steroids. So I've updated it:

• The first thing to understand is the term oligarchy: "a small group of very powerful people that controls a government or society." (Cambridge English Dictionary)  Generally these people are very wealthy and own corporations.  Currently, there are 13 billionaires in our current administration's cabinet, which isn't exactly attuned to the problems of a country in which the majority - 60% - are barely making enough to live on.  
• 
  
• Here are some of the rules of an oligarchy: 

• ALL corporations must make constant profits:  the modern economic doctrine - "maximizing shareholder value" - says that a corporation has no purpose but to make profits for its shareholders. This means that employer/employee loyalty and customer service/satisfaction are both irrelevant.  Pensions and/or health benefits can and must be cut whenever it's expedient to the bottom line. Jobs must be outsourced to the lowest bidder, taxes must be avoided by offshoring or secret, perpetual trusts, and whenever possible, lobbying and promoting certain politicians.  
• NOTE:  The fact that unemployed people do not buy much other than food is ignored.  Also ignored is that the United States is no longer the preferred customer of many corporations. Tesla's largest manufacturing plant and latest market is in China.

• Everything must be privatized, i.e., put into the hands of corporations and the wealthy.  At the same time, the corporations are no longer national, they are global, in order to maximize shareholder value (see above).   Government - on any level - is an impediment to profit, so it must be made as small and neutralized as possible, except when needed to bail out the corporations (see below).  (Only profits are privatized, losses are passed on to the public.)
• NOTE:  I am constantly amazed at how, in one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in history, our government (a democracy, where the government is "we, the people") has been presented as a dangerous waste of resources, while the "private sector" would be much more efficient. Sure, the corporations will make a lot more money, but it will hurt the hell out of most of us who are not wealthy.  Once the Postal Service (which is in the US Constitution) is privatized, then the cost of shipping will go sky-high.  They are trying to eliminate the Department of Education:  setting up public schools was one of the first things that every community prior to today did. And who is going to monitor air traffic, build the bridges, provide health alerts, weather alerts, disaster relief... (oh, that's right, these are all being cut even as I'm writing this...)

• Corporate profits must be maintained, at all costs, including military. Eisenhower recognized the beginnings of this in his Military Industrial Complex Speech.  Since the end of the Cold War, there has almost always been an economic rather than political reason why troops are sent where they are, why outrage is expressed over certain international incidents and not over others.  (This is why, for example, the entire international community joined the United States to invade Iraq in 1990-91's First Gulf War, a/k/a the 710 War, but everyone stood on the sidelines and watched as 800,000 people were slaughtered in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994.)  And many aspects of war - supplies, security, etc. - are now routinely privatized to corporations which make a hefty profit with almost no oversight, including Bechtel (which was accused of  war profiteering), Halliburton, and Blackwater (which was brought before Congress in 2007 for "employee misdeeds," among other things).  
• NOTE 1: In the run-up to the Iraq war, Halliburton was awarded a $7 billion contract for which 'unusually' only Halliburton was allowed to bid (Wikipedia - Halliburton)  It might not have hurt that Dick Cheney had been Chairman and CEO from 1995-2000.    
• NOTE 2:  The current war, of course, is the war on immigrants.  This has caused an increase in spending on detention facilities, ICE employees, etc.  The current Big Beautiful Budget has $45 billion for immigration detention and related services, which would significantly increase ICE's budget for detention. And the private prison industry (in which Tom Homan, the current border czar, has investments) is salivating over future detainees - who become slave labor for whoever needs them.  

• Weapons industries must also make constant profits, and sales must be constant, and thus the NRA preaches the complete and total ownership of any firearm of any kind by anyone at any time.  No license, no training, and in many places, no age limit.  In some states, blind people can carry guns (looking at you, Iowa!, and sadly, I'm not kidding). That's why each new shooting must be propagandized in whatever way that will increase sales:

1. there are crazy people out there with guns, buy more guns now;
2. the terrorists / immigrants are coming to kill you, buy more guns now;
3. the government is coming to take away your guns, buy more guns now. 

• Also, to ensure constant profits for the weapons industry, (plus keep the complaints down about how life is going for everyone), our entertainment and news media must be saturated with ever-increasing levels of threats and violence. BTW, never forget the very important, very underestimated product placement. Every prop / weapon / outfit / drink you see on any screen is there in order to sell one to you.

• NOTE 1:  If you don't believe that media has any effect on people's behavior, then why do corporations spend billions on advertising?  If the constant barrage of news feeds, hour-long TV show, binge-watching television shows, and movies, or unlimited video games has no effect on our minds and behavior, then why should corporations pay millions for a 30-second ad spot?  Why do politicians and super-PACs do the same?  Are they all stupid?  

• NOTE 2:  If you don't believe that violence in media has increased, watch an episode of Gunsmoke on RetroTV some time, and note how seldom Matt Dillon (or even the bad guys) used a gun.  Some day count the number of weapons on display in previews during the morning news.  (The average child will see 8,000 murders on television before finishing elementary school:  Link).  

• NOTE 3:  The quantity of violence not only has increased, but, as the public becomes more jaded, it has become more and more perverse.  On the news, "When it bleeds, it leads!"  Literally.  As for entertainment, in the 1980s, Law and Order SVU was considered fairly hard-core, with story-lines of children being abused and murdered, women and children being raped, tortured, etc.  Not any more. Criminal Minds, Dexter, Hannibal, and other shows upped the ante with on-screen cannibalism, eye-gougings, etc.  Back on "Game of Thrones" human beings were castrated and flayed alive. Live, to-the-death gladiatorial contests cannot be far behind.  (But it's all in jest, they but do poison in jest, no harm in the world...)

When money and power are gods, and corporations are their high priests, there are real world consequences.  And one of those is that the poor - collectively and individually - are sinners, and must be punished by any means at the disposal of the powerful.  The results are:

Propaganda:  The poor are "losers", "moochers", "lazy", "worthless", "stupid". Social Security and Medicare - both fully taxpayer funded, i.e., paid by us - are called "entitlements", which implies that they haven't been earned, but are something we moochers wrongly feel "entitled" to. (Damn straight I feel "entitled" to Social Security - I paid into it for 40 years!)  

        The Truth:

• The truth is, 90% of the economy in this country is done by the people called "the working class" and/or the "middle class".  These are the people who do the actual work in factories, schools, restaurants, grocery stores, any store, who are construction workers, electricians, plumbers, landscapers, teachers, janitors, who pick up the garbage, repair everything from lamps to cars to rockets, etc., and who buy most of the goods, pay almost all the taxes, and keep this country actually working.  
• NOTE:  Again, unemployed people don't buy very much except food and the  gasoline needed to try to get a job.

• The top 10%, which hold most of our country's wealth, spend a lot of money, but for relatively few goods, because what they buy is often maniacally expensive. On purpose. After all, how else are we going to know they're rich if they don't have that $6 million yacht (middle range, actually) or that $499,999 Birkin bag? Or a rocket to take you on a trip to outer space?  And they rarely "shop local".  I remember a very wealthy lady in a small town in South Dakota who wanted to donate art to the library and rather than buy anything from one of the local artists, bought some artwork from New York City and had it installed.  It was not appreciated.  They avoid taxes by offshoring or secret, perpetual trusts, and leave it all to their children, who do the same.  

The most successful and constant propaganda story in history:  "You can't give poor people money or aid of any kind, because they'll waste it on trivial stuff (food, clothing, drink, etc.).  So you have to incentivize the poor by denying them any social services or tax breaks. They just need to work harder. Meanwhile, the rich are incentivized by giving them endless tax breaks, if not eliminate their taxes completely."  

And give them government grants - which they promptly invest in themselves and their trusts.  But of course, this goes back to Victorian times and their version of Catch 22:  "there are the deserving poor (who would never dream of asking for a handout, even if they were starving) and the undeserving poor who ask for handouts, because they are starving, and thus don't deserve it..."  People really need to read more Dickens...

Political restrictions:  Between gerrymandering, voting restrictions, Citizens United, lobbyists, etc., the powerful have done an excellent job of ensuring that the votes/interests/representation of the working class and poor are rendered irrelevant to the political process.  (13 billionaires in one administration...) My own congress people respond to my e-mails and letters with form letters.   

***

The consumer society.  When money and power are gods, individual human life has no meaning other than to make money and consume goods and services, and nothing else. Allegiance must be mindless, generated by carefully crafted advertising, propaganda, and sound-bites. Mental processes must be carefully controlled by endless social media and other distractions, so that no one ever considers that there might more to life than making money, shopping, sports, and/or the latest entertainment craze.  Considering that the average video on Tik-Tok is under a minute, it's amazing any of us have any ability to concentrate at all.

But fear counts above all.  No one must ever question why - living in the richest, most privileged, most free society on earth, the "home of the free and the brave" why people are so afraid, all the time, everywhere.  And like the people in Orwell's "1984", they must never notice that the object of fear constantly changes.  In my lifetime I have watched the enemy - THE ONE WHO WILL DESTROY US AT ALL COSTS - change from Communist Russia to the Axis of Evil (some combination of China/Russia/Iran/Iraq/North Korea, it changed with the President at the time) to Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein to Radical Islamic Terrorism, with a pretty constant drumbeat of fear and horror of blacks, the Black Panthers, drugs, hippies, urban thugs, illegal immigrants, illegal immigrant children, immigrants of any kind, legal refugees, anyone wearing a turban, and anyone with dark skin.  Deep breath.  And, of course, LGBQT+, and the ultimate horror, a transgender person using a public bathroom.  

Speaking of how propaganda works, to many politicians and their followers these days, Putin is now a hero, a strong promotor of Christian and family values... This would have been inconceivable up until twenty years ago. And I am stunned and disgusted by how Nazi salutes and catchphrases have been rehabilitated, to the point where Texas Republican Congressman Keith Self quoted Joseph Goebbels - ‘It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion,’ - at a Congressional subcommittee hearing. (LINK)

• NOTE:  So far, America is still here. So far…

Meanwhile, here are the facts:

• Money and power are abstractions, i.e., fictions, a belief system rather than a reality, to which we daily sacrifice real human beings, not to mention real air, real water, real food, real life.  It's really all about greed.

• No matter how much money and power is worshiped, acquired, accumulated, fought for, praised, and sacrificed to, life will never be 100% safe, and 100% of all people will all still die. Including the wealthiest of the 1%.  The gods of money and power, the church of celebrity, sports and entertainment, the priesthood of politicians, lobbyists and televangelists, none of them will save any human being from that fate.  

This is the truth about the gods that America - or at least a certain portion of America - has chosen.  Like any pagan deities, they require regular human sacrifice.  And they are getting it.  

Voices on a Summer Night

While I mostly write short stories, I have written two novels in my youth:  one for Guidepost's "Mystery and the Minister's Wife" series - The Best is Yet to Be - and a classic teenage post-apocalyptic sci-fi fantasy with what I thought at the time were strong female heroines.  And no, I'm not going to give you a sample of the latter.  (A  collective sigh of relief is heard throughout the land.)  

No, I stick to short stories, partly because I'm more comfortable with the format, because I grew up in a time when people still told stories to each other.  Aloud.  In person.  On a porch.  Or over a summer dinner.  Or over winter cocktails, playing cards, doing a puzzle...  No cell phones, no TV on, maybe a distant radio, just human voices, telling stories that (to child Eve) ranged from boring (how many genealogies do I have to listen to???) to the really, really interesting (especially if I was under the table while the women whispered about things like s-e-x) to the downright scary.  Old monsters die hard.

For example, it was a dark and windy night in summer, and as we did almost every summer, my mother and I were visiting my grandmother in Kentucky.  We were out on the porch, and my mother started telling "The Headless Horseman".  

She was a former teacher and a pretty good storyteller.  She had me huddled up on the porch swing as she built up, slowly, to the peak line:  "AND THERE HE IS!!!!"  And sure enough, there was this guy coming up the porch steps, with his collar pulled up just high enough against the rain that I wasn't entirely sure if there was a head there or not.  Well, I screamed and ran in the house, everyone outside had a heck of a good laugh, and eventually I realized that it was only one of our neighbors.  The story was spread far and wide, to some hilarity, and much shame for me.  But in the end I had the last laugh, because after that, that poor man was always known as "Headless".  Actually, I had the last TWO laughs:  years later I wrote a story sort of based on that, "The Headless Horseman" published in AHMM in 2015. 

The first story I ever published in AHMM (April, 1997) came from those days, too.  "Grown-Ups are All Alike" stemmed from my Kentucky grandmother's next door neighbor's wife.  She was an invalid, and she had her bed in the living room, which I'd never seen before.  We'd visit as a family, of course, but I was also sent over to read to her, though I have no idea why she couldn't read to herself.  (I read my way through many a Reader's Digest that way.)  What I'll never forget is that one year my grandmother talked about her, but she called her a different first name, and that confused me.  

"I thought her name was Sarah."  

"That was his first wife's name," my grandmother explained.  "She died, and he remarried."

"Then why is she still in bed in the living room?"

"Well, she had an accident, and now she's an invalid too.  Some people just don't have any luck but bad luck."

I think we can all see the story potential there.

BTW:  I am the most fortunate person in the world.  "Grown-Ups Are All Alike" was the first mystery story I ever wrote, and I got it published in AHMM!!!!  I still can't believe it.  I really hit the lottery with that one.

There was a difference between my father's relatives and my mother's.  My mother's were all in Kentucky, where the drawl is long and slow and some men sound like they have mush in their mouths.  They take their time, and can keep a story going for many a long hour.  

My father's were all New Yorkers, Greek immigrants, and they talked fast and furiously.  But they were just as good at story telling, and talking around things.  My grandparents lived in a brownstone in Astoria (back when it was an all Greek neighborhood).  When we moved to California, my grandparents sold the brownstone and moved across the street.  Years later, it occurred to me to wonder how in the world my Greek immigrant grandfather got up enough money to buy a brownstone, and asked my father about it.

"Oh, he did a favor for this guy, long time ago, and he gave him a nice little truck route. I've told you about it. We sold pies and stuff to the various bakeries."  

"What kind of favor? Who was the guy?" I asked.

"I don't know what kind of favor, but the guy was some guy named Gambino."  My father gave a mysterious smile, and I will never know if he was joking or not.  

Someday that's going to come up in a story, too...  

***  

Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!

As you HOPEFULLY know, SleuthSayers' anthology, "Murder, Neat" has won the Derringer Award for Best Anthology!  And now it's a finalist for the Anthony Awards!

Thanks, Michael Bracken and Barb Goffman for a fantastic job of editing, and thanks to all of us weird and wacky SleuthSayers for writing some really wicked stories!  Huzzah!  Huzzah!  Huzzah!

Criming and Dying Through History in South Dakota

From the Dakota Scout, some interesting stories from yesteryear:

March 29, 1900 - from the Madison Daily Leader, South Dakota was in the middle of a smallpox epidemic and in Ipswich, SD, schools were closed until fall to limit the spread of diphtheria.  

MY NOTE:  My mother had diphtheria as a child in the Appalachian mountains of the 1920s.  She never mentioned any vaccine (which had just finally been invented), but she did get the old-fashioned treatment for it, which included cauterizing the throat. It was so painful she hoped it would kill her.  

April 5, 1950 - State cement plant employee Ray Deig reported Rapid City's first flying saucer encounter.  He saw one on the night of March 21, but he didn't report it because he thought it "was one of Uncle Sam's secret developments" and "I thought people wouldn't believe me."  (No idea why he changed his mind about folks not believing him...)

April 19, 1900 - Five prisoners escaped the state penitentiary in Sioux Falls by breaking off the bottom of a fence during morning yard work.  

May 2, 1949 - Sioux Falls veterans tried to be first in line for the processing of their WW2 bonus forms, and pilot Joe Foss flew the paperwork overnight to Pierre, but Bonus Director J. J. Kibbe refused to accept it because it hadn't been mailed.  The forms were then mailed to the Pierre post office.  (Meanwhile, I'm sure much cursing was heard and Mr. Kibbe became the most unpopular man in Sioux Falls.) 

August 18, 1899 - the Weekly Capital reported that Manly Beaver, a 13 year old boy, saved the lives of 93 teachers taking a train ride into Spearfish Canyon, who were stuck by the wreckage of an accident on the train bridge.  Beaver ran down to flag the next train and warn them of the danger ahead.  Beaver received $10 and a "free course of education at the Madison Normal School" (now Dakota State University).

August 24, 1899 - Trainmen operating a freight engine in Hermosa had to fight off half a dozen tramps, one of whom drew a gun on the trainmen.  The workers forced the tramps into the depot and kept them locked inside until the law arrived.

September 4, 1949 - The Daily Plainsman reported that Redfield Maynard Schultz was charged with murder after getting involved in a private fight, and becoming so angry he rushed into the police station, grabbed his own .38 service pistol, and returned to the parking lot and killed Roy Sieben.  (Sadly, no backstory given, as in what was the argument about?)

September 9, 1899 - the Kimbal Enterprise reported that a customer paid a 20 cent lunch tab with a $20 bill, but no one noticed that it was a Confederate $20 until the guy left the restaurant. "When reported to federal authorities, the restaurant owner was told that the government didn't regulate the use of confederate money."  (I think they started regulating after incidents like this...  But you could always try it at a restaurant of your choosing.)  

September 17, 1999 - One hundred years later, an Alaskan man was buying rounds for the house until Sioux Falls police showed up and arrested him. Charles Cooper (don't you wish it had been D. B. Cooper?) was wanted for robbing the nearby U.S. Bank before heading straight to the bar.  Loren Bultena, who was one of those getting free drinks, commented, "He can't be all bad, he bought beer."  (Spoken like a true bar fly.)

September 13, 1924 - Mr. and Mrs. Steinbaugh and Tom McGray met with City Attorney Steinback, trying to reconcile their marriage after an affair between Mrs. Steinbaugh and McGraw. Everything went well until Mr. Steinbaugh pulled out a pistol, killed McGraw, and then shot himself to death.  (I hope Mr. Steinback gave up marriage counseling after that.)

December 4, 1924 - From The Black Hills Weekly:  Blackie Brady and Jack Wilson broke out of the Pennington County Jail and stole a Ford car.  Trouble was, it was snowing (no surprise there) and the car left tracks in the snow.  The two headed toward Buckhorn, Wyoming, and the authorities were alerted, and the two men were arrested at a nearby lumber camp.  (It really is all about winter in South Dakota.)

Now this one is out of sequence, but has modern repercussions and stories to go with them:

March 31, 1950 - An explosion at the Black Hills Ordnance Depot munitions facility in Igloo (named after the dome-shaped storage buildings) killed 3.

BHOD Landscape, taken by Vigilante Scout, Wikipedia

UPDATE: "The Vivos xPoint survivalist community was developed in 2016 on the site of the former Black Hills Army Depot munitions storage facility. More than 500 above-ground concrete bunkers are marketed for lease to those who are worried about a potential national or global disaster or who want to live mostly off-the-grid. It’s located in a remote area 8 miles south of Edgemont in southwestern South Dakota... The concrete bunkers, which look like earthen igloos, held military conventional and chemical munitions from 1942 to 1967. The town of Igloo grew up around the depot and was once home a young Tom Brokaw, a South Dakota native and former NBC anchor. The base and town are now abandoned."  Which sounds great, BUT

In 2024 "David Streeter thought abandoning his traditional life to relocate into a survival bunker in South Dakota would allow his family to retreat from the stresses, expenses and restrictions of the modern world.  The family of three also wanted to be prepared in case an apocalypse of some kind altered the course of mankind and threatened their lives and way of life.

"But 18 months after leasing a former Army munitions bunker in the Vivos xPoint residential complex south of Edgemont, the Streeters have had their dreams shattered. And they now find themselves embroiled in a situation that has brought on a level of upheaval, worry and danger they specifically sought to avoid...  In August, Streeter – an Army veteran who was injured while serving in Bosnia – shot a Vivos contract employee at close range. Streeter said the man had threatened his family and he was defending himself. No charges were filed in that case or another fatal shooting involving Streeter in Montana in 2010.

 

(Read more HERE.  You know you want to.)

Who could have predicted that a community of off-the-grid doomsday preppers could be a dangerous place to live?  

MEANWHILE:  HUZZAHS ALL THE WAY AROUND!

SleuthSayers' anthology, "Murder,  Neat" has won the Derringer Award for Best Anthology!  Thanks, Michael Bracken and Barb Goffman for a fantastic job of editing, and thanks to all of us weird and wacky SleuthSayers for writing some really wicked stories!  Huzzah!  Huzzah!  Huzzah!

REPEAT BLATANT SELF-PROMOTION:

Rabia Chaudry reads my story, "The Seven Day Itch" aloud on her podcast, Rabia Chaudry Presents The Mystery Hour with Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Listen to it here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-seven-day-itch/id1581854514?i=1000703738987

Also available in Instagram!

 

A Little Religious Conspiracy Theory: Redux

(In the interest of maintaining openness and transparency, most of this blog post first appeared in March, 2015.  I thought a repeat would be timely, especially since tonight is Maundy Thursday, although I have updated it a little...)

As you hopefully know by now, I love a good conspiracy theory.  And some events generate lots of them.  A very early event that has not yet stopped generating conspiracy theories is, of course, the death of Jesus, and since Easter is in 4 days, I thought it would be a good time to review some of most interesting conspiracy theories.  If nothing else, just to prove that it's not just politics that brings out the crazy...

First of all, there were at least three real conspiracies that surrounded Jesus:

• The first one is in (among other places) Matthew 26:14-16, where the chief priests paid Judas to betray Jesus so they could have him executed, quickly and relatively quietly, before the Passover.  

• The second, of course, was the show trial before first Caiaphas and then Pilate, complete with manufactured witnesses and a lot of fake weeping, wailing and tearing of clothes in horror.  (This is in all the Gospels)

• The third is in Matthew 28:11-15, after the finding of the empty tomb:  "Now while they [the disciples] were going, some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests everything that had happened.  After the priests had assembled with the elders, they devised a plan to give a large sum of money to the soldiers, telling them, “You must say, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ If this comes to the governor’s ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.”  So they took the money and did as they were directed. And this story is still told among the Jews to this day."  
• BTW that "keep you out of trouble" part was VERY important, because Roman guards who lost prisoners were killed in their stead.  (See where the guard gets ready to kill himself in Acts 16:27 because he thinks Paul and Silas have escaped.)  

But enough with reality, let's get on with the crazy:

"When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage & Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent 2 of his disciples & said to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, & immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it & bring it. If anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.’” They went away & found a colt tied near a door, outside in the street. As they were untying it, some of the bystanders said to them, “What are you doing, untying the colt?” They told them what Jesus had said; & they allowed them to take it. Mark l1:1-6

Then came the day of Unleavened Bread, on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. So Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, “Go and prepare the Passover meal for us that we may eat it.” They asked him, “Where do you want us to make preparations for it?” “Listen,” he said to them, “when you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him into the house he enters and say to the owner of the house, ‘The teacher asks you, “Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?”’ He will show you a large room upstairs, already furnished. Make preparations for us there.” So they went and found everything as he had told them; and they prepared the Passover meal. Luke 22:7-13

The above  two passages have been used repeatedly to prove that there was a plot, a conspiracy, and Jesus was in on it and/or was the mastermind. But what kind of plot?  What kind of conspiracy? Folks, there are a lot of them:

(1) That Jesus would be replaced by his twin, or doppelganger, who would die on the cross for him so that he could appear to be resurrected and, thus, start a whole new religion. Or get out of town later. Both ideas have been used. The most likely candidate?  Thomas Didymas, a/k/a "the Twin". Conspiracists know that he really was Jesus' twin, which certainly puts a whole new spin on Doubting Thomas, doesn't it?

(2) Another theory says that these 2 messages - the colt and the guy with the pitcher of water - were coded messages, letting the conspirators know that the time was at hand for a major magic act to take place.  This conspiracy theory breaks down a couple of ways:

• One version says that the plan was for Jesus to be arrested, tried, convicted, crucified and drugged with that vinegar on a stick which actually had opiates in it (John 19:28).  He was then taken down - comatose but still alive - nursed back to health, appeared to the disciples, who spread the story of his resurrection while he went off to Tibet to become a monk in the Himalayas. 

• Another version was given in the 1960's book "The Passover Plot", where they said that everything was going according to the above plan BUT then came some stupid soldier with a spear.  For some reason, he hadn't been bribed, and he killed a living Jesus on the cross by mistake.  And then the disciples had to make up a story and stick to it.  Hence, John 19 & 20, Luke 23 & 24, etc.  

• Dorothy Sayers in her "The Man Born to be King" says that it was a code, a conspiracy, but it was set up by the Zealots:  they offered Jesus a choice between a horse and a colt, and if he took the horse, they'd follow him in an uprising against Rome.  If he took the colt, he was on his own.  They'd find another leader.  He took the colt, and death was the result.  BUT Judas didn't know the details, and he thought that by taking the colt, Jesus had turned political, and so Judas turned him in for being less holy than Judas wanted/needed him to be.  Actually, I kind of like this one - at least it makes sense in the political climate of the time, and it gives Judas a reason to betray Jesus.

(3)  Jesus never existed, but was a myth.  Variations:

• D. M. Murdock, in her book "The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold," says that Christianity was invented by a variety of secret societies and mystery religions to unify the Roman Empire under one state religion.  Without, of course, bothering to explain why the Roman Empire needed one state religion when it already had one in the Emperor Cultus...  Let's just say that this is the kind of book that makes historians like me go bang their head against a wall over and over again...

• Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the Holy Grail - ad infinitum, ad nauseum…  Dan Brown, you have a lot to answer for.

• My personal favorite of all conspiracy theories is in an obscure book from the 1970's, "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross" by John Marco Allegro.  According to Allegro, Jesus was actually a psychedelic mushroom. Or hallucinations resulting from taking psychedelic mushrooms.  And, in case you're wondering, yes, I absolutely do believe that psychedelic mushrooms were consumed in the conception and writing of that book…

Why do people come up with these things?  Or believe them?  Well, there's a lot of reasons.  But I think the main reason is simple:  conspiracy theorists feel like members of an elite club or cult, in which they are in on the "real" truth.  People love to be in on a secret - it makes us feel like we belong, like we're knowledgeable, like we're superior.  Nobody can fool us. We're in control, because we're in the know, whether it's about 9/11 or Roswell or Bigfoot or a death in Judea 2000 years ago.

BTW:  If you like this blog post, you might also want to read/reread my "Who Killed Judas?" HERE.  And I think I'm onto something...  But then don't we all?

BLATANT SELF-PROMOTION

Rabia Chaudry reads my story, "The Seven Day Itch" aloud on her podcast, Rabia Chaudry Presents The Mystery Hour with Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Listen to it here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-seven-day-itch/id1581854514?i=1000703738987

Also available in Instagram!

Plot Holes as Big as a Buick

We've all read a book, or watched a movie, one which we actually enjoyed, but later went...  "Wait a second.  What about???"  

And I 'm not talking about tropes, which are everywhere, ranging from "meet cute" to "discussing highly confidential secrets while an evil person is standing right outside the door listening" to "the supervillain who is always one step ahead of the detective, spy, superhero*" to "the genius detective who is never wrong."  You can either stand them or not, and it's usually based on who's playing the part.  

BTW, Allan Rickman could play either the supervillain or the romantic hero and I was always all in for it.  

No, I'm talking about plot holes, the size of my father's 1955 pink and white Buick, where you just shake your head.  And again, you either accept it or you don't...

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins has two plot holes, but I still love it with a passion.  It has tremendous suspense, one of the great villains of all time (Count Fosco), secret illegitimacy, faked deaths, mental asylums, an evil mother (Mrs. Catherick), an innocent heroine cruelly treated (Laura Fairlie), an even more innocent victim who dies (or is killed?), a dauntless hero, a dauntless heroine (Laura's half sister, Marian Halcombe) and enough twists and turns to keep anyone happy and thinking.  A nice, long winter's read.  But, the plot holes:

The plot turns on wealthy heiress Laura Fairlie's remarkable resemblance to a mentally ill young woman (Anne Catherick), and how, after her marriage, where she becomes Lady Laura Glyde, she is drugged and placed in a mental asylum under Anne's name, while the exceedingly ill Anne dies (or is helped along the way) and is buried under Laura's name.  

First Plot Hole: "The most well known error of chronology is that first described in The Times of 30 October 1860. The plot relies on the fact that Laura’s departure for London took place the day after Anne Catherick had died under Laura’s name. In the book edition the date of that death was 26 July whereas as the reviewer points out ‘…we could easily show that Lady Glyde could not have left Blackwater Park before the 9th or 10th of August. Anybody who reads the story, and who counts the days from the conclusion of Miss Halcombe’s diary, can verify the calculation for himself.’"  (The Wilkie Collins Society)

This was eventually corrected, but not until the fourth edition of the novel - and then the correction interfered with later dates in this tightly woven, complex novel.  Those of us who love the book have learned to live with it, and ignore all, including the second plot hole:

Second Plot Hole:  Long after Lady Laura has been rescued from the mental asylum she and her true love Walter marry, but before her identity as Lady Laura has been confirmed and reinstated by the law.  So what name did she get married under? Was it truly legal?  We are never told.  

There is a similar problem in Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend.  Bella Wilfer marries John Rokesmith - however John Rokesmith is actually John Harmon, using an alias, which leads to the obvious question, how could their marriage be legal since he married under a false name, and did they remarry once John Harmon revealed himself?  

All I can say is, just ignore it and keep reading. 

The Big Sleep - the movie, not the book.  The book, of course, was written by Raymond Chandler. The movie was written by Leigh Brackett, William Faulkner, with touch-ups by Jules Furthman and Howard Hawks.  

Plot Hole:  The legendary "who killed the chauffer?" (whose death starts the whole movie and investigation) is unanswerable. None of the writers knew; so Hawks cabled Raymond Chandler, who said later, "They sent me a wire ... asking me, and dammit I didn't know either."  (Wikipedia) 

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie.  

Plot Hole:  Both the book and the movie have a fatal flaw:  why kill the maid?  Yes, the maid is blackmailing the killer, but the killer has money, and they're on a steamer on the Nile.  Why not just pay the maid off, and keep paying the maid off for a few months, and kill her later when everyone's back home and no one will notice if the maid, for example, gets a little blood poisoning from a scratch and dies of it, or just plain disappears?  Obviously, the only reason was that Ms. Christie (whom I revere in many ways) had made such a complex, ironclad plot that it was the only way to make it possible for Hercule Poirot to solve the case.  

And right there is a lesson for us all:  don't make your plot so tight you can't find a way out of it.  Leave room for errors and basic screw-ups, because we humans do that all the time.  

For that matter, leave room in your life for basic screw-ups, because they will happen.

Rat Paradise

You’ve heard and read a lot of doom and gloom asserting the population is declining thus leading to social and economic collapse. This is a follow-up to Eve’s article earlier this month, ‘What Nature Does Best’.

Growth is good, proselytizes the Chamber of Commerce. Growth is great, sayeth city fathers. No such thing as too much, blabs Peter Thiel, who likes to think he’s scary smart and who advocates for a global population of 1 trillion, a staggering 12,077% jump from 8.212 billion.

A surprising number of people don’t realize population isn’t declining but rather its rate of growth is leveling off. In other words, we’re easing off the accelerator but the bus is still picking up speed (differential calculus to you readers who snack on maths before breakfast). Even Elon Musk got it wrong in possibly a careless slip of the tongue.

Sexology 101

That’s subject to change about fifty years from now when predicted growth trends whisper to a halt and theoretically may start to rewind. Blame men. Worldwide male fertility has declined for decades. Researchers are convinced chemical air and water pollution is affecting male hormones.

In a climate change world of microplastics where wildlife and plant varieties are disappearing, that is worrisome. For the past three-quarters of a century, America’s Breadbasket, its farms and fields and groves, have been replanted with condos and strip malls. Our oceans are slowly turning to waste. A series of aerial photographs over Caracas illustrate the great jungles drying and dying.

Observers muse the planet is fighting back. Is Earth exerting a form of human pest control?

Inevitably, a question arises of men shunning sex: self-described incels, male separatist MGTOW, and that ilk, a phenomenon observed in many developed countries. I had surmised they represent an insignificant (apologies for the unfortunate word choice) percentage of the population, but I was wrong. Researcher Miriam Lindner estimates 39% of men choose to be single or celibate. However, she claims a staggering 62% of women are eschewing relationships with men. Can we spell WGTOW?

Sociology 201

As mentioned above, city fathers and urban mothers have long and loudly claimed ‘Growth is Good’ when promoting pet projects, which have a peculiar way of enriching those urban mothers and fathers. A balance can be good too, a robust, inflation-free economy can be a very good thing, especially when linked to discovery, technology development, and innovation. Those economic ideals are rare because of population growth. As we hatch new people, we need resources to feed them and places to put them.

Sections of New York University’s ‘soft science’ courses dealt with over-population, and a significant portion of related sociology and psychology delved into ‘prisonization’, the socialization process that occurs when individuals mold to the culture of the prison environment. Prison is an extremely hazardous and unnatural environment, a world of fear, a population of discards, an environment without the opposite sex, a large population day after day, decade after decade jammed within cold concrete walls with little mental stimulation. Professionals draw parallels with population imbalances in our world, where too many people who crunch into tight quarters exhibit extreme behaviors– psychological disorders, rape, loneliness, death, fear, disproportionate homosexuality, hopelessness, and in some jails, vile, moldy food despite federal requirements for nutrition and prohibitions against using food or lack thereof as punishment.

I can report on this only through study and research. Our true first-line heroine and expert is Eve Fisher, who lives and observes firsthand what I can only write about. The main point is that prisons offer a peek into ‘Stand of Zanzibar’ effects of overpopulation.

Rat Paradise 25.0

Eve’s description of John Calhoun’s work slightly differs in details from my long-ago reading, likely because Calhoun’s lab ran numerous population experiments with rats and mice. Mostly I refer to Universe 25, forty to fifty-some rodents in a 4⅓×3m enclosure. The gist remains the same: a rodent utopia in which creatures are provided with every conceivable comfort and protection. They were given a predator-free, temperature controlled enclosures with nesting a cornucopia of materials, nourishing foods, optional treats, and willing, fecund sex partners.

In this abundant environment, the critters fornicated like bunnies, gorged on food, and relished their perpetual vacation. As the population grew, aberrant behaviors broke out– violence, rape (eventually including same-sex assault), lack of mothering, signs of mental instability. At some point, rat residents lost interest in sex, socializing, even eating. They isolated until the colony died out. Poof! Gone, incels in the end.

A number of conclusions might be drawn beyond overpopulation. One might consider human’s need adversity to survive, goals to strive for. Progressives and conservatives (not necessarily left and right) might both be right in different ways, we need to advance but we need roots. We require wholesome, challenging work for our own well-being.

Am I suggesting a link between male and female incels, and a wind-down of population growth? No. Yes. Perhaps. Maybe. I don’t know. But I wouldn’t rule it out.

Wall-E © Disney

Behavioral Sink

The opening minutes of Disney’s 2008 Wall-E suggest Earth was devastated by an environmental disaster. However, as the movie transitions, the rest of the story reveals the underlying crisis, a storybook depiction of Calhoun’s mouse utopia.

Seriously? A couple of friends believe adult animation is intellectually demeaning for grownups, but I love a good story in any form. Apparently viewers and critics agree with a 95% approval. I highly recommend Wall-E for thought-provoking exercise and entertainment, with or without nourishing popcorn.

---

What Nature Does Best!

I've been subscribing to The New Yorker for years for a variety of reasons, and my latest rant / wonkout is based on an article by Gideon Lewis-Krause in the February 24, 2025 issue called "The End of Children."  (LINK)

It's about the current seemingly universal worries about the current world-wide demographic decline, which is very real.  Basically, almost every country is in the minus growth for population: fewer babies are born than can replace the population as a whole, and a lot of people are freaking out about that. Especially male white conservatives in the Western Industrial Nations seem obssessed with "The Great Replacement Theory":  that this is a nefarious plot to get rid of white people and replace them with black / brown / Asian / Native people.  

But, even if there is such a thing going on, then why is South Korea and Japan's replacement rate worse than ours? And in almost every country, even with added incentives, there's a steady drop in childbearing. So why?  What is going on?  Who is doing this?  Is it sheer modern selfishness (we've all heard the latest gender war where "selfish childless cat ladies" refuse to procreate in a society that needs them to have more children), or is something else going on?  

Well, while I'm waiting for someone to reveal the eugenicist who is in charge of the GRT and how they've kept it secret for so long, I will tell you what shouldn't be a secret to anyone: the biggest eugenicist of all is Mother Nature.  One of the things Nature as always excelled at is Demographic Apocalypse, and she's got all the best tools for mass murder.  

First of all, some statistics: 

CLIMATE IN HISTORY 

Yes, Virginia, things change.  

100,000-18,000 BCE - Last Glacial Maximum (i.e, end of the major Ice Ages)

68,000 BCE - World population cut to around 12,000 people probably due to the Toba Catastrophe, a super-volcanic eruption in Sumatra, Indonesia. (Sumatran volcanoes are dangerous:  we'll run into them again in 1816, when Mt. Tambora exploded and caused a year without a summer.)

Caldera of Mount Tambora

12,700-10,800 BCE - Late Glacial Interstadial, which is a fancy term for a BIG warm up. 

10,800-9,600 BCE - The Younger Dryas; a sudden huge plunge in temperature, along with another major die-off of humans 

7000-3000 BCE - Holocene Climatic Optimum.  A time of wonderful weather, and the Neolithic / Agricultural Revolution and the rise of a few major civilizations. (We'll get into more of that later.)

535-537 CE - Major global climatic catastrophe. No one is sure whether it was a small asteroid / meteorite / volcanic explosion, but historians like the Byzantine Procopius noted that the sun's light was dimmed like the moon, and Chinese scholars described eerie, colorless skies, unseasonable snowfall and mass starvation. There were world-wide famines. It launched the Late Antique Little Ice Age from 536-560 CE. The weakened populations were further ravaged by the Plague of Justinian (yersinia pestis, i.e., bubonic plague), a deadly pandemic that swept through the Byzantine Empire and beyond. 

950-1200 CE - Medieval Warm Period (Climatic Optimum).  Wonderful weather, that led to exceptional crops, Viking explorations, the colonization of Greenland, vineyards in England, and Cathedral building all over Europe, as well as the 1st-4th Crusades, the Mongol Invasions and other fun events.  NOTE:  Increased food production and increased wealth often leads to increased war.  We are a quarrelsome lot.  

1200-1300 CE -  Cool Down including another probable volcanic eruption(s) from 1257-58 with heavy rains and extreme famine.

1300-1470 - wildly unpredictable weather with wildly unpredictable crop production.  

1470-1560 - Warm Spell (The Renaissance and The Reformation in Europe) 

1590-1850 - the Little Ice Age (including 1816's Tambora explosion redux)

1850 to now -  continuing warm up, much of which was launched and is fueled by the Industrial Revolution.  And for quite a while, we have been in a period of wildly unpredictable weather with wildly unpredictable crop production that shows no signs of letting up.

***

One thing I found fascinating in Mr. Lewis-Kraus' article was where he said, with what to me is a faint whiff of distress, 

"In about 1805, we crossed the threshold of a billion people. That had taken the entirety of human history. Our next billion took just a hundred and twenty-three years."

Meanwhile, our population has climbed from 2 billion in 1925 to over 8 billion of us on this planet today. That's 6 billion people in100 years. I don't consider that demographic collapse in any way, shape or form.

Meanwhile, during that "entirety of human history," humans saw tremendous civilizations of great sophistication, urbanization, with great cuisines, irrigation, flush toilets, waterwheels and windmills, seafaring ships, barges, canoes, massive food production, art, music, dance, sculpture, ceremonies, religions, and fireworks. Also, wars, weapons, gunpowder, and genocide. From ancient empires like China, Egypt, the Mesopotamian and Indus civilizations, as well as ones we're only now discovering underneath the jungles of Amazonia, Indonesia, etc., and on to Classical and Late Antiquity, the Renaissance, the "Age of Enlightenment" - it's pretty amazing (and sometimes horrifying) what you can do with "only" a billion people on the planet.

And on a purely irrelevant, personal matter, I think most people looked better in clothing like this:

 

(Vermeer) or this:

 

(Rembrandt)

than today's casual culture:

So, what are we so afraid of with a demographic decline? Losing all our cheap goods, cell phones, entertainment, transportation, food, and instant gratification? Probably.

Well, as I said before, we struggle to build up civilizations, and Mother Nature slaps us down with regularity.  

Around 66,000,000 BCE, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event caused the mass extinction of three-fourths of all the plant and animal species on earth.  Scientists believe it was a massive asteroid - 6-9 miles wide which slammed into the earth in the Yucatan, creating the Chicxulub crater.  

Meanwhile, there's 2024 YR4, an asteroid about as big as a football field, which is lined up to swing by, visit, or crash into earth around 2032. There's a supervolcano in Yellowstone, and there's always Mount Tambora, Mount Vesuvius, and a whole lot of Iceland, which are all still smoking.  We still haven't figured out a way to undecline our demographic from something like that.  

***

But Mother Nature has another dirty secret up her sleeve:  and it's in our own biology.  Back in June of 1972, Dr. John Calhoun watched as a four year utopian experiment ended in total demographic collapse:  the Universe 25 Experiment.  

He had set up a world in which four mouse couples were given a "veritable rodent Garden of Eden - with numerous “apartments,” abundant nesting supplies, and unlimited food and water. The only scarce resource in this microcosm was physical space.

As population density began to peak, population growth abruptly and dramatically slowed. Animals became increasingly violent, developed abnormal sexual behaviors, and began neglecting or even attacking their own pups. Mice born into the chaos couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves; females stopped getting pregnant. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became “trapped in an infantile state of early development,” even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to “normal” mice. Ultimately, the colony died out.  (LINK)

BTW, Richard Adams, in Watership Down, pointed out that among rabbits, does can and do absorb embryos when hard times come, when there’s insufficient food, or in cases of overcrowding.  Mother Nature, culling the herd from within.  And we are mammals. 

Sounds to me like we're already in Universe 25...  

Oh, the Stories That Will be Written...

Okay, I had a retro post all set up and ready to go, because I have a deadline for something else that I'm working on, but then came two news stories that I found necessary to share:

Exclusive: US intel shows Russia and China are attempting to recruit disgruntled federal employees, sources say

"Foreign adversaries including Russia and China have recently directed their intelligence services to ramp up recruiting of US federal employees working in national security, targeting those who have been fired or feel they could be soon, according to four people familiar with recent US intelligence on the issue and a document reviewed by CNN.

The intelligence indicates that foreign adversaries are eager to exploit the Trump administration’s efforts to conduct mass layoffs across the federal workforce – a plan laid out by the Office of Personnel Management earlier this week.

Russia and China are focusing their efforts on recently fired employees with security clearances and probationary employees at risk of being terminated, who may have valuable information about US critical infrastructure and vital government bureaucracy, two of the sources said. At least two countries have already set up recruitment websites and begun aggressively targeting federal employees on LinkedIn, two of the sources said." (LINK)

AND

Exclusive: Hegseth orders Cyber Command to stand down on Russia planning

"Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions, according to three people familiar with the matter.

"Hegseth gave the instruction to Cyber Command chief Gen. Timothy Haugh, who then informed the organization's outgoing director of operations, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Ryan Heritage, of the new guidance, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity."  (LINK)

Philip Kerr died way too soon...  

Then again, we still have Mick Herron...  There's a lot of stories to come from these two together.

***

Meanwhile:  

"Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace." - Agricola, ostensibly quoting Calgacus.

"Don’t be afraid of anything. This is our country and it’s the only one we have. The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children." – Alexei Navalny, Prison Diaries

"Scream at God if that's the only thing that will get results." - Brendan Francis

"HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE!!!!"  

                            - Shakespeare, The Tempest

More Notes for Horatio

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
— Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5.

First, some BSP - Back in 2017, I wrote a SleuthSayers post on Fort Mountain, Georgia, and the Cherokee legend of the Moon Eyed People with whom they lived and fought and eventually… drove out. Maybe. (LINK) Anyway, Neal Burnette, a writer and director of documentaries, read it and found it interesting and interviewed me for a documentary on the Moon Eyed People. (The video is at the bottom of this post.)

So, I had a few more thoughts on the whole thing (as if I don't always have a few more thoughts on everything...).

First of all, my general approach to history is and has always been to look for the patterns. Because they're there; they're always there. History may not repeat itself, not identically, but it sure does rhyme. I would always try to get that across to my students - there are patterns to revolution, to war, to missionaries, to education, to just about everything.

And the same with legends. Every legend has a germ of truth in it. Often more than a germ. Often it's blaring at us, except that we know it has to be a myth. thanks to the common fallacy that time is an arrow of progress, and we, we who are living here and now, are the purpose and pinnacle of it all, and we are the most brilliant, educated humans who have ever lived. All our ancestors were inferior to us, and they lived in darkness. (This was the whole point of the collective Renaissance strut during their stage of time.) Now that's complete and utter bull hockey, and we can prove it by looking at, if nothing else, the Pantheon in Rome, the bronze vessels of the Shang Dynasty, and the Pyramids. Geniuses and artists have always been with us, along with dictators and monsters, since... well, since the earliest records we have (back to say, 3,000 BC). And before. Check out Gobekli Tepe some time.

But back to legends and myths.

There is an amazing similarity among stories world-wide of "the little people". The canotila in Lakota a/k/a wiwila in Dakota who live in the Black Hills and Badlands, the sidhe in Ireland (commonly called fairies in the British Isles, and very commonly called the Good People in Ireland) and others who appear in every indigenous culture around the planet. All are humanoid, but most are much smaller than most humans. Some live in the forest, some in caves in the woods, but the stories told make it clear that they live in another dimension that intersects with ours. They have their own roads, places, habits, work, hobbies. Some little people have been said to reside in the Pryor Mountains of Montana and Wyoming. The Pryors are famous for their "fairy rings" and strange happenings. Some members of the Crow tribe consider the little people to be sacred ancestors and require leaving an offering for them upon entry to the area.

And the legends of the sidhe are endless. I highly recommend a book called "Meeting the Other Crowd: the Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland" by Eddie Lenihan and Caroline Eve Green for just a few of them.

BTW, by and large, they're not that interested in us. Sometimes they will take children to their world, sometimes for pity (especially an abused child - very common among the Native American legends) or a replacement for a sickly child of their own (most of these stories are European in origin), or for who knows what reason? Some adults have been invited to the sidhe's world, where they find hallways and royalty and a warning (from other humans who have been taken there) that if they eat or drink anything there, they'll never be able to go back. And it's always hard for a human to return to our dimension. Thomas the Rhymer was supposedly carried off by the Queen of Elfland and returned to earth with the gift of prophecy, but then had to return to Elfland when he was summoned back by a milk-white hart and hind. Washington Irving's fictional Rip Van Winkle slept and woke up after almost everyone he knew had died. But there were earlier stories from the German Peter Klaus to ones that are at least a thousand years older, Ranka from China (Link), and Muchukunda from India. Basically, if you eat or drink with the fairies / elves / sidhe / immortals, and go to sleep, if you ever wake up, it will be whole lifetimes later.  

Now to me, this is very interesting. The leap from Klaus to Rip Van Winkle is fairly obvious. But how did the ancient Chinese legend of a woodcutter who runs across a pair of immortals playing a game of Go, eats some of their food, and who falls asleep for so many years that his axe handle turns to dust make it all the way to Peter Klaus in Germany? But then, there are stories of Cinderella, Blind Kings, and deals with the devil in every culture...

There be giants in every culture, and dragons…
But that's another blog post.

Another note, all the stories about them say that if you treat them well or do them a good turn, they will reward you, sometimes very richly. But if you do them a bad turn, they will do you harm, perhaps life-long... In fact, you would do well to appease them or move away, quickly.

Meanwhile, all of this made me do a rethink of the legend of The Pied Piper of Hamelin Town. Now it's pretty obvious that it's tied to the bubonic plague, because Hamelin is swarming with rats and the Pied Piper gets rid of them. But then the Hamelin leaders refused to pay him, and he gathers up all the children (except for one that was blind, one that was deaf, and one that was lame) with his music, and leads them out of town... and into a cave in a mountain, which promptly closes behind them. BUT... the oldest version of the legend is as follows:

On the back of the last tattered page of a dusty chronicle called The Golden Chain, written in Latin in 1370 by the monk Heinrich of Herford, there is written in a different handwriting the following account:

Here follows a marvellous wonder, which transpired in the town of Hamelin in the diocese of Minden, in this Year of Our Lord, 1284, on the Feast of Saints John and Paul. A certain young man thirty years of age, handsome and well-dressed, so that all who saw him admired him because of his appearance, crossed the bridges and entered the town by the West Gate. He then began to play all through the town a silver pipe of the most magnificent sort. All the children who heard his pipe, in the number of 130, followed him to the East Gate and out of the town to the so-called execution place or Calvary. There they proceeded to vanish, so that no trace of them could be found. The mothers of the children ran from town to town, but they found nothing. It is written: A voice was heard from on high, and a mother was bewailing her son. And as one counts the years according to the Year of Our Lord or according to the first, second or third year of an anniversary, so do the people in Hamelin reckon the years after the departure and disappearance of their children. This report I found in an old book. And the mother of the Dean Johann von Lüde saw the children depart.

The sidhe are known for being handsome and well-dressed and excellent musicians...

And now for the documentary! Enjoy!