Since trailers for two of the films Howard Waldrop and I will be reviewing for Locus Online have recently dropped, I thought a trailer roundup was in order:
In November we’ll be reviewing Hugo (AKA Hugo Cabaret, based on Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret), a steampunk children’s fantasy from Martin Scorsese:
Which begs the question: Will Hugo be up for a Hugo?
Next year comes John Carter, AKA John Carter of Mars, AKA A Princess of Mars) directed by Pixar’s Andrew Stanton from a script written by Michael Chabon:
Don Webb alerted me to the existence of Hotel Torgo, a documentary on Manos: The Hands of Fate. It features commentary by El Paso SF fan Richard Brandt (a regular Nova Express reader, back in the day), and memories by cast member Bernie Rosenblum.
Warning: You do have to put up with annoying, intrusive Microsoft ads.
If you’ve read “Gabe’s Globster” or “Bob’s Yeti Problem,” you know that I have an ongoing interest in Cryptozoology. Oddly enough, I’m not really interested in the same boring cryptids that get all the media attention, i.e. Bigfoot and Nessie. I’m into more obscure fauna, like the Mongolian Death Worm or De Loys’ Ape. I guess that makes me a sort of cryptozoological hipster (“It’s a pretty obscure cryptid; you’ve probably never heard of it”), without the appalling fashion sense.
So I’m happy to report that one of America’s more obscure cryptids, The Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp, of Lee County, South Carolina, is back in the news.
The first sighting of the Lizard Men was back in 1988, when a 17-year old said he was chased by what he described as a green, scaly, 7-foot figure with glowing red eyes and three-fingered hands. You and I might say “Dude, you are so high.” But the wise people in Lee County immediately thought “Local legend! Ka-ching!” And thus the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp was born.
And now there’s been a new sighting! Well, not a sighting in the sense of “somebody actually saw something.” There’s a been a sighting in the sense of “Dang, somethin’ dun fucked up my car!” Unfortunately, the actual news article is pretty poorly written, burying the lede four paragraphs down and neglecting to provide pictures of “tooth marks [that] went completely through the fender” or metal “just bent it up [like] it was a piece of tissue paper.” Or any reason this might be the work of a lizard man rather than bear or alligator. (There might be a video there, but since I’ve got Brightcove (a really crappy and annoying ad platform) blocked, I guess I’ll never watch it.)
This piece, from 2008, is much better written, and a lot more likely to make you go “hmmmm.” Here’s another piece on that 2008 incident, with much bigger pictures. That’s awful high up on the fender for a gator to go up and gnaw on a car, and those holes look too deep and far apart to have been made by a bear (which gets mentioned as a possibility in the article). Doesn’t rule out the owners faking them, but those holes do look…odd.
Of course, the “Lizard Man’s Car” license plate in this video does nothing to enhance the witness’ credibility:
The video also includes plenty of local Lizard Man Merch. “Moichindising, moichindising! Where the real money from a cryptid is made!”
Another video from CNN:
And the South Carolina Lottery produced a series of painful Lizard Man-themed promo spots:
As for the location, well, it is near some swamp, but it’s not so far out that you would think a lizard man could escape detection for years on end, especially in an era where everyone has camera phones.
And what ever happened to the original victim? The lizard men killed him! That is, assuming the lizard men have guns. “Investigators say Davis was targeted in a drug-related incident.” (See also: The third paragraph of this post.)
Cryptozoology is one of the more interesting disciplines on the fringes of science, mainly because new animal species are being discovered all the time, and every now and then a cryptid turns out to be real. Alas, the idea of lizard men roaming the swamps of South Carolina may be pretty freaking unlikely, though not (quite) physically impossible.
Of course, South Carolina swamp dwellers are pretty far from David Icke’s shape-shifting ruling class. (I gather from the headline that Obama is now counted among the reptoids, but no way am I wading through two hours of Icke to confirm this.) The chances of Icke’s theory being true range from “Dude, listening to Alex Jones is for entertainment purposes only” to “Nurse, more Thorazine.”
I’ve seen some other videos of lanterns be floated over Poland as part of their midsummer festival, but I thought this was just too cool looking not to post.
(Still in a brownout, Internet up for nowdown again. Who knows how long it will last…)
I think today is going to be a Peter Gabriel Day here on Futuramen.
In my youth every day was Peter Gabriel day. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and Peter Gabriel III were the soundtrack of my youth in late high school and early college. I had pretty much every song Gabriel ever recorded, including such non-album rarities as “Curtains,” “Soft Dog,” and “No More Apartheid.” Not to mention a fair number of bootlegs.
<Onion-On-Belt Rant Mode On>
In my day, you couldn’t just download bootlegs from the Internet. You actually had to buy them on these round slabs of petroleum byproducts called “records.” And you couldn’t even find them in most record stores. You had to find them in the back room, or record conventions, or even more obscure venues. I remember that there used to be someplace in Austin, down on (I think) 12th Street, that was a used clothing store, except they had a small section where there were like four bins of nothing but bootlegs. And you paid more than regular price for them, only to get them home and find out half the time that the quality sucked.
Good times, good times.
<Onion-On-Belt Rant Mode Off>
Anyway, while looking for something else, I stumbled across two different videos of a completely unreleased Peter Gabriel song called “Why Don’t We.”
I would happily toss some money Peter Gabriel’s way if he would put a clean recorded version up on iTunes.
I plan to post a lot more Peter Gabriel discoveries today, power and Internet permitting…
And speaking of Ofunato City, here is footage of the tsunami coming in there:
Someone has put up a series of videos called “people trying to escape from the tsunami,” some of which I’ve never seen before, and all of which look entirely too close for comfort.
Here’s entirely-too-close footage of the tsunami coming in, including large tugboats and a van trying to escape, right before the cameraman decided he really needed to get to higher ground:
That’s the tool chest of 19th century piano maker H.O. Studley. I originally saw this linked from Fark, and knew I had to put up a video of it, if only to show Howard Waldrop (a man deeply appreciative of fine woodwork) the next time he’s somewhere near a computer.
I’m sure this is very old news to some people, as there have been many articles written about it in woodworking magazines. I think my jaw actually dropped open when they showed how the individual fastening drawers slid back and forth.
All six of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant appear to be under control, though there appears to be damage to the reactor cores of reactors 1-3. Those reactors have been given an International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) rating of 5, which would put it on par with Three Mile Island, but well below the 7 assigned to Chernobyl.
