The Terror Conspiracy Revisited

According to Jim Marrs, the US response to the 9/11 hijacking was a bit slow. He says it took too long for the military to respond after the planes went off course, that part is true. But if you look at things from a practical standpoint,  the disappearing planes wouldn’t have come to anyone’s attention. The terrorists weren’t stupid; they hijacked planes from four different airlines at different airports. They knew that four planes going off course at the same time would not have caused a red alert.

Marrs also brings up the issue of how the building collapsed so easily, but it’s been proven countless times that the steel structure was heat-sensitive. It’s true that the building’s steel girders were fireproofed with cement (which fell off from the impact of the plane) but why blame the architect? There was no reason to expect a huge fire in World Trade Center, certainly not a hot enough fire to weaken the structure. It was rare for a plane to crash into a building, and there wasn’t any flammable material inside.

I’ll give the author credit for writing an entertaining book. It was fun to read, but didn’t have any information I hadn’t already seen. There isn’t any investigative journalism here, because all of the information is readily available on the web. Nonetheless, the author successfully uses the information to illustrate the possible conspiracies behind 9/11.

Mind Over Medicine

Mind Over Medicine is about a solution to a great American problem; we let our jobs control our lives, and our lives control our jobs. In a recent issue of Minds magazine, some cops from Oregon took a meditation course as a way to reduce stress. Most of them scoffed at the idea; they all had hobbies, pastimes, and things to do outside of work, so what use would they have for meditation and yoga? But the truth is they needed it badly. The job was often boring rather than active, and that made them resentful. The resentment made it harder to maintain self-control when dealing with rude civilians, and there were numerous complaints.

Dr. Lissa Rankin has written a well-researched and highly enjoyable book on overworked Americans and what we can do about this. She makes it very clear; Americans tend to work long hours and lack true happiness. Worse than the long hours, we have long commutes, and we often hate our jobs. But in the chapter Loneliness Poisons the Body, we see how in one small town had far less stress. The town was Roseto, Pennsylvania, founded by Italian immigrants in the early 20^th century. Doctors found that there was no suicide, alcoholism, drug use, or crime, and heart disease was rare. Was it the olive oil? No, the residents cooked everything in lard. Healthy food? No, they all loved pizza and sausages, and their diet was 40% fat. Genetics? They had the same genes as all other Italian Americans. Then secret was communal activity; families, and even multifamily groups, would gather nightly for group singing, while all the kids played together. Happiness was the key to their health.

Roseto didn’t do well in the modern era. As the younger generation left, the parents had less to do with themselves. As younger college-educated people came back, they influenced their younger townspeople with ideas, most of them about material things. The kids started demanding more, and feelings of discontent spread. By the 1980’s, there were more heart attacks among the residents. The chapter Death by Overwork is something that most Americans ignore. Why do we work such huge hours to pay for a huge home, when we could live in a smaller one and work less? Is it necessary for the kids to go to expensive colleges, when community colleges are within biking distance?

Years ago, I visited a family in Israel that lived in a tiny house, the size of a trailer. We ate dinner on the patio, and the father told us how he’d fixed the roof himself. When we left, my father spoke about how shocked he was. “They don’t have any money at all,” my father said, “their home is so small.” But I didn’t see it that way. The family had no mortgage to pay, only two of their kids were still living at home, and they didn’t have to pay for college. In short order, the family was 100% solvent. But if you have a huge house, two cars, and a kid going to an expensive college, are you truly rich? Are you in debt? Do you have to work such huge hours to pay for what you have?

Unless you are free from debt, you will never be truly free.

The Enemies Within by Trevor Loudon

The USA is in trouble thanks to the liberals, ladies and gentlemen. High school cafeterias will soon be forced to offer pita as well as white bread, shopping malls will have to let women breastfeed in the food court, and if things couldn’t be worse, we’ll have to let kids opt for soccer instead of football. Some say it’s the president. Others say it’s Congress. But regardless, one thing is certain; it’s all a big conspiracy!

Trevor Loudon, a New Zealand based expert on our country’s problems, has uncovered a massive conspiracy by Communists to undermine traditional values. California, for instance, has made Cesar Chavez’ birthday an official holiday, adding to such other nuisances as having to pay for public education. Now tell me, what could be any worse than immortalizing a labor organizer, a man who had the chutzpah to say that grape pickers deserved a raise? Thanks to him we have to pay an extra ten cents every time we buy 20 pounds of grapes!

As if the Cesar Chavez holiday weren’t bad enough, Al Franken (Senator from the all-powerful state of Minnesota) has friends who are Communists. Another Minnesota politician, Keith Ellison, is a member of the Nation of Islam, an advocate of terrorist Assata Shakur (who’s been living in Cuba for 30 years and hasn’t left) and Kathleen Soliah (who spent 25 in hiding.) You may not have heard of Congressman Ellison, but he’ll be big stuff soon. I bet he’s going to destroy America by asking Minnesota public schools to offer pork-free meals to Muslim kids. We’re screwed now!

Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi really crowns things with his unpatriotic antics. He damaged American supremacy by letting US medical students go to Cuba. I kid you not, he told Castro that there was a physician shortage in Mississippi, so Castro offered to let US students go to Cuban medical schools on full scholarship. This is an outrage, to let our students study in Cuba instead of taking out six figure students loans! If this utterly irresponsible Communist pandering isn’t grounds for impeachment, Thompson went on a “fact finding” trip to Cuba with two aids, and do you know how much the trip cost? $1298.26! That’s less than $2000 for a four day trip for three people, paid for by a private foundation. Who does this sleazeball Congressman think he is, doing a project under-budget? What kind of precedent does that set? Very soon we’ll have members of Congress refusing to waste public money, all because Congressman Thompson refuses to waste our tax dollars. How dare he!

Nobody could possible know this stuff better than Trevor Loudon, a man who must have spent at least two weeks in the USA, and researched this book from the dangerous streets of Christchurch. It is clear from his book that the Soviet ideology hasn’t really been dead for the past 25 years, but alive and well thanks to a conspiracy by members of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Whether anything in this book is true or not, I don’t know, but one thing is certain. Right wing conspiracy fanatics will be fleeing to New Zealand, and I’ll gladly help them pack their bags.

True UFO Accounts

The minority of you who actually read my reviews know that I love first hand accounts. This book is a collection of articles from Fate Magazine and its years of UFO reporting, going all the way back to the 1960’s. As for the history of UFO sightings, I had no idea they occurred in ancient Egypt. Sure, I learned about Erich Von Daniken’s “Ancient Astronaut” theory back in 5^th grade, but I’d never heard of the 1865 sighting in Britain. Yes indeed, a man names James Lumley claimed he saw a burning object hit the ground with a strong smell of sulfur. Now are you going to tell me that it was a stray artillery shell, and that the smell of sulfur was from the propellant? As the English would say, not bloody likely? And then there’s the trapper who found rocks covered in hieroglyphics in the mountains of Missouri. Now if this man was a trapper, would he have known enough about hieroglyphics to fake them? It seems that a space-faring race have crashed their vessels in Ancient Egypt, Missouri, and Roswell. Were they attracted by the clean air and natural beauty of those places? A nature-loving race would not have been drawn to Chicago or LA, I guarantee!

The 1949 article gives a good reason to consider a Martian visit to our planet. But first, listen to another theory; some say it was the Soviets piloting some giant experimental aircraft. But who would benefit the most from that suggestion? Boeing and Northrop Grumman! They were paid billions to make stuff for NASA and the army, so the “Soviet spacecraft” idea would be profitable. They made a fortune when Sputnik went into orbit, and the USA went haywire to compete with the Soviets. The Military-Industrial Complex isn’t found in the conspiracy theory section. It’s real!

But seriously folks, why else would aliens come here other than nature? The summers are warm, the winters aren’t bad, and there’s plenty of water in the ocean. Mercury is too hot, Mars is too cold, and as for Venus, well the pressure there is so high that we can’t send a probe.

Looks like Earth is the next stop for the alien tourist.

Spindrift by Jan Bryant Bartell

I was forced to read this book by a malicious spirit who takes great pleasure in leading me to long out-of-print books. As you’ve probably figured out, I’m a sucker for all things nostalgic, and I was drawn to Jan Bartell’s Spindrift: Spray From a Psychic Sea by unexplained forces. Some weird psychic demon lured me into reading this old book, and by the time I was done, I could hear that demonic spirit laughing at me. The prince of darkness can be a real comedian.

The story begins without any dynamic whatsoever. Jan Bartell and her husband move into 14 West 10^th Street, and right away they get noises, shadows, trips and falls. But there’s nothing frightening about the story, nor is there any suspense. What’s frightening about I got up for a drink of water and I heard the creeping noise again when there's nothing leading up to it? There’s no buildup of suspense, no sense of foreboding, no great discovery. It’s got nothing on The Sentinel or The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, where the story gets scarier as it progresses. Spindrift seems more like a bored housewife than a ghost story.

The author’s writing style is annoying. Take this line for instance: returning home, I was chilled less by the flaying winds of winter than by the cold facts of contemporary life. Well I doubt that very much, because if she were truly “chilled” by contemporary life, then she would’ve wised up and not written this rag. She’s trying to “wax poetic” which doesn’t work in a horror story. And for goodness sake, did she have to include every word from her high school vocabulary workbook? In the part at the end when they finally move out, she says it struck me as incredible that I was being dispossessed from my home by an unseen entity, who on a material plane had long since ceased to be. That’s not the way you describe something you fear. Is this a horror story or is she writing about a science experiment? Either way, She’s trying to write about a scary experience in a poetic way, and it doesn’t work.

I first heard of Spindrift in a 1998, in a Time Out NY article about “haunted Manhattan.” Other than that, the only source is Ghosts I Have Known by Hans Holzer, the exorcist they hired to “cleanse” the house. No, the exorcism didn’t work and the demonic spirits followed them when they moved after 20 years. Regardless, the house at  #14 West 10^th Street has a long and dynamic history of its own. It was a stop on the Underground Railroad, a residence of Mark Twain, and throughout the 19^th century, the area was home to the city’s elite wasp families. It’s also the house where Joel Steinberg beat his daughter to death and left his wife with a mangled face. There’s a horror story for you right there.

New York City is a great place to stage a thriller. Rosemary’s Baby and The Sentinel were supernatural horror stories set in New York City, and they work perfectly, with lots of suspense building up to a creepy climax. But Spindrift isn’t scary, nor is it interesting. Worst of all, Bartell passed up a great opportunity to write about her neighborhood. She’s only a few blocks from Washington Square Park and the Beat scene. There had to be a million interesting things going on there. Why waste the effort on a horror story?

Maybe this story is fictional. Was the author desperate to get at least one book published? Was it an exercise in self-indulgence? We’ll never know because the author died in 1973, right before it came out. There isn’t much information about Bartell on the web, except that she had a few minor acting roles, her neighbors knew her as spoiled, neurotic, and possibly bipolar, and her husband died in 1990. Some say she killed herself, others say she died of a heart attack. I suspect that regardless, the “ghosts” were probably hallucinations.

When I go to bed at night, I bet I’ll hear a mysterious, creepy voice say “I suckered you into reading this rag, and you will keep on reading trash like this for the rest of your life!”

Comical Tragedy of Mister Punch by Neil Gaiman

I never could understand why Punch and Judy are a kiddie show act. Not only are they the creepiest puppets ever, but the plots of the stories deserve an R rating; punch spends the whole show beating his wife, throwing the baby down the stairs, and tormenting everyone he can. I used to see Punch and Judy shows in England, and I sat through them out of stubbornness. The urge to run away was overwhelming.

The story here is equally creepy; a little boy spends the summer with his grandfather at his creepy seaside amusement park, and along comes a creepy Punch and Judy showman to make things creepier. In contrast to the boy is the showman’s assistant, a teenager who looks as though the job is the only thing keeping him out of jail (and not for too long, judging by his outlook.) While the boy is both fascinated and frightened by the showman and the carnival (and his grandfather, for that matter) the teen sees right through the whole thing. He knows that the show and the carnival are relics of a bygone era.

Only Dave McKean could illustrate something as frightening as this. By combining photos with hand-drawn illustration, he creates a haunting, lurid backdrop reminiscent of Jan Svankmajer’s animation. For those of you unfamiliar with Dave McKean, he’s the guy that did the Sandman covers in the 1990’s, and those things used to give me nightmares. Sandman was DC’s foray into mature-themed material, and Mister Punch would fit right at home in there.

A little research tells me that Punch comes from Pulcinello, a character from Italian puppet shows, and his name means “chicken” thanks to his massive nose and a voice like a rooster’s squawk. He’s violent, deceptive, and when confronted with something he’s done, he’ll feign ignorance and/or stupidity. He’s usually paired with Arleccino (or Harlequin in English), his agile trickster alter-ego, who I might add is descended from a more demonic character of legend (hence the multicolored costume.)

No matter how much English kids love this guy, I can’t look Punch in the face without getting creeped out. Those beady eyes, the leering grin, he is scary.

 

The World’s Most Famous Ghosts by Daniel Cohen

This was one of my favorite books when I was a kid, just like all of Daniel Cohen’s other kiddie books on weird stuff like UFO’s, the Loch Ness Monster, Conspiracies, and whatnot. The stories are all incredibly entertaining, but they’re also educational. The part with the ghosts of the Tower of London was frightening because the actual location is real. The Berkeley Square Horror, now that got me interested. Soon after reading this book, my family made a trip to London and we made a bee line for Berkeley Square. I remember marching into the building and saying “excuse me, where’s the haunted room?” The only person there at the time wasn’t surprised; there are occasional writers and paranormalists who drop by. But she was there by herself and couldn’t let two strangers upstairs. She said “we use it to store the books, and no, there haven’t been any strange goings-on.” I bet the sight of my typical American dad, with his trucker cap, was probably the strangest “going-on” they had that day!

Abraham Lincoln’s ghost gets a chapter to himself, and it’s a rather depressing one, with or without the haunted rooms. Abe’s family wasn’t a happy one; his son William died in the White House, his wife was crazy, and his youngest son died in his teens. If you couple that with a rough childhood, a difficult adulthood, and the most stressful presidency in history, his ghost has a lot to wail about. But the ghost did show up at the right moment, when someone tried to bulldoze the White House’ famous Rose Garden.

The Winchester Ghost House is a story that always fascinated me, but I never knew what it looked like until the internet allowed me to see photos. Sarah Winchester was the heir to the Winchester rifle company, and like Abe Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd, she had two things against her; she was into spiritualism, and she was nuts! She was told by a psychic medium that her dead husband and daughter were being tortured in hell, and she’d have to build a huge house to lodge all of the ghosts killed by her husband’s rifles. I won’t spoil the rest of the story.

It seems as though these ghosts were once depressed people. Aside from the Drury Lane ghosts, they all have to do with unhappy lives. At least the Drury Lane theater ghosts are considered good luck. In New York City theaters (especially the old ones in the West Village) there are ghosts too. Don’t wear yellow or green on stage. Those used to be the color of the devil in old plays.

Bet you didn’t know that one!

History’s Mysteries by Brian Houghton

Thanks to modern science, the Oak Island treasure pit has been explained, and now the whole mystery is ruined! But hang on, what else could have tempted your appetite for a good story when you were a kid? What better was there to entice you into reading about pirate treasure on a mysterious island?

History’s Mysteries is a great book on the unexplained things we wonder about. One of the things that makes it so darn great is that it’s written by an archeologist; his expertise makes the stories even more fascinating. All of those ancient weird places-Mesa Verde, Petra, the burial mounds-Houghton makes everything readable and enjoyable.

I strongly recommend this for the armchair historian.

Ghosthunting New York City by L’Aura Hladik

I love it when these books are displayed in the store in the month before Halloween. Each chapter is about some charming NYC landmark, and the spirit that lives there at night. In all of the city’s historic houses, there are spirits that move the pictures, pet the cats, or steal pints of beer. The part about McSorley’s Ale House, now there’s history involved in that one, and I bet the owner and patrons all have stories to tell. The old bars in the Village, they’ve been around since the 1800’s, long before all the colleges sprang up in the city. Back then, New York really was diverse, and the patrons weren’t all college students, actors, musicians, teachers, and bankers. There were a lot of unsavory characters.

Hart Island is many things; cemetery for the unclaimed dead, site of an old Nike missile base, resting place for the old Ebbet’s Field bleacher seats, to name a few. North Brother Island was an isolation zone for Typhoid Mary, and later an institution for teenage junkies. I can imagine the ghosts of all those dead kids roaming the island at night. Typhoid Mary’s ghost is probably crying like a banshee from the solitude. If I had to live on an island all by myself, I’d be crazy too!

The haunted NYC theaters didn’t surprise me, because the Drury Lane theater in England is said to be haunted too. But with or without the ghosts, the authors have brought up all kinds of superstitions I never knew about. For starters, never wear green or yellow on stage, the limelight cancels it out. Never whistle in the theatre, because the stagehands were ex-sailors and they’d signal each other by whistling. Whistle the wrong tune, and the curtain might drop at the wrong time. Did you know that green and yellow are considered bad luck on stage? They used to be the colors of the devil in old plays. Never let the theatre go pitch black, because the spirits will run amok.

Here’s the bottom line; New York City is one of the oldest communities in the USA. Old cities, like ours, and New Orleans, Boston, and Philadelphia, they’re bound to have lots of ghosts. Happy Halloween!