Haunted By Hollows Part Two

Caroline: "You have repeatedly raped me!"
Adelle: "Excuse me? I have done no such thing! You agreed to this!"
Caroline: "I never had a choice!"
Adelle: "We always have a choice!"

That's the exchange I've been waiting to see since the first scene of the first episode of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. Since we first saw the two main characters of this shadow play treating tea drinking as if it were a chess board, that's the elephant in the room to which I wanted them to eventually return. Adelle DeWitt, mistress of the Dollhouse, gives Caroline an ultimatum: let us use your body as we see fit for five years, and we will give you back the rest of your life only better. We will fix whatever you perceive to be wrong about it, and you'll get a fresh start. Or except the consequences of your actions and the fact we will not let you go to the authorities and shut us down. Caroline had a choice, but if she wanted to continue breathing, she only had one choice. People feel like that all the time.

I don't get to make the choices that lead to that exchange though. Those decisions are far from my grasp. There's now rumors that Fox Television is not going to show the thirteenth and last episode of Dollhouse. It won't get broadcast. Something they want to save for the DVD no doubt, to encourage more people to buy it. The carrot put out on the stick for us consumers to go 'nom nom nom' on like hopeless squirrels. Joss Whedon has strived throughout this mockery of television publicity to shine a light of beauty and compassion on the Fox Network. He does not want his loyal audience to blame them for the inevitable cancelation of Dollhouse. It was perhaps doomed from the start. It's a premise that network television can't abide. We're talking about using technology to rape people. That's the long and the short of it. A fascinating concept actually. I wish I'd thought of it.

Oh wait. I did. Doctor Xanus. Back in elementary school. A crazy man built a fortress laboratory into a mountain, inside which he had captured human specimens which he then did insane experiments that tortured and twisted the very genetic make up of these poor souls, and he brainwashed their minds so they would follow his every order, fulfill his every maddening whim. Then one day, Doctor Xanus went out into the world to capture another victim for his experiments. He had left instructions for his slaves to continue their routines until his return. While away, his laboratory was self-sufficient, and was even designed to withstand nuclear winter, because he believed humanity was going to eventually destroy itself, and his efforts alone would find a way to make superior humans that could survive anything. He was an insane genius.

Anyway. Something went wrong. Xanus never came back. Maybe he was captured by police. Maybe he just died of natural causes. Maybe any number of a thousand other possibilities occurred. I don't think I ever answered that part of the story. Yet his fortress laboratory under the mountain remained for years, and those inside it continued his work and followed their routines as instructed, waiting for his return. Then one day, years later while on a camping trip with friends, a nerdy teenager named Trevor happened to fall into what he had thought was an old abandoned mineshaft. While trying to find a way out, he stumbled upon an entrance to Xanus' laboratory, and the creatures inside it thought he was their Doctor Xanus. I never finished the tale. I think I started from the idea of a kid falling in a mineshaft and finding a crazy doctor's humanoid brainwashed slaves, and then built the hows and whys around that fall into the mountain. That initial moment of surprise and shock and awe. I guess the end of the story would be the real Xanus somehow returning. Or maybe just the discovery of what happened to him once and for all, but I never answered that for myself.

So maybe the Xanus laboratory in the mountain is not exactly The Dollhouse. I guess there's nothing new under the sun. However, it's how we interpret the old in new ways that puts our individual mark on it. Still, perhaps one of the many reasons why I enjoy Joss Whedon's work so much is that it inspires one's creative juices. Not so that one thinks they can do better. That part kinda keeps my creative juices in check cuz I SO cannot do better than Whedon. Still, one sees a story about vampires existing in modern day and one thinks what other things could co-exist today upon which stories could be told? How many other alleys are there that some other blonde chick could walk down it and begin an adventure?

I'm not satisfied with part one of this vomiting of thought upon these pages [and I'm not satisfied with part two either now that I'm done with it]. There's something in me that won't spit out. It's painful typing these words and I'm not sure why. It's a simple thing. We all have choices. Every day. Every fucking day we make choices, from the nanosecond we wake up in the morning. To quote from the illustrious Margaret Cho, "should I get up and pee, or just pee in the bed?" Those choices have consequences. Peeing in the bed would feel good for about ten seconds, but eventually you're gonna have to clean the sheets... and air out the mattress. So we make the only viable alternative choice; we get the hell out of bed, go to the damned toilet, and we start our godforsaken day, which is going to contain a whole nightmare of other choices like that. Freedom versus control.. or rather the illusion of control via choices that are not really choices when you weigh the options. We make the best choices based on those available. The choices that are least painful or have the least number of bad consequences.

I could have written Evelyn Hollows story. I coulda tried harder to get it right. I coulda found the right medium within which to tell her story. I coulda done whatever one has to do to figure out what an audience really wants in storytelling and then mold and shape Evelyn Hollows' story to meet an audience's expectations. I could have done Evelyn justice. Whedon did it with Buffy. And Angel. And Reynolds. And Echo. Why can't I do that for the population of characters inside my head? Evelyn deserves better than me.

When I saw the episode Haunted, my mind's eye superimposed scenes of the Hollows Eve storyline when snippets of visuals or dialogue coincided coincidentally with where my mind had gone years before. Objectively speaking the comparisons are totallly irrational. Both stories have a leading talented equestian female from a well-to-do family who cheats death. That's about where the similarities end. However, seeing Eliza Dushku walking through the paces of a story vaguely similar to that of Evelyn Hollows... was rather creepy. Evelyn Hollows was buried in a long black dress, so that's how I see her pretty much throughout the story. So when my mind's eye would superimpose images of the Hollows Eve story as I watched Dollhouse's Haunted, the similarities were uncanny. Even her facial expressions triggered images I could only paint mentally from 1987.

Revisiting this, I'm still not doing it right, or conveying to you the reader how heartstoppingly queer this experience was. I did enjoy Haunted very much, but I can't tell if that's because it is thus far the best episode Whedon's Think Tank has done for the series, or because it rekindled a fire I'd long since thought extinguished, and without even realizing it, did justice to a tale I couldn't regurgitate out of my creative juices no matter how many times I have tried in the past twenty years. Perhaps that's a true sign of genius, if the talent of one storyteller can spark the creative juices in another. I don't know.

They say there are two different kinds of the same story. There's the story the writer writes, and there's the story that the reader gets. How the reader interprets the writer's story is something over which the writer has only an illusion of control. When I read Michael Crichton's "The Lost World" before seeing the movie, I had in my mind's eye seen only Sigourney Weaver in the role of Sarah Harding. In the movie, Stephen Spielberg obviously saw Julianne Moore in the part. Decidedly different strong women with remarkably different approaches to their role in storytelling. I was not disappointed in Ms. Moore's performance, but I had to do some mental gymnastics to hop on board Spielberg's superiority of the situation.

So there's more than two interpretations. There's as many different versions of a story as there are people reading it. If you have a group of people writing the story, each of them perceive the story differently too, even though accumuatively they only churn out one physical version of it. Even for one individual, there's multiple stories for the same story. I can't explain with any simplicity how many different versions of the stories surrounding Bridgeborouogh have taken in my mind's eye as I've struggled with trying to find a place to put it or a way to convey it that does the story justice. I have often also tried to leave Bridgeborough and tell stories that don't go there at all, but much like Kevin Smith's relationship with the View Askew universe, one always finds oneself gravitating back to the well that helped one begin. The neurons that fire creatively in my cerebellum are hardwired to a place I've never been, that doesn't exist, but I know precisely where it is. I can smell it. I can taste it. I can feel it.

And when something out of the blue triggers those memories in the most unlikely places, I find myself trying to make these connections and understand why, but there are no answers. Just as the perfume of a passing woman in a bar might suddenly call to mind an apple tree I loved to climb when I was eleven, that woman is not going to understand or appreciate the sudden sensations that flow through me, and I'm not going to be able to tell her she makes me feel young again. She's not going to understand. Or she's going to think I'm trying to stick my dick in her when what I really want her to do is help me find an apple tree we can climb together. Considering the dress she's wearing, she'd probably be less inclined to climbing than the other thing. Besides my back ain't what it used to be. Maybe it'd be enough for me to just politely ask her what fragrance is that, and then thank her and walk away. She'd never know why I asked. I'd be unable to tell her the story. Doubtful it would be of interest to her anyway.

Perhaps these stories of Evelyn Hollows and Justin Graves and Brandon Witcher should never be told. Maybe that's the point. If they were worth telling I would have been able to make it work by now. Or maybe I have failed them. The choices that I have made in my life have been choices that ultimately failed them. I am unable to go back and make different choices and I can't seem to find a choice now going forward that would give these characters their deserved day in the sun. All the years they have entertained me, and I lack the power to return the favor.

So I put them in the back of my mind and I try to forget them, and sometimes I'm successful in that choice. Sometimes I go entire years without thinking about them, or maybe that's what I tell myself. I actually think I think about them far more often than I let myself remember.

But last night, watching Dollhouse's Haunted, the floodgates were once again opened. I guess you could say I'm having... difficulty closing the gates again.

Haunted By Hollows Part One

"...you don't pitch 'Buffy' with 'The Body.' You earn that. You pitch it with the premise, and then you get to all the stuff that you're really doing it for."
-- Joss Whedon

This will take a little explanation. I'll try to keep it brief. [I lied. This so is not brief.]

Back around the early 1980s, I wrote a story mostly for my own benefit; entertaining myself and trying to teach myself how to write. I never got the story to a final draft. It took many incarnations. It was a poem at one time. Then a short story. Then it became the inspiration for a comic book I could never draw. Then I game mastered DC Heroes for friends and elements of the story filtered in. This story grew and blossomed and I still carry it with me. It's more than one story now. It's a lot of stories. Far too many than I could ever tell. And while parts of it remain solid in my mind, other parts remain fluid. The majority of the foundation was built in the early eighties, but now and then I return to this place in my mind - it's an entire city now - and I find more there that I hadn't found before, like I'm a tourist, or a journalist, or even an archeologist, digging up more streets and buildings and people and places and things. Like it's all always been there waiting for me to discover it.

Currently I tell myself stories about one of the estranged granddaughters of one of the characters in the original tale. She doesn't even know about her past. Part of the ongoing narrative is that eventually she's supposed to figure it out, but so far she hasn't, because ironically her personality tends to look forward and not back. I should get all this down on paper somehow. I have tried. It's just bigger and better inside my head than my humble talents to tell it on paper. I can't convey it in a way that would enrapture an audience as much as it has already enraptured me.

Every now and then, I see elements of my story show up elsewhere. In movies. In books. Other talented people telling their stories, and I see reflections of my story in theirs. Like ripples of my own reflection in a disturbed pond owned by someone else. I can't grasp my reflection and claim it as mine. As soon as it's there, it's gone.

The movie Mask for example, with Jim Carrey. It reminds me painfully of my failure to tell Justin Grave's story. Elements of a character in my own story called Harlequin, that I came up with easily a decade before I saw the movie, appear in Mask. There's no way the writer of Mask could have known about my story cuz I never got it down on paper in any public manner. I never published it. However, watching Mask the first time left me a little disturbed. It's not the story of Harlequin. There's a lot of major differences. However, a mask that gives powers to whomever wears it? That was the impetus; the germinal idea behind Harlequin's character. The Mask just did it better than I could ever do. And the humor.. well, Justin started as a standup comedian who couldn't be funny, but the mask had the spirit of a medieval jester that over time ...well Justin learns how to laugh, but he also learns how to grieve. It was the whole tragedy versus comedy mask thing. I guess the story could still work. Maybe there'd be an audience. However, after seeing The Mask with Jim Carrey, I felt the wind knocked out of my sails. I couldn't ever make Harlequin better than Mask.

There have been other examples of this, but as I said when I started, I wanted to keep this brief. Enough preamble. Tonight I felt it happen again. Another character from this city, her name was Evelyn Hollows. She was a colleague of Justin's after he got the mask, and after she got to die.

Evelyn was a popular and successful equestrian who competed with her favorite mare, but there were people who didn't want Evelyn to continue winning, so they drugged her horse just before a competition. The plan was for the horse to go crazy during the routine and throw the contest. The people who drugged her horse didn't know that the mare would throw Evelyn off and then trample her to death. It wasn't the mare's fault, but the drugs ruined her and after an animal publically kills a human being, there's little that can be done but put her down.

So Evelyn and her mare both died that night. However, Evelyn had previously made a bargain with supernatural forces, and challenged the Reaper to a game of chess for her soul. She won, and was able to return to life in her original body. The Reaper didn't tell her though, that she'd come back to a body that was supernaturally enhanced, and linked to a minor diety that had her own agenda. Evelyn wanted to come back to life to investigate her death and that of her horse, but first the minor diety had to be appeased, and Evelyn didn't want to do what the diety wanted her to do. Evelyn essentially returned to the streets of her childhood as an undead thing. Unable to do more but observe her loved ones from afar, and tho the minor diety was powerful enough to grant her special abilities, there were also limitations and side effects to this imitation of life.

Eventually, with the help of the father of her best friend (a paranormal investigator named Brandon Witcher) Evelyn Hollows was able to both appease the minor diety that gave her a second life, and discover that her life was ended by someone close to her. The discovery of this betrayal struck her more painfully than any horse's hoof, and she no longer wanted this illusion of life. However, the deal struck allowed the minor diety and her lord and master to keep her animated as long as she wanted, and she wanted Evelyn to convince people to worship her again, because more believers and converts means more power. That's about where she's at when Evelyn encounters Brandon Witcher's granddaughter some thirty-odd years later.

Now, I guess based on the above description, anyone who saw tonight's episode of The Dollhouse, which was titled Haunted, would probably not see what I saw. Again, this isn't the same story. However, I see elements of Hallow's Eve reflected in Haunted. I see a story better told than I could tell. The equestrian woman who gets a second chance at life is older than Evelyn, and it's not a minor diety she strikes a bargain with but Adele DeWitt of the Dollhouse. Still, the pain of learning how her family members really felt about her when she lived - I gasped. The look on Eliza Dushku's face in that moment is the look I see on Evelyn Hollows every time my mind's eye looks upon her. The sadness and frailty of knowing in death what one could never have known in life. The realization of how precious every waking breath truly is, that you can only know when you are trapped inside a body that no longer needs to draw a breath.

Now, in this incarnation, the equestrian woman came back in a younger form, and was able to talk to her family directly. That wasn't the case with Evelyn. She could never go near them because she looked too ghastly. She needed someone to intervene on her behalf, which is where Bewitcher came into the picture. He was a paranormal investigator. Murders involving people not really dead? Kinda one of his specialties. So there are obvious differences, but I can honestly say Haunted was a far superior way to tell the kind of story I wanted to tell back in 1987 when I first tried to get all this down on paper somehow.

It both hurt and helped, to see on a screen images that I had previously only seen in my mind's eye. I'd never thought about it before but dark eyes, dark hair, pale skin. Eliza Dushku woulda made a good Evelyn Hollows... ten years ago. It's too late to tell the story now.

My problem has always been that I can't dissect it. When I see the story, I see the big picture. I keep trying to whittle it down to just something that I could manage into a single meal for an audience, but the end result loses its flavor. The relationships between Witcher and Graves and Hollows are intertwined, and yet they're not at all because they're each separate individuals with their own lives to live, but I can't seem to introduce one without finding myself having to describe the others. Never to my satisfaction, and all I do is lose the audience.

It's all connected, but Whedon was right. You have to earn that. I was never able to find an in into the overall story arc. I had hoped Witcher's granddaughter would be the in, but she looks forward, and so much of the story is now trapped in the past. Locked forever in 1987. Graves is long since dead, Witcher is missing, but Hollows is still there. ..and is she even still Evelyn anymore? I can't tell, and I created her. I think she's fooling even me.

Oh my God. It's Evelyn's body but it's no longer her soul! Of course! If she'd been an actual zombie she woulda bit me. But that means.. Who the hell is she? The diety? Did she actually get a church started? How strong is she? Have I misplaced Evelyn's soul, or is that part of why Witcher disappeared? I thought Witcher disappeared because of Malcolm Factor but that was long since over by then. Maybe he took Evelyn's soul somewhere that minor diety couldn't get to her. Which would explain why he can't return.

Damn. This story is just bigger than me. It always has been. I can never get a grip on it. The more I learn, the more I don't know. I haven't earned any of this. I have to find the story in the story - the part that an audience would actually want to know. A meal that isn't biting off more than can be chewed. If that worked, from there I could get to the rest of it, maybe someday.

Keep It Or Kill It?

Websites that insist on spreading lame lists like this over twenty or thirty pages so they can get more ad clicks piss me the hell off. Still, Zap2It has put together a list of television shows that, as we approach May Sweeps and head towards an uncertain summer break, appear to be on the bubble for renewal next fall. From their list of almost thirty shows, these are my picks. If'n I were a network executive god type dude, which TV shows would I keep and which ones would I kill?

KEEP!

• Dollhouse: MEGA AWESOME! I'm a Whedon fan. Can ya tell? It started rocky but has really hit a stride in recent episodes and I wanna see where it's going.
• Castle: Formulaic. Predictable. Procedural. also? MEGA AWESOME! Katic is hot & Fillion is hilarious.
• The Unusuals: Procedural, but unpredictable. Funny. Great cast. Kinda formula but has a quirky slant. I like it.
• Lie to Me: Great cast. Interesting premise. Bad writing. I liked it at first, but it's already jumped the shark for me. You think you understand the characters one week, but next week they behave like pod people. No consistency. I still say keep it tho cuz Monica Raymund and Kelli Williams make business attire sexy hot.

KILL!

• Better Off Ted: never seen it. not interested.
• Samantha Who: never seen it. not interested.
• Surviving Suburbia: never seen it. not interested.
• In the Motherhood: never seen it. not interested. not a mom.
• Reaper: never seen it. Never heard about it before today. Looks mildly amusing, but I might have trouble suspending my disbelief.
  
• Cold Case: This is still on? Very formulaic and repetitive. Depressing. Didn't like the regulars.
• Without a Trace: This is still on? Very formulaic and repetitive. Depressing. Didn't like the regulars.
• Everybody Hates Chris: This is still on? ...Wait. The entire CW Network is still on?
• Sit Down, Shut Up: I try not to watch Fox - especially animated shows. The Simpsons should have been canceled around year seven. Fox kills the shows I like and keeps other crap going long after it should have died. FOX SUX.
• Terminator The Sarah Connor Chronicles: I watched the first season, mostly cuz I like Summer Glau. Stopped watching around the finale when the big action scene consisted of an artsy use of stunt men jumping into a swimming pool with Johnny Cash music playing. If you can't afford regular fight scenes, explosions and gore, don't call it Terminator anything.
• Chuck: I'm happy for Adam Baldwin getting a regular paying gig. Aside from that? DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE. I really don't care if Chuck gets the blonde spy chick. The entire premise is unbelievable. The humor is hokey and trite.
• Gary Unmarried: Huh?
• Harper's Island: Huh?
• Eleventh Hour: Huh?
• The Unit: Huh huh huh huh huh.. he said 'unit'
• Privileged: Uh not really.
  
• Medium: I used to like it. Fun if tedious premise. Nice cast. Tolerable writing early on. There just came a point where I could no longer believe what was going on. Suspension of disbelief flew out the window and I went with it.
• New Adventures of Old Christine: I really wanted to like this.. for about 5 minutes. Then I really wanted to watch anything else. I tell ya, the Seinfeld alumni are cursed.
• My Name Is Earl: I never wanted to like this. They lost me with the first episode. I don't care about the characters. I don't find the situations amusing - more like cringeworthy. The humor is forced and juvenile. The accents are annoying. The lack of intelligence on the part of the characters... just sad really. I understand it's trying to break new ground and be different, but I really don't enjoy the journey.
• Parks and Recreation: I like Amy Poehler, but not enough to give this a try. The premise does not remotely interest me.
• Worst Week: Note To Self. If I ever get to name a TV series, try not to put the word "worst" in the title.
• Life: Note to self. If i ever get to name a TV series, try not to use a word that could be used to describe ANY other television series ever in the history of anything.
• The Game: Note to self. If you ever get to name a TV series, don't start with the word 'the' and don't use a vague four letter word that'd look boring on a t-shirt.
  

I would also like to add Smallville and Heroes to the Kill list, although those two have been picked up for next season. I stopped watching Smallville around the second or third season, when it became obvious they were not trying to describe to us how he gets in the cape and long johns. This was admittedly not the Superman story of my youth. It was a retread that turned it into a weak-kneed soap opera. I liked where it started but I despised where it's gone. Recently I revisited it and watched a few recent episodes, witnessing Chloe marrying Jimmy Olsen. Since when was Jimmy Olsen ever married to anyone?

I'm currently still watching Heroes but I wish I could stop. What began as one of the most innovative and imaginative series to come along in some time has deteriorated into a convoluted and mixed up narrative that has no focus or drive or spirit any longer. This is by no means the fault of the actors who are struggling with scripts thrown at them by committees obviously more interested in appeasing product placement than what's required for the story. This show has literally been all over the map. It's overly reactionary to fan opinion. It repeatedly breaks its own rules regarding things like how powers work, usually changing powers based on the needs of plot convenience. Characters join and leave as the story needs it with only cursory explanations regarding motive and despite any common sense. I'd rather they kill off over half the cast, and then focus solely on a handful of survivors who would band together out of necessity and fear that united they survive but divided they'll be next. Keep the narrative more focused, driven, and cut down on the globe trotting. HRG must have frequent flyer miles coming out of his ass.

The only other prime time show that comes to mind which isn't mentioned above is Lost, which I'm happily addicted to and sadly it will end after one more season, but that's a good thing cuz it means the producers of this show know when to end it - when the story is done. Most tv shows do not know when they have worn out their welcome. I'm happy to report that Lost will leave us still wanting more, yet satiated that the tale the writers wanted to tell will be complete. So Lost would definitely stay in the KEEP category, but I understand with fond sadness why it must go when it does.

I used to like a lot more television than I do currently. I'm not sure if that's because I've changed; that maybe I've gotten older or my tastes have matured.. I'd prefer to blame it on the TV industry, which in many cases seems to be phoning it in and it's been like this for some time. The rare exceptions usually get canned, either for political strangeness that only men in suits would understand, or because good quality television costs more to produce, and for some reason advertisers don't want to support that when cheesy talk shows, fake news magazines, and unrealistic 'reality' game shows are cheaper with more stupid people watching who will buy the shit they're hocking. I'm obviously not a part of the demographic that networks want, so I watch television less and less.

That's probably a healthy thing, when you really think about it.

Smishing = Masochistic Sadism

Three quarters of all cellphone users send text messages via the Short Message Service provided in their cellphones. That's over two billion users every day. That's a lot of texting. That's where the minds of roughly one third of the population of the planet are currently. You guys love your cellphones. I say you guys, cuz I don't own one. Nor would I want to. Follow:

I learn something new every day. I already knew about spam, beyond the edible meatish stuff in a can, or the Monty Python reference. I already knew about phishing, where annoying and desperate people use computers to trick people into giving away sensitive personal information that can lead to getting robbed in a cold heartless digital way. Now there's Smishing. Will wonders ever cease? Smishing is so new of a phrase, that the spellchecker which Blogger.com lets me use thinks it's misspelled.

Rather than using email, as in phishing, the process of Smishing utilizes SMS text messages sent to people's cellphones. The message pretends to be some legitimate sounding company like a bank or a dating service, informs the Mark that they will be charged fees for NOT responding to the message, and gives a fake website or phone number. The Mark then responds and learns they must give up their bank account or credit card info in order to have the charges canceled. Of course, there were no charges in the first place because the original message is phony. However, once the Mark gives up their confidential bank info, the Smisher robs them blind. I think that's called a "Sting" in the biz of being an asshole for money.

Currently the standard response to this behavior is to ignore it. Really, there's nothing more you can do. If you respond, you risk the bad guys gleaning some kind of info from you. It's possible if you click on the phony site link, the second you do that server will be able to determine who you are, what ISP you use, your IP address, and other info you probably wouldn't want them to know. Some hackers are able to set it up so the second you click on a website, malicious software or "malware" might infect your computer through the website. You might have that on your computer now and are unaware of it. Most of the time keeping anti-virus software running in the background can help deter that, but there's no such thing as an unhackable program. And since the info provided by the smisher is purposefully fake, it's impossible to use that info to trace back to the source. You can't learn the identity of the person trying to get your identity, so you can't respond by driving to their house and TPing their front lawn.

The sad truth is that simply ignoring them is not the answer either, and I'll tell you why. The reason spam and phishing and now smishing continues to proliferate is because spammers and hacks can continue repeating this behavior with little to no fear of retaliation. Arguably there are laws on the books against this sort of thing, but it's difficult to police and the penalties even if convicted are not a big deal compared to the possible profit one can get if one succeeds. Same reason why thieves rob banks. Sure you'll go to jail, IF you get caught, and thieves always think on the outset that they're smart enough to get away with it. Sometimes they are.

It takes little to no effort or resources on the part of a spammer or Smisher, and because there's hardly any investment on their part, it only takes one fool responding for them to eke out a profit. A spammer or Smisher can spam tens of thousands in minutes or seconds, and if only one person falls for it, they profit. Ignoring them may save you in the short term, but it does not improve the situation for the long term, and there's a sucker born every minute.

As for being charged per text message, I don't own a cellphone so can't speak to that. However, I'm shocked that anyone would sign up with a cellphone company that would charge them per message sent to them. That's absurd. I wouldn't even want a plan where I'm charged per msg I send out. That's crazy too. I'd want a monthly fee and that'd be the end of it. Can't get that, so I live without a cellphone just fine. One of the many reasons why I don't have a cellphone is because I've yet to hear a plan that doesn't sound like I'd get nickeled and dimed to death by the phone company. If they started charging me by the webpage, I'd drop my ISP in a heartbeat! Why do you put up with that on your cell?

If those of you with cellphones would demand more respectable plans from the phone companies, maybe then I could get one, once phone companies are forced to use common sense instead of scamming tactics to rob people of their money. Use your brains, cellphone users! Furthermore this entire issue should not be your problem. The phone companies should be stopping spam and malicious messages BEFORE they get to your phones. What ARE you paying them for, anyway? If you wanna pay someone to randomly annoy you every day, there's homeless people out there who would do that for half the cost of a cellphone. Come to think of it, I'm unemployed currently. I'd love to get into a business where I can annoy people for money. I'd charge twelve dollars an hour - minimum of two hours a day. That'd be like $120 per person per week - I just struck the mother lode!

Et Tu Jackie Chan?

I don't know which one of these is worse!

1. Jackie Chan says: "we Chinese need to be controlled. If we're not being controlled, we'll just do what we want."
2. Jackie Chan says: "You know what the world really needs? A remake of Karate Kid with me as Mister Miyagi!"

OMG! WTF! Say it ain't so, Jackie! You've turned on us! You've turned on me! Despite the fact you've spent your life pursuing life, liberty, and happiness in your own unique way, you now question whether you or anyone has the right to do that? You'd rather just hand the reins of your life and the lives of all Chinese subjects to the rule of your masters? You wound me, Mr. Chan. I'm struck! You might as well have hopped on a plane to Dallas, got in a cab to Oak Cliff, knocked on the door to my home and slapped me in the face.

Perhaps Jackie Chan is under duress. Maybe the Communist regime of China has secretly implanted little doohickeys in all of Jackie Chan's friends, family members, handlers, hair stylists, cooks, massage therapists, and most beloved fans, and if Jackie Chan doesn't do what the Communist regime tells him to do, and say what they tell him to say, some Red China dude will push a button and Jackie Chan's entire entourage of well-wishers and helpers will simultaneously die of mysterious deaths that won't be traced back to the Communist government cuz they control the police force that would normally investigate such things. Boom.

I can't believe a man who co-starred in the Cannonball Run movies would think for a nanosecond that freedom is a bad thing. Okay. Maybe a man who co-starred in the Rush Hour movies would want the power of shutting Christ Tucker's mouth. Who wouldn't? Still, capitalism has done wonders for Jackie Chan's fame and fortune and even his well-being. How could he possibly look at the parts of his life under capitalist rule in comparison to the parts of his life under communist rule and go, "you know what? I like it better when they tell me what to do."

Still, let's try to look at this in context. If there's anyone on this planet who has fully experienced both sides of this coin, it's Jackie Chan. In his dealings over the years with multiple governments in obtaining capital to make his films and obtaining permissions to pull off his stunts for the cameras, Chan is in a most unique position to tell us which way works better for him. However, don't think for a second that he comes from a fair and impartial position, or that he can be objective or fair in his opinion. His opinion is just that; an opinion. Something that everyone in a capitalist society can freely express (provided they understand they're gonna get rebuttals like this one).

Whereas, in a Communist society, you have a right to their opinion.

Chan's point, if you read his entire quote and not just the headlines, is that historically speaking, Chinese people have made mistakes when not under Communist oppression. Sometimes they did the right thing, but sometimes they did the wrong thing, and if one looks at the recent history of the Chinese people, one can look at it as "the glass is half empty" while seeing times the Chinese have been ruled by Communist dictators as "the glass is half full."

I'll grant Jackie Chan that much. I'll go halfway with him there. Provided one accepts that the converse is also true.

When left to our own devices, human beings (not just Chinese people but all kinds of humanoid peoples - even the purple ones) will make mistakes. The real truth is, and don't let them know this cuz they pretend to not know and telling them just pisses them off, but believe it or not Communist regimes make mistakes too. The only difference is, Communist regimes tend to rewrite history as soon as mistakes are made in order to make their past appear flawless. They can do this because they control the historical organizations that would normally keep track of such things.

Capitalist regimes try this too, but since they don't control the media, they don't often get away with it. Case in point; the Bush Administration. The truth will out on that one. Just wait and see. Even Nixon's attempts to convince people he was not a crook soon became a sick twisted joke, and he's the one who helped to open China and US relations in the first place! And Obama's already making mistakes, but contrary to other capitalist run governing, he doesn't seem to be even trying to hide it. So maybe at least Obama's smart enough to know better, or maybe he's just better at hiding the real mistakes by covering them up with smaller more laughable mistakes. Again, the truth will out.

Now, if you let the Communists control everything, and something goes wrong, in theory, you know who to blame. Since they run everything, it's all their fault. However, by the time you give all power over like that, it includes the power to do anything about it. Here in a capitalist state, there's always crazy extremists who are ready to try stuff like seceding from the union or burning things in effigy or protesting on the streets of major cities and interrupting traffic in attempts to orchestrate change.

We have some messy events in American history, but I can't think of anything as scary or bad as Tiananmen Square, which I understand most Chinese children don't learn anything about nowadays. Correct me if I'm wrong. Do those Chinese children learn about Jackie Chan? Now that Chan's publicly prostrated himself before his masters, I'm sure Chinese govt-funded schools will soon require their children to memorize dialogue from Rumble In the Bronx for extra credit.

Paying The Poor

This was my response to a Digg post and I thought I'd repost it here so that, in theory, I can find it later; not that this tactic has worked well for me in the past. In a nutshell the contrary argument to which I respond is thus: "If you pay people to be poor, you'll never run out of poor people. Poverty is not simply an absence of money. Rather, it is bound up with a whole set of other circumstances: lack of qualifications, demoralisation, family break-up, substance abuse, fatherlessness. It follows that you do not end poverty by giving money to the poor..."

We have an economic system that allows a very small minority to control the majority of wealth. Do the math. If the majority of your society has to share a small percentage of the wealth, some people are gonna be left with nothing. An economy is not determined healthy because some of its participants are rich. It has nothing to do with how much an individual saves, but how much an individual spends. Economies are healthy when money is changing hands. Without constant bartering and constant transactions, an economy will stagnate. Only when people give money to one another, or spend money on goods and services, is there a fluid economy that supports the society it serves.

If you think by giving money to poor people you are paying them to be poor, you completely miss the point. By investing in people who are down today, you help give them a chance to pull themselves out of the hole and become productive members of society. If they have no resources, they can't improve themselves. Now granted, most poor people also need education and support so they don't spend what's given to them in a frivolous manner. Most people wouldn't know a good investment versus a bad investment without proper education.

For example, if you come across a homeless person and want to give him money, and he has a liquor bottle in his hand, there is a relatively high probability he'll use the money you give him to buy another bottle of liquor. However, if you take the man to a grocery store or restaurant and buy him a healthy meal, that's a more resourceful way to invest your money on his health. It may cost you more time and resources than if you just throw five bucks at him, but he'll be in better shape when you leave him, and it may help him get out of his hole. Most people just throw money at homeless people to get them to leave them alone. It allows a person to get on with their day and they feel like they helped somebody, but it's not as good an investment as it could have been with more forethought put into it.

Also keep in mind some people just don't wanna get out of their hole. Most of us are always trying to improve our lives whether we're at the bottom of the ladder or on top of the world, but some people just give up on the foolishness of the rat race and find a comfortable place to just be. Maybe you think everyone should constantly be fighting one another to be top dog on the hill of life, but not everyone has the same goals. Some people just want to live a peaceful and happy life, and bring joy to the people around them. Their lives are no more or less forfeit than the lives of the go-getters in the world. We can't all cure cancer. Some of us are just meant to light the way for others with a smile or a word of encouragement. Everyone has their place in this universe, no matter how big or small that place may be.

Law versus Common Sense

Something occurred to me just now. I was reviewing my email and came across yet another obvious spam phishing piece of crap. The 'from' line says "Bank of America" and the 'subject' line says "Unauthorized Activity." The email address says "plukqb at accounts dot net." From this information I can glean it's spam. Predominantly because I do not have an account with Bank of America, and if I did they would not contact me via "random letters at generic word dot something other than com." However, this sort of email fools people all the time, even today. A spammer philistine can spam thousands of email addresses with little to no time or resources spent on their part, and they only need one fool to fall for it, for it to be worth that small investment.

I've said this before, but wherever I said it is lost so I guess I need to document it again here: shouting fire in a movie theater, when there is no fire, should not be illegal. It is an expression of free speech and therefore should be protected by the first amendment. However, the repercussions for such behavior have repeatedly in the past proven to be a detriment for the citizenry of a democratic republic, and so We The People generally agree to give up our freedom in this regard, in return for the security of being able to sit in a movie theater without getting trampled on by the thoughtless words of some mischievous malcontent who abuses inalienable rights.

We all agree to this. However, we give up a slice of inalienable rights when we do so, because we can't trust to police ourselves and all choose not to do something so malicious to one another. When we give up even a little of our inalienable rights, such rights stop being inalienable. What does inalienable mean? It means they can't be taken away - they are supposed to be inherently ours, but if we choose to give up a little bit, then common sense dictates it's possible that the rest can be taken away. So the word inalienable loses its meaning and purpose. That's just common sense.

There are laws on the books in which it is against the law to pose in public as a law enforcement officer. However, there are times when such behavior may be excused. A costume party for example, or perhaps a stripper in a club can wear an outfit for purposes of fantasy. However, even then it is expected that the person not behave in such a way as to purposefully fool others into thinking they have the authority of an actual policeman. If one takes advantage, there's a line that is drawn in the law and if caught, one can expect serious repercussions. Police don't take kindly to their authority being usurped. There are of course other forces out there who think the police have too much power, and maybe they'd pose as a policeman to tarnish the police reputation or otherwise undermine their efforts to impartially enforce the law. Some could argue there are people who are legitimately wearing the badge and the blues, who inadvertently undermine already.

Still, I can imagine legitimate reasons why someone who is not a policeman might pose as one, to harmless and perhaps even beneficial results. However, I can't for the life of me imagine a single scenario in which it would be somehow beneficial or at least harmless to pose as a financial institution. Are there laws on the books making it clearly illegal to pretend to be a bank in a virtual manner? There must be. If there are laws dictating how unacceptable it is to function in society yet undermine its law enforcement efforts, surely there's laws against undermining our economy.

Of course, how do you police that? If we sent to jail everyone who has purposefully or accidentally undermined our economy, we'd have to start with the last several executive administrations of the US government, and work our way down from there. I fear in one way or another, we're all guilty. How many of us can't afford to repay our debts in a timely manner? If one can't physically make enough money, bills don't get paid. The companies that expected those bills to get paid have to tighten their own belts, and spend even more money trying to collect those debts. This may lead to that company having less revenue than it needs to stay in the black and so it falls into debt to those it borrowed money from. It's a vicious cycle. No one wakes up in the morning saying they'll undermine the economy, but in one way or another we all do. If you own a credit card, you may be in debt and not even consciously think about it. That realization puts the insignificant spam in our inboxes in a bit of perspective, doesn't it? In our day to day lives, we have to police our own activities and those of the ones around us. We do our best to pay our debts and juggle our finances so as to hold up our little end of a very big monstrosity. It's never as easy as it looks.

We delete our own spam. We don't expect the government to do it for us. We try in our day to day lives to make the best choices we can for ourselves and those we love. It would be nice if the government could police these trouble spots for us, but sometimes the government is part of the problem. I'm sure it doesn't mean to be, but too many laws bogs down the system, and perhaps there are forces out there purposefully creating a need for more laws, because the more laws you have, the more you think you need, and any political system eventually grinds to a halt, encumbered by its own set of rules.

It would be nice if we didn't need these laws. It would be nice if every individual could choose to do the right thing because common sense dictates it's the right thing to do. However, allowing an anarchist state in which everyone just rules themselves leads to chaos and confusion, and a lot of jackasses screaming fire in movie theaters just cuz they can, and a lot of people getting trampled on just cuz they were in the way.

There's a level of existence that's below the radar for fat government intervention. There's a point where each of us must police ourselves as best we can. However, at that level we have little to no power to actually enforce such policing, especially if our fat government has already intervened in personal freedoms so much as to effectively leave us politically impotent. So a balance must be reached and that balance is ever precarious and fragile. It doesn't take much to sway rights and mights one way or the other. In fact it could happen right under our noses and we wouldn't even realize what we've lost. Laws are supposed to evolve out of common sense, but when they stop doing that, they start conflicting, and that's where it becomes harder and harder, within the confines of Man made Law, to truly be human.

What lies in the shadow of the statue?

A fellow Tweeter named Bram1977 recently made his very first tweet on Twitter this question, and it got me to thinking, that's quite an open question, isn't it? Those of us who watch the show from which this question came are presuming it's the statue of a four-toed, long-haired hippie named Anubis, but there's a lot of statues in the universe. Should we be so presumptuous?

Yet another recent conundrum has entered into the minds of we the teeming masses addicted to ABC's television series Lost. Eventually it is theorized that the writers and producers of Lost will answer that question for us. A few years ago they gave us a similarly cryptic question: "What did one snowman say to the other snowman?" The answer was of course, "smells like carrots." We say "of course" now, but back then it was a head scratcher.

Here's some possible answers you can throw at people if they smugly walk up to you and ask "What lies in the shadow of the statue?" I make no promises any of these answers will keep the questioner from knocking you unconscious with boating equipment.

1. Pigeon poop
2. A pile of missing socks
3. Carmen Sandiego
4. The off ramp from I-423 to the Basingstoke turnpike. Which leads to cake.
5. the temple. duh.
6. Anubis' farts, and he just ate a bunch of fish tacos.
7. All that imaginary revenue that movie companies and music businesses insist they've lost since Internet Filesharing became popular.
8. Manhattan. If you're referring to the Statue of Liberty. By the way, I'd like a Manhattan. Where's the nearest bar?
9. Seashells she sells by the seashore.
10. The operative word to that question is LIES.
11. Cake. Which is a lie.
12. A Starbucks that's about to be 'downsized.'
13. Whatever it is, I'm as "ahnk"sious to find out as you.

My money's on five, by the way, but since I have no money of which to speak, that's not very important.

There Goes The Twitterhood

Well. It's official. Oprah Winfrey has formally joined us on Twitter. At the moment, you can go to http://tinyurl.com/5tkvaw and see just how many normal people (people like you and me who aren't as rich or famous as Oprah) are talking about it. From the time I started this post to now there are currently 509 new realtime results ...no make that 519. ...uhm. I mean 534. My search twitter thing updates every ten seconds. ...551.

Over at http://tinyurl.com/ckllw3 a sweetheart named Leighann (whom I will probably find myself reading more than Oprah Winfrey's posts in the days to come) isn't taking this too well. She blames all this on Ashton Kutcher, who is another celebrity that is far more rich and famous than you or I will ever be. He recently stirred up a littls shitstorm of free publicity by announcing if he could get a million Tweeple to follow him at @aplusk before an allegedly popular @cnnbrk tweeter hit a million followers, Ashton would spend whatever money it took to save the third world of malaria by sending them mosquito nets. Yes that reads a little surreal to me too but presumably his heart's in the right place.

The thing is, having a million followers doesn't necessarily mean you have to follow a million people. So Mr. Kutcher is banking on the fact there are a million people on this planet who want to hear what he has to say, without being able to get him to hear what they have to say.

Leighann has a public message for Ashton Kutcher. "Let me tell you what is wrong with your plan for world domination," Leighann says very clearly and succinctly with no trace of irony, "Twitter is a two-way street."

Actually, it's not. It has this remarkable ability to grant the illusion of a two way street, but what we're all really doing in Twitter is shouting into a void, and if someone happens to choose to walk over to that void and listen for Tweets that may be of interest to them, then you get a possible two way connection going. However, then they have to choose to tweet back at you, and they have to know how to do that properly so that the convo can continue. Twitter's a new beast and not everyone's down with its complexities. The ignorance can make one think they're a part of the circuit when really they're not.

Let's take Oprah's first tweet for example. You can check this out for yourself over at http://twitter.com/Oprah but lemme save you the click. She said "HI TWITTERS . THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY ." Now there's a number of glaring errors I can point out. The first one you probably see for yourself. She's typing in all caps. Apparently someone made her aware of the faux pas because her following tweets were all lower case.

Another error she made was referring to Tweeple as Twitters. It is currently acceptable to call those who use Twitter as either Tweeple or Tweeters, but Twitters would be multiple Twitter accounts, not the people using them. Twitter.com itself is ambivalent. It's a thing. It's a tool that is used by Tweeple. It's the Tweeple that will respond to Oprah's presence in a spectrum of nonambivalent ways. See how that works? In order to keep from confusing ourselves, we can't refer to one another as Twitters. We're Tweeple, and Twitter is a separate entity.

A "Twitter" is a webpage on twitter.com, like say for example http://www.twitter.com/ZachsMind That's one Twitter. Two twitters would be http://www.twitter.com/ZachsMind and http://www.twitter.com/wilw (who is Wil Wheaton by the way). Two examples of Tweeters or Tweeple would be me and Wil Wheaton, because we both use Twitter and have Twitter accounts but aside from that we don't have a lot in common. I read his Tweets on occasion and I doubt he's ever read mine.

Another error Oprah made was not referring directly to the person or persons to whom she meant to convey her message. Now in this case, she can get away with it, because essentially she's talking to anyone who knows that she's taken this historic leap as a rich and famous person and placed her personage upon the ambivalence that is Twitter; because Twitter.com itself is, as I said before, ambivalent. This error she made in her first Tweet does not become evident until her second and third Tweets.

Oprah's second Tweet was entered thusly: "hi jimmy order a reuben for me." Notice how quickly she's adapting by switching from upper case to lower case. Good for her! However, she is asking someone named Jimmy to order her a Reuben. This only works if 1) The Jimmy she is referring to is looking directly at her Tweets right now, and 2) he's within driving distance or has some way to remotely order a reuben sandwich and have it delivered to her door. Chances are this Jimmy she's referring to is like a producer or intern or someone under her employ, in which case shouting at him across the room asking for a reuben might have been more appropriate than if she sent a Tweet to the void anticipating he'd telepathically know she sent it.

A better way of producing that Tweet might have been "hi @jimmy order a reuben for me." but this would only work if @jimmy were actually http://www.twitter.com/jimmy and it's not. That Tweeter is Jimmy Naylor, a self-described "skinny" photographer living in London England who has better things to do with his time than go get Oprah Winfrey reuben sandwiches.

So, clearly, Oprah is shouting out into the Twitter void for purposes of the camera and the novely of it, but her actions reveal the truth; she has no intention of ever listening back. Nor does Ashton Kutcher. He has a million followers maybe, and hopefully he'll stay true to his promise and a lot of kids who could die from malaria in the future will now be saved thanks to the attention he's bringing to a serious problem in the third world. That's all well and good. Their hearts are in the right place.

However, they prove in their actions that Twitter is not a two way street. It's a void. You have to invest the time and resources to make it a two way street, and no one has the time or resources to invest in building a million two way streets in that virtual void. You can opt to shout at Oprah and Ashton all you want via new technologies. Please just don't lose sleep over the fact you won't get any shouts back, because they're not listening. Please don't take that personally. Not that I have any personal experience in this arena, but based on my research, I can say with confidence, being rich and famous is a full time job. Just ask Wil Wheaton. ...No wait. Don't. He doesn't promise to Tweet you back either.

You Don't Know Jack

I do plan to use this space in the future to talk about more than Lost, but with the latest episode (Some Like It Hoth) still weighing heavily on my mind, and the season five finale looming over our heads in the near future, I wanted to take a moment to unload my opinion regarding a character for whom so many fans of Lost seem to have the most polarizing emotions. You either love the guy or you hate him. Very few of us are objective here. I like to think I can be objective, because I try to approach shows like Lost from the perspective of an aspiring writer, or rather, a bitter rejected writer who gave up years ago trying to make it in the world and envious of those who can.

When it comes to Dr. Jack Shephard, I'm unable to be objective. Furthermore his continued presence on the series makes me realize I'm not able to be as objective as I'd like to be about any character on any show, and when I think I am, I'm only fooling myself. On the surface I think, and have thought since about halfway through season one, that Jack is a tool. He's a douche. He's an asshole. I think the writers purposefully invented a character that we'd fall in love with from the get go, and then the more we learn of him the more we find he's a rimjob. However, first impressions are very powerful. A woman falls in love with a man who later starts abusing her, but she's so enamored by who she thinks she knows he really is, that she tries to get past his flaws and tendencies to cause her pain, because she believes deep down he's just as honorable and likeable as he was on the surface when they first met. In the case of Jack, I don't think there is a soft gooey center. I think deep down he's empty.

When we first meet him, he's all over that beach. There's scores of people dead, dozens of people injured, and he's quite objectively the only person within shouting distance qualified to handle the situation. People have argued at length that he has some kind of hero complex, and the tv series itself has admitted that Jack has an obsession with fixing things. I don't fully fall for that line of psychological pandering. I think in the moment on the beach after the crash, Jack was not trying to be a hero. He was simply reacting to the situation.

If you're a doctor, and have enough experience under your belt to be called a Chief Surgeon at a prestigious hospital in a major metropolitan area, you have served more hours than you'd probably wanna count in the ER. That's where they cut the teeth of new recruits in the medical game, and that's where old veterans go to die. When you pull several twelve hour shifts in the Emergency wing of a large hospital, you're gonna see your share of emergencies, and you're going to learn how to deal with them as they come in much the same way a kid learns how to swim or ride a bicycle. You keep doing it till you get it right, or die trying. You do it until you get muscle memory for it, till you can do it in your sleep, cuz sometimes you are. There's no rest for the weary when you're under the gun and on the clock in an ER. From a domestic fire to a gang war to unanticipated problems at a construction site, whatever the cause of the injuries is not relevant - all that matters is you got a body in front of you that doesn't want to die and you patch it back together so it won't - or you fail and a life is lost. Then you move on to the next one.

When Jack Shephard ran out of that jungle and saw bodies strewn about all over the shoreline, he just went into ER mode. It's what his muscles knew to do. He was fired up on so much adrenaline that he barely stopped to notice his own injuries until everyone else was stable. Does that still make you a hero if you've been programmed since medical school to be one?

Since that day, most of the rest of the survivors just instinctively turned to Jack as their leader. Why is that? For the same reason he turned to ER mode when he saw injured. We as human beings are independent thinkers but we are also instinctively creatures of habit. Jack's performance that first day gave the other survivors an illusion of security. They thought a man who behaved like Jack did, personally attending to their wounds and instinctively working up near future plans for how to survive the immediate crisis, would naturally mean this was the guy qualified for getting them off the island. They were wrong. Jack had been trained to take care of immediate pressing issues, but he had no tactical experience in long range plans with unspecified enemies and dangers. He made choices and people followed his orders and he was wrong and they were wrong.

Jack suggested they all move to the caves, without thinking to see if they were even structurally sound. Jack antagonized the native population of the Island when he should have been diplomatically negotiating a truce. Jack promised to get everyone rescued and he was only able to save six of them, and even then not for very long. His behaviors have proven reactionary, with little to no thought. I think when he tried to commit suicide on the bridge, that was ultimately what he had come to terms with - every action he had made since that day had been wrong. He hadn't thought things through, and he was fully unqualified to be the leader of the survivors. It had never even been his choice to make. He was never even given an opportunity to say no. Just as he became a doctor because his father told him to be a doctor, the survivors unofficially chose him as their leader and he just went along with it. Why? Cuz that's all he knows. Jack's not a leader. He never has been. He became Chief of Surgery and he became the leader of the Losties for the same reason: he's following his dad. He's following Christian. He became a leader because he's a follower.

The only good thing he's done recently is to back off and watch Sawyer dig himself into a hole by doing exactly the opposite: Sawyer's now essentially the leader of what's left of the Losties. He's trying to solve their current predicament through guile and cunning and subterfuge. Why? Cuz that's what he knows. That's how he's been trained since youth - to be a con man. The really funny thing? He's not doing a lot better than Jack did.

Lost versus the Temporal Paradox

Both online and offline, I've found myself, geek that I am, repeatedly in a similar argument with other geeks and more mainstream fans of the ABC tv series Lost. I attribute this to decades of television shows like the Star Trek franchise, Quantum Leap, Voyagers, Time Tunnel, Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Sliders, Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, Tru Calling, and most recently, Heroes. I also blame the Terminator franchise and the Back To The Future trilogy. What all these shows have in common is the use of what some (not all) Quantum Physicists (perhaps predominantly the ones who like cameras and audiences more) would call the Many Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics, because of temporal paradoxes.

In a nutshell it goes something like this: in your future you view a webpage that shows you how to make a time machine. You build said time machine and go back in time where something so terrible happens you don't want to experience it, so you travel forward in time to the day when you first learned how to make a time machine and convince yourself not to make it. That way, you'll never go back in time and you'll never experience that horrific event. However, that horrific event was the impetus that caused you to tell yourself not to go back in time. So if you never made the time machine, you could never have experienced that horrific event, and therefore you wouldn't know to stop yourself from making the time machine.

With the Many Worlds Theory, what actually happened was you went forward in time and met yourself and in that instant, you entered an alternate reality. Some theorists think the event of meeting yourself would cause a 'rupture' in reality and others say that reality was always there waiting for you, identical in every way but your arrival to it. The thing is, when you meet yourself, you experience an alternate reality and that other you is not you, because you don't recall meeting yourself in your past, and this other you never makes the time machine. So it's impossible to change your own reality in this manner. Were you to go back in time one second prior to the furthest past you've been, and then immediately return to the exact instant that you left, in theory you'd be back at your original reality (or at the very least, a reality so close to your own that you'd probably never notice it wasn't exactly the same one).

But think about this a moment: For this to be possible, we are not talking about a finite number of alternate universes. There would have to be literally an infinite number of possible realities existing simultaneously omnisciously throughout all of time and space. Perhaps some realities were so similar that at certain causation points they'd have to merge causing some historical innacuracies among those who travelled through time, but people experiencing the universe on a linear temporal causation vector would have no idea that when you went back to change history that any change to history had ever been made, provided it was a relatively small change and in the big scheme of things universally, ANYTHING happening on Earth would be comparatively insignificant.

Some writers would dismiss the causation loops and merges. They'd treat their time story as if there were one final outcome reality. They wouldn't waste time trying to understand the ramifications of their lucid approach to time travel. No wonder speculative fiction, particularly time travel stories, rarely interest a mainstream audience beyond novelty: they never make any sense.

Now many who have been watching Lost are expecting that critical climactic moment when Jack or Locke do something significant that changes everything, and all the sudden (for one possible example) they will have never crashed on that Island because they never had to. However, the writers and producers of Lost have gone so out of their way to avoid this and have even telegraphed to the viewers that they are not going to do this, that it frustrates me more and more when I find myself in a message or a phone conversation or over drinks at a restaurant and this topic inevitably comes up.

I talk Lost. I'm a geek. So?

The writers have clearly pointed out that whatever happened before on the show, even if it was in the future, it happened. It's not going to un-happen. This is not your grand-daddy's time travel story. Everything is in stone. Whatever happened happened. They even made that the title of a recent episode. How can they make it any more clear? When Sayid shot young Ben, in an attempt to keep Ben from growing up and turning into the jackass that has been causing trouble for our heroes since they first landed on the Island, he inadvertently started the very chain of events required to turn Ben into the (once and perhaps again) leader of The Others. One can argue that had Sayid not shot Ben, eventually he would have defected to The Others anyway. That was obviously the child's goal at the time, but it could have also been a phase he was going through. Arguing over whether or not Ben would have become the man he is without Sayid's interference is not relevant. Sayid shot young Ben. That always happened, because whatever happened happened.

There is not an alternate reality here in which other events occurred in a different order. There's only one reality and that's the reality they have shown us thus far. Notice that they have purposefully told the story out of sequence, but they are holding true to a very detailed timeline. Furthermore, they very rarely show one scene that immediately overlaps another, unless it's all part of the same internal narrative. The first 180 days on the Island, we think we know everything that transpired from the moment they crashed to the moment the Oceanic Six escaped, but if you back over the television series carefully, there are a number of opportunities for the writers to go back and invent events that occurred which would explain things happening later.

Claire's disappearance for example. What we know is that Miles, Sawyer, and Claire were alone in the woods. Miles told Sawyer that Claire followed Christian into the jungle. We saw Claire wake up and witness Christian holding Aaron. Sawyer and Miles found Aaron abandoned at the base of a nearby tree. There's several ways to explain these events from a writing perspective, but the writers (prior to Some Like It Hoth) purposefully avoided telling us for purposes of suspense. Also perhaps because they're not entirely sure themselves but purposefully left a lot of information vague and ambiguous so that they could fill in the blanks later. They could not have done that had they not kept the events of that night open to interpretation. Furthermore, when they explain that night, they will do so in a way that keeps more holes open that they can opt to fill in later. They may show us what happened between 3 and 4 am but we won't know what happened from the point immediately after they all fell asleep to the moment immediately after Claire left Aaron behind. There'll be time (even if it's just moments) unaccounted for. This is by design, so they can add more events later if they need to explain why a future event doesn't mesh with a past event.

From the standpoint of an aspiring writer, witnessing this unfold is brilliance in action. In essence this means the tv series cannot have any temporal paradoxes. The writers aren't allowing it. Notice how little information the characters seem to share with one another. Again, this is by design, so they don't have to later explain why character X didn't stop Y from happening after being cautioned about it from character Z. The more in the dark most of the characters are, the better, and in some cases the more in the dark we are the better.

Another argument I'm finding myself in, though not as often at least yet, is whether or not Ben knew that our Losties were going to visit him as a child. When Ben had been captured and was pretending to be Henry Gale, he did not seem to recognize Sayid. That's been explained away for now as trauma due to his injuries. However, back at the end of season two, Ben purposefully had Michael bring four specific Losties to him at the pier. Those four people were Kate, Hurley, Sawyer, and Jack. No one else. It had to be those four. That just happens to be the same four (not including Miles, Faraday, or Charlotte who hadn't arrived yet on the Island) who later found themselves back in time living with the Dharma Initiative.

But were Jack, Kate, and Hurley ever meant to leave the Island? YES. However, they couldn't remain off the Island, because there was historical evidence (the photograph hanging on the wall in the old Dharma office for example) that proved they had been on the Island in the past. When Locke tells Jack they were never meant to leave, that's misleading. They were always meant to leave, but they're also always meant to have come back. In fact, had they never left, they never would have been on the 316 plane which led to their journey back in time. So, not only does everything that happened have to happen, but everything that will happen did happen.

This inevitably leads to the question of predeterminism versus free will. That opens a whole new can of worms.

Wow..

How long has this been here and I'd completely forgot about it? I used to have my own domain; zachsmind.com. That's gone. Long story. Not worth dwelling on. Let's see if I can start using this as a place to leave pieces of brain so that in theory I can find them later. I lost all the brain parts I'd left behind on the web before. Perhaps they're somewhere in Web Archives. It's probably for the best that they're gone altogether. I don't recall having left anything substantial. I'd been doing the Online Diary thing since September of 1997 when my wife said she wanted a divorce. A lot has happened since then, but none of it really significant in the grand scheme of things. After having poured my heart and soul into that previous attempt at a website for close to a decade, I now have absolutely nothing to show for it. I used to think I had so much to say, but the older I get the more I know I know nothing, and the less I feel I have to offer humanity. I feel small and insignificant and I think I always was that, but it's one thing to be that, and it's quite another to know.

Ants don't know how insignificant they are. Moreover, they don't care. Perhaps they're better off.

After reading Fifty-Two

I still haven't picked up a cigarette since a year ago last April 13th, thank you for asking.

The following are my thoughts after reading DC's maxi-series of 'Fifty-Two' weekly comics about a handful of relatively unknown characters in the DC universe. Yes there will be spoilage here, but if you haven't read it by now you probably aren't gonna, and I knew how it was gonna end and it didn't ruin the fun for me, reading it.

Yes, I know I'm a little late to this particular party, but I just got done reading DC's Fifty -Two weekly series of comics, and am attempting to once again revisit the fantasy world of my youth. After spending a year with a curiously chosen cast of characters, I find myself wondering why I'm still fascinated by this fantasy world of my youth, cuz you can't proveribally go home again. I mean this ain't my childhood fantasy. Someone's bulldozed the old neighborhood and put up strip malls. The following are a cast of characters who took center stage during these fifty-two comic books, trying to show the world where the present crop of writers and artists have taken the DC Universe. Most of these characters are obscure and therefore expendable, which is perhaps what makes them interesting. They could die. They could be irrevocably changed. They could have something about their pasts that hasn't been explored before that might actually make them interesting. I thought I'd make a few mental notes about each of them to see if I thought there were any more possible stories that could be told with these characters now that Fifty-Two is over.

Black Adam: For the uninitiated, this is an evil anti Captain Marvel who fits today's definition of the anti-hero. He means well but his methods are very "eye for an eye" which means essentially he's a good badguy. I was done with him before they started, but they made him interesting for awhile, then ripped the rug out from under him. I'm done with him again. Story potential? Zero. I really like the idea though of him living out the rest of his immortality trying to guess the secret word that would once again turn him into Black Adam. That's funny.

Booster Gold: For the uninitiated, this guy started in the 25th century as a washed up football star who got caught gambling on his own games. He decided to steal a time machine, go back in time, and try to be famous in his past cuz he couldn't cut it in his present. Only, he neglected to actually pay attention in history class. You can guess where that's going can't you? You're right, that's where he went. And I was done with him before they started too, but the writers of 52 actually made Booster interesting for awhile. He's a hero now and no one will ever know. If DC's writers can keep that up, I might continue to find him interesting.

Animal Man: A second string hero who was with the Challengers of the Unknown for awhile. Never heard of them? That's cuz they lived up to their namesake. He had his own comic, which was either an opportunistic sillyfest or a grandiose environmentalist pamphlet, depending on the writer. Personally, I really like the guy, but DC can't seem to find anyone who can consistently make him worth reading about. I think they should team him up with Ambush Bug, make his family less serious, and just have fun being silly with him. Maybe pit him up against Bat-mite and Myxlpltk. As he is tho, I'm done with him.

Starfire: Frankly I'm still in shock this Ex-Teen Titan is no longer dating Dick Grayson. I thought those two kids were gonna make it, even though this alien lab experiment gone awry has been married off twice out of duty, you'd think Grayson would look past all that and see Koriand'r for her 'assets.' *ahem* I really like her, but DC doesn't know what to do with her. I'm an old Teen Titans fan from the Wolfman/Perez era. I guess that makes me a Nightwing/Starfire shipper. Seems like that ship has sailed tho, and without the titans, I'm done with her.

Ralph Dibny: aka The Elongated Man. Essentially a second-string character who DC invented for when legal matters would preclude them from using Plastic Man. Despite his less than sparkly history, and the fact they used his wife as a plot device in the now infamous "Identity Crisis" I've always liked this character and his wife, and I think even though they're both dead now, there's a lot of meat left on this bird. I like the idea of a Vertigo-like title that deals with DC's after-life. Have the Dibnys be a ghost detective Thin-Man couple. Have Deadman be their whacky neighbor. It'd be a bit like Beetlejuice meets Macmillan & Wife. I'd buy it.

Renee Montoya: She started in the Batman animated series as a throwaway supporting character but turned out to be too intriguing to ignore. If I had to pick one favorite character in this series, it'd be Ms. Montoya. I particularly appreciated how she kicked the habit of smoking cigarettes. The second someone she looked up to admitted he was dying of cancer because he used to smoke, she dropped the cigs cold turkey. I could totally relate. Although, where she ended up was a bit of a yawn climax, watching how she got there was quite a ride. Now she's managed to become DC's latest "Question." Does her story have a future? Would I read a title focusing on her? I'd buy that. Heck, if she weren't gay, I'd hit that.

Batwoman: Only if she's hitting that. This twosome of The Question and Batwoman would definitely bring me back to the comic book store like a drug crazed lunatic. However, would it be Big Batwoman and the lil question, or The Question and her Significant Other? I mean... who's on top? Who wears the pants in this pair? Even if somehow they can prove that this Kane woman has the right to wear the bat insignia, I'd rather they allow the character to find her own shadow rather than hide inside someone else's. What these two really need to do is put in an application with The Oracle.

John Henry Irons & Daughter: Not one of the stronger links in the 52 storyline. They'll have to dig a bit deeper than they have been tho to make it more interesting. Also, I understand that a major reason why John is a superhero and not dead, is cuz Superman once saved him, but still I think he should drop the use of Superman's insignia, and find his own calling card. Also? "Rain of the Supermen" has got to be the worst pun ever in the history of anything. What a groaner. Lex Luthor is now so far beyond redemption to me, I wish I could personally feed him to Black Adam.

Adam Strange: I am so uninterested in this guy I'm not even gonna try to describe who he is in case you don't know. Didn't he fade into obscurity once? Isn't it time he do that again?

Who'd I miss?

Halloween songs

This is an ongoing list. An equally outdated version is available at everything2.org

Some years ago, I deejay'd for an online radio station [wasn't really a station we just called it that] which doesn't exist any longer. On my show, I took to doing themes. Around September eleventh of one year, I played all the songs located on Clear Channel's list of questionable songs, including a half dozen or so songs by Rage Against The Machine. When Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit, I played as many songs as I could find which had something to do with weather. That was fun. One October, I decided to go for the Halloween theme for a couple weeks, so I amassed the list below.

A list of this sort is an intermittent (pseudo-annual) work in progress, but this list is arguably one of the more extensive you will find on the Internet. I welcome any and all suggestions for inclusions or commentary about present inclusions. I posted this list elsewhere on the Web when I started it, but I've noticed that E2 is one of the few places that didn't either disappear off the web or remove my list after some cobwebs developed. I've decided I'm going to break this list up into two groups. The first is Artists, and the second is Songs.

The first list contains talented bands or people whose work largely falls into the macabre or the suspenseful. With obvious exceptions, almost everything these artists churn out will fit in with your own Halloween festivities. Even if a song doesn't actually have in its lyrics Halloweeny words, it will probably still help set the mood or tone for any October gathering. I created the Artists list because there's some talents who have so many great examples for Halloween it's just hard to choose which is best. The second list consists of talents who have in their repertoire one or two songs which contribute to this theme well, but the rest of their stuff may or may not be as welcome at a spooky party. The chosen song titles are those which in my not so humble opinion, no Halloween party should be without. They're the halloween songs that are unquestionably of the season. If you're with a group of people, chances are some of them have heard it before, and they'll be appreciative, and the ones who haven't heard it before will be quickly educated by those who have.

Admittedly, this list is very commercial and not at all pagan inspired, like the other node entry. This is simply a different approach to the idea of Halloween songs, and it's not intended to diminish the other list which is equally valid, or yet still other lists which others may offer in the future.

THE ARTISTS

Most anything by these artists and bands will work for Halloween. I will note a few examples, but you'd be best served by reviewing their discography|discographies..


• Alice Cooper - Two obvious examples are Welcome to My Nightmare and Teenage Frankenstein but frankly, anything that has ever passed this man's lips rings Hallow. This man personifies the holiday in a way that no one else can. If James Brown is the godfather of soul, Alice Cooper is the godfather of reap.
• Bernard Herrmann - theme from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, music for Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast and the film Citizen Kane, his work for Cape Fear, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Day The Earth Stood Still, and anything he did for Ray Harryhausen. Let's face it, this composer knew how to chill us to our bones. Repeatedly.
• Danny Elfman - motion picture soundtracks for Army of Darkness, Batman, Batman Returns, Beetlejuice, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride, Darkman, Edward Scissorhands, Mars Attacks!, Nightmare Before Christmas, Sleepy Hollow, Tales From The Crypt, and others (see also Oingo Boingo). I honestly don't know if this guy can compose music that isn't deliciously dark and creepy. Even when he's being light and happy, like in the theme song to the Simpsons or his work for Pee Wee Herman movies, Elfman's got one foot in the clouds and one foot in the grave.
• David Seville - Witch Doctor is an absolute must, and to a lesser extent I recommend any random pop covers by Alvin and the Chipmunks (just not the xmas album). I recommend this with mild hesitation. You should incorporate Seville into your Halloween music in small doses only, mixed in with all this other stuff; otherwise you may start a riot.
• Elvira, Mistress of the Dark - aka Cassandra Peterson, has been since 1981 the penultimate queen of bad horror movies, bad jokes about blood, gore, cleavage, and all things that bump around at night. Though more widely known for her *ahem* visual presentations, she recorded five albums worth of comedy and music for the Rino records label. She's also done radio spots, and other random things. If you can find anything with Elvira's voice on it, you should make it a part of your personal Halloween collection.
• Mark Mothersbaugh was the lead singer for DEVO in its heyday and has since done his share of composing for film and television. Like Elfman, Mothersbaugh's work has always embraced the shadows. I would suggest Whip It for a mainstream audience. A more thorough Halloween collection might include music from the film Mystery Men, or the cartoons Rugrats, or Shaggy and Scooby-Doo Get a Clue.
• Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath - definitive examples include Bark At The Moon, and Children Of The Grave, but anything by Black Sabbath when Ozzy was with them is a certainty. Anything by either Ozzy or Black Sabbath after the breakup is probably worthy of Halloween, with few exceptions.
• Tim Curry - early in his career, Mr. Curry portrayed Frankfurter for the motion picture version of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Of course Sweet Transvestite belongs on this list. In the years since RHPS, Curry has built a career in film and music that is unparallelled, including three albums in the late 70s and early 80s. Although not always Halloween-oriented, Curry's unmistakable voice is welcome on any list focusing on the harvesting season. I recommend "I Do The Rock," and his cover of Bob Dylan's "Simple Twist of Fate." He also did a song for the movie Ferngully called Toxic Love which is deliciously creepy. Oh, and long ago he did a strangely fun low-budget video (high quality effects for the time tho) where he actually sings about Halloween. If you can find that, you're set.

THE SONGS

• A Fire Inside - Halloween (Cover of Misfits song)
• Abney Park - The Wrong Side
• Alan Parsons Project - The Raven, Don't Let It Show, Can't Take It with You, Don't Answer Me, and possibly any of their instrumental pieces like Lucifer or Sirius.
• Alan the band - All Hallows Eve
• Alice In Chains - Them Bones
• Amber Benson - Under Your Spell
• Amy Fox - Keeping Time With The Moon
• Andrew Gold - Spooky Scary Skeletons
• Aquabats - Fashion Zombies
• Aqualung - Strange And Beautiful (I'll Put A Spell On You)
• Armand Van Helden - Witch Doctor
• Asylum Street Spankers - The Minor Waltz
• Atlanta Rhythm Section - Spooky
• Barenaked Ladies - Grim Grinning Ghosts
• Barry Manilow - When October Goes (words by Johnny Mercer)
• Bauhaus - Bela Lugosi's Dead
• Bernard Herrman - theme from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo
• Beth Hart - Blame The Moon
• Bette Midler - I Put A Spell On You (Hocus Pocus) see also Screamin' Jay Hawkins
• Bif Naked - October Song
• Big Bee Kornegay - At The House Of Frankenstein
• Bill Cosby - Chicken Heart, Ralph Jameson
• Billy Lee Riley - Flying Saucers Rock 'N' Roll
• The Blanks - Happy Halloween
• Blowtops - Teenage Zombie Blues
• Blue Öyster Cult - (Don't Fear) The Reaper|Don't Fear The Reaper
• Bobby "Boris" Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers - Monster Mash
• Bow Wow Wow - I Want Candy
• Bush - Mouth (An American Werewolf in Paris)
• Candy Snatchers - Halloween
• Cat Power - Werewolf
• Charlie Daniels Band - The Devil Went Down to Georgia
• Children of Bodom - Black Widow
• Christopher Walken - Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven
• Concrete Blonde - Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)
• Course of Empire - Freaks
• Cradle Of Filth - Vampire
• Cramps - I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Creature From The Black Leather Lagoon, Zombie Dance
• Cranberries - Zombie
• Cream - Strange Brew
• Creedence Clearwater Revival - Bad Moon Rising, I Put A Spell On You (Screamin' Jay Hawkins cover)
• Dashboard Confessional - The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most
• Dave Matthews - Gravedigger, Halloween
• David Bowie - Mister Gravedigger, and Scary Monsters (with Nine Inch Nails)
• David Mook and Ben Raliegh - Scooby-Doo, Where are You!
• Dead Kennedys - Halloween
• Demented Are Go - Don't Go Into The Woods
• Diane Schuur - When October Goes (cover; words by Johnny Mercer, music by Barry Manilow)
• Disturbed - Fear
• Donovan - Season of the Witch
• Doors - People Are Strange, Fire
• Down - Stone The Crow
• Drowning Pool - Bodies
• Dusty Springfield - Spooky
• Dweezil Zappa - You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch (cover)
• Eagles - Witchy Woman
• Eden Automatic - Vampire Discotheque
• Elvira, Mistress Of The Dark - Bride of Frankenstein, Haunted House, and Monster Rap
• Eminem - Scary Movies
• Erin McKeown - Blackbirds
• Ex-Voto - Transylvania Twist
• Faith No More - Zombie Eaters
• Fastway - After Midnight, Trick Or Treat
• The Five Blobs - The Blob
• Frank Sinatra - Witchcraft
• Frank Zappa - Goblin Girl
• George Harrison - Here Comes The Moon
• Gerard McMann - Cry Little Sister (Lost Boys Soundtrack)
• Ghoultown - Fistful Of Demons
• Ginger MacKenzie - Sliver Of A Moon
• Grateful Dead - Friend of the Devil
• Gravy Train - Nightmares On Wax Mix
• Grim Reaper - See You In Hell
• Guess Who - Clap For The Wolfman
• Hap Palmer - Witches Brew
• Harry and the Potters - My Teacher is a Werewolf
• Harry Belafonte - Calipso/Day oh, and Jump In The Line (Shake Senora) (see Beetlejuice)
• Helen Reddy - Angie Baby
• Helloween - Halloween
• HIM - Dont Fear the Reaper
• Hooters - All You Zombies
• Horror Pops - Ghouls, What's Under My Bed
• House Of Krazees - Sounds of Halloween
• Inkubus Sukkubus - Dark Mother, and Samhain Pagan Halloween
• Insane Clown Posse - Every Halloween, Great Milenko, and House of Horrors
• Invasion - Bypass
• Iron Butterfly - Real Fright
• Jack Marshall and Greg Wray - Theme from The Munsters
• Jack Off Jill - Fear of Dying
• James Marsters - Rest In Peace (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
• Jane's Addiction - Sympathy For The Devil (Rolling Stones cover)
• Jimi Hendrix - Voodoo Child
• Joan Osborne - Spooky
• John Cale - Heartbreak Hotel (Elvis Presley cover)
• Joy Division - Dead Souls
• Jumpin' Gene Simmons - Haunted House
• Kate Bush - Waking The Witch, Wuthering Heights
• KC and the Sunshine Band - I'm Your Boogie Man
• Ken Nordine - A Cage Went In Search Of A Bird, and Edgar Allan Poe
• Kill Lizzie - I Hear Chains (The Ballad Of Beach Ballones)
• KISS - I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night
• Kirsty MacColl - Halloween
• Kristy Kruger - Pride
• Lambert, Hendricks and Ross - Halloween Spooks
• Laura Brannigan - Creatures Of The Night
• Lazytown - Spooky Song
• Levi Stubbs - Mean Green Mother From Outer Space (Little Shop of Horrors)
• Levi Stubbs and Rick Moranis - Feed Me Seymour (Little Shop of Horrors)
• Lewis Lee - Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
• Loreena McKennitt - All Souls Night, Samhain Night The Old Ways
• Mack David and Jerry Livingston - Casper the Friendly Ghost (theme)
• Mad Sin - Body Snatchers, Mad Filthy Undead, Naughty Little Devil
• Marduk - Samhain
• Marilyn Manson - Dope Hat, I Put A Spell On You, Willy Wonka theme
• Mark Snow - X-Files Theme
• Massive Attack - Angel
• MC Hammer - Addams Groove (Addams Family Values)
• Me First and the Gimme Gimmes - Ghostbusters (Ray Parker Jr cover)
• Meatloaf - Bat Out of Hell, Hot Summer Night
• Mel Brooks - Puttin On The Ritz (Young Frankenstein)
• Men At Work - Who Can It Be Now
• Michael Jackson - Thriller
• Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells (Exorcist)
• Ministry - Everyday Is Halloween
• Misfits - Halloween, Halloween II, Night of the Living Dead, and Scream
• Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels - Devil With A Blue Dress On
• My Chemical Romance - Vampires Will Never Hurt You
• Nancy Lamott - Autumn Leaves/When October Goes
• Napoleon XIV - They're Coming To Take Me Away
• Necromantix - Curse of the Coffin, Demons Are A Girls Best Friend, Haunted Cathouse, Love At First Bite, Nekrofilia
• Neil Norman - Twilight Zone theme
• Nick Cave - I Put a Spell on You (see Screamin' Jay Hawkins), Red Right Hand
• Nine Inch Nails - Sanctified, Something I Can Never Have
• New York Dolls - Frankenstein
• Oingo Boingo - Dead Man's Party, Nothing to Fear (But Fear Itself), Weird Science (see also Danny Elfman)
• Old Man's Child - Return of the Night Creatures
• Outkast - Dracula's Wedding
• Peter Gabriel - Digging In The Dirt
• Police - Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
• Rain Station - Trick or Treatin
• Rammstein - Mein Teil
• Ramones - Pet Semetary
• Randy Newman - If I Didn't Have You (with Billy Crystal and John Goodman)
• Ray Parker Jr - Ghostbusters theme
• Ray Stevens - Haunted House, Teenage Mutant Kung-Fu Chickens
• Redbone - The Witch Queen of New Orleans
• Reverend Horton Heat - Halloween Dance, The Devil Is Chasing Me
• Rick Yost - Monster Inside
• Rob Zombie - House Of 1000 Corpses, Living Dead Girl
• Rob Zombie and Ozzy Osbourne - Zombie Stomp
• Rockapella - Zombie Jamboree, You're a Mean One Mr. Grinch (cover)
• Rocky Horror Picture Show - Science Fiction Double Feature, Time Warp
• Rolling Stones - Sympathy For The Devil
• Rose and the Arrangement - Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati
• Run DMC - Ghostbusters II Theme
• Santana - Black Magic Woman
• Screamin' Jay Hawkins - I Put A Spell On You, Whistlin' Past the Graveyard
• Sheb Wooley - Purple People Eater
• Siouxsie and the Banshees - Jeepers Creepers, Trick or Treat
• Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet With Butterfly Wings (aka The World Is A Vampire)
• Sonic Youth - Halloween
• Specials - Ghost Town
• Spinanes - Halloween Candy
• Squirrel Nut Zippers - Hell
• Steve Martin - King Tut
• Stevie Ray Vaughan - Voodoo Child
• Sting - Moon Over Bourbon Street
• Sweet - Ballroom Blitz
• Taco - Puttin On The Ritz
• Talking Heads - Psycho Killer
• Thomas Dolby - I Scare Myself, She Blinded Me With Science
• Thurl Ravenscroft - You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch
• Tim Curry - Anything Can Happen
• Tom Lehrer - I Hold Your Hand In Mine
• Tom Waits - Murder In The Red Barn
• The Touch - The Vampire Song
• Type O Negative - Black No. 1, Creepy Green Light
• Vic Mizzy – The Addams Family Theme
• Warren Zevon - Werewolves Of London
• Weird Al Yankovic - Nature Trail to Hell
• White Zombie - I'm Your Boogieman
• Whose Line Is It Anyway - Halloween Hoedown
• Zacherly - Dinner With Drac

Share and enjoy. =)