Internet paranormal enthusiasts love to cite the work of parapsychologists Alan Gauld and A.D. Cornell, who famously collated over a 170 years’ worth of reported poltergeist incidents into a comprehensive database organized by the specific qualitative symptoms of the phenomena. For example, based on Cornell and Gauld’s rubric, out of more than 500 studied poltergeist cases, 64% involved the movement of small objects, 58% were more active at night, 48% featured knocking or rapping (though only 2% featured beat-boxing), 36% involved the movement of large objects, etc. What good is this data to anyone? Well, it’s pretty helpful if you write for Weird Things and need to introduce the basics of poltergeist activity (and ladies – if you run into Agent Mulder at a bar, it couldn’t hurt to pull out the ol’ “12% of poltergeist incidents involved the opening and shutting of doors” line).

How do these trinket-tossing ghoul infestations differ from classic hauntings? Good question. In the past, the distinction between the two really just hinged upon the perceived mischievousness of the entity: ghosts were restless depressives who stamped around houses out of discomfort and anger; poltergeists were ethereal miscreants who joyfully roused sleepers and vandalized property to satisfy their voracious adolescent appetites for prankery. As (ahem) research progressed throughout the 20th century, however, the poltergeist phenomena began to look less and less like traditional spirit activity. In modern day parapsychology circles, the party line is this: reported hauntings are generally centered on a place or an object, and last for extended periods; poltergeists are usually linked to individual people (most commonly females under the age of 20) and stop abruptly after only a few months. According to Gauld and Cornell, 98% of reported hauntings are actually cases of poltergeist activity, and that’s a number you can trust because it’s math AND science!

Was I what? Winking?! No! Why would you even say that? You’re funny.

The fact that “poltergeist” is a German word (“polter” coming from “poltern” meaning “to make noise,” and “geist” meaning “spirit” or “ghost”) helps to hint at the phenomenon’s international prevalence – poltergeists have been reported throughout Europe, Asia and both North and South America (I guess Africa’s too busy dealing with witchcraft and AIDs to be bothered by a few inexplicably airborne black market TEC-9s). So what are the scientific, psychological and supernatural ramifications of these wild non-ghosts?

Check back Wednesday and Friday for answers that are guaranteed to include talk of psychokinesis, female sexuality, befuddled physicists and the word “lithobolia.” In short – everything you’ve ever wanted, plus lithobolia.

Even if Apple’s already-divisive iPad doesn’t herald in a new age of laptop computing, it certainly offers a giant leap forward in tablet technology. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Weird Things is paying tribute to the fantastic tablets of yesteryear, and the brave tableteers who sculpted them.

Today: The Bembine Tablet

If the all-powerful monster kid from that Twilight Zone episode (“It’s a Good Life”) decided to trap Dan Brown and Alan Moore in a sealed elevator, the Bembine Tablet is one of the few viable conversation topics on which both could probably agree to waste the precious, dwindling oxygen.

Brown would be entranced by the artifact’s namesake, Cardinal Bembo, a Catholic antiquarian who originally purchased the mysterious hieroglyph-spangled Egyptian relic from a Roman locksmith sometime after the city’s famous sacking. Brown would revel in the tablet’s subsequent crisscrossing of Italy, as monarchs and papal officers swapped it from Mantua to Rome to Savoy to Sardinia to Paris, France, before returning it to Turin, Italy, where it still resides.

I imagine the cryptology-obsessed author would also drool over the tablet’s history as an almost-was Egyptian Rosetta Stone, although he might change some key details about 17th century Hermeticist Athanasius Kircher, who, with all the neurotic bravado of a Tom Hanks character, attempted to decode the Bembine tablet and create a translation key for Egyptian hieroglyphics. See, Kircher’s translation was ultimately ruled a complete fabrication – the bronze and silver tablet’s apparent hieroglyph’s were actually just decorative pictures of peasants, kings and deities, including the god Isis, for whom the tablet was most likely created. It’s like if you tried to translate English from a Where’s Waldo illustration. (Even Kircher’s published decipherments of actual hieroglyphs have since proved utterly fallacious. In one famous instance, he translated what amounts to “Osiris says” as “The treachery of Typhon ends at the throne of Isis; the moisture of nature is guarded by the vigilance of Anubis.”) I’m sure in Brown’s version, Kircher would be discredited by the Catholic Church after discovering that the Bembine tablet really did contain what a continent’s worth of occultists predicted – the language of Adam and Eve.

Here’s where Moore’s eyes would lose their opium glaze. European occultists had little anthropological interest in the tablet, and what linguistic interest they had came from their belief in a legendary grimoire called the Book of Thoth. The theory was that the tablet revealed a code for translating the book, which was written in some proto-civilized god tongue and then buried in the City of the Dead with the Egyptian Prince Neferkaptah. A person who possessed, and could translate, the document would have the ability to talk to animals, cast incomparably powerful spells and control nature itself.

Also, the book is locked in a gold box that’s locked in a silver box that’s locked in an ivory and ebony box that’s locked in a sycamore box that’s locked in a bronze box. All of those boxes are locked in an iron box. The keys to the boxes are spread out across Egypt, with some hidden in treacherous natural formations, others entrusted to earthbound spirits and still others under the watchful eyes of ferocious beasts. On top of all that, the book is cursed, such that its master’s power comes at a terrible price – the death of all those close to him. Oh, the wet dreams and acid trips Moore has surely had about the Book of Thoth.

Too bad the tablet turned out to be the equivalent of a thousand-pound Hummel.

Still, before they suffocated, both authors would carefully list and map out the cities to which the tablet traveled – after all, the pattern is bound to form some sort of Masonic icon or runic sigil. Add Stephen King and John Grisham into the mix and you’ve got a pulpy religious conspiracy court drama with post-modern overtones and a shocking third-act revelation that it was aliens.

Wait. That what was aliens?

“You know. Everything.” replies Stephen King.

Jason has killed a lot of folks with a lot of different tools. His victims may wonder, “Who is this man? And why is he murdering me?” Meanwhile, we the viewers want to know, “What is that tool he’s using? And what’s its history?”

Wonder no longer.

Today: Ice Pick

As used by Jason in: “Friday the 13th Part II” and “Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning”

Victim(s): Alice Hardy, Les (during Tommy’s dream sequence)

Refrigerators are everywhere! My house… your house… your friends’ houses. Your teacher might even have one! But that didn’t used to be the case. Back before people had evolved the ability to invent refrigerators, everyone used ice boxes – unwieldy food preservation cabinets that had to be regularly restocked with fresh blocks of ice that folks bought from merchants called icemen (sorry, girls. There weren’t any actual icewomen. That’s just something daddies call mommies who have headaches). To shape an ice block to box size – or to chip off some cubes to cool down some tasty lemonade – people used ice picks. An ice pick is a sharp, wooden-handled tool that resembles a scratch awl.

Oh. In that case, picture a stitching awl with a straight point.

Really? May I ask what kind of awl you can picture?

Nope. Forget it.

It’s nothing like that kind of awl.

FUN WITH YOUR PARENTS’ STUFF! Breaking ice without an ice pick can be really hard! Try it! All you need are ice cubes and some of your PARENTS’ STUFF! Try crushing the ice with your mother’s jewelry box or the butt of your father’s handgun… try to chip it on the computer keyboard or smack it with the buckle of the Time Out Belt… try as hard you can to break it against the big window in the living room. See why ice picks were so useful?

Sure, ice picks were named ice picks because of their ice picking ability, but they can pick other things, too – human brains, for example! Walter Freeman, a famous neurologist (just a fancy word for “head shaman”), used ice picks to lobotomize (just a fancy word for “calm down”) the mentally insane. Freeman customized a van, which he called the “lobotomobile,” and set off on a nationwide mental hospital tour, during which he taught multiple doctors how to perform his violent and irreversible procedure – place an ice pick through the corner of the eye socket and, to quote the ‘50s pop sensation “Dr. Freeman Boogie,” “smack it like a broken Polaroid camera.” Soon, though, lobotomies went the way of the ice box as powerful neuroleptics like Thorazine took the psychiatric industry by storm.

FUNOLOGY PROJECT! How do you think lobotomized patients were treated? Probably not very nice! Try acting lobotomized around your family and friends, and see how they treat you. It’s easy! Tone down your personality. Quietly fiddle with random objects. Turn off your ability to love. Periodically soil yourself. CHALLENGE! How long can you keep it up for? A week? A month? Remember: science is all about the gathering of unrecorded, subjective data by way of long-running, secret deceptions (just a fancy word for “fun”).

Families… head shamans… who else used ice picks? Good question! Have you ever heard of Murder, Inc.? Well, Murder, Inc. was a group of steel-balled Italians and Jews who performed contract killings for the National Crime Syndicate between 1920 and 1940. Some of these Mafia hit men liked ice picks almost as much as Dr. Freeman liked lobotomizing the insane. Abe “Kid Twist” Reles and Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss, well known members of Murder, Inc., both considered the ice pick their go-to goomba-elimination tool. Human bone is no match for the shattering force of an enthusiastically swung pick! You may have heard that Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky met his fate at the business end of Stalinist-wielded ice pick. Untrue! Trotsky was actually killed by an ice axe, which is like a super-sized ice pick designed to lobotomize thawed-out dinosaurs.

CONTEST! What sort of weapons would you use if you were an assassin working for Murder, Inc.? What if you worked for the KGB? How about Yakuza? Draw each weapon on a sheet of 8.5 x 11 paper, along with an illustration of yourself using the weapon, and mail each of them to: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500. The more entries you send, the better your chance of winning!

Thank you, Jason, for helping us learn through murder.

Join me again soon for another thrilling installment of Jason Vorhees’ Arsenal!

Researcher Masahiro Hotta at Tohoku University has developed a framework by which it could be possible to teleport energy vast distances. The implications for this are pretty amazing. Could we use this to power deep space missions? Teleport power from the sun? Build a Death Star? One can dream.

He gives the example of a string of entangled ions oscillating back and forth in an electric field trap, a bit like Newton’s balls. Measuring the state of the first ion injects energy into the system in the form of a phonon, a quantum of oscillation. Hotta says that performing the right kind of measurement on the last ion extracts this energy. Since this can be done at the speed of light (in principle), the phonon doesn’t travel across the intermediate ions so there is no heating of these ions. The energy has been transmitted without traveling across the intervening space. That’s teleportation.

link: Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy

Even if Apple’s already-divisive iPad doesn’t herald in a new age of laptop computing, it certainly offers a giant leap forward in tablet technology. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Weird Things is paying tribute to the fantastic tablets of yesteryear, and the brave tableteers who sculpted them. For example, Curse Tablets.

Today: Miracle Tablets

Li’l William Creech’s legs were paralyzed, and his father, Doctor Richard Creech, was at his wits’ end. Willy had been stretcher-bound for almost a year. The regular electrical treatments designed to zap function into his hopeless, rubbery gams had, time and again, proven utterly unsuccessful. If anything, the boy’s condition seemed to be worsening. That’s when Doctor Creech received a letter from his mother, imploring him to dose the child with Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People – miracle tablets designed to treat most forms of weakness, including heart palpitations, nervous headaches, partial paralysis and even the post-flu icks. Always the simpering momma’s boy, Dr. Creech immediately crammed his son full of Doc Williams’ superlative curative and, lo and behold, the boy was back on his feet after only four short months worth of daily pill binges.

This story, or at least a QVC-ready version of it, was printed on the label of the aforementioned Pink Pills, which were a popular patent medicine created in the late 18th century. The phrase “patent medicine” is a misnomer – chemical patents weren’t even available until 1925, and by then, most of the patent medicine vendors had either gone belly-up or specifically avoided applying for patents due to the complete ineffectiveness of their so-called “medication” to do anything more than add cirrhosis to a patient’s list of ailments. But let’s back up a bit.

The phrase “patent medicine” was coined after the revolutionary war, and was used to refer to an increasing number of independently produced and marketed elixirs, tonics, tinctures and tablets that, by the 1800s, had become a stand-by of American over-the-counter pharmaceutical treatments. Snake oil tonics are the go-to example of these fallacious panaceas, but all manner of patent medications existed, boasting a cornucopia of miraculous curative properties. Dr. Morse’s Indian Root Pills cleaned the blood. Mug-wump Specific cured (and prevented!) venereal disease. Kickapoo Indian Sagwa renovated the blood, stomach and liver. And Hamlin’s Wizard Oil? That basically cured everything short of bankruptcy and amputations.

With fanciful names, colorful artwork and snappy ad copy, patent medicines almost certainly did more to help evolve product branding strategies than to alleviate physical suffering. Many amateur druggists held giant travelling medicine shows – raucous carnivals replete with sideshow performers, live music and, of course, product sales pitches full of quicksilver patter and volunteered testimonials by pay-rolled shills. Other press-hungry shysters published cheapo pulp-and-spit farmers’ almanacs filled with full-page ads for their homemade nostrums. Hucksters’ pitches and packaging invoked all manner of mystical and pseudo-scientific pabulum, including Native American magic, soothing electromagnetism and healing radiation. Of course, the medicine itself was generally composed of things like cocaine, grain alcohol and various diuretics, then flavored with cayenne, camphor or pennyroyal.

In 1905, a sensationalistic Collier’s magazine article entitled, “Death’s Laboratory,” followed immediately by the 1906 instatement of the Food and Drug Act, which forced amateur pharmacologists to include ingredient lists on all product labels, effectively killed the patent medicine movement. While some patent medications (Vicks VapoRub, Luden’s Throat Drops, Doan’s Pills, etc.) survived into the modern age, their recipes and/or curative claims had to be grossly amended. Others (Coca Cola, Dr. Pepper, 7-Up) persisted by dropping their healing pretenses, removing their opiates and calling themselves soft drinks. Most, however, including Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People, didn’t live to help any more paralytic Creech kids out of bed.

Still, as long as the savvy American charlatan can wring a livelihood from a populace of vain and ignorant quick fix-hungry sponges, patent medicine will live on in the form of vitamin supplements, diet plans and bottled water. Dog Bless America!

What’s more awesome than a giant ancient crocodile? A really giant snake that ate it for lunch.

A 60-million-year-old relative of crocodiles described recently by University of Florida researchers in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology was likely a food source for Titanoboa, the largest snake the world has ever known.

link: Ancient crocodile relative likely food source for Titanoboa, largest snake ever known

In which I add a wholly unnecessary narrative spin to the satisfying, straight-forward conclusion of a film.

Today: “The Thing”

Childs and MacReady eyeball each other as they drink adult beverages in the flaming wreckage of the Antarctic research station. “So…” starts MacReady, “Are you the thing?” Childs look down toward his feet with the ambivalence of a kid glancing down at a balloon with a sad picture on it. “No.” he says, “You?” MacReady just shrugs. “Maaaaaaybe…” Childs looks up and begins backing away. MacReady makes google eyes, lifts his non-drinking hand and wiggles his fingers in an oogity-boogity gesture, then quickly reverts his countenance backs to its default manly pout and says, “Just kidding. I’m not the thing.” Both men stare at each other. Behind them, a piece of lab equipment explodes. Neither man breaks eye contact with the other. Cut to close up on the bearded intensity of MacReady’s soot-streaked mug. Cut to close up on the unapologetic forcefulness of Childs’ rugged aspect. Cut between the two close ups, faster and faster, until the men’s faces seem to morph together into the surly visage of some hard-nosed alcoholic backwoods jazz colonel.

Cut to wide shot of a super-giant space ship screaming down onto the frozen continent. The roaring inferno engulfing the lab looks like a single ignited match when compared to the sheer bed-crapping immensity of the interstellar megacraft descending toward it. There are lots of flashing lights and intense “bleep bloop” noises.

Cut back to Childs and MacReady, who first look up at the ship, then at each other, then at the ship again, then back at each other. As they look at each other the last time, they exclaim, in unison, “Uh-Oh!”

Cut to a reverse shot framing the bottom of the space ship between the panicked men’s men’s heads. A metal gangplank descends from the craft and a weird alien that looks like a human-sized koala in a shock wig and pied jogging suit steps out onto the ice. Childs and MacReady look at it, then at each other, then back at it, then back at each other. “UH-OH!” they shriek. The alien stops a few feet from the men’s men, stomps both its feet and asks, “Why are you on our planet?” MacReady stares back at the alien and intones, “Your planet?! This is our planet!” The alien looks taken aback and bewildered and weird. “No!” he hollers, “You flew through a wormhole, came to our planet, built a base right on top of our thing farm and then started illegally mining our precious thing!”

“Look, we’re really sorry. We thought it was our thing… and if it makes you feel any better, we didn’t even really want it!” says Macready. “Yeah!” offers Childs, “it was killing us even!” The alien crosses his arms over his chest. “Well, okay… but the penalty is still death… except for the bearded one. He’s the thing… our thing.” Childs whips his head over and glares at MacReady. “But you said…” “Hey!” MacReady interjects, “What do you want? I’m the damn thing.”

Cut to close up on Childs’ face. Childs shrugs and remarks, “uh-oh.” Roll Credits.

Even if Apple’s already-divisive iPad doesn’t herald in a new age of laptop computing, it certainly offers a giant leap forward in tablet technology. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Weird Things is paying tribute to the fantastic tablets of yesteryear, and the brave tableteers who sculpted them.

Today: Curse Tablets

If you’re anything like me, the escape plan appended to your Ty Diggs assassination scheme involves traveling back to ancient Greece, and getting a job as Zeus’ animal-transformation/rape coordinator. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I just read this thing about cursed tablets – metal plates with etched binding spells designed to exact bloody revenge against, or coax games of footsy from, your fellow Greeks (Yes. Romans, too. Who are you?). All it takes is a thin sheet of lead (cheap and readily available), a gruesomely (or erotically) worded request to the appropriate god and, depending on the request, a small figurine of the spell’s intended target. Bada-boom! Curse tablet. Sure – the love spells can be tricky, and often require a lock of the intended’s hair followed by careful concealment of the entire schmear in said intended’s place of dwelling, but the other ones? (Especially the violent ones?) You just fold or roll the sucker up, maybe knock a nail through it (to ensure that the invoked magics are bound to the victim) and install it wherever it needs installing (most infernal gods prefer that tablet requests be buried in a sepulcher or tomb, thrown down a well or affixed, Luther-style, to a temple).

Now, folks with mystic inclinations and an affinity for light metalwork will, of course, render these tablets for themselves. That usually means love spells (which come in both “force sexual relations” and “encourage adorable affection”), but those are the more complicated ones, anyway. The mojo-carriers you want focus on are simple, cold-hearted vengeance curses, which were produced en masse by various tablet artisans. These generic vengeance tablets, complete with a blank space just itching to have a disreputable’s name etched into it, were mainly sold outside courtrooms. Greeks tried to do things democratically, but what’s democracy without a little third-party hoodoo laying its fat finger on the scales of Justice? Folks embroiled in court battles would purchase tablets begging the gods to screw with their legal opponents’ court performances, thereby, creating litigation foibles of “Liar, Liar” proportions.

And if ancient Greece isn’t really your thing – maybe you were thinking about one of the Roman Empire’s British providences, or perhaps even ancient Egypt – that’s fine, too. In fact, in the popular past-tense resort town of Aquae Sulis (now Bath, England), archaeologists have unearthed over 100 curse tablets, most of them damning the towel and clothing thieves who made a living off the untended bathing accoutrements of Aquae Sulis vacationers. And in 12th century Egypt, where they never really cottoned to all this tablet stuff, people used “execration texts” – spells etched into clay statues and pottery – to bring on all sorts of glorious misfortune. Just craft, etch, and bury or shatter. Execration complete!

Oh, and not all the “curse tablets” summoned actual curses. For example – you can work with a town to create “judicial prayers,” which are essentially curse tablets aimed at anonymous criminals who did the locals dirty. Or you could etch tablets designed to help the dead find peace in the afterlife. But if you had wanted to do that, you probably wouldn’t have subjected Ty Diggs to the sort of violent death that’s almost certain to turn him into a ghost so that now other ghosts have to hang out with him.

Cursed tablets. Think on it.

This week Weird Things’ Matt Finley explores the failed utopian societies of history. Monday, he traipsed through the memories of the Oneida sex community, Wednesday we delved into the most oxymoronic utopia ever conceived. Enjoy!

As Monday’s post was all about fringe spiritualists and Wednesday’s was dominated by fringe philosophers, you’ll be glad to hear that today you get a little of both. New Harmony, Indiana – even the most well-mannered smart-ass among you surely can’t help but ask, “What happened to Old Harmony?” (And even the most dapper pothead among you can’t help but snigger and give the well-mannered smart-ass a limp high-five.) The answer is “finicky Shakers and drunken abolitionists.” Harmony was established by the Harmonists, a sect of Lutheran separatists who, according to the Historic New Harmony website, “lived by combining the Swabian work ethic (‘Work, work, work! Save, save, save!’) with the Benedictine rule (‘Pray and work!’).” So… “Pray and work, work, work! Pray and save, save, save!” Constant excitement. The Harmonists had already established a colony in Harmonie, Pennsylvania, but, with an eye on expansion, purchased the much larger tract of land in Indiana.

Starting in 1814, they built an entire town. Visitors from nearby Shaker communities stayed with them. Their neighbors, a rowdy (or, at least, rowdy by Harmony standards) group of abolitionists looked at them. Then the Shakers started getting argumentative, and the abolitionists (who they viewed as drunken lollygaggers) began to harass them. Finally, in 1824, a comparable land opportunity opened up in Western Pennsylvania, and Harmony founder George Rapp sold Harmony to British utopian idealist Robert Owen. The Harmonist gang – work horses, save benches and prayer mills in tow – headed back to PA, and Owen went to work on New Harmony – a godless paradise for working class radicals.

New Harmony was founded on the basis that religion is nonsense, an individual’s will and actions are 100% environmentally defined (the “blame society” model) and labor ought always be conducted via the put-out system (individual skilled subcontractors putting out in the privacy of their own homes rather than uniting in a factory for mass whorish industrial orgies). Owen was so confident about the success of his communal, 800-person “New Moral World” that he shipped over progressive European educators and scientists to help ensure the commune’s success. United States currency was abandoned in favor of Harmony-minted “time money,” with each note worth a certain number of labor hours; necessities were assigned prices in the form of time increments, and sold at the “time store.” Luxury items and the notion of private property were also abolished, so that everyone would work for the good of the community, which would, in turn, ensure each individual’s personal well-being.

Well-mannered smart-ass – is that you laughing? You’re nothing if not perceptive. With no common goal or shared belief system beyond the perpetuation of an arbitrary cloistered society, Harmony quickly fell apart. The first problem was that, while many of the community’s residents were dedicated thinkers, skilled laborers and imported academics, plenty of others were wandering philosophers, transient misanthropes, and even petty criminals looking for a fresh start. The second problem was a complete and utter lack of leadership, or even mutually held ideological beliefs (this partially stemmed from Owen’s refusal to live full-time in the community, as he was simultaneously managing a similar failing communal experiment in Europe). In four years, Harmony collapsed under the weight of the very same ideals it was founded upon, as, without individual responsibility, residents were able to selfishly exploit community resources while blaming their capitalist upbringing.

I know, dapper pothead – no high-fives here. No high-fives here.

10 Sci-fi and horror movie commentary tracks I’d like to hear…

• Commentary on David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” by Harold Ramis, who went through a grotesque, Brundlefly transformation in real life.

• Commentary on “A Nightmare on Elm Street” by Nick Nolte, the only real person to have ever committed dream murder.

• Commentary on “Gremlins” by a confused Richard Dreyfuss, who was told he’d be recording commentary for “Krippendorf’s Tribe.”

• Commentary on “The Shining” by Benecio Del Toro, who will focus on his experiences sneaking that much blood into a hotel elevator.

• Commentary on “A New Hope” by David Prowse, who’s still mad that George Lucas cut out the entire Imperial pop-locking contest sequence.

• Commentary on “Alien” by Alan Arkin who, it turns out, has incredibly strong feelings about “that goddamned c***-sucking alien.”

• Commentary on “Dr. Giggles” by members the American Medical Association, who think it’s about time they stepped up and said something.

• Commentary on “Groundhog Day” by Danny Devito, whose own shadow is used to predict annual rainfall in America’s Grain Belt.

• Commentary on “Event Horizon” by Francis Ford Coppola. It’s just heavy sighs and muffled eating.

• Commentary on “Hellraiser” by God – “I always thought of humanity as a stepping stone on the way to ‘Hellraiser.’ At this point, I’m just keeping you guys around for those delightful straight-to-DVD sequels. I’d make them myself if my hands weren’t so damn big. Seriously, they’re like galaxies. And these HD cameras just keep getting smaller.”

A list of recommended reading and viewing from Andrew Mayne, Brian Brushwood and Justin Robert Young as mentioned in the episode Redneck Fireworks Massacre.

Moon

Ayn Rand’s FOUNTAINHEAD

Star Wars The Clone Wars: The Complete Season One (TV Series)

Heir to the Empire (Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy, Vol. 1)

Dan Simmons’ Hyperion

The Star Wars Vault: Thirty Years of Treasures from the Lucasfilm Archives, With Removable Memorabilia and Two Audio CDs

Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora (James Cameron’s Avatar)

This week Weird Things’ Matt Finley explores the failed utopian societies of history. Monday, he traipsed through the memories of the Oneida sex community. Enjoy!

Jumbo shrimp. Military intelligence. Anarchist organization. Classic oxymorons, right? And the founders of the now-defunct Ferrer Colony in Stelton, New York, don’t disagree. In fact, they repeatedly stressed that the colony was not an anarchist organization, but rather an organization of anarchists (a semantic parsing that seems, at best, a lateral move, but if it makes the anarchists happy…). This all took place back in the first half of the 20th century, when Ferrer Schools – self-proclaimed Libertarian learning institutions named for Spain’s famous educator and anarchist, Francesc Ferrer i Guardia – were becoming more popular among working class idealists who wanted to ensure their children were educated from a secular, liberal and socio-culturally conscious point of view.

Formed as an experimental offshoot of Manhattan’s Ferrer School, the Ferrer Colony was intended to take anarchist education to its logical extreme through the establishment of a year-round settlement for students and their likeminded families. Now, I don’t want suggest that the philosophical Poobahs of fringe ideological movements aren’t always the most pragmatic people, but the Stelton project lacked a certain degree of planning forethought. The land was unfit for farming. The bathing facilities were a nearby stream. Early pupils lived in makeshift tents and shacks, from which they watched the dormitory’s sluggish construction. The first winter (1915/1916) found the school staff and five resident families living in a freezing shantytown (though the farmhouse kitchen and nearly-completed dorm had limited heating) where the only bright spots were communal Saturday night dinners, which often ended in joyful, raucous all-night celebrations.

Finally, come spring, the dorm was finished and more families began arriving.

You’re wondering where the anarchy comes in, aren’t you? I mean, organizationally speaking, doesn’t this bear all the markings of idealized socialism? Or a ranch for raising free-range hippies?

You’re not wrong. Many of the school’s founders identified with (and even wandered the outskirts of) the socialist movement, especially in light of the then-raging Russian revolution. In fact, life at the Ferrer Settlement often found itself at the whim of various social fads, including a variety of dubious dietetic trends that Stilton defenders cite when recounting the colony’s stellar health record during the 1918 flu epidemic. Still, to play anarchists’ advocate, the colony’s few written organizational tenets were defined only as a matter of legality, and there were no membership requirements or visitation regulations. The community’s only stated purpose was to provide an inclusive institution to “lead a group of people back to a natural, mutually self-sufficient relationship with one another.”

The colony, which offered an increasing number of adult classes and opportunities for artistic – especially musical – performance, grew throughout the late teens and early 1920s. As one would expect from anarchists, most of the adult couples were unmarried, and the biggest ongoing ideological conflicts revolved around the use of violence in furthering the anarchist agenda (or would that be “the agenda of anarchists”?). Folks were marginally bummed that an increasing number of colonists were converting over to full-on socialism, but, generally, everything was copacetic. While most sources agree that the colony only truly achieved its humanist goals during its earliest days, when residents were forced to rely on each other for survival, the collapse of the Ferrer Colony wasn’t born out of internal struggles, but rather out of outside conflict and the dependable ravages of time. The last straw came during WWII, when the government erected numerous barracks on the land surrounding Stilton, and rowdy soldiers allegedly began vandalizing the school and assaulting residents. The aging colonists left and the community dissolved, proving that, as oxymorons go, the communal individualism of anarchy is no match for the organized chaos of war.

Friday: New Harmony… because old harmony went to the drunks

We explore the ethical implications of covering up your horrific crimes with science and have probably the most boring ideas about utopia ever. We then discuss our worst disaster scenarios. Finally we give unsolicited book and movie recommendations.

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Walk it Off – an abridged compendium of ye olde folk remedies and archaic antidotes culled from UCLA’s Archive of American Folk Medicine. These are real folk remedies. Seriously.

Today’s ailment: headache

Noose Cure

You will need: The rope used to hang a person (preferably the rope a person used to hang him or herself)

Instructions: Wrap hanging rope around head.

Note: This cure is also effective against the conditions resulting from headaches, such as grey hair and baldness.

Cold Water Rub

You will need: A dish of cold water

Instructions: Place hand in water; Rub wet hand over head; Shake hand dry; Repeat as necessary. IMPORTANT! – If hand is not entirely dry before re-wetting, the next rub will reinsert headache into head.

Rattlesnake Cure

You will need: 697 rattlesnake rattles, 1 hat.

Instructions: Place rattlesnake rattles inside of hat’s sweatband; Wear hat.

Cornbreads

You will need: Cornbreads

Instructions: Wear cornbreads

Pocket Nut Stroker

You will need: 1 nut (any type); Pants with pockets.

Instructions: Put on pocketed pants; Place nut in side pocket (either); Place hand in same side pocket as nut; Continuously stroke nut.

Ear Smoke

You will need: 1 tobacco smoker (including tobacco smoking paraphernalia)

Instructions: Have smoker exhale tobacco smoke into patient’s ears.

Half Bath

You will need: 1 barrel; 1 thermometer; water

Instructions: Heat or cool water to 40 degrees farenheit; Stand in barrel; Add water to barrel until water-level reaches hips; bathe (alternately, swap steps 2 and 3 after performing volumetric displacement calculation)

Water Fire Cure

You will need: 1 bowl of water; 1 drinking glass; 3 napkins; matches (or lighter)

Instructions: Balance water bowl on patient’s head; Insert napkins into drinking glass; Ignite napkins; Place fire glass upside-down in head bowl

Note: remedy also effective against victims of evil eye

Bone Snuff

You will need: 1 moldy human skull

Instructions: Dry skull moss; Powder skull moss; Inhale skull moss

Pig Scare

You will need: Practiced deliverer of grotesque over-reactions

Instructions: Have over-reactor tell patient that he/she should have his/her head removed and thrown to hogs

(Note: cure is only effective if patient becomes angry)

Seeing as how you’re on the Internet, I can only imagine that much of your time is spent pissing and moaning about all manner of meaningless cultural apocrypha. Eventually, all the minor complaints gather and accresce into a swollen negativity cloud that represents everything that’s wrong with society. You’re not alone. Throughout history, numerous cantankerous idealists have blown gaskets over family values this and sexual politics that. And their friends all rolled their eyes and said, “I’d like to see you make a better society!” That shut most of them down, leaving their tired eyes to peer gloomily through half-empty bottles, quietly thinking, “so that’s what a stripper would look like if she were in my beer.” But those aren’t the folks I wanna talk about… I wanna discuss the ones that went straight out to an ideological field, stretched their legs and ran, shoulder first, into the nearest paradigm, tipping its entire ungainly mass into the philosophical mud. In other words, attempted utopias – the houses that crazy built.

I can’t think of a better place to start than Oneida, New York, where, in 1848, a man named John Humphrey Noyes founded a communalistic sex cult that would shape the very history of flatware. Noyes and his constituents were certain that, way back in the year 70, Jesus Christ had already returned, which somehow meant they could form a sin-free, heavenly clubhouse right here on Earth. Over the next 30 years, the Oneida community’s population would grow to 300 people, all of them subsisting off the money they earned selling homemade canned fruit, silk thread, animal traps and silverware – the raw material from which dreams are made.

I know, I know… get to the sex stuff.

So, Noyes was worried that relationships between men and women had been tainted by a modern society that pushed selfishness, unspoken social castes, bigotry and insularity. A functioning community, he reasoned, ought to function communally (“…and why am I wearing the watermelon on my feet?”). For starters, men and women were valued as equals, and encouraged (read: forced) to dress in simple shirts and trousers. Everyone was married to everyone else, and they were enthusiastically encouraged to discard any notions of monogamy and romance in exchange for community-fostering spiritual oneness (i.e. slutting around). It was not, however, the sweaty, unfettered Kubrickian orgy that you’re currently picturing… but here’s a little more sentence so you can enjoy one more fleeting moment of boundlessly vivid perversity.

The Oneidans developed a sexual hierarchy – referred to as “ascending fellowship” – based around the arbitrarily assessed spiritual and moral purity of the individual (the group even held regular meetings during which members were encouraged to individually harp on other members’ moral transgressions, spiritual shortcomings and, uh, annoying tendencies toward verbal pauses). Older folk were deemed purer than younger folk and men were deemed purer than women. So, how does one level up, so to speak? By sleeping with someone purer than themselves (the purer, the better). If you’re playing at home, that means the most impure folks were young women and the purest were older men. I know… nutty, but by cult standards, predictable. But wait… in 1869, Noyse introduced Stripiculture, a good old fashioned eugenics scheme that found baby-crazy Oneidans going before an evaluation panel that assessed their spiritual and moral Blue Book value and then assigned them an optimal mate. The resulting offspring were taken away from their assigned biological parents and whisked off to the newly constructed Children’s Wing, where kids were communally raised by chosen Oneidan nurse maids.

Man… can you believe that this perfect society unraveled?

In the end, no one could agree on the minimum age at which the Oneidan children should be sexually inducted into the order (Do I hear 14? Going once…). Eventually, Noyse fled to Canada in the wake of statutory rape charges, and his atheist son – the heir apparent – abandoned the commune, exchanging rape victimhood for worm foodom. Stripiculture was halted, the pubescent sexual rituals stopped and women said “kill whitey” to their mandatory dungarees. The only thing that never ended? The production of Oneida flatware, which can still be purchased today. So next time you’re out a restaurant, and someone dares you to start your own ideal society, look down at your sex fork or your sex spoon and just keep on with the idle, actionless bitching.

Wednesday: Ferrer – colonized anarchy

Logic dictates that if Kansas can have a city called Manhattan and Eurasia get its own Georgia, there’s no reason why the Great Lakes can’t cop a little of Bermuda’s thunder and enjoy their own mysterious, supernatural Triangle. Sometimes referred to as the Michigan Triangle, this ookity, spookity polygon is attributed solely to Lake Michigan, but the events it aims to explain – freak storms, odd disappearances and unexplainable tragedies – are similar to the misdeeds attributed to Lake Erie’s Storm Hag. Unlike the Storm Hag, the triangle (its corners are situated at Ludington, Manitowoc and Benton Harbor) is even blamed for attracting UFOs, as well as for an historic sea monster sighting reported by a Catholic priest. To give you an idea of the multifarious weirdness ascribed to the invisible danger zone, here are two of its best-known tales:

In April of 1937, the O. M. Mcfarland, its holds packed to capacity with coal, was on its way back to Michigan from Erie, Pennsylvania. A few hours out of Port Washington, the exhausted captain put his first mate on alarm clock duty and then retired to his cabin. Upon nearing the harbor, Officer Snooze Button went to rouse his sleeping commander, only to find the captain’s quarters empty… and locked from the inside. “It’s as if [he] evaporated straight through the walls,” explains Ben Kingsley in the unrelated “Shutter Island” trailer.

Then! June! 1950! Northwest Airlines flight 2501 left New York and flew west toward Minneapolis. As the pilot changed the plane’s course in order to avoid a storm outside Chi-Town, giving his last radio update from 20,000 above Battle Creek, Michigan, the flight’s 55 passengers munched peanuts and whispered presciently about the recent birth of Stevie Wonder. Later, rescue crews searching Lake Michigan salvaged fragments of the travelers and the interior fixtures, but the body of the aircraft was never recovered. The crash remains unexplained. (My film adaptation of the disaster ends with a long shot of floating debris that slowly zooms in on a drifting five dollar bill. As the shot gets closer, we see that the bill was minted in 1997 and has a picture of Hitler on it. The movie is called “Cold Hypotenuse.”)

Many Triangle enthusiasts believe that Lake Michigan is host to a dimensional vortex that can stretch and compress time, and perhaps even allow passage through to another dimension. UFO fanatics have even gone as far as to say that areas like the Great Lakes and Bermuda Triangles are commuter portals created by the same race of intergalactic proctologists whose seemingly bottomless research grant has allowed them to abduct us for centuries. Meanwhile, disbelievers are all, “Seriously? It’s a huge lake with correspondingly giant weather, massive cold and treacherous geological formations… saying that the largest of the lakes is afflicted by sinister geometry makes as much sense as saying that the smallest of the lakes is haunted by some mythic weather elemental!” To which the enthusiasts reply, “Uh, yeah… we know… the Storm Hag. That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you!”