Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Matt broke down the basics of the legend Monday and keep an eye for the finale Friday…

Forget the demure courtesy and silent disappearance of that archetypical vanishing hitchhiker who left her stupid dead-person scarf in your car. If you’re going to haul a mysterious stranger around, you want something a little bit juicer than a sun-faded bandana. Like how about some prophecies? Impending natural disasters. Looming personal tragedies. Even the occasional standard-issue end-is-nigh doomsday harangue.

Sir/Madame, you are in luck -

As folklorists Richard Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey sifted through a mess of 79 phantom hitchhiker stories, 9 of the retellings stood out immediately. In these accounts, the kindly driver is less freaked out by the sudden evaporation of his passenger than by the passionate fortune teller act she pulls immediately prior. (Note that the “she” in these stories is rarely the quiet, button-cute lass of the standard tale, but rather a haggard old crone who is only too eager to talk.)

Two such phantom seers predicted that a disaster would occur at Chicago’s 1933 World’s Fair Exhibition. (The show ran smoothly.) One wrinkly clairvoyant warned that Michigan’s Northerly Island would disappear beneath the dark waters of the lake. (It remains unsaturated.) Another posthumous, psychic ol’ biddy even predicted the end of WWII. (A safe bet given the self-limiting timeline of every past global conflict, though, as this prediction had to have been made prior to Beardsley’s and Hankey’s 1941 study, the statement is still more of an empty logical truth than a spookily prescient observation.) Post prediction, each story played out as usual: hitchhiker poofs away without as much as a “thanks, sonny,” and the curious driver ultimately learns of the ride bummer’s deceased status.

To Beardsley and Hankey, these uniquely strange versions of the tale were merely evidence of a local variation, with 8 of the 9 accounts of mouthy dead know-it-alls coming out of the Chicago area. In a way, these head-scratching foretellings are no different than the supposedly prophetic tabloid articles that use numerology, liberal interpretation of ancient texts and an unapologetic flare for wild BSary to create endless predictions of natural disaster and apocalyptic horror. Except these ghost predictions don’t seem to be based on anything at all, opting instead to use the extant hitchhiker lore as a Trojan horse filled with strange portents of Illinoisan doom. To that end, it’s hard to decipher these legends. After all, tabloids have a bottom line to consider. It behooves them to traffic in the sensationalist and the deathly, no matter how spuriously derived.

Other than to shiver the timbers of the superstitious, what’s the sense in turning a harmless campfire tale into a timely warning of local catastrophe?

Find out, AFTER THE JUMP! (more…)

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Look for new installments Wednesday and Friday…

It’s isn’t that I necessarily think that ghosts oughta have cars. It’s depressing to imagine an ectoplasmic ex-president or dead astronaut shoving some stalled out spectral beater along the shoulder of a deserted interstate. But they should have some form of transportation, right? Even if there were just a criss-crossing network of transastral zip lines that they could clip their faces to or something. The dead shouldn’t have to hitchhike. Looking through the annals of American folklore, though, I’d caution all of you to croak with at least one thumb intact because it looks like you’re going to be bumming a crapload of postmortem car rides to nowhere. Especially the ladies.

The vanishing hitchhiker is such a ubiquitous folktale that Jan Harold Brumvand, the University of Utah professor who, through a series of books, introduced the culture at large to the concept of urban legends, titled his first volume, “The Vanishing Hitchhiker.” If you haven’t heard the legend (or if it’s been updated so now it’s about a ghostly Facebook poke or something), the basic story goes as follow:

It’s late at night. A lonely dude is on his way home from a party. As he steers his car around a particularly spooky curve, his headlights catch the figure of an attractive female hitchhiker thumbing down his car from the shadows along the shoulder. The guy picks up the girl, who seems shy and distant. She quietly tells him where to drop her off, and they continue on in silence until they reach her nearby destination, at which point the pretty wayfarer vanishes without a trace.

Find out how the family or the vanishing hitchhiker gets dragged into all this nonsense AFTER THE JUMP…

Like every threepeated tale of a hook-handed killer or a crybaby bridge, this legend has variants. A lot of variants. In fact, it has so many alternate endings and interchangeable spine tingles that numerous folklorists have conducted exhaustive studies of the legend in an attempt to map out, both in space and time, the story’s multiple evolutions. One version finds the hitchhiker leaving a scarf or a hat behind in the car. When the driver grabs the forgotten accessory and runs it up to the hitchhiker’s door, the house’s current resident (sometimes a relative of the hitchhiker, sometimes not) informs him that the scarf’s owner, who matched the description of the hitchhiker to a t, died years ago. In another version, the driver offers the hitchhiker, who appears chilly and pale, his own coat or scarf, which he later finds draped over a cemetery headstone. Upon making some inquiries, he discovers that the person he picked up is the marked grave’s occupant. Sometimes the wandering ghost is hitchhiking on the anniversary of her death. Other times she was picked up at the former site of the horrific auto accident that killed her.

(Use of the female pronoun in regard to the hitchhiker is fairly consistent. I can’t think of any reason for this other than the obvious – it’s unlikely that a lonely midnight driver would pick up a pale, brawny man on the side of the road, no matter how shy he appeared.)

Obviously, the crux of all of these stories is a lone traveler’s unknowing encounter with the other side – a random act of kindness punctuated by a moment of wholly unexpected mortal dread (often on the part of both the driver and the queried family member) in the wake of the wandering ghost’s unceremonious departure. In one way, the story offers a strange sense of comfort – a restless spirit lost and desperate for a posthumous homecoming finds momentary deliverance in the kindness of a lonely stranger. In another way, though, the story is chilling in that its confronts us with a vision of death that finds wayward souls wandering dark roads in continual searches for the comfort of home… searches that always end fruitlessly in the cold passenger seat of an anonymous car.

Folklorists Richard Beardsly and Rosemarie Hankey were the first scholars to collate and organize all of the thumb-waving road-weary specter stories. Their 1941 study collected 79 disparate
American accounts of the tale. Their resulting report on the data managed to separate the tellings into four distinct categories, the first being the full version I related above, which was the most common and, in all likelihood, the original, “authentic” version. Another category involved the aforementioned ill-fated return of the forgotten personal affect. The other two versions? They get a bit more interesting…

Wednesday: Vanishing Hitchhikers and Prophecy

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Look read about the origins of the legend from Monday and how Charlie Sheen inevitably got involved from Wednesday…

As we’ve already established that murder footage shot by a serial killer would not, in all but the most specific hypothetical conditions, be considered snuff, and because the Internet is already rife with clip art-skull-ridden serial killer annals, I promise not to belabor this bit. I’m only bringing it up because, going into writing this series of posts, I didn’t have any clear idea of how many killers, serial or otherwise, were known to have taken video footage of their crimes. If you had told me there was a government warehouse of the stuff right next to that ark storage depot, I couldn’t have argued with you. The reality, though, is that depraved maniacs who murder just for pickle tickles don’t tend to D.A. Pennebaker their heinous acts (or, at least, do a great job of hiding or destroying the tapes/discs/files).

In the 1980s, Northern California crazies Leonard Lake and Charles Ng tortured and killed at least 20 women, videotaping some of the torture, but none of the hands-on killing. Likewise, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, a couple of murderous Canadian sex nuts, videotaped the sexual torture of two of their three teenage victims, but none of the deaths. In 1997, two German citizens (Ernst Dieter Korzen and Stefan Michael Mahn) who recorded the murder of a prostitute became the first people ever to be convicted for making snuff, but, prior to their arrest, they made no attempt to distribute the film and documentation of the case (most of which I found in UK tabloids) is unclear (or in German). Also in Germany, that dude (Armin Miewes) who slaughtered and ate his willing Internet lunch buddy taped his Killin’ and Cookin’ pilot episode. Most recently, in 2007, two sadistic Russian thugs (dubbed the “Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs”) used a cell phone to record themselves murdering a defenseless old man.

(Rumors continue to circulate about “snuff” footage filmed by the Zodiac killer. Most recently, as reported by Blue Line Radio’s blog on January 14th of this year, a man named Dennis Kaufman, who claims his father, Jack Tarrance, was Zodiac, supplied the FBI with segments of a heavily damaged film reel alleged to contain video evidence of a murder.)

Where, oh where, kind readers, does this leave us?

Find out AFTER THE JUMP!

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Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Look read about the origins of the legend from Monday and come back Friday for the finale…

The grisly half-truths associated with the Manson Family did more than just inspire one author to off-handedly coin the term “snuff film” (see Monday’s post) – they inspired a nation to collectively wet its pants and shriek at the thought of a cult pandemic. Manned by the media and powered by irrational fear, the rumor mill began grinding out stories of cult activity, both in the US and abroad. The assumptions offered about Manson snuff films had some basis in fact – In 1969, several of Manson’s BFFs hijacked and robbed an NBC-TV truck packed full of film equipment, some of which was eventually recovered, snuff-free, by police. The ancillary whisperings of an International outbreak of brainwashed cabals with wicked leaders and sinister agendas, though? Grossly (and I mean really extra disgustingly) exaggerated in almost every way possible.

But no less artistically inspiring.

The story of the first nationwide snuff freakout supposedly began with one man, one newspaper and one appallingly awful exploitation film. When Allan Shackleton, President of Monarch Releasing Company, a small film distribution venture known for releasing low-budget nudie flicks, read a newspaper article about a rumored South American snuff ring, he saw dollar signs. And motorcycles. And boobs. Shackleton was remembering a little-known exploitation film called “Slaughter” that had been just barely released in the early ‘70s. It had what he needed: South America and a cult-themed premise. All it was missing was the snuff climax. But it took a lot more than that to discourage the executive producer of 1972’s “When the Cat’s Away” (tagline: “She’s X-rated and IN COLOR!”)

In 1976, Shackleton re-released “Slaughter” as “Snuff,” complete with the tagline “The film that could only be made in South America… where life is CHEAP,” and a newly filmed ending, in which an abrupt cut gives way to a vérité-style scene of an actual murder. To help sell the implication that the film contained real-life snuff footage, Shackleton even pulled a William Castle-esque stunt in which actors playing anti-“Snuff” picketers were planted outside theaters. He needn’t have made the effort. Women Against Pornography (WAP), a radical feminist group that, three years later, held a notorious protest march through Times Square, immediately bunched up their panties, declaring the film a revolting paean to sexual violence. Their very-real boycott of the movie was covered by CBS news. By the time “Snuff” was outed as a fake, and “Slaughter”’s original filmmakers were suing Shackleton for altering their film without permission, the idea of snuff had become a mass cultural folktale, spawning a bevy of low budget horror films (including Weird Things favorite, “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer”) and plenty o’ friend-of-a-friend accounts of actual snuff film screenings.

Learn how Faces of Death and Charlie Sheen play pivotal roles in our international fascination with the snuff film urban legend AFTER THE JUMP…

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I’m sitting here watching Wes Craven’s original “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” trying to ambivalently accept the almost-certainly mediocre reality of the forthcoming remake (or “reimagining” or “reboot” or whatever limp cultural buzz word the blogging apologists and taste-making glossies are using to describe the new Bay-produced “A Nightmare on Elm Street”) and I’m trying to be positive. How am I doing so far? Christ, guys, I know that the new movie won’t make the old one disappear, and I know that the original film’s latter-day sequels (save for The Dream Warriors and New Nightmare, which are awesome) tarnished the original’s reputation far more than any dully predictable modern update ever could, but still. I get weirdly emotional about this stuff, okay? Last time Pepsi changed its logo, I got drunk and set a fire in a graveyard.

The point is, if they’re going to recast Freddy and play with the story a little, I’d rather see them fully embrace a new mythology rather than simply redecorate the old one. Here are my suggestions:

Make Freddy something other than a power plant employee…

Apologies to all organ banks in Sector 7G, but Freddy’s a clever guy. His blade-gloves denote a flair for craftsmanship, his murders scream creativity, and he had the confidence and self-motivation to come back from the dead and learn how to murder people in their dreams. Imagine how fast he’d pick up QuickBooks. Maybe he was an architect. He could say stuff like, “I’m an architect of nightmares!” and “Your skin will shingle the gambrel roof of my Dutch Colonial hell!” Or maybe he was a chef – “I’m cooking up nightmares!” “I used to be a chef.” Either way, they should find a way to fit in an insert shot of his last W-2. I think the fans would like that.

Add a parents of Elm Street vigilante arson B-plot…

The parents of Elm Street rose up mob-justice style and burned Freddy Krueger to death. It only follows that, as a result, they’ve acquired a taste for blood and roam the streets of town looking for any excuse to reclaim the surge of empowering, adrenaline-soaked horniness they felt as they watched Freddy crisping away into a carbonized husk. Maybe do it so we begin to associate them with the weapons they use – like one guy only uses Molotov cocktails and one lady only uses hairspray and a lighter. The other two just use matches, but one’s really fat and the other has a weird birthmark covering half his face, so we associate them with those things and, anyway, those two die early on in a fight with drug dealers.

Have the token nerdy kid program a robot to dream, then use a wig and lipstick to disguise the robot as one of the girls so that Freddy goes inside the robot’s dreams and gets trapped somehow (software?), but then gains control of the robot’s consciousness. Then have the robot fight Molotov Cocktail and Flaming Hairspray…

During these scenes, the kids can watch Freddy on a computer monitor and he yells stuff at them. Either “I’ll open your skulls as if they were casement windows” or “I’ll chef all of you!” depending.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Look for new installments Wednesday and Friday…

This week, I want to talk about the rumors and assumptions surrounding snuff films, and the supposedly booming black market that creates and distributes them. First things first, though, we need to look at how most folks define snuff in order to understand one of the core truths about it – Snuff doesn’t not exist because of the limits of human greed or depravity; snuff doesn’t exist because of the limits of its definition.

The verbal dances we undertake in attempting to nail down specific definitions for broadly understood, but taxonomically elusive, phenomena like pornography have nothing on the addendum-flinging rumba that people perform in pinning down snuff films. In this sense, snuff is the opposite of the former example – the struggle to dogmatically codify pornography is an exercise in encapsulating an ever-expanding set of subjectivities as they relate to the perceptions and intentions of both producer and consumer. Porn can encapsulate anything from video recordings of fully exposed penetrative intercourse to a photograph of a person’s bare feet. The working definition of a “snuff film” is so ludicrously specific as to systematically eliminate every known snuff-like recording from the mass hypothetical understanding of what constitutes true snuff.

Snuff started out as a fairly open-ended term. First used by author Ed Sanders in his 1971 true crime book “The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion,” the term “Snuff films” was used to describe an alleged series of violent (possibly murderous) home movies shot by Manson and his acolytes. Though no footage ever surfaced, the term caught on and became a catch-all label for any video recording depicting the actual murder of a human being (I’ll get into the specific history and examples in Wednesday’s column).

Today, the definition has been vastly constrained by a huge honkin’ caveat:

Said murder must have been committed for the express purpose of distributing (and, according to the strictest definition, profiting from) the recorded footage.

Click AFTER THE JUMP for the rest!

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Re: Changelings – I’ve got good news and bad news.

The bad news is that, if your kid was covertly swapped for an aging elf or weird, magical stick, you’re pretty much boned. True, there are a couple fairy tales where parents manage to wrangle their young one back from its abductors. In one Swedish story, a mother is advised to brutalize or abandon her newly acquired changeling boarder. After the woman refuses, she finds her real son wandering through the woods. He explains that his troll abductors freed him, unharmed, after witnessing the woman’s compassion toward their big-boned, slobbery offspring. Unfortunately, I would assume that this is a late edition to changeling lore, as it reads like a fanciful PSA put out by some child-welfare lobbying group trying to halt all the folklore-fueled child beatings. In all probability, the closest you’re ever going to come to getting your baby back baby back baby back is ridding your house of the magical imposter.

To humanely evict a changeling, simply brew beer, or cook stew, in a bunch of eggshells. European cultures as disparate as Spain, Wales and Germany all believed that this bizarre and seemingly random culinary display would essentially gobsmack the miniature pretender into revealing its true identity. According to the stories, the changeling will begin laughing and shout something like “I was born 100 years ago, and since then I have not seen so many egg shells near the fire!” before vanishing or jumping up the chimney. (Interestingly, the notion of changelings as far older beings than their appearance suggests extends beyond the elvish elder tales – a post-pubescent developmentally disabled teen was often feared for having the mental capacity of a child and the sexual urges of an adult. Women, especially, were afraid of being sexually assaulted by what superstition told them was a creature possessed of a hidden, ancient, and ultimately malicious, intelligence.)

The other way to give a changeling the boot was to, quite literally, give the changeling the boot. Right in its goofy face. And then whip it with a belt. And throw it in the fire. Then chug a beer and spit on everything from “The Dark Crystal.” Abuse the monster to the point where it fearfully retreats, or its mommy comes to collect it.

Ahem.

The good news is that there are plenty of ways to prevent stupid elves from sticking you with their stupid senior citizen in exchange for your stupid baby.

Martin Luther, captain of the protestant reformation and full-on panty-tossing God groupie, had a big foam finger that said “Changeling Infanticide.” He wasn’t shy about letting everyone know that a changeling was a malformed progeny of Satan’s oogy womb and, as such, was “only a piece of flesh,” soulless and fit for brutal dispatch. It’s no surprise, then, that many Protestant churches advertised Christian baptism as a great way to protect a baby from the handsy mitts of devil-humping trolls. For extra insurance against magical baby theft, Protestants recommended that a bible be placed in every child’s crib. The Catholic Church also hopped aboard the bandwagon, espousing the crucial importance of baptism, and recommending nursery decoration that included rosaries, a liberal smattering of holy water and crosses. Lots of crosses.

The most popular secular changeling prevention method? Constant vigilance. The effect of this simple advice was two-fold:

It ensured that, should a child turn out to be mentally or physically handicapped, the blame fell squarely on the mother. In an age when the mom was expected to do all the early child rearing while dad was out felling trees with his bare nuts, even the most innocuous negligence (an accidental nap, a trip to the bathroom) was seen as an open invitation to all eerie creeping things – “Free Baby! Come and F***ing Steal It!” As a result, mothers of suspected changelings were often ostracized by neighbors and abandoned by their husbands, especially if they refused to take the steps necessary (i.e., booted steps onto the changeling’s goofy face) to rid the household of the mystical blight.
On the upside, it allowed mothers to focus solely on parenting, which, in many cases, gave destitute women a well-deserved break from butt-mauling labor. People (presumably women) even began spreading stories about newborns that had been stolen after landlords had prematurely forced the recovering new mothers back to work in the fields. Score one for the ladies.

Most articles about changelings mention that if folks still credited developmental disabilities to supernatural baby trades, there’s no question that autism would be blamed on dark elves, nefarious fairies and regular trolls. I’m glad that people are past these beliefs – past the fantastical scapegoating of unlikely enemies and ready to turn to science for rational, empirically derived answers. Now we know, for example, that it’s actually evil, undetectable chemicals hidden in vaccines that cause developmental disabilities.

How far we’ve come.

Still, it’s interesting to think about how Martin Luther and Jenny McCarthy are connected by more than just a storied reputation for nailing things.

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: Meat Cleaver

As used by Jason in: Friday the 13th Part 3; Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter; Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

Victim(s): Harold; Jimmy; Junior Hubbard, Ethel Hubbard, Jake

A cleaver is a big square knife. (Not square like the kid who sits behind you and talks about taking his guinea pig on vacation with him; square like the head of the kid in front of you who has a giant square head and everyone calls him “nipple finger” because, also, one of his fingers is all messed up and looks like a nipple.) Staring at a meat cleaver, you might think “Don’t cut me with that! It looks sharp!” To which I would reply, “Actually, it’s rather blunt. Cleavers aren’t like most kitchen knives, which are made from very hard steel and designed to gently, but precisely, slice. Cleavers are made from soft steel and designed to violently chop, using the power put behind the knife to forcefully propel the blade through sinew and bone.” “Okay, okay!” you’d reply, “Just please don’t cut me, mister!” “Then shut your mouth and hand over the emerald spider” I’d yell. Then you’d toss me the emerald spider and I’d return it to the museum and you’d escape from the police but then die from the Curse of the Emerald Spider. And as you died, you’d whisper “Ugh! I’ve been killed by ‘the Curse of the Emerald Spider’” because people like it when characters say the title of the movie.

STORY TIME! (Cleavers appear throughout Zen Chinese lore) Once upon time, an unskilled knifesmith was watching a professional butcher cut up ox carcasses. “How do you do that?” he asked the butcher, to which the butcher replied, “Instead of cutting through the bones, I cut between the bones.” “No, I meant the way you’re sitting.” The first man replied. “Oh. I’m quadruple jointed.” HAPPILY EVER AFTER!

Speaking of China, many stupid gringos refer to a Chinese chef’s knife as a “Chinese cleaver.” I guess they look sort of similar… IF YOU’RE RETARDED! The Chinese chef’s knife has the same thin structure as a general-purpose American kitchen knife, and is primarily used to cut vegetables or boneless meats. The reason for this is China’s exorbitant bone tax. By the time animals are mature enough to be slaughtered for food, they’ve already paid most of their bones to the government in order to avoid being killed for sexual pleasure by jailed sex criminals who receive delinquent animals in exchange for good behavior. The amorphous, obstacle-free structure of dutiful taxpayers makes mass food production easier, and also reduces transportation costs by ensuring that livestock can be stuffed into, and blown through, pneumatic tubing. Meanwhile, the government has a steady supply of animal bones for their secret project. (Some people think it’s a skeleton boat.)

STORY TIME! (Cleavers appear throughout Zen Chinese lore) Once upon a time, a frustrated peasant asked Confucius to explain why the philosopher was always discouraging commoners from emulating the habits of the wealthy. Confucius responded, “Why use an ox-cleaver to carve a chicken?” “Because I’m effing poor,” responded the peasant, “and I can’t afford a good chicken knife.” “Then I shall make you a chicken knife by pulling metals out of the Earth and shaping them with my mind, like how Magneto makes his chicken knives in X-Men.” All Confucius asked in exchange for the knife was a chicken dinner, but the man refused and so Confucius wrapped him up in synthetic webbing, explaining, “This is like in Spiderman.” HAPPILY EVER AFTER!

Try crushing a bunch of garlic cloves with the flat side of a hard, slicing knife.

Whoops! The blade cracked. That was your parents’ best knife! It cost, like, $200! What were you thinking?! It’s from William Sonoma. That means it was the Pre-Jay-Z-boycott Cristal of knives! You are in so much trouble! Oh my God!

But wait… hold my hand and with one lick of my Time Patch…

We’re back before you broke the knife. Now – try crushing a bunch of garlic cloves with the flat side of a cleaver.

Look at that! The softer steel and wide shape of the cleaver blade makes it perfect for crushing things. Whoops! You’re parents were saving that garlic for their turn on neighborhood vampire patrol tomorrow. I guess they’re going to get turned into vampires and then come back here and kill you and you’re sisters.

Sorry, I only have one more lick before the Time Patch runs out and I want to be able to see Spoon twice without having to drive all the way to Boston. Yeah, no, they’re awesome live.

STORY TIME! (Cleavers appear throughout Zen Chinese lore) Once upon a time, a taxpaying pig slid all the way to the Chinese capitol and asked the Duke of China what the government was doing with all of his bones, “Secret project.” Replied the Duke. “And the bones of my family?” asked the pig. “Secret project.” Replied the Duke. “And the bones of my friends?” “Secret project.” “And the bones of my enemies?” asked the pig. The Duke put placed his hands on his hips. “We put those in a big hole and spit on them for fun. And pee on them.” “Oh.” Said the pig, smiling, and painfully slid away. Later, one of the Duke’s closest aides asked the Duke, “Why did you lie to that pig and tell him that his enemies’ bones didn’t go to the secret project?” To which the Duke replied, “Because I wanted him to leave. Duh! It was, like, a strategy. That pit thing sounds pretty good, though. Get some people on that. I wanna pee on some bones.” HAPPILY EVER AFTER!

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

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

Out of all the ye olde speculations as to the motives of changeling-planting baby swappers, my favorite involves geriatric elves using human homes as unknowing assisted living facilities. Essentially, an aging elf musters up some sort of human infant glamour, gets traded off with a human child and spends his golden years playing peek-a-boo and getting ambushed by the tickle monster. No word on what the other elves did with their newly acquired human fussbudget, but if they can make an ancient elf look like a newborn baby, they can make a newborn baby look like an impressive hand-carved mahogany desk.

Another popular theory was that magical younglings needed human milk to thrive, while their birth mothers ran smoothest on squirming baby meat. The changeling would drink its fill from an oblivious human’s teat as the breastfeeding mommy’s actual child got all ate up. What’s more, stories of milk-ravenous fairies resorting to kidnapping extend beyond changeling lore – some European cultures told tales of strange creatures stealing lactating women for use as perpetual wet nurses in maternity wards of the damned. Many of the same people also theorized that a pregnant fairy required a female human midwife to assist with the birthing.

Both of these ideas hinge on the notion of human maternity – both physical (lactation) and emotional (maternal instinct/experience) – as some sort of specialized Earth magic required even by those beings with direct, mystic lines to the planet’s center. In other words, it makes women, and, by extension, humanity, an innate and integral component of nature, even as it applies to mythological eco-systems. But what’s folklore if not an opportunity for the tellers to embellish the details of their own universal significance? Regardless, Imagine having your boobs sucked down to husks by a magic cave’s worth of caterwauling fairy spawn. Or just watch some of the anime where that happens.

Then, of course, there are the people who think all the trolls, fairies and elves are just being mean. In the stories where this is the case, and the creatures are perpetrating tike exchanges just to rattle the ranks of humanity, the kidnappers hold on to their offspring and, instead, leave a stock – a magic, baby-lookin’ hunk of wood that gradually appears to sicken and die. Meanwhile, the mystical child thieves can raise the stolen baby as their slave, eat it or sell it for parts. In one Scandinavian tale, a bunch of trolls set up an arranged marriage between their changeling and a troll prince with a human fetish. There are even bittersweet stories where desperate monsters steal babies because they just want to experience the love of a child (feel free to add your own bitter quotes around the word love if you were molested by trolls or something).

All of this just so adults could feel better about punching under-aged retards. Or, as you will read about on Friday, so they could feel obligated to throw them into fires.

Friday: Changeling Prevention and Stolen Child Retrieval

An abridged compendium of ye olde folk remedies and archaic antidotes culled from UCLA’s Archive of American Folk Medicine

Today’s ailment: Sore Throat

Eddie Vedder’s Noose

You will need: 1 Strip of Red Flannel

Instructions: Tie flannel around neck

Some Kind of Crazy Voodoo Sh-t

You Will Need: 1 Sheep’s Heart; A Bunch O’ Unused Pins; 1 Fire

Instructions: Insert pins into sheep’s heart; burn heart in fire

Note: Apparently, this doesn’t actually cure the sore throat, but rather summons the witch that caused it. What I’m saying is, you might want to have, like, a blessed dagger or Methodist gun or something.

Human Health ? Goose PTSD

You will need: 1 Live Gander; 1 Competent Fowl Wrangler

Instructions: Have wrangler dip live gander’s head into throat of the afflicted 3 times, each time making sure not to remove the head until the gander honks.

The Neck-Water Swig

You will need: 1 Bowl; Water

Instructions: Fill bowl with water; Bathe neck; Drink water

Note: If you live on a mountain or a hill, the water MUST be procured from the side opposite the one you inhabit. Otherwise, you’d have to drink the water and then bathe your neck in it, and this isn’t that kind of website.

LEECHES!

You will need: LEECHES!

LEECHES!: LEECHES!

Note: !!!!!!!!!!

You Say “Tomato,” I Say “Sore Throat Curative!” Then, for Legal Reasons, I Add, “I am Not a Medical Professional, so you May Want to Call the Whole Thing Off.”

You will need: 1 Tomato

Instructions: Rub tomato on feet; Rub tomato on throat

Mixology 205 Final Exam

You Will Need: 1 Glass of Water; 1 Rusty Nail; 1 Bedbug

Instructions: Mash up bedbug; Put mashed bedbug into glass of water; Stir bedbug drink with rusty nail; Gargle resulting concoction

Necrophiliac’s Foreplay

You Will Need: The Hand of a Person who Died an Untimely Death

Instructions: Rub throat with corpse hand; Enjoy

A Day like Any Other

You Will Need: Sweaters; Whiskey; Quilts

Instructions: Don several layers of heavy clothes; Jog around the block; Drink 4 ounces of whiskey; Go to sleep beneath heavy quilts or blankets

Dr. Wistar’s Balm of Wild Cherry

You Will Need: 1 Time Machine; Confederate Money

Instructions: Use Balm as Directed

All this week Matt Finley takes a look into the changeling. Look for posts Wednesday and Friday that complete his horrendous tale about tricksy elves and those unfortunate enough to be mistaken for them.

Even for 17th century Sweden, it was a strange trial. If their court testimony is to be believed, the couple didn’t intend to kill their son. Or, rather, the thing that wasn’t their son. According to them, the ailing 10-year-old being they abandoned atop a freezing heap of fermenting manure wasn’t even human. The couple did have a son, but, years earlier, he had been stolen by elves and replaced with the strange, growth-impaired elfin facsimile that had just coughed up its last breath from atop a lonely pile of animal crap. And that wasn’t the couple’s fault – the elves should have retrieved their dying offspring and, in exchange, returned the family’s rightful child.

Note that it wasn’t the parents’ story that made this trial so unusual; it was the fact that the case was brought to trial at all. Back then, in the same way that severe mental illness was often diagnosed as demon possession, birth defects and growth impairments in children carried their own mythologically charged explanation – changelings. Identifiable by their pale skin, or strange vocalizations or malformed limbs or spines, changelings were believed to be children of elves, fairies or trolls – dwindling races that used the human baby swaps to ensure nurturing upbringings for their twisted younglings. Cases of changeling neglect, abuse and murder weren’t uncommon, and certainly weren’t often prosecuted. Hell, Protestant leaders, including Martin Luther, were famously ambivalent to, sometimes even trending toward approving of, the murder of suspected changelings.

The problem was two-fold:

Scientifically speaking, diseases like Down syndrome, spina bifida, cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis weren’t understood. Especially given that many of these disorders take months, or even years, to fully manifest, it was easy for people to believe that their once seemingly healthy child had been covertly switched with the grotesque spawn of a foreign biology. Remember: supernatural creatures were already a rich part of European – and proto-European – oral tradition. Attributing these strange maladies to these ubiquitous fantastical antagonists took only the slightest flick of Occam’s razor. Also, most changeling tales, including the one recounted above, involve a male child. It’s not a coincidence that human males are more susceptible to birth defects than females. Also, pragmatically speaking, have you ever tried to pass off a baby troll as a little girl? It’s like trying to take E.T. into Chuck E. Cheese and not get arrested.

Economically speaking, the peasant class (traditionally the most superstitious of the social castes) was poor. It’s no wonder that one of the classic marks of a changeling was a voracious, insatiable hunger. If a family was comfortable, it was because every member of that family was working their backs to the front to put food on the table. Sad as it is, an impaired child whose only physical contribution was food consumption could easily become an object of resentment, derision and, ultimately, neglect or abuse. It’d be a lot easier to rationalize such blatant dereliction of the maternal/paternal instinct if the wittle cutie were actually an insidious cuckoo placed in the residential nest by nefarious monsters.

But wait… what was the endgame for the supernatural baby traders? What kind of futile insanity did folks invest in preventing these Middle Earth switcheroos? And what happened to that Swedish couple who were tried for murdering their son?

Freaking relax. Jesus. All your questions will be answered this Wednesday and Friday.

Except that last question. I never found out what happened to them.

Shortly after being dragged to shore and cut out of the custom-made oak barrel that she’d ridden over Niagara Falls, Annie Taylor told the press, “If it was with my dying breath, I would caution anyone against attempting that feat…” It was on October 24, 1901 – her 63rd birthday – that Taylor packed both herself and a mattress into the wooden vessel and became the first person to ever stunt drop over Horseshoe Falls (all such stunts are performed on the Canadian falls due to the jagged rocky hostility of the American ones). Arriving on shore with a gash on her head, but otherwise intact, the aging schoolteacher patiently awaited the riches and fame that she had been certain would follow her (and her outsized three-quarter-life crisis) over the pummeling torrents of icy water. Alas, Taylor would spend the last 20 years of her Earthly existence hustling pocket change from tourists who, in exchange for a meager fee, could take a picture with the pioneering daredevil and her sidekick, the barrel. It wasn’t just her act of daring that was largely ignored – it was also those admonishing words she had spoken to journalists.

10 years after Taylor unknowingly opened up a new frontier of falls stunting, English circus performer Bobby Leach, who had already made multiple trips through the Niagara river’s whirlpool rapids, became the second non-suicidal person to purposely careen, unguided, over the perilous 173-foot drop and into the river below. Leach survived the fall, but still managed to break both knees and fracture his jaw. Though he was able to parlay his stunt into a successful touring career, his death was as inauspicious as Anne Taylor’s life – he broke his leg slipping on an orange peel and succumbed to the resulting infection. Wah wah waaah.

The next person to challenge the falls was Charles Stephens, whose ill-fated 1920 journey ended with the removal of a single severed arm from the splintered mess of Russian oak that had once been the British barber’s protective barrel. Don’t feel bad though – both Bobby Leach and Niagara River boater William “Red” Hill, Sr. warned Stephens that his untested barrel was likely to double as his coffin. Sure enough, the anvi-lcum-ballast that Stephens had attached to his feet tore right through the bottom of the cask, ripping Stephens, who was secured into an arm harness, into three distinct pieces.

Stupid and tragic as it was, Stephens’ death had a bright side – the next brave-hearted, fool-headed Niagara daredevil could look at that gross, severed arm and reflect on how not to go over the falls. In 1928, Frenchman Jean Lussier took his reflections beyond the obvious conclusion of “test your friggin’ barrel” and decided to take on Horseshoe Falls in a giant rubber ball. 6 feet in diameter, with a still frame, 32 liner inner tubes and a heavy rubber bottom to prevent rolling, the ball cost Lussier his entire life savings, but earned its keep on July 4, 1928 when it successfully bore its intrepid French cargo over the watery precipice.

In 1930, an obsessive mystic name George Strathkis attempted a barrel ride over Niagara. He survived the drop but suffocated to death when his vessel became trapped behind the falls. Oops.

Remember Red Hill, Sr., who, along with Bobby Leach, called-out Charles Stephens for being a careless idiot? Well Red was a local celebrity, known both for rescuing countless careless swimmers and boaters from the Niagara River’s dastardly current, and for several well-publicized jaunts through the whirlpool rapids. Red had a son – William “Red” Hill, Jr. Red Sr. was never goofy enough to attempt a falls stunt, and died of a heart attack in 1942. Nine years later, though, Red Jr. decided that the best way to honor his father’s memory would be a madcap jaunt over the falls. Eschewing wood, steel and common sense for inner tubes, canvas webbing and outright insanity, Red, Jr. built “The Thing,” a stack of inflatable rubber rings bound together with canvas and fish netting. With a crowd, including his wife and 10-year-old daughter, looking on, Red, Jr. slid inside his maniac tube and rode the river over the falls. The next morning, after Red’s mangled corpse was discovered near the Maid of the Mist boat dock, the Niagara Parks commission declared falls stunting illegal.

Like that ever stopped anybody.

Little is known about Nathan Boya who, in the summer of 1961, showed up unannounced at the falls with a giant reinforced rubber-and-metal orb called the “Plunge-O-Sphere.” Boya took the plunge, came out unscathed, paid a $113 dollars in fines and went on his way, saying only that his trip had not been a “stunt,” but rather something he needed to do. Years later, a family member of the Caliguiri Brothers, the owners of a New York fixtures company that helped design the Plunge-O-Sphere, reported that the native Bronxite had performed the feat to impress his girlfriend. Given this information, I’d move the Plunge-O-Sphere from the middle of the “Necessity” circle to the portion of the Venn diagram where “Stunt” and “Necessity” overlap (but, obviously, still completely outside of the “Revenge” circle).

By the 1970s, the excitement surrounding courageous Niagara plunges had dwindled. More folks survived than not; modern technology continually offered better and better solutions to the problems of air supply, impact and river currents; and the success of survival only meant being pulled from a barrel or bathysphere in handcuffs. A full 12 years after Boya’s necessity, a Canadian named Karl Soucek, who billed himself as “The Last Niagara Daredevil,” survived a trip over the falls, resulting in the confiscation of his homemade barrel. In 1985, 22-year-old Stephen Trotter became the youngest person to live through a falls stunt (and, later, the only probable member of the 172-Foot-Drop Club: he repeated his stunt 10 years later, this time with his girlfriend riding shotgun). 1989, however, saw the first two-person trip over the falls, when two Canadian men, Peter DeBernardi and Jeffrey Petkovitch, took the plunge in a giant, handcrafted steel barrel. Additionally, Canadian John David Munday took on, and survived, the falls twice: once in 1985 in a homemade barrel and once in 1993 in a converted diving bell.

And that’s it for successful and/or mentally competent trips over Niagara’s Horseshoe Falls. June 5th 1990 saw Tennessean Jesse Sharp steer a kayak over the falls. Yeah – his body was never recovered. Then in 1995 man named Robert Overcracker jet-skied himself over the brink of the falls. To his credit, he had a parachute, and planned to drift softly down into the river. To his detriment, the friend who prepared the parachute forgot to tether it into Overcracker’s pack. *blushing shrug.* The last person to tumble over was an unemployed Michigan man named Kirk Jones, who successfully blundered over the cataract without any sort of barrel or life preserver or even floaties. Jones’ testimony as to stunt vs. suicide attempt flip-flopped several times, though his family remains convinced that the act was a courageous spectacle rather than a gratuitously awesome goodbye, cruel world. The good news is that Jones has a job now – stuntman at the Texas-based Toby Tyler circus.

Phew.

The stunts described above were performed alternately by professionals, morons and insane people. You probably shouldn’t try any of them unless you really, really want to.

Below are descriptions of three grotesque monsters. Two of them are merely the fictional creations of popular artists; one is a creature that has actually been reported. Can you Find the Fiend?

A) This terrifying ape-like creature, which is rumored to be the deformed offspring of a gorilla loosed during a circus train crash, prowls the woods surrounding Kansas City.

B) Alleged to stalk the hallways of a well-known American University, this monstrous primate is supposedly an escaped scientific specimen.

C) These vicious, man-sized apes are rumored to protect the forests surrounding a legendary city of riches.

Find the answer AFTER THE JUMP (more…)

If you graduated from high school, there’s a good chance that, at some point, you had your physics acumen tested by way of an egg drop competition. So, you suffocated your egg in old bubble wrap and foam insulation, wrangled a mess of Popsicle sticks into the approximate shape of a box, Koosh-balled the hell out of the whole business and left its fate to gravity’s butter fingers. The brass-balled Niagara daredevils attempted similar feats – except they were the eggs, and while it was blind, stupid courage that brought them to the lip of the falls, it was their makeshift barrels, boats and bathyspheres that ultimately had to carry them over. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. 75 years’ worth of stuntmen, performers and sailors challenged the Niagara River before anyone dreamed of taking on the falls.

When people look at a giant waterfall, they instinctually want to send crap over it. Visit Niagara and then tell me you didn’t wish you had a dilapidated schooner full of wild animals to drop over the roaring cataract. I use that example because it’s totally what you wished, but also because in 1827, the owners of the only three Niagara-area hotels had the same collective dream (although their vision also involved lots of flying “No Vacancy” marquees and airborne dollar signs slam-dunking cash wads through money hoops). After procuring a condemned boat called the Michigan, the intrepid hoteliers began rabidly advertising that the “pirate Michigan,” along with a cargo of “animals of the most ferocious kind, such as Panthers, Wild Cats and Wolves,” would plunge over the falls on September 8. Word spread and people gathered. On the publicized date, a crowd of 10,000 onlookers watched as one buffalo, two raccoons, one dog and one goose road the Michigan over Horseshoe Falls (two bears were placed on the boat, but escaped into the river before the vertical drop). Only the duck survived.

The first Niagara daredevils, who may have had the recently pancaked buffalo in mind, avoided the actual falls, preferring instead to take on the surrounding rapids, gorges and whirlpools. Beginning in 1829, when famed stunt jumper Sam Patch (AKA “The Yankee Leaper”) successfully completed a 125-foot feet-first leap into the Niagara River, performers and wannabes from all corners of palookaville began squaring off with the area’s most treacherous geography, and the falls became an incidental backdrop to a vast culture of thrilling death defiance. Swimmers challenged the rushing river waters upstream from the falls. Along the river’s banks, divers flung themselves from makeshift ladders and platforms. Stuntmen and sailors attempted to steer boats and converted barrels through the treacherous downstream whirlpool rapids. But in 19th century Niagara, amid all the varied calculated showmanship and reckless heroism, one type of act reigned supreme– the gorge-spanning tightrope walk.

Of the dozen or so high-wire performers who balanced their way across the 160-foot-drop between tenuously strung cables and a definite, tangible fate (most on foot, though in 1869 J.F. “Professor” Jenkins crossed on a velocipede [all I can picture is Professor Frink riding Mr. Garrison’s IT]), none compared to the nimble Charles Blondin, AKA The Great Blondin, and his well-muscled, business-savvy rival William Hunt, AKA The Great Farini.

The Great Blondin (real name Jean-Francois Gravelet), a French-born acrobat, arrived in Niagara in 1859 with the intention of crossing the gorge on a tightrope. After stringing a 3 ½-inch-thick, 1,100-foot-long rope across the canyon, the svelte, mustachioed performer completed his goal with seemingly effortless aplomb, and immediately began working to up the ante. Over the next two years, Blondin performed a cornucopia of increasingly absurd acts, all while perched high above the Niagara River’s icy water and pummeling currents. He crossed blindfolded. He crossed on stilts. He crossed carrying his manager on his back. He crossed with a portable stove, sat down in the middle of the rope and cooked and ate an omelet.

During the second year of Blondin’s success, a new talent arrived in Niagara. New Yorker William Hunt had abandoned his family, his girlfriend and his name to become the high-wire extraordinaire known as The Great Farini (an unapologetic bid to cash-in on the erotic mystery of a European pedigree). Strong as moonshine and focused as a Ford Focus, Farini had one goal – out-perform Blondin. For his first stunt in Niagara, Farini high-wired halfway across the gorge, used a second rope to descend all the way down to the waiting Maid of the Mist, enjoyed a glass of wine (how European), climbed 160 feet back up to the tightrope and completed his crossing… only to re-cross minutes later, blindfolded and wearing baskets on his feet. Whereas Blondin ended his performances by humbly asking the audience for donations, Farini preceded his stunts with solicited sponsorship deals and publicity campaigns that guaranteed larger crowds and bigger profits. Farini matched Blondin stunt for stunt, carrying a local woman across the falls after Blondin piggybacked his manager, and even one-upping the omelet act by schlepping a washtub out on the line, lowering the basin down into the river, hoisting it back up and washing a dozen handkerchiefs in it. On several occasions, he called Blondin out, directly challenging him to mano a mano competition. The Frenchman never responded.

Eventually, Blondin moved to England where he became a respected acrobatic performer. Farini followed him and ultimately emerged the more successful man, touring much of Europe as an acrobat before eventually teaming up with P.T. Barnum to work behind the scenes as a circus coordinator. Interestingly, despite Farini’s long and varied career, it’s still Blondin whose name is synonymous with Niagara high-wire acts. As they say – life’s a bitch and then you yell at it until you get throat cancer and die a prolonged and agonizing death.

At the dawn of the 20th century, the ropes and platforms and fearsome freestyle strokes of daredevils past would be overshadowed by a new frontier in insane, ridiculous name-making – the journey over the falls.

(Continued on Friday)

Niagara Falls also has five separate year-round haunted houses because, well, it’s a huge, majestic waterfall. The house with the most tourist acclaim (based on TripAdvisor.com’s user ratings) is Nightmares: Fear Factory, where Canada’s primary export – fear – is rendered from the phantasmagoric dreams of children who saw their parents murdered, sweetened with real Maple syrup and shipped off to Africa. Nightmare’s prolific brochures and advertisements lure in the tourists (myself included) using three gimmicks:

1. A vague back story about a grumpy old coffin maker who used to operate out of Nightmare’s building. Kids made fun of him, and when he tried to shoo them away, somehow a coffin fell on him and he died. Now his ghost haunts the building or something.

2. A Splash Mountain-inspired offer of two mid-attraction keepsake photographs taken during the house’s most terrifying moments.

3. A safe word (“Nightmares”) to shout if and when you want to prematurely back out – an option that, according to the ads, has been taken advantage of by more than 100,000 paying guests.

My experience as it relates to the gimmicks:

1. I still don’t know what this almost-certainly apocryphal tale has to do with anything. The story suggests a cantankerous ghost, bloodied coffins and a vengeful agenda. Also, maybe an America’s Funniest Home Videos tape where the coffin topples over, or a Benny Hill sketch where the guy chases the kids. Nightmares: Fear Factory is a pitch black maze where startling sound effects give way to screaming actors shooting pressurized air at your genitals.

2. The closest thing I experienced to the freak-out visible from space that they portray in the ads was my reaction to Nightmare’s 13.95 CAD admission fee, and even then I just quietly wet my pants while sighing. Granted, in my picture, I was nervously laughing while cowering my way through the maze, holding my girlfriend in front of me like some sort of fright plow. Needless to say, I didn’t pay the extra scratch for the photo. (If you’re that desperate for it, just picture a quivering Shaggy desperately clinging to a stoic Ellen Ripley.)

3. I don’t know. I bugged the guy at the box office to give me more information about the chicken tally, but all he could tell me was that it spanned 26 years of bok-bok-b’gokking wieners. I can’t imagine that many people being inconsolably terrified of a dark hallway that they paid handsomely to grope their way down. The x-factor is drunkenness – the 600,000 gallons of water that drop over Horseshoe Falls every second have nothing on the gross volume of alcohol consumed by college-aged tourists every hour. 90,000 of these so-called chickens were probably just triumphantly declaring their location. “Nightmares! WHOOOO!”

Unrelated Note: If you look at Niagara Falls, Ontario as Canada’s perception of what leisure-seeking Americans value, there’s nothing more telling than the giant sculpture of Frankenstein’s monster eating a hamburger. Seriously, take a look AFTER THE JUMP!

Wednesday: 100% more barrels

Weird Thing Thing Th-th-thing Things! I just got home from Niagara Falls, Canada and have plenty of legends to share with you. Most are awesome, and a couple are even not gross fabrications. But before I get to the good stuff, I need to check up on some facts and catch up on some Caprica. Until Wednesday’s information-stuffed edu-palooza of falls facts and historical japery, please accept these ramblings on some Weird Things-relevant Canadian miscellanea that I encountered:

Apparently, nothing complements an enduring wonder of nature like creepy waxen celebrity models. The Ripley-owned Louis Tussaud’s waxworks are here, as are the Movieland Wax Museum of the Stars and the Rock Legends Wax Museum. The clear winner, though, if even just for its esoteric morbidity, is the Criminals Hall of Fame Wax Museum.

The heart of a standard wax gallery’s charm is, of course, physical recognition – artistic skill is represented through the artist’s ability to create lifelike facsimiles of ubiquitous public figures. The Criminals Hall of Fame clearly understood this principle enough to know that, given their artist’s ability, it might be best to stick to the second- and third-stringers. In other words – name recognition. The downside is that the well-known criminals – Al Capone, John Wilkes Boothe, Charles Manson – all end up looking like the same dead-eyed off-the-shelf mannequin in a fly-by-night Halloween store’s window display. Even Hitler comes off as a Fuhrer-inspired SS surplus emporium floor model. The upside is that you get to see what are probably the only existing wax replicas of halfway-obscure, all-the-way-bitchin’ ne’erdowells like Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory (bonus: this display features a gratuitous, but lovingly sculpted, naked tit) and 19th century American serial killer H.H. Holmes.
Sure – some of the costumes were probably bought wholesale from a bankrupted Olde Time Photo business, and yes, many of the wigs look to have been stripped off inherited taxidermy, but the museum does a good job of varying up the criminal element, such that cowboy fans, gangster aficionados and serial killer buffs will all find something to enjoy. In particular, the Mafia displays have extensive information placards. Also, it’s the cheapest wax museum in the area… and where else are you going to see a life-sized wax statue of Timothy McVeigh sharing a jail cell with a one-to-one scale model of Ted Kaczynski?

Unrelated Note: Saw that the Lundy’s Lane Best Western has a delightful little restaurant called “Windows on the Lane,” with (doy!) floor-to-ceiling windows boasting views of the aforementioned lane. Sights include a Wendy’s, a paint shop and an adult video store. If they really want to make people happy, put the windows on the adult video store so the shiftless, defeated pervert of a counter clerk can stare out of the glass and, for at least one moment, revel in the unobtainable beauty of a mid-priced corporate hotel franchise.