Few people on Earth have watched as many vampire films over the past few weeks as the hard-working staff of the 2009 Vampire Film Festival. While they prepare to descend onto New Orleans October 23rd for a four day celebration of vampire-centric film, music and celebration they were nice enough to send Weird Things their 10 biggest pet peeves with the vamp genre.

The search for a long-dead lover. It always ends in finding some poor girl who is the dead amours dead ringer, literally. That plot device had been overused to the point of being clichéd.

One bite transforms you into a vampire. Sorry, this would mean we’d be up to our eyebrows in the pesky things world-wide in about six months.

Vampires must kill regularly to feed. Anne Rice does this, but consider — three vampires in New Orleans killing at least once a night for sixty years. That is over sixty thousand corpses! In a city with a population of less than a quarter of a million! The Civil War was less devastating to the city!

Killer sun exposure. This device is not in vampire lore or Dracula but from the film Nosferatu. Vampires are depicted as an all-powerful, eternal beings but their Achilles’ heel is the sun. How can you be all-powerful if you can be bumped off by a suntan?

Sloppy eaters. I love cioppino, for example. Love it. But when I eat it, only a few drops might end up on my lips and shirt. Why would vampires be any different? Or if you use the analogy of addiction — do addicts spill cocaine? Not deliberately they don’t! In fact they’ll go to great lengths not to!

Flight. No offense but I’m a bit bored by vampires who can fly a la Superman. Or are associated with bats for some reason. Neither has any basis in folklore (well, some Asian vampires can fly…)

Secret vampire societies. Another overworked device that is a bit lame but takes care of one issue with vampires…how the hell do they make a living?

Vampire males who mope about being vampires. Okay we get it, you don’t like biting people for your next meal but please don’t push undead angst to the limit

Ancient juvenile delinquents. You have centuries to grow, to learn, to experience things. And in all that time all you end up becoming is a bully? Frankly, that is hard to believe. Some might atrophy, might go subtly mad as they coped less and less well with change, or become focused on individual obsessions, but wouldn’t others–given the time and the opportunities huge amounts of time provides–evolve into more interesting persons?

Bug-eating servants. Renfield was innovative in his day. Devouring live insects is no longer edgy, but cliche.

Other pet peeves include:

Weird Vampire Sounds. What’s Up with the hissing sounds the vampires make in films.

Letting it All Hang Out. The stupid face they make when they bare their fangs, is that really necessary?

Over stating the Myth. Garlic, stakes, crosses sunlight-one of these usually doesn’t work on vampires. Which ones varies. Usually it is accompanied by ” X doesn’t work!”

All Vampires Are Evil. How would that work, precisely? Even on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where a person’s soul is replaced by a demon’s when turned undead, vampires ended up with a wide variety of behaviors, including Spike (starting before the chip) and Harmony. I’m less displeased if some kind of justification is given, but usually there isn’t even a hint.

Oversexed vampire tarts. They are always played by played by big-breasted, no-talented actresses and the whole thing is tired…at least to the women in the audience.

If you are in the New Orleans area or just really love the idea of those dapper undead scamps please take the time to check out the Vampire Film Festival website. The fest begins October 23rd and runs for four days. We thank them for helping us out and would like to editorially note that we are quite fond of the oversexed vampire tart concept.

If you’d like more information on the Cotesia Glomerata read this stuff. Wow.

Today’s Weird Things chat is going deep into the world of unwelcome guests. Ready the antidote, we’re going to find the Weirdest Parasites in the World.

Here are the ground rules:

• If possible PLEASE include a picture of either the parasite or the animal it infects.

• NO CRYPTIDS, all entries must be verified by mainstream science.

Email all submissions to JustinRobertYoung@Gmail. I’ll see you kids right here at the front page at 5:30 p.m. EST where we will hash out the ultimate champion.

Our baseline comes from National Geographic. They are grasshopper-infecting hairworms.

cientists say hairworms, which live inside grasshoppers, pump the insects with a cocktail of chemicals that makes them commit suicide by leaping into water. The parasites then swim away from their drowning hosts to continue their life cycle.

The truth is out there, we find it today at 5:30 p.m. EST.

Meet the Crying Boy.

In his wake, he’s allegedly left dozens of homes completely ravaged by fire. According to some reports in the UK, over 50 fires have been fought where this painting has been the only piece of art or furniture to survive.

It has since been revealed that the paintings have not always been the same exact picture, many have been traced back to Spanish artist Bruno Amadio.

Are the portraits cursed, creepy relics and harbingers of disaster? Or are they just shockingly flame-retardent department store art favored by tasteless English housewives?

A missing Maltese-flagged freighter has sparked the curiosity of maritime law enforcement as well as those how theorize that the vanishing vessel could be evidence of paranormal phenomenon.

Weird Things contacted Bermuda Triangle expert Gian Quasar (author of Into the Bermuda Triangle) to get his opinion on the case. Although he is quick to point out that we don’t have near enough evidence to conclusively prove something paranormal has occurred, some of the more mundane explanations for ship disappearances don’t seem to apply in this case. For example, the region is not necessarily known for piracy, the vessel did not contain a highly valuable or coveted cargo and the waterways are relatively thick with law enforcement from multiple countries and Interpol.

So what is the answer? Quasar says we just won’t know until the boat is found. And if that never happens, we just might never know.

Here is a link to the story about Hitler’s painting lessons aboard an alien craft, long before he became the power-mad dictator we came to revile.

Thanks to Matt Finley and VenomV for helping with the chat.

Today’s Weird Things chat is a probing look at the oddest interstellar kidnapping stories ever told. Spark up that fire in the sky, we’re looking for the weirdest Alien Abduction Stories in the world.

Here are the ground rules:

• They have to have been reported somewhere else first. No making things up out of whole cloth.

• PLEASE keep them as short as possible.

Email all submissions to JustinRobertYoung@Gmail. I’ll see you kids right here at the front page at 5:30 p.m. EST where we will hash out the ultimate champion.

Here is our baseline, as provided by Three Cheers.org:

The abductee is often told they were chosen to either help continue the alien race or that they are going through this to aid in salvaging humanity.

They are then often escorted to rooms containing humanoid babies or youngsters which are half alien – half human hybrids, they are then informed that some of these children are theirs and are enthusiastically encouraged to personally interact with them.

The truth is out there, we find it today at 5:30 p.m. EST.

This comes from The Metro.co.uk:

The young teenagers were playing by the waterfront in a Panama lake near Cerro Azul when the bald beast emerged from a cave behind a waterfall. They started screaming as it shuffled out “as if to attack them”.

Locals told Panama news the monster was like “Gollum from Lord of the Rings”…

But in a “desperate bid to defend themselves” four children grabbed rocks from the beach and hurled them at the beast.

After offing the beast, the children threw the body in the water and confessed to their parents what they’d seen. The carcass of crazy creature was later found picked apart by buzzards. Like, really, picked apart considering only bleached bones remain of what looks to be a completely intact, if waterfall dwelling, Gollum.

We might never get to examine this anomaly in a laboratory but at least those Central American youths had the times of their lives beating a rare creature to death before carelessly tossing it into a lake.

Hat tip to the one and only Brian Brushwood for this link.

Featuring Weird Things writer Matt Finley.

The video for Baby Laughs-A-Lot

Ah, moons. So often overshadowed by your rocky, gassy, and thermonuclear overlords, you help invoke tides, stabilize axial tilts, sculpt and replenish rings, and provide at least one species with a stepping stone to timidly venture from the safety of their home planet. In this article we pay tribute to all those underappreciated planetary custodians by recognizing five of the downright weirdest moons in the solar system.

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The unfortunate passing of temporary worker at a chocolate factory in Camden, NJ was the Weirdest Death in the World according to our viewers. Check out the recorded of the broadcast including help from Scam School’s Brian Brushwood.

For decades, the Nain Rouge leap-frogged one disaster to the next, always arriving in time to pre-empt tragedy with some goggle-eyed nose thumbing before evaporating into the high drone of an emergency broadcast signal, and for decades, from one disaster to the next, Detroit marshaled and rallied and summoned hope up out of the ashes and bones of the city’s past. In July of 1967, everything changed.

What should have a been a routine raid on an illegal bar turned into a five day riot that ended with the deployment of National Guard and U.S. Army troops. Fueled by festering racial tensions that were only exacerbated when the Detroit police, a source of friction to begin with, started making mass arrests, the riot surprised the entire country – urban living statistics coming out of Detroit portrayed it as a diverse, racially integrated wonderland. (Ultimately, the fault didn’t lie in the numbers, but in rampant, unquantified everyday prejudice, including frequent racially based mistreatment of consumers by local merchants.) In the wake of the confrontation, which was supposedly preceded by several chortling visits from the hyperactive Nain Rouge, even the most adept statistician couldn’t argue with the 43 deaths, 467 reported injuries, 7,200 arrests and more than 2,000 immolated buildings.

Like a wounded, shell-shocked Veteran, the city never fully recovered. The crime rate skyrocketed in the 1970s and the town’s social fabric unraveled. Through much of the decline, the cheeky red gnome didn’t issue so much as a somber Bronx cheer.
For more than two and half centuries, the Nain Rouge seemed conjoined to the city, genetically tethered to it by a thin band of fiction, sharing whatever municipal organ secretes narrative dopamine in the wake of urban injury. But it’s hard to define the identity, the personhood, of a city. It lives in constant symbiosis with its citizens and the culture they mold and consume and re-mold, defining the place as it, in turn, defines them. The Nain Rouge was an identifying aspect of Detroit since its founding, a lodestone of a socio-cultural foundation that many believe to have crumbled in 1967.

After the riots, local and state government banded together to form a committee meant to revitalize – to redefine – the city. In defiance of history, they called the group “New Detroit.” In the last three decades, only a single Nain Rouge sighting has been reported.

Special thanks to Sky News’ Viewers’ Editor Paul Bromley. We writes, what looks to be a pretty awesome blog.

Today’s Weirdest Thing In The World chat will shuffle off this mortal coil, friends, were talking death.

Here are the ground rules:

• Please shorten all entries to the bare bones of the why the death was strange.

• Include a picture of the dearly departed.

• All entries MUST be historically verified or be journalistically verified.

Email all submissions to JustinRobertYoung@Gmail. I’ll see you kids right here at the front page at 5:30 p.m. EST where we will hash out the ultimate champion.

Here is our baseline, courtesy of Neatorama and found by Travis Lopes, the best live chat producer in the business.

Austrian Hans Steininger was famous for having the world’s longest beard (it was 4.5 feet or nearly 1.4 m long) and for dying because of it.

One day in 1567, there was a fire in town and in his haste Hans forgot to roll up his beard. He accidentally stepped on his beard, lost balance, stumbled, broke his neck and died!

Let’s face death, for only then can we appreciate life.