Our faithful chronicler reminds that on this night, the date shared with many other momentous occasions including the annexation of Hawaii (1900), the fall of Saigon (1975) and the coming out of the tv character of actor and comedian Ellen DeGeneres (1997), Beltane Eve is observed (previously here and here) in the northern hemisphere, coopted locally as the syncretion of the day before the feast day of Saint Walpurga, an abbess and Anglo-Saxon missionary from Devonshire to the Frankish Empire.
Converts were encouraged to pray to her for intercession and protection from witchcraft—though Walpurga’s patronage was restricted to hydrophobia, odd given the witch connection, and sailors in distress. Though there’s a lot of regional variation in the way the holiday is kept across northern Europe, common customs include bonfires—a ceremonial burning and/or celebration of the diabolical and a sort of sealing off the portal, marking the last opportunity that the supernatural can cross over from the nether world, until Halloween.
Tuesday 30 April 2019
walpurisnacht
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐, ๐ถ, ๐ , holidays and observances
Wednesday 31 October 2018
Saturday 27 October 2018
fancy dress party
In case you are in need of a bit more inspiration to come up with a Halloween custom as the holiday creeps closer and close, why not consult your friendly neighbourhood AI.
Check them all out at the links above and perhaps find a character that speaks to you for trick-or-treating or your office party—and yes, there’s even a whole sub-set of ill-advised sexy costumes.
What are your favourites?
Friday 26 October 2018
bobby (boris) pickett and the crypt-kickers
We enjoyed this appreciation of the quintessential Halloween anthem, the 1962 novelty song “Monster Mash,” from Tedium—delving into the piece’s musical inspirations and long legacy of homages.
Aspiring actor and musician Pickett was performing a cover of the Diamonds’ “Little Darin’” one evening but substituted the middle monologue with a horror movie exposition of a bridge (in the voice of Boris Karloff) and the audience cheered, and drawing from the earlier novelty hit, The Hollywood Argyles’ “Alley Oop,” and the dance sensation the Mashed Potato, captured by Dee Dee Sharp’s “Mashed Potato Time” and “Gimme Gravy,” Pickett went on to collaborate and compose the graveyard smash. Among the original Crypt-Kickers was pianist Leon Russell. Listen to the song, covers and everything adjacent at the link above.
Wednesday 17 October 2018
decorative gourd season
Building off an earlier exercise in training a neural network to conjure up extremely plausible sounding names for craft beer and small batch breweries, Janelle Shane (previously here and here) brilliantly tweaked the naming conventions slightly to infuse the results with pumpkin spice and other seasonal trappings. Here are some of our favourites but they whole beer menu is definitely worth sampling:
Bog Porter
Winter Winter This Dead Ale
Warmer Hollow
Ale Gore
Spice Prophecy
Pumpkin Disaster
Faceless Ole Ale
Winter Zuul
Check out AI Weirdness (aka Lewis and Quark) at the link above for more and to study the methodology and learn how to develop an artificial intelligence of your own.
Monday 15 October 2018
6x6
mystery machine: a 1999 Scooby-Doo parody of “The Blair Witch Project” from Cartoon Network
the history league: jerseys for fantasy sports teams centred on momentous events, via Shadow Manor’s Art of Darkness
feng shui: the opening of Kyoto’s first dispersed hotel promises visitors an authentic, immersive experience in the old capital
public service announcement: contemporary artists offers updates on the iconic vintage series from the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal organisation
siren song: the micronation of Uลพpis, an enclave in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius
Saturday 28 October 2017
sexy sexy dombie sexy cat
For those still undecided on a Halloween costume, one can always repair to a neural network, we discover via Fancy Notions, for last-minute consultation.
Naturally robots were not prepared for this highly idiosyncratic task but soon became more authoritarian. Ranging from Sexy DVORAK keyboard to suggesting in later iterations that one aspire to be a Starfleet Shark or Mario Lander or the Statue of Pizza or the Twin Spider Mermaid the sub-routine seems to be learning. Check out more recommendations at the links above and see if you find your inspiration.
Tuesday 24 October 2017
trick or treat
For those out there still harboring doubts that Dear Dotard’s regime was about anything other than personal enrichment and propelling a self-styled billionaire from his true status as a heavily leveraged economically and moral bankrupt individual, we present a festive Halloween baseball cap on offer as official presidential memorabilia whose hue compliments that monster’s hair and complexion. It’s becoming a serious challenge to imagine anything more terrifying than the banality of merchandising that betrays a blissful ignorance of the missives and message that it is sending.
Sunday 8 October 2017
aka manto or things that go dump in the night
As part of its annual celebration of the spooky and ghoulish leading up to Halloween, Atlas Obscura gives us a brief but intimate—to let one’s imagination get the better of oneself—primer on the Japanese yลkai (previously here, here and here) that tend to haunt private bathrooms and public, communal facilities.
The bathroom horror trope, predictably, since one is by all rights alone (or within maybe uncomfortable earshot) can be terrifying and could easily become more than one cares to indulge (even the idea of looking in a mirror can be hijacked into a horrific prospect with the right milieu) so consider oneself forwarded, but most seem to be just mischievous, muttering just out of range, making untoward noises or swiping toilet paper and other pranks, if not pitiable spectres and there’s a very specific ritual to summon up, sort of like scrying Bloody Mary (or if you’d rather, Moaning Myrtle from Harry Potter), these tortured ghosts that inhabit certain stalls (the third one or the last one) and people are supposedly due for an encounter with these ghosts within a month after learning of their sad fates. Others still seem more sent to clean-shame those who might not keep theirs in the most hygienic of conditions, with a nasty little water sprite that’s said to lick the mildew off of one’s sink and bathtub. Visit, if you dare, the links above to learn more.
catagories: ๐ฏ๐ต, ๐, myth and monsters
Friday 7 October 2016
amphigorey
In the lead up to Halloween (all the more fraught with terrors should we consider the state it’s in without help from the infernal), TYWKIWDBI serves us a ghastly collection of black-humoured wit from Edward Gorey (more on the writer and illustrator here, here and here). Most—if not all of the panels, are highly unsettling: one, an abecedarium, documents (going through the alphabet in order) precocious children meeting their fates in twisted and atrocious ways, and two an appreciation of Gorey’s equally dark limericks. Visit the blog for more unfortunate mayhem, if you dare.
Thursday 15 September 2016
cabin in the woods
Apparently just in time for Halloween, a developers are hoping to release an augmented reality game to bring monsters into one’s own homes—for those among who aren’t already enough challenged by playing life on hard-mode.
The platform will take full advantage of the surveillance powers of our
smart phones to accurately plot the layout of one’s home (assuming that
many of us reside in places that must be mapped out, like the Overlook Hotel) and will monitor players’ heart rates and galvanic responses to gauge how frightened they are as they are running for their lives. What do you think about that? It won’t be like those whodunnit dinner theatres I suspect and I don’t imagine well catch a reprieve. Who is needing to invite more ghouls and demons into their lives? Announcing it so early, is this holiday-creep as well as holiday-spillage?
catagories: ๐, ๐ฅธ, ๐ง , myth and monsters
Thursday 22 October 2015
5x5: halloween edition
monster parade: ghoulish GIFs for thirty-one days of horror
psychopomp: high-fidelity hardware that aided mediums during sรฉances
a costume, not a culture: just because one can append the word sexy does not mean it’s a good idea for dress-up
revue: from Atlas Obscura’s crypt, an archived celebration of the season
catagories: ๐, ๐, ๐ง , antiques, myth and monsters
Thursday 8 October 2015
humbug or the great pumpkin
catagories: ๐ซ, ๐, food and drink, myth and monsters
Wednesday 1 May 2013
axis mundi or you got to pick up every stitch
I won’t say that May Day (der Tag der Arbeit) is a subdued affair beyond the land of the Franks by any means (there are quite a lot of protest rallies and demonstrations happening—which I was curious to see but I don’t think I should go looking for trouble today), but I did not appreciate the clear demarcations of customs and traditions and the holiday rather snuck up on me, without the Maypoles (Maibรคume) being set up.
It makes some sense, however, jenseits (this side) of the Limes—the limits of the Roman Empire and thus the civilised world, that conquests would have tamped out some heathen celebrations. The follow-on missions of Christianity did not attempt to totally quash but rather integrate and co-opt such behaviour. No one really knows the origin of the beams, temporary totem-poles, regaled and danced around, but some theorise that the tree represents the axis on which the world turns or the cosmological Yggdrasil that connects the nine worlds of Norse mythology. The bit about the ruckus of the night before, Walpurgis, might be a religious conceit, saying that witches gather to dance with their gods or commune with the devil—although it must have always been observed in some manner and with meaning (though now lost) as a cross-quarter day, exactly half a year on towards the harvest festival of Samhain (Halloween). Superstition holds that one will meet a witch on May Day, which old witch and probably why it is a good idea not to go looking for trouble since it knows where to find you.
Sunday 28 October 2012
in season: butternut-salmon lasagna
For this dish to serve 3 to 4, one will need:
- A medium casserole dish
- A large Butternut squash, enough to get 1½ pounds from (600 – 750 grams), minus the skin and seeds (a slender squash, as compared to a dumpy one with wider squash hips tends to have less seeds)
- A bit of butter, flour (about 4 tablespoons each) and salt and pepper and fresh dill (chopped) and nutmeg (Muskat) for seasoning
- 1 cup (250 ml) of cream
- 2 cups (500 ml) of vegetable stock or bullion
- A 9 oz (250 g) package of smoked salmon (fresh or from the refrigerated section)
- About 7 oz (200 g) of grated cheese (gouda or mozzarella)
- A 4 oz (about 100 g) package of lasagna pasta
- A large onion
Begin by shelling the squash and removing the seeds, and then slice the squash into small cubes and set aside.
Pre-heat the oven to 400° F (200°C). Peel and dice up the onion, frying it in a large pan until glassy in some butter over medium heat. Add a few pinches of flour to the pan (about a tablespoon in all) then pour in the broth and the cream, reducing the heat, and add the graded cheese, seasonings and garnish with the bundle of dill. Mix and leave on low heat for around five minutes. Take the uncooked lasagna noodles and arrange in layers in a casserole dish (grease with a bit of butter) apportioning slices of the salmon, squash and a dousing of the sauce, three layers deep. Pour the remaining sauce over the top, spinkling a bit more cheese over it, and allow to bake for about 45 minutes. Enjoy with a fine Moscato white wine.
Thursday 25 October 2012
bunnicula, count duckula
Lore and superstition regarding vampirism, even preceding the imaginations of the writers they’ve inspired, sanction standard horror and a well-developed, though flexible, codex of rules governing the undead, but can also be keenly abstract in their beliefs.
Folklore of some populations in the Balkans, but surely anchored to a place, a patch of land as much as a particular people, created the overall apparition of the traditional vampire but also held the nightmare that inanimate objects, left out in the pall of the full moon, could become vampires. Certain fruits and vegetables were especially prone to being turned, especially melons, squashes and pumpkins still on the vine during this witching phase of the Moon. It is not clear if the vampire produce took on a changed appearance—nor caused much of a bother, other than rolling about and maybe lurching and bumping into things, but they were no longer fit to eat and needed to be ritually destroyed. The notion that gourds could harbour a malevolent, though paralyzed, force is pretty spooky, and there have been some creative and slightly goofy modern retellings. The idea of possession, a curse settling into a plant also made me think of that troupe of evangelizing vegetables from that children’s Christian television show. The practice of making a jack-o’-lantern out of a pumpkin comes from a completely separate string of traditions and folklore from the British Isles—originally, probably from a hollowed out turnip with the practical objective of making a torch whose flame was protected from the winds.