A day late ...

Happy Moon Day! (June July 20th, at least here in the States; it was the 21st in Europe)

"Yes, the surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe." -- Neil Armstrong, the second and third things said after stepping onto the lunar surface.

Buzz Aldrin held the first Lunar Communion earlier in the day; Armstrong observed but did not partake. (A bit of trivia: the small chalice used on the moon is still kept at Aldrin's church in Texas.)

Aldren's first words when stepping onto the moon? "Looks like the secondary strut had a little thermal effects on it right here, Neil." Rather more businesslike.

PotW

The new picture of the week is up -- it was actually up on the website yesterday morning, but I'm just getting around to posting it here.

20 July 2008 Verdun Manor, 2001 This is one of the better photos Ysengrin took of Verdun Manor at Thrillvania. It was a slow night, as witnessed by the short line of patrons on the porch. Location: 32° 41' 11" N, 96° 14' 42" W

The framing was consciously inspired by a large photo of the old Verdun Manor facade in Forney, given to Lance by Mike Malec and hung prominently in Lance's trailer.

This photo was a long exposure real-film 35mm photograph, one of a series I took with slightly different framings and exposures.

I'd put the actual date as either October 29th or 30th, the Monday or Tuesday right before Halloween that year, as the full moon was the day after Halloween. Attendance was always very lean on weeknights right before Halloween (that was the only time we were open other than Friday-Saturday-Sunday), and the photo would have been taken close to closing time (10pm for those nights), so the small crowd on the front porch would not have been unusual.

I've been working on detailed plans, descriptions and renderings of proposed scenes intensively for the last few weeks, so my thoughts naturally turned to my days at Verdun Manor for this week's image :)

Blast From The Past - Satanic Panic

Oi! While doing the tape-to-DVD thing, I came across a local Texas news "exposé" on Satanic cults in south Dallas county. Highlights include:

• two teen-aged silhouettes give emotional (and lurid) tales of their brushes with ritual sacrifice, sex and drugs at the hands of older students/adults ...
• the reporter tells us that only Satanists tip over tombstones, then visits a local cemetery to show us purported Satanist-overtipped headstones as proof ...
• A reconstructed Satanic altar from a thirteen year-old's bedroom is shown. It looked like they emptied a Spencer's of anything non-comical with a skull on it.
• A counselor (identified as from a local church) tells us that Satan is the new marijuana and that a majority of our teenage children are either being courted directly by Satanists or (shudders!) are already dabbling in Satanism, which leads to suicide or (for the lucky few) recovery in their Prayer Camp™
• The Satanic influence of rock music is thrown in almost as an afterthought as we're told to turn in tomorrow night for the next part, when we'll be shown how to tell if your child is being brainwashed by Satan.

Satan or Satanic was used thirty-plus times in a two and a half minute report. At least on the up side, none of the terms "pagan," "witch," nor "occult" were used.

This would have been around October 1989; the lead-in to the piece was a story on Sara Aldrete, a member of the very real bloodthirsty cult led by Adolfo Constanzo. (Thanks to Google for that info; I just vaguely remembered the broad details of the kidnappings and murders because it was all over the news at the time)

So, how many of you born in the 1970's remember kidnapping and sacrificing babies to Satan?

Yes, I should be doing other things, but this was too good not to share. Why did I have this on tape? It's simple - it was in a newscast I caught in the before-and-after timer window while taping Star Trek: Voyager. EDIT: Actually it couldn't have been Voyager; I've been swapping tapes back and forth while trying to give the DVDs some kind of sense, and I don't know what the original show was now. The date is good from bits embedded in the newscast, though.

A better blast from the past

I've also come across then-live footage of the Space Shuttle Columbia landing (STS-5, off of CNN).

Less Daily Spam

Well, after dropping the airmail.net address I had for over a decade, the spam I have to dig through is back to managable levels. From 1K+ a day, I'm now down to 12-15. For some reason there was a massive increase in spam over the last few weeks, almost all with the same quirky formatting (though they were for many different subjects with apparently different target URLs), and it was making it impossible to keep up.

Most of the remaining spam is using the "Angelina Jolie Nude" hook; it seems to be making the rounds again.

Anyway, I'll be digging back though the mail to make sure I didn't miss anything before dumping it all.