Now that AMERICAN HORROR STORY: FREAKSHOW is taking ont he paranormal uberlegend, it will be fun to actually go back and figure out of the story is true. Here’s a link taking you back to when I discussed this months ago, long before AHS made it a subject matter issue.
As far as my opinion, while I don’t dismiss it completely, I find it a bit unlikely.
But the images and story are creepy nonetheless..
When AMERICAN HORROR STORY: FREAK SHOW debuted this month, strong ratings gave the show one of the biggest premieres. Ever..
But the theme of the show was unsettling to some who enjoy the finer things in life. Such as clowns..
According to various reports now, the ‘pro clown’ community is freaking out over the freak show. While it is strange to even comprehend an entire community of people being pro clown, it appears to be the case..
The show’s scariest character is killer clown. In all actuality, the role in the show actually has people truly freaked out.. People are scared .. and real life clowns are lamenting the bashing of their cherished trade.
Clowns in pop culture are nothing new.
When I was young, Pennywise the Dancing Clown appeared in the television adaption of Stephen King’s IT. Tim Curry’s role as the dancing clown was haunting and effective. Until FREAKSHOW, Pennywise may have been the scariest clown to grace our society..
Michael Myers is also a bit of a clown–the blank face of pale death is reminiscent of the appearance of the zany circus actor. Even professional wrestling tried the clown role with “DOINK and Dink” in the 1990s–of course he was a good guy at first and then took on the role of a villain.
Why are clowns scary?
You may want to check out an truly amazing and listenable GROUND ZERO WITH CLYDE LEWS radio program from the other evening he called “MEDIEVAL CARNIVAL 666.” Lewis did he best to track back the origins of the pale white figure to the Middle Ages, when clowns were introduced to the masses dying from the Bubonic Plague. The clown’s appearance was devised to mock death–the embellished aspects of a clown all had a meaning to represent some part of the process of the body decomposing.
In a 1989 PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER article, the paper profiled a fiction play –based on reality– in which the church employed a squadron of clowns to entertain the dying. But clowns could be traced back even further than the dark times of the middle ages.. Some say they can be found in ancient Egypt in 2400 BC. The ghostface appearance came somewhere in the 1800s..
Film and literature always made them seem scary..
And the fear of clowns blossomed into the phobia it is today.
Even the SMITHSONIAN studied the reasons why clowns were so frightening in a 2013 report. They conclude that people have been fearful for centuries of the appearance of a clown.
Recent news has given us more reason to be unsettled.. Only days ago, parts of California were haunted by the appearance of a clown at night named Wasco. Some reports actually had children claiming that clowns were chasing them around the streets at night with an ax.
The notion of a clown showing up at a time when reality has become unfathomably scary is frightening in itself. Imagine the planet suffering through deadly disease, a possible upcoming food crisis, droughts and plagues, and beheadings across the Middle East, and a clown shows up to sit on your local park bench. Armed with the persistent smile, balloons.. or an ax to chase a child across town..
Goosebumps times 50…
Some disagree that clowns represent death–as we see from the outcry over AMERICAN HORROR STORY, the pro-clown posse is existent.
I argue, though, that they do. Or they at least represent the attempt to mock death–the wild actions and bizarre makeup do have corpse-like features. And more, their mischievousness is tame at face value but also disturbing in a deeper way. Perhaps that is why children jump in fright so often when they initially come in contact with a clown.. especially a clown out of the element, a place such as a bus terminal or under a street light in the middle of the night..
We all seem to be a little unsettled by a clown..But we also latch on to staring at them when we see them. That may explain the amazingly high ratings of AMERICAN HORROR STORY..
So while the clown troupe is annoyed with the representation of their job, perhaps another group is going to get angry at the latest FREAKSHOW.. In the latest episode, conjoined twins played by Sarah Paulson disturbed viewers even more with the singing of the song CRIMINAL by Fiona Apple.. Let the outrage over that begin.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQKJ3jlRhG8]
The threat of violence against feminist Anita Sarkeesian has refocused attention on the often-misunderstood #Gamergate debate.
Video game culture wars.. They are certainly are not new.
It wasn’t long ago that people accused GRAND THEFT AUTO 5 of deliberating degrading women… And that debate has only intensified with newer fights and fads online..
I have not been covering the game world lately, but there is something very notable taking place within it. Apparently there are high amounts of threats against women who review games.. the latest include a threat of violence against feminist and gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian.
CNN reports,
“It’s been the talk of video game professionals for the past two months,” gaming critic Evan Narcisse said. “The culture wars that … hit other creative media (are) hitting video games now.”
Here is the lowdown on something you may already know about if you’re a gamer in a gaming world. Men who play the hardcore violent video games are on one side. On the other: The new world of gamers, which so often includes women. And the world of online hate has entered the real world of pain..
CNN attempts to sum it up this way:
Then there are the others (see above) who smell a fight and have piled on. The vitriol, much of it aimed against women, has spilled from the Internet into the physical world. In recent months several women in the gaming industry say they received rape and death threats so specific they were forced to leave their homes.
Some gamers have adopted “Gamergate” as the term for a loosely defined movement defending hardcore games against criticisms from feminists and others.
It all begins, we are told, with a critic claiming that often women are the victims of violence in games. Or used as eye candy. And on that point, it’s undeniable. Women get bad treatment in really violent male-oriented games.
But it has moved on from there.. Now the allegations of sexism in the gamer world are coming to light, women claiming harassment from within the industry, and the constant barrage of rhetoric of males vs females over games online. This is the a pop culture war—not a culture one, perhaps, since it is confined to one small sliver of American life.
The gamer world needs to come out of the basement and realize that what they are playing is not real.. This nonsense of female vs male is ridiculous.
For the men who hate women in entertainment and games, get ready: Women are the ones now buying games, deciding what movies to watch, and creating popular television shows. All-male oriented entertainment is going to be gone.. just as the movie studio creating a all-female GHOSTBUSTERS remake. The wizard master may be the male in that one..
Also, for those playing video games, mired in the world of fiction and false realities, get a grip on yourself before you wreck yourself.. I wrote about how too often our pop culture and entertainment gives us false sense of security. While you play games, the real world is at war outside your safe walls.. For some people, the walls come down and the real world enters.
I am sure GAMERGATE will continue.
After a while, it will burn itself out.. and the fight if today will be a distant memory of tomorrow.. as women slowly begin taking their path into the rough and tumble gamer world. Men need to make room.. Haters will hate. But gamers will play.
And the only way to unite gamers is to play a game.
It was the best of times..
The worst of times..
The rest of the time,
The world’s sublime.
Here is a sample of a sampling of news from the world that we think you should know today.. Some good, some bad, some scary, a few fads.. read and weep, Earthling..
Some political news to begin
Here is a bizarre story from the political world in Florida: Apparently there was a debate at the Governor’s debate over a fan that was propped to keep Charlie Crist cool. Here is the VIDEO from CSpan..
The rules said no fan. Crist denied knowing about it. Eventually Florida Governor Scott came out after several minutes of shouting, jeering, and controversy from the audience.. It was tense, weird, and perhaps one of the weirdest moments in debate history in politics.
“Nothing to see here” continues strong in Japan.. Radiation levels from Fukushima are the highest ever after the monster typhoon that just struck. As a matter of fact, they are three times higher than previous levels. And the previous levels were high..
Who is the mystery man that was not wearing protective gear around an Ebola infected patient being transported from Dallas to Atlanta.. But at least he had a clipboard. Meanwhile, there are worries in Dallas that things may get worse. Also this: The hospital that seemingly has screwed up so bad in Dallas is saying sorry for the Ebola mistakes it has made.. Kevin Sack in the New York TIMES writes about the downfall of a hospital due to Ebola. This seems to be a very big wake up call hospitals that are not trying to prepare–as the hospital in Dallas apparently fell victim to.
The NEW YORK GIANTS received an EBOLA primer.. They play this weekend in Dallas.
Meanwhile in the UK, a nurse is finding herself in hot water after purposely breathing on a child … she was doing so while she had a throat infection.
There are accusations being made of a double standard in France’s judicial system. Apparently a topless woman imitated an abortion at a church. She simulated an abortion by carrying to the altar pieces of a calf’s liver, symbolically representing the fetus. The act culminated in Bouton urinating on the altar’s steps.. But amazingly, that’s not the story of controversy. Some are saying that the penalty is much less than the group got when they put a pig’s head out of a mosque. A fine for the abortion stunt. Prison time for the ‘religious intimidation’ of the pig’s head bit. Either way, always topless, rude and crude.
Real news is beginning to look like a horror movie..
This is a scary map: Watch 13 years of a drought develop in the state of California on one GIF.. the most amazing sight to see is how the dark red sort of develops out of no where over the past 24 months.
This must have been a horrific scene in Missouri: Spiders “bleeding from the walls” in a home drove the family out–6000 venomous spiders to be exact. Two pest control companies were unable to stop the deluge of horror..
VICE has a must read article running about the man who trick the chemtrail conspiracy theorists.. Michael Allen writes in the publication about a man who used ‘video evidence’ to show chemtrails–all the while duping people into thinking it was evidence of chemtrails. While this is not a commentary in my opinion that dismisses all chemtrail evidence, it certainly shows how pervasive hoaxes can be online. Perhaps someone needs to come up with the ANTI-SNOPES page, a site that will announce a conspiracy theory but discredit anyone who is trying to discredit it with fakery. Nonetheless, good read in VICE.
Here is another hoax that people are STILL falling for: The future according to Adam Sandler. The pervasive rumor that the actor predicted many horrid tragedies was put out by the ONION in a satirical piece. That has not stopped people from believing it and re-posting the fallacious information.
TIS THE SEASON: A group of ‘ghostbusters’ in the UK say that when they went to a haunted mansion, they saw ghosts crawling around on the ground. The SCOTSMAN has the full creepy story of the haunted house..
I think this may just be a tree, but the DAILY STAR in the UK is reported that a ‘terrified mum’ (love their way of speaking) saw a black eyed ghost in a tree.. I still just think it’s a tree.
A website posted a list of the most annoying Facebook status updates. We agree.. along with it, throw in the photos of food and other Instagramed-colored hue-ed photos that pretend life is grand.
I am sandwiched in the middle of two locations GAWKER reports have the ‘ugliest accents’ in the United States. I pick Pittsburgh, simply because the Scranton accent has more weight in the coal region of Pennsylvania where I currently reside. The dialect is peculiar and often tough to listen to.. the videos in the GAWKER article are right on the money.
This is the best month of the year for creepy stories, strange feelings, and the thinning of this reality and merging with another. Or so we think..
October’s season of the witch is one of the most beautiful times of year.. Leaves are shifting from dark green to the amazing colors of autumn.. The winds are a bit more chilled, with each breeze seemingly blowing deeper into your soul than those of the warmer months..
And the darkness–the darkness!
The darkness penetrates everything in October..
The sun is seen less. When it is actually in the sky, it shines dimmer–of course if you’re not reading this in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s quite the opposite for you.
There’s one more thing that often happens this time of year.. at least to me: Shadows.
Shadows invade …call them shadow people, shadow figures, or just quick sliding darkness in the corner of your eye.
The ‘shadow people’ craze began over a decade ago. Since that time, the Internet and other paranormal sources have been in a constant buzz about what people were seeing.. But shadow people, or ghostly darkness, has been within paranormal lure for generations. The tales of people seeing figures, dark creatures, or even shadow rats from their vision have been around for years. Some have applied very skeptical science to the notion that we are seeing quick bursts of a paranormal world. Hallucinations, perhaps.. Maybe just optical illusions that are mind is being tricked into thinking is real.
But try to tell yourself in the midst of seeing a peculiar darkness in your sight that it’s not real.. Attempt to explain away what your mind is attempting to explain .. Give it a go and dismiss that creepy and chilling feeling that comes over your entire being when you see a presence of darkness, and feel the cold wrath from the corner of a room..
Floaters? optical tricks? brain lapses?
Or maybe a shadow being…
Maybe this world is thinning this time of year–the season where we are on the verge of spilling over into a spirit world..
Ever since I was a kid, I always felt a bit strange on or around Halloween. There seemed to be a very thin reality during that evening.. Maybe pop culture has reinforced the premise that Samhain is really a paranormal reality.
I cannot say if the other worldy does in fact exist. However, I can say this: I have seen more than a few shadow figures this year.. All of them have taken the shape of a human mist, and all but one vanished when I looked directly at it.. That one that did not haunts me.
We may not be able to hear him nightly on the radio until his non compete clause with SIRIUS expires in 2015, but that is not stopping the talk show legend from taking to the Internet to express his anger over the apparent mishandling of the Ebola situation in the United States.
Bell posted several links over the past week concerning the outbreak. The latest update from his Pahrump homestead featured a photograph of a clearly unprepared person at the airport in Dallas as an Ebola patient was loaded no an airplane to Atlanta for treatment.
Minutes later, Bell said,
It seems to me that as long as Ebola remains spread only by bodily fluids that we will survive it, I am not sure we can survive the present level of stupid. Turns out the Nurse in Ohio actually called the CDC before boarding with a fever and they said no problem…..
And he was right.
When news today was revealed that the second nurse in Dallas actually was on two airline flights over the weekend, the government seemed to initially blame her… At one point the CDC said it was the wrong thing for patient number 3 to do. But news broke late in the day that the nurse actually called the CDC and they said it was permissible for her to take the flights! The CDC said that since her fever was below 100 she was not in the category of high risk.. Hours after taking a flight from Cincinnati to Dallas, she was in an isolation ward ..
Bell’s words are right on the money.. A ‘present level of stupid.’ The problem is if the ‘stupid’ continues, the present level of reality may change.. The United States cannot afford many more stupid mistakes in the Ebola nightmare..
Tonight in an apparent attempt to save some face, President Obama addressed the nation concerning the crisis, saying that “Ebola swat teams” were prepared to respond to infections.. That term raised the eyebrows of some, with the term seemingly implying that violence against patients infected may be administered.. Instead, the nation was reassured that it simply means the CDC will be able to get to any hospital in all 50 states within 24 hours should another case pop up..
The same CDC that blamed the first nurse in Dallas, and now the same CDC that permitted a second nurse to board a flight while being in an Ebola watch group.
Art Bell is not the only former radio host who is speaking out about the latest news. Today, Matt Drudge broke his Twitter silence to post one of his first Tweets in months–after all of his others were deleted–simply saying “self quarantine.”
While Art Bell may not be heard nightly at this time, his words still register with the thousands of followers who like or comment on his semi-regular status updates. It’s notable that as of late, Bell seems to be more active on Facebook. Perhaps that is because, as any veteran listener could testify, his eyes and ears have always been on the Ebola story since the early 1990s.
Without a doubt, the high desert will be active with typed words from Bell until his voice will again be on the Dark Matter Radio Network in the late summer of 2015.
And interestingly to contemplate, but then we will know what type of story Ebola turned out to be: A scare or a culling.
The CDC says that the nurse who become the Latest to develop Ebola should not have traveled .. Reportedly they boarded flight 1143 with a slight temperature on Monday.. A day later it became the second health worker from the the Dallas Presbyterian hospital to be diagnosed.
The CDC insists that since the nurse was not vomiting or bleeding, the likelihood of the disease spreading is low..
Tell that to he 132 people who now are under the Ebola watch list..
This ominous Drudge tweet is making major headlines .. Earlier this year, prior to deleting all of his tweets, Drudge posted famously ‘have an exit plan.’
This new tweet is even creepier to some who think that Drudge has his finger on the pulse of news and pop culture ..
Now revealed: Chemical weapons have been found in Iraq..
Even more, the new work times reports:
In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.”
So the problem was not as the Bush administration said.. The problem for these secret missions have not been active chemical weapons but instead only and abandoned ones..
Even more from the TIMES:
The American government withheld word about its discoveries even from troops it sent into harm’s way and from military doctors. The government’s secrecy, victims and participants said, prevented troops in some of the war’s most dangerous jobs from receiving proper medical care and official recognition of their wounds.”
The TIMES goes on to say:
Congress, too, was only partly informed, while troops and officers were instructed to be silent or give deceptive accounts of what they had found. “ ’Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to say,” said Jarrod Lampier, a recently retired Army major who was present for the largest chemical weapons discovery of the war: more than 2,400 nerve-agent rockets unearthed in 2006 at a former Republican Guard compound.”
The scandal here is that we have NOT been told that chemical weapons have actually been found–instead we let the talking point survive that no chemicals were located..
The broader implications here are also that ISIS may be able to get into a stash tucked away somewhere.. The problem created over the secretive actions is that we believe, in essence, that Saddam’s Iraq was free of WMD. That clearly is not true.. While there may have been no active nuclear or chemical facilities creating anything new, there certainly is enough of the ‘old’ laying around to cause problems..
The worker apparently had a fever on Tuesday, was quickly tested, and was isolated within 90 minutes because results showed that the 70% fatal disease is present..
Unknown at this time are several facts, including who the person is and what contact with Thomas Duncan there may have been.. Regular? Occasional? Was protective gear malfunctioning in Duncan’s room? Another fact missing is whether or not this person was among the 70 people already being monitored for the disease…
Also unknown at this time as how many people this new patient, and hospital worker, actually came in contact with! The ever broadening Ebola crisis is now taking center stage deep in the heart of Dallas.
It seems very likely that we will hear more cases pop up over the coming days, if not hours. That 21 day incubation period has come and gone in many cases, and now the people who have been exposed to Ebola will undoubtedly begin to get revealed as the disease takes over their internal organs and begins to cause hemorrhagic conditions..
The concerning part, too, is that American hospitals may not be equipped for a rush of hundreds of patients coming to emergency rooms with symptoms of Ebola, even though many of the people who think they have it will not and fear will guide them to the hospital… Hypochondriacs exist.. But what if one actually has Ebola…?
The World Health Organization warned that 10,000 people per week will soon get Ebola…
I think back to the Georgia Guide stones intrigue from a few days ago, when the new pillar that said 2014 was installed–and removed a few days later. It would certainly seem that somebody knows something more about big events place final months of this year
All of the strange blood moons may now make sense. Blood above and below.
Is it raining is it snowing, is a hurricane a blowing? The danger must be growing.. 