Horror Report

Category: pop culture

  • Did James Webb find Melmac? A requiem for an alien

    Did James Webb find Melmac? A requiem for an alien

    A few amazing things occurred this week. Images were finally revealed from the James Webb telescope that are giving us a visual representation of the past.

    Of course while they are amazing and breathtaking to some, others have found reason to ponder how similar they look to those awful class school pictures from the 1980s..

    But it was in this context that aliens and space life really was abundant this week. For some odd reasons I decided to re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-watch the final episode of ALF.. and it just so happened that I also spoke to friends about the little alien from Melmac this week as well..

    We already know that Melmac exploded. But why couldn’t Webb find it since it was looking at early space!?

    While the James Webb telescope found no evidence of the planet Melmac or ALF’s cat eating friends and family, or Willie Tanner’s real life criminal history, it also did NOT find the continuation of the famous 80s TV show..

    Here is a bit of a background..

    ALF. THE ALIEN THAT WAS

    Those who were fans then or newcomers long after the 20th century may know very well the real pain that ALF brought. the 80s TV show was a hit. He had commercials. He appeared at awards shows.. he had a Monday night regular series on NBC from September 22, 1986, to March 24, 1990..

    The show got that popular that he was even invited to the White House by Nancy Reagan for the 1987 Christmas party… There were rumors that President Reagan himself said ALF was his favorite show.

    For the long duration of the program, the hairy alien tried dating. He went on Johnny Carson. And from the first episode, he just wanted his heavy hairy and sarcastic body to be able to get back onto a fixed spaceship and back to his home planet again.

    (And it is interesting to note that even then Senator now President Joe Biiden got mocked by ALF)

    x x x

    Think about the pain that ALF felt, forced away from his life.. His planet gone for good and the survivors just zooming around space presumably looking for other lost creatures from the planet. Alf forced away from his home. And on this planet Earth just to search for cats to eat in a society that frowned on it… He even blew up a kitchen..

    But in the end, Alf had a tremendously awful existence on Earth despite the humor.. He just wanted to go back to a home that was gone forever… And Willie Tanner never had the right parts to fix the ship to take Alf back up into space. The military was always on to the Tanners from episode one. They figured he was harboring a space creature.

    So with this sad existence, it is with particular pain that so many of us watched the finale on that fateful night of March 24, 1990.

    By 1989 the show’s ratings were declining. And as its fourth season was coming to a close, network execs pondered whether the series would even continue..

    ALF’s writers created a cliffhanger for the season’s final episode that would by default become the series finale.

    THE CLIFFHANGER

    Here was the plot: While using a ham radio in a failed attempt to contact Australia, Alf intercepted a coded message sent by his old Melmac friends. They invite ALF to join them on New Melmac, an offer he has trouble accepting but ultimately accepts. The Tanners take him to a secluded field and say their goodbyes. Just as the spaceship’s lights approach, the U.S. Military Alien Task Force arrives, capturing ALF and scaring off the approaching alien ship. The episode ended with a title card that read “To be continued.”

    And that, my friends, is where it ended.

    There was never ever a continuation. Nothing. we never knew what happened.

    Did they take him to torture him at a black site? Was he an eventual Dr. Fauci animal experiment on a virus? Did he go crazy and attack all of the humans including the Tanners? So much could have been done. But it just ended with a whimper as opposed to a bang.

    Since this finale painful finale where Alf tries to make jokes about sports and beer with military abductors, we know that producers were verbally told that a season 5 could occur.

    However, the network changed its mind and abruptly canceled the show. That fall, a different notable program would debut in ALF’s old time slot: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air..

    A 1990 newspaper report in the Baltimore SUN summarized the finale of ALF.. It praised the death of the ALF show.. they longed for the 1988 version, as the 1990 version had been moved to Saturday nights. Death.. The show was doomed.

    FAILED ATTEMPTS AT NEW ALF LIFE

    There WAS actually an attempt to bring us the follow up on that awful finale. It is rarely recalled because of fan hostility about it…

    In 1996,  ABC aired the made-for-TV-movie Project: ALF.

    The plot is as follows: It revolved around the Alf’s antics while being held captive by a government agency. ALF was the only character from the original series to appear in the film, a fact that contributed to its many negative reviews. The more-than-five-year gap between series finale and TV movie also bred a lack of interest. Project: ALF has largely become a forgotten footnote in television history.

    Fans, including us, reject this final movie .. it’s not canon. It is not ALF universe materials. We live in the world where season 4’s cliffhanger still exists as is..

    From popular media reports, Max Wright was so ready to be done with the show that when the final day of taping ended, he immediately cleaned out his dressing room and left the studio, without saying goodbye to any of the cast or crew.

    And that is too bad. As aforementioned, a season 5 could have benefited Max Wright greatly.

    It was over. And quite frankly, it was not a proper send-off for what Alf created.

    Top this day, it we ignore the ALF project and instead we want that last final season. We desire to know what occurred, how the little alien was able to survive with gun-drawn government officials breathing down his hairy neck..

    Another final attempt was made to bring us Alf’s antics.

    HEY-OOOOOO!!

    In 2004, a series called ALF’s Hit Talk Show debuted on the TV Land cable network.

    The show featured ALF in a late-night host role, with Ed McMahon as his sidekick. Guests included Drew Carey, Joan Rivers, Bryan Cranston and Tom Arnold.

    The show lasted seven episodes before being canceled.

    It just was never meant to be.

    THE REAL ENDING NEVER HAPPENED

    Season 5 was meant to be–and it just did not happen.

    So we still long for the REAL true and actual series finale .. that finale that could create finality to the painful existence that ALF felt..

    Instead we got knee-jerk reaction style shows .. We received next-to-nothing style programs to just give fodder but not feed.

    We cry for Alf.. all these years later. He stands there still, waiting for the government folks to make their decision on what painful future Alf would exerience..

    Is there a future for an Alf in the modern James Webb world?

    Well.. one of those photos from Webb of the many millions of billions of distant galaxies that harbor trillions of zillions of planets may very well end of Alf’s home planet.

    We find comfort in the thought that he is back there instead of some lab..

    Stranger Things gave us the massacre at Hawkins Lab.

    Maybe Alf could at least give us the massacre in a Secluded Field as he escaped their grasp……..!

  • A blast to the past thanks to a Geocities screen shot

    A blast to the past thanks to a Geocities screen shot


    oneterabyteofkilobyteage    :

    original url http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Woods/2663/

    last modified 2005-02-26 17:51:45

    We have been following oneterabyteofkilobyteage for several years–amazing old content.. It’s less nostalgia and more a document of the life and times of Geocities sites that once were (kids these days probably would never understand how weird and wonderful Geocities was when it existed) ..

    Nonetheless, this one struck us.. A screen shot of a old site for a kid named Justin, or J.T., who apparently died.. It’s difficult to know what the story of this human being was by a simple screen shot..

    So we dug a little deeper ..

    His name was Justin Tandan Schumacher, and he died when he was 16.

    He was born on February 25, 1980 and died on July 25, 1996 when a drunk driver struck him..

    A visit to the site on the Wayback Machine appears to show that Justin’s parent created the Geocities site at that time..

    On the page, someone writes the details of the crash and also includes photographs of the car that was involved.. from the text:

    Have you ever thought, in your wildest dreams, that while on your way to pick up a pizza, you could end up in a mess like this? This is what happened to my two boys and two of their friends.

    After a long day of working on Justin’s pick up these 4 boys, ages 16 & 14, decided that they were hungry. It was only 9:30 at night, so they called and ordered a pizza and were on their way to pick it up. It’s only 5 or so miles from where they were. What can happen in that short of time, on a week night, that early? Well, plenty, when you encounter some person, who has decided to take a handful of pills and DRINK and DRIVE!!!

    You see this man was on a back road, going east and had come to a T in the road, where there was a stop sign. Apparently, because of the .32 Blood Alcohol Level in his system and the unconfirmed report of narcotics, it prevented him from seeing the stop sign. The boys’, heading south, couldn’t see him, because of a corn field.

    In a matter of seconds, they were hit broadside and pushed into a tree. My oldest son, Justin was dead. Killed on impact. Jim, my 14 year old, was taken to the nearest hospital, along with the other 2 boys and the Drunk Driver. Jim was stabilized enough to be transported via helicopter to the nearest trauma center. Jim coded, quit breathing, on the way there and they had to bag him, breath for him until they could put him on a respirator. He also had a broken cheek bone, broken 1st rib, broken collar bone, broken jaw and soft tissue damage to his neck, along with lung and brain contusions. The 16 year old in the back driver’s seat broke his neck and the driver of the car, also 16, (Josh) suffered extreme trauma to his head, that eventually lead to him going into a comma for approx. 2 months. He now has TBI (traumatic brain injury), and is partially parilized on his right side.

    Upon investigation, it was found that the Drunk Driver, a Drug and Alcohol Councilor, from California had a cooler of ice in the front seat. They also found an open bottle of vodka, 100’s of prescription narcotics, a television set and a shot gun in the trunk of his car.

    Of course, as is standards, Blood Alcohol tests were run on the boys’ as well. None of them had, had anything in their systems.

    After spending 3 days in the hospital, the Drunk Driver was turned over to the Authorities and held in the County Jail under $100,000.00 bond. After, approximately, 1 week he posted $11,000.00 cash bond and was released, with the stipulations that he had to check in at the jail 3 days a week and have random drug and alcohol testing done. He was let out of jail on a Wednesday. He reported to the Authorities on Thursday and on Friday, when he didn’t report, they found him dead, in his motel room, of a drug and alcohol overdose.

    It goes without saying that oneterabyteofkilobyteage is often fun and humorous, showcasing old website with terrible moving GIFs and awful graphics.. but sometimes the deeper you go on some of these sites, the more you realize the quality and reality of the early web. There were no fancy selfies .. So many people originally saw the internet as their little place to share intimate details in writing… use Xanga or other sites to create a diary for friends, but mostly strangers, to read.. To connect in some form, to use this new weird technology to find a voice and a place.

    Now it has been taken over by socials… by the anti-socials.. and by corporations.

    But when you visit old Geocities sites as featured by oneterabyteofkilobyteage, especially this one, you get a glance into a time and place of a family.. a parent agonizing over the loss of her child.. and you realize that despite what everyone says, things on the internet actually DO disappear over time. That is tragic for voices that needed to be heard loud and clear..

  • Off to the socials!! Musk takes Twitter

    Off to the socials!! Musk takes Twitter

    “Twitter, Inc. today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company.

    Under the terms of the agreement, Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter common stock that they own upon closing of the proposed transaction. The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter’s closing stock price on April 1, 2022, which was the last trading day before Mr. Musk disclosed his approximately 9% stake in Twitter.

    Bret Taylor, Twitter’s Independent Board Chair, said, “The Twitter Board conducted a thoughtful and comprehensive process to assess Elon’s proposal with a deliberate focus on value, certainty, and financing. The proposed transaction will deliver a substantial cash premium, and we believe it is the best path forward for Twitter’s stockholders.”

  • What you think about this cat photo apparently tells the story of your personality?

    What you think about this cat photo apparently tells the story of your personality?

    We fell for it.. we got the click bait.. and we dove straight in.

    It appears a new “dress” style debate has emerged online–all from an image that was either taken in 2015 or first appeared then.

    This cat:

    It’s walking up–or down–stairs..

    According to The Minds Journal, the direction in which you see the cat walking says a lot about your personality.

    If you think the cat is walking upstairs then supposedly you are optimistic, whereas if you see it walking downstairs then you’re more pessimistic…

    And we have no idea why someone decided that was the case..

    So what does that make us here at the HORROR REPORT?

    The first thing we thought was that the cat was literally walking along a straight flat surface that just had a design that appeared as though they were steps… neither up, nor down.

    So we are just plain old realistic… Or surrealistic..?

  • Zoom doom: 900 employees fired virtually

    Zoom doom: 900 employees fired virtually

    The future is now!

    Live by the virtual. Fired by the virtual…

    Better.com CEO Vishal Garg announced the mortgage company is laying off about 9% of its workforce on a Zoom webinar Wednesday abruptly informing the more than 900 employees on the call they were being terminated just before the holidays.

    “If you’re on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off,” Garg said on the call, a recording of which was viewed by CNN Business. “Your employment here is terminated effective immediately.” He then said employees could expect an email from HR detailing benefits and severance.

  • Superman’s son comes out!

    Superman’s son comes out!

    Clerk Kent and Lois Lane’s son may not have secrets he wants revealed. But his sexual preference is front and center in a new Marvel generation..

    That same-sex relationship is just one of the ways that Jonathan Kent, who goes by Jon, is proving to be a different Superman than his famous father. Since his new series, Superman: Son of Kal-El, began in July, Jon has combated wildfires caused by climate change, thwarted a high school shooting and protested the deportation of refugees in Metropolis.

    “The idea of replacing Clark Kent with another straight white savior felt like a missed opportunity,” Tom Taylor, who writes the series, said in an interview. He said that a “new Superman had to have new fights — real world problems — that he could stand up to as one of the most powerful people in the world.”

  • Michael Myers vs the first responders

    Michael Myers vs the first responders

    This was bound to happen! Judging from the trailers and clips release so far, John Carpenters next installment in the Halloween series threatens to pummel first responders.

    The movie “Halloween Kills” seems to begin with first responders and firefighters trying to put out the fire that Laurie Strode set to kill Michael Myers.

    Instead, and angry and burned Michael exits the home and begins to slaughter any firefighters he comes in contact with, seemingly with their own apparatus and tools.

    Now.. A petition has emerged in which a fire fighter is trying to get people to sign onto the demand to cut those scenes from the movie! https://www.change.org/p/change-org-stop-the-petition-to-remove-the-slaughtering-of-firefighters-in-halloween-kills-2021

    It’s probably fair to say that the petition is getting more attention with media than it is with signatures, but it was all those expected given the world we now live in. They cancel culture mixed with a overzealous ability to make first responders saints in a time of Covid and other social upheaval.

    And now they have met Michael Myers in a movie. They’re being slaughtered, without mercy. John Carpenter warned us of this, and it may not just be the first responders who see their demise in this film. It’s been billed as a bloodbath, a record-setting murderous escapade on a Halloween night. No matter how many petitions emerge, the film is set for release on October 14.

  • ‘SNL’ Season 47 Premiere Is Lowest-Rated Episode in Show’s History

    ‘SNL’ Season 47 Premiere Is Lowest-Rated Episode in Show’s History

    Owen Wilson picked the wrong year to host “Saturday Night Live.” The Season 47 premiere was “SNL’s” lowest-rated episode of all time
    — Read on www.thewrap.com/snl-season-47-premiere-record-low-ratings/

    Often criticized for a lack of humor, the younger demo have all but abandoned the show.. it was the lowest rated episode and some say rightfully so after an episode of jokes not handing and dull humor that forced you to wince as you watched ..

  • The Drudge show hits IMPEACHMENT

    The Drudge show hits IMPEACHMENT

    It is great to see Matt Drudge showcase himself again on his own website..

    There is absolutely no doubt that the Drudge Report changed the world, started a media revolution.. and for better or worse paved the way for what we are dealing with today…

    Drudge showed the media that a glamor job on a network wasn’t what mattered..

    Just a modem and a web space. It all happened in the murky mid-90s when his gossip column reached 300,000 or so folks–a major achievement for that time! Even AOL had struggles Drudge never did.

    And that magic moment. The time he was given a lead that no one else would bite one: An intern sex scandal in the White House that would change history, journalism, and the basic fabric of our nation…

    And now Drudge is touting his presence in the Monica Lewinsky drama IMPEACHMENT..

    DRUDGE HIMSELF MARKED THE OCCASION WITH A SERIES OF NEWS LINKS AND A NOSTALGIC IMAGE OF HIMSELF ON HIS SITE, THE DRUDGE REPORT..

    Drudge linked a story by Adrienne Gafney with a headline “Memories How Drudge Changed it All” ..

    She wrote,

    Drudge, and his soon to be famous site Drudge Report, achieved the impossible in 1998 and stunned the world when he broke the news about President Clinton’s affair with an intern named Monica Lewinsky—a relationship that’s at the center of the new series, airing now on FX.

    There is a lot more about his influence, his role … all of it.

    When the HORROR REPORT first began back in the early days if the 21st century, we homaged Drudge by stealing his look and design.

    Some have dismissed his site and his role in history. Other realized immediately then and still today how much of a role has had in just about every historical event since the mid 1990s….

  • Lana Del Rey leaves the socials!!

    Lana Del Rey leaves the socials!!

    She has announced for various reasons she is deactivating her social media world..

    The singer has left the slums of the socials.

    https://youtu.be/drTWdycvIjg