BOO WHO?

I do not understand why, once a year, I am expected to provide a sugar rush to every kid in the neighborhood. This is the annual fall shakedown. The bonfire of the bonbons. And should I try offering these adolescent vagabonds healthy treats like diced carrots, sliced celery, a couple cheese chunks on toothpicks or, God forbid, a little rice pilaf,  rather than being thanked for saving a young heart, my house would be egged, my windows soaped, and my cat redecorated.

What these ‘Kinder Mafia” demand is pure dextrose, not a mere saccharin rush. Their obsession with fructose, glucose, lactose, sucrose and maltose is neither healthy nor reasonable. They expect me to feed their sugar habit. . Oh, sure, they dress it up in fairy costumes and go door to door chanting, “Treat or trick”. But what they really mean is "Show me the Chocolate!"   This is not the holiday the ancient Druid priests envisioned, nor the Aztec mortuary artists. It is not a holiday. It is sugar wealth redistribution, confectionery socialism straight out of the barrel of a gummy bear.

The roots of Halloween were planted long before Christians had enough saints to celebrate "All Hallowed Saint’s Day". The Aztecs were celebrating Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) even before they were speaking Spanish,  maybe 3,000 years ago.  And the Druids in Ireland were celebrating “Samhain” by carving turnip Jack-o-lanterns,  2,500 years before they saw their first pumpkin.  "And how", you may ask, "could offerings to Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec Goddess who was still born, become individually packaged bags of M&Ms’ handed out to a skeleton named Debbie or Bobby?  And I will answer you, ‘Only in a world where the love child of Salvador Dali and Ma Barker is allowed to design holidays, that’s where!

This is the night for hyperventilation and hypertension - when the line between the dead and the not-really-alive (also known as Donald Trump) becomes fuzzy, and everyone grows concerned about ghosts, spooks, ghouls and zombies entering our world.  Call it the invasion of the Fox News hosts.

But its common knowledge that ghosts can not manipulate physical objects. So they can only harm you psychologically, meaning Scientologists  are safe since they don’t believe in anything that might hint at L.Ron Hubbard's level of insanity. And nobody should be afraid of “spooks” because once you speak a spook’s name they are “spooken for” and thus rendered harmless; which is what Dick Cheney did to the spook Valerie Plame.

Now Dick Cheney was a real live ghoul, one of  those creatures who revel in death and horror and who keep coming back to life again - usually on Fox News - the network staffed by brain dead zombies. Rupert Murdoch's invention is the perfect example of how we are terrified of all the wrong things in this life and death.

I cannot imagine Dick Cheney and his fellow Federalist Society banshees  will cease being such soul sucking terror mongers just because they have finally passed beyond the veil of death. Hell, they will just be getting started!. 

Yes, on Saturday October 31st,  I will be answering my door wearing three levels of face masks and bearing a bowl filled with tribute, because I don’t want to spend half of November pulling toilet paper out of my rain gutters and the rest of the months dead. However, we could instead of this terror Halloween been celebrating "Reformation Day",  when, in 1546, Martin Luther nailed his “95 Things I Hate About The Pope” to the front door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. He was was later charged with deformation of church intellectual property. But I diverse...

So, logically, children could be going door to door, calling, “Treat or I’ll nail your butt to the door, you papist low life, and, oh, by the way have you got any Jews hiding in here?”  A bit hard to see children squeezing candy out of that transaction.  So I guess we were lucky we got the screwed up jawbreaker, mini-Snickers holiday we did get, and not an endless election season that lasts four long painful years and gets won by the Russians.

The truth (as if that ever mattered about holidays) is that Martin Luther defiantly nailing his arguments to the church door was probably no more real than George Washington chopping down a cheery tree. Neither thing really happened. And neither does ghosts or ghouls.  And this year you just might see Martin Luther costumes on Halloween Night.  I did see a George Washington once, but that was so long ago the costume was probably made in the United States.

Last year Americans spent over $6 billion on this mish-mash of a holiday. Almost all of our black and orange fix, like cocaine, is provided by overseas suppliers who have no other connection to us of this holiday, and although that kind of chump change would barely support the occupation of  Afghanistan for a month, it does work out to about $65 per American family each year. Our family is not spending anywhere near that much, so I figure Donald Trump and his con man buddies must be spending like a billion each to make up for what us po' folks aren't spending anymore - call them  the ghoul creators.

About 4 million Americans even bought costumes for their dogs last year, like PetSmart’s spider web dog collar for $12, or PetCo’s doggie Pumpkin dress- up for $16. It gives a whole new meaning to the term "Puttin' on the dog".  Still, this canine costume capitalism is surprising. considering that dogs and skeletons would seem to be a natural costume combo. And once the holiday was over you would not have to pack up the costume -  you just let Rover bury it.

But as a nation we seem determined to spend as much as possible on this “dead holiday thing”.  In a normal year we used to put 2 million pirates (mostly boys, and far outnumbering the original pirates) on the streets that night, along with 4 million princesses - mostly girls and about equal to the number of real princesses) with adults to follow behind them, as back-up muscle. At the ring of the door bell us older folks, cowering in our homes, then answer the door armed a can of heavy duty Lysol and a half-empty bowl of bite sized Three Musketeers, and hope that is enough to buy us protection for another year.

And that is where all smart adults should be on Halloween night, dreading the sound that fills the night with horror and chills the bones; “Trick or treat, trick or treat, give us something good to eat. Or else.”  Yes, Trick or Treat, and bon appetit, my fellow cowering masses. And if you survive this night, you have just two years until the next real horror ; election day 2022!  Boo Who? Boo You, that's who!

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HOLIDAY ON ICE - Tragedy At The Coliseum

I suppose everyone was expecting a happy ending. The “Holiday On Ice” skating show had started well after 8pm in front of 4,300 spectators, most of them members and guests of the Shriner's. Smoothly the cast ran through the numbers; “Holidayland”, followed by “The Sleeping Beauty”, “Egyptian Fantasy”, “Rhapsody For Strings”, and “Waltz At Maxims”. And just after 11pm the stars – including the talented Jeanne “Jinx” Clark  (above)– were gathered just off stage for the grand finale as the chorus filled the rink and dixieland jazz swept up the audience.

In the south west corner of the building, just under box seats section thirteen, fifty-four year old Wilbur Gauthier was supervising his staff of vendors when something caught his attention. He thought it sounded like tea kettle left on the boil. As he walked toward the back of the room Gauthier was startled to see a six foot propane tank fall and begin to roll across the concrete, hissing loudly as it did. In an instant the floor was covered in a thickening white mist. Horrified, Gauthier screamed for everyone to clear the room, and started to run toward the tank. He never made it. It was 11:06pm, Halloween night, 1963.

The State Fair Coliseum in Indianapolis had been constructed in 1939, and built to the cautious standards of the Great Depression, of stone and steel; otherwise the disaster could have been much worse. Walter Spangler was sitting in section 12, in the North West corner of the coliseum. He remembered, “The show was virtually over. Suddenly there was a dull thump.” Then, directly across the coliseum from his seat, “…there was a tremendous column of fire – about 15 feet in diameter, and 40 to 50 feet high. Along with it was literally a column of bodies…dozens of people flying through the air. Their arms and legs outspread. Then there was a lot of screaming.” 

Vivian Barkley remembered that, “The bodies looked like rag dolls." The victims began falling amidst the costumed skaters on the ice. Mrs. Manford James told a reporter later that she saw “…pieces of cement, people, arms and legs flying through the air. You could see bodies falling into the flames…” 

And then a second, larger explosion threw 128 seats and 700 square feet of concrete flooring of section 13 into the air and sent it plummeting onto the 240 bleacher seats at the north end of the coliseum floor. Five hundred square feet of the floor caved into the basement. In that initial moment 54 people were dead and almost 500 were injured. The death toll would go higher.

Walter Spangler forced his way through the chaos that followed the explosions, trying to reach the injured. “I saw a woman lying on top of another woman. One woman’s head had been flattened by a large piece of concrete.” 

Pauline O’Neal recalled, “I saw two men carrying children, begging for someone to help them, but everyone just stared.”  

Mrs. Marilyn Barngrover remembered, “Shriners near us helped keep people calm and we moved out very quickly.” The explosion had knocked Mrs. Robert Stoeckinger onto her back. She said, “The little girl who helped pick me up had a gash in her head, but I didn’t notice it until later.” 

Mrs. Myrtle Ericsson said “…I grabbed my purse and started out. I fell over a fire hose and cut my lip and was bruised…I’ve never seen so many bloody people.”

The reason for all this agony was originally considered a containment by the refining industry. Because it is heavier than methane, with which it is found naturally, propane has a tendency to collect in the elbows and bends of pipes, forming blockages.

So it is necessary that propane, butane and other similar containments be removed from “natural gas” before it is sent down pipelines. It was only a matter of time (1913) before an inventive chemist (Dr. Walter O. Snelling) discovered that, although propane will normally boil at anything over – 42 C, if kept under pressure it can be shipped and handled as a liquid (U.S. patent #1056845). 

At the point of use, a simple relief valve can convert the propane back into a gas, and allow access to its stored energy. But that makes the relief valve the weak point in the system. Today all propane tanks have a thick metal safety collar that protects the valve from being bent or broken. In 1963 (below)  they did not.

Every ambulance in Marion County was dispatched to the scene. And “…literally hundreds of nurses, doctors, first aid volunteers and firemen…” who were off duty rushed to offer assistance.  But because they were not ready in advance, most of their efforts were too late.

Because it was Halloween night there were 200 extra Indianapolis police officers on duty and they were quickly rushed to the coliseum as well. An auto wrecker was driven onto ice to pull sections of concrete “the size of pianos” off the victims. When it proved insufficient a construction crane was found and brought in. 

The coliseum got so crowded that Chief of the Indianapolis Police Robert Reilly eventually had to bar any further traffic from the fair grounds, including ambulances and first aid workers. The injured were sent to six area hospitals.  But there was no attempt to keep track of who was sent where, or even how many were even sent to hospitals.

The next morning the county coroner laid out the dead in rows on the ice (above) , and family members had to walk along their bloody, chard and dismembered ranks to identify their loved ones. The last official victim died in February of 1964. The total death toll then stood at 74, with 386 injured, including 176 who were still hospitalized. There was a public outrage over the tragedy, and a conviction that somebody should be held accountable.In December a Grand Jury had indicted State Fire Marshal Ira J. Anderson and Indianapolis Fire Chief Arnold Phillips on misdemeanor charges for failing to inspect the coliseum, specifically the haphazard storage of large numbers of propane tanks in busy work areas. But neither man was convicted, destroying any hopes for civil suits brought by the victim’s families against the state, which was then able to hide behind the concept of "sovereign immunity."

It’s an old English common law idea that “The King can do no wrong.” The concept was grafted into the constitution in 1794 in The Eleventh Amendment: “The Judicial power…shall not be construed to extend to any suit…commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by citizens of another state….”  And in 1890, in Hans V Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court held it effective even against private citizens trying to sue their own state. In other words, you are not allowed to fight city hall. 

But civilians had no such protection. The President, vice President and local manager of “Discount Gas” which had supplied the propane tanks, were also indicted, as was Coliseum manager Melvin Ross, and the concession manager Floyd James, all on manslaughter charges. But the only person actually convicted was Edward Franger, president of Discount Gas, who was found guilty of assault and battery. And even this conviction was overturned on appeal by the Indiana State Supreme Court.

Much has changed since that horrible Halloween night. Beside the safety collar on propane tanks, the disaster is used as a teaching example of how not to organize rescue operations and how not to treat the families of victims. The Coliseum Disaster Fund raised $78,000 (over half a million today) from the public.  Lawsuits by 379 victims produced $4.6 million in monetary awards, or a little over $12,000 per victim.

It would be 2003 before a plaque (above)  was installed in the Indiana Fair Grounds “Pepsi” Coliseum, to remember those who died and were disfigured physically and emotionally by the tragedy.  In any tragedy, it seems, there is no such thing as justice or a happy ending.

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BITE ME! The Truth About Vampires

I want to pierce to the very heart of this issue, which is mythology. If the little prince had been remembered by his real name, Vladimir Basarab Tepes , he would have been a lot less infamous. He might still have been reviled as Vlad the Impaler, or, in the same vein, immortalized as Vlad III,  Prince of Wallachia and defender of the Christian faith.... except he was such a hellian that in the end even the Christians refused to claim him. The bloody truth is that his own baptized appellation has so faded against his myth that you are far more likely to say, “Oh,  I know who that is. That is Dracula, the inappropriate Transylvanian phlebotomist.” But even then you would be dead wrong. Well, undead wrong,

Dracula is not a name. It is a title, and in Romanian means “Sons of the Dragon”. They were an order of Christian Knights, which included Vlad’s father  during the mid-thirteenth century, when he was the Prince of Wallachia,  not Transylvania. He ruled a tiny slice of the southern Carpathian mountains, as a vassal to the Sultan of the  Muslim Ottoman Empire.

At the tender age of five Vlad’s familiar bonds were severed when he was offered up as a hostage to the Ottoman Sultan,  Murad II (above). Vlad grew up a cruel little creature. At any moment he might be executed by Christians or Muslims because his dad was getting too close or not close enough to the Sultan.   During his six years in a Turkish prison, Vlad’s only playmates were bugs and spiders, who he tortured to his heart’s content, just as he had been tortured by being separated from his mother.

When he was eleven Vlad’s father and older brother were both murdered by Boyars, the local landlords. You can understand, then, that when Vlad was finally given the keys to the princedom, in 1456, he perforated every Boyar he could lay his bloody hands on. Unfortunately he skewered his economy as well, but you can’t have everything.

To hold onto this little kingdom Vlad (above, on the throne) had to lean first toward the Ottomans and then toward the Christians, but never to much or too long in one direction or the other.  So he laid claim to the Christian title of Dracula only at formal occasions, such as banquets and blood lettings, which were often the same events for him.  But Vlad's entrance into his victim's blood stream was about as far from the neck as you can get.

Legend has it that Vlad once sat in judgment of a wife suspected of adultery. He awarded the husband a divorce, and avoided burdening the man with child support by impaling the mother and child on the same spike. His social programs were saturated with the same carnassial logic. The invalids in his realm were invited to a feast, at which Vlad bolted the doors and windows and set the hall on fire. Once the flames died down Vlad announced he had eradicated poverty in his realm, like any good Republican.  

In 1462 the Sultan decided he had enough of Vlad’s savage vindictiveness, and the Ottomans invaded Transylvania with a 90,000 man army. Since Vlad only had about 30,000 men his cause seemed a dead letter. Still Vlad made it interesting by puncturing the 20,000 mostly Muslim men, women and children, of his capital city of Targoviste, and leaving the forest of their skewered corpses behind his retreating army. 

This particular act of mass murder managed to impress the Sultan,  who was no slouch in the mass mayhem department, himself. Still the outcome was the same; Murad II  forced Vlad into exile, and  placed Vlad’s half brother on the throne.

And it turned out that Vlad’s Christian allies were no more comfortable with the intemperate Prince  than the Muslims. Vlad was locked up in the 14th century equivalent of a mental ward for 12 years, by which time the memories of his murderous malignant management style seem to have faded. So, in November of 1476 he had mended enough Christian fences to be re-crowned Prince, but about month later Ottoman troops ambushed Vlad and his little band of sociopaths and butchered them all. Monks buried his body in the Monastery outside Comana, in what is today Romania. But to prove to the Sultan that Vlad was  was not merely dead, but certainly, assuredly and really most sincerely dead the soldiers  decapitated the corpse and sent his head ahead to Constantinople.

No doubt about it, Vlad Teppes  was a capricious and violent murderer, but no one thought he was coming back from the grave.  Vlad was never ever accused of being a vampire, not in his original lifetime, anyway.  He would not have even known what a “vampyre” was.  He might not even have known what a vrykolakas was. Because that was a Greek invention, a sort of Slavic vampire without dentures, one of the undead motivated by a necrotic sense of humor. 

A vrykolakas is created when a dog or a cat jumps over a fresh human grave. Should they pause to urinate on the crypt mid leap, the uric acid drives the new vrykolakas to clamber from their tomb and engage in a mortiferous game of “Knock, knock”.  In Slavic lands, a tap on the door after dark should never be answered. Not because Greeks fear Mormons will put the bite on them, but because it just encourages the vrykolakas to keep knocking. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrykolakas)

The one thing Vlad would never have expected was to be connected with was bats. Bats eat insects, and although being warm blooded and carrying diseases which sometimes infect humans, European bats were never considered a threat. However,  in 1810, Frenchman Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire recorded the first vampire bat, captured in the New World.  By 1839 even Charles Darwin had written about the bloodthirsty little winged rodents.  

The closest real life version of  a human vampire are 3 species of air born rodents,  the common  Desmodus rontundus, the hairy legged Diphylla ecaudata, and the white winged Diaemus youngi. These are all the vampire bats there are.  These little south of the border blood suckers secret an anticoagulant in their saliva, called Draculin.  Very linguistically inventive, these biologists. Draculin keeps the victim's life's blood flowing as long as the sanguivore keeps drinking.  But vampire bats take only an ounce of blood a night, and unlike a lawyer or an investment banker,  they often share their meals with less healthy and successful bats.  But by the end 18th century, the elements of the vampire story were on the table, waiting for someone to assemble them.  Oddly, there is little evidence Bram Stoker did that.

Irishman  Abraham "Bram: Stoker, was the business manager for  London's Lyceum Theatre, and he supplemented his income grinding out popular adventure and horror stories.  And in 1897 conceived his most popular one,.  "A key was turned with the loud grating noise of long disuse, and the great door swung back…Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of color about him anywhere….The old man motioned me in with his right hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange intonation. “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own free will!...I am Dracula…”

But was Stoker inspired by the Romanian  Dracula? Elizabeth Miller who has made a study of the issue (“Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow” – 1998) does not think so. She wrote. “…(Stoker's) research seems to have been haphazard (though at times fortuitous) rather than scholarly. What he used, he used “as is,” errors and confusions included….After all, Stoker was writing a Gothic novel, not a historical treatise. And he was writing Dracula in his spare time, of which I doubt he had much.”

It was Stoker's business to know what the public wanted and to give it to them. Obviously the public always wants sex. But if the deeply closeted Stoker had openly supplied sex to his Victorian audiences  he would have gone directly to jail,.like his close friend, playwright Oscar Wilde.  

Had Stoker not written "Dracula" he might have been famous as the man who married Oscar Wilde's ex-girlfriend. In fact, it was just after Wilde's conviction for "gross indecency" meaning homosexuality, that Stoker began writing Dracula,  In that story, Stoker sublimated the theme of suppressed sexuality, which has been part of every vampire tale which  followed. And none of that had nothing to do with Transylvania.

It turns out the Irish had their own blood suckers, the English absentee landlords who owned most of the property in Ireland.  Between 1845  (Stoker was born in "black" 1847)  and 1852 one million Irish starved to death because the potato crops the working poor depended upon failed, and because the British government refused to let the poor eat the wheat grown on Irish land, or replace it with cheap American grown wheat. Things were so bad that many were reduced to cannibalism, and a million were forced to emigrate to find food. And although Stoker's family were middle class Irish Protestants, they could not avoid the nightmare which had been unleashed on their island.

And there is a Gallic term, deach-fhoula - pronounced drac-ula - which means tainted or bad blood. There is even an Irish castle called Dun Drac-ula (above), or the castle of the tainted blood, which sits on property once controlled by a legendary 5th century Irish landlord and or warlord  named Abhartach (pronounced avertack) who was either a dwarf or a giant. Among his other crimes, and there were many, Abhartach required the village of Garvagh to yearly produce a bowl of human blood, which he then drank in their presence. A pretty nasty form of intimidation. He claimed it gave him supernatural powers.  

Legend says that eventually the villagers killed Abhartach. But once he was dead and buried - vertically as was the tradition - he came back, and they had to kill him all over again. After a second second coming of Abhartach, the villagers buried him upside down, and they erected a stone Dolman atop his gave, to keep him there. Locals still refer to it as as the Slaghtaverty Dolman (above), or "The Giant's Grave".  So maybe his mother's bedtime stories were Stoker's  inspiration for the bloodsucker supreme, in which case it was a political allegory instead of a sexual allusion?  The truth is, it could have been both. Stoker's name was on the title page, but there is evidence that his London editor cut the first one hundred pages off the book before publishing it, along with lots of other market driven changes..   

But Vampires on the page proved so bloodless they produced few progeny. And it was not until 1922 that the Prince of Darkness hit the silver screen. Suddenly sucking blood became a business model, able to even survive the misdirected anger of Stokers' widow,  the lovely Florence Ann Lemon Balcombe Stoker. 

After "Bram" died from tertiary syphilis in 1912, Florence (above) became the executor of his estate, such as it was. She managed to publish a collection of his short stories in 1914, but the sales were anemic.  Then, in 1922 she learned of a film claiming it was "loosely based" on her late husband's book, which had been released by a German organization called Parna films.  

Now Parna is a Sanskrit word meaning life force, as in "may the force be with you". Founded by a small group of occult affectionatos in 1920, they intended getting rich by making films about the supernatural.  They hired writer Henrik Galeen, based on his script "The Golem: How He Came Into The World' (above). But a single minded Jewish mud monster failed to resonate with German audiences at least in 1914. However the occultists were certain a film version of Dracula would be hit, but to avoid sharing royalties, Galeen changed the name of his undead vampire to Count Orlok, and named the entire effort "Nosferatu".

 In the spring of 1921 they hired Friedrich Murnau (above) to direct, and after rewriting the ending, he started shooting in July.  

And on 4 March, 1922, "Nosferatu" opened to rave reviews from everybody except Florence Stoker. With the backing of the British Society of Authors, Florence  demanded the producers pay her royalties, and that they turn over to her the negative of the film, as well as every copy made so far. In a ploy as old as business, Parna declared bankruptcy under the legal theory "you can't sue me because I no longer exist".  The film about the undead had become a zombie movie.

It didn't work. In 1925 the German courts ruled in Florence's favor. The single negative of Nosferatu, and all distribution prints were handed over to her lawyers. Whereupon, Florence burned the lot. Maybe she should have seen the film before she burned it.   Some partial prints were discovered later, and slowly over the last century, film lovers cobbled much of the film back together.  Their success with the reborn "Nosferatu" helped sell a lot of copies of the book "Dracula".

Still since then Dracula has been to Hollywood and Berlin and Moscow and back, in almost 200 retellings of the myth of Dracula and his pups. We all know how to annoy a vampire - garlic or a cat - how to kill a vampire - sunlight or a stake through the heart. and a Cross seems to cause them great pain, even of its two candle sticks held at right angles.  And it never seems to bother fans of the bite movies that we allot brain space to all of this vital information about a mythical creature we are never going to meet.

The disconnect in these  ensanguine exhibiionists is that central issue of sex, which makes no sex, er sense.  To the  un-dead, any exchange of bodily fluids is what you call counter productive. For a vampire, it can only be a one way street. Believe me, there are no vampires out there watching porn on the Internet.

An actual human vampire would require a similar anticoagulant in their saliva to Draculin, else their nightly siphoning would form a huge clot of hemoglobin in their tummies, which they would vomit up periodically like a big stinky full ball. And a few of those around the property should make Vampires stand out like a sick cat. Has anybody given this any thought?  Obviously, I have.

But the human fascination with fangs seems to have been all about the sublimation of sex. Who would have thunk that?

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