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The awesome Canadian severed feet story appeared in a list of eerie, unsolved crimes this week.
Cracked prefers the psycho killer theory. Which leads to this nicely Gothic prognostication:
As for who the other feet belong to, and why they keep showing up on British Columbia beaches in running shoes, well, we probably won't know until we find the rest of the victims.
(thanks to Ladi)
Motel Gothic: in today's news story of real-life horror, a Memphis Budget Lodge rented a room with a corpse inside. Five times this Budget Lodge room was occupied, and "cleaned", from January through March of this year, while a dead woman's body gradually decayed under or within a bed.
That's got to be embarrassing to, well, just about everyone.
""In hindsight should an investigator have gone in there and torn the room up? Sure,” said Deputy Chief Joe Scott."
And
Investigators found Millbrook’s body after housekeepers reported a foul odor. Scott said hotel employees did not report anything wrong with the room beforehand, and neither did the people who rented the room.
A fine story for road warriors everywhere. Add it to your unpacking routine: "check bed boxes for bodies."
(thanks to Arnaud Leene; image from Google Maps)
The Georgian hoax storytelling story continues to develop. Now there are accusations of governments being involved in creating the mockumentary.
First, someone Webbed up an audio clip purportedly revealing Georgia's president had a hand in things.
The voice of the man, widely attributed to Giorgi Arveladze, the director of the Georgia Imedi Production Group, Imedi TV’s parent company, counters that "Misha" [a nickname for the Georgian president] does not want any cautionary text or subtitles that could take away from the report’s "gusto."
"[Misha] said it should be broadcast like an ordinary Kronika [news program]," the man in the recording says.
Georgia's political opposition seems to like this tale, seeing the video as pro-Saakashvili propaganda.
Next, one of the alleged talkers blamed not the Georgian state, but the Russian:
In remarks to the pro-government station Rustavi-2 late on March 15, Arveladze argued that the clip was the work of "Russian special services," adding that Russian agents could also put together "my conversation with the Dalai Lama or Rome’s pope."
In other words, responsibility for the video has now scaled up to a new level. While discussion first settled on one tv outfit and its creativity, things now concern government intervention. From bad-taste hoax to propaganda, the move has been fast.
There's also this bit of unrelated American culture weirdness:
On March 16, the Soroka website posted a Russian-language transcript of an alleged phone conversation between Saakashvili and Minister of Culture, Monument Protection and Sport Nikoloz Rurua that touched on the need for the Imedi report to have featured a warning. (The conversation also covered supposed efforts to contact American R&B singer/songwriter Stevie Wonder and a performer identified as "Houston.").
The FBI is expanding its coverage of social networks, according to a recent story. A FOIA request revealed that federal law enforcement will friend people to gather information.
From a fearsome media perspective, this hits several registers. First is the problematic identity angle, in that one can't trust (or trusts less) who another network member is. Second is the dystopian law enforcement aspect, a la Little Brother, with safe (or safe-r) locations made dangerous by the presence of authority.
But more interesting yet is the idea that this could be greeted with... support. Note that the Yahoo story mentions Facebook before all other networks: "The Feds are on Facebook. And MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, too." If Facebook maintains its fear-less (or fear-lite) reputation, then the FBI's friending campaign takes on the aura of friendly neighborhood police or diligent protectors, rather than tyrannical intruders. For example,
Maxi Sopo, a native of Cameroon living in the Seattle area, apparently slipped across the border into Mexico in a rented car last year after learning that federal agents were investigating the alleged scheme. The agents initially could find no trace of him on social media sites, and they were unable to pin down his exact location in Mexico. But they kept checking and eventually found Sopo on Facebook.
While Sopo's online profile was private, his list of friends was not. Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Scoville began going through the list and was able to learn where Sopo was living. Mexican authorities arrested Sopo in September. He is awaiting extradition to the U.S.
Consider how the story would have read if MySpace had been the first term in the series.
A fresh example of the War of the Worlds broadcast effect came from Georgia this week. A local tv station broadcast a mockumentary about a Russian invasion. Although Imedi TV preceded the show with a this-is-fiction warming, many viewers missed it, or didn't pay attention. Then they passed rumors on.
The program apparently mixed archival footage with new content, reporting attacks on South Ossentian and Georgian presidents, Russian aerial bombardments, tank columns on the move, panic.
One video clip of coverage about coverage, I think:
This Eurasianet article offers many fine examples of the fiction-fueled panic, like this theater within a theater scene:
The actors performing Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Theatre on March 13 at first tried to ignore the whispers in the audience that began just as the curtain went up...
One woman screamed into her cell phone, jumped to her feet and lumbered out of the hall. A train of spectators soon followed, all of them scurrying for the exit. Bewildered actors were left wondering about the cause of the interruption...
Down went the fourth wall:
Turning to the audience, [actor Zaza] Papuashvili, who was appearing in the role of Countess Olivia’s sullen steward Malvolio, asked spectators what "in hell" was going on.
"They say the Russian army has invaded, and they killed Misha [President Saakashvili]," a voice cried out.
The buzz intensified. One woman broke into tears. Some audience members started calling their friends and relatives; others used their cell phones to browse the Internet for news...
Remember those stories about Americans getting guns to shoot Martians in New Jersey?
When news surfaced that a battle was allegedly going on between the Russian and Georgian armies outside Tbilisi, audience members considered a fresh plan of action -- finding weapons to go help the Georgian army fend off the invaders.
I love this moment of audience debate:
A lone spectator cautioned that if Tbilisi was under attack, "we probably would hear it." He urged the audience not to panic at television claims...
"What other proof do you want?" a woman’s bitter voice hit back. "You want to wait until Russian soldiers waltz in and do a Cossack dance for you on this stage?"
James Brown's body has disappeared, says the British press, and is that a first line for a song waiting to happen.
The story was sparked by one of Brown's children.
LaRhonda Pettit said: "My daddy's body has disappeared. I have no clue where it was taken, but I need to know where."
Maybe Blue Oyster Cult could do the song, a la "Joan Crawford has Risen from the Grave."
[more Pettit]: "I'm convinced his death was suspicious and I want the people responsible brought to justice."
The body is missing from the Godfather of Soul's crypt, so much the Gothic better:
Brown's body is said to have been sealed in a temporary crypt at his daughter Deanna's South Carolina Home while arrangements are made for his permanent burial.
If I ever get back to working hard on the Gothic, Goth maestro Screaming Jay Hawkins (pictured) is someone I've been meaning to catch up on.
(link thanks to Jesse Walker; image from this fine listing)
Panic over the South Korean dead baby story keeps going, with William Saletan sounding Slate's alarm. It's a fascinating piece of cyberfear.
To begin with, after reprising the narrative, Saletan realizes that, like all good distant atrocities, the bad thing is really about us.
[L]ook in the mirror. Every time you answer your cell phone in traffic, squander your work day on YouTube, text a colleague during dinner, or turn on the TV to escape your kids, you're leaving this world. You're neglecting the people around you, sometimes at the risk of killing them.
(Looks up from blogging anxiously)
"You, too, can let babies die!"
It's fascinating how the author shifts from observing one type of interaction (person to software) to a second (person to person, mediated by software) without realizing it.
This unacknowledged slide is related to the old expression "stop talking on the phone" - one doesn't really talk on the phone, but talks to someone else through the phone. To the caller, which is more important, the other person or the handset?
Saletan's revivified argument also turns a blind eye to all pre-digital distractions, be they pre-Web radio, tv, books, or just daydreaming*. It's a classic move for those expressing fear of new technologies, especially in the US. Question: are any of those other technologies or media or practices not "virtual"? Are they ok now in their absorption, validated by being non-cyberspatial?
Having summoned fear at a murderous level, Saletan then extends things further, calling up a clash of civilizations, or rather worlds:
That's the real horror behind the Korean story: The balance of power between the worlds is shifting. Here and there, virtual reality is gaining the upper hand.
This one death is but a sample of the horrors to come. World-sized, Lovecraftian terrors.
Again, note the slide from interpersonal communication to interaction with software.
Say, does "balance of power" suggest the possibility of war? It does:
The dead baby is just another casualty of this war between the worlds—a war increasingly dominated by the world in which you're reading this.
Lest we think Saletan is basing too broad an argument on a too-narrow pedestal of one single case, don't worry. He has (3) more (out of 48.2 million):
At least two Korean men have died of exhaustion after round-the-clock video-game marathons. Another man, nagged by his real-world mother for disappearing into video games, allegedly resolved the dilemma by killing her.
*EDITED TO ADD: an email reminds me that Saletan does, in fact, mention tv. It's part of a string of digital sins: "Every time you... turn on the TV to escape your kids, you're leaving this world." I'm not sure if he lists tv there because of inherited tv=wasteland criticism, or because of increasing digital integration for tv, or both.
(via MetaFilter, image from Elven*Nicky)
Today in Japanese real-life Gothic, the tale of a terrifying, thousand-year-old severed head. It was the head of a rebel, Taira no Masakado, and initially displayed to cow the populace.
Naturally, or at least "naturally" to we Gothically-inclined people, stories began to crop up, like these:
Strangely, Masakado’s head did not decompose. Three months later, it still looked fresh and alive, though the eyes had grown more fierce and the mouth had twisted into a horrifying grimace. One night, the head began to glow, and it lifted into the air and flew off in the direction of Taira no Masakado’s hometown.
The head grew weary on the long flight home, and it came to rest in the village of Shibasaki (present-day Otemachi, Tokyo). The villagers picked up the head, cleaned it, and buried it in a mound at Kanda Myojin shrine.
Read on for more tales, including some reminiscent of the old American Indian burial ground routine, and a haunted movie set.
(thanks to Ed Webb!)
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