Halloween: Whence the pursuit of horror?

Some of the neighborhoods near my house in St. Louis have already celebrated Halloween. For instance, my street celebrates Halloween on the Sunday afternoon prior to Halloween. Celebrating in the daylight makes it easier for us to visit with little neighborhood children and their parents. The nearby Compton Heights neighborhood celebrates Halloween on the Saturday night prior to Halloween. Our family was invited to venture over to Compton Heights a few nights ago, and we weren’t disappointed. head Amidst all of the traditional candy-giving, we stumbled upon one particular house where the family had put together its own haunted house. The family owns a big old house, but also owns a separate large two-story carriage house in the back. They hired an electrician to wire up the carriage house with sophisticated lighting and they assembled a team of 20 friends and family to pose as various types of dead people inside the house. Not typical dead people, mind you. Dead people who stand still in the dim lighting and come alive just when you are convinced that they are mannequins (and there were quite a few mannequins too, some of them dismembered). When selected dead people came alive, they yelped, or they screamed; some of them reached out and grabbed you. There were ghouls and ghosts, a vampire, a mummy, floating bones, a guy with a “chainsaw,” and a beheaded guy who suddenly moaned, all of this horror looking rather real and all of these characters lurking carefully amidst the dim lighting as we toured this incredible house. front-of-haunted-houseEach of the photos in this post is from this house. Note that it’s not always easy to take photos in a darkly lit haunted house. While I was taking a photo of a decapitated head on a table, for instance, a dead man reached out and tugged on my sleeve, smudging the long exposure. How good was it? I stood outside for 30 minutes after I toured the haunted house, and every ten minutes or so, I saw a panicky grown child running from the haunted house crying. Bravo! I then learned that the haunted house family has been putting on this magnificent show, for free, for 15 years. Double Bravo! But as I walked away from the haunted house, I wondered two things.

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Frank Rich on the media’s pursuit of balloon boy

In addition to blaming balloon boy's dad, Frank Rich blames the media:

Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking. Norman Lear, about the only prominent American to express any empathy for little Falcon’s father, vented on The Huffington Post, calling out CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS alike for their role in “creating a climate that mistakes entertainment for news.” This climate, he argued, “all but seduces a Richard and Mayumi Heene into believing they are — even if what they dream up to qualify is a hoax — entitled to their 15 minutes.”

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Onion pundits hammer Biden for recent gaffes

Pundits from Onion Network News got fed up with a recent string of miscues by Vice-President Joe Biden.
Gaffe-Prone Biden Embarrasses Nation Yet Again By Sneezing During Meeting As you can see, the "pundits" from The Onion were actually hammering real life pundits, and had to work extra hard to parody the absurd.

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Amazon Accidentally Increases Internet Disinformation

We have previously posted regarding the latest reprint of Darwin's "The Origin of Species", by Ray Comfort. If you don't know about it, it has a 50 page forward full of untruths, confusion, and misdirection in an attempt to discredit the original text that follows. Yes, he's trying to use Darwin to discredit 200 years of thoroughly tested evolutionary biology. Unfortunately, Amazon.com reviews and ratings confuse it with another (reputable) reprint by the same name, as discussed in detail here:

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Scientist finds all missing links. Evolution proved. Churches scheduled to close.

Assimulated Press - Tempe, Arizona In a discovery that not even the most optimistic scientist would ever have predicted, all of the transitional forms necessary to prove that evolution is indeed a fact have been found in one location. In a strange twist of fate, it was a Creationist scientist who found the fossils. Uncovered over the course of several years at one extensive archeological dig in Arizona were all the so-called “missing links” needed to show that man has indeed evolved from simpler primate ancestors and that we are kin to all other primates, mammals and indeed every living thing on the planet. At a press conference on Monday, chief archeologist Matthew Christiansen of the Creation Science Foundation stated, “I really didn’t expect to find these fossils. Genesis says that we were created separate from the animals but even I can’t deny this evidence. People can now stop saying that evolution is ‘only a theory’ because it isn’t. It’s a fact. We now have all the complete sets of fossilized transitional forms that we need. There are no gaps. This case is closed.” The news has sent Jewish synagogues and Christian churches around the world into a frenzy. Rabbi Eli Weinstein of the Beth Shalom Israel synagogue in New York put it this way, “Those of us who accepted the traditional account of seven day creation as true are devastated. Proof of evolution means that Genesis is wrong which means that God doesn’t exist. I guess I’m out of a job!” [More . . . ]

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