My purpose here has been to inquire into mediated understandings of Hindley, and to question how popular texts delineate between the deeds of a human being and the way those deeds are culturally inscribed. The task is neither conclusive nor complete, for monsters are illusive. There is always some part of them that evades both enunciation and comprehension.
posted by Trurl
on Oct 30, 2011 -
15 comments
The most cruel viral ad campaign yet. Give your friend the experience of being stalked by a serial killer. Make sure to preview the very slick customized video generated first, before you decide whether you really want to do this to someone you like.
[Yes, yes, viral advertising for some FX show, also Flash]
posted by blahblahblah
on Aug 14, 2007 -
38 comments
Black Sheep Bloodthirsty, murderous sheep are on the loose in a small farming village. Keep your fingers crossed, this upcoming horror movie from New Zealand just might be Snakes on a Plane 2!
posted by dhammond
on Jan 11, 2007 -
36 comments
An iTunes For The Rest Of Us? Just for laughs I often flip through my (free subscription!) Stereophile magazine. You know, the one with the ads for the
$12000 speaker wire and
$5000 CD players. Imagine my surprise when I saw a
preview of a new music service,
MusicGiants, that is offering lossless music downloads for $1.29 each. Targeted to "audiophiles", MusicGiants is also selling its "
SoundVault", which seems like some kind of Windows Media Center PC, albeit with a $10,000 price tag, and an ability to download the lossless tracks to some portable media players, with the notable exception of the iPod. Oh, and there's a $50 annual fee (!). Ho hum so far, but then I noticed that the
service has significant buy in from most of the major labels, indicating that they seem to have developed some faith in the ability of Microsoft's DRM to shield their "top quality" downloads from pirates. My thinking on this is that if successful, it should prompt Apple to offer lossless downloads from the iTMS Service, if only because Apple likes to present a "high end" image, and having a competitor
actively dissing iTMS by lumping it in, quality-wise, with "pirated music from p2p networks" has got to hurt.
posted by meehawl
on Nov 18, 2005 -
63 comments
Jack Cafferty pulls a Jon Stewart --Cafferty, CNN's resident curmudgeon, goes off live on the coverage of the BTK killer.
(video here at Crooks and Liars) ... This is a ghoulish exercise on the part of the news media and if ratings are the reason, then I’ll say it again, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. There was no reason to give this guy a platform to talk to everybody in the country ... With
cameras in courtrooms almost everywhere nowadays, what is the media's responsibility?
posted by amberglow
on Aug 19, 2005 -
82 comments
Happy 420 day! Although many have (
wrongly) believed that 420 had something to do with police code relating to marijuana offenses or 4/20 being the dates that Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrisson, and John Belushi died; this infamous number really was simply the time that several San Rafael high school students would meet after school to get baked.
posted by tsarfan
on Apr 20, 2005 -
105 comments
Life and Death: an extraordinary post from Chris Clarke about his connection to serial killer Stephen Peter Morin. His family chimes in meaningfully in the comments.
Morin's execution is often pointed to as proof of the cruelty of lethal injection.
posted by Cassford
on Apr 4, 2005 -
20 comments
I've just finished reading a copy of Larson's
Devil
in the White City sent to me by a relative who heard of my love for
Isaac's
Storm.
Devil is a biography of two men who were
central to the 1893
Chicago World's
Fair. One,
Daniel
H. Burnham would become one of the most influential architects and
city planners of the early 20th century. Burnham organized a crew of
the architectural, engineering and artistic elite including landscape artist
Frederick Law Olmstead
(famous for Central Park and Biltmore) in an effort to better the Paris
world's fair of 1889. The Chicago exposition would be profoundly
influential for American culture introducing Arabic Dance (the tune for "There's a place in France/where the naked ladies dance" was created in Chicago), the Ferris
Wheel, Shredded Wheat, and helping to settle the
Battle of the Currents
between Edison and Tesla. The fair drew a large variety of larger than
life figures including Archduke Ferdinand, Elizabeth B. Anthony, Buffalo Bill Cody and the
mostly forgotten master of self promotion
Citizen
Train.
Devil is also a biography of the man given credit for
America's first recognized serial murders, the self-named
H. H. Holmes. At the start
of the fair, Holmes changed his
modus operandi from marrying and
killing women as part of insurance and real estate scams, to running a
hotel from which an unknown number of his female tenants never checked
out. Although information on Holmes's activities is scanty, he serves
as a mirror of the utopia of civic safety created by Burnham. Larson makes the argument that the contrasts between optimisim and pessimism, well-intentioned virtue and depravity, urban utopia with a few blocks from slums, would set the tone for the 20th century.
posted by KirkJobSluder
on Aug 7, 2004 -
13 comments
Microsoft unsympathetic toward ending serial killings.
"Spokane County Sheriff Mark Sterk held an extraordinary public meeting two months ago and asked the public for fresh tips. He even wrote to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, asking him to donate software to help analyze 10 years of homicide files; according to a sheriff's spokesman, Microsoft said no." => Lack of confidence in their software, or lack of a value system for MS?
posted by greyscale
on Apr 23, 2000 -
5 comments
