Happy Birthday, Bela Lugosi!

Today would have been the 138th birthday of Bela Lugosi, the undying star of such classic Golden Age horror films as DRACULA, MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE, WHITE ZOMBIE, ISLAND OF LOST SOULS, THE BLACK CAT, THE RAVEN, etc. In honor of this most venerable day, I suggest listening to the 10-22-19 episode of Roejen Razorwire's PROJECT ARCHIVIST podcast in which Gary D. Rhodes and I discussed our Rondo Award-nominated nonfiction book, BELA LUGOSI AND THE MONOGRAM NINE. So feel free to slip into your black-velvet-lined coffin, relax, smoke some opium, and get ready for an hour-long discussion filled with mind-boggling, Lugosi-related mysteries such as the FBI and OSS surveillance of Lugosi throughout World War II, Lugosi's peculiar relationship with Ed Wood, and the always fascinating surrealism of such cinematic enigmas as THE APE MAN, BOWERY AT MIDNIGHT, and THE CORPSE VANISHES! This makes perfect listening for the Halloween season! If you want to check out this weird and macabre interview, simply click HERE!

(And if any if this piques your interest in BELA LUGOSI AND THE MONOGRAM NINE, you can buy a copy right HERE!) 

As an added bonus, here's a photo of The Ghost Host at Disneyland standing beside Yours Truly outside the gates of The Haunted Mansion as we find ourselves hypnotized by the weirdly alluring, vampiric prose of BELA LUGOSI AND THE MONOGRAM NINE....

Old Time Radio Flashback: THE CITY OF THE DEAD Chapter 5

Carlton E. Morse's legendary radio serial ADVENTURES BY MORSE: THE CITY OF THE DEAD originally aired in the 1940s. You can hear "Chapter 5: The Skeleton Walks In" directly below....

"QAnon Has Made Life Difficult for the Organizations Actually Trying to Save Children..."

What follow are three relevant excerpts from Kaleigh Rogers' 10-15-20 FiveThirtyEight article entitled "Trump Said QAnon ‘Fights’ Pedophilia. But The Group Has Made It Harder To Protect Kids.":

It’s hard to argue against a phrase like “save the children.” Which, presumably, is why QAnon uses it as a hashtag. The growing online conspiracy cult has co-opted the phrase to push falsehoods about pedophiles who run the world. But in promoting its radical worldview, QAnon has made life difficult for the organizations actually trying to save children. And the results could be putting kids at risk [...].

Over the summer, Q followers began using #savethechildren to spread the conspiracy theory, and it worked. From Aug. 9 through Aug. 15, more than 12,000 public Facebook posts used the hashtag, according to the social media tracking tool CrowdTangle. The rest of the year, the hashtag tended to garner fewer than 200 posts per week.

But most of the content shared using #savethechildren was based on a Q-fueled and completely warped picture of what child trafficking looks like in this country. And that has made life difficult for the people who actually do anti-trafficking work.

“It’s extraordinarily frustrating,” said Lisa Goldblatt Grace, co-founder and executive director of My Life My Choice, an anti-trafficking nonprofit. “We’ve worked so hard for the last 18 years to shift the narrative and have people understand this is happening in our communities. QAnon instead gives folks this incredibly sensationalized ‘other’ to fear and be angry about.”

In reality, child trafficking in the U.S. doesn’t look like a bunch of Hollywood and D.C. elites performing satanic rituals on children they stole from suburban playgrounds. Instead, kids who are sexually exploited are often poor, children of color, immigrants, or some combination of the three, and they’ve often been in the child welfare system or run away from home. In 2018, 1 in 7 kids who were reported as runaways to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children were likely victims of child sex trafficking, according to UNICEF [...].

Even if QAnon is bringing people’s attention to child trafficking in general, it’s focusing that attention specifically on a sensationalized, largely inaccurate picture of what trafficking looks like. And that can pull focus and resources away from the actual problem.

“It can lead to not only a misunderstanding of the issue, but also a wrong response,” said Borislav Gerasimov, the program coordinator for communications and advocacy at the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women.

As an example, Gerasimov cited the gunman who fired inside a pizza shop in 2016 because he wrongly believed it was the location of an underground pedophile ring, a conspiracy theory called Pizzagate that is a precursor to QAnon. “If you portray human trafficking as something that a secret cabal is doing, the solution becomes guns and surveillance. This is totally not the solution to trafficking.”

The solutions that anti-trafficking groups advocate for aren’t about raiding pizza shops or decoding Justin Bieber’s headwear choices, they’re about improving social programs so kids don’t fall through the cracks and end up in situations that leave them vulnerable to exploitation. That’s not as easy of a sell to the QAnon crowd.

“I don’t find that I’m able to translate the kind of fervor and excitement and investment people get for #savethechildren into an investment and focus and excitement in caring for the most marginalized among us,” said Goldblatt Grace.

Click HERE to read the entire article.

(And click HERE to read my recent five-part SALON series about QAnon.)

Old Time Radio Flashback: THE CITY OF THE DEAD Chapter 4

Carlton E. Morse's legendary radio serial ADVENTURES BY MORSE: THE CITY OF THE DEAD originally aired in the 1940s. You can hear "Chapter 4: Old Clawfoot Again" directly below....

The Weird Worlds of Richard Sala

If you're looking for the perfect reading material for this Halloween season, look no farther than the weird worlds created by the late Richard Sala. Sala passed away earlier this year, leaving behind decades of sui generis graphic novels that somehow manage to pull off the always difficult tightrope act of marrying the grotesque with the absurd. I recommend watching the following Sala retrospective produced by FOR THE LOVE OF COMICS this past May in the wake of the artist's unexpected death....

Footnote: Back in December of 2017, I wrote about Sala's THE BLOODY CARDINAL in a Cryptoscatology post entitled "The Cryptoscatology Top Ten: The Best Comic Books of 2017!" On November 18, 2019, Richard Sala quoted from my review of THE BLOODY CARDINAL on his Facebook page. I was pleased to know that he approved of my assessment of his book:

Note to my readers and to lovers of unusual comics in general: I hope to finish up my web serial THE BLOODY CARDINAL 2 by the end of the year (at the rate of a page or two (or 3) a week…. Psst! There's a new one coming tomorrow). Then sometime next year (??) the story will be one of four graphic novels in a hefty omnibus from Fantagraphics. -- So I have been glancing back over my shoulder at The Bloody Cardinal book which came out in 2017 -- and while doing so I discovered a very nice quote about it from a column on the 10 best comics of 2017 (on which it was included). Of course I am much too humble to repost it here…

Just kidding! -- how can I resist since the reviewer kindly name checks two of my paisanos!:

"Imagine Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (a playfully self-reflective novel in which a pair of obsessed readers explore the interdependence of art and reality) mixed with an Italian giallo slasher film directed by Mario Bava, throw in a man dressed like a big red bird and a cast of innocent young women in danger of being the homicidal fowl’s next victims, and you won’t even come close to the treasure trove of strangeness awaiting you in Richard Sala’s perversely humorous graphic novel, The Bloody Cardinal."

Grazie!

Old Time Radio Flashback: THE CITY OF THE DEAD Chapter 3

Carlton E. Morse's legendary radio serial ADVENTURES BY MORSE: THE CITY OF THE DEAD originally aired in the 1940s. You can hear "Chapter 3: The Body That Walked Off" directly below....

QAnon Abroad

From Mitch Prothero's 10-13-20 BUSINESS INSIDER article entitled "European Intelligence Agencies Are Deploying Resources to Track QAnon as the Conspiracy Theory Spreads Beyond the US, Sources Say":

Europe's domestic intelligence and law-enforcement services have apprehensively watched the QAnon conspiracy theory migrate from the US and now consider it a significant security concern.

That assessment was given by two security officials contacted by Insider, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity given the nature of their work [...].

A Belgian counterterrorism official told Insider that many European services like his were now rethinking a decision to ignore QAnon as a solely American phenomenon.

He drew parallels between QAnon and jihadist movements that have traditionally occupied intelligence agencies.

"I worked on jihadis and Al Qaeda, ISIS, for over 20 years, and now I am looking at the secular American version," said the official, who's part of Belgium's Federal Police.

"This Q thing is very similar to jihadism in several ways that are not obvious at first. For example, both are cults of magical thinking. Jihadis are drawn to the cause because they find comfort in a black-and-white morality in a complex world.

"And then they get to participate in a new version of reality, one where they aren't just a flawed person but they're heroes in a battle that normal people are too ignorant to even see.

"So it turns out the world isn't a complex place where making the right choices and understanding things around you can be a challenge," the official continued. "It's a very simple place where there's good and evil and you get to be good and oppose evil.

"And you're no longer some Moroccan kid from Molenbeek — you're a holy warrior protecting the true Islam," the official said, referring to a Brussels neighborhood associated with jihadism. "Or you're no longer some normal suburban person with a boring job — you are on the front lines battling a lizard-person death cult."

When asked whether fears of Q-related violence in Europe were legitimate, the official said they probably were [...].

A French police official based in Paris said that a long list of other concerns meant that significant resources hadn't been assigned to QAnon. But he said that could change.

"French love conspiracies; half our country thinks the Masons run the world, and the other half thinks the Masons should," the police official said.

Click HERE to read the entire article. 

(And click HERE to read my recent five-part SALON series about QAnon.)