It’s no secret that I’m fascinated by both (as of this writing, there have been only two) World Wars. Simply because about six months or so, I learn some new insane fact about the conflicts. Nothing so far has beaten aircraft carrier submarines, though. So when I saw the Kickstarter for The Neptune Monograph Project, I leapt on it. This is the document that was used for D-Day planning and was the highest level of Top Secret (BIGOT) they had (except for Double Secret BIGOT). The end result is badass and the sort of thing you can data geek out on for weeks. There are descriptions of German fortifications. There are charts about tides and info on the type of ground they’re going to hit when they arrive. There’s a level of info that…well, I have no idea how they pulled together this much stuff. I couldn’t do it today with Google Fu. So basically it’s an important WWII document that is now fully restored for posterity and uses its blank pages to provide historical context. If you really want to deep dive on the subject, you can’t get much deeper than this. If you need one for yourself, there’s still a couple left being sold over at Amazon.
Author - Widge
If you’re reading this, then it’s official: you’ve survived 2018. Congratulations. Or you’re in the far flung future and somehow a copy of this site is extant despite the atomic wars, the invasion of mutant hamsters, and the revelation that saliva causes stomach cancer. So you were wise enough not to be born yet when 2018 happened, and thus I say also to you: congratulations.
One of the things we do around here while passing the time awaiting the heat death of the universe is to attempt to keep up with the release of new music. It’s impossible. I tried to listen to as much music from a single year a few years back and it damn near killed me. If anybody comes close to being able to sift through everything, that would have to be Need Coffee Music Ministers, Tuffley and Rob. And keeping with tradition, they have published their best-of lists for the year that was. You can find them on Spotify (links below). Also keeping with tradition, I tried to keep up with them and failed with spectacular grace for someone of my size. So I have my own list, heavily dependent on the other two to remind me of stuff I forgot (like Tuffley’s list reminded me that we had new (!) Coltrane, and Rob’s list making me aware of the existence of Durand Jones).
It’s Episode #190 for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, in which our protagonist is blown away not only by badass animation and a kickass story, but also by the fact Spider-Ham is in a feature film.
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It’s Weekend Justice: the Internet’s #1 audio trainwreck. This episode is from the archives: recorded in May 2016.
Agenda:

“Face it. I rock this look.”
The Helen Mirren class is excellent and she is an absolute hoot. Her approach to choosing scripts and then how she takes the scripts apart (literally) is fascinating, as well as how she advises you to deal with the writer and director. And when she steps back to actually show you what it looks like to act on film (and the spot on the camera you’re basically acting to), you get a sense that she knows who people on the crew are–and that she’s a class act. Not that you doubted that, I’m sure, but you know what I mean. Granted, in the section where she’s going through set decoration and rummaging through a buffet of props, I hoped she had a good relationship with them because I could see (if you weren’t expecting her to do these things) the people on the crew wincing and wondering what the hell she was on about. Really good insight. Also–and this is a small thing, but I never realized it before–she has a tattoo on one of her hands which, as you can imagine, has an interesting backstory.
For tonight’s final entry in our journal of weirdness, we go to The Weird Circle itself: the episode “What Was It” from 1943.
The New Scooby-Doo Movies teamed up Scooby and the Gang with Batman & Robin, The Three Stooges, and here, of course, The Addams Family. I’ve long advocated making a new round of these with the likes of Slipknot, Ryan Gosling, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Just because.
Well, unbelievably enough, we’re coming up on time to put 32 Days of Halloween back into the coffin for another year. The Halloween Season, of course, extends through New Year’s, so don’t worry yourself about that. But before we go, we need to go to an old-time radio version of a classic, “The Hitch-Hiker.” Starring Orson Welles, who performed it a few times on radio, it was later turned into a Twilight Zone episode. If you’re starved for time, at least listen to Welles’ intro.
Before we switch over to one last oomph of science fiction for this year, let’s go to a CBC series called Nightfall and their production of the W.W. Jacobs classic, “The Monkey’s Paw.”
First, it’s time for some more old-time radio with Boris Karloff in the 1941 episode of Inner Sanctum called “Fog.” If you’re on a time budget, at least listen to the announcer and his intro. Sanctum had one of the best openings. Mmmmm?
Next, here’s an insane cast for you. It’s from the 80s classic series Faerie Tale Theatre, hosted by Shelley Duvall. “The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers” has Peter MacNicol as the titular boy, plus Christopher Lee, Dana Hill, David Warner, Frank Zappa, and Vincent Price as the Narrator. Just damn.
Now we come to our feature film: Macabre from 1958, another William Castle classic. This was his entry into sensationalist promotional gimmicks: attending the film would get you an official certificate from Lloyds of London, insuring you for $1000 if the film caused you to die of fright. Fantastic.