Thanks to a posting at the Night Shade message boards, I found these interesting giant squid related links. First is paintings by Skot Olsen that use the giant squid as a symbol. They look like some twisted take on Popeye.
The second link is TONMO, the Octopus News Magazine Online. It's set up as a message board and there seems to be a ton of stuff to look at.
A new giant monster movie is being made in Asia: Garuda. There's a trailer for the film at the site. The Thai film looks like it's going to use a lot of CGI for its big winged monster.
People on a Papua New Guinea island say they saw a 'dinosaur.' Armed police went out in search of the creature, but no trace was found. From the article:
"Eyewitness Christine Samei told reporters she ran for her life after seeing a three-metre tall, grey creature with a head like a dog and a tail like a crocodile which was as fat as a 900-litre water tank.
'It's a very huge and ugly looking animal,' Samei told local media. "
Last Plane to Jakarta is an interesting music review site (at least, what I've checked out so far are music reviews.) His take on death metal has won me over, now I must read further.
(Link found at another new site on my list, Rake's Progress.)
There's a new toy company launching in Japan with a whole selection of new Godzilla figures. At that site is a large picture of some of the test figures, one of which is the Smog Monster! And he looks awesome! I rarely buy imported toys, but wow, these are tempting.
A page has been set up for the Fresh Air Fund for Charles L. Grant. That page is part of a Grant's Web site.
Also, here is Grant's story Temperature Days on Hawthorne Street at SciFiction, if you want to get a taste of his writing.
Step by step lessons on how to be a ninja.
Step 7
Find yourself an interesting yet threatening ninja pose. As a ninja you obtain certain responsibilities such as kicking asses and looking cool and tough.
Ramsey Campbell lists his 10 "crucial" horror stories. I reprint them here (but you really should check out his Web site anyway):
"Ten that I think are crucial:
"The Fall of the House of Usher" (Edgar Allan Poe)
"Carmilla" (J. Sheridan Le Fanu)
"The White People" (Arthur Machen)
"The Monkey's Paw" (W. W. Jacobs)
"The Willows" (Algernon Blackwood)
"The Colour out of Space" (H. P. Lovecraft)
"A Warning to the Curious" (M. R. James)
"Smoke Ghost" (Fritz Leiber)
"Running Down" (M. John Harrison)
"The Hospice" (Robert Aickman)
Whether these are the most terrifying is a moot point. Some certainly deserve the adjective, but I don't think it covers all the qualities of any of them. "
It's an excellent list. I've added hyperlinks to the stories that can be easily found on the Internet. (Harrison, Lieber and Lovecraft are all still under copyright.) I haven't read the Aickman story. I've been trying to find more of his works lately, but I don't think much is in print. "Smoke Ghost" is one of my favorite ghost stories ever.
Apparently there was a discussion of this list at The Third Alternative message boards, but I couldn't find it.
(Link found at The Write Hemisphere.)
Harvey Pekar has made a deal with Ballantine to publish three new graphic novels. The first will be about his experiences making the movie "American Splendor." The next two will be biographies of other people he met during the making of the film. (Maybe Pekar will start updating that blog now.)
(News found at Return of the Reluctant.)
Nazi raccoons conquer Europe. What more needs to be said?
(This and other links from Fortean Times.)
One Norway family got real lucky. Two giant stones came down on either side of their house, one flattening the garage. Story includes pictures.
Man killed during a Masonic initiation. The event must have been unusual:
Carl Fitje, grand master of the New York State Freemasons, said in a statement Tuesday that guns do not play a role in any officially sanctioned lodge ceremonies.
I haven't read this long, long article, but just its existence is fun. It's a report on winged cats. (For added fun, there's some bizarre pics at the bottom of the page of "abnormal elasticity of the skin.")
(Found at Undiscovered.)
Many people in Mexico City's El Tepito slum are looking for help and mercy from Santa Muerte, or St. Death:
Swathed in a cloak and equipped with a long scythe, Mexico's Santa Muerte, or St. Death, is a dead ringer for the Grim Reaper.
But devotees like those in Mexico City's notorious El Tepito slum insist she is a motherly angel of mercy, and they make sure to attend to her like a queen.
Her larger-than-life statue, kept in a glass box at a street-side sanctuary, is draped in lace-trimmed satin. Her hooded, grinning skull is crowned with a rhinestone tiara, and every bony finger protruding from beneath her cloak boasts a glittering ring.
"She's not frightening. She's beautiful," insisted welder Isiel Alvarado, 27, flipping up his T-shirt to expose a tattoo of St. Death on his tummy. Genuflecting and crossing himself repeatedly before the shrine, Alvarado said he believes in St. Death because she delivered his brother safely from prison.
Comb jellyfish, the world's most dangerous alien species, is invading the Caspian Sea after having run wild on the Black Sea. It's killed anchovies, decimitated the kilka population and is threatening caviar:
A self-fertilising hermaphrodite, Mnemiopsis breeds as fast as it eats. It reaches maturity within two weeks and then produces 8,000 eggs daily. Its appetite is so great that it can double its size in a day. By 1990, its total biomass in the Black Sea had reached an estimate 900 million tonnes, 10 times the annual fish catch from all the world's oceans.
One snorkelling marine biologist from the Ukraine, Yu Zaitsev, calculated that there were 500 of the beasts in a single cubic metre of water in Odessa Bay. There was almost more jellyfish than water. Meanwhile, fish catches across the Black Sea had declined by 90 per cent. The valuable anchovy virtually disappeared.
Daily Yomiuri On-Line gives a look back on the original Godzilla film. The reporter manages to talk with a few of the people that actually worked on the movie.
""Both Honda and Tsuburaya strongly wanted Godzilla to land in Shinagawa," after they visited coastal locations in the Tokyo and Kawasaki areas, he said. "They both wanted Godzilla to knock trains over because they thought destroying something moving would make a good spectacle. Shinagawa was the perfect location because the Tokaido Line trains run along the coastline there." "
Scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman talks a little about "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." Recently, la gringa talked about getting an early view of the film. She says it's brilliant:
"It's an extraordinary film. It's genuinely funny, and -- in places -- heartbreakingly sad. But the overall feeling you walk away with is that this is a very human film. I can't describe it better than that."
I can't wait for this movie to come out. It's being released March 19.
In better horror writer news, there are interviews with Ramsey Campbell at SuicideGirls and Science Fiction Weekly.
