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Posts by Greg B.

    Reply #1:

    Hey Shivi and K@ti, will your postal delivery find you without last names? Just want to check before I send them.

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    Reply #2:

    The first poster for The Dark Knight (aka Batman Begins II) is out.

    <a href="http://photobucket.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://i99.photobucket.com/albums/l307/redguard1971/dark_knight_teaser.jpg" border="0" alt="Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket"></a>

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    Reply #3:

    Count me in on the full throttle kitten kard

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    Reply #4:

    This is Little Joe, a gorilla who escaped from the Boston Zoo in 2003. He was found waiting at a bus stop. I kid you not.

    <a href="http://photobucket.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://i99.photobucket.com/albums/l307/redguard1971/little_joe_escapes.jpg" border="0" alt="Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket"></a>

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    Reply #5:

    Well don't feel bad, when I go to gothy places they think i'm a spy too Happy

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    Reply #6:

    Now here's something fun that I just stumbled across. Maybe all of you on the other side of the pond know about this, but I didn't:

    Tonight is Krampusnacht!

    Says the Rotten.com library of the occult:
    Krampus

    Krampus is one of those quirky survivals of a pagan tradition that preceded Christianity. Much like Santa himself. Or Jesus. Oops, did I say Jesus? Never mind.

    Santa Claus is a Christianization of a handful of traditional winter solstice figures, who morphed into St. Nicholas after the Catholics swarmed into Austria.

    Santa was most heavily influenced by the Norse Thor, who had a long white beard and cheerfully rode a flying chariot. The enemy of good in Norse mythology was Loki, a figure usually depicted as falling somewhere in the range between Satan himself and Carrot Top.

    Loki was a devil-trickster figure with big horns. (Of course, most Norse gods were wearing horns on their hats if they didn't have them growing out of their heads.) While the noble Thor was a good candidate for transformation into a Christian saint, Loki was not so much. But old gods never die, they just fade away. The lingering afterimage of Loki became part of the template for Krampus.

    The tradition is primarily an Austrian thing, although it spread erratically around Europe. There are two takes on Krampus, one being a secular humanist approach and the other being a magic tradition angle. If you put any two Austrians in a room, they'll soon get into an fistfight about which interpretation is correct.

    In the secular humanist approach, Krampus and the observation of Krampus traditions are pretty much just the antithesis of Santa Claus. On Dec. 5, the eve of the feast day of St. Nick, Austrians celebrate Krampus by running across the city in grotesque masks and generally scaring children. This is an extension of the good-cop, bad-cop theory. St. Nick makes his rounds on Dec. 6 rewarding all the good little children, a task which is made easy since Krampus has been out the night before, punishing pretty much the same children with a good switching.

    In other variations on the theme (and there a lot of variations considering what a relatively small geographical area we're talking about here), Krampus is one of Santa's minions, who follows along obediently passing out presents or switches depending on the moral turpitude of the child in question. Presumably, this would make the pointy-eared Krampus kind of the template for Santa's elves in later Rankin-Bass productions, but the jury is still out among the scholarly community on this subject.

    Then, all the adults go out and gets drunk, and much hilarity ensues.

    The other interpretation of Krampus is more mystical. Under this theory, people dress up in the hideous masks of Krampus in order to scare off evil spirits. ...

    The Krampus masks benefit from being particularly grotesque, or to be more accurate, stupid-looking. Let's just say Hindus have a better aesthetic sense than Austrians. Krampus masks suffer from the silliness of the whole Christian devil image, but occasionally he's presented as passably scary looking. Especially if you're eight years old. ...

    One of the relative benefits of paganism over Christianity is that paganism usually has holidays devoted to wild orgiastic excess. The Celts indulged in this behavior around Easter, which led to the adoption of the Easter bunny as mascot for the Christian version. Austrians liked to keep warm during those cold winter months, if you catch my drift.

    Once the Christians criminalized orgiastic excess, the Krampus-fertility nexus evolved into more of a taboo-stalker kind of scenario, in which the devilish figure, traditionally depicted with a swollen foot-long red tongue, malevolently thrusts himself on nubile women who are eternally "protesting" his advances. But not protesting too much. After all, he had a foot-long red tongue.

    <a href="http://photobucket.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://i99.photobucket.com/albums/l307/redguard1971/krampus8.jpg" border="0" alt="Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket"></a>

    For more see: http://www.rotten.com/library/occult/deviltry/krampus/

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    Reply #7:

    Oh yeah. Working retail during the holidays is hell. I used to work at Barnes & Nobles (big U.S. bookstore chain) and have lots of xmas horror stories.

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    Reply #8:

    I missed Vulgaras at the Knitting Factory last week and I'm going to miss Aimee Mann this week. Now I have my sites set on Dracula's Ball in Philadelphia for Valentine's Day, although I don't know who's playing yet! Oh, and I'm taking my kid to see Sweet Honey in the Rock in January.

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    Reply #9:

    I'm trying to clear a workspace and get all things in order for my new collage project. Also, I got Ancient Egypt cookie cutters at the Brooklyn Museum so my daughter and I can bake holiday cookies this weekend. Santa and the tree are banished this year!

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    Reply #10:

    I know what Cat's going to say: go start a "Get A Room" board! LOL

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    Reply #11:

    That's more like it. Now we can see those beautiful eyes!

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    Reply #12:

    I'll ask my wife and get back to you on that Happy

    And you rock those glasses, although I wish we could see you a bit more clearly in that pic!

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    Reply #13:

    Why yes, I do.

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    Reply #14:

    Here's my chance to return your compliment, opposites-girl. Bestill my gothy heart!

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    Reply #15:

    We're going to the Bust magazine holiday craft fair in Manhattan on Saturday. Is anyone else in the New York area planning to go?

    Here's the info if you haven't heard about it:
    www.bust.com/craftacular/

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