Day: October 13, 2003

Christopher Lee: A Man of Few Words

I’m pretty much a horror film junkie — I went through a period of a few years where I pretty much did not watch anything but horror films (followed by three or four years of watching nothing but Westerns — I definitely have an obsessive sort of personality).

Anyway, I love it when October comes around because then the channels that normally wouldn’t run horror films do very briefly (the exception is the SciFi channel, which runs the same piece-of-crap horror films year round).

So the other night the wife and I spent some time watching (and laughing at) the 1966 Hammer film “Dracula, Prince of Darkness” with Christopher Lee reprising his title role.

First, I generally despise the Hammer films, especially their efforts to update the Universal monster films. For some reason I’ve managed to see “Brides of Dracula” several times and firmly believe it could be put to great use in interrogating suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

But “Dracula, Prince of Darkness” goes the traditional Hammer film one better in that Christopher Lee does not say a single word in the entire film (oh yeah, and the special effects really suck, even for the 1960s).

The studio and some idiot fans claim that this done to create some sort of really frightening atmosphere. Lee claims that the dialogue that was written for him was so silly and absurd that he refused to say any of the lines. Of course the silly hissing he does (my cat does a better job of hissing than that) is hardly Shakespearean either.

Thank goodness Hammer films never tried to remake “Freaks.”

Ending the War on Drugs in Switzerland

According to the BBC, Switzerland is close to lifting an almost 100-year ban on high-proof absinthe. It’s interesting to note how little has changed in 100 years,

Absinthe, first produced in the 18th century by Henri-Louis Pernod, acquired a reputation as a creative lubricant in 19th-century Paris.

But it was banned in Switzerland in 1908, after a factory worker killed his wife and two children in a frenzy thought to have been brought on by the drink.

Source:

Switzerland ‘to lift absinthe ban’. The BBC, September 25, 2003.

Mike Adams on Diversity and Moral Relativism

One of my favorite conservative columnists of late is Mike Adams, if only because he does a nice job of skewering the nonsense political subtext that those of us who work at universities pretty much can’t avoid.

For example, his column on diversity is absolutely on target from my experience.

One of the amusing things about diversity rhetoric is that those behind it pretend that it’s a universal value, but in fact it’s basic special pleading.

So the one seminar I ever attended about diversity explicitly validated my particular religious beliefs — i.e. atheism — while at the same time denigrating the religious beliefs of more widely held beliefs, such as fundamentalist Christianity.

Adams writes,

Recently, I also noticed that the university’s Women’s Center website provides a link to gay churches. One of the writings is called “Christ on a Rainbow.” It is located just below another called “Love that is binding: The musings of a deep throated Pollyana.” One of the advertisements for a local gay church reads, “Whatever you believe, we embrace you!” All this, despite the center’s refusal to provide a link to a crisis pregnancy center because it is, in the director’ words, “overtly religious.”

Source:

NAMBLA: Coming to a campus near you! Mike S. Adams, September 29, 2003.