NOW HIRING: Our organization is looking for lazy shiftless menials who are awful at their jobs. Sneaky day-drinking and taking naps during work hours are a plus. Must be able to visually conform to thematically appropriate caricatures while maintaining proper vaudeville or music hall standards.
Duties will require remaining oblivious about some nearby horror (e.g. a corpse, supernatural entity, and/or rogue gorilla) until the moment of maximum comedic impact. Candidates will be assessed on the ability to bulge their eyes out, do a spit take, exaggeratedly wheel their arms and holler “A G-G-G-G-G-GHOST!”
Generous benefits package, including vision and dental coverage. Serious inquiries only.
Recommended listening: If you cut a rug, does it not bleed?
This October 31st, amaze and delight your friends and neighbors by going out as Frugal Person Who Did Not Want to Pay the Premium for a Real Star Wars Mask!
If you throw in some fishnets and a bustier, you can upgrade it to a SEXY Frugal Person Who Did Not Want to Pay the Premium for a Real Star Wars Mask!
Also, check out this dude’s legally sketchy hustle.
“Duke! I ate ham and farted!”
Recommended listening: When the one track where everything clicks perfectly also happens to sound nothing like the rest of the artist’s body of work.
No other tabletop RPG experience could ever match the obsessive bliss of my junior high self flipping through the copy of Fiend Folio he’d found marked down to $3.95 at the local Kay*Bee Toys store. It didn’t matter than I was a neophyte Basic Set player who had no idea what most of the statlines meant, only that the book contained a host of weird and wicked creatures drawn in a lurid style befitting their roots as the products of British fandom.
Browsing the book felt like a transgressive act, and made both 1st Edition Monster Manuals — when I eventually acquired them — profoundly disappointing by comparison.
My love of Atom Age sci-fi horror — specifically, flicks where radiation makes shit turn BIG — comes from my late mother, who adored the stuff and would tune into Channel 56’s Creature Double Feature whenever those movies were aired.
The Deadly Mantis was her favorite, though she also gave high marks to The Amazing Colossal Man, Tarantula, It Came From Beneath the Sea, and Earth vs. The Spider. I’m not sure why these movies caught her fancy, apart from being a somewhat geeky child of the 1950s who spent most of her early years living on military bases.
Apart from that personal nostalgic connection, I love these movies because they are so square and formulaic with the same bunch of archetypes (often played by the same set of actors) going through the motions against some oversized creature until SCIENCE and/or the U.S. military restores order…typically via some form of huge-ass explosion.
They’re the instant mac ‘n’ cheese of cinematic genres — nothing to set the world on fire, but make for fine belly filler.
From the letters page of The Witching Hour #53 (April 1975) comes a fascinating glimpse into the cinematic fantastic during the Gerald Ford era.
“You don’t understand what things were like before Star Wars” has become the stuff of cliche when oldsters (such as myself) deploy it in discussions about how utterly that film changed everything if you were into escapist fare, and the above blurb drives that home by showing how even the concept behind Star Wars was difficult for folks to comprehend before it manifested on theater screens.
That said, I would absolutely watch a re-staging of West Side Story in the world of Star Wars.
Recommended listening: One of the best bands to ever do it.
I was going to make a joke about Halloween 1977 being the special day when one could see King Kong snort lines off Darth Vader’s naked ass cheeks, but realized it probably happened on a nightly basis during the height of disco’s decadent phase.
Recommended listening: Until you can’t boogie oogie no more.
My name is Andrew Weiss. I am happily married to The Queen of Animals, and we live in a house on the hillside filled with pets and a shared collection of popcult ephemera.
I am an obsessive retrologist and hopeless dilettante. I also have a complicated relationship with my home town of Woburn and the Bay State in general.
I can be reached at bitter DOT andrew AT gmail DOT com.
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The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. - Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
The saddest day of your life isn't when you decide to sell out. The saddest day of your life is when you decide to sell out and nobody wants to buy. - Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron
The tragedy of your time, my young friends, is that you may get exactly what you want. - Inspector Shrink, Head
It was incredibly stupid, yet we danced to it. - Maura, Queen of Animals
Your tears are sweet sweet nectar to bitterandrew. - Dave Lartigue
Sometimes you are literally the grossest person I know. - Chris Sims
