Meet Danny. Danny is lonely. Danny just wants to meet a woman; a woman who’s attractive. She should have features like eyes, legs, and, perhaps, automatic windows or at least a cup holder. Danny wants to take you out on a romantic date, complete with a candlelight dinner, roses, hand holding, music, and, because he knows how you women folk jibber-jabber, lots of talking. On the beach. He has a wild streak as well, once having run across the street without looking. He’s a wild man alright.

Watching this video I wonder just how closely related the man’s parents were or if the place where they made their home was riddled with high levels of radiation. I also wonder just how honest Danny is being in this video. Does the key to the city of his town even exist? Does he really want to talk or is he just looking for a real life woman to replace he crusty, worn blow-up doll? Lastly, do specific features matter or does he just need them to fill out the ever growing collection of body parts he stores in his basement?

pathetic dating video [YouTube] : Dethroner : Esquire

We have presented odd theremins before but those had a special charm, an air of frivolity distinctly laking in this offering on ebay. Fashioned from the leering, demonic head of a child’s doll, its eyes alight with an unholy crimson glow, truly this is an instrument for an emotionally stunted and traumatized sociopath or, perhaps, a high-school goth.

DOLL HEAD II LPC THEREMIN SCI FI SYNTH EFFECT (NEW) [ebay] : Gizmodo : boingboing

The late 1970s/early 1980s saw the birth of some of the freshest pop music ever created by Humans without the aid of alien technology or Machine Intelligence. Landscape’s “Norman Bates” is probably THE catchiest little jam ever written about Psycho, and one of the best synthpop jams ever created: if you do not find yourself bopping around all damn day singing “My name is Norman Bates, I’m just a normal guy”, there’s something not wrong with you and you should never read this blog again.

Good luck finding this music on CD or mp3, though. As far as I can tell, Landscape’s catalog only ever appeared on vinyl. I managed to track down mp3s of most of their tracks, but I’m an obsessive music freak and will gladly pull an Indian Jones and raid mysterious Mexican jungle temples filled with old vinyl and mysterious BitTorrent trackers to find what I desire. It’s Out There, though!

Landscape’s “My Name is Norman Bates” [YouTube].

A clip from a 1970’s educational film strip on how to talk to your children when you catch them masturbating. The preload image alone in the embedded YouTube clip is a good idea of the horror to come.

Ricky — a dead-eyed youth with a face pocked by melanoma — stares without blinking at the ceiling while woodenly masturbating. As he does so, his door knob begins to turn slowly, ominously, like the door knob in a zombie movie. The door opens and his mother — a flabby, emotionless polyp of a woman — enters his room without knocking. Despite Ricky earlier appearance of soullessness and the fact that he is covered with a sheet and could easily have passed himself off as taking a nap, the boy wildly overreacts, flailing his limbs wildly around him, gasping and fumbling with himself. Smooth, Ricky. Now she’ll know you were jerking it.

And she does. But his mother is understanding. “Oh, I’m sorry, Ricky. I did see what you were doing. It’s all right.” she says calmly, her voice atonal and utterly drained of feeling. “It felt good, didn’t it?”

Ricky simply stares at her, a dollop of drool forming at the bottom of his lower lip. This is the first sign that debilitating psychological trauma is kicking in.

“I’m glad you’ve decided to do this in the privacy of your own room,” the mother continues, clearly referring to Ricky’s uncle Randall and the men’s restroom adventures of the same, “When you’re a little older, we’ll talk more about these feelings and what causes them and how we can control these feelings. I’m sorry I intruded on your privacy. I’ll be sure to knock next time.”

And then, as if in reverse motion, his mother calmly leaves the room, leaving Ricky shaking in the fetal position. Unfortunately, the clip ends there, leaving many pressing questions unanswered, not least of which is whether or not Ricky managed to finish up.

Caught in the Act [YouTube] : POETV

This (currently) three-part short story documents the personal experience of a simple English teacher, caught in the blood-oiled gears of a Cthulhian apocalypse.

The story takes place in an alternate, but similar timeline to our own, and Derek C. F. Pegritz (the author’s) adjustments to world history are both clever and frightening:

When I was a kid, growing up in the ‘80s—that Last Great Decade before the recessions and the ever-escalating war with the Azifists in the Middle East began, before the end of the Reagagnostic Era and Gorby’s suicide and the revelations of all the horrors the superpowers had dug up in Antarctica and Australia and the Pacific during the Colder War—when I was a kid, like I said, I was an apocalypse junkie. Kind of hard not to be when every night the news had something more to say about tamed Russian shoggoths used against the Afghans, Azifists crashing planes into skyscrapers in order to create psychic shocks powerful enough to coalesce transdimensional polypoids, R’lyeh rising a foot a year, Reagan’s Project Stargate estimating the casualties resulting from thermonuclear war with Russia or a return of the Antarctican Elders at 99%.

Trois Freres will be ongoing, says the author, and will hopefully be joined at that blog by the works of other horror authors, such as Cait Kiernan.

This bit of fiction stands as the only non-Lovecraft-written Cthulhu Mythos work I’ve ever enjoyed. Well done, sir.

Trois Freres [Footnotes to a Species Once Called Humanity : shoggoth by Dennis Sibeijn]

When a new Coen Brothers movie comes out, something happens to me: my entire spinal column begins to quiver, from neck to coccyx. The sensation has not paled even after a couple of notably inferior Coen Brothers films: their mediocre remake of the The Ladykillers and the enjoyable but decidedly un-Coen-esque Intolerable Cruelty.

But good lord, this trailer for their upcoming version of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men is stunning. It’s a return to the darker side of the Coens, a throwback to their earlier films like Blood Simple and Fargo. And just from the trailer, Javier Bardem as Chigurh — a violent sociopath obsessed with chance and carrying a cattle gun — looks like he could just be one of the darkest and most frightening villains in Hollywood history.

I’ve never read any McCarthy, but both The Road and No Country for Old Men really look up my alley. Anyone care to give me a recommendation?