Strange wimmin' distributin' swords

Speaking of Merlin, my search for the Wikipedia page on the TV series also turned up this interesting character:

" Merlin Hanbury-Tracy, 7th Baron Sudeley... was a very active member of the House of Lords for over thirty years... In 1985 he was elected a Vice-Chancellor of the International Monarchist League..."

Shouldn't that read something more like "In 1985, his army defeated the forces of all rival candidates for Vice-Chancellor of the International Monarchist League, after which he had them executed or imprisoned for treason, and their families exiled, and then declared that he had inherited the position by the grace of God"?

John Faa vs John Farson; or, King vs Republic

(WARNING - CONTAINS SPOILERS)

I've just finished reading a very lengthy, best-selling fantasy series. I was fortunate, in some ways, because I only started reading the first book after the last had been published, so - unlike many thousands of this writer's loyal fans - I wasn't left hanging in suspense for years, wondering if the final book in the promised series would ever be published (it was long overdue). The final opus is a fat bookshelf-buster, which loses some steam towards the end (especially in the final volume), but which at its best reaches the summit of fantasy writing.

The novels are filled with vivid, memorable scenes and ideas... alongside some clunky writing, padded chapters and embarrassing self-indulgence by the author, which I suppose you can get away with if you're a celebrity superstar.

Foremost, this opus - like Narnia, like Raymond E Feist's Magician, and like Alan Garner's Elidor -- is a travel-between-alternate-universes story. Another world, like our own Earth but not quite. Familiar words spelled differently (eg, replacing "e" with "ae" to get ye Olde Englishe atmosphere); Hebraic place names; minor but oft-repeated differences in dialect (trying to think of examples but there ent ary as come to mind).

We follow the heroes' quest across many parallel worlds, seeking a mysterious citadel where the enemy sits enthroned.

The male hero carries a weapon of special power, re-forged from a magical blade. He has two fingers sliced off early in Book 2 of the series, and he has serious issues with his long-absent father. One of his allies, a former Catholic cleric who's lost faith in God, has been wandering - on foot - through rifts between worlds, eventually settling among peaceful agrarians whose bucolic idylls are regularly disrupted by raiding predators. The rifts in the cosmic fabric are spreading, because the various universes are collapsing into chaos; the process is accelerating; spectral monsters are escaping through the cracks and preying on humans, consuming their brains. Our heroes must stop and reverse the collapse and restore the fabric of space/ time. To do this, they need to ascend to the very top of a mysterious tower, built by ancient scientist-magicians.

Innocent children are kidnapped and mutilated in a hidden scientific laboratory, until the good guys intervene and destroy it. In the devastated ruins of a once-great city, destroyed by the hubris of its own scientists, roving gangs prey on the visitors.

Giant sentient fighting bears make fearsome guards - but they have their own weaknesses, which our heroes can exploit. A talking animal companion provides some cuteness and comic relief. Children, hiding in cupboards after filching food from the castle cook, overhear plots to murder with poison.

One of the good guys - a quasi-cowboy whom, the author tells us explicitly, was inspired by spaghetti-western actor Lee Van Cleef [1] - wields the biggest, longest pistol anyone has ever seen, and reminisces about his alternate's world's version of the Battle of the Alamo. [2] Characters quote from a weirdly different version of the King James Bible. The dominant religion is supposed to be Christian but doesn't bear much relationship to it in the world we know, apart from passing allusions to Methodist hymns.

Computerised machines are possessed by, and speak with the voices of, disembodied intelligences. Semi-visible spirit-beings desire sexual union with humans. Characters who die in one world wake up in another, parallel universe and live on. Tarot-like symbols can be read to prophesy the future. Our defiantly atheistic hero sacrifices a child's life at the end of Book 1 so he can continue his journey across the parallel worlds... but don't worry, the kid turns up alive again in a parallel universe.

The malevolent villain, known by many different names in different worlds, possesses some supernatural power but falls short of the godlike status he desires. In the end, he dies an undignified death.

The main character's mother, a promiscuous noblewoman, philanders with a supernatural villain. There's even a doomed teenage romance as well; young Will's destiny means he must be tragically separated from the girl he loves, forever, although he can never forget her. If Hollywood does (as anticipated) get around to filming the entire opus,[3] the two young lovers' ages will need to be discreetly revised upwards.

And finally, the author places great emphasis on a monosyllabic concept as an excuse for the most bare-faced plot short-cuts, coincidences, and dei ex machinis. But despite all this, I found myself addicted to reading the books in his Dark...

... Phillip Pullman? Who he? No, I'm talking about Stephen King's The Dark Tower heptology, of course.

... Well, actually, now that you point it out...

Both King and Pullman acknowledge that it was Inklings who gave them the itch they needed to scratch. Pullman has famously excoriated CS Lewis for religious preachiness, ethnic and gender stereotyping, and glorification of death (which is rather like Quentin Tarantino attacking Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones for being excessively violent), whereas King reminisces fondly about his urge to write a Tolkien-inspired epic quest that wasn't just a Terry-Brooks-style Lord of the Rings knockoff. Watching spaghetti westerns inspired him to create the Gunslingers of the Barony of Gilead city-state of Gilead in the Barony of New Canaan, descendants of King Arthur's knights, who now pack six-shooters instead of swords: The Good, the Bad, and the Uglûk, do ya please.

But what surprises me most is not so much the list of similarities (you can also spot several Dark Tower parallels with Firefly, for example, a.k.a Torres and Glass),[4] but the fact that, amongst all the tens of thousands of words I've read discussing Pullman's three novels and King's seven, no one seems to have pointed this out. Try a Google search: most of what you get is book catalogues. They who read of Tull and they who read of Tullio seem to be nearly non-overlapping sets.

Both authors have found success through genre-blending. Pullman combines (largely successfully) Narnia-style talking animals fantasy with faux-19th century Jules Verne-style steampunk. King's great insight was that the Western - despite its veneer of gritty, unsentimental, taciturn realism - draws on much of the same iconography as mediaeval and fantasy fiction does. Horse-riding; dusty fields; desolate paddocks; failed harvests and reaptide bonfires; gallows; cows' and birds' skulls nailed to trees; Old Testament allusions; itinerant fighters, bound to a taciturn code of stoic chivalry; damsels in distress; counties and (cattle) barons; solemn, even high-falutin' diction.[5] However, King does (to my mind) dilute the power of this iconography somewhat by moving from the Mid-World to our own prosaic Earth. (In the later novels, King even includes himself as a character - which highlights the silliness of the standard legal disclaimer, which prefaces all seven books, that "all characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental". He also portrays his near-killer, redneck road menace Bryan Smith, with savage parody - which is understandable, if not the height of chivalry). Robin Furth, who is to King what Bjo Trimble was to Gene Roddenberry (right down to publishing the official Concordance), has loyally defended her dinh's metafictional crossovers... but still, I have to say, the chapters set in backwoods Maine are not those I find myself opening to re-read again and again. And there can't be many epic fantasies where saving the universe from chaos involves not only shooting down vampires, mutants and robots but also travelling between parallel worlds and... setting up a corporation to buy a vacant lot in NYC: Lawyers, Guns and Manni, anyone?

However. It still moves. The only really annoying side-effect of reading the adventures of Roland Deschain (by the way, what sort of rough-riding cowboy has a poncy French name? Louis L'Amour, wire your office!) has ruined both ordinary fantasy and ordinary Westerns for me. Each, on its own, is now lacking. So these days, when I watch Sky One's Merlin, I'm thinking: "Where's Black Thirteen? When's Arthur going to melt down his sword to forge the Guns, or destroy the ancient war machines left by the Old Ones?" and if I watch HBO's Deadwood, I want to know what demons abide in speaking circles on the road to Spearfish, and which of the West'ard Baronies is plotting to annex the Black Hills of the Dakotas.

============================================

[1] "Some [characters] just appear... Others I have to make up. Lee Scoresby, for instance: the Lee part comes from the actor Lee Van Cleef, who appeared in the Dollar films with Clint Eastwood, because I thought my Lee would look like him..." - Philip Pullman interview (2000).

"On a movie screen, projected through the correct Panavision lenses, [The Good, the Bad and the Ugly] is an epic to rival Ben-Hur. Clint Eastwood appears roughly eighteen feet tall, with each wiry jut of stubble on his cheeks looking roughly the size of a young redwood tree. The grooves bracketing Lee Van Cleef's mouth are as deep as canyons..." - Stephen King, "Introduction: On Being Nineteen (And A Few Other Things)," in The Dark Tower, Vol 1: The Gunslinger (2005 revised edition), p xiii.

[2] In fact, the fansites that were dreamcasting JJ Abrams' formerly-anticipated [update: but now abandoned] Dark Tower screen adaptation seem to favour Sam Elliott (Lee Scoresby in the Golden Compass film, also the Marlboro Man cowboy guy in Say Thankya For Smoking) for the role of Steven Deschain, Roland's father.

My own first choice would have been John Costelloe, who played Jim "Johnny Cakes" Witowski (seen on screen lovin' lo Vito loco in Season Six of The Sopranos). Costelloe has exactly the sad eyes, the painful thinness and the drooping handlebar moustache that King described; but in December 2008 he killed himself using, err, a gun.

So my next choice is Christopher "Dr Who #9" Eccleston - partly because he'd have the right note of melancholy, partly because it would be cool and self-referential in a Lawless-Stockwellian-Hatchian kind of way, and partly because Eccleston can be relied upon to pronounce both "Gunslinger" and "Stephen King" so as to rhyme with "finger".

[3] If JJ Abrams Ron Howard does go ahead and turn The Dark Tower into a film and/or a TV miniseries, I have a few scattered suggestions. (You listening, JJ? All SAG fees hereby waived, just include me in the credits.)

* Gilead flashback scenes should be in sepia, a la the opening credits for True Blood. So, at the very beginning, we see an introductory scene where Arthur Eld (would using footage of John Wayne be overdoing things?) is seated at a throne around the Round Table, with a dozen knights raising their swords to salute him. This dissolves/ morphs to a scene at the same table, and a dozen gunslingers in "modern" dress (long frock coats, American Civil War army jackets) raising their pistols to salute the (now empty) throne. The opening 5-10 minutes of Ken Branagh's 1993 Much Ado About Nothing should provide inspiration.

* The Gunslingers' weapons, etc, should not be taken straight from the existing "Westerns" section of Props department, but should be subtly different - about 50% Western, yes but 30% mediaeval and 20% Eastern/ Japanese (reflecting the Arthurian and samurai echoes), eg, Roland's gun belt should be intricately tooled, like a Viking's sword belt, and he should be wearing the ragged remains of a Civil War-style military uniform under his Drizabone trenchcoat, with a small (largely ceremonial) metal breastplate over the top of his chest. His hat should be a battered US Cavalry-type with a badge showing the banner or sigul of Gilead - Llamrei, Arthur Eld's horse (like a stylised chess knight), rampant over two crossed pistols.

* The theme song should be by Bruce Springsteen - either some of his classic hard-scrabble devils 'n' dust songs like This Hard Land (1995) and If I Were The Priest (1974), or else one composed by The Boss especially for the series (".... The world has moved on now/ the Beams, they are hollowed/ While the man in black fled/ And the Gunslinger followed"). A banjo-and-fiddles ballad, but with eerie Celtic pipes in the background, and a mediaeval-sounding lute or lyre (as in Dire Straits' Romeo and Juliet). Hell, King owes Springsteen big time for the line that gave him a title for his biggest-ever book (And King mentioned rumours that Springsteen was in contention at one time to play Larry Underwood). And of course space should be made for The Man in Black, in his long preacher's coat.

* The first few minutes of a Gilead flashback should begin with a dusty, horse-track Western frontier town, as in Deadwood or True Grit. We see horses, stagecoaches, drinking troughs, etc. Then the camera pans upwards and we see the walled city/ castle of Gilead itself, pennants fluttering, tapestries hanging, as magnificently mediaeval as the White City of Gondor, or Camelot in First Knight. (Okay, not copying anything else from First Knight.) So we initially think we're watching a cowboy film, but then whoa... we're not in Kansas any more.

[UPDATE: And get this guy a gig on the soundtrack. Pure brilliance... Ennio meets Enya and they dance Ravel's Bolero].

* And on that note (so to speak): Susan Delgado should have an Irish or Welsh accent. Can't say why, she just should. Imagine, say, a younger Tara Fitzgerald speaking Susan's lines from Wizard and Glass with a Celtic lilt ("And you'll not be pert with me, sai Dearborn!").

UPDATE: If Alessandra Torresani is booked out, I nominate Jessica Chastain for Susan. Fitting on every level.

[4] "Gina Torres should play Odetta/ Susannah, for two reasons: 1. Her surname means “Towers” in Crunk – err, Spanish. 2. She already has experience playing a butt-kicking black chick who (a) marries a pasty white guy (who gets in over his head with gangsters) and (b) hangs around with a troubled teenager who sees disturbing visions; an ex-cleric with a shady past; a private-school boy who detests his wealthy father; and a disillusioned ex-soldier who, after his side loses the civil war, wanders around New Canaan and other worlds killing mutants with his six-shooter, all the while speaking a folksy David Crockett-style argot interspersed with Asian words." (here)

It's ironic that the best two Westerns I've ever seen at the cinema weren't actually Westerns at all: The Two Towers and Serenity. Now that cigarette advertisements are banned, it's oddly ironic that the closest thing to the glorious vistas of the old Marlboro Country ads are brought to us by a director named Peter Jackson.

[5] Daniel Grotta (no, that's not a Russian Hogwarts ripoff), in his JRR Tolkien: Architect of Middle Earth, mentions that, as an Oxford undergraduate, Tolkien was fascinated by tales told by Allen Barnett, an American fellow-student, about growing up in rural Kentucky. And certainly there's something very Huck Finn-ish about the Hobbits, especially as Jackson portrays them.

PS: Add to the above list of similarities that 'Both refer to [the] Christ as "the... Man Jesus".'

Until Kristen Stewart sprang with superhuman speed between him and the taxi, denting its metal hull but saving his life

Paul Chi and Lisa Ingrassia, "Robert Pattinson Hit by Taxicab," People Magazine (Thursday 18 June 2009)

UPDATE: Great minds think alike.

(Fal)Staff Training Sessions

Prince Harry has been ordered by his British army bosses to enrol in an equality course after calling a fellow officer a "Paki". The 24-year-old is understood to have been formally disciplined by army chiefs for making the offensive remark and told he must realise his behaviour was unacceptable...

- "Prince Harry to attend equality course," NineMSN News (Thursday 12 February 2009)

One here pictures Hazza's tutor bowing low before him and saying "If it please Your Royal Highness, might I may be so bold as to venture to instruct your Royal Highness that the equality of all subjects - from the highest nobility down to the merest commoners -  is deeply, deeply, embedded in the laws, usages and customs of Our Sovereign Lady Your Most Majestic Grandmother's realms, lands and dominions, wheresoever situate."

Because it's not always the red shirt who gets dismembered first

Problem A: younger offspring loved the figures from Wiggles [TM] keyboard so much that ended up pulling off the top half of Greg the Yellow, leaving him a legless corpse like the android Bishop. [*]

Problem B: older offspring loved various Wall.e toys so much (Wall.e being to our TV room floor what Elvis is to a typical Beenleigh pensioner's lounge room wall) that frequent dis-assembling thereof left one with a missing head - presumably vacuumed up weeks ago (dark grey being vary hard to see on the lino), and so gone forever.

Solution: a Greg/ Wall.e cybrid (cyborg hybrid) - with a curious resemblance to a sort of robotic Mr Tumnus....

[*]     That's Lance Hendriksen's character in The Aliens (1986), not Baths.

Kylie Eleison

'Singer Kylie Minogue is so desperate to wed Spanish model Andrés Valencoso in a church she is considering converting to Catholicism. The 41-year-old singer reportedly has her heart set on a traditional church wedding and may adopt his faith in order to have the ceremony of her dreams...''

- "Kylie Minogue wants to convert to Catholicism for dream wedding", The Courier-Mail (15 June 2009)

Hmmm.... Australia's Sweetheart decides that the theological subtleties of Unam Sanctam are unimportant compared to the fact that she really, really loves her latest overseas heart-throb. I'm sure this will end well... I was going to say "At least this time there won't be any disparity of cult, if she converts", but apparently some Protestant UQ Medical Student referred to Scientology as a "cult" years ago and Tom Cruise has needed counselling for it ever since.

Nay, sai, 'twere Jack McCabe

"KUNG-FU cult hero David Carradine may have been killed by a secret society of martial arts assassins, his family's lawyer claims...."

- NEWS.com.au (8 June 2009)

Who the hey is my neighbour?

'HARE Krishnas and Baptists seem like odd neighbours but both religious groups are planning massive developments on land in the same short, pot-holed and overgrown street in Brisbane's southwest. Sundays in Seventeen Mile Rocks may never be the same again. Locals fear the imposing Hare Krishna temple, with its Indian-style architecture, three conical altars up to 15m high, restaurant, shop, and six accommodation "ashrams", will become an imposing blight on an escarpment overlooking the Rocks River Park. The escarpment has views all the way to Brisbane's CBD....'

- John McCarthy, "Hare Krishnas and Baptists may be neighours," Courier-Mail (1 June 2009)

Baptists and Hari Krishnae. One lot shave their hair short, bail you up in the street, and repeat repetitive phrases during their worship services, while the other... Anyway. Sounds like Seventeen Mile Rocks (or, as it is known to those who reject the Protestant heresy of "Sola Scriptura", Twenty-Three Mile Rocks) is nearly as theologically diverse these days as Cordelia Street.

The biggest colluder?

There's the forgivable type of price-fixing cartel. And then there's the unforgivable type.

From JJ Adams to JJ Abrams, or: "First DeForest, then Urban" is not a zoning by-law

(Warning: possible spoilers)

"Remember a movie called Forbidden Planet? It was made in 1956, long before Star Trek was ever conceived... Leslie Nielsen's JJ Adams and William Shatner's James T Kirk would be equally at home on each other's spaceships."

- David Gerrold, The World of STAR TREK (NY, Ballantine Books, 1973), pp 204-05.

Curiously, the last two films I've seen have related to Brother Gerrold's book:

Last week, Martian Child (2007) starring John Cusack, based on a fictionalized version of Gerrold's own life.

Then, this week, saw Star Trek XI and was, as the reviewers warned, blown away thereby. It's better even than First Contact, I'd say.

Only two flaws I could point to:

(a) one bi-i-i-g plot coincidence, in a scene that seemed to have been borrowed from Monsters Inc; and

(b) a problem not so much with this film on its own, as with its place in the ST canon as a whole. That is, most of the plot points in "XI" are good and make sense in this film, BUT have been used before in previous Trek films. Vengeful Ahab-like villain? Check (II, VII, X). Sinister Romulan with family issues, personal vendetta and enormous super-ship? Check (X, XI). Unstoppable alien force travels back in time? Check (VIII, XI). Heads towards Earth? Check (I, IV, VII, X). Starts huge ruckus in San Francisco Bay? Check (VI, X). And so forth.

Having said that, one can construct a similar list of similarities for, say, rebooted BSG (if you cite Trek DS9, Blade Runner and The Terminator, you've pretty much covered the field) yet that is not to deny that the re-user may come up with a much better production than the original.

Four more points of note:

*       Good to see Amanda - Spock's mother and she who is (wave arm benevolently in her general direction) Sarek's wife - wearing a head covering. As Jane Seymour proved playing Serina in the original BSG, a simple shawl/ scarf is successful in wholly nullifying a woman's sexual attraction to males.

*       The Quinto Element.

*       Sulu putting the "slash" into "Star Trek slash fiction". How weird is that?!

*       Now that Abrams has struck cinematic gold with Trek XI, he should get the go-ahead from the studio money men for his next project - Stephen King's Dark Tower, praise the Man Jesus.

Kingsryche

'Britain may allow the monarch to marry a Catholic and give female heirs an equal claim to the throne, the Government said, in what would be a reversal of discriminatory laws going back 300 years.... Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Queen Elizabeth have held talks on changing the 1701 law on succession to the throne that was drawn up at a time of widespread hostility to Roman Catholics.... The Act of Settlement bars royals from becoming king or queen if they "profess the popish religion or shall marry a papist"....'

- Reuters, "UK flags reversal of discriminatory monarch laws," ABC News (28 March 2009)

Vatican spokesperson Cardinal Aircraftcarria praised the move. "We are pleased that perfidious Albion has at last dragged itself into the 21st century", he was quoted as commenting. "Restricting the office of Head of State to a particular religion is as unacceptable as restricting it on the grounds of gender. Neither should be tolerated in the laws of any sovereign state."

"The much-married Newt Gingrich converts to Catholicism this weekend - and I'd pay a year's salary to have been a bug on the wall during his religious instruction....'

- Christopher Buckley, "The Audacity of Poping," The Daily Beast (26 March 2009)

At least that'll push the Herbert W Armstrongites off the first page of hits next time someone Googles "Catholicism + Beast".
 
Article #1 above will be good news to Catholics everywhere. It raises the intriguing possibility that, when the Airstrip One Regional Consultative Council (formerly the "UK Parliament") proscribes Love and Responsibility as "hate speech" in a couple of decades' time, the Royal Assent to the Bill could be given by a Catholic King or Queen.

On the other hand, as Article #2 shows, it also creates a risk of Noot the Grinch eventually taking the Throne at Westminster in a "King Ralph"-style comedy of errors.

Episode 5.1 title leaked...

"Dr Who and the Planet of the Pyramids of the Spiders from Life on Mars"
 

Now that's not wholly fair...

... it wasn't until "As If" that Sara really sold out to the commercial devil.

"Coal Mine Blamed For Causing Diarrhoea," NineMSN News (9 January 2009).

Leadership Beyond Politics

"The mother of Denmark's Prince Frederik tempted her son with two eligible European princesses in an attempt to lure him away from Tasmanian Mary Donaldson, a new book claims...."

"Romeo Dhakhotah" was already taken

"A Pennsylvania man has complained a local grocery store refused to decorate a birthday cake with his young son's name: Adolf Hitler Campbell. Heath Campbell, 35, who denies the Holocaust took place and decorated his home with swastikas and Nazi paraphernalia, said The ShopRite supermarket in Greenwich Township refused to print his son's name on a cake to mark his third birthday, the Harrisburg (Pennsylvania) Express-Times reported Monday. Campbell said the store has also refused to decorate cakes with his 1-year-old daughter's name -- JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell...."

- UPI News, "Store: No cake for Hitler" (15 December 2008)

"Och, yeer damned right theeere, mon", the supermarket's manager, Angus Ian MacDonald, told press Monday. "I'd sooner defile yon cake with tha poop of a wee doggie than with that accursed name - Campbell."

... And It Will All Happen Again

We've all seen Exhibit A a zillion times since August '08. Exhibit B,
however, shows that this thing is really getting out of hand....

Life, alas, imitates art

Well, kitsch pop art, anyway:

Clone Wars

Couple of thoughts on the new "Clone Wars" series (after seeing the
pilot at the movies, and chunks of the first 2 episodes on TV today):

1. Good move to take control off Lucas and let others have a crack at it - this was how "Star Trek" and "Battlestar Galactica" both improved enormously, by changing the guard (NPI) (and you don't even need Ron Moore to take over, as I earlier thought!).

2. Also good to have SW episodes that are just meant to be an entertaining Saturday-afternoon adventure serial - crashes on jungle planets, secret plans, kidnappings, battered spice freighters, pirates, etc - as it was originally supposed to be in 1977-78, unlike the films where, after 'ESB' in 1980, every episode had to be Great Art freighted with heavy moral and historic symbolism (ie, Joseph Campbell; Jedi Temple = 9/11; Anakin = Dubya Bush; etc). CW reminds me of the SW comics (Marvel, pre-Dark Horse, ie costing less than an actual horse) which I used to buy religiously (NPI) back in 1982-83. Intelligent good fun, but no pretensions. Screen science fiction is never going to be critically acclaimed like "Taxi Driver", no matter how waaaaay dark you make it. So just give us Senator Palpatine, not Senator Palatine.

3. Lucas would have put enormous attention into, eg, making the spaceships look a certain way (to pay homage to some obscure detail in "Forbidden Planet"), but would not have thought up the entertaining human character touches that Dave Filoni did - eg, that the Clone Troopers, despite being identical copies of Jake The Muss, have expressed their individuality by giving themselves different haircuts, from bald to Milhouse-style bleaches to Marines jarheads.

4. Don't confuse "Clone Wars" with "THE Clone Wars" - entirely
different Star Wars-based animated TV series. (That stray definite article can make a big difference. Ask Scorsese whether anyone went to see "God the Father, Part II").

PS: Speaking of The Godfather... "Filoni." "Jabba's wicked uncle plotting to have him killed." Hmmm.

"Beatles' Tribute to 'Father McKenzie'"

"FOLLOWING last week's Guardian report on Northwich Memorial Hall's 40th birthday celebrations, tributes have poured in for one man who was at the heart of everything good during the early days. Tommy McKenzie was the hall's first compere and was responsible for bringing many of the top acts to perform at the venue. He lived in Rudheath, but originally came from Liverpool where he befriended The Beatles. Such was the bond between them, that the most famous band in music history called Tommy 'father'. The more avid Beatles fans will spot how much Tommy meant to the band. He was Father McKenzie in the song Eleanor Rigby..."

- "Beatles' Tribute to 'Father McKenzie'," Northwich Guardian (8 June 2000)

Let all men [sic] know, that this blog does not endorse non-centuries-old transgressions of Jesus' command in Matthew 23:9.

Sorry we ever doubted you, Ira Levin

No word yet of Templars, aliens or Kali-sacrificing Thuggee, but there's still much excavating to do.

And here I was thinking Douglas V Duff's On the World's Roof had conclusively located them in Tibet. Cancel Brad Pitt!

Nazi graveyards have been rediscovered deep in the Amazon rainforest during research for a book that chronicles the fanatical regime's plan to create a secret colony for a master race in the 1930s.

Totem-pole like wooden structures, standing at around 2.75m tall and with swastikas carved into them, mark the graves of the Nazis at Jari River, a northern tributary in the Amazon river.

The grave markers are believed to have been built by the Nazis but were forgotten about for decades, the UK's Daily Mail reports.

It wasn't until Jens Gluessing, author of The Guayana-Projekt: A German Adventure On The Amazon, began investigating the sites that he uncovered the wartime graves.

His book claims Hitler's henchmen believed they were destined to start a super colony in the jungle and that they were destined to settle the world like pioneers of America's wild west.

On one of the graves, an inscription says: "Joseph Greiner died here on 2.1.1936, a death from fever in the service of German Research Work."

Mr Gluessing discovered Greiner was one of three explorers sent to the jungle by the secret service to explore the region with the idea the Reich would eventually populate it.

Greiner's team sent information back to the Nazi headquarters in Berlin detailing how soldiers could live in Brazil, even though their cover story was that they were collecting wildlife samples.

In his notes to Heinrich Himmler, he said: "The two largest scantly populated, but rich in resources, areas on earth are in Siberia and South America,' he wrote to Himmler.

"They alone offer spacious immigration and settlement possibilities for the Nordic peoples."

"Amazonia" was the best place to begin colonising, he wrote.

"For the more advanced white race it offers outstanding possibilities for exploitation."

"Nazis 'hatched master race plan in Amazon'," NineMSN (Friday 24 October 2008)