!!! IT'S  WEDNESDAY !!!

                                                    That Means.....

 

  NEW

 

  FEATURE

 

 NIGHT

 

here at my wretched little brain's

 

 

VIDEO THEATER OF THE MIND
 

 

                     RIVER  HALVING
                                        STREAMING  PAST               
                                                                      ROCK  THINKS

                                 LOOK  AT  ME! 
                                                                  I   BREAK  THE  WATERS!
                                      
                                 WATER LAUGHS
                                                           THINKS
                                                                 TIME TO COME
                                                                    ROCK WHO?

                                                                          

                                         
                                      

                                            

 

          


        Here at MY WRETCHED LITTLE BRAIN we're proud to announce that Video Theater of the Mind is now providing, direct to your home entertainment center, free, uninterrupted, no commercials whatsoever service.   So without further ado, the premiere installment of a new feature we like to call.....

                                                     YOUR WEEKLY SOAP

            Suds up and follow the continuing adventures of Beelzebeth, Roger and the rest of that rascally Rollins clan.  Share their heartbreaks, their triumphs, their ridiculously elaborate dinner menus, their bonehead mistakes and fashion faux pas in the oddly compelling saga.....

                          
                  DREAMS OF VERMILION SHADOWS



Beelzebeth Doddard Rollins

Roger 'Roger Dodger'  Rollins

(not to be confused with anything you may have seen, read or unwittingly been exposed to however vaguely similar the title or one or two of the characters (hell, just about the whole damn cast) might seem.  After all, dreams are a funny place, you know, the familiar and the strange mixing and merging seemingly with no intent other than to profoundly confuse, and frighten, the Bejeesus out of you.  Here at My Wretched Little Brain, through the auspices of our free, no charge Video Theater of the Mind, we are proud to make our own humble contribution to this honored, neigh, hallowed, subconscious nocturnal regurgitation of all things horrid and frightful. So lay back, relax, enjoy, then after the show let those droopy eyelids fall and allow your soul to be tormented and laid to waste by Hell's own premium cable channel as you sink further and deeper into the carnivalesque nightmare that is the pitiless sleep of the damned.)





Rollinwood

                                                   
                             Episode One

                 Strange Departures
                                                   

               Beelzebeth Rollins, matriarch of the Rollins clan, stands just inside the entryway to Rollinwood Mansion, massive, twin oak doors open to the night.

Coming, or going?

     "The night seems a time for odd comings and goings around here, doesn't it, Candida?"
       "It certainly does, Ms. Rollins."
       "Don't close the doors just yet.  And please don't call me Ms. I've told you how I detest such societal degradations."


Candida Repast

       "Yes, M.. Mrs. Rollins.  Aren't you cold standing there in just that Titian red, Jackie Kennedy-ish two piece suit with the sleeves that come down only to just below your elbows and matching, open toed pumps, no stockings, legs beneath the just above the knee hemline naked to the wind, looking out into the storm filled darkness where there's  nothing to see except the oddly twisted, gnomish looking trees of  Rollinwood Woods?"
       "You know I like listening to the boom and hiss of the Atlantic as it endlessly, relentlessly, smashes itself against the rocks at the base of Rollins Bay Cliff before I go to bed."
       "You've been standing there longer than usual tonight."

       "I have so much on my mind, Candida.  My brother Roger has been away longer than usual on one of his incessant business trips, the phone lines are down, the road is washed out, that irresponsible, so-called caretaker Philly Gloomis has disappeared again, my dearest, darling  Mircalla, the daughter I always yearned for but never thought I'd have is out somewhere with that no-account beatnik boyfriend of hers..."
      "I think they call them hippies nowadays, ma'am."

     "What does that have to do with anything!"
      "Nothing, ma'am. My mistake ma'am. You broke you're heal again stamping your foot down so hard again, ma'am."
      "Damn this heel!  Damn these shoes!"
      "Please don't throw them so far out into the woods ma'am.  It's always the devil's little tea party to find them in the morning."
      "And damn you, too!"
      "Yes, ma'am."
      "And to top things off, that despicable Mason Deguerre just won't shut up with his baseless insinuations about my involvement in that mysterious occurrence years back, and that other thing."
      "Didn't you know?"
      "Know what?  Nobody tells me anything around here!"
      "He's gone."
      "What?  Again?  Gone where?"
      "I don't know ma'am.  Him and that Philly Gloomis are always coming and going with nobody seeing them come and go."
      "Two peas in a pod!  Hopefully we've seen the last of them."
      "I doubt it, ma'am.  Their things are still in their rooms."
      "Did you look through them?"
      "Yes, ma'am."
      "What did you find?"
      "Nothing out of the ordinary, ma'am, except that Philly Gloomis painted another one of those encircled pentagram things with all the funny writing around it on the floor under the rug, and after all the time it took me to scrub away the other one, and Mr. DeGuerre had this here mysterious looking map in his underwear drawer." 
      "Hmmm, I don't think I seen this one before."
      "No, ma'am, looks new to me, too."
      "You put the other ones back where you found them?"
      "Always, ma'am."
      "And you never managed to decipher them?"
      "No, ma'am.  Even Professor Van Pelt down at Rollinwood University couldn't figure them out with all those dusty old books of his."
      "Another useless man!  Well, we'll just have to see what that shiftless no-account with his phony Irish accent is up to."
       "I always thought it was French, ma'am."
       "That's just what I mean!  You can't be certain about anything with that man, even his phony accent!"
       "Well, ma'am, whatever it is he's up too, I'd bet anything that good for nothing Philly Gloomis is involved."
      "I wouldn't be surprised."

                                              

                               TUNE IN FOR NEXT WEEK'S EXCITING EPISODE OF

                                     DREAMS OF VERMILION SHADOWS

                                                          RIGHT HERE ON......

                                                      YOUR WEEKLY SOAP

         a presentation of Video Theater of the Mind, a My Wretched Little Brain production
                                    




                                                       

                                                    



               



Hello all

Today I'd like to introduce a new feature here at My Wretched Little Brain that I like to call.....



VIDEO THEATER OF THE MIND

                                Slicked back hair gleaming, thin young men
                                               in double-breasted suits
                                         glide across moonlit courtyards,
                             In their arms pertly bobbed blonds quiver,
                                    dimpled knees shivering to the latest Dixieland jazz       

A funny thing happened to me on the way to this blog posting.  In consequence, the topic of this post  is now totally different from what I'd originally planned.
 
As per usual, prior to commencing to blog, I hit Facebook after hitting every other social media, news and entertainment site in my habitual zeal to avoid doing anything that has the least semblance to work.  And what, in my innocence, did I find waiting to accost me on my friendly little Facebook page?  Endless page after page after page of articles from Huffington Post's Celebrity Page archives, 'shared' to me by some anonymous troll.  Stuff going back to when Michael Jackson was among the living, Andy Dick was still getting arrested in airports and Carrot Top looked, well, less abnormal.  Took a while to get rid of it all but, apparently, no harm done.



disco never dies........



......but this did

Right away my razor sharp, though wretched, little brain deduced why I'd been singled out for this vicious attack of celebrity news:
   
     Retaliation!

But by who?  And for what dire act?

I'll let you be the judge of that.

The night previous to the insidious infiltration mentioned above, before putting little Toshiba to sleep I commented on a Huffington Post info-caplet accompanying a photo of Mr. Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta.  Part of a celebrity Scientologist slideshow, it was tacked to the bottom of an article looking into the, er, interesting, relationship between Tom Cruise and David Muscivage, Scientology's head honcho.
 


I thought there'd be more guys

             The Travolta info-caplet stated he'd been introduced to Scientology via a book he'd received on the set of early '70's horror cheeseball,  'The Devil's Rain,'  which featured the weirdly intriguing thespian talents of William Shatner, Ernest Borgnine, Eddie Albert and Jack Albertson (Chico and the Man).  On-set 'advisor' for this flick?  Infamous chrome-domed and devilishly goateed Anton LaVey, founder and head of the Church of Satan (his version of it, anyway), which seems to have had quite a following among established and would be movie star types looking to network, seek wisdom and enlightenment (and altars with naked ladies) in an atmosphere encouraging of sexual exploration.   Intrigued, I noodled around on Google and found that LaVey's real name was Howard Levey  (I'd always suspected Arnold Levine.)                         


Howard (Anton) and friends

But wait, there's more.  

the old boy himself,
looking rather pleased

For a time, back in old San Francisco, LaVey's almost next door neighbors were Charles Manson and his merry band of psychopaths.  LaVey is said to have based his theology on the writings of Aleister Crowley, known variously as the Beast and the Wickedest Man in History.  Manson, too, is said to have looked to Crowley's writings for inspiration. 

Which, in a convoluted way, brings us back to Scientology, via L. Ron Hubbard.


L. Ron, in a nautical state of mind

Scientology's founder and creative spirit, Hubbard is said to have met Crowley at least once. What is known is that after his WWII service, Hubbard moved in with John Parsons, genius jet

Handsome devil of a  fellow, eh, what?

propulsion expert.  Parsons, who was quite close to Crowley, was appointed by Mr. C. to be head of the Pasedena Agape lodge of  Crowley's 'magical' order, the OTO.  Hubbard was said to be an enthusiastic participant and 'writer' of the sexually oriented rituals Parsons conducted, which included his wife and daughter.

Too silly not to include

Interesting tidbit -- Parsons, who would habitually chant a hymn to the god Pan during rocket launches,
lived with Crowley in London for a spell.  It was there he made his fuel research breakthroughs.  Coincidence or not, Crowley had studied chemistry at university.



Back then, spies adhered to a
higher standard of loungewear

 Crowley, by the way, was an operative for British Intelligence, along with playwright Noel Coward, who has nothing to do with any of this but I like to imagine their joint intelligence debriefings.
                                                                       



Something like this, I suppose

Sometime prior to the Manson Family's murder spree, this miserable band of misfits and losers is said to have been infiltrated by undercover CIA guys who supposedly used them as a sort of running experiment in mind control.

Here's where it gets creepy.  Manson Family victim Sharon Tate was the daughter of a high ranking CIA official.  Several of the other Family victims killed with Tate had family connections to the CIA as well.  LaVey (remember him?) was on-set advisor (and Satan's sex scene stand-in) on Polanski's 'Rosemary's Baby.'  Tate was 8 1/2 months pregnant with Polanski's child when she was killed.  A few year's previous, she'd appeared in 'Eye of the Devil,'  filmed in London.  While there, she met well known Wiccan High Priest and Priestess Alex and Maxine Sanders.

Here's something I find extremely odd: In the early 60s, Tate lived with her family in Italy where her father was posted.  She came to the U.S. to study and pursue acting but returned to Italy because her mother was so terrified of something horrible happening to Sharon in California that she had a massive nervous breakdown.

It gets creepier and way too involved for me to deal with in this post.  Also, I'm just not qualified to make judgments on the veracity of the slew of information out there.  I don't have access to original source material and wouldn't know how to even begin authenticating it.  It's a fascinating though somewhat paranoia inducing topic, easy to get lost in, with one-thing-leads-to-another links connecting secret government agencies to the worlds of rock and roll, Hollywood, the occult, organized crime, political assassinations and, of course, Nazis. 

By the way, my original comment on HuffPost regarding Travolta mentioned almost none of this. Though I'd read and heard bits and pieces of all this weirdness through the years it was all pretty much buried somewhere deep inside the convoluted recesses of my wretched little brain.  Even I can deal with only so much weirdness on a daily basis.  It was the celebrity news story attack on my Facebook page that led me to brush up on my behind-the-curtains occult-CIA-military machinations trivia.

Better stop reading right there, pal

Oh, did you know that the Spahn Movie Ranch, where Manson and his gang hid out in the middle of the desert, was built as part of a western movie backdrop for early Hollywood shoot-em ups?  And that during the thirties it was where Ma Barker and her gang holed up?  And it was then elderly gang member Alan Karpis who clued in cell-mate Charles Manson about this great place to hide out?  And that Karpis started out as what was then known as a white slaver working with a Jewish gang that specialized in this, and that the FBI was brought into being specifically to eradicate this scourge?  And the Jewish gangs worked hand in hand with the Italian gangs, elements of both going on to form what became known as organized crime, which the FBI for decades refused to admit the existence of because Hoover was being blackmailed over his relationship with lifelong partner Clyde Tolson.



"Nice Suit."
"Ditto."

                                                                                                                                        


Like I said, a lot to wade through.

 

 

just a thought...

 

Why can't we replace these guys....

......with these guys?



Hello all.
 
Been a while, hasn't it?
 
Got a good excuse this time.
 
Immediately after my last posting a teeny-tiny message box popped up at the very bottom of my computer screen warning of incipient memory overload, only a few measly KBs keeping the old Dell from going into disc overwrite death rattle.
 
Next (hot hot hot) morning I hit the local (well, closest to me) Staples, on 95th street in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to pick up whatever external drive was on sale.  What I thought would be a quick $40 or $50 fix turned into a credit-card busting expenditure when it turned out that no external memory currently on the market is compatible with the version of windows (Vista) the old Dell was running (poor laptop, only 41/2 years old and already condemned to the recycling dustheap of history) so had no choice but shell out for something new.

A few weeks previous the touchpad's left click button quit on me (a $15 wireless mouse took care of that) so I knew the end was coming soon. But when it came it was still something of a shock.  Not as big as the one I received when three-quarters of my music got lost in space somewhere when transferring ITunes over to the new Toshiba.  Fortunately I was able to retrieve most of the music that had been purchased through ITunes but just about all CD uploads (we're talking approximately half a thousand songs here) simply ceased to be.

No big deal, I told myself, just root through some jumbled together CD stacks and re-upload.  But nothing is ever that simple in this here new fangled computer age. Since my new laptop didn't come with a CD player (which I'd thought a plus in terms of cost and weight) I had to start up the old Dell and upload on that, but proving that the search for simplicity is a sucker's game, for some reason the file transfer process had made a hash of ITunes files and wouldn't let me upload directly to it.  So I had to upload to Windows Media Player, then download everything to flash drive (after a failure notice due to lack of available flash memory necessitated yet another 2 bus transfer trip to Staples) then upload to WMP in the Toshiba, then copy everything over to ITunes one file, sometimes one song, at a time.
 
All this after a fruitless weekend trying to do basic set-up stuff, making me wish I'd shelled out the extra C-note and a half for their Home Setup Service. Finally at wits' and scalded eyeballs' end I packed everything up and on another broiling hot morning took another 2 bus trip to Ye Olde Neighborhood Staples.
 
I have to say the staff couldn't have been nicer.

Jerry spent almost an hour setting everything up, straightening everything out and rescuing the Toshiba from the graveyard of lost passwords.  This on top of the original sales/tech guy having installed the security package the night of purchase.  An expected 30 minute job, it ended up taking three times as long due to the difficulty involved in extracting the pre-installed Norton Security 30 day trial software, which, virus like in tenacity, is still telling me to activate it before I'm seriously compromised. (Which brings to mind one of those 50s-60s British noir type movies where Dirk Bogard or somebody is being blackmailed over some unnamed act of moral turpitude.)

Also, they took care of another problem, one purely of my own making and one I doubt anybody else could be anywhere near idiotic enough to create.
 
You know that strip on the back of that library-type card that comes with the Microsoft Office download package?  The one you're supposed to gently scratch away at until your personal, one of a kind, 25 digit Key Code is revealed, the one you need to enter to download Office's operating software to your computer, the one which, without, you might as well have tossed your hundred and nineteen dollars and ninety-nine cents down the nearest sewer grating?

Yeah, that one.
 
It wasn't revealin' nuttin'.
 
I tried scratching at other areas on the back of the card.

Nuttin'.
 
Went back to the damn strip, determined.
 
Overly determined, it turned out.
 
The strip came off in twisted, sticking to itself shreds, only a portion of the numbers visible.  Sheepishly, I handed the mess over to Jerry after all his hard work setting up, feebly trying to explain, fully expecting a dismissive throwing up of hands and directions to the nearest exit.

No problem, it turned out.
 
He handed the mess over to the store manager who got Microsoft on the phone and after they first insisted the problem could only be resolved at an Official Microsoft  Store, not just a store that sold Microsoft products, she calmly but firmly asked if they were aware just how much of their product was moved through just this branch of Staples.  After that, it was just a quick refund and buy-back and I was good to go.

My surprise at Staples' super efficient and super customer friendly policies and the staff's technological expertise is born of past, not so pleasantly resolved difficulties at that self-same Staples branch: endless battles over rebates and refunds for product failure, delivery date and times about as firm as a snowman on the 4th of July, clueless staff and endless, molasses slow checkout lines.

Never thought I'd say it, but here's to Staples.

(available for paid endorsement. can be contacted through this blog.)