In Which I Met Some Ghosts, and They Met Me Back

I returned this afternoon from my Ghostage aboard the Queen Mary, and let me say, little bloggyfriends, that it was not a boring night! To save myself writing a novel, I've put up my humble case report from the TAPS message board for y'all to read.

Thought I'd toss you guys an update:

I took a digital recorder with me, hoping to casually scout for a location and do some EVP work. Unfortunately, I didn't realize I was on the ship on a Saturday night, with a massive company dance party, two weddings, and tons of people booked for one night waiting to catch their Carnival cruise the next day. So needly to say, the ship was packed and I couldn't find two seconds alone anywhere. I finally gave up and went to bed. Was sharing a room and a queen sized bed with my Grandma. We were on the B deck in room 511 (if anyone has any stories) and needless to say I had no evidence, but puh-lenty of personal experiences! Will try to break it down so this isn't a novel.

1. Climbed into bed around 12 pm. Almost immediately felt that sensation of being watched.

2. Started watching TV to try to relax as I was very tense and vigilant. I was taking the best advice everyone gave me, be observant but do not panic.

3. Began to feel touched very softly with little spots of cool pressure, like a curious poke. It began to become more noticeable as the night went on, especially every time I began to doze off. Felt it on my back, collarbone, and feet.

4. The TV turned itself off three times during the night. Twice I was awake for it. The third time at 5am I fell asleep, and it was off when I woke up. (The remote was next to my pillow, btw) The first time, it woke my Grandmother. She told me it was probably automatically timed to turn off after awhile, but I noted that there was no specific time frame for the three occurrences. The first time I'd been watching for two hours. The second time was forty-five minutes later. The third was sometime between 5ish and 9:30am. In hindsight, I should have waited to see if it turned itself back on, but I didn't think to test that theory.

5. At 5am, sat up in bed to do a visual sweep of the room. Almost immediately there were three quick scratching motions on the coverlet above my foot (like when you scritch-scratch a blanket to get a cat's attention)

(Quick note, for those of you who haven't stayed there, the lower rooms have no portholes, so when the lights are off it is absolute darkness, as if you had blackout curtains closed. It is hard to make anything out, and impossible to tell what time of day it is without a clock)

6. I woke at 9:30 to hear the sounds of someone moving around. I thought it was my Grandmother, who got up at 3 to put in insulin (she's diabetic, and hates to turn on lights when her blood sugar is low, as she says it hurts her eyes) There was a mirror on the back of the bathroom door, and I could see the motion of someone's legs walking back and forth. I could not tell if it was a reflection in the mirror of the area where my Grandmother put her bags, or if the bathroom door was open and she was puttering around in the bathroom (like I said, very dark) so I called out her name. She answered from next to me in bed. She asked if I wanted to sleep in a little more, and I said "Nope, I think I'll get up now."

So I'm proud to say that I had a great and gratifying time! I confronted my fear of ghosts by approaching the situation objectively and not running away. I confronted my fear of having a ghost experience affect me negatively or possess me simply because it is paranormal. I not only heard disembodied noises, and had direct physical/entity contact, but saw a partial-body apparition! Plus I got to feel the heaviness in the chest I've heard tell of while touring the engine room on the self-guided tour. As soon as left the area, the pressure was gone.

I'd also like to say, for anyone ghost hunting there in the future, what I encountered on B-Deck feels harmless and non-threatening. If anything, I'd say it seemed curious!

Saturday Morning Cartoons: Time Capsule Edition

We don't remember them for a reason. But if we were old enough to understand what the %$*# we were actually WATCHING, we wanted all the toys associated with it.

Enjoy.









I take it back. Bravestarr was actually really cool.

Three Degrees of Separation

1. I am friends with Toast.

2. Above mentioned Toast went to school with Fyfe Dangerfield of Guillemots, whom we have seen twice, and hung out with after, equally twice.

3. Guillemots recently cast Ian McKellen to star in their new music video.

Therefore, Ian McKellen and I are BEST FRIENDS.

random thought

One of the funnest things about life and life experiences is the many different ways we can interpret the things we do. Also, the ways we can explain said activities to others in order to get different reactions. This has become a bit of a hobby of mine. For instance, I could tell my parents, when they call, that my awesome friend Chris and I did some awesome headshot/glam photography this morning in Koreatown (which we invited some construction workers to join in on, but they were total wussbags and wouldn't even let me play on their truck)...OR I could call my dad up, and when he asked me what I'd been up to, I could say nonchalantly, "Oh, nothing much. A tall black man took me back to his apartment and took pictures of me. What's up with you?"

Guess which one I went with. Actually, I went with the first one. But only because the second would have been WAY too much fun. Plus my dad would probably be driving, and I'd hate for him to spill his refillable gas station plastic soda cup of Pepsi all over himself in shock. Then he'd have to stop and clean it up, and then he'd miss the first ten minutes of a new CSI episode.

So if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to entertaining my friends. Which is a more positive way of saying I'm going to pet and/or feed my five cats.

I Ain't Afraid of No Ghosts...

As anyone who has shared a tv with me at any point in time for the past year can tell you, I'm hooked on my Ghost Hunters. I'm hooked on Ghost Hunters like it wasn't full of ghosts, but with crack cocaine. I told my therapist and she threw her hands up in the air "Why are you watching that? You're terrified of ghosts!!"

I imagine it did seem pretty odd. I do in fact carry around a hefty load of phasmophobia, aka a fear of ghosts (Write it down, there's a quiz later), I've seen many in my time, and I have to sleep with the lights on when I'm home alone and I've watched a spooky movie all by m'self. However, it isn't really as out of place in my psyche as you'd think. Spooky movies have their stars at the mercy of various supernatural forces, and in real life it almost seems too ridiculous or freaksome to be happening. The awesome gents and ladies of The Atlantic Paranormal Society, on the other hand, are so in control. They chase ghosts the way stormchasers chase tornados. Week after week, they wander around in really dark, really effed-up places, and one of them says "Whoa, dude, I just saw a man standing in that corner!" or "Dude, did you hear that voice?" and instead of flipping out, they giggle like kids at Christmas and CHASE. IT. They see the spooky thing and run towards it like the disembodied voice or full-body apparition is a pinata full of candy and Rolex watches. And they always come home in one piece. It might get a little scary, or a little intense. You might even get slapped by something you can't see. But you'll still be fine at the end of the day. In the end, you're more mobile and more determined than any old ghost, and hopefully you've got his voice on an EVP to show the world that these things do exist.

Where am I going with this? Next weekend, I will be staying aboard the Queen Mary, a very haunted little tub in Long Beach, with my parents and grandma. We will be going on the ghost tour. And then, at the end of the evening, when my parents tuck themselves into bed....

the ship is mine to investigate.

Get Educated, Part 2

I missed this one previously....

Jack Black is still Benjamin Franklin, and he's UP TO SOME SHENANIGANS.

Kentucky Explains The Dinosaurs

In a previous entry, we talked about how the good (and by good I mean CUH-CRAZY) people over at Chick Tracts have explained away the dinosaurs, evolution, fossil evidence, and anything that sounds like actual science in a humble little tract called There Go The Dinosaurs. I had a chuckle about it. Well, apparently someone decided I needed to really look at the information in ways a teensy little illustrated pamphlet couldn't provide...

So they opened A MUSEUM.

That's right. A museum. As in totally scientific. Or, not. In one exhibit, two young T. rexes peacefully watch fish swim in a placid pond. Two curly-haired robotic kids play nearby. In any other place, this would be the setup for a massacre. But this pre-Noah's-flood Jurassic Park is benign. The animals are vegetarians and plants don't have thorns. The fossil record, says the museum, confirms all of this.

At the ribbon cutting, Ken Ham, the rugged-faced CEO and president of Answers in Genesis, the nonprofit ministry that built the museum, tells an enthusiastic crowd that the Creation Museum will undo the damage done 82 years ago when Clarence Darrow put William Jennings Bryan on the stand in the famous Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn. "It was the first time the Bible was ridiculed by the media in America, and that was a downward turning point for Christendom," Ham says. "We are going to undo all of that here at the Creation Museum. We are going to answer the questions Bryan wasn't prepared to, and show that belief in every word of the Bible can be defended by modern science."

Really? Every word? How about the words VIRGIN BIRTH? How about the parting of the Red Sea? How about someone RISING FROM THE DEAD AFTER THREE DAYS?

I'm a Christian, kids. I'm a very gung-ho, Bible-reading, church-going Christian. But I'm also not a hellfire-and-brimstone lunatic, or a member of the frigging Inquisition. I don't think we need to sit around in the Dark Ages simply because a very faulty grasp of one translation of the Bible(the King James Version...because 1611 England really had all the answers and understanding of ancient history and languages we need, right?) has been taken by some to be LITERALLY true. I personally believe that taking a beautiful collection of stories and lessons handed down to the people by various apostles, witnesses, and disciples, and trying to use it like the owner's manual of a car, or a high school textbook, is missing the point entirely! The Bible is subjective, and moral. It isn't objective and scientific. And there's nothing in the Bible that states exactly what course of events God used to create the Earth.

Setting my personal religious beliefs aside, I'd like to point out that

1. Medical treatments for epileptic seizures
2. surgery and surgical procedures
3. the number ZERO
not to mention
4. Common people owning and reading the Bible themselves

were ALL at one time or another in our Christian history condemned for their mockery of Biblical or Christian values, and their use fought against ferociously! Maybe the opponents of that diabolical, unchristian, zero should have founded a museum.

If you believe in miracles, it doesn't mean you have to hate science. If anything, science itself is a miracle. Don't hold everyone back because you're afraid of getting an answer you can't reconcile with a very narrow view of your own world history. If we did that all the time, there'd be no penicillin, no women in the workplace, childbirth would still be commonly fatal, and mathematical theory and physics would be considered heretical witchcraft.

Luckily, the Creation Museum not only has answers for us, it has a cameo appearance by a very sexy Adam, who is also, in real life, aporn star. Just to keep things a little spicy for the tourists, right?

I think one of the interviewed visitors to the exhibit summed up the philosophy of this little variety show perfectly when he said
"I don't care how long it took to make the Grand Canyon. It's not how old it is that matters to me. What matters is being right with God. Darwin's theory has no God. It can't be right. I don't know if this story is truer than Darwin's theory, but I do know it's better."

Am I the only one who misses that crazy neighbor lady who thought that Dino bones were devil bones put in the ground by Satan to trick us into believing in Darwinism? I'd like to see that in a diorama.

An Open Letter To Mars

I was not aware you had written a memoir of your married life to date. You did a good job of trying to hide it, changing your last name like that. But I'm on to you.

Dare I say, we're hoping for Oprah's Book Club? Too soon?

Get Educated

With some drunken history!

Michael Cera is Alexander Hamilton!

Jack Black is Benjamin Franklin!

And a couple of drunk guys are really, really drunk.

Jack Chick Knows What Happened to the Dinosaurs

No longer content with being the source of all truth and knowledge on the subject of Catholics, mother *!#@ truck drivers, angry Muslim children, spinster evolution-touting teachers, Mormons, hot chicks who play Dungeons and Dragons (?), and basically everyone else in the world going to Hell (aka YOU), Jack Chick has gone one step further. Our favorite wacky tracts have now successfully provided information that previously only those huckster paleontologists, museums, and various other scientist types held the monopoly on:

He's gonna tell us what happened to THE DINOSAURS. I'm gonna leave this little gem to speak for itself. All I'm gonna say is this:







Apparently dinosaurs wore fake eyelashes, and this is an attempt to put a little "God Humor" in for the kiddies.




I bet dinosuar burgers were friggin DELICIOUS.

Chick tracts all do this, and it always creeps me out. Why doesn't God have a FACE??? Its like heaven is designed by the people who make those Japanese horror films with creepy little asian girls and random curses.
On the plus side, the stegosaurus and the zebra seem like good buddies.



And finally, this thought. Dragons, which in 1841 were renamed Dinosaurs (By whom? Was there a committee? Dragon didn't have enough panache?) were aboard the ark. Think about it. It's Jurassic Park! On a boat!

You're telling me there were two T-Rexes, two brontosauruses, two pterodactyls??? I get that the idea of every animal on earth on a boat is a bit much, but every dinosaur on earth as well? How many time zones did this ark take up? Did the cheeetahs and the raptors have footraces around the deck? Did the alligators feel inadequate?

I have to admit, however, it has a certain appeal. How much cooler would the Bible be if instead of a dove, Noah sent a pterodactyl off to return with an olive branch? That would be the most awesome Bible story ever.

Some Basic Information.

Hello, new blog. Hello, interweb. It's been a long three years since my last serious pre-myspace blogging effort. Mars has inspired me to return to the hobby of entertaining you fine people in the cybernet. No, I didn't consult an astrologist. Mars is a girl. You'll find her and her alien baby in the blogs I'll add links to.

So here's a little bit about me. This is me:

This, is NOT me.

This is Winona Ryder. She has more money than me, is more famous than I am, and is cute as a button. She also steals occasionally and has shagged Johnny Depp. I have only done one of those two things. Which one? I'll never tell.





But I am NOT Winona Ryder. I am Lola. So once again:




Me.







































Not me. Winona Ryder.







I hope that's cleared things up. Good to be blogging again.