Check out these odd and strange Halloween postcards from the past.
-Vintage Everyday
I slip inside the front door of the Menger Hotel, unaware of its history
and hauntings, for now. I just want to get away from the dusty Texas
heat. A trickle of sweat slides down to the small of my back as I am
transported to another era, with Victorian-style furniture and old jazz
music playing. Two elderly women make their way around the expansive
lobby, admiring the period furniture and the pictures of famous guests
and Texas elite who have visited the hotel over the years. “Oh, I wish
we were staying here,” one of the women says. Like me, they are not
guests of the hotel but tourists who have wandered in off the crowded
street. Her friend shakes her white-haired head emphatically. “Not me. This place is haunted.” The first woman flashes a wicked, age-defying grin. “I might find a boyfriend.”
-Narratively
California’s Salton Sea was once a sparklingdesert oasis, attracting vacationers in mobile homes and RVs. The people have
gone but their trailers remain. Located
in Southern California’s Colorado Desert, the Salton Sea was created
inadvertently in 1905 when a “perfect storm” of heavy rains and ill-advised
construction of irrigation canals allowed the mighty Colorado
River to divert into the bone-dry Salton Sink.
-Leenks
It has become one with the jungle since the last human inhabitants abandoned its shores in World War II. Ross Island, or as I’ve come to call it, “Jungle Book Island”, was once
referred to as the “Paris of the East”, for its opulent architecture and
exciting social life amidst the unlikely setting of a tropical island
forest. It was the seat of “British Power” in the Andaman Islands, where
the colonial government of India chose to set up their
remote headquarters in the 1850s. But beneath nature’s impressive
takeover of what now looks like a scene from The Jungle Book, there is a much darker story to tell than any children’s tale…
-Messy Nessy Chic
In the hills of Mexico, a tribe of Indians
carries an ancient secret: a diet and fitness regimen that has allowed
them to outrun death and disease. We set out to discover how the rest of us can catch up.
Tarahumara men have a taste for corn snacks and beer, for instance.
They're hard workers, but come downtime, they party like a rap star's
roadies. According to one of the few outsiders to witness a
tesguinada--a full-on Tarahumara rave--women were ripping the tops off
each other in a bare-breasted wrestling match, while their husbands
watched in glassy-eyed, drunken paralysis. Tarahumara men love sports,
booze, and gambling so much, they'll stay up all night to watch a game,
down enough beer in a year to spend every third day buzzed or
recovering, and support their teams by literally betting the shirts on
their backs.
-Men's Health
They say comparison is the thief of joy, and this, as it turns out, is one cliché that has a raft of empirical evidence backing it up. But there is another truth about
social comparison: It’s pretty much inevitable, so you may as well learn
to use it to your advantage, say Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer,
both social psychologists and co-authors of the new book Friend and Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both.
-NY Mag
La première adaptation de Philip K. Dick au cinéma ressort en salles
cette semaine. L’occasion de voir ou revoir cet excellent film de Ridley Scott, réalisé trois ans après son mythique « Alien ».
« Blade Runner » était sorti quelques mois après la mort de Dick le
2 mars 1982 : Ridley Scott a adapté « Les Androïdes rêvent-ils de
moutons électriques ? », et met en scène un Los Angeles oppressant, en
2019 (dans le roman, paru en 1968, c’était 1992, et dans des rééditions
2021). L’adaptation est assez lâche par rapport à l’original, comme
souvent dans les transpositions d’œuvres de Dick.
-Rue89
