LGBT History Month: The AIDS Masterpiece of a Lost Disco Pioneer

LGBT History Month: The AIDS Masterpiece of a Lost Disco Pioneer, It's just a coincidence that LGBT History Month occurs during our culturally appointed Scariest Time of the Year—it’s positioned to coincide with National Coming Out Day (October 11) and to commemorate the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which took place October 14, 1979, not with All Hallow's Eve.

But what a coincidence it is, given the horrors gay and queer people have suffered historically. Directly manmade cruelties like bigotry, discrimination, and attendant violence aside, I can't think of anything scarier than the onset of AIDS in the early ‘80s. Before it was a global epidemic, before it was cause, before it united gay men and women to save each other and themselves, before there was even a blood test for it, it was a mystery with several names and still more causalities. No matter how much Larry Kramer I read or stories I hear, I will never comprehend the blindsiding tragedy of a community of friends and lovers just dropping dead around each other without explanation. Sick and then gone. It’s terrifying, and I think about it a lot even though I’ll never wrap my head around it.

One of the earliest and most fascinating documents of those early days of despair and mystery is the final album from San Francisco electronic disco producer Patrick Cowley. Cowley was best known for his work with drag queen diva Sylvester—he remixed Sylvester’s signature 1978 song “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” among other collaborations. He also famously re-edited Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” stretching it out for a glorious 16 minutes, and you could say he absorbed a musical aesthetic from that song’s original producers, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte: like Moroder and Bellotte's Cowley’s disco was highly synthesized and spacey, but not without its individual idiosyncrasies (an obsession with sci-fi sound effects, high velocity BPM, a grinding feel to arpeggiated bass lines).

It was also very sexual and dynamic. Cowley’s 1981 track “Menergy” described the contemporary culture of public sex and cruising (“The boys in the back room / Laughin' it up / Shootin' off energy / The guys in the street talk checkin' you out / Talkin' 'bout / Menergy”) and contained an early example of what would come to be known as a “drop” (the defining feature of contemporary EDM, in which the thumping bass drum returns after a temporary absence). It is also, in my opinion, the best example of a drop, not just because it is particularly exhilarating but because it functions as a climax in a song so sexual. There are three of these drops that build and explode (shooting into the air like…a spaceship) in this song. “Menergy” is multi-orgasmic.

By 1982, Cowley was very, very sick. According to Joshua Gamson’s excellent 2005 Sylvester biography, The Fabulous Sylvester, Cowley directed the engineering of his third and final solo LP, Mind Warp, “while reclining on a couch in the studio. People propped him up by the synthesizer so he could work.” Mind Warp, Gamson writes, was referred to as Cowley’s “death record.”

Even without have read the book, you can tell as much. The first sound that you hear on the album’s opening track, “Tech-No-Logical World,” is a rotted synth fit, slipping in and out of tune. The song continues the futuristic theme of much of Cowley’s catalog, but it's less celebratory and woozier. He's the same musician, but altered. Frequent collaborator Paul Parker, for whom Cowley produced the club classic “Right on Target” that year, sings in his loungey croon of, “Mankind’s splendor spread out far and wide, but the flags of doom unfurl.” The producer's “Megatron Man” is rusting.

From there, the album presents a mutated version of Cowley’s hi-NRG disco – atonal noise reverberates, some tempos move with syrup slowness, vocoders babble incompressible and ominous data. The title track is Mind Warp’s most conventionally Cowley track in terms of danceability, but the sparse refrain tells of…mind warping. The album closes on the relatively jubilant “Goin’ Home,” a lift-off “to parts unknown” that nonetheless retains the album’s thematic woozy, out-of-tuneness. It is also a formal goodbye.

Also consider the lyrics of “They Came at Night,” which explicitly continues the theme of the preceding instrumental track, “Invasion.” Its lyrics describe invaders that arrive is “familiar form” only to “change their shape” and reside “inside your mind” permanently:

They came at night
They all arrived
In form familiar to the eye
Uh oh! Uh Oh! Beware of darkness
They came at night
Impatiently
They waited there to steal the seed
Uh oh! Uh Oh! Beware of darkness

Invasion
The voice behind your eyes
Invasion
Intruders from the sky

The moment came
They changed their shape
They made their move on a human race
Uh oh! Uh Oh! Beware of darkness
They came at night
The spinal tap
They disappeared
And closed the gap
Uh oh! Uh Oh! Beware of darkness

They came at night
But wouldn’t go
The only trace a
Greenish glow
Uh oh! Uh Oh! Beware of darkness
They came at night
They came to stay
Inside your mind
By the break of day
Uh oh! Uh Oh! Beware of darkness
Were Cowley not sick, were a plague not incubating, “They Came at Night” might come off as just another paranoid horror disco track like Cerrone’s “Supernature” or Easy Going's "Fear." But it's impossible not to read “They Came at Night” as an AIDS analogy given the context it was created in. It’s impossible not to read the whole of Mind Warp as the earliest full musical statement on this invasion and takeover of the human body. The politics of disco were largely inherent (for an excellent exploration of this, see Alice Echols' Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture). By merely meditating on an epidemic that no one cared about, that no one of power would talk about (including New York mayor Ed Koch and President Ronald Reagan, who didn't so much utter the word "AIDS" in public until 1987), Cowley's disco was more political than most.

Mind Warp is not album about death, but about dying, and its unpleasantness is essential to its message. It is a tough listen, almost devoid of the joy prevalent in Cowley’s work that came before it. Though it did well on Billboard’s Dance/Disco Top 80, it’s hard to imagine anyone dancing to it today, and in fact the Cowley tracks that do endure are ones that came earlier. (One of the musical highlights of my year so far, incidentally, was getting to hear “Menergy” on the gorgeous, liquid sound system of Output in Williamsburg, when Horse Meat Disco played there Memorial Day weekend.)

Mind Warp was released in October of 1982. Cowley died November 12, 1982, 24 days after his 32nd birthday. He was among the first public figures to die of AIDS.

Cowley is a tragic figure for succumbing to AIDS so early. He is, in my opinion, not remembered thoroughly enough—he deserves his own biography, a biopic, a shrine. (Earlier this month, Dark Entries and Honey Soundsystem released School Daze, a collection of less club-oriented Cowley outtakes. So at least there’s that.) He does have one thing, though, that only an elite group can claim: a legendary story that reads like a tall tale, but that I, for one, want to believe is the god’s honest. This comes from Gamson’s The Fabulous Sylvester, too. The setting is early 1982 at the U.C. Medical Center, where Cowley has been admitted for pneumonia:

Sylvester visited him regularly at the hospital, to “read my Bible and just be with him.” Doctors were calling his disease GRID, for gay-related immune deficiency, which a lot of people just called the gay cancer. Whatever his illness was, Patrick wasn’t getting better; his family came out to San Francisco from Buffalo, since it looked as if he had reached his end. Patrick was screaming that he wanted to be unplugged, and his parents were considering the request. Then Sylvester walked in.

Marty Blecman [who ran record label Megatone with Cowley] sent him to “tell and promise Patrick anything just to give him some hope or something to live for.” Sylvester held Patrick’s hand and simply refused to take no for an answer. He told Patrick that everyone was waiting on them to do another project together, and that he would just have to try harder. “I’m not having it anymore,” he said. “Get your ass up out of bed so we can go to work.” Patrick was released from the hospital a few days later.

When Patrick left the hospital, he went to stay with his best friend Paul Parker (whose dance hit “Right on Target” he had written and produced), and Paul’s boyfriend, Ken Crivello. Their apartment was up several flights, so Paul would throw Patrick on his back and walk up the seventy-two steps. Paul and Ken nursed Patrick from eighty pounds back up to around a hundred and ten. When he was well enough, Sylvester stopped by to pick him up and bring him over to Megatone, also known as Marty Blecman’s house, on his moped. Patrick was like Lazarus with a scarf. They went to work.
The song they produced was one of the defining hits of either of their catalogs, “Do You Wanna Funk,” an international hit that received domestic exposure via Eddie Murphy’s Trading Places. The song doesn’t contain a trace of the decayed Mind Warp sound or paranoia. It is a straight-forwardly joyful sexual come-on via electronic disco.

There is more than one way to write an AIDS song. Cowley’s last days were rich and more varied than most people’s entire careers.
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Biden's Niece: "You Don't Know Who You're Doing This To!"

Biden's Niece: "You Don't Know Who You're Doing This To!, It's said that connections can open a lot of doors, but Caroline Biden learned last month that jail cell doors aren't among them.

Caroline was arrested in September after she allegedly had a violent confrontation with her roommate over unpaid rent. The New York Post reports that it has learned she tried to get off easy once the cops arrived, telling them, "I shouldn't be handcuffed! You don't know who you're doing this to." She also reportedly told them not to go through her handbag because it contained "secret service stuff."

After two hours of questioning at the police station, she reportedly asked to use the bathroom. When the door was opened, the police report says, she informed them that she was leaving and attempted to simply slip past the trained police officer blocking her way. She eventually made a phone call (to her semi-powerful father, not her almost-all-powerful uncle) to escape police custody.

Friends say she has in the past struggled with alcohol and pill problems, and during questioning cops apparently wondered whether her behavior could be chalked up to medication.

'Noxious Odor' That Shut Down School Turns Out to Be Axe Body Spray

'Noxious Odor' That Shut Down School Turns Out to Be Axe Body Spray, A Brooklyn prep school was briefly shut down yesterday and eight students were hospitalized after a noxious gas was released into one of the classrooms that later turned out to be Axe body spray.

EMS were called in to the Medgar Evers College Preparatory School in Crown Heights around 1 p.m. after a "hazardous" substance caused several sixth graders to take ill.

In a statement released by the Department of Education, the incident was blamed on "Axe Spray" being released inside the classroom by a student.

The statement goes on to say that the incident is being investigation and "disciplinary action is pending."

NewsFeed points out that Pennsylvania high school went so far as to ban Axe from its halls following the hospitalization of one of its students. In Connecticut, a high school's fire alarm was set off by a student using an "overabundance" of the spray.

Hero Bus Driver Stops to Save Woman from Jumping Off a Bridge

Hero Bus Driver Stops to Save Woman from Jumping Off a Bridge, Buffalo bus driver Darnell "Big Country" Barton says he only did what he felt he was supposed to do when he stopped his bus to rescue a woman threatening to jump from an overpass above the Scajaquada Expressway.

It was just another Friday afternoon for the public transportation employee who was heading south toward Buffalo State College with a bus full of McKinley High School students.

"It didn't seem real because what was going on around, traffic and pedestrians were going by as normal," Barton told WIVB, recalling the sight of a woman preparing to jump off the overpass's narrow ledge.

Security footage from inside the bus shows Barton pull the bus over and quickly walk up to the woman in an effort to grab her before she had a chance to do the unthinkable.

"She was distraught, she was distant, she was really disconnected," he said. "I grabbed her arm and put my arm around her and said 'Do you want to come on this side of the guardrail', and that was actually the first time she spoke to me she said yes."

After helping her over the guardrail, Barton sat with the woman until a counselor and a corrections officer who happened by offered to take over.

"Darnell won’t tell you this, but when he went back on his bus, the McKinley students gave him a round of applause," a Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority spokesman told the Buffalo News.

"I was supposed to be there for her at that moment and I was," said the humble Barton. "I wanted to convey that whatever it was, I'm going to help you through and it's not as serious as jumping onto the 198."

Toronto Cops Are Investigating Mayor Rob Ford's Drug Habit

Toronto Cops Are Investigating Mayor Rob Ford's Drug Habit, This morning the Toronto Police Department released a 500-page application for a search warrant used in the arrest of Sandro Lisi, a drug dealer who served as a driver to Mayor Rob Ford. It makes clear that Rob Ford uses drugs, and the police are pursuing a criminal investigation into his behavior.

Toronto reporters are tearing through the document as we speak. The photo above—which was posted to Twitter by Toronto Star reporter Robyn Doolittle, though without much context—clearly shows that Ford was under surveillance by the police.

According to quotes from the document posted by the Star's live updates, the Toronto Police Department dispatched a detective to investigate reports in Gawker and the Star that Ford was filmed smoking crack cocaine. The report quotes a Ford staffer, who was interviewed by the cops in June, telling cops that "he doesn't know where the mayor got marijuana from but has heard that 'Sandro' may provide the Mayor with marijuana & possibly cocaine."

We'll update as more information from the documents comes out.

FAA Allows Portable Electronic Devices to Be Used During Entire Flight

FAA Allows Portable Electronic Devices to Be Used During Entire Flight, The Federal Aviation Administration today made historic changes to its longstanding Portable Electronic Devices (PEDs) policy, officially allowing airlines to grant passengers permission to use PEDs "during all phases of flight."

In its official press release, the FAA said implementation of the new policy among airlines will take time as carriers must prove that their fleets can handle the usage of multiple PEDs gate-to-gate, but the agency expects that by the end of this year, passengers will "be able to read e-books, play games, and watch videos on their devices during all phases of flight, with very limited exceptions."

Those exceptions include the use of cellphones or tablets to make phone calls or send text messages during takeoff and landing, which will remain prohibited.

Also, all electronic devices with cellular or WiFi service must be set to "airplane mode" during that time.

Speaking with NBC News, the national safety and security coordinator for the Association of Professional Flight Attendants expressed concern that these new guidelines could increase friction between passengers and flight attendants.

"It’s going to become more challenging to determine whose device is okay and whose isn’t," said Kelly Skyles, a flight attendant herself. "My greatest concern is that it’s going to put flight attendants at risk for more confrontations."

Blessed Be Halloween, America's Only Honest Holiday

Blessed Be Halloween, America's Only Honest Holiday, Halloween digs itself out of the chilly autumn ground for a few weeks each year, too weird and primal for governments or religions to claim. It is an ancient pagan harvest festival and a leering plastic skeleton in a front-yard cemetery of styrofoam tombstones. It is candy and liquor, sex and death, and the only "moral lesson" of Halloween is a sneering threat from a child in the night: Give me mine or you'll get yours, mister. It is the only honest American holiday.

Late October is also the happiest time of year, with leaves crunching under your shoes and a hint of woodsmoke in the crisp air. Great piles of squash and pumpkins are stacked around the markets, and people look wonderful again—women in scarves and boots, men in wool coats, the stench of summer forgotten.

Storefronts are suddenly revealed to hold secret societies of retail artists, as strange and whimsical displays pop up in the shops that generally skip the more mundane holidays of Easter or July 4: optometrists, tailors, hardware stores and especially the beauty salons are transformed into camp scenes of undead mannequins and morbid jokes. Halloween has become the greatest city festival of all: a do-it-yourself riot of schoolyard fairs, community pumpkin patches, ridiculous parades, drunken costume parties and temporary social chaos.

There is crass commercialism, of course, but what is America without crass commercialism? From the three aisles of black-and-orange seasonal crap at the Walgreens to the life-sized Spanish-language Elvira beer ads at the liquor store, it is the one time of year when everything is marketed with the nighttime glamour of death, which is coming soon, for all of us.

Handmade tissue ghosts and gloomy plastic yard displays, crows eating candy corn off the sidewalk, giant felt spiders and acres of poorly stretched synthetic webbing, all of it laughs at death, which is one of many reasons why religion and government keep their distance. The afterworld faiths are powerless when you greet the inevitable end of life with a grin. Politicians and their wars and their laws die a little more each time a 300-pound bald man in a Miley Cyrus twerking costume tells a cop to "blow me."

There are those who complain about the alleged intrusion of adults into what is nostalgically remembered as an amusement exclusively for children. But why take offense at American adults finally getting a national carnival after centuries of puritanical oppression? Children have finished their trick-or-treating long before the slutty whatevers and their zombie paramours take to the streets, and masquerade balls were a normal pastime of the American city dweller until the forced conformity of the 1950s. The gays and the punks and the drag queens of New York City finally busted out of those dull chains in the 1970s, transforming Halloween into a hard-earned civil rights celebration of the weird.

The pre-schoolers dressed as scarecrows and superheroes march door to door at twilight in occult solidarity with the lingerie-clad vampires and sleazy popes who work the late shift. Every all-night diner looks like a horror movie backlot or Star Wars cantina scene once the bars close and the Halloween parties shut down after the third noise complaint. Moldy pumpkins are smashed in the booze-soaked rituals of 4 a.m., hangovers are quietly suffered in cubicles and college classrooms, and for a few short days and nights it's actually fun to look at Facebook.

Everybody who wants something from Halloween gets it. Your version is as valid and awesome as anyone else's, whether it's a hyper-violent haunted house or a tasteful block party with local pumpkin soup and upstate hard cider. It is perfectly fine for you and your adult roommates to dress as Hogwarts students or characters from a Netflix series or giant boxes of wine with crotch-level spigots. You are encouraged to hold Satanic rituals in the woods or drink enough of those pumpkin-spice coffees to trigger sugar-caffeine psychosis. Solemn Wiccan ceremonies are as legitimately Halloween as a porch loaded with rubber monster babies from those awful "Spirit" stores that pop up in unloved malls this time of year. Halloween may be your annual stab at bisexuality or a last wild drunk before the pre-Thanksgiving dryout. As a Crowleyan sigil at the end of this month's Google calendar, it will do what you ask of it.

Some people despise Halloween, of course. You'll find them mostly way out there in the exurbs, where the local megachurch franchise demands that even public schools skip the ghoulishness, and you're lucky to even get a "harvest celebration" of smiley-faced pumpkins that suck the joy right out of the autumn air.

If you're stuck in such a place this Hallows' Eve, do your friends and neighbors a favor and host a Halloween party in your house or backyard. You can do a Martha Stewart thing with the bobbing for apples and an iTunes playlist of funeral marches and Carmina Burana, or you can get drunk and watch horror movies while eating pizza. It does not matter, as long as you let the spirit of Halloween inside.

The miserable alternative is to let it scratch on the window glass all night long.

Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson Had Six-Year Affair

Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson Had Six-Year Affair, The twelve jurors in Britain’s phone-hacking trial against several staffers of the shuttered Murdoch tabloid News of the World were told on Thursday that former editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, both charged with several counts of conspiracy to intercept communications and impede a police investigation, had maintained a six-year-long affair over the course of their employment at News International. The relationship apparently lasted between 1998 and 2004, during which both were married to other people.

Gawker reported in July that prosecutors had discovered evidence during pre-trial discovery that, along with Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, Coulson had had an affair with Brooks.

This development is likely to further embarrass the administration of Prime Minister David Cameron, under whom Coulson served as communications director between May 2010 and early 2011, when he resigned amid his own administration’s heightened scrutiny of his former employer’s aggressive news-gathering tactics, allegedly authorized by both Brooks and Coulson. In June The Daily Mail reported that the Prime Minister’s cabinet was rocked by a “stunning” sex scandal among unnamed individuals close to the British leader.

How the Ouija Board Became the Mouthpiece of the Devil

How the Ouija Board Became the Mouthpiece of the Devil, At Halloween parties across this dreaded land tonight, people will set up Ouija boards and tarot decks for the traditional drunken fortune teller's table of occult items. At least a few people will freak out when the Ouija board spells out something maniacal like "KILL YOU FOREVER GOOD-BYE DADDY," and again we will wonder why we keep these apparent portals to Hell in our closet alongside Connect Four and Monopoly.

According to this Smithsonian Magazine history of the mysterious board game, it wasn't until The Exorcist terrified everybody in the 1970s that the Ouija became associated with Satanic possession, because the little girl in the movie is possessed by an ancient Iraqi goblin named "Pazuzu." For nearly a century before that 1973 movie, talking boards were a fun way to try to communicate with your dead relatives, in Heaven. (The ghosts would never admit to being tortured in Hell forever.

American Christians apparently learn most of their theology from 1970s horror movies, because born-again types across this dumb land suddenly realized their harmless board game was actually a direct line to Old Scratch. And ever since, people have been terrified of the Ouija board, which is actually controlled by the players' own subconscious thoughts and knowledge. Watch these people name their pretend demon "ZOZO," which is what stoner kids call Led Zeppelin's fourth album, which is also forever associated with freaking out born-agains in the 1970s:

(Yes, we are aware that many people pronounce the sigils of Zeppelin IV as "Zoso," even though the symbols are not letters from the alphabet.)

Have fun with the Ouija board tonight, occultists! And remember that you have to do whatever the Oracle tells you, because the Oracle is actually your brain! Or the other person's brain. Anyway, just do what it says.

ALSO PLEASE: Share your terrifying Ouija board demon tales here, as the Oracle demands attention.

Al Roker in Blackface and Other Today Show Halloween Horrors

Al Roker in Blackface and Other Today Show Halloween Horrors, Halloween descended on New York like Hallowe'en upon a city Thursday, which meant the goons and goblins over at the Today show were up at dawn, peeling off their flaky reptile hides and stretching the skin of real people over their spikey, misshapen bodies. On top of that: a Halloween costume, as is appropriate for the day.

Weatherman Al Roker, taking a page out of Proactiv spokesperson Julianne Hough's playbook (the play the book is for is an 1865 production of Our American Cousin), dressed up as Julianne Hough dressed up as Mr. T. dressed up as B.A. Baracus from The A-Team. I pity the fool who doesn't enjoy this clever costume.

"The Man" Matt Lauer tucked his genitals snugly inside a pair of pantyhose and inserted a pair of fake breasts with pert little nipples into the women's one-piece he happened to be wearing, then realized he was dressed as Pamela Anderson dressed as C.J. Parker from Baywatch. Willie Geist suited up as David Hasslehoff's character, Mitch Buchannon. Carmen Electra was there too, although her nipples were not visible. You'd better Bay-watch your back if this crew comes to your Halloween party because they look great and will definitely steal things from your home.

A woman named Savannah Guthrie and one named Natalie Morales dressed up as cherished television characters Laverne & Shirley, respectively. They rode into the Today show plaza on a bicycle, and when they separated, Savannah was still Laverne but Natalie was once again just regular old Natalie with a weird haircut and dress and no other particularly distinguishing features. Schlemiel, Schlimazel, Natalie, and Savannah.

Two spooky witches, Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb, dressed up as a couple of friends who definitely don't want to stab one another until dead: Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble. They both looked darling and Kathie Lee got to dress up as the slightly more important character, which probably meant a lot to her. Viewers were treated to a touch of early morning comedy when the duo cracked a joke about drinking "pterodactyl tequila" in celebration of "Thirsty Thursday," a weekly holiday celebrated daily by Kathie Lee and Hoda. Yabba dabba do not drink and drive, ladies.

Just trying his best was Carson Daly, who rolled on set dressed as a police officer friend of CHiPS star Erik Estrada. Everyone was so exited to see Mr. Estrada. Good thing Halloween fun is not illegal.

Michael Hayden, the Voice of Terror

Michael Hayden, the Voice of Terror, Michael Hayden, the former head of the NSA and the CIA, is the official mouthpiece of the American surveillance state. His blithe, unquestioning acceptance of the idea that privacy is a foolish notion is horrifying. And for that, he is valuable.

Michael Hayden believes that his experience makes him a voice of moderation and maturity in the debate that has arisen over the NSA's vast global spying program. In fact, he is the voice of extremity. He is the living embodiment of the belief that surveillance is its own justification—that appeals for privacy on the basis of morality or ethics are ridiculous.

He represents the philosophy of the primacy of the surveillance state: The democratically elected government exists to serve the spies, not the other way around. Nowhere is this better revealed than in Hayden's Wall Street Journal op-ed today, a masterpiece of the "Whining to Friendly Ears" genre.

The purpose of Hayden's piece is for him to scoff at any efforts by policymakers to rein in the activities of the "intelligence community," in the wake of revelations that the NSA has been spying on everyone from leaders of allied governments to religious figures to you and me. It is amusing to watch him paint a picture of a horrifying world in which unaccountable spying bureaucracies are forced "dangerously close" to the scary prospect of transparency. Can you imagine?

And now the government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel feels fully entitled to ask (and have answered) the Watergate question: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

It is bad politics and bad policy for good friends to put their partners in politically impossible situations, and recent reports of aggressive American espionage have done just that.
In the wacky world of Michael Hayden, our "good friends" are being extremely rude by trying to find out more about our secret program of spying on them. How dare they?

And so the president is clearly committed to a "rebalancing." He has teed this up by reminding audiences that "just because we can do something doesn't mean we should do it," and the coming report from his "outside experts" panel, due by year's end, will give him recommendations (and political cover) for making some moves.

Fair enough. I had my share of "political guidance" while at the NSA, too. It's not new.

But the administration needs to be careful not to overachieve.
It takes little imagination to hear the choked tone of mockery in Michael Hayden's voice as he says these words. "Rebalancing." "Outside experts." "Political guidance." He is celebrating Halloween with ample scarequotes. Thank god unelected spymaster and loud Acela talker Michael Hayden is here to remind the president not to try to "overachieve" when it comes to reining in a surveillance apparatus that quite literally has awarded itself the ability to tap into all the world's communication. That could be dangerous.

There's a real danger here. The American signals-intelligence community is being battered at home from extreme left and extreme right, and it's being battered from abroad for just being extremely good.

Beyond receiving new policy guidance, I fear that community will now take new blows and be conveniently labeled by some as "excessive" or "unconstrained" or "out of control."
The American surveillance state is excessive, unconstrained, and out of control. You'd have to be some sort of dangerous extremist not to see that. Thank you for always speaking up, Michael Hayden. That way the public doesn't need spies to know what the dangerous extremists are thinking.

Everything That's Wrong with HealthCare.gov

Everything That's Wrong with HealthCare.gov, The HealthCare.gov launch did not go so well. Some people paid the website a visit only to be greeted by a blank screen. Others found error messages or talked to misleading call center reps or had their personal information compromised. The whole thing is borked, and everybody knows it.

It's been less than a month now since the much anticipated home for the Obama administration's healthcare exchange went online, and it's going to be at least another month before it actually works. The problems are by no means minor.

Reuters reports that hundreds of thousands of Americans could lose access to low-cost health insurance as a result of the botched launch. At this point, everybody's playing the blame game pretty hard. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius blames the (too many) contractors who built the site. Obama blames himself. Americans, for some reason, seem to want to blame the girl in the stock photo on HealthCare.gov. But quite frankly we might never be able to find a single culprit.

So, as Bloomberg Businessweek commemorates the epic fail that was the Healthcare.gov launch with a wonderfully glitchy Obama cover, it's worth having a look how that fail actually happened.

Site Overload

It was bad from the beginning. On day one, people trying to access HealthCare.gov immediately hit a wall. Instead of displaying the many affordable care options available under Obamacare, the site read, sadly:

We have a lot of visitors on the site right now. Please stay on this page. We're working to make the experience better, and we don't want you to lose your place in line. We'll send you to the login page as soon as we can. Thanks for your patience!
Just keep staring at that blinking cursor, America!

Unfortunately, the contractors who built the site saw this coming... but didn't say anything. Just days before the launch, site tests showed that HealthCare.gov would crash after just a few hundred visitors. The nearly 10 million that showed up on launch date never had a chance.

Site Suicide

After the nightmarish bottleneck in the site's first days, Reuters asked a bunch of security experts what could be causing all the problems. The experts agreed that it wasn't just the traffic. The site's very architecture was to blame, specifically the fact that the site made users download an unruly amount of data just to log in. One expert counted 92 separate files and plugins—including 56 JavaScript files—that users had to download when they hit the "apply" button on HealthCare.gov. Another said that the amount of data passed back and forth was so intense, it made it appear "as if the system was attacking itself." So you know about distributed denial of service attacks? HealthCare.gov was effectively launching one against itself.

Glitchy Sign Up Process

If you were lucky enough to actually load HealthCare.gov in those first few days, you probably didn't make it very far. Glitches plagued the sign-up process. Some people reported that the site wouldn't recognize their log in or passwords—more on that in a second—while others happened upon error messages and "page not found" screens. At the very least, plenty of people complained that the site ran slowly. Meanwhile, the insurance companies that were receiving information from the exchange complained that they were receiving incomplete and duplicate applications. That all adds up to a lot of unhappy Americans.

Bad Customer Service

Whenever you muster up the courage to actually call a customer service hotline and endure the bad hold music, the last thing you want is to be told the wrong thing. Well, that's exactly what HealthCare.gov reps did. As early as October 8, the site's call center was telling people to reset their passwords to help alleviate the site's log in problems. But, whoops, that's not even true because call center reps were given the wrong script. Meanwhile, other people were being told to re-register completely, albeit with a new username since their old one was stuck in limbo somewhere. Sound convenient?

Data Center Outages

Last weekend, a data center powering HealthCare.gov experienced a failure and lost connectivity. The outage affected not only all of the Americans trying to sign up for coverage through the federal exchange but also people in the 14 states and District of Columbia who had set up their own exchanges. This one is arguably not the government's fault, though. Verizon's Terremark operates the data center and said the outage happened during planned maintenance. But surely, HealthCare.gov's crappy architecture didn't help.

Privacy Violations

So on top of all that nonsense, we've recently learned that HealthCare.gov is violating its own privacy policy. Security researcher Ben Simo spotted some trouble when trying to recover his username and password. For some reason, HealthCare.gov was sending his personal data to third party companies, including analytics services like DoubleClick and Google Analytics. Those companies have since said that they have no interest in this kind of data, but the very fact that HealthCare.gov sends it to them appears to be a violation of HealthCare.gov's own privacy policy: It promises that "no personally identifiable information is collected by these tools."

Security Risks

File this one under "avoidable errors." A memo dated four days before HealthCare.gov went live reveals that the government knew that the site had "inherent security risks," but it moved forward anyway. The memo also said that the site hadn't been tested enough, "exposing a level of uncertainty that can be deemed high risk." Personal data that people surrender to HealthCare.gov include birthdate, Social Security number and estimated income range; however, security researchers revealed how the gaps could reveal users' email address and allow hackers to take over entire accounts. Nevertheless, Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told a House committee this week that they went ahead with the launch because they had a "mitigation plan" in place. A little late for that now, Kathleen.

NBC Is About To Pick Up A Sitcom From Tina Fey About Abducted Girls

NBC Is About To Pick Up A Sitcom From Tina Fey About Abducted Girls, I've just been tipped off that 30 Rock producers Tina Fey and Robert Carlock have just received a straight-to-series episode order for a new comedy starring Ellie Kemper. The premise? Girls who've been abducted.

I'm told NBC executives aren't fans of the script, which will likely receive a 13-episode order rather than the standard six, and are worried that the premise might be offensive. Carlock and Fey are co-writers on the project, and wrote it as a spec months back.

NBC had been sitting on the script for a few weeks, until pressure from Fey and Carlock's WME agents forced them to make a commitment, lest they lose the project to another network. Universal Television (where Fey and Carlock's producing deal is based) and 3 Arts (the management and production company that reps Fey and serves as a producer on her projects) have already sold two successful series outside of NBC: The Mindy Project, which NBC famously passed on and is now in its second season on Fox, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which just received a full season pickup, also on Fox.

Kemper is no stranger to darker comedic roles: her busted pilot from the 2013 season, Brenda Forever, was known for getting gummed up at NBC due to its edgier scenes—namely one involving a young Brenda getting caught for masturbating against a desk while at school.

Carlock and Fey have already set up two other comedy projects this year: a pilot at NBC with writer Colleen McGuinness, as well as a FOX project with 30 Rock writer Matt Hubbard, that already has a series commitment.

I've reached out to NBCUniversal for comment and have yet to hear back.

Niglets' Warned Not to Trick-or-Treat in 'White Neighborhood'

Niglets' Warned Not to Trick-or-Treat in 'White Neighborhood, Better luck next year to the woman who will be handing out fat-shaming letters to overweight trick-or-treaters because America's Worst Neighbor officially resides in Norfolk, Virginia.

A since-removed Craigslist post attributed to someone living in Norfolk neighborhood of Larchmont-Edgewater has riled up residents who say the sentiments expressed therein are not their own.

Writing under the headline "Reminder: Overage Trick Or Treaters Stay Out!," the anonymous poster starts by ranting about "kids older than twelve going house to house for free candy."

We hate seeing kids older than twelve going house to house for free candy. Doing so is illegal and this year we will be calling the police on you bastards. Overage trick or treating is a Class 4 misdemeanor and carries a $250 fine. This will also go on your criminal record if you don’t have one already.
Were it to have ended there, the post, found in the site's "Rants and Raves" section, would be acceptably grouchy.

But it doesn't end there. Instead, it goes from a rant, to a rave, to unabashedly racist:

And you niglets, stay the hell out! We’re a white neighborhood and we don’t want you baboons here!! You little turds better think twice going into my neighborhood or you will be legally punished.
"That`s awful, that`s awful," Larchmont-Edgewater resident Ainel Alerth told NewsChannel3. "When I see that, I don`t know where it comes from, where all the anger comes from. Why are we using these words?"

Another resident, Timo Mitchell, agreed with the poster insofar as overage trick-or-treaters were concerned, but less so about the rest.

"I can understand if you have a 16 or 17-year-old show up without a costume, but just a blanket statement to say all kids of different colors can't come in?" said Mitchell. "I don`t think that is appropriate for this neighborhood, because we are very eclectic here."

Though Larchmont-Edgewater is far from diverse, Norfolk police spokesman Chris Amos told WTKR that hardly justified discrimination.

"You can't discriminate against someone being in a particular neighborhood, the law doesn’t address that," Amos said.

Your Coffee Is Getting Better, Not That You'll Notice

Your Coffee Is Getting Better, Not That You'll Notice, What's that? You detected a sweeter, gentler, more luxurious flavor in your Folgers this morning? Why yes, its quality has improved. You liar.

Coffee snobbery, like wine snobbery, is bullshit. The average American who fancies himself a dandy amateur barista would sing the haughty praises of a cup of Cafe Bustelo made in a $20 Mr. Coffee machine if you poured it into an interesting mug and called it "Ethiopian Yirgacheffe" and charged $4.50 for it.

So we will assert up front that all but the most drastic changes in the underlying "quality" of mass-produced coffee grounds will be wasted on the general public. That said, Reuters reports that the price of arabica coffee beans (the good ones, relative to robusta beans, the cheaper ones) is falling, meaning more high quality beans in your Maxwell House or whatever. From Reuters:

But drinkers detecting more of arabica's distinctively sweeter, gentler notes in their cup will probably be saying more about the power of suggestion than their discernment, as roasters will only be tinkering with blend changes that consumers are unlikely to notice.
You thought you tasted more prominent notes of arabica in today's cupping? Wrong—you're drinking flat Diet Coke that we warmed up in the microwave. Consumers can't tell the difference!

Megabus Is No Longer the Best Way to Smuggle Drugs

Megabus Is No Longer the Best Way to Smuggle Drugs, Have you ever ridden Megabus, Peter Pan, or any old grungy Chinatown bus around the Eastern Seaboard and thought to yourself, Man, this would be a great way for someone to run drugs? Well, the good news is you're not alone; many people have had that idea. Don't try to turn that fantasy into a reality, however, because the cops are now wise to the game.

The Burlington Free Press reports that a man was arrested in Vermont this week with 30 grams of crack he'd smuggled via a Megabus from New York City. This was the fifth time in less than a year that a drug-trafficking suspect has been busted in Vermont after disembarking a Megabus. All the arrests have prompted the University of Vermont, which hosts Megabus' Burlington stop, to consider ending its relationship with the company.

"We have been working with Megabus since early in the year to find an alternative location for the bus stop that serves both the company’s interests and ours," UVM spokesman Enrique Corredera said in a statement in response to inquiries Tuesday from the Burlington Free Press. "There is clearly an ongoing problem that could put our community at risk. We take this issue seriously and are currently evaluating our options in order to identify a suitable and safe alternative location for the stop."
Next time, maybe try Bolt Bus to move your cocaine. At least you'll be able to use WiFi before getting locked up.

Anthony Weiner Claims He Never Asked the Times for That Blowjob

Anthony Weiner Claims He Never Asked the Times for That Blowjob, This is the thing about Anthony Weiner: He's just so very, very seductive. Irresistible. He makes you do things you'd never dream of doing. Well, not you. Some people. They just want to surrender to him. The failed mayoral candidate tells GQ's Marshall Sella about how this sad fact undermined his campaign from the start, when he offered himself and his wife, Huma Abedin, up to the New York Times Magazine for the profile, by Jonathan Van Meter, that was to mark his return to political respectability:

“The problem was that the story was completely different from what we thought would be written,” he told me. “I thought there’d be thousands of questions about the sexting. But there wasn’t a lot of conversation about that. We had a guy [Van Meter] who wasn’t tough enough. We needed someone to just tear away at me. And not someone who would do something sympathetic…. He wrote an aftermath story, about two interesting people. Later, I thought, ‘We didn’t get this done. Of the hundred things we wanted to do, the one thing we wanted to accomplish was to get that out there!’”

This is ridiculous, self-serving bullshit, naturally. Of course Weiner wanted the Times to believe that his habit of sending cock shots to strangers was a regrettable and regretted lapse, something he had put in his past, rather than an ongoing compulsion. Or, more broadly, he wanted the Times to believe that he wasn't the sort of obtuse, narcissistic dingbat who would be brazen enought launch his political comeback before he even stopped doing the thing that had knocked him out of politics. If Jonathan Van Meter had been aware that Anthony Weiner was still sexting, there would have been no story, and if there had been no story, there would have been no Weiner for Mayor campaign.

Which leads back to the question: why was there a story at all? Weiner comes off as a fraud and a creep in his remarks to GQ. But Van Meter comes off worse. Here is a writer for the New York Times Magazine, explaining how he came to write the politically helpful and painfully misleading story of a marriage on the mend and a politician ready for his second chance:

First off, he says, it’s not as though Weiner and Abedin phoned the Times Magazine and told them to send a random reporter on over. They chose him, specifically because they’d liked his previous features about Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, published in Vogue three years apart. “In that experience, I spent a lot of time around Huma—and she said to Anthony that if Jonathan Van Meter does it, that is the kind of writer I’m comfortable talking to,” he says. “I was chosen. They knew exactly what kind of story and what kind of writer they were going to get.”
This is the sort of negotiation you expect to see between fashion magazines and the celebrity faces they need to get on their covers. Not between the New York Times and a political figure. On it goes:

Van Meter was so personally stung ... upon seeing Weiner’s July 23 press conference to confess, again, and ask for a second chance (actually a third), that he was depressed enough to take to his bed for two days. “It was instantly clear that what had once been considered by so many people a triumph of access in journalism had now turned to shit,” he now says. “I was really bummed out.”
That a "triumph of access in journalism" turned into an embarrassment for everyone involved may be the lone public service Anthony Weiner has ever accomplished in his squalid life.

Gay Couple Can't Find Any Homophobes in the Two Most Homophobic States

Gay Couple Can't Find Any Homophobes in the Two Most Homophobic States, With the eyes of the nation trained firmly on which state will be next to legalize same-sex marriage, The Daily Show is naturally looking in the opposite direction: Which state will be last.

According to statistician Nate Silver, the two states most likely to battle it out for last-past-the-post are Alabama, with its notoriously harsh anti-gay laws, and Mississippi, where sodomy is still a felony.

To get a first-hand look at just how tough it's going to be to get those two state on board with this whole "equal rights for all" thing, Madrigal hired two men to play a stereotypically southern gay couple, and sent them to roam the streets in search of homophobia.

As it turned out, it was actually tougher to get Alabamians and Mississippians to treat the two gay guys inequitably.

"Alabama might as well be blowing Mississippi right now," Madrigal concluded. "They are kinda butt to butt there," added Silver.

Is This the First Google Glass Traffic Ticket?

Is This the First Google Glass Traffic Ticket?, Probably a murky area of the law right now, but we're thrilled to see a big first step towards criminalizing face computers.

San Francisco resident Cecilia Abadie, who describes herself as a "Google Glass pioneer" and "transhumanist," explains her run-in with the analog arm of the law:

A cop just stopped me and gave me a ticket for wearing Google Glass while driving!
The exact line says: Driving with Monitor visible to Driver (Google Glass).

Is #GoogleGlass ilegal while driving or is this cop wrong???

Any legal advice is appreciated!! This happened in California. Do you know any other #GlassExplorers that got a similar ticket anywhere in the US?

Here’s How to Make Subway Conductors Smile

Here’s How to Make Subway Conductors Smile, If you’ve spent enough time on the subway in New York, you’ve probably noticed the train-conductors pointing at a striped black-and-white sign each time they pull into a station. The conductors are required to do this to show they’ve fully arrived on the platform.

So Yosef Lerner and Rose Sacktor decided to have a little fun. Feeling sorry for the conductors who spend their whole day “in that small booth, alone,” they duo decided to stand at subway stations in New York holding special signs knowing the conductors would have to point at them. The video results are pretty endearing.

While the best sign they hold is “Point here if you are dead sexy,” they also made many other signs asking the conductors to “point here” if:

You are not wearing pants right now

You have taken a selfie while driving

You have seen a passenger naked

Shoot the target with your laser finger [bullseye]
You still love Thomas The Tank Engine

Snape kills Dumbledore

The 2nd Ave Subway is a lie

NY is the greatest city in the world
You should watch and smile too.

Missing Autistic Boy Maybe Spotted on Subway, Then Disappears

Missing Autistic Boy Maybe Spotted on Subway, Then Disappears, Avonte Oquendo, a 14 year-old autistic boy, went missing from his school in Queens almost four weeks ago. Fliers with his picture are everywhere in New York City. And now—finally—he may have been spotted. But!

A 13 year-old spotted someone who looks exactly like Avonte on a subway train on Tuesday, and snapped a picture that's now in every paper in town. Their interaction, according to the New York Daily News, went like this:

The youngster approached the look-a-like, asking, “Hey, are you Avonte?” according to Tony Herbert, president of the Brooklyn East chapter of the National Action Network.

The boy didn’t answer, Herbert said, and the inquiring youth — whose identity was unknown — snapped a picture before he got off the train.

He didn't answer. AVONTE OQUENDO IS AUTISTIC AND NONVERBAL. A NON-ANSWER IS ACTUALLY CONFIRMATION. Avonte Oquendo has a greater media presence in the New York City subway system than Jay-Z and Dr. Zizmor combined. HOW HAS NO ONE SPOTTED THIS KID IN FOUR WEEKS? It is mind-blowing.

A wanted fugitive would kill to achieve this level of invisibility. WHERE ARE YOU AVONTE? CAN ALL EIGHT MILLION OF US IN THIS CITY NOT SPOT THIS YOUNG MAN SOMEWHERE? HE DID NOT FLY TO BANGLADESH. HE IS NOT THE LOCH NESS MONSTERS HE'S 14 AND HE DOESN'T SPEAK. HE IS HERE SOMEWHERE. WHAT THE HECK??

If you see Avonte Oquendo on the train, please notify the police, instead of just taking his picture.

Hero Bus Driver Stops to Save Woman from Jumping Off a Bridge

Hero Bus Driver Stops to Save Woman from Jumping Off a Bridge, Buffalo bus driver Darnell "Big Country" Barton says he only did what he felt he was supposed to do when he stopped his bus to rescue a woman threatening to jump from an overpass above the Scajaquada Expressway.

It was just another Friday afternoon for the public transportation employee who was heading south toward Buffalo State College with a bus full of McKinley High School students.

"It didn't seem real because what was going on around, traffic and pedestrians were going by as normal," Barton told WIVB, recalling the sight of a woman preparing to jump off the overpass's narrow ledge.

Security footage from inside the bus shows Barton pull the bus over and quickly walk up to the woman in an effort to grab her before she had a chance to do the unthinkable.

"She was distraught, she was distant, she was really disconnected," he said. "I grabbed her arm and put my arm around her and said 'Do you want to come on this side of the guardrail', and that was actually the first time she spoke to me she said yes."

After helping her over the guardrail, Barton sat with the woman until a counselor and a corrections officer who happened by offered to take over.

"Darnell won’t tell you this, but when he went back on his bus, the McKinley students gave him a round of applause," a Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority spokesman told the Buffalo News.

"I was supposed to be there for her at that moment and I was," said the humble Barton. "I wanted to convey that whatever it was, I'm going to help you through and it's not as serious as jumping onto the 198."

This is spinal tap

This is spinal tap, Guitarist Nigel Tufnel is explaining his amplifier to documentary filmmaker Marty DiBergi:
It's very special, because, as you can see--the numbers all go to 11. Right across the board. Eleven, 11. . . .
And most amps go up to 10?
Exactly.

Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?
Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not 10. You see, most blokes are going to be playing at 10--you're on 10 on your guitar, where can you go from there? Where?
I don't know.
Nowhere! Exactly! What we do, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? You put it up to 11.
Eleven.

Exactly. One louder. Why don't you just make 10 louder, and make 10 be the top number, and make that a little louder?

Nigel is so baffled by this notion that he almost stops chewing his gum. "These go to 11," he repeats finally. His faith in that extra push over the cliff is unshakable. Marty DiBergi realizes he's dealing with a matter of guitar theology, not logic. Nigel has few ideas, but they are clearly defined and defiantly defended. DiBergi, a rational filmmaker, is helpless in the face of Nigel's rapture.

"This Is Spinal Tap," one of the funniest movies ever made, is about a lot of things, but one of them is the way the real story is not in the questions or in the answers, but at the edge of the frame. There are two stories told in the film: the story of what the rock band Spinal Tap thinks, hopes, believes or fears is happening, and the story of what is actually happening. The reason we feel such affection for its members is because they are so touching in their innocence and optimism. Intoxicated by the sheer fun of being rock stars, they perform long after their sell-by date, to smaller and smaller audiences, for less and less money, still seeking the roar of the crowd.
The fake documentary, released in 1984, was the directorial debut of Rob Reiner, then famous as Meathead from "All in the Family," soon to become one of the most successful of Hollywood directors ("The Sure Thing", "The Princess Bride", "When Harry Met Sally...", "Misery", "The American President"). He plays Marty DiBergi, the dogged documentarian who follows along on Spinal Tap's first U.S. tour in six years.

He was first attracted to the band, he says, by its "unusual loudness," so perhaps he should be more grateful for Nigel's technical secrets.

The band members are the blond rock god David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), the bass player Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) and Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), who longs for St. Hubbins with big wet spaniel eyes. When Nigel learns that David's girlfriend Jeanine Pettibone (June Chadwick) is flying over from England to join the tour, his heart sinks. His crush on David is obvious to everyone except, of course, David.
The two front men get most of the glory, while the drummer Mick Shrimpton (R.J. Parnell) supplies percussion on borrowed time: Previous Spinal Tap drummers have had an alarming mortality rate. One spontaneously combusted, and another choked to death on vomit ("but not his own vomit").

Support for the band on their U.S. tour comes from a perfectly observed group of music industry functionaries. Their manager Ian Faith (Tony Hendra) is like a weary scoutmaster promising a troop of mama's boys that the hike is about over. He carries a cricket bat and releases tension at crucial moments by such therapeutic activities as smashing TV sets. Bobby Flekman (Fran Drescher) is a record company publicist trying to explain without really explaining why the band's new album, "Smell the Glove," is not in stores. Letterman bandleader Paul Shaffer is Artie Fufkin, the advance man who fails to provide a single fan for an autographing.

Fred Willard is the upbeat Lt. Hookstratten, in charge of their last U.S. concert, an officers' dance in the airplane hanger of a military base.
Guest, McKean, Shearer and Reiner wrote the screenplay themselves, benefitting from improvisational rehearsals, and they also wrote all the songs, some of which, like "Sex Farm," became popular and were really not much worse than other heavy metal hits. (Guest liked the genre so much he directed two mocumentaries of his own, "Waiting For Guffman" and "Best In Show.") For Spinal Tap, heavy metal was the band's last stop on an odyssey that began with the boys as a folk group and saw them morph into '60s flower power before finally emerging in their final form, as fearsome and hairy. Their tour now features props like a giant death's head and alien pods which give birth to them one by one, or at least that is the plan.

Reiner fills the frame with background information and subtle touches (look at the way he uncertainly crosses and uncrosses his arms while delivering Marty's introductory remarks). The love triangle involving Nigel, David and Jeanine is never overtly acknowledged. The disintegration of the tour is explained offhandedly, in asides (after the Boston concert is canceled: "It isn't a college town"). In an early scene, Nigel and David have lip rings. In a later scene, they have scars from the unsuccessful piercings. Dialogue makes its point by accurate word choices, as when Derek Smalls introduces a groupie as "my new special friend."

The biggest laugh in the second half of the film is assembled lovingly, over time, out of many small elements. It involves an assignment to set designer Polly Deutsch (Anjelica Huston) to build a replica of one of the elements of Stonehenge, which will descend onto the stage during a big production number. Bad communication causes an error in scale.

To appreciate the skill of Reiner and his editors, observe the way they prepare for the payoff. Instead of simply showing the erroneous prop descending from above, they include a scene where we are told what will happen. Then, after intermediate footage to create anticipation, we see the disastrous moment. This is a rare case where it helps to know the punch line before it arrives: We are laughing not only at what happens (which is funny enough) but at the reactions of the band members, who have not been prepared.

Seeing "A Hard Day's Night" recently, I was struck by how much fun the Beatles were obviously having. If there is a more joyous and orgasmic single scene in the movies than their "She Loves Me" number, I have not seen it. You can see Paul and John grinning at each other while singing--not as a performance technique, but because they can't help themselves.

Many musicians must go through that early stage when they want to pinch themselves because of their good luck. "We can taste how much they love embodying their roles," David Edelstein of Slate wrote when "This Is Spinal Tap" was re-released. "And why not? Who wouldn't want to be a rock titan, even a ludicrous and stupid and fading one? It's the supreme pipe dream of our era."

He puts his finger on the film's deepest appeal: It is funny about Spinal Tap, but not cruel. It shares their pleasure in being themselves. It has affection for these three fragile egos. Yes, they're spoiled. Yes, they make impossible demands (the scene involving the size of the bread for the dressing room sandwiches is a masterpiece of petulant behavior). Yes, their music is pretty bad.

But they're not bad men; they're holy fools, living in a dream that still somehow, barely, holds together for them. They deserve the last-minute rescue of their Japanese tour--although what have the Japanese done to deserve them? One of the loveliest ironies of "This Is Spinal Tap" is that the band took on a life of its own after the movie came out, and actually toured and released albums. Spinal Tap lives still. And they haven't gotten any better.

Halloween h20 20 years later

Halloween h20 20 years later, The pre-credits sequence, beginning with the accompanying tune "Mr. Sandman", opened in Langdon, Illinois on October 29, 1998. Marion Whittington, the nurse of Doctor Sam Loomis who had died in 1995, drove up to her home, where she was shocked to see it had been burglarized (or vandalized). Next door, she alerted some neighboring teenaged boys, and after one of them, ice-hockey attired Jimmy Howell, called the police, he went back to her house alone to check it for intruders, with his hockey stick for protection. When he found nothing, other than a ransacked home office and bottles of beer (to steal) from the refrigerator, Miss Whittington was given an all-clear signal to return. Now dark outside, she discovered the power was out, but searched with a flashlight in her office, where there was an empty file folder labeled "LAURIE STRODE."

The masked killer Michael Myers was in the house behind her. Sensing trouble and a presence, she raced back next door. In the living room with the TV airing Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space, she found Jimmy murdered in an easy-chair - his face was diagonally stabbed from forehead to chin with the blade of an ice skate stuck into his face. The second teenaged boy, Tony Allegre was also discovered dead, standing up at a side door with a knife in his back , and he fell on top of her. Myers stalked after her as she valiantly fought him off with a fireplace iron poker. She broke a window with the poker, and screamed at the police, who had just arrived: "IN HERE, GOD DAMMIT!!," but went unheard. Myers murdered Miss Whittington by slitting her throat with a butcher knife. Police were entering her home as she was being murdered only a few feet away. Myers drove off in the neighbor's car as the two officers noticed the broken neighbor's window, jokingly calling the dual B & E "the Daily Double."

The next day, Halloween Eve, two detectives (Detective Fitzsimmons and Detective Matt Sampson) investigated the three gruesome killings, finding evidence that Loomis (who had spent his life "tracking down that Halloween guy who butchered all those kids up in Haddonfield...they never found his body...that was like 20 years ago") was obsessed with Michael Myers. Newspaper clippings from the Haddonfield News lined two walls of his bedroom ("CHILDREN FOUND BRUTALLY MURDERED ON HALLOWEEN") as well as other sketches, pictures of murder victims, and articles. They notified Haddonfield to warn of Myers' possible threat.

The camera panned over the bulletin board contents as the credits were played. Other headlines, filling in the back history of Myers, read: "Local Boy, Age 6, Kills Sister With Knife," "Child Murderer Sent to State Hospital," "Dr. Sam Loomis - Past Obsession?", "Laurie Strode Sole Survivor of October Mass Murders," "Babysitter Killer on the Loose," "Headstone Stolen From Area Cemetery," "Child Murderer Escapes Mental Hospital," "Is Michael Myers Still Alive?", "Survivor of Halloween Murders Killed in Auto Accident." In voice-over, Loomis (voice of Tom Kane) narrated: "I met him 15 years ago. I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding, even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and the blackest eyes - the devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... evil."

Keri TateEdit

The next scene was introduced with the camera tracking through school corridors into a classroom, where a nameplate read: "HEAD MISTRESS Keri Tate." At 12 midnight, signaling the arrival of Halloween on October 31st, Laurie Strode, now assuming the name 'Keri Tate', was still haunted by her teenage years, as she struggled to recover and overcome her life experiences after Michael Myers attempted to kill her 20 years earlier in Haddonfield, Illinois [she had been identified as the killer's sister]. She woke up screaming bringing her 17 year-old son John Tate to her bed-side. She was attempting to live a normal life (but under the pretense of an assumed false identity to escape her past), while she was heavily medicated and experiencing frightening nightmares and paranoid visions of Michael appearing everywhere - she saw the killer in her dreams, in window reflections, and in her mind.

A graduate of the class of 1979 in Haddonfield, she had relocated to Northern California, where she became successful as the headmistress of the secluded private prep boarding school (behind wrought-iron gates) called Hillcrest Academy, in Summer Glen, although separated from her husband (an "abusive, chain-smoking, methadone addict"). At 37 years of age, she lived on campus with her student-son. It was October 31st, Halloween. When John asked permission to go on the annual school camping trip to Yosemite during Halloween weekend with the other students, his over-protective, overly-cautious single mother was unwilling to allow him. He was frustrated by her denial and confronted her: "your overprotection and paranoia is inhibiting my growth process...I need a little more open air. I've earned it." When John's girlfriend Molly Cartwell was also forced to remain on campus due to problems with her financial payments, their two friends - sex-obsessed Charles Deveraux and Sarah Wainthrope also planned to remain behind (with made-up excuses - a late history report, and a 102 degree fever) to hold their own private Halloween party on the almost-deserted campus.

On Highway 139 in northern California, a mother named Claudia and her young daughter Casey pulled into an empty rest area for a bathroom stop. They walked by Myers' vehicle that he had been driven from Illinois, with a flat right front tire. Forced to use the men's room, Claudia was spooked when her handbag (with her car keys) was grabbed and she saw a masked figure through the toilet's door. Outside, the strewn contents of her handbag led to her car - now driven off and stolen by Myers.

At the school, Miss Tate was involved in a semi-discreet affair with her love interest suitor, the school's guidance counselor Will Brennan, who claimed he was "attracted" to her issues and problems. Other staff members included Laurie's busy-body secretary Norma Watson, and the school's security guard Ronald Jones, an aspiring writer of semi-erotic novels. John convinced Ronny to let him leave the locked and gated grounds during lunchtime, with Charlie, to go to town to get a gift for his girlfriend. At the same time, Miss Tate was having a 1 pm lunch date with Will in a downtown restaurant. She opened up, describing her fears of losing her son,while Will expressed his loving support and believed that she could recover from her problems and her mysterious "back story." She claimed that she had tried everything to heal: "Twelve steps, uh, self-help, group therapy, shrinks, meditation - everything."

When he left for the men's room, she revealed that she was a functioning alcoholic when she gulped down her first glass of Chardonnay while hurriedly ordering a second one from a startled waiter. The two boys were caught wandering in downtown (after Charlie had shop-lifted a bottle of wine for their party) by John's enraged mother, and reprimanded. John assertively shouted back at his mother that she must responsibly move on from her haunted past: "Michael Myers is dead...It's over...We should try to get on with some attempt at a happy existence...I can't take it anymore." He reminded his mother of the 20 years that had passed: "You told me yourself you watched him burn...20 years. Don't you think he would have shown up by now? What's he waitin' for, huh?" The stolen vehicle followed them back to the gated campus entrance, where Ronny was scolded for letting the boys leave the grounds.

Before the school buses departed at 4:15 pm, Miss Tate taught an English literature class on Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. Molly noticed the masked figure lurking and staring at her from outside the classroom behind a locked door-entrance, before prophetically responding to a question about the book and fate: "I think that Victor should have confronted the monster sooner.

He's completely responsible for Elizabeth's death. He was so paralyzed by fear that he never did anything. It took death for the guy to get a clue." She also explained why Victor finally confronted the monster when he "had reached a point in his life where he had nothing left to lose. I mean, the monster saw to that by killing off everybody that he loved. It was about redemption. It was his fate." Miss Tate was awakened from deep thought about the response when the bell rang. At the end of class, John's mother surprised him by permitting him to attend the camping trip, although he had already decided to remain behind with his friends for their planned Halloween party. As she watched the buses leave, she spoke to Secretary Norma - who startled her: "It's Halloween. I guess everyone's entitled to one good scare." Acting maternally, Norma advised Miss Tate, making reference to the troubles that they have shared: "I don't like to see you like this. I've seen you like this before, and, we've all had bad things happen to us. The trick is to concentrate on today!"

Michael enters HillcrestEdit
Later that evening, Ronny was distracted at the gate by the arrival of Myers' stolen vehicle parked at the gate, and as he turned off the car's engine, the killer slipped onto the grounds behind him. The phone lines were cut, and he suspected something was amiss. On his rounds throughout the school, Will checked on Molly and Sarah, and then joined Miss Tate for company in her home, to carve a jack-o-lantern together. The four teenagers snuck away and gathered left-over food from the school's kitchen for their candle-lit dinner party. Charlie left to find a corkscrew to open the stolen wine bottle.

In a moment of complete self-revelation, Miss Tate told Will the "truth" about her past history, as they kissed each other (although at first he thought she was joking): "I'm not who you think I am...My name's not Keri Tate...Laurie Strode...I changed my name when I went into hiding...My brother killed my sister when she was 17...With a really big, sharp kitchen knife...They locked him up for a long time, but he got out and he came after me, but I got away. But he killed a lot of my friends. It happened on Halloween. Finally, he recognized her ghastly, infamous tale of Michael Myers from 20 years earlier.

She explained more about how Laurie Strode "faked her death and now she's the headmistress of a very posh, secluded private school in northern California...hoping and praying every year that her brother won't find her." After sitting for 15 years in the sanitarium, one rainy night, Myers murderously decided "to go trick-or-treating" when she was seventeen years old in 1978. Suddenly, Laurie feared for the life of her own 17 year-old son John, and tried to call Yosemite to talk to him, but her phone was dead. Then she discovered her son's camping gear in the closet, realizing he hadn't taken the trip. She grabbed a hand-gun from under her pillow in her bedroom, telling Will she was going to find John. At her door, Ronny told her that there was a "strange car" parked at the gate, but there were no signs of trespassing.

Sarah found Charlie searching for a corkscrew in the kitchen, without any luck. He took the dumb-waiter to the next floor up, where Michael Myers confronted him and slit his throat with a newly-found corkscrew - after some suspense when the corkscrew dropped into the garbage disposal. When Sarah followed after him, she found his bloodied corpse in the dumb-waiter. Myers chased after her and slashed her in the right thigh as she fled into the dumb-waiter up to another floor.

As she was climbing out, Myers cut the conveyor's rope, causing her leg to be crushed by the dropped dumb-waiter door. He then approached, held her neck to the floor with his foot, and stabbed her multiple times in the back with the butcher knife. When John and Molly went looking for their friends, they found a blood trail on the floor and Sarah's body hanging from a light fixture in the pantry. They fled for their lives after a glimpse of the killer. Myers stabbed John in the leg - although Molly fended him off as they both ran to a locked gate outside his mother's residence. The two were cornered, trapped and threatened by Myers' slashing knife between the locked gate and the doorway, until Laurie and Will opened the door behind them. Laurie came face-to-face, momentarily, with her own evil nemesis, through the door's round window. As she grabbed for her hand-gun, Myers disappeared.

The two teenagers were barricaded and locked in one of the rooms, as Will and Laurie searched for Myers in her hallways. Will fired five shots at a shadowy figure, accidentally shooting Ronny in the head [he was not seriously injured - the bullet just grazed his head]. As they panicked, Myers appeared and stabbed Will to death in the back - holding him up by the knife-point as his body trembled. Laurie was pursued, and defended herself by bashing Myers in the head with a fire-extinguisher, before running outside with the two teens to her vehicle.

Brother vs SisterEdit

At the school's front gate, she left them to "drive down the street to the Becker's," a mile down the road, where they were to call the police and an ambulance, while she returned (after breaking the gate mechanism with a rock) to the school to battle Myers herself. She grabbed an emergency fire axe, and challenged Michael by calling out his name several times as she stalked him! Laurie wounded him with the axe, while her arms were slashed. With his butcher knife, he stalked her under table-clothed tables in the school's dining room, until she impaled him with a wooden flag pole. He pursued her into the kitchen, where she heaved knives at him, and then stabbed him repeatedly in the chest, sending the unstoppable killer off a balcony into a dining room table below. He appeared to be dead after the fall but to make sure, she decided to stab him more times, although Ronny prevented her.

The police arrived at the school, where Ronny's and Laurie's wounds were bandaged, as the stretcher carrying Myers in a body bag was loaded into a coroner's vehicle. Wielding a gun, Laurie drove off at high speed in the coroner's vehicle, and steered down the winding mountain road, as Myers reanimated and resurrected himself inside the body bag behind her. When he emerged, she slammed on the brakes, propelling him through the windshield and onto the ground. Then, she crashed the van into his body, and steered the van off a cliffside. In the accident, the van tumbled over and over, and Myers found himself helplessly pinned between the vehicle and a tree. Although thrown from the vehicle, Laurie recovered and saw Michael entreating her with an outstretched hand. Seeming to pity him, she touched her fingertips to his, but then decapitated him with one swing of the large fire axe .

Scream Queens: Which Horror Movies Made These Actresses Famous?

Scream Queens: Which Horror Movies Made These Actresses Famous?, The notion of "scream queens" might bring to mind blood-soaked damsels in distress, but not all female protagonists in horror movies are helpless victims.

Take, for example, the recently released remake of "Carrie," starring this "Kick-Ass" young actress. At first, Carrie White is a shy and guarded high school student with an overbearing mother (played by this veteran flame-haired actress) and harboring a potentially deadly gift. But when pushed too far by her taunting classmates, the victim becomes the victimizer in this classic revenge tale.

Check out our gallery of notable actresses and see if you can guess which memorable horror flick turned them into a bona fide scream queen.

Jamie Lee Curtis

Seemingly ubiquitous thanks to her role as a spokesperson for this healthful yogurt company, Curtis herself comes from Hollywood royalty: Her father was actor Tony Curtis, and her mother was this notable scream queen. A-list pedigree aside, she’s proven herself a formidable actress in drama, comedy and action films. But it was her start in the horror genre that got her noticed, especially her feature-film debut in this slasher classic.

Linda Blair

A former child actress, Blair skyrocketed to fame after appearing in this landmark horror film. Blair subsequently parodied her iconic role in a hilarious spoof film starring Leslie Nielsen.

Mia Farrow

Before becoming the muse of this famous bespectacled director, Farrow turned heads as the protagonist of this Roman Polanski-helmed classic about a woman who starts to believe she's carrying the spawn of Satan.

Sissy Spacek

She won an Oscar in 1981 for her portrayal of country legend Loretta Lynn in this affecting biopic, but Spacek's haunting portrayal of a timid high school student pushed to the breaking point by her jeering classmates in this iconic horror film garnered her first Academy Award nomination.

Neve Campbell

The lovely brunette first gained attention as Julia Salinger in "Party of Five" and for a supporting role in this witchy teen thriller. But it was her portrayal of a teen trying to outsmart a masked killer in this definitive '90s horror flick that made her a star.

Jennifer Love Hewitt

She currently plays a sexy single mother leading a shocking double life in this hit Lifetime show, but Hewitt first shot to fame in the '90s as the protagonist of this slasher film about four friends haunted by the consequences of trying to cover up a hit-and-run murder.

Milla Jovovich

Trading the catwalk for the silver screen in the late '80s, Jovovich impressed viewers with her diverse range, easily moving from action to drama  to comedy . But it was her lead role in this horror-action franchise based on a popular video game that cemented her status an international star.

Sigourney Weaver

Despite her serious training as a stage actress at Stanford and Yale, Weaver's breakout role came when she was cast as the fearless leader in this action thriller set in outer space about a crew responding to a distress call in space, only to be met with a terrifying foe.

Margot Kidder

Before she was cast the beloved Lois Lane in "Superman," Kidder made her first starring turn in this disturbing Brian De Palma thriller about separated conjoined twins who harbor a diabolical secret.

Janet Leigh

Already a star thanks to her notable performances in films like "Little Women" and "Touch of Evil" , Leigh's most memorable role was of a woman on the run who finds refuge in the wrong motel in this iconic Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Jessica Lange

With her breakout performance in "American Horror Story," Lange has reinvented herself into a scream queen matriarch. But it was the actress' big-screen debut in this 1976 remake of a classic that first garnered her attention for being a temptress of terror.

Elizabeth Olsen

Some know her as the younger sister of these famous twins, but Olsen has made a name for herself as a formidable budding actress. Her career really took off with a lead role in this chilling movie about a girl who finds herself trapped in her family's lakeside vacation home.

Jennifer Connelly

Fans mostly associate her with stirring dramatic roles in films like "Requiem for a Dream" or "Little Children," but Connelly was also a darling of the '80s thanks to "Labyrinth." Before going head-to-head with David Bowie in the cult classic film, she gave a hair-raising performance as a girl with the ability to communicate with insects in this Dario Argento flick.

Drew Barrymore

Barrymore's beginnings as a child actor before her tumultuous adolescence were punctuated with some great performances, as evidenced in films like "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial." But her star turn as a girl with pyro-kinetic powers in this film based on a Stephen King novel made her a force to be reckoned with

Catherine Deneuve

Considered one of France's greatest actresses, Deneuve's breakthrough performance in Roman Polanski's psychological thriller about a schizophrenic young woman made viewers and critics alike take notice of her talents.

Heather Langenkamp

Fans of director Wes Craven's most famous films will definitely recognize Langenkamp as the protagonist who appears in three installments of the horror franchise about a killer who haunts his victims' dreams.

Kate Beckinsale

After getting her start in film with a part in Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of this Shakespearean classic, Beckinsale made a name for herself with some memorable performances in indie films , dramas , and romantic comedies  But it was her lead role in this supernatural blockbuster about the secret war between vampires and werewolves that made her an action superstar.

Danielle Harris

A prolific child actor who appeared in blockbuster films like "Free Willy" and "Daylight," Harris has reinvented herself into a preeminent scream queen, starting with a supporting role in Rob Zombie's remake of this classic horror film.

Asia Argento

Argento was practically born a scream queen, considering her father is legendary Italian horror director Dario Argento. She's starred in a number of his films, most recently "Dracula 3D" and "Mother of Tears." But it was her lead role in her father's 1993 film that got her noticed as an actress to contend with.

Sheri Moon Zombie

This former model became a full-blown scream queen when she was cast in husband Rob Zombie’s 2003 directorial debut about a sadistic serial killer family living in the backwoods of Texas.

Shelley Duvall

Already a successful actress thanks to her roles in several Robert Altman films like "Nashville" and "3 Women", one of Duvall's most memorable performances was in this 1980 Stanley Kubrick thriller as the wife of a troubled author driven mad by the spirits in a hotel.

Adrienne Barbeau

Barbeau was known primarily as a TV actress thanks to her stint on the '70s sitcom "Maude," but her breakthrough into film was in this scary 1980 John Carpenter flick about ghosts terrorizing a small fishing town.

Tippi Hedren

Discovered after appearing in a TV commercial on "The Today Show" in 1961, Hedren jumped from modeling to acting when she made her film debut in this suspenseful Alfred Hitchcock movie about a town besieged by flocks of ferocious fowl.

Jennifer Carpenter

Best known for playing the sister of a serial killer on "Dexter," Carpenter made viewers and critics alike take notice with her star turn in this chilling 2005 film about the death of a young girl who underwent an extreme exorcism.

Geena Davis

Remembered for her notable roles in films like "Beetlejuice" and "Thelma & Louise," it's possible Davis never would have gotten those parts had it not been for her memorable performance as the love interest of Jeff Goldblum this 1986 David Cronenberg film about a scientist who accidentally splices his genetics with a winged insect.

Renée Zellweger

An Academy Award-winning actress with an impressive resume of films under her belt (including "Jerry Maguire," "Chicago" and "Cinderella Man"), Zellweger gave one of her most interesting early performances in this 1994 sequel to a '70s slasher film.