"According to Okinawa's tourism site, the castle burned down three times during the Ryukyu Dynasty and was burnt down again in World War Two during the Battle of Okinawa. It is currently the largest wooden building in Okinawa. The castle had been scheduled as a stop on the 2020 Tokyo Olympic torch relay route."
Today is Halloween, even though in Oz we don't officially celebrate it. But if I was going to dress up and go trick or treating tonight I'd be doing something along the lines of 'The Never Ending Story', like these guys below:-) Should I Get a Never Ending Story Tattoo?
I stumbled across a series on Amazon Prime this morning called BuzzFeed Unsolved(also known as simply Unsolved) an "American documentary entertainment television series created and produced by Ryan Bergara" according to Wikipedia anyway.
I had never heard of this show before, so I started watching season 1 and realized that it was similar in format to the Australian podcast 'Mysterious Universe', where two knuckle-heads pretend that they are half serious (who knows, maybe they really are) about investigating "paranormal happenings", while they usually crack jokes at whatever it is that they are investigating, while they pass the hat around or sprinkle advertising throughout the free portion of the show, which is probably where their real interests lie:-)
But that might just be my cynicism overriding my BS detector, right?-) Anyway, I watched a few of the episodes from season 1 and could see the good keystone cop, bad keystone cop routine in play for the viewers of BuzzFeed Unsolvedand then I skippedahead to season 6 and saw these guys seemed to be trying to cash in on Joaquin Phoenix's current hot fame flame by not only doing a show about 'The Viper Room' and what transpired there on Halloween in 1993, but also paying a visit to the bar to do some "serious investigating" with their giggle box/EVP/whatever to prove some deceased spirits who have nothing better to do but throw a few random words into the static in an effort to have a conversation with a couple of dickheads running a podcast, really are still hanging around in some LA shithole waiting to be rescued and pointed to "The Light" by a couple of spiritually blind guys.
Do you really think River Phoenix, or any other deceased spirit would be hanging around there just hoping some "ghost-buster" would come along to save them from listening to Ramones cover bands? If I was a deceased spirit hanging around in this bar and a couple of morons came in wanting me to "communicate" through their giggle box, I would either stay silent or smash a bottle over their heads so they would have something to talk about, providing the blow wasn't hard enough to damage the speech center in their brain. Although trying to hit a near impossible target like their brain might be a harder task than trying to communicate with the dead;-)
I did find it rather Jim Carreycrazy that River was born on the 23rd and died at the age of 23 and that the street number of 'The Viper Room'(8852 Sunset Boulevard)adds up to 23:-)
I guess I did learn something from watching these two clowns after-all, but I just wonder how real they are when it comes to their "investigations"?
Maybe these clowns need to team up with the 'Mysterious Universe' fools for more laughs:-)
I feel sorrier for the living than the dead.
Imagine Joaquin seeing a couple of Jokers exploiting his brother's death all for a "shits & giggles" Halloween themed investigation to rake in a few bucks.
I wonder if BuzzFeed Unsolvedhas done a show about brain-dead zombie clown pod-cast hosts yet?-)
Sounds like a lot of NOTHING doing going on to me. UPDATE: November 11th, 2019
I don't know why the original You Tube in the post above was made private, but it seemed to have been re-posted again (whether edited or not I don't know) at a later date at the Future Thinkers podcast site.
I've got to say that until this year I've never been a big fan of QT's movies, but I do count his last one as one of my favourite movies of all time.
I've seen it three times already this year at the cinema and I could still see it again and not be bored with it. This was one time that I'm glad the movie didn't stick to the "true story" of real life events.
In 'Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood'the Cliff Boothcharacter feeds his dog a band of dog food called Wolf's Tooth, which comes in the flavours of rat or raccoon. With me living in Australia I thought surely this couldn't be a real brand of dog food sold for consumption to American K9s, but who knows with the American market, right? After doing some net searches I found out Wolf's Tooth was one of QT's fake brands like his Red Apple Cigarettes.
'Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood'was one of the biggest box office smashes in Australia for 2019 and the movie 'Ride Like a Girl' was an Australian movie based on a "true story" that was one of the biggest Australian made movies to do well at the Australian box office this year -
I liked 'Ride Like a Girl' and would happily pay to see it again at the cinema, as I grew up going to the racetrack with my father and my Nan.
Unfortunately, for the majority of the people doing the right thing in the racing industry a major story broke on the Australian national TV network the ABC (after a two-year investigation, mind you) of the appalling practice of slaughtering healthy unwanted ex-racehorses at local abattoirs -
When I saw the cartoon in a local Queensland newspaper of the three brands of dog food I couldn't help but think of the Wolf Tooth brand in QT's movie that came out the same year that this scandal was aired. Not only that, but in the same edition of the newspaper with the tinned dog food cartoon was this story in the sport section 'Beau hungry on Wolfe'?!
Horse racing in Australia had better clean up their act and how the hell is it legal to slaughter healthy horses at abattoirs in the first place in a country like Australia? I'm a stunned as this animal pictured below, that probably ended up fox food in the end.
I can't help but think that society is becoming more and more one tragic joke. Or that it always was one and we are just becoming more aware of what a sick joke this world really is.
It's like Halloween never ends anymore, like the sale of hot-cross buns in the supermarkets all year round ... in Australia anyway:-(
And we don't even celebrate Halloween in Australia ...
I bought 'A Gift of Wings' secondhand in a Byron Bay bookshop in 2015 when I was walking around Byron with my eldest son when we went down to see a show that night at the community centre. But I hadn't started reading it until after I had read'Life with my Guardian Angel' about a week ago.
I remembered thinking it was kind of synchy that a plane taking off from Brisbane Airport was on the front page when I put down my book on top of the paper that morning, but then when I picked the book up again it wasn't long until I was reading a story titled 'There's Always the Sky' that seemed to me rather eerie from a 2019 perspective.
There's always the sky?
This book was published in 1975, so I would imagine the short story would be at least a few years older again. The story was about Richard walking around in Manhattan and feeling depressed and trapped by the tall buildings surrounding him, until he did something he claimed people rarely do in Manhattan, and that was to look up and observe the sky.
When Richard wrote, "What do you know, I thought. What do you know about that. No matter how tangled and twisted and distressful goes the life of an airplane pilot, he always has a home, waiting." I couldn't help but think of the events of 2001, rather than the time Richard was referring to while looking up into the Manhattan sky.
I wondered if Richard had almost recalled a nightmare of the future to come when walking those Manhattan streets, which he may have dreamed one night in his past, but couldn't pull from those waking ten seconds after opening his eyes.
The day after 9/11 there were no planes to be seen in the sky over Manhattan after they were all grounded ... only sky.
