PicoBlog

Leon Vitali died last week, and if you’re saying, “Who?,” that’s pretty much the point. In a film industry and a popular culture that lionizes the individual, Vitali represented the many unknown names and faces without whom the individual would have no glory. He was a factotum – the person who gets things done and receives no thanks for it. Specifically, he was Stanley Kubrick’s personal assistant from the late 1970s until well after the legendary director’s death in 1999.

Welcome to our bi-weekly news roundup! Greetings Lit Magcyclists, This past week saw quite the kerfuffle in the horror-writing scene. As Mike Glyer reports on his site, a Kickstarter fundraising campaign was started for an anthology. New Demons Anthology was slated to have big names in the field, including Chuck Palahniuk, Owen King, Joe Hill and many others. Within a few days, the anthology raised over $25,000, which was five times its original goal.

Fearless reporting, a behind-the-curtains look at how journalism is made — and an unabashed point of view. Welcome to Chills. Share I can’t sleep. I feel unsafe, even though I am completely so, tucked into a hotel room in Oświęcim, Poland. The war in Israel is deeply upsetting to so many of us, but for some reason, it’s making me feel unsafe. I’m at Auschwitz, so it’s possible that part of the feeling is amplified by being so fundamentally reminded of my Jewishness with all the hateful rhetoric against Israelis right now.

Kevin Seefried has been sentenced to three years in prison for his part in the January 6, 2020 riot at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Seefried carried a Confederate flag through the capitol on that day and was photographed numerous times, most famously in a hallway that featured paintings of Charles Sumner and John Calhoun. It will go down as one of the most famous (or perhaps infamous) photographs from the attempted insurrection.

In Part I—published last week—I noted that chicken and waffles is historically three different dishes: creamed chicken and waffles, broiled chicken and waffles, and fried chicken and waffles, each of which had its moment in the sun.   Of the three, it’s probably broiled chicken and waffles that had the greatest fame in the mid-19th century. The most celebrated purveyor of broiled chicken and waffles was Warriner’s Tavern in Springfield, Massachusetts, an old fashioned coaching inn run by Jeremy “Uncle Jerry” Warriner and his wife Phoebe.

Hudson Soft, founded in the 70s, did just about everything a studio and publisher could do in the video game industry before it was fully absorbed into Konami on March 1, 2012. For the next month here at Retro XP, the focus will be on the roles the studio played, the games they developed, the games they published, the consoles they were attached to, and the legacy they left behind. After all, someone has to remember them, since Konami doesn’t always seem to.

This week, Jack Encarnacao and J.P. Sarro’s popular wrestling history and nostalgia podcast, The Lapsed Fan, is covering Vince McMahon’s 1992 World Bodybuilding Federation Championship pay-per-view event in two parts. Since Jack cited my September 2015 Fighting Spirit Magazine article about the WBF in the process, you know what that means: It’s time to go into the stacks and reprint that article! (Please keep in mind that, as always with FSM articles, they were edited to use British English.

Dear readers. This is the second post. A friend of mine who lives in Canada read my first post and pointed out that there were a few grammar mistakes. I'm not good at English, but I'm trying to learn little by little and reduce my grammar mistakes. I hope you read through to the end. On March 22, The State of Emergency has been officially lifted for all of Japanthough COVID-19 is not over yet.

Hello Friends! Thank you for your support and happy Saturday! I’m excited to announce my memoir is available for presale at various retailers here. It’s about faith and reconnection with God after surviving religious abuse and walking away from God. The book is called Motorhome Prophecies (because we lived partially in a motorhome), and it will be published by Hachette Book Group as a memoir book coming out next February 13; it's about how I recovered from an abusive childhood growing up in motorhomes, sheds and tents in an offshoot Mormon cult (my dad was excommunicated from the official LDS Church) with poverty, welfare and sexual abuse.