Blog Archives

History Channel to Launch New "In Search Of..."; Plus: Scott Wolter Marks Three Years Since End of "America Unearthed" with Radio Interview

1/31/2018

The History channel has greenlighted a ten-episode revival of In Search of… starring Zachary Quinto, taking over the hosting role originated by Leonard Nimoy in the 1977-1982 original. Quinto was selected because he, like Nimoy before him, played Mr. Spock in Star Trek. In announcing the decision yesterday, the network said that the revived series would explore “dynamic” subjects “such as alien encounters, mysterious creatures, UFO sightings, time travel and artificial intelligence.”

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Omnibus Reviews of "Heartthrob," "The Babysitter," "Slasher," "Beyond" and More!

1/30/2018

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For the past few weeks, I’ve been catching up on obscure genre movies and series. I was amused to see that the Decades channel showed a few episodes of Circle of Fear (a.k.a. Ghost Story), a 1970s supernatural series that NBC commissioned as a companion piece to Night Gallery. I had never seen Circle of Fear, which only ran for 22 episodes over two years, and it turns out that it is a rather poor knockoff of Night Gallery. Episodes are overlong at an hour, and the production values are low, even for 1970s TV. The stories are a little flat, and the enjoyment of the episodes comes mostly from the retro stylings of the outrageously 1970s costumes and sets, and the appearance of celebrities like John Astin, Carolyn Jones, Martin Sheen, and others. I’m glad I saw it, but I don’t think I’d want to watch it again.

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"Aeon" Article Claims Racism and Nationalism Are the Driving Force Behind Good vs. Evil Sci-Fi and Fantasy Stories

1/27/2018

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In Aeon magazine, freelance writer Catherine Nichols has an interesting but flawed essay speculating on the reasons that modern pop culture narratives are “obsessed” with the conflict between good and evil, while ancient and medieval myths, legends, and folktales lack a recognizable locus of evil. It’s a question that is good for generating discussion, but Nichols only identifies some of the reasons for the difference between ancient and modern approaches, leaving out one of the largest and most important.

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My Forthcoming Print Articles; Plus: Gaia TV Makes Me an Offer I Can Refuse

1/26/2018

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I have some good news to share today. My critical review of alt-right philosopher Jason Reza Jorjani’s Prometheus and Atlas is about to be published in The Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature & Culture. The Autumn 2017 edition, which was supposed to have been published last fall, has finally come back from the printers and will be in your favorite academic library and electronic database in the next few weeks. I have some more good news, too: My article providing a historical overview of Rothschild conspiracy theories has been accepted for publication by Britain’s All About History magazine and will be appearing in an upcoming issue this spring. It’s a major feature with a 2,500-word article and two supplementary info-boxes with 1,000+ words of additional information.

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Review of "The Cygnus Key" by Andrew Collins (Part 2)

1/25/2018

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THE CYGNUS KEY: THE DENISOVAN LEGACY, GÖBEKLI TEPE, AND THE BIRTH OF EGYPT
Andrew Collins with Rodney Hale | 464 pages | Bear & Company | 2018 | ISBN 978-1591432999

READ PART 1

In the first part of my review of The Cygnus Key, I reviewed Andrew Collins’s views on the supposedly prehistoric origins of a cult that worships the constellation of Cygnus the Swan as a vulture that leads souls to heaven. I also noted that this part of the volume, a third of its length, is essentially little more than a summary of Collins’s previous books going back a decade. In the remainder of the book, Collins finally gets to the meat of his thesis, starting with what he calls “The Giza Revelation.”

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Review of "The Cygnus Key" by Andrew Collins (Part 1)

1/24/2018

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THE CYGNUS KEY: THE DENISOVAN LEGACY, GÖBEKLI TEPE, AND THE BIRTH OF EGYPT
Andrew Collins with Rodney Hale | 464 pages | Bear & Company | 2018 | ISBN 978-1591432999

British writer Andrew Collins opens The Cygnus Key, due to be published this May, with an acknowledgements page giving ample thanks to two cash cows whose profiteering largesse has made his work profitable: Ancient Aliens and Gaia TV. That he treats these outlets for the outré as something serious should tell us everything we need to know about the intellectual firepower behind his elaborate house of cards suggesting that civilization began with the Denisovan hominins, who, through a long memory as the Nephilim of myth, inspired ancient Egypt through the remnants of their hitherto unimagined civilization. And yet it is the preface to the book that really sets up the more disturbing layers of Collins’s narrative, one implicit in his several earlier books on the same subject but here accidentally made clear. In the fictional opening scene of the preface he imagines the extinction of the Denisovans and assigns to these miraculous generators of civilization one trait that no great godlike men can lack: white, or at least light, skin. He takes time to claim that when the Denisovans succumbed to a hypothetical Homo sapiens invasion and interbreeding, the Denisovans would have noted that “their skin [was] darker” than the improbably light Denisovans, whom science knows only from a few bones.

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Reviews of "The Open House" and "The Alienist"

1/23/2018

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A decade ago, a news story from Japan made flesh crawl around the world. A homeless woman in the town of Kasuya entered a man’s house and hid in the closet, where she lived undetected for a year while the man went about his life oblivious to the intruder. The homeowner installed cameras after becoming suspicious when food started disappearing from his kitchen, which led to the woman’s discovery. Not long after the story broke, horror authors incorporated variations on this bizarre event into their work, producing some creepy tales that I half-remember from old editions of Best New Horror.

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Bonus Monday Post: The Science Channel Hunts Atlantis in Morocco

1/22/2018

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I haven’t been posting on Mondays, but this weekend I saw a show on the Science Channel that made me mad enough that I thought I should make a brief posting about it. Apparently, the network has a series called Mysteries of the Missing with former Lost actor Terry O’Quinn narrates stories ripped from schlocky “unsolved mystery” paperbacks. The episode I saw originally aired in September, and it featured a search for Atlantis in Morocco. I don’t generally watch random crap on cable anymore since I have much less time for trash TV, so I missed it on its first airing.

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Michael Shermer Revises Downward the Moral Arc of the Universe

1/20/2018

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I love The Good Place. In addition to being a hilarious sitcom about the misadventures of flawed people in a morally dubious afterlife, it is also a clever reflection on moral philosophy. What is astonishing, though, is that the show has a better handle on understanding the limits of universalist moral philosophies than many of the secular humanists who have put forward claims for “scientific” morality.

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What Should Critics Cover in the Era of Peak Everything?

1/19/2018

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All right, I’ll admit it. I’ve got next to nothing today. It’s been a pretty slow period for bad historical ideas, and a lot of what is currently floating around is retreads of retreads. But that did raise an issue for me when I read Tim Goodman’s recent article in the Hollywood Reporter debating what the proper role of a TV critic is in the world of peak TV and more than 480 primetime scripted series. Goodman tried to make the case that the critic is justified to ignore TV series that millions of people might watch in favor of focusing only on the most interesting or ambitious series, especially those that few people might ever see. Goodman’s argument is essentially one of elitism, but it reflects a lot of the criticism I have received for reviewing media products that are well below the cultural interests off media elites.

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