Each year, it’s a little more difficult to write a seemingly lighthearted review of the year in weird. This year was both personally and professionally a bit of a struggle as A.I. continues to eat away at my day job and the closure or collapse of a number of media outlets has made it more difficult place stories in paying publications. I lost my gig as a CNN Opinion columnist right when it was starting because CNN shuttered the entire division. As the year came to an end, about one-third of my income for the year remains outstanding from businesses that are dragging their feet on payments and have been since early fall. That has made it difficult to devote too much energy to caring about whatever old claims the usual cadre of kooks and weirdos are recycling on any given day.
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An interesting little Christmas mystery, inspired by a recent post Graham Hancock made on social media praising his “great friend” Robert Bauval and his Orion Correlation Theory from the 1990s. Back in 1997, when Hancock and Bauval teamed up for The Message of the Sphinx (a.k.a. Keeper of Genesis), the two authors presented a variant version of the Christmas carol “We three kings” that replaced “Orient” with “Orion,” rendering the first line as “We three kings of Orion are.” They provided no source, and for a long time I wondered if they had just made it up.
It's been a quiet week as we head into the holidays. If you haven't seen it, Fox News Digital interviewed me about my book, Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean, and the segment ran this week. Be sure to check it out here!
I don’t typically watch Josh Gates’s Discovery channel documentary series, and Expedition Files, the latest spinoff of Expedition Unknown, didn’t really appeal to me. Gates expends minimal effort standing in front of a screen and narrating segments comprised of b-roll and the occasional expert interview, and the topics are such hoary rehashes that In Search Of… had already done many of the same segments forty years ago. I decided to check out a couple of segments this week, however, because Gates touched on two topics that are extremely familiar to me.
I appeared today on the Forgotten Hollywood podcast to discuss my new book, Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean. You can listen below, at this link, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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