WIN ONE FOR THE BEAST

This is surely too good to pass up. I can only hope it presages the Rapture and all these bloody (and I use the word advisedly) fundamentalists will vanish straight up their own apocalypse. From AOL...

ROME, Ga. - Tickets at one movie theater screening Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ are being deemed decidedly unholy. The number 666, which many Christians recognize as the ''mark of the beast,'' is appearing on movie tickets for Gibson's film at a Georgia theater, drawing complaints from some moviegoers. The machine that prints tickets assigned the number 666 as a prefix on all the tickets for the film, said Gary Smith, owner of the Movies at Berry Square in northwest Georgia. The 666 begins a series of numbers that are listed below the name of the movie, the date, time and price. “'It's from our computer and it's absolutely a coincidence” Smith said. '”It has nothing to do with the film company or any vendor. It's completely in our computer.”

To paraphrase the old radio serial, The Shadow, “Where evil lurks in the hearts of men, the computer knows.”

JACK ELAM RIP

One of the few redeeming moments in the otherwise mind-numbing 2004 Oscar show was when poor dear departed Jack Elam appeared in the role-call of the dead, in a tiny clip from his epic cameo in Once Upon A Time In The West, in which he traps the fly in his gun barrel. With his one glass eye, he was my all time favorite western character actor, and teenage skanky role model, and if you don’t know who he is shame on you.

FROM THE EMAIL

Lordmarm writes from Texas

There's no explanation for Houston. It just is. Elron, Bush, the listis endless. See the latest Harpers for a fun piece on Repuglican fund raising in that fair city. But it's not all corruption and oil. Get your ears around Jandek (http://tisue.net/jandek/) if you want a truly alternative vision of that eldritch city. You've never heard the blues so desolate and scary and horrible. But the execution capital of the free world is Huntsville, about an hour's drive north nof Houston. According to the city's website (http://www.huntsvilletexas.com/) "there's something for everyone in Huntsville!" And don't miss this:http://www.txprisonmuseum.org/ for sheer ghoulish weirdness. There are plenty of anti-execution protest sites online. There are usually people with banners outside the gov's mansion here in Austin. But we're not really Texas -- but I guess that'll change now that Tom Delay's redistricted us and turned us into a suburb of effin' Houston...

CRYPTIQUE – Did the lights flicker?