For the Weekend Warriors, Weirdos & Whackjobs - Issue #5
A freaky pantry, a pulpy parcel and other weird shit to take you into your weekend.
A busy week and one filled with flus, colds and the rapid clickedy-clacking of our keyboards when not pounding Neo Citran or eating roadside McChickens (don’t ask).
You learn long ago that if getting kicked in the face a few times a week isn’t something you enjoy, you probably don’t want to work in wrongful convictions or short selling.
This week had an awesome post by Somebody Else’s Lawyer titled How to Find a Fire, that you should go and read if you haven’t already. My favourite FOIA tip from Wednesday’s masterpiece:
Cool trick for finding out who these carriers are, by the way: Do a FOIA to an agency you know investigated the fire, and ask for all sign-in sheets for scene inspections. If the fire was large enough, the public investigation and private investigation might have been conducted at the same time, OR while the agency was still in control of the scene, and the sign-in sheet will reveal who was there, and on whose behalf.
There’s oodles to learn and the story is a fascinating one.
From Last Weekend
What Justin Watched
The Pantry Ghost Documentary (Amazon Prime) - hear me out, here people. So again, much like other movies, I get freaked out easily and then I become skeptical. This is just who I am. This documentary was as bad as the H.H. Holmes ‘documentary’ in Issue #1 but the Pantry Ghost is a unique form of bad. Not in the cheesy-special-effects way but in that icky-something-feels-really-wrong-here way. Something bugged me about it.
Weird as I am, I sat with that thought, and wondered what it was that bugged me so much. I realized that it was that I had felt a simple, unwritten rule of horror had been violated here. If you were going to do a found footage film, great, do a found footage film. If you were going to allege it was all real, fantastic, do that too. But pick fiction or non-fiction (really, its all fiction isn’t it?) and don’t break the rules between them.
Stay tuned for my next Freak in the Google Sheets piece where I’m going to timeline out the Pantry Ghost and show you how Sheets makes timelines easier and more powerful than ever. All the better to catch bullshit with, my pretties.
*sneezes*
Excuse me.
Side Quest Updates - Closer To H.H. Holmes Than Ever
So this week a parcel had arrived that I had been eagerly awaiting and is something I hope will finally close the loop on my original H.H. Holmes challenge that I had set out in Issue #1.
It is the October 1943 issue of Master Detective, the cover of which you have already seen at the top of this post. I’ve opened the box and taken some initial pictures but haven’t read through it far enough to tell you how the hell it is that it arrived in my hands and why, stay tuned for that!
*blows nose*
Have a great weekend, stay healthy and wear a fuckin’ mask.
— Much Love From The Bullshit Hunting Crew