So apparently there’s this movie and the film itself is haunted and oooo scary yeah right. In a nutshell: independent filmmaker Alex Monty Canawati finds some unused 16mm black and white film on the pavement of Hollywood Boulevard(!). He thinks it would be fun to use it to make a movie set in the 1920s and, using a vintage hand-cranked camera, makes Return To Babylon , a film about the scandals involving some of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the time. And then the weirdness starts. Cast and crew claim they sensed something was off during filming. Actresses Jennifer Tilly , Maria Conchita Alonso and Debi Mazar said the set had an otherworldly feel and that they felt unseen hands grab them during filming  (and no, Harvey Weinstein wasn’t involved in the production).  As the film was being edited, Canawati says he and his editor began seeing things that really, really shouldn’t have been there. Things like actors’ features morphing into hideous demonic visages...

It’s been ages since I’ve used my camera (not counting last week ’s trip to see the pups ) so I took Cadbury to the little dog park here at the apartment complex to get some photos of him. I’ve already got about 3.6 trillion* pics of him on my phone but I rarely get photos of him with my camera. Firstly, I don’t really want to lug a DSLR around with me when I take him for a walk, and secondly, my DSLR spent two happy years in Britain because I couldn’t be bothered carrying my camera bag onto the plane. I only brought it back to the US in November last year. *This might be a slight exaggeration. And not having used it in so long, it’s been a learning process just getting it into burst mode or changing the exposure level. Which are two of the things you need to know when trying to photograph your dog when he’s running around with a tennis ball in his gob. But one of the things I came to hate about carrying a camera around everywhere is that you end up seeing so muc...

So I think (with the emphasis on “think,” even though it hurt) that I've decided on the look for the new iteration of PlanetMut. The red wall, v1. Note the font that says “I have no idea what to do, that looks OK, I'll go with it.” Now I’m sure some of you are looking at the site going “Jesus wept, what is this shit?” as you don a pair of sunglasses to cut down on the glare from the white background and bright colours. And they are bright, aren’t they? Same wall with the font from The Cure’s Wish album . I originally really had no idea what look I wanted for the site. I’ve still got the old PlanetMut header and button images and gave them a look over when I was creating the new version, but I decided I wanted to do something new. Oh look! Red! I think this was the third version of the site. Add some stars, change the font and voila! — a “redesign” is born. And I was a bit sick of red, which is obviously why I stuck a photo of a red brick wall at th...

Off to the annual Pet Days event at the OC Market Place today to check out the puppies. Not that I’m in need of another dog, although there were several pups I’d happily have taken home. Here’s hoping they all find forever homes.

I’ve long been interested in mysteries and mysterious things — my current fave is the mystery of how Cadbury knows to crap when we’re at least a mile from the nearest bin — but recently I stumbled upon a puzzling and slightly creepy case that I’d never heard of before. It’s become known as America’s Dyatlov Pass after a similar-ish incident in 1959 in Russia (about which I wrote a post a few years back on my old blog, said post now enjoying the holiday of a lifetime on my external hard drive.) The Dyatlov Pass Incident also inspired the bloody awful movie Devil’s Pass which is terrible so just don’t. On February 24, 1978, five men left their homes in Chico, California, to attend a basketball tournament at California State University in Yuba. On the way back they stopped at a convenience store to buy some snacks. They got back in their car and set off on the 45-mile drive home, a journey that should take them about an hour. Aged between 24 and 32, the five were Gary Dale Mathi...

Sorry about that. Anyway, the original PlanetMut domain expired two years ago and is now apparently a Malaysian gambling site or something, so my advice is don't go there. I managed to backup the 10 years' worth of posts on the original PlanetMut to my hard drive, but I have no idea what to do about getting them back so whatevs. I'll give it another go and I'll be adding some of the same stuff back (the Mexican advent calendar springs to mind) as soon as I can work out how to, well, work it out, let alone actually actually be arsed to do it. So, as you can see, PlanetMut II: The Planeting is on a free blogging site. There's a few reasons for this, but to be brief: 1. I can't be arsed shelling out on another domain name and hosting. I work in community newspapers, do you think I have money? 2. The old PlanetMut was on WordPress, which I loved, but I wanted something a tad simpler because laziness. 3. Speaking of laziness, I cannot stand the though...