George Case's Blog, page 2

Most of us have had the opportunity to take part in alumni or other organized reunions – meeting up with former classmates, teammates, workmates, or squad mates after many years’ separation. The affairs can be pleasantly nostalgic or emotionally awkward, but at least they are more or less private. Popular culture, however, is replete with […]

In 2020 a longstanding mystery was solved by Rolling Stone journalist Kory Grow, who tracked down and interviewed the woman posed in a witchy outfit on the jacket of the classic 1970 record Black Sabbath, the veteran British rockers’ debut.  The model, one Louisa Livingstone, had never before been identified – some had speculated she […]

Politics, and the passage of time, have made revisionist history around World War II newly topical. Last year the prominent American pundit Tucker Carlson hosted a podcast with Darryl Cooper, himself a popular podcaster, who has claimed that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain of the Second World War.” Churchill’s record as an unrepentant Anglo […]

It was poignant to note the April 13 death of English actress Jean Marsh at age 90, just when I’ve been rediscovering the classic television series she co-created and starred in, Upstairs, Downstairs. The show, which originally aired in Britain from 1971 to 1975 and became popular internationally, was essentially a handsome soap opera about […]

A recent episode of publicity and show business spilling over into the field of sober editorial commentary concerns not a blockbuster movie, a banned book, or a brand of beer, but a country music single.   The controversy over Jason Aldean’s 2023 hit “Try That In a Small Town” – the song and its video […]

Probably the two most influential horror stories of the last sixty years – and maybe the two most influential stories period – are Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. Both began as popular novels that modernized the occult themes of witchcraft and demonology, formerly all but dicarded in a secular age; both were soon adapted into […]

With the movie industry increasingly vulnerable to new media and new tastes, Hollywood is increasingly dependent on the financial security represented by intellectual property, or IP. IP is the catalogue of pre-existing, pre-sold stories and characters which can be profitably adapted into film: sequels, prequels, re-boots, and “re-imaginings,” as well as franchises based on popular […]

My weekday walk to my job site in a large Canadian city takes me through a gauntlet of the urban underclass.  Here’s a noisy gaggle of ragged folks clustered around a bottle or two, there’s a man screaming obscenities at an invisible enemy, a woman sits and stares vacantly outside the bank, and over by […]

There is an exclusive list of shocking events which subsequently become fodder for conspiracy theories. The bombing of Pearl Harbor. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy. The death of Princess Diana. 9/11. The Sandy Hook mass shooting. Each of those is claimed by the theorists to have been […]

At one time or another, you or someone you know has probably joked, “When I am dictator…,” and then invoked a totally capricious pet cause you would order your underlings to enforce: prohibit the farming and consumption of asparagus; have Prince Harry and Megan Markle publicly thrown into a vat of human waste; make “Whole […]