Spooky Castles And Spectacular Stunts
Here we are again, another Monday morning, fresh outside our door like a summer bouquet or possibly a box of spiders - can’t really know until we open the door.
I’m REALLY hoping for the bouquet, but let’s be honest, it’s been spiders a lot lately. So please let this newsletter be your spider-proof jacket and face mask thingy, or at least the extra-long socks you tuck over the pants so the spiders can’t get in your pants. And all of this is making me wonder: did Spider-Man ever have an enemy that only wanted to kill him because he really, really hates spiders? Like he had no evil plan, just thought “Dude is running around being a spider, I will not stand for that.” This would be a good villain. I feel they would be very relatable.
ANYWAY. Here’s some nice stuff.
MOTHERLOVING SIMONE BILES
I am an Olympics nerd, but most especially I am a gymnastics nerd, as my family can attest by having to sit through approximately 200,000 viewings of the TV movie Nadia about Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci. It was not a good movie. Here is an even worse trailer.
But I loved Nadia very much, and I wanted very much to be a lithe, tiny gymnast, when in fact I was a fat lil Courderoy Bear of a child who was not able to do a cartwheel after six months of gymnastics classes. Oh well.
BUT. When I see gymnasts do amazing things, it makes me feel all warm and powerful, and SIMONE BILES is just the most mind-blowing gymnast the US has ever had.
At 22, she is supposed to be well past her “prime” in terms of the sport (many girls are too beat up by injury near the end of their teens to continue, which is a whole other problem) but Biles, after dominating the Olympics in 2016, just gets stronger and stronger. At the US Championships this weekend, she started off by landing a beam dismount no one has ever successfully performed:
And then followed that up on Sunday with a floor tumbling pass that no one has ever even attempted in competition.
That is a triple-double, a move that combines two flips in the air with three complete twisting rotations. LOOK at this in slow motion:
Biles went on to win her sixth US Championship, no shock there. Also - remember, this is a woman who is 4’8, AND YET:
The human body, man. It’s amazing.
The Human Brain, However, Sometimes Has Problems
I can’t not show you some of these bizarre concoctions. There are thousands of houses around the world like these, and NO ONE seems to be able to explain the stories behind them.
WHY
HOW
WHO IS RESPONSIBLE
Crazy Architecture Is Upsetting. Creepy CASTLES, On The Other Hand…
Ooooh we’re getting dangerously close to fall and the beginning of Halloween festivities. Just once I would like to spend a Halloween night in a spooky castle and see what the ghosts get up to at their nightly jamboree. Spooky castles are so delightfully full of history and (I’m sorry, this rhymes) mystery. As a kid, one of my hands-down favorite movies was Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and the hands-down best scene in that movie is when Witch Angela Lansberry has to fight some Nazis so she brings a castle-display full of medieval knights to life and oh my god, that movie is so cool, why hasn’t it been remade?? The moment that banner starts to wave is class-A spooky.
Here’s some other VERY cool spooky castles. Definitely some forest spirits living in this one:
I also had this exact scenario happen in Sim City Societies when I got overexcited about building my Sims house castles.
ADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images
Check out the story at the link above, it’s insane.
And there are definitely some pirate-sea-ghosts at this imposing abandoned castle in Wales. Who doesn’t love pirate-sea-ghosts?
That’s Carew Castle, and it’s got something extremely cool about it. Its 15th century owners became a critical ally for Henry Tudor, making them instrumental to the royal dynasty. On one of the doors of the castle is something extraordinary: a crest depicting the coat of arms of Tudor’s son, Arthur, and Arthur’s wife, Catherine of Aragorn. If that name is familiar, it’s because Catherine went down in history as the first wife of Henry VIII, who became the heir when Arthur died only six months after wedding Catherine. As part of his move for the throne, Henry also took the beautiful Spanish princess as his first wife. For this brief period, emblazoned on a door in an abandoned castle in Wales, there was no oncoming reign of Henry VIII, no shift in the monarchy to Protestantism, and no rise of Queen Elizabeth. It’s a fading relic of a world that almost was.
See, I told you: Spooky!
While We’re On Spooky
I do try to share only hopeful stories in this newsletter, because you have - well, the rest of the world - for the other stuff. Although this kind of astonishing story out of Cosmo deals with a very dark world - the online spawning grounds of white supremacists - its hero is absolutely astonishing.
Written by Andrea Stanley, this article details the work of an understandably anonymous woman, an ex-marine and ex-cop, who spends her days hunting down white supremacists.
Her hours are all the time; hate doesn’t sign off at 5 p.m. Her job, i.e., to stop potential mass murderers from carrying out their plots, used to mean tracking domestic terrorists like Finton. But lately, K’s focus has been pulled toward the alt-right, a younger, more misogynistic version of the white supremacist movement that’s converting a new generation on message boards and social media. She is tracking the men who hate women. And they’re so dangerous that most of her family and friends don’t even know what she does.
K apparently possesses an uncanny knack at telling when rhetoric is about to turn into something actionable, and the FBI knows her well enough that when she calls, they listen.
When I ask Oren Segal, the director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism, if there are other people like K, he tells me there are other people who do what she does but no one like her. Because it’s not just her intuition—it’s that she literally never forgets a face. Once she encounters a hateful man online, “she remembers their name and everything about them,” says the friend who works in a similar field. “She’s got this phenomenal ability.”
This week the FBI caught a man planning to carry out anti-Semitic attacks on a tip. I’m now going to spend a lot of time wondering, when you hear about a tip, if it was K. A suburban mom in a nameless subdivision, fighting the darkness while she raises a family.
That IS hope.
And Now: A Snack
I have lived in Los Angeles for almost 12 years. In that time, I have had three perfect meals. One was a dinner at Republique where I cannot think about the composed white salad without weeping. One was at the sadly short-lived Street, which I puked after and did not regret a bit. And one was last week at Union in Pasadena, where I had the greatest spaghetti ever made by any human in the history of the world.
Spaghetti alla Chitarra is named for the shape of the noodles, which are pressed through a slicer that looks like the strings of a guitar (chitarra=guitar.) And don’t get me wrong, the rest of the meal was also perfect - including a polenta that I would date if it was legal - but the sauce. The SAUCE on this spaghetti is truly amazing. I scraped every molecule on the plate up. I nearly licked it. Even Johnathan Gold, bless his memory, got a little emotional about this pasta:
So when you get past the salads of roasted figs with ricotta, and of beets with buratta and of peaches with radicchio, there is the spaghetti alla chitarra — arranged into a tight cylinder, topped with a roasted hot chile, ready for its Instagram close-up but still very much spaghetti in tomato sauce, firm yet supple, and nearly as charismatic as its $24 equivalent at Scarpetta in Beverly Hills.
I made this using the recipe above, and it came out nearly perfect. It’s such a simple tomato sauce - good san marzanos, which you can get at any nice grocery store - a fresno chile (they have ‘em at Whole Foods) - a good glug of oil and butter. You will not believe the flavor that comes out of this. You will feel MOVED by this. I swear to you.
And if you go to the actual restaurant, take me with you.
Your Dog Of The Week
I have to resort to stealing dogs from Twitter because you guys won’t send me any dogs to feature. I don’t know if this means you hate your dogs, but I’m certainly telling your dogs that’s the reason. Anyway, I don’t know who these dogs are but let’s pretend I do.
This is Rufus and Seaworthy. Rufus is the big one, he was a stray his owner found eating of his garbage. He liked the canoe just fine but he won’t go in the water. Seaworthy was a dog rescued by a friend of the guy who now owns her; she was discovered swimming across a 700 acre lake and her owners couldn’t be found. They’re best friends and Seaworthy won’t eat until she’s sure Rufus has also been fed. They are very good dogs, like your dogs could be if you’d send me some photos of them, which is maybe the FIRST TIME in the HISTORY of the internet someone has needed to ASK for dog photos.
Send me your puppers at mujihoshi@yahoo.com
I hope this newsletter perked up your Monday! By the time you read this, I will likely be screaming at the crossword over coffee. It’s a terrible ritual, but it’s one I apparently have now.
Love you all. Stay brave.