Awesome Or Off-Putting: The Mad Gasser of Mattoon
Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, myths, ancient artifacts, religion, strange facts or just the plain unexplainable.
This week: The Unexplainable
In the early to mid 1940s reports of a tall thin man dressed in black abounded in the town of Mattoon, Illinois. The man would sneak up to the window of houses and spray in an unknown gas from his flit gun - a device normally used for spraying pesticides. There were several reports of this gas-man, and in two different towns no less, but the police could find no trace of him.
This is the story of the Mad Gasser.
You have to love Prince Charles - his sons are never out of the newspapers, his dead wife is a saint and his Mum is now a movie star, but good old Prince Charles is still plugging away, uncomfortably posing for photo-ops with poor people like always.
We’ve had quite enough of all of the relentless Katie Holmes bashing by the press. Just when she’s settled into another $50,000 shopping spree with Victoria Beckham at Barneys Department Store, the media starts thrashing her for not reprising the character Rachel Dawes in the Batman Returns sequel, Dark night.
Some clever people have realised that there's a gap in the market for people who thought the Scary Movie series was too scary, so they created Epic Movie - a spoof of literally every film that couldn't be shoehorned into any of the four Scary Movie films.
Last night's Screen Actors Guild awards threw up some major upsets; for instance, when Helen Mirren, Forest Whitaker, Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Hudson won their SAG awards, it was easily the most unexpected thing since the sun rose this morning.
When we get old we'd quite like to be like Super Granny. While most old people are content to forget the names of their own children and occasionally soil themselves for excitement, Super Granny is out having wild adventures.
It seems Jared Leto doesn't like it when people diss his band, 30 Seconds to Mars. This was a bitter lesson Elijah Wood learned when the two got into a hobbit-sized scuffle in October at the MTVU Woodie Awards.
Last week saw just about every dusty old band in the history of the universe get back together even though nobody has expressed an interest in them for longer than anyone cares to remember - yes James and Crowded House, we mean you.
That's the end of Celebrity Big Brother 2007, then - and after being bullied, insulted and squawked at relentlessly at monumental volume about Oxo by a fat-mouthed pikey, Shilpa Shetty has finally emerged as the Celebrity Big Brother victor.
This series of Dancing On Ice is really hotting up, although sadly not enough for the ice rink to melt and drown all the competitors - and newsreader Phil Gayle is the latest to get the Dancing On Ice shove, primarily because nobody knows who he is.
A snippet review of the week. Folded for the up, Creased for the down.
In some ungodly cock-up, the UK seems to be the last country on Earth to have the new Cornelius album released on its shores. While we're forced to wait one more poxy month for that, is there anything vaguely similar to fill the time?


