Jackdaw Posts

There are moments in history when everything unravels in style—the time when the fashionable aristocrats of France decided that having their heads attached to their bodies was simply too passé. Yes—the French Revolution. That glorious moment when France turned its powdered nose up at monarchy and said, “Off with their wigs… and while we’re at it, off with their heads.” It was a time of bloodshed, chaos, political upheaval—and couture. A savage catwalk of liberty, equality, fraternity… and beheading. Let’s start at the beginning—when France was already a loaf short of a baguette.   Revolutionary Runway: Fashion Takes the Stage   Pre-Revolution: Cake, Debt, and Denial By the late 1700s, France was broke. Not “tighten your belt” broke— desperately flogging state jewels while Versailles hosted garden parties broke. Centuries of war, reckless spending, and a tax system that squeezed the poor and coddled the nobility left the country in an economic tailspin. Meanwhile, the Fi...

Elvis is alive, and he's not happy about it. He's old, arthritic, abandoned, and wasting away in a rundown nursing home where the pudding’s cold and the bedpans are lukewarm. But somewhere between the bingo nights and the unspeakable indignity of growths “on his pecker,” a greater evil emerges—an ancient Egyptian mummy in cowboy boots, feeding on the souls of the forgotten. This is Bubba Ho-Tep , and if that plot summary sounds insane, congratulations—you’re alive.   He came for souls, not sponge baths. The Plot That Shouldn't Work (But Somehow Does) Directed by Don Coscarelli ( Phantasm , The Beastmaster ) and based on a short story by cult author Joe R. Lansdale, Bubba Ho-Tep is a film about: Elvis Presley, who faked his death and swapped places with an impersonator. JFK, also still alive, though now inexplicably Black, brain-altered, and residing in the same care home. A soul-sucking mummy dressed like a down-and-out rodeo reject. Existential dread, cosmic ...

Some scams wear suits. This one wears a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, shouting "TO THE MOON!" from the back of a rented Lamborghini. The pump-and-dump is not new. It did not spring fully formed from the meme-stained depths of Reddit or the crypto gutter. It’s older than disco, nastier than Prohibition, and slipperier than a Wall Street apology. It's the financial world’s dirty secret that everyone knows and no one learns from. This is a story of greed, hype, lies, and the kind of gullibility that keeps the market spinning.   Pump and Dump: From Jazz to Jail Time I. The Original Swindle: Livermore and the Jazz Age Hustle Long before TikTok influencers were shilling dog coins, there was Jesse Livermore. Born in 1877 and trading by chalkboard before the Federal Reserve even existed, Livermore turned market manipulation into high art. He didn’t call it a scam. He called it strategy. Livermore bought up cheap stocks, paid off newspapers to sing their praises, and watched as e...

Tick. Tick. Boom. Split Second is what happens when noir gets irradiated . Dick Powell's directorial debut throws a ragtag group into a ghost town at ground zero of an atomic test. Motel noir meets apocalyptic suspense. It’s brutal, bleak, and unapologetically B‑movie in spirit—classic RKO paranoia with a sanitised plutonium garnish.   Sunsets, Saloons, and Sudden Death by A-Bomb. The Setup: Bad Guys Holed Up at Ground Zero The film opens in the Nevada desert—hot, dusty, forbidding—where Sam Hurley (Stephen McNally), cold-blooded convict and reluctant leader, and Bart Moore (Paul Kelly), wounded in a prison breakout, flee into an abandoned mining town. Moore bleeds out, and Hurley, needing medical help, hijacks a car driven by Kay Garven (Alexis Smith) and her lover Arthur Ashton (Robert Paige). They add a reporter, Larry Fleming (Keith Andes), and a dancer, Dottie Vail (Jan Sterling), to their hostage roster before arriving at Lost Hope City—a ghost town built atop the governmen...

Skulls have been hanging around since the dawn of humanity—staring back at us from the dirt, whispering secrets we pretend not to hear. They’re more than bones. They’re talismans. They’re warnings. They’re mirrors with no reflection. From cavemen to couture, conquerors to counterculture, skulls haven’t just represented death. They’ve defined it. And sometimes, they’ve defined us. This is the story of humanity’s longest, strangest, most enduring love affair—with the bone beneath the grin.   The last laugh is silent — but it always has teeth. History’s Head Count: The Long Love Affair with Skulls Prehistoric Flexing: Death, Power, and Trophy Culture Before museums and morgues, skulls were cultural currency. Neolithic tribes didn’t just bury their dead—they displayed them. Ancestor worship? Maybe. Intimidation? Definitely. In Jericho, one of the world’s oldest cities, people took skulls of the dead, packed them with plaster, and gave them seashell eyes. Portraits made of death...

They don’t make films like this anymore. Hell, they barely made them back then. Dark City crawled out of the late-‘90s like a trenchcoat-wearing fever dream—equal parts Kafka and comic book, German Expressionism smeared in greenish grease and nicotine. It’s what happens when film noir takes a hallucinogen and wakes up on a slab with no memory, no sun, and a pocket full of riddles. Directed by Alex Proyas ( The Crow ), this 1998 tech-noir cult classic arrived a year before The Matrix and got mostly ignored. Wrong timing. Wrong marketing. Wrong world. Critics were confused. Audiences stayed home. But the film quietly endured. Today, Dark City feels like the older, wiser brother of every simulation-themed thriller that came after it. Less kung fu, more existential dread.   Welcome to the experiment: no sun, no exits, and your personality’s been reassigned. Again. The Setup: Amnesia as Architecture John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell, sharp-eyed and sharp-jawed) wakes up in a bathtub, al...

Or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tic Tac Humanity is a curious beast. We split the atom, claimed the Moon, then spent decades arguing about the camera angles—as if a species that can’t agree on the shape of the Earth should be trusted with the cosmos. Since the Cold War handed paranoia a megaphone, three legends have burned themselves into the soft circuitry of our collective imagination: Roswell , Area 51 , and the endlessly awkward saga of alien abductions . And sure—maybe the moon landings were staged. Maybe Kubrick filmed it in a dusty warehouse and shouted “Cut!” between takes. Or maybe they weren’t. The point is: we no longer trust the feed. Is it all Cold War smoke, mirrors, and weather balloons? Or are we just the punchline in the galaxy’s longest-running hidden camera show? Let’s dive into seven decades of sky-borne hysteria, backroom briefings, and those “maybe it’s true” moments that refuse to die.   They ordered takeaway. The universe delivered s...