“evangelical leaders and parents also worried about covert indoctrination into the occult from children’s entertainment, such as the popular cartoon He-Man.”

As a small child in a conservative Central Valley town, I remember this specifically, and it was the reason my mom got rid of all my Masters of the Universe…

Some mentally ill people can be extremely convincing, even of the wildest shit the human mind can cook up. Just her persistence may have had an eroding effect on their skepticism. I’d guess a blend of boredom, the coming into the mainstream of this stuff in general, and being in a fin de siecle time period in the…

That’s exactly what happened. To this day, I still don’t understand what was so convincing about her unsubstantiated claims. Surely police get conspiracy shit all the time. What made law enforcement think that flushing kids down a toilet to be raped and sacrificed was a possible?

I have heard this too but I also cannot remember where, maybe the MFM podcast. However, I did grow up in an evangelical household in the 1980s so the satanic panic was my childhood. We were only allowed to listed to shitty christian music, had to attend church so many times a week and anyone with a van was probably a…

As someone who lived through it, also in the South, I can tell you that it didn’t come out of any one incident. The evangelical community has pretty much always believed that Satan is hiding behind every tree. But the popularity of movies like The Exorcist and The Omen during the 70s, the growth of interest in the…

I believe she had schizophrenia or something along those lines. She wrote the police a letter making extremely wild claims and that had classic features of schizophrenia — disorganized speech, etc — and instead of recognizing it as the delusions of a mentally ill person, they took it at face value.

My mother was all-in during the Satanic Panic of the mid-80s. She was a stay at home mom who had Trinity Broadcasting Network going all day. And she blindly followed whatever those televangelists were spouting.

I don’t remember where I read this, but my understanding of Satanic Panic started when a bipolar, alcoholic mother was convinced her toddler was being molested and indoctrinated into Satanism. She’d made a bunch of outlandish accusations, including the bit about being flushed down a toilet, but then she died before…

It’s solid advice, whenever I’m thinking of buying a fancy gadget I’ll wage whether it’s a uni-tasker. Saves me from a lot of dumb purchases.

I have a spatula that I bought from Goodwill for $0.25, it’s the best spatula every created. I originally bought it for camping, so that if it got lost I wouldn’t be sad, now I covet and protect it as if it were signed by Bourdain himself. Actually, all my favorite non-knife cooking tools came from Goodwill and were…

Alton Brown had it right with the idea that kitchen tools should be “Multi-taskers” Great thing is most of the basics cane be bought at a thrift store where the quality is from a time when things were built to last. 

Ok, this is actually hilarious. Now I’m trying to think what my kid would have written about the kids in his class. For at least one, it would have been, “My mom thinks your mom should stop fucking her best friend’s husband.” 

I had a guy I liked over to my apartment for the first time. We’d had some wine and one of those conversations where things keep clicking and you get super intellectually turned on, which turns into regular turned on and you just want to devour the person.

This is sort of Halloween appropriate, but seems gruesome at first, so keep that in mind. Backstory: I was a kid in Los Angeles in the 70s and 80s when there seemed to always be a serial killer on the loose, notably the hillside strangler a few years previous to this incident- and I lived on a hill.

Can we have a meta-pissing contest? You triggered a memory.

So, actually, I have one. It’s not digital, so this is just a photo of a photo. This is either the morning, or possibly earlier in the week, I forget.

In high school, I went as a scarecrow. I had a flannel shirt, jeans, straw sticking out of sleeves. I also wore a carved pumpkin on my head (I looked out of the mouth, the eyes were closer to my forehead). The problem was that I had carved the pumpkin a few days earlier, and by the time Halloween rolled around, it was…

When I was 9 years old, I decided that I wanted to be the alien queen from ‘Aliens’ (Don’t ask me how a nine-year-old managed to see aliens when it came out, I literally don’t remember the circumstances. Although I do remember that I distinctly had the goal of watching it out of spite, because I was so angry that it…

I have no Halloween costume disasters, but I do have a public service announcement:

Went as Carrie from the movie of the same name, post-blood-bucket prom scene. Drove to party in dress/wig, and then got out of car and dumped the fake blood over my head. And then I was wet. Very wet. And dripping. I tried to wait around for the blood to get tacky, but it was really cold. So I went into the party and…