100 years (and one month) ago today one of the greatest mystery writers of the Golden Age was born — Mr. John Dickson Carr.

Carr — who wrote a few of his best books under the nom de plume Carter Dickson — was a master of the “locked room” mystery and an ingenious spinner of intricate puzzle plots.

About a month ago, I stumbled across a British re-release of one of his finest novels (known in the U.S. as THE THREE COFFINS) while I was browsing at The Strand. The British title of the book is THE HOLLOW MAN, not to be confused with the similarly titled Bacon-Verhoeven joint of more recent years or the famous T.S. Eliot poem.

Anyway, if you’re a mystery fan like me, and happen to run across this paperback at your local used-book store, pick it up. Carr certainly deserves to be remembered and read much more than he is today. He was one of the best.

Buster has his begging interrupted when M grabs his tail. [Silent]

Click here to watch the video.

A few moments grabbed from Jacques Rivette’s rarely screened OUT ONE: SPECTRE.

Shot at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City. [Silent]

Click here to watch the video.

Tabu

A sensual island masterpiece, Tabu began as the collaboration between two talented Hollywood outsiders — accomplished documentarian Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North), who had recently been fired from his first attempt at fiction filmmaking, and German expatriate Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, whose American debut, Sunrise, was an artistic triumph that had failed miserably at the box office. The pair set out for the South Seas in 1929 and, working from an original story by Flaherty, hashed out a tragic screen tale of youthful love destroyed by societal conventions. Tabu relates the elemental story of a young island fisherman (the exceptionally virile Matahi) whose nascent romance with the beautiful Reri (Anna Chevalier) is dashed when a visiting tribal chief decrees her a holy maid whom it is taboo for any man to touch. Despite the directors’ shared romanticism and affinity for lyrical beauty, their collaboration fell apart once it moved to the directing stage. Flaherty found himself confounded by Murnau’s imperious approach and eventually abdicated control of the film. As a result, the sun-drenched Tabu gradually drifted into darker thematic waters, leading to a fateful finale so perfectly composed and rhythmically edited that it still has the power to make modern audiences swoon. The film’s sumptuous black-and-white cinematography earned cameraman Floyd Crosby an Oscar. And although Tabu wasn’t released until 1931 — four years after The Jazz Singer — it is a resolutely silent film, with images so distilled that not a single title card is necessary to convey dialogue. Sadly, Murnau would never again climb to such artistic heights; he was killed in an automobile accident only a few short weeks before the premiere of this cinematic jewel. — D.G. (written for Barnes & Noble.com)

A string of related clips (including a magisterial performance of the song “Underage Bichon”) from Robert Smigel’s short-lived TV FUNHOUSE series on Comedy Central, starring America’s sweetheart — Triumph, the insult comic dog.

Special guest appearances by Hootie and the Blowfish, a stripping “chimp-stitute,” and that legendary crooner Mr. Robert Goulet.

WARNING: Not for the easily offended. It’s as filthy as a bathroom floor… but at least three times as funny.

UPDATE: Oh well, the bastards at Viacom forced YouTube to take the video down. It’s America’s loss.

This article reminded me of a song by Freakwater with the lyric, “there’s nothing so pure as the kindness of an atheist….”

It also reminded me of seeing Richard Dawkins — on C-Span recently — presenting his book THE GOD DELUSION to an audience in Lynchburg, Virginia while fending off attacks by students and faculty from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.

Dawkins talked at length about the very real discrimination that self-professed atheists face — a situation that forces many of them into the closet.

Are you in the closet? Do your beliefs (or lack thereof) make baby Jesus cry? Rest assured that Americans hate you every bit as much as they do the Muslim family down the block or their gay neighbor Billy.

Atheists identified as America’s most distrusted minority, according to new U of M study

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (3/20/2006) — American’s increasing acceptance of religious diversity doesn’t extend to those who don’t believe in a god, according to a national survey by researchers in the University of Minnesota’s department of sociology.

From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public. “Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years,” says Penny Edgell, associate sociology professor and the study’s lead researcher.

Edgell also argues that today’s atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the past—they offer a symbolic moral boundary to membership in American society. “It seems most Americans believe that diversity is fine, as long as every one shares a common ‘core’ of values that make them trustworthy—and in America, that ‘core’ has historically been religious,” says Edgell. Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism….

Read the entire article here.