April 13, 2011

“Catnip for Conspiracy Theorists,” and other Bunga-Bunga tales

We are pleased to report that your humble curators are still alive and well, even if not blogging frequently. We realize we are overdue for an update, especially since the recent successful launch of the Italian edition of Secret Places. The original cover design is shown above, which some suggested looked like an entrance to a nefarious den of ill repute. Thanks entirely to some stupendous media coverage in Italy, the book is selling briskly from Rome to Milan and Naples and beyond.

Bilderberg secretariat launches its official website
However, all editions of our tome need updating now, given the recent launch of the official website of the Bilderberg Meetings. No worries, though: everything Bilderberg remains “catnip for conspiracy theorists,” and that is unlikely to change anytime soon.

Full-employment act for purveyors of oddities
It’s also been a busy season for all the categories that we cover, from MI6′s newly commissioned art (we like the painting “Waiting in the Hotel Room”) to reports that cocaine traffickers have been building rather good small submarines to ferry their contraband. Perhaps you also heard about the bruising civil war in New York’s Clubland, with members of the Century Association (“Centurions”) fighting over whether to end reciprocity with the all-male Garrick Club in London? (Relations are now severed, you’ll be unsurprised to learn.)

Only in America?
Anyone read R.R. Reno’s amazing description of the US landscape? “Where else in the postmodern West can you find snake-handling preachers; earnest middle-aged women at Unitarian churches who talk about astrology; bookstores full of novels about the rapture; entire seminaries given over to dispensational scholasticism; men with long beards, fur hats, and yarmulkes; priests in cassocks; camp meetings; church suppers with cabbage and lime Jell-O salads; stolid Presbyterians, sweet Methodists, fire-breathing Baptists, and home-schooling Catholics; liberal Jesuits; Jewish Buddhists, Black Muslims, and more…”

Awaiting the Apocalypse underground, but with the latest appliances
Last but not least, new real estate development concepts are back. We’re thinking of software engineer Larry Hall’s redeveloped former Atlas F Missile Base bunker in Kansas: $900K will buy you a posh underground condo with hardened concrete walls, Kohler bathroom fixtures, simulated view windows and a five-year food supply. As far as bunkers go, this one’s a “dream silo.”