Mondo Weirdo

Philip Howard's legendary 'Lost Words' column has been appearing weekly in The Times for many years, wittily illuminating a raft of the most obscure, esoteric words the English language has to offer. At the same time, his 'Word Watching' puzzles have provided readers with the chance to pit their lexicographical skill against his tongue-in-cheek multiple-choice conundrums. This unique collection, bringing together the very best of all these, is a feast for word lovers. Here we can lament the disappearance of words like 'accismus' (an insincere and feigned refusal of something that is earnestly desired), and wonder why we ever thought we could do without 'zoilus' (a censorious, malignant or envious critic). And, once we have completed our journey through the dictionary entries time has forgotten, there's more fun to be had, as we ponder whether having a 'tirrit' means one is in possession of a trumpet, throwing a fit or the proud owner of a type of bird, and if the charge of being 'spissid' is a comment on one's girth, sobriety or resemblance to a javelin, either literal or metaphorical. Endlessly fascinating, Lost Words continues Philip Howard's amusing and informative tour of words that enrich the English language and would otherwise have been lost forever.

Explores ghosts and haunted places, local legends, cursed roads, crazy characters, and unusual roadside attractions found in the United States.

Unlike images of sex, which were clandestine and screened only in private, images of death were made public from the onset of cinema. The father of the modern age, Thomas Edison, fed the appetite for this material with staged executions on film. Little over a century later the executions are real and the world is aghast at brutalities freely available online at the click of a button. Some of these films are created by lone individuals using shaky camera phones: Luka Magnotta, for instance, and the teenagers known as the Dnipropetrovsk maniacs. Others are shot on high definition equipment and professionally edited by organized groups, such as the militant extremists ISIS. KILLING FOR CULTURE explores these images of death and violence, and the human obsession with looking — and not looking — at them. Beginning with the mythology of the so-called ‘snuff’ film and its evolution through popular culture, this book traces death and the artifice of death in the ‘mondo’ documentaries that emerged in the 1960s, and later the faux snuff pornography that found an audience through Necrobabes and similar websites. However, it is when videos depicting the murders of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg surfaced in the 2000s that an era of genuine atrocity commenced, one that has irrevocably changed the way in which we function as a society.

Exciting new critical perspectives on popular Italian cinema including melodrama, poliziesco, the mondo film, the sex comedy, missionary cinema and the musical. The book interrogates the very meaning of popular cinema in Italy to give a sense of its complexity and specificity in Italian cinema, from early to contemporary cinema.

Melbourne, 1971: radical counterculture, hippies, opposition to the Vietnam War and consumerism. The birth of Oz blues rock. Influenced by American blues after Robert Johnson, parallel to developments with Paul Butterfield, the Bluesbreakers and Canned Heat, Chain's music also developed in distinct ways, taking on a style later referred to as Oz blues, or Oz indigo. The emergence of prog rock and the consolidation of blues rock globally made for interesting times. Rock shifted beyond the basics, in the direction of new musical forms and prefigurative politics. In this moment, Chain, four regional white boys with jazz cred and blues licks, recorded the classic Oz blues single Black and Blue and its bedrock LP, Toward the Blues. 50 years later, it remains a monument in Australian rock history. Based on interviews with guitarist and singer Phil Manning, scholarly research and memoirs, this book tells the story of the album's creation and its cultural impact on the Melbourne music scene in a time of significant social change, seeking to capture the magic of that moment.

Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats is the first comprehensive account of how the rise of postwar youth culture was depicted in mass-market pulp fiction. As the young created new styles in music, fashion, and culture, pulp fiction shadowed their every move, hyping and exploiting their behaviour, dress, and language for mass consumption and cheap thrills. From the juvenile delinquent gangs of the early 1950s through the beats and hippies, on to bikers, skinheads, and punks, pulp fiction left no trend untouched. With their lurid covers and wild, action-packed plots, these books reveal as much about society’s deepest desires and fears as they do about the subcultures themselves. Girl Gangs features approximately 400 full-color covers, many of them never reprinted before. With 70 in-depth author interviews, illustrated biographies, and previously unpublished articles from more than 20 popular culture critics and scholars from the US, UK, and Australia, the book goes behind the scenes to look at the authors and publishers, how they worked, where they drew their inspiration and—often overlooked—the actual words they wrote. Books by well-known authors such as Harlan Ellison and Lawrence Block are discussed alongside neglected obscurities and former bestsellers ripe for rediscovery. It is a must read for anyone interested in pulp fiction, lost literary history, retro and subcultural style, and the history of postwar youth culture. Contributors include Nicolas Tredell, Alwyn W. Turner, Mike Stax, Clinton Walker, Bill Osgerby, David Rife, J.F. Norris, Stewart Home, James Cockington, Joe Blevins, Brian Coffey, James Doig, David James Foster, Matthew Asprey Gear, Molly Grattan, Brian Greene, John Harrison, David Kiersh, Austin Matthews, and Robert Baker.

Something odd is happening after dark in Britain's schools...Ofsted, the schools' Inspectorate, are deeply worried. To lose one inspector in the line of duty might be considered a misfortune, but to have four inspectors lured into school after hours, dispatched, and left in outlandish poses before a cryptic message scrawled on the blackboard - that just looks like carelessness.Helen Haversham, Year 1 teacher at Hornby Infants School, is also worried. Both Ofsted and Christmas are coming. Her displays are up, her paperwork is done, and she has read the Head's memo explicitly forbidding ritual homicide, and yet something doesn't seem quite right...Who has been making midnight visits to the school?What has so unhinged the leader of the Ofsted team?How can she stop the class guinea pig from going on another dirty protest?If Helen can't answer these questions by Friday story time, then the school's end of term carol concert and Nativity is going to come to a truly unforgettable climax...

This is the third in a major series of volumes supplementing the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Volume 3 contains 3,000 new words and meanings from around the English-speaking world, including the UK (Citizen's Charter), North America (affluential, Clintonomics), Australia (beardie), and the West Indies (zouk). A wide variety of subjects is covered, including the sciences (buckyball, nanotechnology, Tourette syndrome), finance (junk bond, negative equity), literary theory (metafiction), computing (freeware, core dump), and sport (basho, lowball).