DDD SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ JAN 22, 2015

1. Did you ever wonder how, where and why the concept of "jay-walking" first originated? As you might have guessed by the fact that I'm linking to a story about it, it's probably not how, where and why you first thought! The story begins...

100 years ago, if you were a pedestrian, crossing the street was simple: you walked across it.
Today, if there's traffic in the area and you want to follow the law, you need to find a crosswalk. And if there's a traffic light, you need to wait for it to change to green.
Fail to do so, and you're committing a crime: jaywalking. In some cities — Los Angeles, for instance — police ticket tens of thousands of pedestrians annually for jaywalking, with fines of up to $250.
To most people, this seems part of the basic nature of roads. But it's actually the result of an aggressive, forgotten 1920s campaign led by auto groups and manufacturers that redefined who owned the city street.

2. Fortean Times is one of the finest publications going. Unfortunately, since they enjoy being a financially solvent operation, that means they don't like to put their excellent content up online for free, so that any asshole can tuck in, willy-nilly. That's too bad, because every once in a while they publish a story that it really is in the public interest to spread and have as widely known as possible. Case in point? One of their recent features on the bizarre fate of big-time Hollywood screenwriter Gary Devore, who disappeared mysteriously after a number of unidentified spooks clued him in to some dark secrets about the invasion of Panama in the 1980's. Thankfully, one of my fellow Rigorous Intuition readers typed out the entire story on the RigInt message board to share with all and sundry! And hoo-boy, is it ever a page-turner...

Gary had been returning from actress friend Marsha Mason’s New Mexico residence where he had just finished a screenplay he’d told his wife would be the hardest-hitting piece of film Hollywood had ever seen. A year later, in the summer of 1998, his car was located by a police dive team in a shallow aqueduct following a tip-off from an ‘amateur sleuth’. Inside the vehicle, belted into the front seat and dressed in Gary’s cowboy clothing, sat a skeletal corpse.
The Californian Highway Patrol wrote a 158-page report declaring it an accid­ent: case closed. And that was that… except for the fact that many of those who knew Gary Devore remain convinced that the official investigation was a whitewash, that Gary was murdered, and that the US government itself has been trying to wipe clean its fingerprints from the case.

Keep reading, folks, it only gets deeper and darker from thereon out.

3. And now, thank [adult swim] for this Infomercial selling you Goth Fitness!