I wanted to know, for reasons that escaped me mere moments later, what Details might possibly have chosen for their list of “The 25 Greatest Gen X Books of All Time.” (I think it was because the “of all time” part amused me.) Unfortunately for all of us, when I clicked through from a friend’s Twitter, I found their list was horrifically organized as one-book-per-page slideshow. (The “show” of those slides consisted, of course, of pictures of the book covers.) Fortunately, their SEO desires undid them, to my benefit.

Phew! Right there on page one. No need to click through. And no need to endure their pop-up ads, urging me to subscribe!

Doing hard time in Manitoba’s polar bear jail: “The bears also do not have cellmates. Stainless-steel doors cover the bars so the bears cannot see people or each other. Conservation officials want to prevent them from getting accustomed to humans to avoid complications when they are released. Usually bears ‘do’ 30 days in the Churchill compound before they are tranquilized, put in a net and flown up north where they are marked with a green dot and tattooed before being released. Each flight costs approximately $3,000 and usually only carries one bear at a time.”

Horror Chick, With Melissa Lafsky: The 10 Most Terrifying Unintentional-Horror Movies (Part Two)

Think horror always comes with axes and monsters and hockey masks? Think again. Not long ago, we brought you the the first five of the ten most gut-wrenching unintentional-horror films. Here, after a short hiatus for turkey and excessive vodka consumption, are our top five. Watch and be afraid.

5. The Truth About Cats and Dogs

Guess what? Everything you ever feared about the innate shallowness of human beings is true. No matter how beguiling, brilliant and charismatic you may be, the world will nevertheless judge you on a set of genetic factors over which you have absolutely no control. All that crap about “inner beauty” and “gorgeous personality” is, quite simply, an elephantine crock. You may have spent decades cultivating chemical magnetism and tender compassion and a rapier wit and a laugh that shoots beams of charm from your soul-but if you do not look like the chromosomal mix of Rita Hayworth and a pound of IF-grade diamonds, all that character and spirit will not matter for shit. Men/women will not approach you, they will not notice you and they will likely not respect you. And if you do manage to land the hot English photographer on the basis of said personality alone, you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering if he/she is plotting to trade up. Bow before the power of the Pretty, and be horrified. (For a joy-destroying double feature, watch this one back-to-back with No. 2)

4 . Julie & Julia

Every creative thought you may have, every scrap of inspiration you may glean, every goal you set about to achieve-it’s already been done, and better. Think you can write about cooking? Bitch, some pasty Amazonian chick did that four decades ago, and trumped any bourguignon your sorry ass could ever imagine. You are not original, and you have nothing new to offer. And so you will be reduced to a creative tapeworm, parasitically sucking off the achievements of others to wrangle readers and book deals, staging cheap simulacra of great accomplishments from your cheesy Queens apartment with your whiny husband who’s upstaged by the swishy fashion editor from Devil Wears Prada. And then you will ruin the aspic, because you are no fucking Julia Child (though at least the part of You wasn’t played by Meg Ryan).

3. A River Runs Through It

Death comes at random. It doesn’t give a shit if you’re smart or successful or benevolent or handsome, or how much time you’ve spent working out your filial differences through pregnant bouts of fly-fishing. It could take you young, it could take you rich, it could take you even if you have a face that looks like it was farted out by Aphrodite and crafted into anthropoid perfection by Michelangelo on a bender. Death could take any of us, at any time. It could take the better brother-and that brother may not be you.

2. Pretty Woman

You better be pretty. You better be really fucking pretty. You better be so fucking pretty that the concrete melts and the heavens rumble and the woodland creatures frolic and sing before your all-encompassing epochal beauty. And you’d better STAY that pretty, and pray you get the chance to display it before the Richard Gere equivalent of Charles Keating. Because if you aren’t, and you don’t, you’ll end up like Kit De Luca, beaten by pimps and butt-slammed by winos and scraping for next month’s rent as you strive to avoid getting knifed by the unwashed troglodyte with track marks under his toenails who just paid you $15 for backseat head.

If you are male, simply substitute “rich” for “pretty” in the above paragraph.

1. Kramer vs. Kramer

Think evil clowns under the bed or Tim Curry in the sewers is scary? Try this, my children: One day you will wake up, and your entire existence will have been sucked down the existential toilet and ground into shit clafoutis. Your parents will have transformed into narcissistic monsters, bent on destroying whatever remains of your mangled childhood. They will cry and shriek in public and divide their belongings with masking tape and parade you in front of lawyers and tell your teachers your bad math grade is “all his bastard father’s fault” and head to California to find themselves and fuck their therapists and drink excessively and make you tiptoe around the scary naked people who invade your house on Sunday mornings. You will be transformed into a pawn, a human cigarette butt tossed and stomped at the will of raging sociopaths who have complete power over you until the day you turn 18. And you will spend the rest of your life wondering, “What did I do to bring this evil upon us?”

Give us your chainsaws, your torture porn, your artery-crushing eyeball-slicing genital-mashing carnage. Anything but this.

Melissa Lafsky prefers horror movies for some really good reasons.

A group of elderly Germans were charged with illegal kidnapping and grievous bodily harm after they abducted their financial adviser and chained him up in a cellar for four days during which they tortured and abused him.

American-born James Amburn, 56, was ambushed outside his home in Speyer, western Germany, bound with masking tape and bundled into a car boot after being bashed in the head with the Zimmer frame of an elderly client.

‘’It took them quite a while because they ran out of breath,’’ said Mr Amburn.

The kidnappers, upset by losses of nearly $1 million, face a minimum of five years in jail if convicted.

Dispatcher: “OK. County 13 is advising that you can defend your property if you need to.”
Jackson: “I don’t want to have to kill this man, but I’ll kill him graveyard dead ma’am.”
Dispatcher: “I understand.”
-An 911 operator explaining to 57-year-old Donna Jackson, of Cushing, Oklahoma, that she was within her rights to kill an intruder in her home. Which she then promptly did. “Police said they will not charge Jackson with a crime. Prosecutors said she was justified under Oklahoma’s ‘stand-your-ground’ law.” The main downside, it seems to me, is that, now that the intruder is dead, she’ll never know why he was breaking in. I guess I just hate unanswered questions.

So you heard how the waves got big enough this week-averaging over 20 feet in height-at Oahu’s famed Waimea Beach to hold the prestigious Eddie Aikau big wave surfing contest for the time in five years? San Clemente, California’s Greg Long won the event by riding the “monster drop” of the day, a 40-foot wave that broke during the competition’s final heat. Totally awesome, for sure. Also awesome is the above video, put together by the contest’s sponsors that assembles footage of the biggest waves and craziest wipeouts from The Eddie over the years. The song that makes the soundtrack is good. It’s called “Land of the Lost,” by a band called Freedom Hawk.

Armed with that sublimely ridiculous name, Freedom Hawk hails from Virginia Beach, Virginia (maybe they know The Clipse?) and provide a pretty dead-center brand of Black-Sabbath-by-way-of-Queens-of-the-Stone-Age stoner rock. (“Rawk with the Hawk!,” their website instructs.) But that is okay. In my opinion, there is not enough of this music in the world.

Here’s a question, though: When watching that surfing video, and rawking with the Hawk, and lifting a hand in a gesture of salute, are we to extend only thumb and pinky finger, indicating the surfer’s “hang loose?” Or also extend the index finger, so as to pay to tribute to the goat’s-head horns of our metal lord Satan? Confusing. And important.

Oh, and in case you need to watch it again, here is the “Freedom Rock” commercial.

A reader writes, in re yesterday’s Observer article on the bar-owning Dorrian clan: “Can we talk about this ridiculous article in which the statment ‘Shut up about the Preppie Killer, that was a fluke,’ appears? Really? Was that the same fluke that led a girl to get killed after drinking at The Falls, also owned by the Dorrians, 20 years after Jennifer Levin got killed after drinking at Dorrian’s Red Hand?”

It’s a fair point.

“New Jersey is reality central. If you went through all the casts of people on reality shows, you would find more people from New Jersey than any other area, except maybe L.A. People from New Jersey run the gamut. They’re eccentric, they’re from rich areas and poor areas. Maybe it’s because they’ve got that chip on their shoulder because of New York, but they always put out that little extra effort.”
-New York Reality TV School instructor Robert Galinsky adds another entry to the long list of reasons for which Garden State residents can take pride.

I don’t know what’s going on with that spooky spiral that lit up Norway, but I think we should all be very afraid.

The future is now: Florida’s Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee has ruled that lawyers may not accept social networking “friend” requests from judges, citing a risk of “the appearance of impropriety.” Lawyers are, however, allowed to comment on judges’ status updates if they so desire.