Elizabeth Holmes: BLINK!

BLOGGER'S NOTE. It was not so long ago that the media were drooling over this woman, who perpetrated one of the biggest and most protracted medical frauds in history. She was literally dealing in blood. I did not have to do too much to these gifs to reveal her extreme sociopathy - it's all there right before your eyes.

This was one of the more astonishing puff-pieces that the media spewed out, completely naive and unquestioning as the seductress eyeballed her way into untold riches (and power - need we say it?). It took nine years for the bottom to drop out, but drop out it did, to the great disappointment of everyone who longed for a "girl" to come along and succeed like Steve Jobs did (Steve Jobs being the only standard anyone cares about) - and not any girl, but a blonde, blue-eyed one who never seemed to blink. I have since found out that it's typical among cult leaders.


ICONS & INNOVATORS

The Unusual Strategy That Made This Woman a Multibillionaire

Elizabeth Holmes's growth strategy flies in the face of conventional startup wisdom.

By Larry Kim CEO of MobileMonkey, Inc.@larrykim

In each generation, an elite few entrepreneurs skyrocket to almost unimaginable heights. Among that already select group, an even more exceptional group emerges: those whose business success affects society in such a way that they become forever ingrained in the public consciousness.

Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and now Mark Zuckerberg are a few examples of this top-tier, ultra-successful group. As self-made billionaires, they certainly experienced success, but they went on to become household names and forever cemented a place in history thanks to their innovation and ingenuity.

A young woman named Elizabeth Holmes is rapidly working her way toward this status.

Never heard of her? That's not surprising, and was actually by design.

Most entrepreneurs can't wait to get their startup in the news. You need customers to buy into your idea. You need the industry to take you seriously. You need investors to get on board and help you grow.

Looking back, Holmes was certainly a prodigy, though like many other billionaires, she dropped out of college to pursue her dream. In high school, she taught herself Mandarin and sold C compilers to Chinese universities. She went on to Stanford for chemical engineering, where she filed her first patent and traveled to Singapore to work on the SARS virus. Just ahead of her sophomore year, however, Holmes left Stanford behind and went after her dream of pioneering personalized medicine.

Her company, Theranos, was born of her desire to make the greatest change she could in the world, Holmes recently told the San Jose Mercury News.

She has spent the last 11 years developing a revolutionary blood-testing technology to run diagnostic tests with a single drop of blood, drawn by a painless fingerprick. Imagine completely accessible diagnostic testing available across the country, capable of running hundreds of tests with a tiny amount of blood--and at a fraction of the current cost.

It will fundamentally change health care, in America and around the world.

Blood testing hasn't evolved since the 1960s and Holmes saw a unique way to shake up the industry, while doing social good.

But she kept it quiet.

Contrary to the strategy of the vast majority of startups, Holmes hasn't been shouting her idea from the rooftops. There's no PR team behind the curtain orchestrating speaking engagements and media coverage. In fact, until Holmes landed on Forbes's "40 Under 40" list and the cover of Fortune magazine this year, she was virtually unknown.

(Holmes was featured in Inc.com's "30 Under 30" list in 2006 but still managed to stay unusually under the radar.)

Holmes had a vision so significant, she didn't want her competitors to catch on until she had the creation of an entirely new market--consumer health technology--well under way.

And her competitors are huge; think Quest, LabCorp, and other well-established players in the $70 billion U.S. blood-testing industry. Yet instead of coming out of the gates with barrels blazing, Holmes quietly worked away at her startup for a decade before beginning to increase her public presence. In that time, she built a business that now has about 500 employees and counts Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, and venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson among its investors.

In the age of selfies, YouTube stars, and "breaking the Internet," isn't it refreshing to discover a young entrepreneur focused more on her business and doing social good than on her public persona? At just 30 years old and as 50% owner of her $9 billion company, Holmes only now seems to be making a concerted effort to come into the limelight.

It's an unusual growth strategy, to work away diligently, largely out of the public eye, but it's one that has served Elizabeth Holmes, the world's youngest self-made female billionaire, incredibly well.

Pee Wee Herman: the Bill Cosby Connection

Reubens' 1991 arrest


In July 1991, while visiting relatives, Reubens was arrested in Sarasota, Florida, for masturbating publicly in an adult theater. Detectives would periodically visit pornographic theaters and observe the audience, arresting those engaged in indecent exposure. Reubens had not been in character for a year and a half, but because CBS was still running reruns of Pee-wee's Playhouse, Reubens' infamous mug shot, which did not depict the clean-cut look Reubens had shown for the last decade, shocked the public, and many thought that the show had been canceled due to the arrest.

The arrest was widely covered, and both the character Pee-wee and Reubens became the subject of ridicule. CBS stopped airing Playhouse and Disney-MGM Studios suspended from its studio tour a video that showed Pee-wee explaining how voice-over tracks were made and Toys-R-Us removed Pee-wee toys from its stores. However, his voice work in Disney's Star Tours was not replaced.

Despite the negative publicity, many artists who knew Reubens, such as Cyndi Lauper, Annette Funicello, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Valeria Golino, spoke out in his support. Bill Cosby defended Reubens, saying "Whatever (Reubens has) done, this is being blown all out of proportion". Other people who knew Reubens, such as Playhouse's production designer Gary Panter, S. Epatha Merkerson and Big Top Pee-wee director Randal Kleiser, also spoke out against the way Reubens was being treated by the media.

Reubens's fans also organized rallies of support after CBS canceled the scheduled reruns, with several dozens of "Pee-weeites" picketing in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco.The general public also appeared to sympathize with Reubens – the TV newsmagazine A Current Affair received "tens of thousands" of responses to a Pee-wee telephone survey, with callers supporting Reubens with a 9-to-1 majority. He remained in a state of shock for weeks and was haunted by the arrest for several years, refusing to give interviews or appear on talk shows. - Wikipedia

Blogger's blather. I posted this admittedly-weak post because the line about Bill Cosby jumped out at me. It jumped out at me because - no, I can't refer to the pot calling the kettle black. But it's something like that.

When you think about it, though, why do people even GO to adult theatres? For the popcorn? Why do cops hang around adult theatres waiting to make an arrest as soon as they see a guy with his hand on his dick? Why do they bother, when there are assholes like Bill Cosby drugging and raping women for DECADES, and getting away with it?

People may have found the image of a children's entertainer whacking off in a porn theatre unsavory. That's because it is. I don't really want to think about ANYBODY whacking off ANYWHERE, which is not to say I am "against" it. I just don't want to think about it.

On a similar subject (or maybe not). This is one man's confession of sin before he joined Scientology. Obviously, they're pretty strict about what constitutes perversion. I don't think burning yourself with matches or jabbing yourself in the butt is the sin here. It's - God, I can't even SAY it! NO ONE does that, do they? I mean, EVER.

Royal Canadian Men's Historical Society and Masturbation Club, circa 1897

(NOW we know how that guy dislocated his shoulder.)

It's lies, I tell you! Dirty, filthy lies!

I will confess to one thing: I stay up late at night, and look for photos of - two! Two things I confess to. I stay up late at night and look for photos of Harold Lloyd - THREE! Three things I -

Sorry, I've just been in a Monty Python mood lately. It's the silly season, and I want to coast along and not put in the usual feverish effort that makes this blog so totally obscure, not to mention primitive to look at.

I found this lovely shot of HL, obviously a candid photo. I love the quality of light in it, sifting down as if some sun or moon dwells in the corner.  Someone is wearing a silk top hat, which is not something you saw every day even back then (likely in the  mid-1930s). Harold is wearing very fancy evening wear and, as usual, looks splendid in it (and as he said himself in his Nebraska-born way, "Well, some say I don't clean up too bad"). This was a  gentleman to the manor born, but what's he doing here? Who is the blonde, and why does Harold look just a tad guilty?

As you can see here, the private Harold looked very different from the Glass Character who propelled him to fame. He was better-looking, for one thing, with the clean Gregory Peck jawline that makes male movie stars so photogenic. He carried himself differently. He rocked a tux like no one else. But what's going on here - just the usual social whirl he was obliged to engage in (not always happily, as he was essentially a family man)? Then why does it look as if the attractive, willowly blonde, dressed to the nines, is signing a hotel register? Is it just too hazardous if HE signs it, even if it's Mr. and Mrs. Smith?  He might as well relax, because his fans won't recognize him anyway.

The faces in the background look vaguely familiar to me. Can you make them out? So could this just be one of those elegant Hollywood soirees that - no. Harold liked women, and he sort of liked them in bulk. Skimming through the photos, some of which I'd never seen, there were several of him as an older man photographing female nudes, his favorite of his many hobbies. Nudes, as in women decorously draped below the waist, but with mammoth breasts and considerable curves elsewhere. To his credit, Harold would not photograph a skinny woman and liked bodies that were not so much modelled on Monroe (whom he photographed, though clothed) as Jane Russell, practically exploding out of her Howard Hughes-designed bra.

These photos of the photographer make me uneasy, for obvious reasons. Some of them are plain bizarre, with oddball props that make you wonder just what is going on. The family released a coffee table book a decade or so ago featuring the best of these nudes, so obviously they're not trying to hide anything. Some of them are in 3D, a technology which Harold may not have invented (that was Grandma's old Stereoscope that you held away from yourself like a selfie stick), but developed from its primitive William Castle roots to something that could  be seriously used in theatres. In an interview late in life, he claimed that in the future every movie would be shot and shown in 3D, and the interviewer made sure he mentioned in his writeup that Harold had gone a little crazy in his old age.

Now there is a Harold Lloyd Award for Excellence in 3D Photography. Martin Scorsese notably won it for - ironically - Hugo, where the main character dangles off the hands of a huge clock. Since he was a humble man, I think Harold would have been pleased by the respectful quote.

But getting back to it: Harold was human, but did absolutely nothing to attract women. They came to him. Flocked. It was wrong to say he chased them. He paid his models a flat fifty bucks, and the lineup ran around the corner of the block. There is a lot of evidence these bodaceously curvaceous women were quite willing to sneak into bed with the photographer.

I read part of a disgusting book called The Secret Life of Humphrey Bogart. I forget who wrote it. I didn't buy it, folks, I read the "Look Inside!" excerpt on Amazon. It's one of the sleaziest things I've ever seen, so of course I had to read it (given my insatiable appetite for the tawdry). Pure fiction, so I should not pay any attention to the fact that there was a tell-all passage about Bebe Daniels, Harold's first leading lady in the 19-teens. She claimed that Harold was "proficient and good at" the sex act - well, my goodness! Hardly sweep-you-off-your-feet stuff, but BD then claimed she could expect to have at least three orgasms during these sessions.

It's lies, I tell you - a pack of dirty, filthy lies! But with HL's Nebraskan' thoroughness and his propensity for studying every facet of life until he WAS good at it, it may well be true. "Good at" means "satisfaction guaranteed, Ma'am", among other things.

Or so my wicked imagination tells me.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Mangled by media

The media fascinate me, and horrify me. (And it's plural, folks. One medium; two media. But it doesn't apply to those psychic dudes, for some reason.) I'm closer to the subject than most people: I have a daughter who's an award-winning reporter with CTV News, and even after a dozen years I feel immensely proud to see her on the air (and I will still say to my husband, if he's out of the room, "Hey, Shannon's on!")

One of the things we both do is watch all the newsmagazines: Dateline NBC, 20-20, 48 Hours. I'm always interested in her take on these things and how they're covered: she often catches things I miss.  The stories can be lurid and sometimes (as in the case of mass/child murder) too extreme for me to watch. But Shannon always watches, with the eagle eye of the insider.

But there's another aspect to this, quite apart from the stories themselves. It's how they're covered, the spin they're given (and believe me, there's always a spin). And as Shannon has often told me, this is inextricably bound up in the personalities behind the news.

Some 50 years ago, communications guru Marshall McLuhan famously said, "The medium is the message," and if we never hear that statement any more, it's because we're frogs in hot water, not feeling the temperature gradually rising as we come closer and closer to being boiled.  The public is never consciously aware of this, either, but personality is also the message, or at least it trumps content every time. Far from being mere delivery devices, these strangely compelling men and women often seem to be the whole point of turning on the TV.

My daughter's favorite reporter is the craggy, canny Keith Morrison, an ex-pat Canadian whom she describes as a brilliant storyteller. He's an old-style journalist, long and lean, his face seamed with wrinkles, his hair falling down in a floppy silver forelock. In spite of the wrinkles, he seems ageless, gangly like a teenager and dressed in youthful clothing that never seems incongruous. His delivery is unusual too, almost exaggerated, his voice sometimes dropping to a whisper as he describes the hideous domestic murders that seem to make up 85% of the show. But he gets away with it, makes it work. It's his style and he's comfortable with it, plain-spoken but not quite folksy, low-key, intense and hard to get away from. 

Compelling television. The Keith Morrison Show.

But his lean, striding, casually-tossed-mustang-mane'd delivery is far from the norm. Some reporters are so tensely-wound that you can almost see the key in their back. They appear shiny, their teeth gleaming and their hair perfect behind a bulletproof, plexiglass shield. But we're not buying it, not falling for their invincibility. The consumer/viewer probes, poking around for vulnerability, feasting on it while we pretend to be sympathetic. 

We aren't. Not really. Mostly, we're just hungry.

Not long ago, the diminutive, deceptively-smooth Elizabeth Vargas came on 20-20 and talked about her decades of alcoholic drinking and her (harrowingly short, I felt) stint in rehab, but she looked tense and very uncomfortable, and at one point said she was only doing this because the press had already “outed” her. Otherwise she would have kept it private. 

Then there was that utter disaster on The View – and what’s Barbara Walters doing on TV, anyway, when she “retired” a couple of years ago and is now doddering around in her 80s? – when Walters said, “Oh, we knew about it, all right. We all knew.” Vargas just looked mortified and offended and shocked. In the name of spontaneous live television, pandering to the grand old bitch of TV, she had been swiftly and ruthlessly ambushed. 

Vargas drank heavily for years and years, assuming she was hiding it from her colleagues, and (in a twist of irony) did FIVE stories on 20-20 about alcoholism, including how it affects women and even mothers. All the while, she was a mother dangerously drinking and being secretive about it (though as Barbara Walters gleefully pointed out to her on live TV, they were on to her all the time). 

Of course there had to be backstory about her anxiety disorder, her separation from her father who was in the military (though I kept expecting them to say he had died). There had to be. Addiction is almost as bad as mental illness in demanding “WHY?”. You can’t just have it. Something has to have damaged you into it, really badly, or else you'd be normal like the rest of us. Right? 

Where’s the weakness, where’s the flaw? The public jabs and probes like a dentist attacking a rotten tooth, while the object of all this drilling hopes desperately they'll garner some sympathy from it, not pity and contempt. But it’s always a mixture, because people love to feel superior to those in the limelight. Build them up, knock them down.  

But that's nothing compared to the extent that these "journalists" can be vicious to their own kind, consuming them with a carnivore's gusto in full view of the watching public.

I hesitate to get into the bloodbath of Ann Curry being ripped out of her job on the Today show, the siege led by Matt Lauer who did the world's worst impersonation of a warm sendoff.  Rumor has it that she had been subjected to every sort of humiliation imagineable, while at the same time being assured everyone was just thrilled to have her on-board. Thus if she felt bad about what was happening to her, if she thought she had to run run run to keep from going backwards as the rug was steadily pulled out from under her, she was just too sensitive and should man up.

Her sendoff was nothing like the usual "it's been great, but it's time to move on to new blah, blah, blah" that we usually hear. To everyone's profound discomfort, she began to whimper and cry and endlessly rattle on in what began to sound almost like an apology for her career. I've seen Ann Curry's work, and it does seem a trifle too vulnerable for comfort, just a little "off", though I can't put my finger on why. She wants to be my Mommy, and I won't have it - or, worse, she wants ME to be HER Mommy. The slaughter was jokingly referred to behind the scenes as Operation Bambi, though I think Curry ended up being more like Bambi's mother. 

(Note: I decided to find a YouTube video of her now-infamous exit scene, and it was horrendous to watch, one of the most embarrassing things I've ever seen. It was like listening to a narcissistic actress winning her first Oscar and refusing to be "played off", or a teenage girl with galloping PMS, with just a bit of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz: "I think I'll miss you most of all." I was going to try to make one of my famous gifs of her wiping away her tears, but it was too much, I had to turn it off.)

The more I read about this boiling swamp of piranha, the more I want to turn my TV off forever. . . except that I can't. I'm just as hooked as anyone else. Though reality TV loves tears and snot and shoving the camera up the subject's nose, the TV newsmagazines still seem to demand the plexiglass front that kept Elizabeth Vargas trapped in her alcoholism for so many years.

Not too emotional, please. But not cold! No one will be able to identify with you! And you can't have a speech impediment, for God's sake, unless you're that famous museum piece from Madame Tussaud's, Baba Wawa. No wrinkles, you'll look old, but it's OK, even endearing on Keith Morrison. Reveal your flaws and failures, make those fatal "admissions" about horrendous things like alcoholism and mental illness, but be aware it will be a black mark on your record forever, and that whenever people hear your name, that's the first and perhaps the only thing about you that they will ever remember.

I think I'd drink too.

(BLOGGER'S COMPLAINT. Since they're so goldern fun to make, and since my reading audience is so minuscule I might as well do whatever I gosh-darn please, gifs have almost taken over this labor of love that I call my Blog. When I discovered Gifsforum, I began to turn cartwheels of joy. It was not only easy to use, but had a fantastic array of options: size, speed, forward or backward, a dozen different filters/effects, the option of compressing frames so that the gif moved like a silent film, even incremental reductions of color that turned them into superb moving paintings.

NOW IT'S ALL TO SHIT. I mean it. All. To. Shit. I go on the site to do my usual fun fiddling around, and whoooshh, it's all gone now except the most basic gif-making, with NO flexibility at all. All those features have been removed. The gifs cook up very swiftly now, but so what? They also look like shit. The large ones once had an almost 3D clarity to them, especially old black-and-white ones of my beloved Harold Lloyd movies. Now you get one size only, kind of a mediocre medium. I can't choose the option of making them smaller to embed in emails and in my posts. Not only that, I was horrified to discover that the ratio is "off" and they look distorted, vertically stretched! I'd go back to the one I started with, Y2GIF, but it doesn't work at all any more. You sit there while that little goddamn thingamabob swirls around and around and NOTHING happens. And your brilliant little gif doesn't exist because you are tired of waiting for it.

Worst of all is the way they describe their primitive gif-making gizmo: "NEW!" Oh yeah, it's new, all right! It's a piece of shit! They're bragging about it being new and improved, when 90% of the capacity of the thing is shot all to hell! So what's the point?  I might as well DRAW my bloody gifs and nudge them with my fingers and hope they will move.)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

"Ah, desert night": the world's dirtiest diary, Part II

Amazing what you can ferret out if you just keep trying. Turns out those lost excerpts from Mary Astor's infamous diary weren't in David Niven's books - any of them. There was mention of Mary being "a very busy girl indeed", but no explicit details.

Damn.

I'm sick as shit today and can't sit in my office chair because it hurts my butt, can't kneel in front of my computer because it hurts my knees, can't sit up in bed to read because it hurts everything, and am too bored and uncomfortable to sleep. So I went on sniffing the ground like a jowly old bloodhound for answers.

As it turned out, what I was looking for was right under my nose. The bookcase in my office is mainly for show, with nice-looking but basically boring hardcovers that were a mistake to purchase. But in with all this bumph (perhaps buried by guilt) was THE BOOK: Hollywood Babylon (which I only bought to research a paper on Cecil B. deMille, I swear!).

OK, so Mary's little diary isn't nearly as salacious as the things we see today, but by the standards of the 1930s it's pretty hot. It even drops the f-bomb a couple of times, so be warned, if that sort of thing bothers you. Her unlikely liaison with the married playwright George S. Kaufman, who looked a bit like Kramer in hornrims, generated all sorts of sparks and steam. The story continues. . .

"One morning about 4 we had a sandwich at Reuben's, and it was just getting daylight, so we drove through the park in an open cab, and the birds started singing , and it was a cool and dewy day and it was pretty heavenly to pet and French. . . right out in the open. . .

Was any woman ever happier? It seems that George is just hard all the time. . . I don't see how he does it, he is perfect."



Such "perfection" had to be carefully hidden from her husband. But there were ways.

"Monday I went to the Beverly Wiltshire and was able to see George alone for the first time. He greeted me in pajamas, and we flew into each other's arms. He was rampant in an instant, and in a few moments it was just like old times. . . he tore out of his pajamas and I never was undressed by anyone so fast in all my life. . .

Later we went to Vendome for lunch, to a stationer's shop. . . then back to the hotel. It was raining and lovely. It was wonderful to fuck the entire sweet afternoon away. . . I left about 6 o'clock. . .

Sat around in the sun all day - lunch in the pool with Moss (presumably, playwright Moss Hart) and George and the Rogers - dinner at the Dunes  - a drink in the moonlight WITHOUT Moss and Rogers. Ah, desert night - with George's body plunging into mine, naked under the stars!

(Uh, OK. Sooner or later the starlit idyll ended: the jig was up and Mary's husband threw a fit, demanding she give up George immediately. But Mary was not quite ready to surrender her sweet desert nights beside the pool.)

"For the sake of peace and respite from all this emotionalism, I told him I would do nothing at the present. My main reason for saying that is, quite honestly, I want to be able to see George for the rest of his stay here without being all upset - looking like hell. I want to have the last few times of completely enjoying him."

Completely enjoy him she did, like prime rib or a fine piece of sirloin. Why she chose such a complete doofus still remains a mystery, especially in light of the rumors that he and his wife lived chastely separate lives.

I like the chick-a-boom at the end of this story.

"Kaufman had taken a powder during the courtroom proceedings: he sat them out in New York with Hart. He dodged queries concerning the case, but once, when cornered by reporters at the stage door of the Music Box, he allowed:

"You may say I did not keep a diary."



The Ghost of Wesley Hall

(From a site called Eerie Places: Haunted Windsor and Essex County)


Ontario - Chatham - Park Street United Church - A tall man dressed in black has been seen at night running through a room called Wesley Hall. Two janitors had seen him. The odd thing was, was that the motion detectors were on. On another occasion, the same man was seen by a teenager playing hide and goes seek in the sanctuary. Also, in a certain storage room near the gymnasium, an intoxicating smell can be detected.

OK then. This might just be one-of-your-average, run-o'-the-mill ghost sightings. Most of the strange goings-on listed on this site really aren't so strange. But who is this mysterious man-in-black running around Wesley Hall?


I think I might know.

Eons ago, I wrote about the minister of my church, Rev. Russell Horsburgh, and the havoc he wreaked on a small-town congregation in the early 1960s. This had such a deep impression on me that I based a character on him in my second novel, Mallory. Who knows why the good folks at Park Street United hired a man like Horsburgh: he was a firebrand who believed in civil rights and actually allowed "negroes" into the church (and not just as cleaning staff). He  held meetings and discussion groups about controversial issues instead of sweeping them under the rug. As if that weren't bad enough, soon he had marshalled the listless young people's group into a passionate affair, which turned out to be a mite too passionate.

I was only eight or nine when all this happened, and my parents were trying to protect me, I guess, or else just get me to shut up, so I had to piece together whispered fragments: "psychopath," "in league with the devil," "what they found in the church," "liquor bottles, cigarettes. .  .and worse." There was national coverage of the scandal as Horsburgh was thrown in jail, tried, and found guilty of leading juveniles into immorality, vagrancy and delinquency.

I don't know how long he spent in jail, but a few years later he died of cancer, all his holy fires spent. He had a group of loyal supporters who in later years claimed to have exonerated him and found him completely blameless, the victim of a witch hunt, but by then it was too late.


Personally, I think Horsburgh was a megalomaniac and a sociopath. I remember him as a big, tall, scary man in black who harangued the congregation and literally pounded on the pulpit as he drove his points home. He once (infamously) printed Martin Luther's "casting my pearls before swine" speech in the church bulletin and signed it with his own name. ("Someone" - ? - had x'ed it out before it was mimeographed, but it was easy to read the original by holding it up to a window. Such goings-on.)

Do you believe in spooks? Ghosts, things that pound pulpits in the night? This account, full of spelling mistakes, may just be a hoax playing on a dark bit of Chatham history which the townsfolk would rather forget. In fact, if you asked anyone about it even 10 or 15 years later, they would likely have denied any knowledge of it. I once tried to hunt down a copy of The Horsburgh Affair, a book someone wrote to defend him, and it had to be dredged out of the inactive vaults of the Vancouver Public Library. Not exactly a bestseller, though I do remember a copy floating around our house in the book-lined den in about 1965.  As I recall, the book is exceedingly poorly-written and doesn't prove anything.

Oh, about that "intoxicating smell" in the storage room near the gymnasium. . . well, this is just too funny, isn't it? For one of the more vile rumors about Horsburgh was that he encouraged his teenage reprobates to partake of illegal substances in the church basement. I don't remember a gymnasium in the church, but maybe they added it when Dufferin Hall was torn down and turned into a parking lot for the dental offices and chiropractors who had invaded the main church building. (This was when the proposed Country Music Hall of Fame and the indoor parking lot for a local motorcycle club had been vetoed, along with other "unseemly" options which we can only imagine.)

http://www.cktimes.ca/archives/column/11/9271.html
http://www.cktimes.ca/archives/column/11/9302.html

I attach a couple of links to a very well-researched article from the Chatham Daily News which I found a few years ago. This was the only detailed information I could find on the subject. The article is largely sympathetic towards him, an understandable attitude in light of the small-town primness of the times and the fact that most people never knew about the strange butts, empty liquor bottles and used condoms the (black) cleaning staff found on the floor of Wesley Hall.

(I just thought of something. The way that ghost-sighting report was worded, it's unclear whether it was that teenager in the sanctuary who was playing "hide and goes seek", or if in fact it was the Good Reverend Scary-boo Horsburgh himself. And if so, playing with whom? With the Ghost of Christmas Past, or the deceased maiden lady clerk at the Metropolitan store who sold goldfish for 15 cents, or that well-known reprobate of abandoned church sanctuaries, Ebeneezer Screwed?)