I am in the middle of revamping the site, so excuse the mess. It's also the busy time for people enrolling in college for Fall, so I've been busy with that as well.

The Ripper Legacy by Martin Howells and Keith Skinner is a book I just got; it's one of those seminal works on Jack the Ripper, yet I don't think it gets the recognition it deserves. Both authors have been invaluable to others in researching and unearthing new facts about the case for decades. If you want a well-written book that disproves many of the prevalent theories, this is the one.

I watched Phantom Fiend with Ivor Novello over the weekend. This movie is very hard to track down as it is a remake of The Lodger by Alfred Hitchcock with Ivor Novello reprising his role as the lodger. In Fiend, he is an Italian musician who falls in love with Daisy, an actress. The movie is only about an hour long and appears to go more for laughs than the subject matter would indicate. Plus, since Hitchcock wasn't involved, it is devoid of suspense or crisp direction. I've heard that Novello had a big hand in running the shoot, so that may account for it. Novello was a matinee idol, but that hardly qualified him to direct. All in all, Hitchcock's silent movie with it's evocative fog and claustrophobic sets succeeds in retelling Belloc-Lowndes story more faithfully than the follow-up Phantom Fiend.