In the ArsGeek’s Top Picks section you’ll find all of these.  With each pick I’ve either spent a bunch of time with the thing, or find myself really wanting too.  I’ll be updating these often as well.

you can also sort through a whole bunch of other products.  This is an Amazon.com powered store, the proceeds from which will go into keeping ArsGeek a living, breathing site with fresh updates so if you get a chance, stop on by!

Thanks,

Ben

Technorati Tags: video games, dvds, movies, computers, electronics, gadgets, store, arsgeek boutique

Due to multiple redirects and some RSS stuff that still has me feeling like I’ve just slugged down a vodka and gasoline shot, the ArsGeek feeds were looping back to the ArsGeek main site.  If CERN’s LHC had you worried, then I’m glad you didn’t hear about this because little vortexes were spinning about all over the web.

Thankfully Cavtroop and I have fixed the problem, thus securing the Universe as we know it - at least until Sept. 10th when the LHC comes on line and all that Halo training will be suddenly useful.

Thanks,

The ArsGeek Team

Technorati Tags: vortex, rss, feed, borked, bork bork bork, swedish chef, hungry, meatballs, stream of consciousness tags are bad

The Forums are back and will hopefully become active once again! Please do stop by and say hello.  It’s a very friendly place where everyone knows your name.  Or your screen name.  Or avatar.

Welcome!

Technorati Tags: arsgeek, forum

ArsGeek is expanding and we’re looking to bring on a few new bloggers!  We’d like to reach a wider audience and to do that we need some fresh faces and fresh writing.

Here’s what we’re looking for:

4 or more original posts per week.  Editorials, reviews, insights, covering events, lists, rants and other original pieces.

2 or more links to other cool people and places on the web a week.  Great sites, interesting videos, deals and more.

You’ve got to love writing about your subjects, whether it’s Linux, SciFi, gaming or the latest revelation about robotic exploration of space.  A good sense of humor and geeky self deprecation is always appreciated.  You’ve also got to be in the United States.  A bonus if you’re in or near a big city which hosts relevant conventions as you’ll get to attend them and report on them.  You’ll be able to review books, software, gadgets, movies and more.  Tech geek, SciFi/Fantasy geek, science geek, gaming geek - we’re interested in you.

You’ll also get paid to do this.

We’d love to talk to you if this sounds like fun for you.  Please contact us and give us a little info about you.  We’ll be in touch and ask for some writing samples or link to a current blog or site, and discuss how payment will work.  We’re still a small site looking to get bigger so don’t expect a salary and health benefits but do expect the ability to earn some spending money and play with some neat stuff while getting in touch with a wide community of like minded folks.

Another plus if you’re a big fan of science fiction and fantasy, video games and table top games as we’d like especially to expand our coverage in these areas.

Technorati Tags: hiring, arsgeek, blogging, arsgeek wants you!

Man stabs shoppers in Tokyo street, killing seven

By David Dolan

TOKYO (Reuters) - A man who said he was tired of life went on a stabbing rampage on Sunday in a crowded Tokyo shopping street, killing seven people and wounding a dozen others.

The man drove a rental truck into a crowd of pedestrians at lunchtime and then walked down the street knifing passers-by in Akihabara district, known for its discount electronics and maid cafes.

“I came to Akihabara to kill people,” Kyodo news agency quoted the attacker as telling police. “I am tired of the world. Anyone was OK. I came alone.”

A Tokyo police spokesman said at least seven people had been killed and 12 wounded.

“The man jumped on top of a man he had hit with his vehicle and stabbed him with a knife many times,” Kyodo quoted a 19-year-old witness as saying. “Walking toward Akihabara Station, he slashed nearby people at random.”

The dead were six men aged 19 to 74 and a 21-year-old woman, the news agency said.
The police said a man had been arrested, and television stations showed a slight, blood-splattered 25-year-old being herded into a police car.

Witnesses said the rampage was stopped when a policeman armed with a gun confronted the man, who NHK television said was shouting as he cut down his victims.

The street, usually crowded with tourists and locals seeking cheap gadgets, was cleared by police, who searched for evidence amid pools of blood.

“It’s pretty shocking, considering that I come here all the time,” a man told NHK.

The rampage came on the seventh anniversary of a massacre at a Japanese primary school, when a knife-wielding janitor and former mental patient killed eight schoolchildren. He was later executed for the killings.

Although Japan has relatively little violent crime, such high-profile cases have raised public concern about violence.

Shooting deaths remain rare in Japan, although there have been some recent cases involving “yakuza” criminal gangs.

As well as electronics, Akihabara has become known in recent years as a centre for Japan’s expansive “nerd” culture of video games, comic books and outlandish fashion — including street performers and cafes with waitresses dressed as French maids. (Editing by David Fogarty)

It’s hard to believe it’s Memorial Day Weekend. For the first time in the 6 years I’ve lived at my apartments the parking lot is full. The typical busy Saturday afternoon street beyond my patio is almost quiet, and went I tucked my tail  between my legs again and bought a weeks worth of groceries at ‘Grocery Outlet’ it was filled with people from all sorts of social classes who had the same look as I did, “Oh please let this not hurt at the register.”

The fast food chains had 1-2 cars in the drive-thru at high noon and I’m no longer drooling over the latest in high tech gadgets or video games. With gas at four dollars a gallon, Mad Max popping in my head and surviving a blood bath of layoffs where I work; I can’t help but wonder what’s ahead.

I was sitting on my chair outside, looking at the empty field across the street and I automatically graphed my city. One of the many things I loved about visiting Manhattan during these difficult financial times was that it’s set up to be a walking community. The on going joke of “Two blocks” because everything seems to be within two blocks of wherever you are. Although the streets were busied with traffic, there were even more people walking to their destinations.

I wish that my city could cure the pain of shopping by breaking the area into smaller sections. In a smaller city, things are spread out making it impossible to walk the distance from your home to the department store, pharmacy and grocery store. Renting the latest dvd has fallen off my list of priorities and I don’t really care to run out to the movie theater because the thought of sitting at a red light makes me cringe. Am I cheap? I’ve always been a moderate minimalist especially for being a self proclaimed geek. Now however, I have to truly look ahead and really stick to the bare minimum.

I’m curious though because all areas are different and the impact may not be as vivid as it is where I live- am I the only one who has come to a grinding halt in purchasing anything that isn’t food or fuel (typical bills)? Will the lifestyle change be temporary or are we on the verge of turning our communities into merchant stands in the streets and barter systems? Do I just have an over active imagination and things are really temporary and not as bad as I think??? Will I ever be able to justify buying another shiny new gadget????

If you’re a website owner or have a profile… any where SiteMeter is tried and true. I’ve had the free/basic service for 8 years now and after trying out other stat keepers, none have measured  up to the information I’ve been able to obtained through SiteMeter.

Useful situations: If you’ve blocked your creepy ex’s e-mail address and can recognize his/her IP from the full header of the message, you can easily see that they’ve been visiting your site, when, what pages and how often they’ve been reading your every word. You can also get a good idea when their IP address has changed and what the new one is to deny access to your site. 

My main purpose is to get an idea of what the people like and why they head my way. So far it’s mainly because of Betta Fish

I’ve tried just about every other service out there and this still remains on top. The logo/stat meter is relatively small and easily hidden within a CSS. I’ve used one for all social networking profiles and my website without needing multiple accounts.

The upgrade price varies depending on page views and can range between $6.95 - $199.95 per month. Give it a chance, try it out for a month and then you’ll see how other trackers just don’t seem to compare; unless of course there’s one that easily does the same thing in such an organized manner with all the perks and is totally free. If you know of one, let me know!

If you’re interested or have an account:
Site Meter news/announcements
http://weblog.sitemeter.com/2008/05/01/beta-test-volunteers/
Beta Test Volunteers?
We would like to begin building a list of 100 brave souls to participate in our upcoming beta test. The testing will require volunteers to be accessible via email, a willingness to paste new or additional code on their site pages, and to provide detailed written feedback on results. We do not anti…

Below are some screenshots from the main demo area. If you like easy to read and understand formats that contains a wealth of data, Sitemeter is for you. The free version does have its draw backs by only holding onto approximately 100 detailed visitors at a time. This of course didn’t use to be the case and I haven’t found it to be as inconvenient as I had initially thought it’d be when they made this change.

I know all good things come to an end, and perhaps it’s just a beginning, but in the meantime the return is sinking me.

I fell in love with NYC. Head over heels in love and it’s going to SUCK having to communicate with Ben in different time zones again! I don’t wanna!

Today wasn’t quite as exciting or eventful as the previous days. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were so unbelievable that I feel anything today could not even come close to it. I guess it *is* quite a bit for NYC to keep one upping itself. I think the city was begging for mercy, or maybe it was my aching feet.

We started off by seeing the NYC Jedi (the much cooler version of the SCA) Choreographed Jedi fighting with lightsabers (although I wanted to stand up and protest- YOU CAN’T JAB SOMEONE WITH A SABER AND YOU CAN’T CAUSE SOMEONE TO BLEED!!! IT’D CAUTERIZE!!) <- and that’s why I’m a dork. Then there was an hour of getting separated from my party by a sea of people (I should have gotten the watchie talkies).

Thankfully we found each other (with the help of security) just in time to get to the IGN theater. It was awesome seeing quite a bit of Wanted and listening to Timur Bekmambetov discuss the upcoming film and answer questions pertaining to the film (if they wore costumes then everyone would know they’re assassins- SO DON’T ASK!! Yes, that was a duh thing, but TWO people inquired!!). Seth Green and Matthew Senreich had us cracking up with a look into the Robot Chicken Star Wars (I can’t wait!) and then it was a definite treat to listen to the panel discussion of Hell Boy 2 with Guillermo Del Toro and the crew (Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones, Luke Goss etc. Guillermo Del Toro is truly a genius and one who does enjoy straying far from his roots in Independent film. It sucks financially, but creatively it’s worth the suffering.

We truly have a summer of delights coming our way.

The disappointment came when we tried to get into Zombie Survival 101. Now I’ll never know how to survive a zombie uprising. I bet half the people who took our spots probably thought it had to do with how to survive sitting through a Rob Zombie film (creative genius- but he needs to quit trying his hand at full length films… please Rob, I’m begging you). If the long wait and bad jokes on our part was a test, then we definitely failed. We weren’t fast or aggressive enough to push and shove our way through a ton of other people who had to wait equally long… yet fortunate enough to wait closer to the door.

The saving grace was when our Media Queen (Jenn, she’s been completely awesome- and yes… SHE… media queen is not a stage drag name) managed to get Ben to meet one of his favorite authors Terry Brooks along with a book signing. This entire trip she has done an outstanding job making sure Jonathon met his mentors and ensured we didn’t get lost!

Dinner was at Pomodoro on 9th Ave. Great food and service- make sure you stop in. You can say “Arsgeek” sent you, but that really wouldn’t do anything but cause them to smile and nod at you politely.

Tonight I’m resting up for a day of saying good bye to my friends and the city by seeing as much as we can before the evening separates us and signals the time for our departures.

Ben of course will have his say on the days events (and pictures- I left my camera on by accident and drained the battery). Until then, good night everyone and a continued thank you for your support and encouragement in making this trip possible. It’s been great getting to meet and introduce Jonathon to the many people we could who have helped to make this all a reality and being able to say “Thank You”  face to face. Sadly our last few thank you’s have been drained mumbles of appreciation because our bodies just cannot keep up with all we’ve wanted to do and see.

Dawn

Technorati Tags: Wanted, Hell Boy 2, Robot Chicken Star Wars, Terry Brooks

Of course I could be wrong, but please educate me if I am. If I’m correct and if there are any comic book writers out there: “Why do you hate your mothers?”

This causes me to think further- If a superhero is raised without an a-typical family; Why to politicians and religious figures shove the need for strong family values down our throats? We should show them the ficticious examples of what the world would be like without a two parent environment: Laser beams destroying buildings in large cities, mid-air fighting and shiny costumes all for the greater good!

I’m beginning to believe that if my folks were offed when I was a wee one, then I’d be out there saving innocent people from the clutches of evil. Thanks for being alive mom and dad. you always ruin EVERYTHING!

This brings me to my Star Wars Trilogy (V, IV, and VI) marathon this weekend. Sunday morning I popped in The Empire Strikes Back. I woke up and nixed the coffee before viewing the Lucas treat and surprisingly I was awake enough to enjoy it. A few hours and an energic lunch later I put in Return of the Jedi. 30 minutes into the movie I was completely out in slumber land. I woke up to the fire works and little Ewok celebration and realized that this is what happened the last time I watched it. The movie knocks me out regardless of the time of day or coffee quota met.

Do I like the movie or do I hate it? I’m not sure of anything except it’s a great sleep aid.

SO, if you hear an awesome ColdPlay song on the radio that makes you relaxed, pull along the side of the road and enjoy your nap.

1. The survey only consisted of 2,248 people.
2. The people were British.
3. It was done at a hotel chain (where most people on holiday would probably crash if the re-runs of the Headbanger’s Ball was airing).
4. I really love the Star Wars Trilogy… well, I guess I really love 2 of the 3… I can’t really recall the the middle part of the third, and evey time I try, I yawn and wake up 8 hours later.

Original Article from Reuters: Survey finds rockers Coldplay help you sleep
LONDON (Reuters) - Britons like a dose of music from the rock band Coldplay to help them fall asleep, a survey from hotel chain Travelodge found on Monday.

The band, whose frontman Chris Martin says he avoids caffeine and alcohol and is known for a lifestyle that is anything but rock ‘n’ roll, topped a poll of music choices to help listeners nod off.

Other artists chosen for their slumber-inducing qualities were James Blunt, Snow Patrol, Take That and Norah Jones.

But those who prefer to be tucked in with a book at night judged celebrity autobiographies as the most effective sleep aid, with the life stories of glamour model Jordan, soccer star David Beckham and Sharon Osbourne ranking at the top.

Charles Manson reaches behind bars and into your iPod with his new album (semi-new, new to me… apparently out since around 2005): “One Mind” via licensing through Creative Commons. I’m in disbelief that he’s able to do this. Notorious for brainwashing- it’s okay for HIM to make music?? I seriously can’t believe he’s allowed *that* kind of freedom.

Manson loose on the internet? That explains SO much. This was found here at LimeWire Music Blog.

Anyway, you’re adults with the freedom to listen or not and then blog away at the analogy of giving a serial killer a loaded gun and pointing to a crowd full of people. This is also the part where I ask those who have kids or are responsible for children, “Are you paying attention to what they’re downloading?”

I did post the YouTube of the music and opted to take it down. This is *not* cool, this is not something I believe should be made available to the public and I imagine a bunch of little emo’s jumping all over this. If you’re unfamiliar with the creepiest man of the latter part of the 20th Century and now the 21st Century, the following is from Wikipedia:

Charles Milles Manson (November 12, 1934) is a convict who led the “Manson Family,” a quasi-commune that arose in the U.S. state of California in the later 1960s. He was found guilty of conspiracy to commit the Tate-LaBianca murders, which members of the group carried out at his instruction. Through the joint-responsibility rule of conspiracy, he was convicted of the murders themselves.

Manson is forever associated with “Helter Skelter”, the term he took from the Beatles song of that name and construed as a race-based conflict that the crimes were intended to precipitate. This connection with rock music linked him, from the beginning of his notoriety, with pop culture, in which he became an emblem of transgression, rebellion, evil, ghoulishness, bloody violence, homicidal psychosis, and the macabre. Ultimately, the term was used as the title of the book that prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi wrote about the Manson murders.

At the time the Family began to form, Manson was an unemployed ex-convict, who had spent half his life in correctional institutions for a variety of offenses. In the period before the murders, he was a distant fringe member of the Los Angeles music industry, chiefly via a chance association with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. After Manson was charged with the crimes, recordings of songs written and performed by him were released commercially; a number of artists have covered his songs in the decades since.

Manson’s death sentence was automatically reduced to life imprisonment when a decision by the Supreme Court of California temporarily eliminated the state’s death penalty. California’s eventual reestablishment of capital punishment did not affect Manson, who is an inmate at Corcoran State Prison.

Early life

Childhood
First known as “no name Maddox,” Manson was born to unmarried, sixteen-year-old Kathleen Maddox in Cincinnati General Hospital, Cincinnati, Ohio; no more than three weeks after his birth, he was Charles Milles Maddox. For a period, after her son’s birth, Kathleen Maddox was married to a laborer named William Manson, whose last name the boy was given. Charles Manson’s biological father appears to have been a “Colonel Scott”, against whom Maddox filed a bastardy suit that resulted in an agreed judgment in 1937. Possibly, Charles never really knew him.

Young Manson’s mother, allegedly a drinker, once sold him for a pitcher of beer to a childless waitress, from whom his uncle retrieved him some days later. When his mother and her brother were sentenced to five years imprisonment for robbing a Charleston, West Virginia, service station in 1939, Manson was placed in the McMechen, West Virginia, home of an aunt and uncle who grew very religious. Upon his mother’s 1942 parole, Manson was retrieved by his mother and lived with her in run-down hotel rooms. He would one day characterize her physical embrace of him on the day she returned from prison as his sole childhood joy.

In 1947, Kathleen Maddox tried to have her son placed in a foster home but failed because no such home was available. The court placed Manson in Gibault School for Boys, in Terre Haute, Indiana. After ten months, he fled from there to his mother, who rejected him.
First offenses
By burgling a grocery store, Manson obtained cash that enabled him to rent a room. A string of burglaries of other stores, from one of which he stole a bicycle, ended when he was caught in the act and sent to an Indianapolis juvenile center. His escape after one day led to his recapture and his placement in Boys Town, from which he escaped with another boy four days after his arrival. The pair committed two armed robberies on their way to the home of the other boy’s uncle.

Caught during the second of two subsequent break-ins of grocery stores, Manson was sent, at age thirteen, to the Indiana School for Boys, where, he would later claim, he was brutalized sexually and otherwise. After many failed attempts, he escaped with two other boys in 1951.

In Utah, having burgled gas stations all along the way, the three were caught driving to California in cars they had stolen. For the federal crime of taking a stolen car across a state line, Manson was sent to the Washington, D.C., National Training School for Boys. Despite four years of schooling and an average IQ of 109 (later tested at 121), he was illiterate. A caseworker concluded he was aggressively antisocial.
First imprisonment
Less than a month before a scheduled February 1952 parole hearing at Natural Bridge Honor Camp, a minimum security institution to which he had been transferred the previous October on a psychiatrist’s recommendation, Manson “took a razor blade and held it against another boy’s throat while he sodomized him.” He was transferred to the Federal Reformatory, Petersburg, Virginia, where he was considered “dangerous.” In September 1952, a number of other serious disciplinary offenses resulted in his transfer to the Federal Reformatory at Chillicothe, Ohio, a more secure institution. About a month after the transfer, he became almost a model resident. Good work habits and a rise in his educational level from the lower fourth to the upper seventh grade won him a May 1954 parole.

After temporarily honoring a parole condition that he live with his aunt and uncle in West Virginia, Manson moved in with his mother in that same state. In January 1955, he married Rosalie Jean Willis, a hospital waitress, with whom, by his own account, he found genuine, if short-lived, marital happiness, and whom he supported via smalltime jobs and auto theft.

Around October, about three months after he and his pregnant wife arrived in Los Angeles in a car he had stolen in Ohio, Manson was again charged with a federal crime for taking the vehicle interstate; after a psychiatric evaluation, he was given five years’ probation. His subsequent failure to appear at a Los Angeles hearing on an identical charge filed in Florida resulted in his March 1956 arrest in Indianapolis. His probation was revoked; he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment at Terminal Island, San Pedro, California.

Charles Manson Jr., Manson’s son by Rosalie, was born while Manson was in prison. During his first year at Terminal Island, Manson received visits from his wife and mother, who were now living together in Los Angeles; but in March 1957, when the visits from his wife ceased, his mother informed him Rosalie was living with another man. Caught trying to escape by stealing a car less than two weeks before a scheduled parole hearing, Manson was given five years’ probation; his parole was denied.
Second imprisonment
Manson received five years parole in September 1958, the same year in which Rosalie received a decree of divorce. By November, he was pimping a sixteen-year-old girl and was receiving additional support from a girl with wealthy parents. Pleading guilty in September 1959 to a charge of attempting to cash a forged U.S. Treasury check, he received a ten-year suspended sentence and probation after a young woman with an arrest record for prostitution tearfully told the court she and Manson were in love and would marry if Manson were freed. The woman, whose name was Leona and who, as a prostitute, had used the name Candy Stevens, did, in fact, marry Manson before the year’s end, possibly so testimony against him would not be required of her.

After Manson took that same woman and another girl from California to New Mexico for purposes of prostitution before the year’s end, he was held and questioned for violation of the Mann Act. Though he was released, he evidently suspected, rightly, that the investigation had not ended. When he disappeared, in violation of his probation, a bench warrant was issued; an April 1960 indictment for violation of the Mann Act followed. Arrested in Laredo, Texas, in June, when one of his girls was arrested for prostitution, Manson was returned to Los Angeles. For violation of his probation on the check-cashing charge, he was ordered to serve his ten-year sentence.

In July 1961, after a year spent unsuccessfully appealing the revocation of his probation, Manson was transferred from the Los Angeles County Jail to the United States Penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington. Although the Mann Act charge had been dropped, the attempt to cash the Treasury check was still a federal offense. His September 1961 annual review noted he had a “tremendous drive to call attention to himself,” an observation echoed in September 1964. In the interval, in 1963, Leona was granted a divorce, in the pursuit of which she alleged she and Manson had had a son, Charles Luther.

In June 1966, Manson was sent, for the second time in his life, to Terminal Island, in preparation for early release. By March 21, 1967, his release day, he had spent more than half of his thirty-two years in prisons and other institutions. Telling the authorities that prison had become his home, he requested, unsuccessfully, that he be permitted to stay, a fact touched on in a 1981 television interview:

Tom Snyder: Let’s go back to 1967, the time you were winding up serving a term of a number of years, ten years, and written accounts indicate that you told the authorities, “Don’t let me out, I can’t cope with the outside world.” Do you have a recollection of that? And do you –
Manson: You’re making a desperate plea out of something, man. There’s no desperate plea out of it. I said I can’t handle the maniacs outside, let me back in.
Snyder: I didn’t use the word desperate; that’s your word, Charles.
Manson: Yeah, well, your inflection and your voice tones were, uh, implications there.

Rise of the Family
On his release day, Manson requested and was granted permission to move to San Francisco, where, with the help of a prison acquaintance, he obtained an apartment in Berkeley. In prison, he had been taught to play steel guitar by 1930s bank robber Alvin Karpis; now, living mostly by panhandling, he soon got to know Mary Brunner, a twenty-three-year-old University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate working as an assistant librarian at UC Berkeley. After moving in with her, he overcame her resistance to his bringing other women in to live with them. Before long, they were sharing Brunner’s residence with eighteen other women.

Manson also established himself as a guru in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, which, during 1967’s Summer of Love, was emerging as the signature hippie locale. Expounding a philosophy that included some of the Scientology he had studied in prison, he soon had his first group of young followers, most of them female.

Before the summer was out, Manson and eight or nine of his enthusiasts piled into an old school bus they had re-wrought in hippie style, with colored rugs and pillows in place of the many seats they had removed. Hitting the road, they roamed as far north as Washington State, then southward through Los Angeles, Mexico, and the southwest. Returning to the Los Angeles area, they lived in Topanga Canyon, Malibu, and Venice — western parts of the city and county.

In an alternative account, which included no mention of the eighteen girls at Brunner’s place, Manson, apparently accompanied by Brunner, acquired Family members during some months of travels that were undertaken, in part, in a Volkswagen van; it was November when the school bus set out from San Francisco with the enlarged group.
Involvement with Wilson, Melcher, et al.
The events that would culminate in the murders were set in motion in late spring 1968, when, by some accounts, Dennis Wilson, of The Beach Boys, picked up two hitchhiking Manson girls and brought them to his Pacific Palisades house for a few hours. Returning home in the early hours of the following morning from a night recording session, Wilson was greeted in the driveway of his own residence by Manson, who emerged from the house. Uncomfortable, Wilson asked the stranger whether he intended to hurt him. Assuring him he had no such intent, Manson began kissing Wilson’s feet.

Inside the house, Wilson discovered twelve strangers, mostly girls. Over the next few months, as their number doubled, the Family members who had made themselves part of Wilson’s Sunset Boulevard household cost him approximately $100,000. This included a large medical bill for treatment of their gonorrhea and $21,000 for the accidental destruction of an uninsured car of his they borrowed. Wilson would sing and talk with Manson, whose girls were servants to them both.

Wilson paid for studio time to record songs written and performed by Manson, and he introduced Manson to acquaintances of his with roles in the entertainment business. These included Gregg Jakobson, Terry Melcher, and Rudi Altobelli, the last of whom owned a house he would soon rent to actress Sharon Tate and her husband, director Roman Polanski. Jakobson, who was impressed by “the whole Charlie Manson package” of artist/lifestylist/philosopher, also paid to record Manson material.[22][23]

In the quasi-autobiographical Manson in His Own Words, the account is that Manson first met Wilson at a friend’s San Francisco house where he, Manson, had gone to obtain marijuana. The Beach Boy supposedly gave Manson his Sunset Boulevard address and invited him to stop by when he would be in Los Angeles.
Spahn Ranch
By August 1968, when Wilson had his manager clear the Family members from his house, Manson had established a base for the group at Spahn’s Movie Ranch, not far from Topanga Canyon.[24][25] The evictees joined the rest of the Family there.

Located in (or near) Chatsworth, the ranch had once been a location for the shooting of Western films; then, with its old movie sets run down, it was primarily doing business in horseback rides. While Family members did helpful work around the place, Manson kept the nearly-blind, octogenarian owner, George Spahn, on his side by having Lynette Fromme act as Spahn’s eyes and, along with other girls, attend to Spahn sexually.[26][27] For a tiny squeal she would emit when Spahn would pinch her thigh, Fromme, one of the early Family members who had boarded the school bus, won from Spahn the nickname “Squeaky.”

The Family was soon joined at Spahn Ranch by Charles Watson, who had met Manson at Dennis Wilson’s house. A small-town Texan who had quit college and moved to California,[28] Watson had given a lift to Wilson, who had been hitchhiking because his cars had been wrecked.[24] Watson’s drawl earned him, too, a George Spahn nickname, “Tex.”[25]
Helter Skelter
Main article: Helter Skelter (Manson scenario)
In the first days of November 1968, Manson established the Family at alternate headquarters in Death Valley’s environs, where they occupied two unused or little-used ranches, Myers and Barker.[23][29] The former, to which the group had initially headed, was owned by the grandmother of a new girl in the Family. The latter was owned by an elderly, local woman to whom Manson presented himself and a male Family member as musicians in need of a place congenial to their work. When the woman agreed to let them stay there if they’d fix up things, Manson honored her with one of the Beach Boys’ gold records,[29] several of which he’d been given by Dennis Wilson.

While back at Spahn Ranch, no later than December, Manson and Tex Watson visited a Topanga Canyon acquaintance who played them the Beatles’ White Album, then recently released.[23] Despite having been twenty-nine years old and imprisoned when The Beatles first came to America in 1964, Manson had been all but obsessed with the group. At McNeil, he had told fellow inmates, including Alvin Karpis, that he could surpass the group in fame; to the Family, he spoke of the group as “the soul” and “part of ‘the hole in the infinite.’”

For some time, too, Manson had been saying that racial tension between blacks and whites was growing and that blacks would soon rise up in rebellion in America’s cities.[35] He had emphasized Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, which had taken place on April 4, 1968.[29] On a bitter cold New Year’s Eve at Myers Ranch, the Family members, gathered outside around a large fire, listened as Manson explained that the social turmoil he had been predicting had also been predicted by The Beatles. The White Album songs, he declared, told it all, although in code. In fact, he maintained (or would soon maintain), the album was directed at the Family itself, an elect group that was being instructed to preserve the worthy from the impending disaster.[35]

In early January 1969, the Family escaped the desert’s cold by establishing yet another base, at a canary-yellow home in Canoga Park, not far from the Spahn Ranch. Because this locale would allow the Family to remain “submerged beneath the awareness of the outside world,”[36][37] Manson called it the Yellow Submarine, another Beatles reference. There, the group prepared for the impending apocalypse, which, around the campfire, Manson had termed “Helter Skelter,” after the White Album song of that name.

By February, Manson’s vision was complete. The Family would create an album whose songs, as subtle as those of The Beatles, would trigger the predicted chaos. Ghastly murders of whites by blacks would be met with retaliation, and a split between racist and non-racist whites would yield whites’ self-annihilation. Blacks’ triumph, as it were, would merely precede their being ruled by the Family, which would ride out the conflict in “the bottomless pit” — a secret city beneath Death Valley.[38] At the Canoga Park house, while Family members worked on vehicles and pored over maps to prepare for their desert escape, they also worked on songs for their world-changing album. When they were told Terry Melcher was to come to the house to hear the material, the girls prepared a meal and cleaned the place; but Melcher never arrived.
Encounter with Tate
On March 23, 1969,[39] Manson entered uninvited upon 10050 Cielo Drive, which he had known as the residence of Terry Melcher. This was Rudi Altobelli’s property, where Melcher was no longer the tenant; as of that February,[40] the tenants were Tate and Polanski.

Manson was met by Shahrokh Hatami, a photographer and Tate friend, who was there to photograph Tate in advance of her departure for Rome the next day. Having seen Manson through a window as Manson approached the main house, Hatami had gone onto the front porch to ask him what he wanted.[39]

When Manson told Hatami he was looking for someone whose name Hatami did not recognize, Hatami informed him the place was the Polanski residence. Hatami advised him to try “the back alley,” by which he meant the path to the guest house, beyond the main house.[39]

Concerned over the stranger on the property, Hatami was now down on the front walk, to confront Manson. When Tate appeared behind Hatami, in the house’s front door, and asked who was calling, Hatami said a man was looking for someone. Hatami and Tate maintained their positions while Manson, without a word, went back to the guest house, returned a minute or two later, and left.[39]

That evening, Manson returned to the property and again went back to the guest house, where, presuming to enter the enclosed porch, he spoke with Rudi Altobelli, who was just coming out of the shower. Although Manson asked for Melcher, Altobelli felt Manson had come looking for him,[41] as is consistent with prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s later discovery that Manson had apparently been to the place on earlier occasions since Melcher’s departure from it.[39][42]

Speaking through the inner screen door, Altobelli told Manson that Melcher had moved to Malibu; he lied that he did not know Melcher’s new address. In response to a question from Manson, Altobelli said he himself was in the entertainment business, although, having met Manson the previous year, at Dennis Wilson’s home, he was sure Manson already knew that. At Wilson’s, Altobelli had complimented Manson lukewarmly on some of his musical recordings that Wilson had been playing.[39]

When Altobelli informed Manson he was going out of the country the next day, Manson said he’d like to speak with him upon his return; Altobelli lied that he would be gone for more than a year. In response to a direct question from Altobelli, Manson explained that he had been directed to the guest house by the persons in the main house; Altobelli expressed the wish that Manson not disturb his tenants.[39]

Manson left. As Altobelli flew with Tate to Rome the next day, Tate asked him whether “that creepy-looking guy” had gone back to the guest house the day before.[39]
Family crimes

Crowe shooting; Hinman murder
By June, Manson was telling the Family they might have to show blacks how to start Helter Skelter.[36][43][44] When Manson tasked Tex Watson to obtain money supposedly intended to help the Family prepare for the conflict, Watson defrauded a black drug dealer named Bernard “Lotsapoppa” Crowe; Crowe responded with a threat to wipe out everyone at Spahn Ranch. Manson countered on July 1, 1969, by shooting Crowe at his Hollywood apartment.[45][46][26][47]

Manson’s mistaken belief that he had killed Crowe was seemingly confirmed by a news report of the discovery of the dumped body of a Black Panther in Los Angeles. Although Crowe was not a member of the Black Panthers, Manson, concluding he had been, expected retaliation from the group. He turned Spahn Ranch into a defensive camp, with night patrols of armed guards.[45][48] “If we’d needed any more proof that Helter Skelter was coming down very soon, this was it,” Tex Watson would later write. “[B]lackie was trying to get at the chosen ones.”[45]

On July 25, 1969, Manson sent sometime Family member Bobby Beausoleil along with Mary Brunner and Family member Susan Atkins to the house of acquaintance Gary Hinman, to persuade him to turn over money Manson thought Hinman had inherited.[49][45][50] The three held the uncooperative Hinman hostage for two days, during which Manson showed up with a sword to slash his ear. After that, Beausoleil stabbed him to death, ostensibly on Manson’s instruction. Before leaving the Topanga Canyon residence, Beausoleil, or one of the girls, used Hinman’s blood to write “Political piggy” on the wall and to draw a panther paw, a Black Panther symbol.[46][26][51]

In magazine interviews of 1981 and 1998-99,[52][53] Beausoleil would say he went to Hinman’s to recover money paid to Hinman for drugs that had supposedly been bad; he added that Brunner and Atkins, unaware of his intent, went along idly, merely to visit Hinman. On the other hand, Atkins, in her 1977 autobiography, wrote that Manson directly told Beausoleil, Brunner, and her to go to Hinman’s and get the supposed inheritance — $21,000. She said Manson had told her privately, two days earlier, that, if she wanted to “do something important,” she could kill Hinman and get his money.[50]
Tate murders
When Beausoleil was arrested on August 6, 1969, after he had been caught driving Hinman’s car, police found the murder weapon in the tire well.[40] Two days later, Manson told Family members at Spahn Ranch, “Now is the time for Helter Skelter.”[54][55][45]

On the night of August 8, Manson directed Tex Watson to take Family members Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel — one of the hitchhikers allegedly picked up by Dennis Wilson — to “that house where Melcher used to live” and “totally destroy everyone in [it], as gruesome as you can.”[56][57] He told the girls to do as Tex would instruct them.[54][58]

When the four arrived at the entrance to the Cielo Drive property, Watson, who’d been to the house, on Family business,[23] climbed a telephone pole near the gate and cut the phone line. It was now around midnight and into August 9, 1969.

Backing their car down to the bottom of the hill that led up to the place, they parked there and walked back up to the house. Thinking the gate might be electrified or rigged with an alarm,[58] they climbed a brushy embankment at its right and dropped onto the grounds. Just then, headlights came their way from farther within the angled property. Telling the girls to lie in the bushes, Watson stepped out, gave a command to halt, and shot to death eighteen-year-old Steven Parent, the driver of the approaching car.[56][59] After cutting the screen of an open window of the main house, Watson told Kasabian to keep watch down by the gate.[56][58][54] He removed the screen, entered through the window, and let Atkins and Krenwinkel in through the front door.[58]

As Watson whispered to Atkins, Roman Polanski’s friend Wojciech Frykowski awoke on the living-room couch; Watson kicked him in the head.[56] When Frykowski asked him who he was and what he was doing there, Watson replied, “I’m the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s business.”[58][56]

On Watson’s direction, Atkins found the house’s three other occupants and, with Krenwinkel’s help,[58][60] brought them to the living room. The three were Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant; her friend and former lover Jay Sebring, a noted hairstylist; and Frykowski’s lover Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune.[40] Polanski, Tate’s husband, was in London, England, at work on a film project.[61]

As Watson began to tie Tate and Sebring together, by their necks, with rope he’d brought and slung up over a beam, Sebring’s protest — his second — of rough treatment of Tate prompted Watson to shoot him. After Folger was taken momentarily back to her bedroom for her purse, which proved to hold about seventy dollars, Watson stabbed the groaning Sebring seven times.[40][56]

Frykowski, whose hands had been bound with a towel, freed himself and began struggling with Atkins, who stabbed his legs with the knife with which she had been guarding him.[56] As Frykowski fought his way toward and out the front door, onto the porch, Watson, who joined in against him, struck him over the head with the gun multiple times (breaking the gun’s right grip in the process), stabbed him repeatedly, and shot him twice.[56] Around this time, Kasabian, drawn up from the driveway by “horrifying sounds,” arrived outside the door and, in a vain effort to halt the massacre, told Atkins falsely that someone was coming.[54][56]

Inside the house, Folger had escaped from Krenwinkel and fled out a bedroom door to the pool area.[62][63] Pursued to the front lawn by Krenwinkel, who stabbed and, finally, tackled her, she was dispatched by Watson; her two assailants stabbed her a total of twenty-eight times.[56][40] As Frykowski struggled across the lawn, Watson finished him as well, with furious stabbing that brought his total stab wounds to fifty-one.[56][54][40]

Back in the house, Atkins, Watson, or both killed Tate, who was stabbed a total of sixteen times.[40] Tate pleaded to be allowed to live long enough to have her baby; she cried, “Mother… mother…” — until she was dead.[56]

Earlier, as the four Family members had headed out from Spahn Ranch, Manson had told the girls to “leave a sign… something witchy”;[56] now, using the towel that had bound Frykowski’s hands, Atkins wrote “pig” on the house’s front door, in Tate’s blood. En route home, the killers changed out of bloody clothes, which were ditched in the hills, along with their weapons.[56][64][58]

In initial confessions, to cellmates of hers at Sybil Brand Institute, Atkins would say she killed Tate.[64] In later statements — to her attorney, to Vincent Bugliosi, and before a grand jury — she would indicate Tate had been stabbed by Tex Watson.[58] In his 1978 autobiography, Watson himself would say that he stabbed Tate and that Atkins did not.[56] Since he was aware that prosecutor Bugliosi and the jury that had tried the other Tate-LaBianca defendants were convinced Atkins had stabbed Tate, he falsely testified he did not stab her.
LaBianca murders
The next night, six Family members — the four from from the Tate murders as well as Leslie Van Houten and Steve “Clem” Grogan — rode out at Manson’s instruction. Displeased by the panic of the victims at Cielo Drive, Manson accompanied the six, “to show [them] how to do it.”[58][54] After a few hours’ ride, in which he considered a number of murders and even attempted one of them,[54] Manson gave Kasabian directions that brought the group to 3301 Waverly Drive, home of supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, a dress shop co-owner.[59] Located in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, the LaBianca home was next door to a house at which Manson and Family members had attended a party the previous year.[58][68]

After walking up the driveway and looking in a window, Manson took Watson with him through the unlocked back door. This would be reported in Watson’s autobiography, although Atkins and Kasabian had told prosecutors Manson went up to the house alone, returned to say he had tied up the house’s occupants, and sent Watson up with Krenwinkel and Van Houten.[58][54] Watson explained that, at trial, he “went along with” the women’s account, which he figured made him “look that much less responsible.”

Rousing the sleeping Leno LaBianca from the couch at gunpoint, Manson had Watson bind his hands with a leather thong. After Rosemary LaBianca was brought briefly into the living room from the bedroom, Watson followed Manson’s instructions to cover the couple’s heads with pillowcases, which he bound in place with lamp cords. Manson left, sending Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten into the house with instructions that the couple be killed.[58][54]

Before leaving Spahn Ranch, Watson had complained to Manson of the inadequacy of the previous night’s weapons.[54] Now, sending the girls from the kitchen to the bedroom, to which Rosemary LaBianca had been returned, he went to the living room and began stabbing Leno LaBianca with a chrome-plated bayonet, the first thrust going into the man’s throat.

Sounds of a scuffle in the bedroom drew Watson there to discover Mrs. LaBianca keeping the girls at bay by swinging the lamp tied to her neck. Subduing her with several stabs of the bayonet, Watson returned to the living room and resumed attacking Leno, whom he stabbed a total of twelve times. After Watson was done, he carved “WAR” on the man’s exposed abdomen, as he would state in his autobiography. Atkins, who did not enter the LaBianca house, told prosecutors she believed Krenwinkel had carved the word.[58]

Returning to the bedroom, where Krenwinkel was stabbing Rosemary LaBianca with a knife from the LaBianca kitchen, Watson — heeding Manson’s instruction to make sure each of the girls played a part — told Van Houten to stab her too. She did, on the exposed buttocks and elsewhere.[68][60][62] At trial, Van Houten would claim, uncertainly,[69] that Rosemary LaBianca was dead by the time she stabbed her. Evidence showed that many of Mrs. LaBianca’s forty-one total stab wounds had, in fact, been inflicted post-mortem.[70]

While Watson cleaned off the bayonet and showered, Krenwinkel wrote “Rise” and “Death to pigs” on the walls and “Healter [sic] Skelter” on the refrigerator door, all in blood. She gave Leno LaBianca fourteen puncture wounds with an ivory-handled, two-tined carving fork, which she left jutting out of his stomach; she also planted a steak knife in his throat.[58][54]

Hoping for a double crime, Manson had gone on to direct Kasabian to drive to the Venice home of an actor acquaintance of hers, another “piggy.” Depositing the second trio of Family members at the man’s apartment building, he drove back to Spahn Ranch, leaving them and the LaBianca killers to hitchhike home.[58][54] Kasabian thwarted this murder by deliberately knocking on the wrong apartment door and waking a stranger. As the group abandoned the murder plan and left, Susan Atkins defecated in the stairwell.[71]
Justice system

Investigation and arrest
On August 10, 1969 — while the Tate autopsies were under way and the LaBianca bodies were yet to be discovered — detectives of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which had jurisdiction in the Hinman case, informed LAPD detectives assigned to the Tate case of the bloody writing at the Hinman house. They even mentioned that the Hinman suspect, Beausoleil, was associated with a group of hippies led by “a guy named Charlie.” The Tate team, thi