The only thing less impressive than Greg Long’s skills as a writer are his skills as an investigator.

In The Making of Bigfoot writer and self-professed journalist Greg Long sets out to uncover the truth about the famous Patterson-Gimlin film. The Bigfoot film. Captured in the late 1960′s the film features about forty seconds of an unknown bi-pedal creature walking across a creek in the middle of the woods. Allegedly filmed in Northern California by two amateur Bigfoot hunters (Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin) it has been the subject of much controversy since its release forty years ago. Greg Long decides to put all the questions and controversy to rest, once and for all and by the end of the book he is satisfied that he’s done exactly that.

Let me be clear though, if I handed in The Making of Bigfoot as a term paper in University I would receive it back to me, almost immediately, chalk-full of red pen.

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In the early 1690′s in the colony of Massachusetts in what would become the United States of America a witch hunt broke out. Led by the Puritans, a movement within the Church of England who were both extremely religious, in their own right, and rather political, they sought to track down and bring to trial anyone who they thought might be a witch. The indications that witchcraft were taking place in the colony were obvious: families would often find their crops or livestock devastated by bad weather, blight, or even earthquakes. The only explanation for such devastation was evil magic. The indications that one was a witch were pretty obvious as well: any woman who was single or recently widowed.

The truth behind the Salem Witch Hunt is that there were a number of pretty simple social and economic factors at work behind the scenes.

Socially, the Puritan community was very tight-knit and very religious. The rules by which they lived their lives and operated their societies were strict and unforgiving. What’s more, these were politically-minded people; people who had chosen to leave England and make a new way for themselves in the colonies—opposing opinions abounded. And these were hard economic times. Growing families were encroaching on one another’s farm lands, crops and livestock (due to completely natural reasons) were susceptible to the weather and to disease, and it was increasingly difficult to make ends meet. Mass panic over the possible presence of witchcraft in the colony would find fertile ground to grow in and when it began to spread it probably felt natural and right. Witchcraft, the thing that the Puritans feared the most, explained everything that was going wrong; it was the answer to everything.

Enter Stockwell Day, former Minister of International Trade, presently the head of the Treasury Board and our government’s Chief Witch Hunter.

On July 23, 2010 Day spoke about the long-form census on Edmonton-based radio station CHED 630AM explaining that why it was, ultimately, unnecessary:

We live in an information age where any 12-year-old kid can push any button on the Internet and find out any information he or she wants without threatening a citizen that they’re going to go to jail.

In this witch hunt, my friends, facts and statistics are our evil magic.

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The Pacific, Parts 2 and 3 are very different animals. While Part 2 follows the first installment pretty closely, and deals with some very fierce jungle combat, Part 3 finds our characters on leave in Australia and it’s this action-less episode that’s garnered significant criticism around the intarwebs. Now I feel like it’s my duty—nay, obligation—to level some pretty harsh criticism of my own at those who had a problem with Part 3, but I’ll try to be nice.

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Those that know me well know that I love everything about the British royals—the Monarchy—so I approach a cinematic offering like The Young Victoria ready to just devour it. I’m happy to say that this film is a feast that doesn’t disappoint.

I should clarify. I do love the royals, but more than that, I love a good historical biopic film. The Young Victoria is exactly that: a dramatization of just what the name implies—the life of the young Queen Victoria. The beginning of the film covers Victoria’s growing up, her aging uncle, the King, and the power struggle that surrounded her eventual rise to the throne. Once she assumes the throne—and I hope I’m not spoiling this for anyone but she does become Queen—the rest of the film follows her settling into power, her mistakes and missteps, her personal life and, of course, her falling in love.

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The Pacific is the newest venture from the Spielberg/Hanks team that brought us the Oscar-winning Saving Private Ryan and the Golden Globe-winning Band of Brothers mini-series. With a resume like that, expectations for the pair’s new mini-series were understandably through the roof and buzz surrounding their new production began, in earnest, a full four years ago.

The Pacific began airing last Sunday on HBO. It’s a ten-part mini-series which will air in installments until May 16th. Like Band of Brothers, The Pacific seems to be based around the actual stories of World War II veterans but instead of focusing the action around the European theatre of war our characters find themselves in, unsurprisingly, the Pacific. The American war with the Japanese.

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Maria picked up Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend off the non-fiction new releases rack at our library. She knows me so well.

It was a pretty good read, in a way. Through the course of the book, the author, an “independent scholar” with a fairly strange name, Joshua Blu Buhs, sets out to frame the legend of Bigfoot in terms of its larger societal impact. From the outset, this seemed like a pretty interesting idea. I’ve had an interest in Bigfoot since, I think, I discovered my own big feet (size 12, not bad) so a book about society and the Bigfoot monster seemed like something good to read. But it was, to be sure, a little bit too good to be true.

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