Tuesday, 7 October 2025

 

  • Tuesday October 7Hunters Moon Harvest Moon - Supermoon 
  • Wednesday November 5Beaver Moon - Supermoon 
  • Sunday December 4Cold Moon - Supermoon 
the Harvest Moon is always the full Moon that occurs closest to the September equinox. Most years, it falls in September; every three years, it falls in October. (Astronomical seasons do not match up with the lunar month.) If the Harvest Moon occurs in October, the September full Moon is usually called the Corn Moon instead. Similarly, the Hunter’s Moon always follows the Harvest Moon. 


October 7 2025 Hunter’s Moon

 






















Tonight is officially 2025's Harvest Moon night, marking the first of three supermoons that will close out 2025

you can spot the full Moon rising above the eastern horizon just as the Sun is setting.



October Full Moon - Hunter's Moon - Harvest Moon - Supermoon

 





























Tuesday 7 October 2025 - Harvest Moon - Hunters Moon - Supermoon

 




Tuesday 7 October 2025  - Hunters Moon -
Harvest Moon - Supermoon

The full Moon will be both this year's Hunter's Moon and a supermoon. 

The Hunter's Moon is also a reminder of the changing seasons and the inexorable march of time. As the autumn leaves fall and winter approaches, the full moon serves as a symbol of nature's rhythm and the importance of preparation for the colder months ahead.

October's Hunter's Moon was given its name because it was at this time when tribes gathered meat for the long winter ahead. June's Strawberry moon received its name because many strawberries were commonly harvested at that month.
After the harvest moon comes the hunter's moon, in the preferred month to hunt summer-fattened deer and fox unable to hide in bare fields. Like the harvest moon, the hunter's moon is also particularly bright and long in the sky, giving hunters the opportunity to stalk prey at night.
It gets its name from Farmer's Almanac, which states that it's hunting season when the leaves fall and the deer are fat. Hunters can clearly see the animals that have come out to glean because the harvesters have already reaped the fields. Other names for it include Blood Moon, Dying Grass Moon, and Travel Moon.

The Hunter's Moon is a potent period for magical and spiritual activities. Its significance lies in the amplified energies from the thinning veil between the physical and spiritual worlds, making it a powerful time for crafting or charging magical tools like wands, athames, or pentacles.

In European traditions, the Hunter's Moon has also been associated with hunting, feasting, and festivities. The full moon often played a role in the timing of various activities, from sowing seeds to butchering livestock. Many cultures took advantage of the bright moonlight for communal gatherings and fun

Any Moon near the horizon will appear bigger because the horizon provides more size perspective. It's called the Moon Illusion. When you look at a full moon near the horizon, it often looks more red or orange because the light rays have to travel further into the atmosphere before they get to you
Because the approach of winter signaled the possibility of going hungry in pre-Industrial times, the Hunter's Moon was generally accorded with special honor, historically serving as an important feast day in both northern Europe and among many Native American tribes.
The Hunter's Moon is also a reminder of the changing seasons and the inexorable march of time. As the autumn leaves fall and winter approaches, the full moon serves as a symbol of nature's rhythm and the importance of preparation for the colder months ahead.

The "harvest moon" (also known as the "barley moon" or "full corn moon") is the full moon nearest to the autumnal equinox (22 or 23 September), occurring anytime within two weeks before or after that date. The "hunter's moon" is the full moon following it. The names are recorded from the early 18th century.

The Hunter's Moon can sometimes appear red or orange in color, due to the way that sunlight is scattered by the Earth's atmosphere. This is especially common when the moon is low in the sky, such as during sunrise and sunset.

Some Native American tribes call the moon the "Travel Moon," or the "Dying Grass Moon." The Hunter's Moon is associated with the final harvest and was a signal to begin preparing for winter. It is an excellent time to focus your magic on psychic abilities, transformation, cleansing, protection, and banishment


This moon marked a crucial time for hunters to store up meat before winter. The Hunter's Moon also was considered a feast day for Native Americans and many Western Europeans.


  • Harvest Moon
    The full moon closest to the fall equinox, the Harvest Moon may occur occasionally in October. It is during the helpful light of this moon that corn is often harvested. This will be the penultimate supermoon of the year.

Monday, 6 October 2025

 Just when you think it can't get any worse, it can. 

And just when you think it can't get any better, it can


Sunday, 5 October 2025

 There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. 

There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. 

Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million.

 Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. 



 There is no season 

when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, 

and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings 

as now in October


 

The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere --
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:


Saturday, 4 October 2025

Mount Erebus

 












 things to love about October


Crystal clear sky
Fallen leaves
Horror movies
Pumpkin spice latte
Halloween
Trick or Treat



 For man, Autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together.

 For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.

Friday, 3 October 2025

Ed Gein

 Are monsters born or are they made?


“Who was the monster? This poor boy who was abused his whole life then left in total isolation, suffering from undiagnosed mental illness?” Hunnam asks Tudum. “Or the legion of people who sensationalized his life for entertainment and arguably darkened the American psyche and the global psyche in the process?”

Ed Gein’s life: his abuse at the hands of his mother, Augusta Gein,  his fascination with Nazi war criminals, his grisly crimes against the women of Plainfield, Wisconsin, and finally his incarceration and diagnosis.


Gein’s first victim comes early in his life, when he hits his brother Henry  over the head, killing him accidentally.  He covers his tracks to avoid blame, but Henry’s death breaks his mother’s heart and damages her already rocky relationship with Ed. 


Augusta’s resentment forms a lingering rift that defines nearly everything about Ed. “He was this bizarre guy that lived in his own world, in his own reality, in total isolation with only one other point of contact,”  “And so everything in his life was sort of made up, was a work of his own creation.”


Even Gein’s voice felt inspired by this formative relationship. “It was an affectation, it was what Ed thought that his mother wanted him to be,”  “It wasn’t an authentic voice that lived in him. It was this persona, it was this character that he was playing because his mother desperately wanted a daughter, and she was given a son. In her more hostile, vile moments, she would tell him, ‘I should have castrated you at birth.’

After his brother’s death , Ed is soon left alone for good when his mother succumbs to illness and passes away. Missing his mother, Ed tries to dig her up — but settles for another corpse. Gein’s grave robbery was far more prolific than his killing; he used dried skin to create furniture, lamps, and more. A drawer of dried vulvas is one of the most disturbing


the sordid fantasies that would come to dominate his life, including his fascination with Nazi war criminal Ilse Koch, the “Bitch of Buchenwald.”  Koch inspires Ed to skin his victims and use them for furniture.


He is probably one of the most influential people of the 20th century, and yet people don’t know that much about him,”  “He influenced the Boogeyman and Psycho. Norman Bates was based on him. He influenced The Silence of the Lambs. He influenced The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. He influenced American Psycho.


Psycho specifically as a turning point for the horror genre. “Prior to Psycho coming out, monsters in movies were werewolves and Dracula and Frankenstein,” “They weren’t your next-door neighbor. They weren’t the person working in a hotel that might have a key to your room, to come in at night. It was a complete reimagining of the horror genre


Ed begins a romance with local shopkeeper Bernice . Bernice is open to exploring Ed’s quirks and her own sexual kinks, but Ed soon finds himself hallucinating Augusta, and he kills Bernice as well. It’s this final crime that brings law enforcement to his door: Bernice’s son  is the local deputy. 


 Ed’s state of mind may have kept him off death row. 

 Ed didn’t know what he was thinking when he was doing those things. It was just in a manic state.”

The judge in Ed’s trial agrees and sends him to a mental institution rather than prison. There, Ed lives out his days in relative peace — albeit with a few remaining fantasies. Via a ham radio, he imagines himself communicating with Ilse Koch, the woman who, from a distance, helped start Ed down the road toward monstrosity.

 “He makes sense as a person and a subject matter only in the context of the Holocaust really,” . “It was those images that got stuck in his head that he couldn’t unsee.”

Ed’s ham radio also allows him to “get in touch” with another long-standing fascination of his: Christine Jorgensen (Alanna Darby), the first widely known person to undergo sex reassignment surgery in the United States. Ed has become convinced he himself is transgender, wearing the skin of his female victims just as Buffalo Bill would in The Silence of the Lambs. But, as Jorgensen tells him, Ed is not transgender but instead is gynephilic — a man who’s so aroused by the female body that he wants to be inside it.


While in isolation in the mental hospital, Ed is finally diagnosed with schizophrenia, which gives him much-needed insight into why he committed the crimes and why he doesn’t remember committing them.

If he had gotten the right treatment sooner, [the question becomes] if he would’ve ever done the things that he did.


He really lived in that world, and the parameters and fantasies of that world were as real to him as anything else,”  “It was just his reality. Those manic episodes were the experience he was having, just like anything else.”


Ed was the perfect person to talk about that because when he was apprehended, he was very quickly diagnosed, and he was given great care by a society. He was taken to different hospitals. He was treated well. He was given the correct medications



Ed Gein

 Edward Theodore Gein August 27, 1906 – July 26, 1984), also known as the Butcher of Plainfield and the Plainfield Ghoul, was an American serial killer and body snatcher. His crimes, committed around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, gathered widespread notoriety in 1957 after authorities discovered that he had exhumed corpses from local graveyards and fashioned keepsakes from their bones and skin. He also confessed to killing two women: tavern owner Mary Hogan in 1954 and hardware store owner Bernice Worden in 1957.

Gein was initially found unfit to stand trial and confined to a mental health facility. By 1968 he was judged competent to stand trial; he was found guilty of the murder of Worden, but was found legally insane and thus was remanded to a psychiatric institution.


 Augusta, who was fervently religious and nominally Lutheran, frequently preached to her sons about the innate immorality of the world, the evils of drinking and her belief that all women were naturally promiscuous and instruments of the devil. She reserved time every afternoon to read to them from the Bible, usually selecting verses from the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation concerning death, murder and divine retribution. Gein idolized and eventually became obsessed with his mother


Gein's father was also known to be a violent alcoholic who regularly beat both of his sons; this would cause Ed's ears to ring when his father beat him on the head. Augusta took advantage of the farm's isolation by turning away outsiders who could have influenced her sons.


Gein left the farm only to attend school. Outside of school, he spent most of his time doing chores on the farm. Gein was shy; classmates and teachers remembered him as having strange mannerisms, such as seemingly random laughter, as if he were laughing at his own personal jokes. Augusta punished Gein whenever he tried to make friends, according to family acquaintances. Despite his poor social development, Gein did fairly well in school, particularly in reading


On May 16, 1944, Gein was burning away marsh vegetation on the property. The fire got out of control, drawing the attention of the local fire department. By the end of the day—the fire having been extinguished and the firefighters gone—Gein reported Henry missing. With lanterns and flashlights, a search party searched for 43-year-old Henry, whose dead body was found lying face down. Apparently, Henry had been dead for some time, and it appeared that the cause of death was heart failure since he had not been burned or injured otherwise.

It was later reported by biographer Harold Schechter that Henry had bruises on his head. Police dismissed the possibility of foul play and the county coroner later officially listed asphyxiation as the cause of death.The authorities accepted the accident theory, but no official investigation was conducted and an autopsy was not performed


With Henry deceased, Gein and his mother were now alone. Augusta suffered a paralyzing stroke shortly after Henry's death, and Gein devoted himself to her care. Sometime in 1945, he later recounted, he and his mother visited a man named Smith, who lived nearby, to purchase straw. According to Gein, Augusta witnessed Smith beating a dog. A woman inside the Smith residence came outside and yelled for him to stop, but Smith beat the dog to death. Augusta was extremely upset by this scene; however, what bothered her did not appear to be the brutality toward the dog but, rather, the presence of the woman. Augusta told Gein that the woman was not married to Smith and so had no business being there, angrily calling her "Smith's harlot." She suffered a second stroke soon after, and her health deteriorated rapidly.Augusta died on December 29, 1945, at the age of 67. Gein was devastated by his mother's death; in the words of Schechter, he had "lost his only friend and one true love. And he was absolutely alone in the world"


 he became interested in reading pulp magazines and adventure stories, particularly those involving cannibals or Nazi atrocities, specifically concerning Ilse Koch, who had been accused of selecting tattooed prisoners for death in order to fashion lampshades and other items from their skins.


. During the search authorities also discovered the head of Mary Hogan, a tavern operator who had disappeared in 1954.

 During state crime laboratory interrogation, Gein also admitted to shooting 51-year-old Mary Hogan, a tavern owner missing since December 8, 1954, whose head was found in his house, but he later denied memory of details of her death.


On the morning of November 16, 1957, 58-year-old Plainfield hardware store owner Bernice Worden disappeared. The hardware store's truck was seen driving out from the rear of the building at around 9:30 a.m. The store saw few customers the entire day; some area residents believed that this was because of deer hunting season. Worden's son, Deputy Sheriff Frank Worden, entered the store around 5:00 p.m. to find the cash register open and blood stains on the floor.

Frank Worden told investigators that on the evening before his mother's disappearance, Gein had been in the store and was expected to return the next morning for a gallon of antifreeze. A sales slip for the antifreeze was the last receipt written by Bernice Worden on the morning that she disappeared. That evening, Gein was arrested at a West Plainfield grocery store, and the Waushara County Sheriff's Department searched the Gein farm.

A sheriff's deputy discovered Worden's decapitated body in a shed on Gein's property, hung upside down by her legs with a crossbar at her ankles and ropes at her wrists. The torso had been "dressed out like a deer".Worden had been shot with a .22-caliber rifle, and the mutilations were made after her death. Searching Gein's house, authorities found:

  • Whole human bones and fragments[29]
  • A wastebasket made of human skin[30]
  • Human skin covering several chairs[31]
  • Human skulls mounted on bedposts[32]
  • Female skulls, some with the tops sawn off[30][31][33]
  • Bowls made from human skulls[30]
  • corset made from a female torso skinned from shoulders to waist[31]
  • Leggings made from human leg skin[30]
  • Masks made from the skin of female heads[31][32][33]
  • Mary Hogan's face mask in a paper bag[32]
  • Mary Hogan's skull in a box[34]
  • Bernice Worden's entire head in a burlap sack[35]
  • Bernice Worden's heart "in a plastic bag in front of Gein's potbelly stove"[36]
  • Nine vulvas in a shoebox[37]
  • A young girl's dress and "the vulvas of two females judged to have been about fifteen years old"[38]
  • A belt made from female human nipples[39]
  • Four noses[28]
  • A pair of lips on a window shade drawstring[28]
  • A lampshade made from the skin of a human face[28] 

These artifacts were photographed at the state crime laboratory and then "decently disposed of." When questioned, Gein told investigators that between 1947 and 1952, he had made as many as forty nocturnal visits to three local graveyards to exhume recently buried bodies while he was in a "daze-like" state. On about thirty of those visits, he said that he came out of the daze while in the cemetery, left the grave in good order and returned home emptyhanded.[ On the other occasions, he dug up the graves of recently buried middle-aged women he thought resembled his mother and took the bodies home, where he tanned their skins to make his paraphernalia.

Gein admitted to stealing from nine graves and led investigators to their locations. 

 Gein had robbed the graves soon after the funerals while the graves were not completed. The test graves were exhumed because authorities were uncertain as to whether the slight Gein was capable of single-handedly digging up a grave during a single evening. They were found as Gein described: one casket was empty; another casket was empty but contained a few bones and Gein's crowbar; and the final casket saw most of the body missing, yet Gein had returned rings and some body parts. Thus, Gein's confession was largely corroborated.

Soon after his mother's death, Gein began to create a "woman suit" so that "he could become his mother—to literally crawl into her skin." He denied having sex with the bodies he exhumed, explaining: "They smelled too bad."

A 16-year-old youth, whose parents were friends of Gein and who attended baseball games and movies with him, reported that Gein kept shrunken heads in his house, which he had described as relics sent by a cousin who had served in the Philippines during World War II. Upon investigation by police, these were determined to be human facial skins, carefully peeled from corpses and used by Gein as masks.