I was actually about to vote for Pierre’s fabulous Frankensteinia blog over at the Rondo Awards based on a post from Arboghast’s blog. But while on the Rondo page I noticed a blog had been nominated that I have long admired and would like to style my site after in some way in the future if I have not already started on some level. That blog is Kimberly’s Cinebeats. Cinebeats is in no way strictly a horror blog and covers many other genres from a period usually before 1980. She promotes exploitation, Japanese and British cinema as well and gives attention to musicians and artists. I do not know her but I can sense from her writing she is a kind person and is passionate about her varied subjects. She handles the topics with the respect they deserve. The blog has a nice retro themed appearance that I love as well. So many horror blogs these days use that standard annoying black Blogger template with red letters for the font. Cinebeats has a cool look that shows pure creativity and relevance to the themes it addresses. When I first began The Uranium Cafe I did not want it to be seen as strictly a horror movie blog. I lifted the retro sounding title from the famous diner near the site of the early atomic bomb tests. I usually feel my direction is all fragmented and not focused while Kimberly has managed to handle a variety of classic and cool topics and  keeps it all wrapped up nicely. I cannot say enough about Frankenstenia as well but I had to choose one or the other and I am going with Cinebeats as the official vote from The Uranium Cafe as the best horror blog for the 2009 Rondos.

The Café reached it 200th post before the end of the year, which was something I was hoping for. I know some other bloggers who started out abut the same time I did have passed me up in sheer terms of post numbers. I had hoped I would be closer to 300 now than 200 but given some situations it seems I am lucky to have reached this amount even. As people may or may not know I live and work in China and therefore blog from here. Not the easiest country in the world to blog from. My other site Necrotic Cinema, which focuses on newer horror films, simply died after Blogger was yet again blocked here. I maintain that site from a VPN proxy now. I had loads of hosting issues that almost made me give it all up more than once. I had to change hosting providers and my URL. My site was hacked. Bandwidth and storage became problems. I now pay more per year than I want to admit too and do it with Chinese RMB. I think the rate right now is around 7 RMB to one American dollar. If you’re traveling to China and spending the dollars you made in USA that is sweet. If you’re in China paying for services in the US it blows big time.

But I am happy with the way things are for now. I love the way the site looks. My traffic is around 1500 to 1800 visitors a day and it’s more than I thought I would have at this time. I get very comments but I can tell by my stats I have good traffic and that they like to look at pictures of sexy girls more than read studies of K. Gordon Murray or Al Adamson. My most visited post is my tribute to Julie Newmar which I wrote off the top of my head. So I am giving my fans what they want with this 2ooth post with a chesty picture of Hammer gal Madeline Smith. I have tons of stuff to report and comment on. New Podcasts and Beatcasts in the works and who knows what else. Barring any unforeseen disasters with my hosting service or my ailing Lenonvo PC the Café will continue to churn out the high quality posts that it has come to be known and revered for in horror circles all over the world (that last part I sort of made up but it sounds great). Thanks to every one who helped me out in hard times and to any one who visited the site more than once. Now I am back to working on my slightly too long Inglourious Basterds post.

Bill D. Courtney aka Uranium Willy

I was browsing some of my favorite blog sites a little while ago looking for new films or inspiration when it dawned on me suddenly that today is Halloween. I am in China and Halloween actually occurs here almost a day earlier than in the States but I had no inkling that Halloween had finally arrived since the holiday is not recognized in any form here. Why would it be I guess. There are no Jack-o-Lanterns or spooky cardboard monster on doors. The idea of Trick-or-Treating here would probably be as alien as a two party political system. From what I understand they had a party at the school I work for last year and some students said that they invited me to go but I do not remember. I do not usually do school events anyway. I asked my students if they would like to see a scary movie for Halloween and they almost all said no. They are around twenty years old but the idea of sitting through a scary movie is more than they can handle. There is no spirit for the day here and so it is easy to overlook I guess though inexcusable ultimately for a horror blogger. I am truly ashamed.

MORE HAPPY HALLOWEEN FROM THE URANIUM CAFE HERE >>

Saw a meme posted over at Gilligan’s Retrospace and it looked a little interesting. Let me first post the rules:

1. Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2. Go to “Random quotations” or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3. Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

So there you have it. I did not see anyone getting tagged and I usually do not do that anyway since the few people I stay in touch with are all tagged by the time a meme gets to me or I see it. If you like it do it. I am not going to tag anybody. The person who originated the meme is Darius Whiteplume over at Adventures in Nerdliness.

I certainly felt like cheating at first but I stuck to the rules and came up with this odd album cover. The  complete actual random hit I got at Wikipedia was Karashiki Sakuyo University, but I do not feel I am bending the rules much to turn the University word into the letter U as it is a common enough thing to do. The 4th picture I got at Flicker was some cute Japanese girl making a silly face and it certainly seemed  at first to match the Japanese name I got at Wikipedia but, again, I did not cheat and used the 3rd image. The last few words of the quote frustrated me as well and I almostdid the whole thing all over, but after I put it all together in Image Ready and added the papyrus font it looked like some New Age album with lush synths and drones and suddenly the quote even seemed to make a great title. The name could either be a band or solo performer. Some tunes to absorb in a lotus position with some mild herb tea and your magic crystals near by in their little medicine bag. Om.

THE 2nd URANIUM CAFE POLL: WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SEE MORE OF HERE AT THE CAFE?

The results of the second Uranium Cafe poll are finally in. I waited so long as a couple choices had been tied for almost two weeks and I was just waiting to see which one was going to pull ahead. Lets take a look at the results with the category receiving the least votes first:

6) Music Posts: I know one of the people who voted to see more music posts was Kimberly over at one of the best movie culture blogs around, Cine Beats. So her vote matters to me. And I have struggled so hard with trying to get some downloadable audio and have a huge task ahead of me here soon to redo all my music posts one at a time that even if this category came in last I am still going to continue it and soon you can expect at least one music post per page (eight posts). do we listen to he readers here at the cafe? yes. Do we do what they want us to do all the time? no. I know my music posts get lots of hits and support, so they are going to continue and grow rather than diminish.

5) Classic European Horror: While never my preferred cup of tea I am watching more and more Eurosleaze and general horror/sci-fi and developing a taste for it. Just got in Lucio Fulci’s Perversion Story and it looks wonderful. Learning more and more about the main directors (Jess Franco, Jean Rollins, Mario Bava, Antonio Margheriti etc. ) and finding that while not all of their work is worth the effort a lot of it is visually stunning and loaded with plot quirks and twists you would not see in most American films. A little more will be on the way but the site will not go bonkers over too many of those films simply because I still find the stories incomprehensible at times.

4) Comic Books and Art: expect this category to stay at about where it is, with a post or two per page dedicated to comic book and movie poster art yesterday and sometimes today. I once wanted to draw comic books and love the period when Marvel ruled the world back in the 70’s. I have a huge collection of material on my hard drive, ranging from the precode period to late 70’s. Some great stuff there. I also have thousands of movie poster, pulp paperback cover and  miscellaneous art samples. Since I a graphics oriented person they will continue but will not dominate the site.

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Boy do I love that name. I have been trying to decide on a sister blog to The Uranium Cafe for some time now. Last night I was watching a newer style horror film called The Ruins and the name hit me. Necrotic Cinema. I scribbled it down and started work today and it is officially launched. I am using a Blogger template I downloaded and there may be some little bugs in it, I hope not as I like the look. For some time now I have been wanting to do posts on newer horror films I watch, but they did not seem to usually fit into the Uranium Cafe theme unless they were Japanese. I had dabbled with the Son of the Uranium Cafe but I hated that name and it was just a site to do some testing on Blogger, which I am new at. The site will focus on American Horror mostly of the monster, psycho, stalker, slasher variety, but expect some European and Asian material as well. There will less emphasis on comic books and music there, is any at all.After I had the name and found a theme/template that fit I began to experiment with some HTML for the backgrounds and was soon happy. I was going to make a temporary banner and I put the above one together in like ten minutes and was very happy with the results. So happy that I expect it to remain the banner for some time.

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The Alphabet Meme from Fletch’s BLOG CABINS

From Fletch: (more…)

I think a lot of time we can all feel like we are working in a vacuum doing this movie blogging stuff. I know I do at times. I actually work pretty hard collecting information and images and then editing all that stuff into a post that I hope will be readable to a few people. I have also had a lot of technical issues with my site that almost made me give up but I stuck it out and now and reasonable happy with the look and content though I want to get better at what I am doing. I am happy with my traffic but would like to double it someday. I have to admit that seeing higher numbers in Google Analytics or searching a topic and then seeing my own site appear on the first page of Google is a boost and has helped me to stay the movie blog course. But I wanted to say something about the LAMBs (the Large Association of Movie Blogs) and if you have a movie site you want to promote it is good place to start and to find others as well with similar tastes and interests. The LAMBs is a project headed by Fletch (or Dylan) and his site is Blog Cabins if you want to have a peek. At last look the total number of LAMBs was up to 215, with Kimberly’s most excellent Cinebeats blog being the last entry. There are lots of cool sites to be honest and I will refrain from naming the ones I like the most or naming some people that have been special and extra supportive to me and the Café here. That is because I might forget someone because I am spacey  and then they will get hurt feelings, turn paranoid and stalk me and try to hack me to pieces in an attic with a meat cleaver and I just don’t need that kind of trouble right now. (more…)