A light breezy look at the history of Ventura, California, that includes: odd history, lost treasures, strange characters, Ghosts and haunted places, including the old Mission San Buenaventura (founded by St. Junipero Serra 1782). Ventura has over 200 years of history bizarre happenings!

A collection of government documents dating back to 1950's.

The author of The Book of the Bizarre returns with a new compendium of freaky facts, terrifying trivia, and true stories that are stranger than fiction. In Beyond Bizarre, Varla Ventura presents an all-new batch of nightmarish tales that teem queasy diseases and paranormal encounters—not to mention the outrageous, outlandish, and the simply strange. Arranged into thirteen chilling chapters like Haunted Hollywood, Tales from the Cryptids, Bride of the Bizarre, and It’s Enough to Make You Hurl, Beyond Bizarre tackles everything from female pirates and creepy candy stripers to psychic predictions, virgin shark births and much, much more. A word of warning: this book is not for the faint of heart!

The Gnostic revival of the Enlightenment witnessed the erection of what could be called the “Kantian Rift,” an epistemological barrier between external reality and the mind of the percipient. Arbitrarily proclaimed by German philosopher Immanuel Kant, this barrier rendered the world as a terra incognita. Suddenly, the world “out there” was deemed imperceptible and unknowable. In addition to the outer world, the cherished metaphysical certainties of antiquity—the soul, a transcendent order, and God—swiftly evaporated. The way was paved for a new set of modern mythmakers who would populate the world “out there” with their own surrogates for the Divine. Collectively, these surrogates could be referred to as the Beyond because they epistemologically and ontologically overwhelm humanity. In recent years, the Beyond has been invoked by theoreticians, literary figures, intelligence circles, and deep state operatives who share some variant of a technocratic vision for the world. In turn, these mythmakers have either directly or indirectly served elitist interests that have been working toward the establishment of a global government and the creation of a New Man. Their hegemony has been legitimized through the invocation of a wrathful earth goddess, a technological Singularity, a superweapon, and extraterrestrial “gods.” All of these are merely masks for the same counterfeit divinity... the Beyond.

THE WEIRD SERIES What’s weird around here? That’s a question Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman have enjoyed asking for years—and their offbeat sense of curiosity led them to create the best-selling phenomenon, Weird N.J. But why should they stop at New Jersey when there’s so much that’s peculiar, odd, and utterly nutty across the whole U.S.? So the two Marks—along with several other writers with a taste for the strange—have focused on some key locales, giving each of them the full “New Jersey” treatment. Spanning the breadth of the country, from New York to California, these are travel guides of a sort, but to the kind of places voyagers will never find on their everyday maps. Instead, they’re chock-full of local legends, crazy characters, cursed roads, and bizarre roadside attractions. So come along and join the fun: Some of what’s out there is disturbing, some hilarious, but all of it is unforgettably…weird. Praise for WEIRD N.J.: “They are the chroniclers of the creepy, bards of the bizarre…From abandoned asylums to colorful real-life characters past and present, to folk stories of ghosts, monsters, and aliens, Mr. Sceurman and Mr. Moran have created a journal of New Jersey’s unwritten history.”—The New York Times. “Enough with the head-severing mobsters of Jersey. The state is packed with far more evil than TV could ever invent—from satanic Klan rallies to time-traveling tree farmers. And Weird N.J. has the pictures to prove it.”—Rolling Stone. “Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran see their native state as others do not. For them, it is a demented Disneyland of worldly, and otherworldly, delights.”—The Boston Globe. “If it’s the offbeat, paranormal or downright weird that you crave…there could be no better place”—USA Today. Praise for Weird U.S. “Weird U.S. is delicious armchair reading. Who can resist an ax-wielding man in a bunny suit, a home shaped like a giant shoe, cannibal albino villages, midget colonies, passages to hell or close relations of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster?”—San Francisco Chronicle. “Weird U.S. is a marvelous work of entertainment and the basis for a truly unique vacation.”—Library Journal. “Kudos to Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman…This is the book by which future explorers will chart their road trips in pursuit of the meaning of this nation.”—New York Press.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning film critics offers up more reviews of horrible films. Roger Ebert awards at least two out of four stars to most of the more than 150 movies he reviews each year. But when the noted film critic does pan a movie, the result is a humorous, scathing critique far more entertaining than the movie itself. I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie is a collection of more than 200 of Ebert’s most biting and entertaining reviews of films receiving a mere star or less from the only film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize. Ebert has no patience for these atrocious movies and minces no words in skewering the offenders. Witness: Armageddon * (1998)—The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense, and the human desire to be entertained. No matter what they’re charging to get in, it’s worth more to get out. The Beverly Hillbillies * (1993)—Imagine the dumbest half-hour sitcom you’ve ever seen, spin it out to ninety-three minutes by making it even more thin and shallow, and you have this movie. It’s appalling. North no stars (1994)—I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it. Police Academy no stars (1984)—It’s so bad, maybe you should pool your money and draw straws and send one of the guys off to rent it so that in the future, whenever you think you’re sitting through a bad comedy, he could shake his head, chuckle tolerantly, and explain that you don't know what bad is. Dear God * (1996)—Dear God is the kind of movie where you walk out repeating the title, but not with a smile. The movies reviewed within I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie are motion pictures you’ll want to distance yourself from, but Roger Ebert’s creative and comical musings on those films make for a book no movie fan should miss.