Fred and Loathing on The Internet

The Serial Killer Became Prolific After Learning How To Parallelize His Work

2023-Nov-06

There is a pile up of topics worth reviewing on the fredlambuth.com/blog. The reason for the pile-up is a slowdown on the commits toward reconfiguring the backend to this site, at least the Spotify collection functions and data model. After a few days of breakneck speed refactoring the API calls and the pipelines from those to the source tables, I’ve come to a dilemma when trying to add the non-Spotify data to the Sqlite3 database. A solid written-down model needs to be made first, so I can follow that plan. Too often I am visiting similar problems that I solve in two different ways that end up causing me trouble when I update or improve stuff. What I plan to do is make a Spotify API Request module that has its own processes and data. The Flask front-end will have its own module and database, with a daily job transferring new data between the modules.

The book review for today is Chaos by Dan Piepenbring and Tom O'Neill. Tom being the star of the book, the magazine writer protagonist who started a blithe article about the thirtieth anniversary of the Charles Manson murders for a Hollywood entertainment magazine. The book chronicles how the story spiraled out of what should have been a quick magazine piece collecting sound bites of celebrities that had been around the same crowd that was mixed up in the same circles as the Manson family. The book’s premise of finding lies and subterfuge behind the official story that convicted the members of Charles Manson’s cult of murderous hippies kicks off when the author finds that nobody wants to comment on any possible loose end to the story.

I did enjoy every step of the way the author explained his twenty year exploration of all the angles that were either dismissed, omitted, or sometimes lied about in the bestselling book written by the prosecutor of the case, Helter Skelter by Vicent Bugliosi. Helter Skelter was one of the very first big-boy adult books I had read of my own volition. The title comes from the purported motive for Charles Manson ordering the murders he was being tried for; which was to kick off a race war that would soften the world enough to be ready for Manson to emerge from a hole in the desert and be embraced as a messianic figure.

This Chaos book by Piepenbring and O’Neil is not just a refutation of the motives given for the murders, but to the writing of Helter Skelter. I had read it as a teenager. I wonder if I read it now would I have found it as appealing as I did in my adolescence. At the time of my reading the book I did not especially remember finding the ‘helter skelter’ motive too incredulous. I thought maybe this Manson fellow was speaking in metaphors.

This enjoyment from hearing the writer’s approach wore a little bit thin as the investigation plodded forward yet with not much clarity about what it was trying to accomplish. The protagonist accommodates the thinness to his findings by bringing himself into the story, mentioning how a multi-decade investigation into conspiratorial motives can change you, and your esteem among others.

Ultimately it comes to a payoff ending that I found to be lightweight in evidence. The book did a splendid job poking holes into the official documents and Bugliosi’s reporting of these investigative anomalies or coincidences. Nothing much comes to light after finding these gaffes. Speculating as to how these anomalies could come to be by wrenching in some mysterious characters involved around the actual murder or Manson’s colorful past in federal correctional institutes and Haight-Ashbury in 1967-68 is enjoyable. Ultimately the conclusions brought forth are not conclusive. Rather they are something worth speculating on for kicks until something is actually proven. It has given me stirring thoughts about just what happened that makes everybody involved in the ‘happening’ scene among Roman Polanski’s friends so tight lipped. To be honest, I was hoping for more Polanski gossip. I have a feeling he’s holding a lot of skeletons in his closet and to him the murders were an intersection of other smaller conspiracies and the whims of short-sighted violent people.