You will probably not recognize the name H.H. Holmes, I didn’t either, but he is sometimes also known as American’s first serial killer. He was born in 1860 in New Hampshire as Herman Webster Mudgett. After graduating from medical school he took on the alias H.H. Holmes. He bought a pharmacy in Chicago from a widow and later killed her and disposed of the body. After running the pharmacy for a while, he bought a large piece of land across the street and not far from the soon opening World’s Fair.

It was here that he built a hotel and stores. The hotel was filled with windowless rooms, doors leading into brick walls and staircases to nowhere. The hotel also had a vault were he could torture victims without being heard and a chute that led to basement where he had installed furnaces to dispose of the flesh and organs. The skeletons he put together and sold to medical schools and doctors.

He was finally discovered after fleeing Chicago and admitted to killing 27. However, there have been estimates as high as 200 murdered. He was hung in 1896.

He was able to keep his secret for so long due to his cunning ability to lie and the fact that the hotel was built using many different workers who were often fired after just working two weeks.

The book The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson is a fantastic telling of the building of Chicago’s Worlds Fair and the grisly murders that occurred during the same time period.

It seems that celebrities have Get Out Of Jail Free passes (they must play Monopoly a lot). Now that Paris Hilton has ended her 45 day in jail with just three days, I am sure she is pretty depressed. After all, she will have to spend the rest of her sentence at her home. How sad! I wonder what the rules are for house arrest. Can you have people over? If so, she could throw a party ever night if she wanted. As long as she isn’t driving on the streets! Next time she might want to invest in a radar detector so she doesn’t get caught in the first place. Do they still make those?

Following on my Disney theme, here are the Disneyland Rides and Places that I miss.

1. The Carnation Ice Cream Parlor on Main Street. We always used to have lunch here with ice cream sundaes to follow.
2. Main Street Electrical Parade. I still have the tune in my head. What a great parade after dark!
3. Submarine Voyage. As a little kid you really felt like you were in a submarine.
4. Adventure Thru Inner Space. Corny I know, but it was still cool!
5. Rocket Jets. One of the few rides that was way up in the air.
6. The Bear Country Jamboree. Fun songs and a good place to get out of the heat.
7. Explorer Canoes. Yes, you actually got to ride about the lagoon paddling canoes.

As I was contemplating an Orlando Vacation, I thought back to when I grew up in California and we use to go to Disneyland at least once a year. Back then, you paid an admission fee and you also had to buy a book of tickets. The tickets were letter coded. We always had plenty of A tickets left over, because those were for the rides that we didn’t really want to go on. We NEVER had enough E Tickets. With an E Ticket you could go on The Pirates of the Caribbean or The Haunted Mansion or the Matterhorn.

I miss those tickets! They really taught me how I had to make choices. If I only had 2 E Tickets, then I had to choose only two of those rides to go on. I really appreciated the rides I choose!

If you grew up in the 1970s, then you should remember the tale of the warm fuzzies. This was quite the craze at the time. We would make warm fuzzies out of small pom-poms and attach eyes. Usually there was a cute saying attached as well.

The story goes something like this:

Once there was a society where everyone was given a bag of warm fuzzies when they were born. People were constantly giving each other warm fuzzies and warm fuzzies made you feel warm and fuzzy all over. Then a witch started to tell people that they would eventually run out of warm fuzzies. People started hoarding the warm fuzzies. Some where even dying because they never got any warm fuzzies.

The witch gave the people a new bag with cold pricklies instead. Everyone was handing these out, but they made you feel unhappy and cold – not warm and fuzzy.

Finally a woman came to the land and told the children they would never run out of warm fuzzies. The grownups were not happy with this. They tried to convince the children to not give away their warm fuzzies.

The moral of the story – don’t be afraid to freely give out warm fuzzies!

You can read the whole story by Claude Steiner here.