A great afternoon, spooking the $cientologists...

[onager]

...and getting spooked by them...

Anyway - yesterday, Saturday 6/9, I decided to go down to Hollywood and take the Dearly Departed Tour (a/k/a Hollywood Tragical History Tour).

Wanted to do that for a long time, and not getting any younger, thought I'd better do it before I become one of the Dearly Departed myself.

This is a tour of places where celebrities have croaked or gotten involved in scandals, along with the seamier parts of L.A. history - the Black Dahlia murder, home of the Menendez Bros, apartments where various atrocities took place, etc.

A nice touch - the one bathroom break on the tour is at the restroom where George Michael got busted for propostioning a vice cop.

Which is smack in the middle of Beverly Hills, at the postage-stamp-sized Will Rogers State Park. That's Will Rogers as in: "I never met a man I didn't like." Cough...

So I get to the tour office on Sunset Blvd. And right smack-dab across the street is...



Yep, that's the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR). Which includes the "Psychiatry: An Industry of Death" museum.

A $cientology front! Ack! Urgh!

Turns out that's just an unhappy coincidence. Our tour guide was a real live wire who knows his Hollywood history.

He also really dislikes the $cientos and let us know that. Forcefully.

The tour took us by the $cientology Celebrity Centre, a massive architectural gem built by William Randoplh Hearst back in the 1920's.

The tour guide told us that the Co$ also owns all 8...yes, EIGHT...of the beautiful old Hollywood apartment buildings surrounding the Celebrity Centre.

He also pointed out the plainclothes $cientology "security guards" around the place. All of us on the tour bus smiled and waved to a couple of the goons. They didn't wave back.

Oh, justification for the tour to visit this particular place - in 2008 a nut drove onto the Celebrity Centre grounds and got out waving a pair of samurai swords. One of the armed $ciento security guards shot and killed him.

The tour guide told us about being harassed by these clowns when he was walking in the neighborhood, taking pictures of the architecture. Apparently they can't really do a whole lot unless someone actually comes onto $ciento property, since the surrounding streets ARE public space - however much they hate it.

If you're planning to visit L.A. this summer and have a...macabre turn of mind, I highly recommend this tour. Yesterday we had three touring Brits and Canadian family of four - Mom, Dad, two teen-aged kids. And Canadians seem like such NICE people...



Here's the site for the tours: http://dearlydepartedtours.com/

[AJTheMan]

1. What a creepy cult. It's hard to believe that people actually want to join that cult.

Not many religions have armed guards.

[PassingFair]

2. Well....the Pope's got THESE guys.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

4. Michelangelo designed the Swiss Guards' uniforms.

[laconicsax]

7. Ah, yes...the henchmen.

[Kennah]

6. You can pack a gun inside the Church of Cthulhu ...

... but if the Almighty shows up, you're still fucked.

[dimbear]

3. What? Lord ElRon still not back from the dead? What's the holdup? n/t

[Warren DeMontague]

5. Galactic Emperor Xenu is not amused.

Careful, there.

[frogmarch]

8. When my two sisters

and I attended the 1996 MST3K ConventionCon Expo-Fest-A-Rama 2: Electric Boogaloo in Minneapolis, there was a scientology bookstore between our hotel and our favorite outdoor cafe. My younger sister was so afraid of scientologists that she wouldn’t walk by the bookstore, and we had to walk a block out of our way to get to the cafe from the other direction so that we wouldn’t have to pass by the bookstore. She was afraid they’d drag us into the bookstore and do something awful to our brains. My older sister and I thought that was funny, considering the fact that we were at a MST3K convention and our costumes for the Grand Ball were melting man’s ear stuck on a tree, the leech woman and the deadly mantis.

[eqfan592]

9. Not to go off topic, but MST3K = PURE AWESOME!!

I wish I had been able to make one of those conventions back in the day. Still would love to see a live Cinematic Titanic or Rifftrax performance.

[frogmarch]

10. Same here! :-D

Getting back to scientologists, my older sister and I assured our younger sister that the worst thing they could do to us would be to try to kill us with a forklift.