A Cowan Shoots A Palin On TV

The photo on the left, provided on Wednesday, November 17, 2010, by the Dane County Sheriff's Department shows Steven Cowan, and the one on the right is a publicity image of the target of Mr. Cowan's rage, Bristol Palin.

The man with an extremely Masonic name, Cowan* (meaning an intruder, a pretender, and an eavesdropper), has now popped up on the twilight language radar screen linked with a member of Sarah Palin's family. (The surname Palin is a name of English or Welsh origin. Possible derivations include an anglicization of the Welsh patronymic ap Heilyn ~ "son of Heilyn" ~ or a reference to the English placenames Poling, West Sussex or Sea Palling, Norfolk. In the Mabinogi of Branwen ferch Llŷr Heilyn fab Gwyn Hen is one of the seven men who escape the conflict in Ireland. With his fellows he accompanies the severed head of Bendigaidd Frân on its journey to the White Mount in London.)

Prosecutors say this rural Wisconsin man blasted his television with a shotgun after watching Bristol Palin's "Dancing with the Stars" routine.

According to court documents, 67-year-old Steven Cowan of the small town of Vermont in Dane County, Wisconsin, became enraged while watching Palin dance on Monday evening, November 15, 2010. He felt Palin was not a good dancer and he was fed up with politics. He went to his bedroom and returned to the living room with a shotgun and blasted his television, then reportedly pointed the gun at his wife, who managed to escape and call police. A SWAT team surrounded the couple's Wisconsin farmhouse and officers were able to talk Cowan out Tuesday, after an all-night standoff.

Cowan has been charged with second-degree reckless endangerment, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and $25,000 in fines. It was unclear whether Cowan has retained an attorney.

Bristol Palin is shown holding her brother Trig, August 2008.

Sarah Palin, as Miss Wasilla, 1984, when she was 20, Bristol's present age.

Bristol Sheeran Marie Palin was born on October 18, 1990, and raised in Wasilla, Alaska. Her mother, Sarah Louise Palin (née Heath; born February 11, 1964), has explained that Bristol Palin's first name was chosen for the Bristol Inn where she (her mother) had been employed; Bristol, Connecticut, the headquarters city of ESPN, where Sarah Palin had hoped to work as a sportscaster; and the Bristol Bay region of Alaska, where Bristol's father, Todd Mitchell Palin (born September 6, 1964), grew up. Todd's mother Blanche Palin (née Kallstrom) is one-quarter Yup'ik, and his maternal grandmother, Helena (Bartman) Andree, is a member of the Curyung tribe. Besides working for BP oil in Alaska, Todd is also a commercial salmon fisherman at Bristol Bay on the Nushugak River.

Starting in 2005, Bristol Palin (right) attended Juneau-Douglas High School and began dating Levi Johnston (above, left). In 2008 she moved to Anchorage to live with her aunt and uncle and attended West Anchorage High School. She returned to Wasilla and graduated from Wasilla High School in May 2009.

Palin and Johnston's son, Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston, was born on December 27, 2008. The couple, which had become engaged during the 2008 presidential campaign, broke off their engagement in March 2009.

Palin joined the Fall 2010 season of "Dancing with the Stars." Her partner is professional Mark Ballas, who is a two-time champion on the show, having won with Kristi Yamaguchi, in season 6, and with Shawn Johnson in season 8. Palin's first dance was a cha-cha to "Mama Told Me Not to Come" by Three Dog Night, seen as a humorous reference to Sarah Palin.

Her successful run on the show has not been without controversy. For example, there was widespread media coverage of her failure to turn in her absentee ballot for the November 2010 general election, which she said was due to her dancing rehearsal schedule.

There has been speculation regarding her unexpected success on the show from public voting, when the judges have frequently given her lower scores than opponents. This speculation has included allegations of fraudulent online voting using multiple e-mail addresses. Executives at ABC and the show's executive producer, Conrad Green, have stated that "checks and balances" in the system, including IP address verification, prevent such voting practices, and that "[t]here's nothing in the voting that looks dissimilar to previous seasons."

Green has speculated that Palin received votes for political reasons by backers of Sarah Palin in the Tea Party movement. In addition to support from older viewers who felt maternal toward Palin and empathized with her lack of prior experience. Palin herself credited her success to the support of her fans who were tuning in each week to see her improvement.

*Definition of COWAN:

This is a purely Masonic term, and signifies in its technical meaning an intruder, whence it is always coupled with the word eavesdropper. It is not found in any of the old manuscripts of the English Freemasons anterior to the eighteenth century, unless we suppose that lowen, met with in many of them, is a clerical error of the copyists. It occurs in the Schaw Manuscript, a Scotch record which bears the date of 1598, in the following passage: "That no Master or Fellow of Craft receive any cowans to work in his society or company, nor send none of his servants to work with cowans." In the second edition of Anderson's Constitutions, published in 1738 (page 146), we find the word in use among the English Freemasons, thus : ''But Free and Accepted Masons shall not allow cowans to work with them ; nor shall they be employed by cowans without an urgent necessity; and even in that case they must not reach cowans, but must have a separate communication." There can be but little doubt that the word, as a Masonic term, comes to us from Scotland, and it is therefore in the Scotch language that we must look for its signification. Now, Jamieson, in his Scottish Dictionary, gives us the following meanings of the word: Cowans.

A term of contempt ; applied to one who does the work of a mason, but has not been regularly bred.

Also used to denote one who builds dry walls, otherwise denominated a dry diker.

One unacquainted with the secrets of Freemasonry.

And he gives the following examples as his authorities:

A boat-carpenter, joiner, cowan (or builder of stone without mortar), get ls. at the minimum and good maintenance. P. Morven, Argyles. Statistic, Acct., X, 267. N.

Cowans. Masons who build dry-stone dikes or walls. P. Halkirk, Carthn, Statistic. Acct., XIX, 24. N. In the Rob Roy of Scott, the word is used by Allan Inverach, who says:

She does not value a Cawmill mair as a cowan.

The word has therefore, in the opinion of Brother Mackey, come to the English Fraternity directly from the Operative Freemasons of Scotland, among whom it was used to denote a pretender, in the exact sense of the first meaning of Jamieson.

There is no word that has given Masonic scholars more trouble than this in tracing its derivation. By some it has been considered to come from the Greek meaning a dog; and referred to the fact that in the early ages of the Church, when the mysteries of the new religion were communicated only to initiates under the veil of secrecy, infidels were called dogs, a term probably suggested by such passages as (Matthew vii 6), "Give not that which is holy unto the dogs"; or (Philippians iii 2), "Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision'' (see also Revelations xxii 15). This derivation has been adopted by Oliver, and many other writers.

Jamieson's derivations are from the old Swedish kujon, kuzhjohn, meaning a silly fellow, and the French coion, coyon, signifying a coward, a base fellow. No matter how we get the word, it seems always to convey an idea of contempt. .The attempt to derive it from the chouans of the French Revolution is manifestly absurd, for it has been shown that the word was in use long before the French Revolution was even meditated.

However, Brother Hawkins points out that Doctor Murray in the New English Dictionary says that the derivation of the word is unknown.

Notwithstanding the above reference by Brother Hawkins we may venture to consider another objective.

- Source: Mackey's Encyclopedia of Freemasonry.






For a related posting about a "cowan-synchronicity," please see here.






[Hat tip to Adam Parfrey of Feral House for alerting me to the original news item.]

Death Threats Phoned To Casting Directors

On November 7, 2010, five casting directors in the Los Angeles area received death threats via their office telephones. All reported the threats to Teamsters Local 399 , which represents Hollywood industry casting directors. Local police and their studios were notified.

Teamsters business representative Ed Duffy, who confirmed to the blog Back Stage that the threats took place, sent a mass email to members of the L.A. casting community warning them of the phone calls and encouraging anyone else who has been threatened to come forward. On November 15, 2010, a sixth casting director came forth telling of another death threat. Duffy would not identify the members threatened. 

"It's a pretty low blow to do something like that to these casting directors," Duffy said. "Whether it's a reality or not, it has to be taken seriously."

Of course, then on Tuesday November 16, 2010, famed publicist Ronni Chasen was shot multiple times while driving her Mercedes-Benz through Beverly Hills on her way home from the premiere of Cher and Christina Aguilera's new film Burlesque. She died after being transported to a local hospital.

"Invaders" Creator Talks of Murdered Sister

Director Larry Cohen, the man who created "The Invaders," has paid tribute to his sister, publicist Ronni Chasen, who was shot dead in Los Angeles on Tuesday 16 November 2010. The public relations mogul was shot multiple times while driving her Mercedes-Benz through Beverly Hills on her way home from the premiere of Cher and Christina Aguilera's new film Burlesque.

Her brother Cohen says, "She was my sister and best friend and we shared so many wonderful times together. Ronni was a loving and caring person who treated her clients like they were her own family."

Film composer Hans Zimmer, who was also a client of Chasen, added, "I'm profoundly sad, devastated, mad, incredulous and lonely. She was radiant. She knew everybody in the room. She took Chris Nolan over to the next table and introduced him to George Lucas. I was watching her (and) standing there listening to them and I thought, 'There's my friend Ronni, introducing two great directors to each other. She's on top of her game.'"

Lawrence G. "Larry" Cohen (born July 15, 1941) is an American film producer, director, and screenwriter. Although he writes and produces for others, he is best known for directing his own low-budget, satirical, and inventive horror films and thrillers that are laced with scathing social commentary about modern American society.

Cohen was born in Kingston, New York, USA. Cohen moved to the Riverdale section of the Bronx at an early age, eventually majoring in film at the City College of New York. He started his career in television, writing on many shows and creating the cult classics "Branded" and "The Invaders." 


He wrote, produced, and directed his first feature film, Bone, in 1972. He came to prominence with It's Alive (1974), a horror film about a mutant killer baby. Though cheaply produced, it is notable for its satirical black humor (the hero's son slaughters the medical staff at birth) and for its exploration of the parents’ dilemma: the hero, who has fathered one of the creatures, at first disowns it but later tries to protect it despite its obvious anti-social tendencies. It's Alive is also noted for being scored by Bernard Herrmann. Cohen made two sequels, It Lives Again (1978) and It's Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987).


Cohen's films are full of quotable dialogue. In Full-Moon High (1981), a teenage werewolf puts off his girlfriend's advances with the excuse that it's “his time of the month.” In Q (aka The Winged Serpent, 1982), the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl is resurrected and flies about New York City snatching human sacrifices off the skyscrapers. Cohen was able to employ the talents of Michael Moriarty, David Carradine, and Candy Clark, and the film is one of his most sophisticated, but it still manages to include such lines as “Maybe his head got loose and fell off.” and "I want a Nixon-type pardon!" The Stuff(1985) concerns a parasitic goo from beneath the Earth's crust that manages to get itself marketed as a dessert. The film's hero announces proudly at the beginning, "Nobody could be as dumb as I appear," and later delivers the maxim that "everybody has to eat shaving cream once in a while."


Perhaps Cohen’s most complex film, as well as his darkest, is God Told Me To (a.k.a. Demon, 1976), in which a troubled Catholic detective is faced with an epidemic of murders carried out by apparently normal people who claim, with quiet satisfaction, that God told them to do it. The film mixes science fiction and horror with religious satire.
In 1987, Cohen made an unofficial sequel to Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot. With typical chutzpah, Cohen threw out all of King’s characters and kept only the basic premise of a small American town inhabited by vampires. A Return to Salem's Lot starred Michael Moriarty (a Cohen regular) and Samuel Fuller, and satirizes small-town snobbery and hypocrisy: a little old woman vampire refers coyly to her drinking problem while the evil king vampire is shown to be, at bottom, little more than a rather nasty conservative politician.


Besides monster movies, Cohen has also made thrillers such as The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977), which portrays the FBI chief as a sexually repressed and paranoid megalomaniac. Ronni Chasen worked on that movie as the publicist.  Cohen also made Special Effects (1984), the twisted tale of a policeman, a murderous film director, and the woman who gets turned into the double of his leading lady; and The Ambulance (1990), a Hitchcock-style entertainment in which Eric Roberts investigates the sudden disappearance of a young woman.


Because of their frequently hurried guerrilla production style and their bargain-basement budgets, Cohen's films are sometimes murkily shot or messily edited, but Cohen’s freewheeling approach (and complete independence from studio interference) enables him to attack a number of satirical targets that often get off lightly in the mainstream—for example, ruthless food companies in The Stuff. In the third film of the Alive trilogy, Cohen even manages to work in some telling swipes against the American demonization of Cuba.
Cohen was influenced by director Samuel Fuller and now lives in a house formerly owned by Mr. Fuller. In recent years, Cohen has curtailed his directing and producing activities, and has focused mainly on writing. His work was primarily for low-budget films and television until 1998, when Cohen's spec script Phone Booth triggered active interest and aggressive bidding from major Hollywood players. Joel Schumacher directed the resulting 2002 film, which starred Colin Farrell. Cohen was also credited with the story for the 2004 release Cellular, another thriller with a telecommunications theme. However, in 2006, Cohen returned to directing briefly with the episode “Pick Me Up” of the Showtime series Masters of Horror.


In 2003, Cohen, together with production partner Martin Poll was at the center of a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox, claiming the company had intentionally plagiarized a script of theirs titled Cast of Characters in order to create the Sean Connery-starring League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film in 2003. According to the BBC, the lawsuit alleged "that Mr Cohen and Mr Poll pitched the idea to Fox several times between 1993 and 1996, under the name Cast of Characters."


The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was an adaptation of the 1999 published comic book series by Alan Moore and artist Kevin O'Neill. The lawsuit alleged that Fox had solicited the comics series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen from Moore as a smokescreen for its intent to produce a movie plagiarizing Cast of Characters. It also claimed that both films shared similar public domain characters, including Tom Sawyer and Dorian Gray, characters who did not appear in the comic book series. Although Fox dismissed the lawsuit as "absurd nonsense," the case was ultimately settled out-of-court, a decision that Moore, according to the New York Times "took...as an especially bitter blow, believing that he had been denied the chance to exonerate himself."


Police have launched an investigation into Ronni Chasen's death.  No new leads have surfaced.


Chasen worked on campaigns for more than 100 movies, including last year's Best Picture Oscar winner, The Hurt Locker, as well as Cocoon, Baby Boom, On Golden Pond and the 1989 best picture winner Driving Miss Daisy.

"She worked with us on every picture we made since The Verdict and has been a loving and dear friend for so many years," said producer Richard Zanuck, who won the Oscar for "Driving Miss Daisy' along with his wife, Lili Fini Zanuck. "To think of not being able to get her on the other line of the phone is unimaginable.

"She was the best publicist in the business in our opinion whose tireless and determined energy combined with her love of movies made her one of a very special breed. We can't tell you how much we will miss her."

Actor Morgan Freeman, who earned an Oscar nomination for Driving Miss Daisy, also praised Chasen.

"I had the extreme pleasure of working with Ronni on Driving Miss Daisy," Freeman said. "We've been friends ever since. She is someone I greatly admired and she will be remembered."

Born and raised in New York, Chasen began her career doing theater publicity.

She later moved to Los Angeles and was head of publicity for American International Pictures.

She eventually became executive vice president of motion pictures at Rogers & Cowan, and was senior vice president of publicity for MGM.

Larry Cohen's Filmography

• Masters of Horror—"Pick Me Up" (2006)
• Air Force One: The Final Mission (2004)
• Cellular (2004) (Story)
• Phone Booth (2002) (Writer)
• Original Gangstas (1996)
• As Good As Dead (1995)
• The Ambulance (1990)
• Wicked Stepmother (1989)
• Deadly Illusion (1987)
• It's Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987)
• A Return to Salem's Lot (1987)
• The Stuff (1985)
• Special Effects (1984)
• Perfect Strangers (1984)
• Q (1982)
• See China and Die (1981)
• Full Moon High (1981)
• It Lives Again (1978)
• The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977)
• God Told Me To (1976)
• It's Alive (1974)
• Hell Up in Harlem (1973)
• Black Caesar (1973)
• Bone (1972)