Happy Halloween

Hope everyone has a Spooky Evening!

What's on the iPod? - Doctor Who Forever Autumn

Sorry I haven't checked in for a while guys. Didn't have a new flash idea and kind of wanted to keep the flash at the top of the blog for October. I will get a jump on next year, and I hope we can do the round-robin again. That's a great idea Charles had.

I have been busy mostly working on things for school or watching too much political coverage.

School has devoured a lot of my time. I also finished a graphic novel script in and around writing a portion of a prose novel for school.

It's good to be blogging. I've just popped a Doctor Who novelization to the top of my playlist for Halloween time. It's called Forever Autumn, written by Mark Morris and read by Will Thorp who sounds a lot liked David Tennant.

The scares will all wind up being scientific, but the Doctor can often edge into the horror realm.

It's about two hours, so it's perfect to get me through to the 31st. The synopsis reads:

It is almost Halloween in the sleepy New England town of Blackwood Falls. Autumn leaves litter lawns and sidewalks, paper skeletons hang in windows, and carved pumpkins leer from stoops and front porches.

The Doctor and Martha soon discover that something long-dormant has awoken in the town, and this will be no ordinary Halloween. What is the secret of the ancient chestnut tree and the mysterious book discovered tangled in its roots? What rises from the local churchyard in the dead of night, sealing up the lips of the only witness? And why are the harmless trappings of Halloween suddenly taking on a creepy new life of their own?

As nightmarish creatures prowl the streets, the Doctor and Martha must battle to prevent both the townspeople and themselves from a grisly fate...

Sounds like fun!

Horrortober 2 - Halloween Horror Fiction

Here's another piece of flash fiction in keeping with the Halloween-month celebration started by Charles and now including: Avery, Stewart , Miladysa, L.A. Mitchel and Laughingwolf.

This one might not be for the squeamish. If any of these tales are.

Jack-O-Lanterns

You need sharp tools for carving. It helps with the detail. I won't carry on any pretense that I'm talking about a pumpkin. You're too smart for that.

You've seen Tales from the Crypt, or you've even heard of EC Comics and William M. Gaines and those tales of revenge. In those stories you'd have to watch or read until almost the end for the twist, in which it's revealed that the carving involves not a pumpkin but the head of my wife's lover.

"The Revenge of the Cuckold" it might be called, and the build up would be all about the pumpkin carving and all of the careful, precise cuts.

Only in the last frame might it be revealed that the lover's head was the stand-in for the more traditional choice for Jack-O-Lantern.

The wife might return home to see the lover's ruined face, staring at her from the front window, eyes hollowed out, a permanent grin carved into the lips, a candle shoved up through the throat.

Quite a story, but not the one on the agenda. I've already done that carving. It's the head of my wife's ex-lover, the one before you. I wanted a little practice.

If I put it in the window,  she might not come in, and we wouldn't want that. We'll want her here--stop struggling, it will do you no good.

We'll want her here, so that she can watch when the carving begins on you, so that she can see the detail work even as you scream.

And she'll know that after that work is finished...she'll be next.

Now included in my collection Scars and Candy or here for Amazon UK

Horrortober - Halloween Horror Fiction

Since Charles has been posting some cool Flash horror stories in celebration of October, and Avery, Stewart , Miladysa, L.A. Mitchel and Laughingwolf are joining in, I feel inspired and compelled to join the fun. Halloween's my favorite holiday, too.

All right, Gramlich. I'll play your little October game. This is inspired by Charles's "Spot."

Having His Say

Shuck is my only friend. The old man dragged him in by the scruff of the neck one day when he was just a little squirt and tossed him in the corner beside me.

He’s not the first dog I’ve had. That was Blue. I loved Blue, but he messed the floor until he had to be punished.

The old man didn’t do the punishing. He made me do it. He said Blue and I both had to learn.

Shuck has been a little better. I knew what the cost would be if he didn’t learn, so I made sure he was paper trained quickly. He knows now he should only make when we go into the back yard—we’re only allowed to go in the back yard. The fence is electric there. The old man knows we can’t get past it.

But, yeah, Shuck is a fast learner, especially now that he’s not a puppy anymore. He’s grown big. He’s getting bigger, and I think he understands real words.

He’ll fetch the ball I throw, and he’ll heel.

Pretty soon we’re going to test a new word he’s learned.

“Shuck, THROAT,” I’ll say.

Then we’ll go out the front door, and the old man won’t have any say any more.

He literally won’t have any say.

Food for the Soul

I'm a little delinquent in reporting on a book I received via the Library Thing Early Readers program, so let me tell you about this interesting title. It's called Food for the Soul by Chana Rubin, RD. It carries the tag line "Traditional Jewish Wisdom for Healthy Eating.

It really includes practical food advice for anyone interested in staving off eating-related health issues, though it does sprinkle in epigrams from sacred texts and address matters such as "Diet and Health: The Jewish Connection" and "Jewish Women: Setting the Tone With Food."

Topics covered also include everything from Jewish holiday meals to the complexities of carbs with sub points such as: "What happens when you eat a bagel?", "Drinking for your health," and the place eggs fit into the diet.

The final section is Recipes with everything from stuffed bake potatoes to chocolate chip cookies.

I'm going to be trying some of those.

End of the Week Humor

Well, it's been quite a week. A little humor for the weekend seems like a good thing, especially since I've been focused a little on surrealism this week in my schoolwork.

A bill passes

Well, this week has been sobering.
I think this animation which helped me with civics when I was younger left out a few stages in the process.




They don't mention the failing in the House, going to the Senate for a few billion in sweeteners, then riding back to the House on another bill for another vote.

Sweet land of liberty!

On a night like this

I find myself thinking tonight of my parents. As the world apparently melts down and the future is awash somewhere in the liquefied remains, I'm reminded theirs was dubbed the Greatest Generation, and I'm reminded of why.

They lived through the Great Depression and then through World War II on its tails. My old man lost his father when he was 15 in the mid-'30s and made his own way and headed to the Pacific Theater when he was called. More or less called. He joined the Navy because he preferred sailing to marching.

My mom was the youngest child in a single-parent family. They had them then, too. My grandmother had been abandoned by one husband and was left a widow by a second.

Mom held the homefront. Her brothers went to Germany.

The Depression and the war were the realities of their teens and twenties.

I've never really sat back and thought about what the '50s must have looked like when they finally rolled around. I wonder if there's something like that in our future.

And what will they say of us, those people of the future, and our generation as we are looked at further down the road?

Paul Newman is Gone

A couple of headlines just hit me on my Google home page, announcing the death of Paul Newman, and I'm having to wipe away a tear or two, not something you usually do with the word of a celebrity death.

Newman certainly was one of the finest film actors to achieve star status. He played characters on screen, not always himself, and I've always admired his altruism as well. I've had his fair trade coffee a lot of mornings, doused a lot of salads with his salad dressings and downed a lot of his chocolate cookies. I have also witnessed the handiwork of checks from Newman's Own benefiting charities in my community.

He's also, always kind of defined Lew Archer for me because I was introduced to the Ross MacDonald detective series because of the movie tie-in edition of The Drowning Pool in which Newman re-created his portrayal of Lew Harper. The name change came about when the first Archer novel, The Moving Target was being adapted and Newman wanted to follow the success of Hud and Hombre with another H title. The Moving Target became Harper, and the later Twilight was really kind of an Archer/Harper movie w/out the name.

It's a sad day on many fronts.

Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn

(Charles was right the other day when he noted people can have strong feelings and not understand how others can have different ones. This is generally a pop-culture and personal diary blog, not a political blog, but some days, whether it's good for me or not, I feel compelled to babel about the real world. )

The real world looks more and more like the world of The Dark Knight every day, not in a literal way with set pieces of dire chaos but in a symbolic way as we live through a whirlwind of financial and economic turmoil.

A line from the Batman movie's been playing through my head all week, but I wasn't sure where it applied until last night and this a.m. as reports about yesterday's meeting at the White House unfolded.

Sen. John McCain, after yet another bold, "maverick" move to "suspend" his campaign that was analyzed best, as usual, by The Daily Show:

made a few more public appearances then blew into Washington to fan flames of dissent in a meeting he had called to build agreement.

As the New York Times reported:

At the bipartisan White House meeting that Mr. McCain had called for a day earlier, he sat silently for more than 40 minutes, more observer than leader, and then offered only a vague sense of where he stood, said people in the meeting.

Perhaps the "suspension" and the effort for consensus were inaccurate. Clearly Sen. McCain is more an agent of chaos with a goal articulated by Michael Cain in The Dark Knight.

"...some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn."

Addendum
Salon's Joe Consan assesses McCain's roll in the derailment.

Portfolio.com Blog: McCain's Economics

David S. Broder: McCain as Alpha Mail, "imbalance in the deference quotient"

Some on the right are joining a chorus of criticism over Sarah Palin

Newsweek: The Bailout Bill Failed, Should We Blame McCain?

Twittering Mad Men

Wayne and I have been engaged in a bit of interesting anachronism this week. Pretty much all of the characters from AMC's Mad Men are on Twitter where they post microblog updates on their activities.

It's possible to send them messages, and to receive messages, and there are little stories or characters touches that are playing out.

Most notable is the quiet desperation of Betty Draper (January Jones on the show). She's the wife of Don Draper (Jon Hamm) philandering creative director of Madison Avenue ad agency Sterling-Cooper. That's one of the best known TV ad firms since McMahon and Tate, I suppose.

I sent Don a message. Twitter posts note how the person conveyed his message, whether it's the web or mobile device.

Don's are being posted from the web, so I asked how he was managing that from 1961. He messaged back to note he was living in 1962. My bad. Should have remembered all the Jackie O references from the show.

Lots of companies are using Twitter to push out information to their employees, and I'm sure there are more TV shows at work but Mad Men makes for interesting interaction.

It's probably more added fun for current viewers than it is a conduit to attract new ones, but it's certainly an interesting use of Web 2.0 for enterprise, and it's certainly fun to join the Mad Ave boys for after dinner drinks, especially on a week like this. Their world was on the brink of drastic change just like ours is. We all live in interesting times.

Now, let me get back to check out what Joan Holloway is up to.

Meltdown One Liners

I know there's not much funny about what's going on, but a couple of one-liners hit me this a.m. Fortunately on the web, there are hyperlinks to Wikipedia that can replace rim shots, though I'll try for onomatopoeia.

"Looks like the financial bail out will arrive for the taxpayers CDO." Ba, dum - chussss.

"It appears Congress, the Fed and the Treasury spent the night in the tranches." Ba, dum - chussss.

Hope everyone is hanging in!

Addendum - 9-21-08
Conde Nast Portfolio is offering a slide show of editorial cartoons about the crisis under the heading "Laugh if You Can."

Addendum - 9-23-08
And more from Conde Nast: Financial One-Liner of the Day.

An ARC Arrives: Any Given Doomsday

I received an ARC in the mail yesterday of Any Given Doomsday via Library Thing's early reader program. I will be fitting the reading of it in soon and hope to report back.

Looks like an interesting new series kickoff in the Urban Fantasy realm. It introduces Elizabeth Phoenix, a woman with a touch of psychic ability facing the end of the world and an assortment of demons and other dangers.

The ARC's letter from author, Lori Handeland, explains she had always wanted to write about a "character who rises and falls, moves forward, steps back and who lives and learns and loves like the rest of us--but in a world very different from our own."

Looks like it will include some laughs and chills. It's due for release in November.

Post Ike

We were very fortunate once again with Ike. Some of the alarm is always the weather services working not to understate the problem, but I continue to be amazed that storms are more and more an issue so far inland.

When we lived in Central Louisiana I can remember occasions where we taped the windows and brought in flower pots but never really felt any concern.

For a while yesterday it really seemed like wind might be cause for concern, but in the long run we rarely lost out Dish signal and went without power only a couple of hours.

At one point we were thinking it might be a while before the lights came back on because we were listening to Christine's disaster-proof radio and one utility company was explaining they were having to wait for gusts to die down before they could risk going up in bucket trucks.

A little while after that our lights came back on. We have a different utility company.

I read, worked on the laptop and spent a little while debating whether to waste battery power on a DVD of The Spiderwick Chronicles, so we were much more fortunate than others, though my indoor-outdoor cat, Oliver, suffered some mild depression having to spend Saturday indoors.

So it goes.

My First Packet

My first packet of critical and creative writing for my MFA is back, and, happily, after a lot of anxiety, I received a positive response from my adviser who reviewed my materials.

It's almost time to do it again, so I'm feverishly working on my second packet which will include more of my creative piece, more annotations of books I've been reading and one longer examination of a book.

I've been re-introduced to the world of literary research, tapping into online databases, which is kind of exhilarating and exciting even though the task of writing critical analysis that can count on my permanent record is daunting.

Head rush
The research is even a bit addictive. While I've decided not to write my longer paper this time about We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I found a piece called "The Hero is Married and Ascends the Throne": The Economics of Narrative End in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Honor McKitrick Wallace. That, I think, may require more blood flow to my brain than my organs can produce and pump.

Still it's fascinating to delve into the different ways a work can be dissected, and to follow trails of thought here and there.

It's also interesting to see how hard-core critics can disagree, with me at least, on other works I've been pondering including The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. I'm exploring that in part because it's such a cornerstone of the mystery genre.

Oh well, onward and upward. It's kind of interesting to be staring down a new packet deadline and Hurricane Ike.

I'm far, far inland, but the weatherman is scary. I'm charging my laptop so I can keep working if we lose power and generally hoping for the best.

Addendum
It's looking by the maps now, that the storm will be downgraded further than first expected before it reaches my neck of the woods. It should be a tropical storm and no longer a Category 1 force storm.

Palin Supporters Speak Out

Wayne turned me on to this program. It's called Red State Update:

For those interested in a more serious review of just one of the issues on the national agenda--a matter with a little more gravity than lipstick--check out the discussion of renewable energy by Thomas Friedman on an episode of Fresh Air from earlier this week.

Palin Contradictions

I just thought this compilation of clips was hilarious. No contradictions here.

Chrome at Home?

I haven't decided if I need Google Chrome, Google's new browser, at home. I'm test driving it at the day job because it's a good idea to see how a site looks in different browsers, and I think a lot of people will be using Chrome just because of Google's ubiquity. (Does the logo remind anyone else of the old Simon game?)

A site that looks lovely in Internet Explorer 7 may not degrade so nicely to Internet Explorer 6. I once spent a day trying to find a piece of template code that would change line from purple to orange in IE6 while it was as rich as Blogger's orange in 7.

Happily Chrome has no problems with any sites I have anything to do with. Any problems are mine. Gotta upgrade my personal home page to utilize CSS one of these days.

Google Chrome has some nice touches. It's succinct, no frils, gives you a full view of a web page without much wrap-around. It has a memory for site's you visited that's a bit like Opera's Speed Dial, and it seems fast and handles Flash content and the like readily.

It takes a bit of getting used to to access the tools on the upper right corner, but that will probably come with time.

It features some new "incognito" touches that are the current rage as well.

I guess I haven't found many points not covered in Infoworld's review. As they note, I use a few addons in Firefox that it won't accommodate but I don't stick to one browser anyway.

For quick easy surfing, I think chrome may not be a bad choice.

Palin's Speech to the Convention

Wouldn't it be cool if it were Michael Palin who was appearing in the Twin Cities?

Books I've Been Reading For School: We Have Always LIved in the Castle

The last few weeks have been a bit hectic, reading and writing for school while juggling other projects and the day job. The flip side is that I'm getting through some interesting books, some I should have read a long time ago, I know.

It's schoolwork that's not too bad, eh. I may get beaten up on my first packet, but time will tell. A lot of us first semester folk have been sweating a bit until we get the hang of things.

One of the works I've had to annotate so far is We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I wrote--in a gig Charles turned me on to--a Masterplots article about The Haunting of Hill House ages ago, but I'd never checked out this other great and eerie tale from Shirley Jackson. The gist of the analysis I wrote for school focused on the fact that Jackson's technique of distancing the reader actually engaged me more.

An unreliable narrator
The novel is narrated by Merricat Blackwood, and she doesn't tell all. She hints at facts in some cases. In others she reports events and lets dialog from other characters reveal things that have come before in the recent Blackwood family history. She, her sister and her uncle are the only family members left alive after arscenic poisonings. Why? Well, she'll get to that eventually.

Merricat frequently raises questions then waits a long time to answer. To me that made even mundane events take on much more weight. I was leaning into the book to try and figure things out. It's a far from passive reading experience.

Reliable chills
By the story's end it's posible to interpret all including the things Merricat doesn't say, and to me that made it all exceptionally chilling, scarier on an emotional level that was more affecting than The Haunting of Hill House.

If you haven't, you should.

BTW
I love the cover from the Popular Library edition which I've included here. It's the edition I own, and it features a painting, obviously of Merricat that's fabulously rich in meaning.