It’s a Series

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The transition between Lemony Snicket’s The Wide Window and The Miserable Mill, volumes three and four, respectively, of A Series of Unfortunate Events, is the gulf between what was portrayed in the 2004 movie and what wasn’t.  The books do show their age a bit in that some of the villains might be considered offensive these days, but the writing is clever and even educational.  Dealing with two of them together is, like the film, an attempt to forge a transition.  The Wide Window, which is both compressed and elaborated in the movie, doesn’t resolve itself as portrayed on the screen.  Of course Count Olaf is at large again and the Baudelaire orphans are left homeless once more.  In the movie Jim Carrey’s Captain Sham is perhaps his best character with his attempts at a cross between a sea captain and a Newfoundland landlubber.  The book raises the ethical issue of what laws it’s permissible to break to save your life, which is missing in the film.

The Miserable Mill, book four, reflects how dark these tales can be without the movie to lighten the mood a bit.  Maybe not quite enough to categorize them as horror, but enough to make them somewhat scary.  Here the orphans have reached the end of their family connections and are passed off to the owner of a lumber mill who puts them to work right away.  Of course, Count Olaf is lurking nearby and is working with an ophthalmologist who specializes in hypnosis.  It is actually a frightening thought to be hypnotized against your will.  The orphans learn to appreciate how difficult their siblings’ specializations are and, of course, make it through together.

Hypnosis is something I’ve never experienced.  I went to a show once where the stage performer attempted to hypnotize the audience.  I was fervently religious at the time, and it didn’t work on me.  I’d read that religious people are difficult to hypnotize (that is, those who haven’t been hypnotized already).  Since that time I’ve been curious if I might be hypnotized as an adult, and, if so, what it would be like.  As a mental state, hypnosis is still poorly understood.  It is used in literature, not uncommonly in horror.  I will, of course, continue working my way through A Series of Unfortunate Events because once you get started it’s difficult to stop.  It is obvious, however, that I’ve watched the film enough to have a sense of what transpired through The Wide Window.  Now, with and after The Miserable Mill, I have little recollection of what might be ahead.

Scary Painting?

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The Painted tries.  It really does.  The premise is good but the execution makes it all look rather silly.  The failure comes from the writing, the acting, and the directing.  The idea of the plot is that paintings in a house inherited by Evelyn and Adam come to life because a jilted ancestor became a succubus and her painting controls the others in the house.  There are several points at which the logic of the premise breaks down and even more points where the family (Evelyn and Adam have three children) act in a way no sane person would act in such circumstances.   Plot points are raised and dropped.  Some of the special effects are pretty good, however.  Overall, though, this horror film doesn’t scare and it inadvertently becomes funny.  It’s really too bad because there is potential here.

The Elster family has inherited a gothic house from a cousin who died in a murder-suicide with her new husband.  This is because, using a grimoire, he summoned a painted demon who’s actually a succubus.  The Elsters move in and quickly determine that the paintings are attacking them.  Adam, who likes pornography because his business is failing (!), has a fling with the succubus but doesn’t tell anyone.  The family flees the house in the middle of the night, but the succubus has come home with them.  The parents, discovering this, leave the kids alone so they can go back to the inherited house to take care of things.  When they get there the paintings attack, but they end up burning them on the lawn and going home.  At home, naturally, things have gone wrong.

Their college-age son has locked himself in the basement with their youngest daughter to sacrifice her.  The parents arrive home and get the key (which the high school-aged daughter apparently couldn’t do), free their youngest, and lock their son in said basement.  He’s very nearly broken out by the time they begin the ritual, but it doesn’t work.  Adam finally confesses to his affair with the succubus and decides his suicide is what’s needed to take care of the issue.  It helps, but only when the image of the succubus is burned out of the painting does the danger really pass.   There is a sincerity to the movie—as I say, it clearly tries.  It’s not intentionally bad nor is it completely mishandled. It’s just altogether it doesn’t fill the frame.  Spirit painting is a wonderful idea for a horror film.  The Painting, it seems, was released just a bit before it was fully dried.

Forgotten

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As most horror fans know, on a stormy night in 1816 a group of Romantics gathered and a scary story “contest” was suggested.  The best known result of this contest was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  More devoted horror fans will also know that John William Polidori’s short story, “The Vampyre,” also had its origins on that night.  It was built on a very slim skeleton suggested by Lord Byron.  Percy Bysshe Shelley’s efforts are lost to history.  As are those of the most overlooked of the group, Claire Clairmont; her story was finished some time later, unpublished.  Claire’s birth name was actually Jane, and she was Mary Shelley’s step-sister.  (Mary was Godwin at the time.)  Percy, Mary, and Claire had traveled to Geneva at Claire’s suggestion.  She was pregnant with Lord Byron’s child.  Shelley and Byron became fast friends and the three young men present on that night would all die within eight years.

Claire is unjustly forgotten.  Of the five gathered in Villa Diodati she lived the longest, making it to eighty.  She had a difficult but occasionally warm relationship with her step-sister.  This book by Robert Gittings and Jo Manton is the first real biography of Claire.  She lived a fascinating life.  Drawn from diaries, letters, and reminiscences of friends, as well as the other sources of the historian’s art, Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys is quite readable.  And moving.  Claire was young and infatuated with Byron when she set out to seduce him.  He never returned the love she felt for him, and took responsibility for their daughter on the condition that Claire never see him again.  Her inability to see her own child was the great sorrow of her long life.

Claire went on to live in Italy, France, Russia, and Austria.  She was fluent in French, Italian, and German.  By all accounts she was a gifted musician.  She hobnobbed with high society, often by being a governess in aristocratic households.  She lived near poverty at times, but inherited a living from Percy when his father died.  It’s the sad fate of many who don’t get published that they are forgotten to history.  (Being published is, I hasten to add, no guarantee either!)  Claire’s personality comes through in this account as that of a strong, vivacious woman who defied the conventions of her era.  She made her own way in the world, never marrying, yet being sought out by those who latterly wanted accounts of Shelley’s life.  She’d lived with Percy and Mary for several years.  This is a story of a different but fascinating time.  I hope that future treatments of that famous night in 1816 might take a bit more notice of this deserving, if forgotten, woman.

Nightmare Talk

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For those inclined to podcasts, and who plan in advance, I wanted to pass along the information on this poster.  James Annitto and Victoria Jaye have kindly invited me to be a guest on their Nine Gates Podcast.  The topic will be Demons in Media.  This is a subject that has interested me for some time since it seems that our current ideas of what demons are owe a huge debt of gratitude to The Exorcist.  Yes, exorcism did exist long before the novel and blockbuster film.  And yes, many of the reported behaviors portrayed therein had been proclaimed by witnesses to said exorcisms—this is what gave William Peter Blatty the idea in the first place.  What had also happened, however, is that public interest in the topic had waned to the point that the novel and movie were so shocking as to jolt the interest back to life.

After The Exorcist, we had a new old monster to add to the horror lexicon.  The Exorcist-styled demon.  It has only grown from there.  A ritual that the Roman Catholic Church had mostly buried became frequently requested.  Protestants, never willing to let Catholics get the upper hand for long, joined in with their own methods of expelling demons.  Popularizers such as Malachi Martin and Ed and Lorraine Warren joined in, asserting demons were not all that uncommon after all.  Those who distrust science now had a new potential source to cure ailments that may have, ironically, been spawned by movies that convinced people that demons did exist.  I dealt with this in my book Nightmares with the Bible.  

I’ve occasionally been invited to various podcasts (a list is here) and I always enjoy it.  It reminds me of being back in the classroom, where I belong.  I realize blogs are outdated, but writing is what I do.  Also, putting together a single podcast can eat up a weekend while a blog post claims much less time.  I like to think I pay back the publicity of my kind hosts by advertising books here.  I have no idea if such notice ever leads anyone to add to any author’s coffers, but I can hope.  Living by the word has never been an easy prospect.  Certainly book royalties (in my experience) don’t come near reimbursing the expenses.  I suppose they’re more legacy building than anything else.  My “Kilroy was here” spray painted on the internet.  In any case, if you’re interested, on a forthcoming Tuesday night, look for me on the Nine Gates Podcast.

Lemony Reptiles

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Having embarked on A Series of Unfortunate Events again, and having just finished The Reptile Room again, I might reflect on Lemony Snicket’s contribution to dark academia.  I mentioned to a friend recently that some dark academia aficionados consider the series to fall into that genre.  Having had the books read to her at a young age, she asked “Why?”  That got me thinking again about this wide, wonderful, amorphous category of books.  In my personal calculus, dark academia involves education—and this may be book learning undertaken independently—something going seriously wrong, and, in the best of it, a gothic atmosphere.  While A Series of Unfortunate Events is generally quite funny and fun to read, it clearly has the main elements I seek in classifying dark academia.  The Baudelaire orphans are pursued relentlessly by Count Olaf in a setting which, although difficult to place time wise, has Victorian aesthetics.

Of course, The Reptile Room is the second book utilized by the movie A Series of Unfortunate Events to get it up to feature length.  Reading it again revealed just how distorted my memory of the story had become by the movie.  The resolution of the scam by Stephano in the film is merely a distraction by the children to come to the real reveal in the book.  I’m not one to diss the movie.  It is quite gothic and it has many quotable moments, but it isn’t the same as the books.  I still remember when we first learned about these books from a niece, very young at the time, who enthused about them.  We were just a little cautious about reading scary stories to our daughter because one Roald Dahl book we read really was too gruesome for a child of tender years.  We immediately loved this series, however.

A quarter century or so is plenty of time to forget details.  Rereading these books also reminds me how influential they were on some of my own writing, although I read them as what passes for an adult at the time.  (I was old enough to be, and indeed was, a father.)  It occurs to me, as it likely did back then, just how clueless adults are.  Some of the descriptions of Count Olaf in this book could easily be substituted for a particular denizen of the Oval Office these days.  And, I suspect, children are able to see through those who constantly make up excuses to cover their own incompetence.  I’m looking forward to The Wide Window.

In Hollywood

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Serial killers, depending on how they’re portrayed, often get a movie a horror rating.  But not always.  And not even when Quentin Tarantino writes and directs it.  My wife had been wanting to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood while, I must confess, I’d heard nothing about it.  I find the movies I watch through websites that tend to favor horror, or sometimes sci-fi.  After I realized she wanted to see it, the next trick was finding an evening that would allow for an almost three-hour movie.  (This is, I confess, entirely my fault.  I wake up very early and can’t stay up too late watching movies without completely trashing the next day.)  We finally found a weekend with enough wiggle room to fit it in.  Random murders, like those of the Charles Manson family, always bother me.  Still, this film makes it seem not so threatening.

The story is somewhat complex, but basically a fading actor and his stuntman buddy are trying to survive in, well, Hollywood.  The actor lives next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate in 1969.  Much of the plot follows his efforts to stay relevant and his, in reality, scene-stealing stuntman’s antics.  Brad Pitt’s acting in this role definitely earned him that best supporting actor Oscar.  While the actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) struggles, unable to get over himself and his alcoholism, the stuntman meets some members of the Manson Family and visits Spahn Ranch.  I got uneasy at this part.  I’ve never been a fan of true crime and I’ve only had a passing idea of what took place with the tragic Tate murders.  Also, I didn’t know if the movie was depicting things as they might’ve actually happened or not.  (It isn’t, in case you’re as clueless as me.)

Overall, there is a comic resolution as the murderous plot gets turned back on the Manson kids.  Curiosity drove me to read about what had happened in California when I was six years old and I found myself getting dragged down a true crime rabbit hole I wanted to avoid.  Maybe it’s my age, or maybe it was because the movie was still lingering in my head, but the facts didn’t bother me as much as I thought they would.  There aren’t too many auteurs whose work I follow (Robert Eggers and Damian McCarthy are ones I do), so before Once Upon a Time, the only Tarantino film I’d previously seen was Pulp Fiction.  But then again, I’m more at home amid straightforward horror.  Preferably without serial killers.

More Rocks

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Another thing about rocks—I warned you!—is the matter of scale.  When I go out jogging, it’s on pea gravel.  Some of these tiny stones are interesting.  Or, if you’re the romantic type and gave or received an engagement ring, that diamond is likely not to be massive.  I’m always reminded of this when I go to a mall, say, which has a floor full of fossiliferous limestone.  I think of the hours I’ve spent poking around creek beds and cliff faces for fossils, and here, laid out for thousands of square feet, is polished flooring floating with fossils.  Or when I walk into a bank, say, and see a counter made of labradorite.  I carry a small labradorite piece in my pocket that my brother once gave me.  I love the way it catches the light and reflects a beautiful blue color back to me.  Here it is in massive form where I’m trying to make a modest withdrawal.

Once in Wisconsin we went to Devil’s Lake for the purple quartzite of the region.  If you look among the tumbles you can sometimes find clear quartz crystals.  I’ve noticed that on rockhound YouTube channels that collectors are chuffed to find nice, if small quartz crystals.  They’re collectable.  But they’re also small.  Size is one of the reasons for not letting rock collections grow too much.  I’ve tried my hand at making small sculptures out of significant rocks.  I can see some of them on the landing window ledge from where I’m sitting at the moment.  They’re small, but heavy, and if we ever move, will require careful wrapping.  I’m not even sure what kind of rock they’re made of.

Wisconsin quartzite with quartz crystals

Rock identification is hard work.  I have a Moh’s scale set.  A streak plate.  A hand loupe.  It’s hard to use the acid test (vinegar will do) because the pieces are so small.  Identification is often destructive.  This might not be an issue if I had a ton of similar rocks to dispose of.  No, but when you have just a handful, and these had to fit in your luggage along with your clothes, making TSA agents scratch their heads, you’re reluctant to damage them just to figure out what they are.  So identifying the small rocks I have is difficult.  Online forums tend to be unhelpful in this regard.  Not even the color can give you certain answers.  Once I collected some jasper in a creek.  I could identify it because a large boulder clearly had jasper intrusions and I could compare.  The piece I took home, of course, was quite small.  Small, however, does not mean insignificant.

Dark Academese

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I thought I was having a stroke.  The words on the page just didn’t make sense.  Nouns were being used as verbs.  Gerunds were mugging nouns.  A subject for the sentence was impossible to be found.  Was this a brain seizure?  No, it was a piece of academic writing.  In a field in which I hold a terminal degree.  This made me feel plain terminal.  I wonder what has happened to academia.  My wife and I were going to be an academic couple.  We started out when there were defined academic disciplines and with a little bit of discipline-specific training you could read just about any journal article in said discipline.  Now hires are being made in what seem like completely made up fields.  People can’t explain their appointments, so they opt for addressing their current research project.  And I confirm with Toto that this isn’t Kansas anymore.

Fearing for my sanity, I asked my wife for a reality check.  She opined (probably correctly) that in the 1980s universities were issuing lots and lots of business degrees.  More and more people were thinking college was the same as job training, not teaching young people to think for themselves.  That could explain how the rules of grammar have been abandoned so that a humanities professor can make him/herself sound like a nuclear physicist.  And those of us with degrees from the early nineties are unemployable because the standard disciplines just aren’t on offer any more.  I scratched my head when the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh couldn’t get a position in religious studies approved but was launching a marina management major.  (No joke.)

I’m a fan of dark academia.  I think maybe it makes sense given the weirdness into which I’ve stumbled.  I like to think I have a reasonable education, but I often come across documents in my own field that I can’t hope to understand.  Perhaps I’m just a slave to S-V-O (subject-verb-object, to eschew obfuscation).  All I want is to be able to understand what I’m reading from my peers.  They’ve come to believe, however, that if you write so that people understand what you’re trying to express, they’ve somehow failed in erudition.  I love higher education.  I’d go back to the professorate in a wink.  I’d be considered somewhat more ancient than protoplasm, I expect.  I went to school to learn how to communicate effectively and to express my findings so that they could be understood.  Today I’m wiping my brow, glad to learn that this isn’t a stroke after all.

Life Underground

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Having really enjoyed Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, I was looking forward to The Starless Sea, despite its nearly 600 pages.  I don’t mind getting lost in a book; in fact it’s one of life’s true and simple joys.  The Starless Sea came to my attention as a dark academia book.  The story is a good one, but in my uninformed opinion, a bit too long.  The fault is my own, I’m sure.  My sensitivity to high fantasy has reached a point where swords tend to put me off.  And some bits, particularly in book V were a bit confusing.  Still, Morgenstern’s writing is beautiful, and at some points sublime.  If it’d been a bit shorter I’d probably be gushing.  Instead I’m reflectively admiring.  As a sometime writer myself, I know that you write what you write and others may not get it.  That’s life.

The story generally follows grad student Zachary Ezra Rawlins as he finds a book from a library of a world that’s beneath the ground.  A world that includes a harbor on the Starless Sea.  That world is inhabited by the surviving members of a decaying society made up of stories.  Most members of this world (and it’s difficult not to see this as an allegory) have left for the world above (this world).  Access between the two worlds is through doors.  Sometimes real doors, other times doors painted on a wall.  Zachary finally goes through one, having not tried one outside his house when he was just a boy.  He’s not sure if he wants to stay in the Starless Sea world or not, but he gets roped into the story.

Many other characters, at varying levels of the story within a story get involved, of course.  He meets his true love, and one of the undergrads he taught gets interested in his fate, and the denizens of the world below are intriguing characters in their own right.  Despite the length of the book, there are still plenty of gaps left for the readers to fill in for themselves.  Again, my own limitations prefer to have not too many gaps because I get confused.  The story tips a hat to several of its influences explicitly, and in many ways reminded me of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.  With its grad school protagonist, lots of libraries, and even a secret society, this fantasy is a card-carrying dark academia novel.  The genre encompasses may differing books and styles.  And I’m glad to have read this one as part of my own quest in that genre.  It was a sustained escape from life in the upper world.

Augustine’s Children

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A horror film that relies more heavily on religion than just about any I’ve seen is Tin & Tina.  What really happens is up to you to decide because different characters have different interpretations.  Adolfo and Lola can’t have children.  Lola was pregnant with twins but a miscarriage with complications left her sterile.  The couple visits a convent to adopt two children.  Lola is attracted to two seven-year-olds with albinism.  The twins are very religious, while Adolfo and Lola aren’t.  The religion of the kids leads them to strange behaviors which can be disturbing, or even dangerous.  Lola begins to suspect they are trying to kill her, and, after she miraculously becomes pregnant, her son.  In a fit of rage Adolfo burns their Bible and the couple return the children to the orphanage.  Then Adolfo is struck by lightning and the house burns down.  Or is his death really the doing of the children?

In the view of the nun at the orphanage, the children are completely innocent.  Her teachings, however, raise some doubts.  When the family dog, which is terrified of the children, bites Lola, the children “cleanse” him by taking out his heart and washing it, assuming the dog will be resurrected.  Or do they?  A bully who teases them at school has an accident, but Lola believes that the twins caused it.  (There is some evidence of this, but it is ambiguous.)  When Lola refuses to let her newborn be baptized, the twins do it by holding him upside down in a fountain.  Are they attempting to drown him?  Each time they act innocent and quote the Bible to justify what they’re doing.  Lola believes they were in the house the night Adolfo burned to death, and the children believe whatever someone sows, they reap.  He had burnt their Bible.

Horror is often ambiguous.  Tin & Tina (their names short for Augustine, for they were in an Augustinian convent) remains ambiguous throughout.  Are these kids really just doing what they believe is right and only look guilty, or are they carrying out rough justice and using the Bible as an excuse?  The movie opens by defining the word “theophany”—an appearance of God.  The nun insists that they’re innocent, so Lola adopts them again at the end.  Many scenes here resemble The Omen, but overall the movie is unnerving.  And the tension doesn’t end when the credits roll.  In many ways this is a textbook example of religion and horror.  And like most matters religious, what you believe, in the end, is up to you.

Let Me Explain

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One of the reasons, I believe, that people said I was such a good teacher is that I explain things.  Clearly and thoroughly.  Living in a nation that has never really valued teachers, I have come to understand just how rare clear and thorough explanations are.  In April, within one week, we had two urgent household repairs that both required financing.  Even though I experienced sticker shock both times, I listened carefully as this was explained.  Both times it was explained poorly and I had to put multiple calls in to each of the lenders after the fact.  I can’t tell you what this does to my blood pressure, but I can say I’m glad I had Cheerios for breakfast.  One of the services wasn’t even performed in the way that it was explained.  In any case, I wrote all the more detailed explanations down.  I learned that companies don’t send you any verification that you’ve paid off a loan anymore.  At least we haven’t received one.

I was doing okay with this.  Blood pressure back to normal.  Then I received a letter from the IRS.  This always raises blood pressure, even before opening the envelope.  In my experience, it’s never good news.  In this case it was an identity verification request.  Okay, that I can handle.  But then I found something unexpected on our 1040.  You never want to find something unexpected there!  We’d paid a professional to do our taxes for us, and all we had to do was sign on the dotted line (actually, sign the screen with your finger).  I ticked taxes off my to do list back in March.  Here it was May and I was finding an irregularity on my professionally filed taxes.  I called the vendor.  I soon learned that how this was being handled simply hadn’t been clearly explained in the office.

I hope that I’m a reasonably intelligent Homo sapiens; I can tie my own shoes and I can figure out how to get to Manhattan on fairly short notice, from two states away.  What is obvious to me is that many people of my species are not good at explaining things clearly and thoroughly.  I’ve worked for employers who’d rather see costly inefficiencies remain in place for years rather than hire a trainer who can explain things clearly.  I’ve left more than one HR office more confused than I walked in.  Why is it that we eschew good explanations about things like financing and taxing?  Last year I was scammed by a guy who, despite his moral deficiencies, explained things clearly and thoroughly.  He was lying through his teeth, but he could and did explain things.  What I’m wondering is why legitimate businesses can’t do the same, only with the truth.

KK from OS

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It was probably a silly reason—the misspelled word—that kept me from watching Killer Klowns from Outer Space.  That, and the bad taste left in my eyes from Morons from Outer Space.  Then I noticed it was leaving the streaming service in a matter of hours.  Killer Klowns came out during that liminal period between finishing my master’s and beginning my doctorate.  It was a time of not much money (some things never seem to change) and we didn’t go out to a lot of movies.  I was preparing to move to Ann Arbor at the time since my wife, fiancé at the time, lived there.  And I wasn’t watching much horror then.  Killer Klowns is sci-fi horror and comedy horror and I was expecting it to be much worse than it is.  Camp, yes.  But camp played sincerely by the actors (apart from the purely comic roles).  Given the many people these days who are afraid of clowns, it’s fairly easy to see what the film has become a cult classic.

As the name implies, the klowns are actually aliens who fly around in a spaceship shaped like a circus tent.  They kill and consume people using standard, but deadly clown props.  The curmudgeonly police officer Mooney doesn’t believe any of it while his partner, Dave, is willing to listen to his ex-girlfriend Debbie, who witnessed the klowns and saw a couple of their victims.  The ship lands in a closed amusement park where Dave, Debbie, and her boyfriend Mike find them.  Several other people are killed along the way, but not with the gore that many horror films use so gratuitously.  Although the plot is farcical, it’s nevertheless well done.  It winds up with a happy ending, at least for the principals.  Many of the others wind up encased in cotton candy.

Comedy horror always has the danger of devolving into schlock, but Killer Klowns somehow manages to avoid that without taking itself too seriously.  Visually, the colors used add to the appeal.  The horror/fun house of the ship’s interior encourage viewer interest.  While the klowns are difficult to take seriously, they are scary-looking, even for those of us with no inherent fear of earthly clowns.  For a movie from the late eighties, it manages a lot without CGI, making it somewhat impressive in the effects department.  That title, with its misspelled word, gives the viewer a good idea of the silliness in store.  It manages, however, to make it scary when it needs to be. 

Going Some Place?

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I recently had to drive to the Philadelphia Airport to drop off/pick up some folks.  Here in the Lehigh Valley I’m roughly an hour north of the city of brotherly love.  Like most sentient drivers, I’ve come to rely on GPS navigation.  Dropping off my parties turned into a nightmare of congestion.  The GPS solidly insisted that the turnpike, 476, was the “fastest” way.  One thing AI doesn’t understand is how people behave.  The flight required dropping off a couple hours before that known as “rush.”  476, once yet get near Philly has several pain points where traffic merges on from several ramps onto an already crawling stream of traffic.  That’s human behavior—never considering that the “longer time” route might actually be quicker.  Or at least a touch easier on the blood pressure.  Of these thousands and thousands of people, relatively few were going to the airport.  Once I got home from a journey that Al told me would be two-and-a-half hours, round trip (which was actually three-and-a-half), I began looking for alternate routes for pick up.

Pulling up the usual map app on my laptop, the only route shown was the turnpike, clearly not designed for this volume of traffic.  Not being native to Philadelphia, I don’t know my way around very well.  Then I began to lose trust in Al.  Interstate 95 also goes right by the airport.  I force-dragged the route over that way.  The estimate? Maybe fifteen minutes longer than the turnpike.  AI doesn’t understand that people who know the turnpike is a bad idea at this time of day will take it anyway.  It is the “fastest” way to where you’re going.  And who wants to waste time?

Me, I’d rather not shave off so many years of my life.  I’m not so foolish as to suppose I-95 would be much better, but with the “real-time” facts added in, it might very well save some time, and gray hairs, to go the somewhat longer, slower route.  Al didn’t even want to tell me that was an option.  Who could possibly want to go on at a slower pace, for mental health reasons?  Even en route it will try to reroute you back onto “the fastest” way that it clearly misunderstands.  I remember driving in Newark, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and, briefly, New York City.  Those who write algorithms are missing something basic.  Human psychology plays into this in a major way.  Al is not human nor does it “think.”  It calculates.  As for me, I calculate that the slower way may just be what the doctor ordered.

Naming Birds

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I’m no Jane Goodall, but I grew up loving animals.  I still do.  I’d spend many hours poring over animal identification books.  When I was young I could tell a crab from a lobster from a crayfish.  I knew moths from butterflies.  Megafauna?  I had it covered.  One thing, however, eluded me.  Bird identification.  Now, I can tell the obvious ones apart, but ornithology seems to delight in making the trade difficult.  For example, I was on a walk with a couple friends in May.  We spotted a small bird—smaller than finch size but larger than a hummingbird.  Short tail.  Its coloration was an unusual shade of brown.  We got a good look at it.  Back home I pulled out my bird identification books.  Nothing like it.  I tried online, even Cornell’s famed ornithology lab website.  According to all the specs what we saw doesn’t exist.

The problem with birds is that they come in different colorations.  Most bird identification books and sites focus on the males.  They tend to be more colorful and their identification is easier.  Not only that, but young birds’ plumage often changes as they mature.  This is such an issue that some bird books warn the would-be watcher not to try to identify by the color.  You should look for things like eye-rings, beak shapes, and that tiny spot on the tip of the tail, when seen in flight.  Right.  After a couple of days of searching in my spare time, I gave up.  Given how small it was, this was likely a juvenile.  Which sex I have no idea.  It bothers me when I can’t identify what I see.  The world is full of such wonderful things!

Many years ago in Scotland, some friends willingly crawled to a cliff’s edge with us on a rainy day in the Orkney Islands.  We’d come here to see the puffins.  Puffins nest on cliffs overlooking the sea.  They have colorful bills and are similar in looks (but not physiognomy) to penguins.  We were rewarded with a view of a cliff-full of sea-birds, including puffins.  I often ponder, living inland now, why the bright, colorful birds tend to hide.  I know, I know—predators.  But still, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen an adult male oriel with their bright orange plumage, despite living in an area where they’re listed as common.  Birds can be so coy.  Maybe that’s why dedicated bird watchers have such passion.  I love animals.  The problem with birds is, despite hours with books and websites, some of them I just can’t identify.

Gothic South

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Southern gothic has a certain appeal even to northerners.  Casting about for a weekend movie included in one of our streaming services, A House on the Bayou suggested itself.  I hadn’t heard of it before, but it bore the Blumhouse brand, so I gave it a try.  In this age of digital production, it is the equivalent of a “straight to video” release.  The story is a bit confusing but the atmosphere is creepy and most of the acting is good.  Spoilers may arise from this point on.  John is having an affair with a younger woman and Jessica has found out.  She insists that if John wants to save their marriage he has to agree to a vacation with her and their daughter Anna.  Down on the bayou.  Once they get there both Jessica and John’s passive aggression towards each other is on show.

A couple of locals, eighteen-year-old Isaac and his Grandpappy, stop over.  It’s pretty obvious from the beginning that there’s something off about the pair.  Isaac clearly has supernatural powers and soon begins to threaten the family.  It turns out that John, knowing Jessica would insist on coming to this house, had pre-hired Isaac and Grandpappy to kill Jessica and make it look like a robbery.  Thing is, Isaac and Grandpappy have moral fibre.  They lock John in a hidden room with a demonic coyote that eats him.  And they burn his lover to death.  Jessica and Anna, who still love John, want to save him and after Jessica kills Grandpappy and Isaac, goes to the police.  It turns out that there is no house on the bayou and they all know about Isaac and Grandpappy, who are still alive, because they’re beings who kill evil-doers.

While not a great movie, this is one that’s heavily invested in religion and horror.  Morality is defined, according to Isaac and Grandpappy, by the Bible.  There is some confusion in the plot, however, when Grandpappy denies Isaac is his grandson and the locals seem to say he is.  Isaac implies that he’s the son of the Devil.  Grandpappy says Isaac never ages, but he tells John he’s 21 and has been in the Army (he tells Anna he’s 18).  Although he protects morality, Isaac attempts to abduct Anna to “marry” her, although she’s only 14.  There’s a good attempt to integrate religion into this horror, but as often happens, the religion is inconsistent with what it claims to be.  I’m not sure how many viewers pay attention to such things, but some of us do write books about it.  Overall, it is passable southern gothic for a rainy afternoon.