Halloween 2024

Well, another Halloween has come and gone.  In the past, I have blogged quite a bit about Halloween, which one can read by clicking on the appropriate tag below.  

This year I don’t have too much to say.  Once again, Halloween did bring out the brief flickering of my old desire to write weird fiction.  I happened to read the Wikipedia entries on the jack-o’-lantern, and from there the entry on the will-o’-the-wisp, and all the attendant legends, and thought that there was a lot of material there to inspire a story.

But, once again, I came up with nothing. 

Also, I have been wondering when people should take down their Halloween decorations.  As of yesterday and earlier today, I was still seeing numerous ghosts, skeletons, and giant spider webs in people’s yards.  The situation is starting to feel a little like the phenomenon of people leaving their Christmas lights up well into January or February (or March . . . ).  

Perhaps the answer would be to leave decorations up until the end of the similar but unrelated holiday, the Day of the Dead, which is, um, actually two days. 

A Strange Pole Arm at the Battle of Caen

A few months ago, Wikipedia featured an article on the Battle of Caen, a conflict in which the English attacked the French town of Caen in 1346.  The article was illustrated by a super-awesome painting from Froissart’s Chronicles. 

As I examined that painting in detail, I noticed something very odd about one of the pole weapons (as Wikipedia calls them) or pole arms (as we knew them back in Dungeons & Dragons days) being used by a soldier.  I present the relevant portion of the image below:

 

The man on the right is holding what looks like an ornate glaive.  (I included a glaive in a Halloween illustration on the blog many years ago.)  But what caught my attention was the object that the man on the left wields, something that I, speaking as a casual fan of Medieval weaponry, cannot identify.  The wooden shaft is topped by a pointed spear head, and there are what appear to be two metal disks mounted on opposing sides of the spear head, with a spike protruding from the center of each disk.     

This particular weapon is not some unique aberration; there are two at least additional weapons of the same type in another section of the image (posted below), as well as other possible (though unclear) examples elsewhere in the picture.

In my research, I did find other pole weapons that were similar in that they had a pair of spikes or blades on the opposing sides of a spear head, such as the ranseur and the Bohemian earspoon. (And doesn’t everybody need a Bohemian earspoon?)  But there was nothing with anything close to those metal disks at the base of the spikes. 

From a Dungeons & Dragons perspective, it seems that we are looking at something that didn’t occur even in E. Gary Gygax’s wildest dreams.

I will also note that weapon in question does not appear on the phylogenic diagram of pole arms shown below.  (Was the phylogeny derived using cladistic analysis?)

Halloween Thoughts 2021

The darkness of winter is approaching, and encroaching, and other such words; the pumpkins and plastic skeletons and fake spider webs have gone out in front yards; Halloween is almost here.  In the summer of 2020, I thought that the pandemic might be mostly over by Halloween of that year, and, Halloween being on a Saturday, people would use the occasion to release the tension of the previous months with some wild partying . . . but then the pandemic flared up again, and Halloween pretty much didn’t happen.  This year though, despite the continuing pandemic, we are, maybe, possibly, having Halloween.  And Halloween will be on a Sunday, which, while not quite as good as a Saturday, is better than a Monday.  

On Sunday (October 24) I went into the Old Town section of Alexandria.  I was surprised to see a number of people, and an even bigger number of dogs, wearing Halloween costumes. 

Is the fact that there were people walking around in costumes one week early evidence that Halloween will be super-crazy this year?

Or is it just part of the phenomenon of Halloween taking over the entire month of October?

Or, since I saw many more dogs than people in costumes, is one week before Halloween now Dogoween? 

* * * * * * * *

My Sunday visit also made me think more deeply about the twin topics of Halloween and Old Town.  

Halloween awakens my longstanding ambition to write fiction (which, like all my ambitions, remains unfulfilled), and, in this specific case, fantasy-horror fiction.  And Old Town, a genuine Colonial setting with narrow alleyways, walled gardens, and half-concealed cellar doors, seems like the perfect environment to fill my mind with visions of the unnatural and terrifying things about which I would want to write. 

Yet that never happens.

Maybe it is because I just don’t have the capacity to be inspired toward storytelling.  Or maybe it is because Old Town is a thoroughly modernized, well-maintained, touristy city, and not the sort of dilapidated, half-abandoned urban area where there could conceivably be evil fish-men lurking in the shadows. 

Of course, if you have seen any evil fish-men lurking in the shadows of Old Town, please let me know in the comment section.

 

It’s Landmark

I may have to revise my movie-watching criteria (as related in the previous post) to the following:

*Star Wars

*Lord of the Rings

*based on someone whom I once knew 

*featuring a mall which I once knew

The trailer for next year’s Wonder Woman 1984 is out.  Some scenes for the movie were filmed at Landmark Mall in western Alexandria.  The mall can be seen in the trailer between 0:33 and 0:47. 

Landmark was the local mall from my childhood onward, and the mall that I knew best.  It wasn’t the fun mall for hanging out when I was a teenager; that honor would probably have gone to Springfield Mall.  But Landmark was, for many decades, a dependable place to buy socks.

Wonder Woman 1984 uses Landmark as a typical shopping mall of the Eighties, but, ironically, what one sees in the movie is not how Landmark looked in 1984.  Landmark was originally an open-air mall; it underwent renovations in the late Eighties and reopened as en enclosed mall in 1990.  

Landmark was available for filming because it is the stereotypically dying modern mall; for the last few years it has been entirely unoccupied except for an anemic Sears.  The mall is slated to be torn down and turned into a mixed-use retail and residential development. 

But we’ll always have Wonder Woman 1984.  

Colleges That Need Renaming

In my work, I am constantly paying attention to the names of institutions of higher learning.  Over the years I have concluded that there are certain colleges whose names aren’t quite right, and would benefit from some readjustment:

*Denison University should rename itself Denisovan University, in honor of our lost hominid cousins, the Denisovans. 

*The College of Wooster should rename itself the College of Woofter, in honor of a guy with whom I went to high school. 

*Purdue University should rename itself Perdue University, for, well, chicken reasons.  (And isn’t that what most people think already?)

*Baylor University should rename itself Balrog University, in honor of the evil creature from The Lord of the Rings.  Furthermore, “Baylor” sounds like “baleful”, and a balrog is nothing if not baleful.  Indeed, “baleful” is one of those early Dungeons & Dragons-type words, like “ilk” and “denizen”, calling to mind the game’s very early days, when the name “balrog” was given to a Dungeons & Dragons monster, before it had to be renamed for copyright reasons.  

it is even rumored that if you say “baleful Balrog” five times, the ghost of E. Gary Gygax will appear to award you 100,000 experience points, and/or exile you to the Slaad-Infested realm of Limbo.

The Dream That Came Undreamed

Ever since my childhood, I have wanted to write fiction.  And, specifically, I have wanted to write in the field of science fiction and fantasy.  People tell me that I am a good writer.  Unfortunately, though, I am not a good storyteller.  Successful fiction writers are filled with story ideas just waiting to burst out.  I almost never get any ideas for stories, and on the rare occasions that I do get ideas they are often more suited to a visual medium like television than to the written word.  Thus, although I would like to write, I generally have nothing to write.  

The one exception to this problem comes from my dreams.  Every so often I will have a dream that arranges itself into a narrative, or suggestions of a narrative.  

Years ago, perhaps fifteen or more years ago, I had one such dream.  In the dream, I was in eighth grade.  Another boy and I decided to skip class and go to Las Vegas, which was conveniently located next to the school.  There we saw a sign saying that on New Year’s Eve, a spacecraft high above the city would release two million ears of corn, which would burn up in the atmosphere, creating an artificial meteor shower.

An artificial meteor shower lighting up the Las Vegas sky on New Year’s Eve seemed like a good basis for a science fiction story.  I carried the concept around in my head for a long time, and a few years ago I started trying to develop a narrative around the concept.  (One immediate change that I made was to turn the ears of corn to grains of sand.)  But since I had a lot of other things to do, and very little self-discipline, I never got very far with the story.  

Then about a year ago I came upon an article on the internet reporting that a Japanese company is planning to implement an artificial meteor shower in the Hiroshima area in early 2019.  (A more recent account places the meteor shower in early 2020.)  Instead of ears of corn or grains of sand, specially-concocted pellets will be used to provide multiple colors.  

Normally one considers a dream coming true to be a good thing.  But in this case, my dream is robbed of its prescience, and thus of its effectiveness as a science fiction story. 

And so ideas become rarer still.

Kolchak: The Night Heron

Once again, I am in the position that I have a lot that I want to write for the blog, but I just don’t have the willpower to get it done.  But I have made a commitment to myself to publish at least one post per month, and May is almost over with no posts, so I need to put up something.  

Here is a Black-crowned Night Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) that I photographed over the weekend.  

The name reminds me of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, an obscure Seventies television series which I have been watching in recent weeks on the MeTV network.  Kolchak is best known today as a major influence on the development of The X-Files.  That connection gives Kolchak a lot of credibility in the science-fiction/fantasy/horror community, but it doesn’t mean that the show is necessarily very good.  Take for example the titular Kolchak.  The fact that he is a “night stalker” makes it sound as if he should be mysterious and ominous, but he’s actually an inept middle-aged reporter who wears a porkpie hat.  (I think that it’s a porkpie hat.  I’m not good with hats.)

Ultimately, then, we have accomplished nothing with this post.  But at least the monthly requirement is fulfilled.

Rough, Tough, Chough

There are a few words in the English language in which the letter combination GH is pronounced as F.

These include rough, tough, enough, and Julianne Hough.

Given how rare such words are, I thought that I knew them all, and was surprised in the last few days to learn a “new” word in which this linguistic oddity occurs: chough.  

The name chough is applied to two Eurasian bird species in the family Corvidae; they are generally crow-like in appearance, but have orange or yellow beaks.  The name is also applied to an Australian bird in a different family, Corcoracidae.

Therefore this example of a linguistic rarity is entirely unknown to English speakers in North America, but (presumably) well-known to English speakers in the British Isles and Australia.  

Incidentally, this GH-as-F phenomenon reminds me of something that happened to me in second grade: I was reading one of the later books in the Wizard of Oz series.  I understood every word in the book, except one: laughter.  I thought that it was pronounced “lawter” (which would rhyme with slaughter, although I’m not sure if I knew that word either).  For the entire book, I couldn’t figure out what “lawter” was, but I was able to deduce from the context that “lawter” occurred in mirthful situations.

Icicles: Winter Is Coming

I saw these icicles over the weekend.  They are a reminder that winter is coming, or, if you, like me, go by meteorological winter, that winter is already here.  

“Winter is coming” is the catchphrase from the popular television series Game of Thrones.  I have never actually seen this show, despite the fact that it looks like the sort of thing that I would like.  Maybe one day I will take the time to watch it all.  Until then, I must rely on the basic knowledge that the characters in Game of Thrones live in an epic quasi-Medieval fantasy world, doing epic quasi-Medieval fantasy things, and occasionally reminding each other that winter is coming.  

For example:

[Somebody is fighting a dragon.]

[They pause.]

Somebody: Winter is coming.

Dragon: Yes, winter is coming.

[They resume fighting.]

Wait a Minute . . . We ARE Having a Mummy Resurgence

In a recent post, I opined that mummies should be the next big thing in popular horror.  Now it turns out that next summer there will be a major mummy movie, starring Tom Cruise.  The trailer was released last week.  

I almost think that I should blog about other things that I want, and see if they come true.

I could start with the dinosaurs returning, but that might be taking things too far.  

Maybe We Could Have a Mummy Resurgence

The Halloween season is coming to an end.  Soon the last of the plastic skeletons and fake spiderwebs will be removed from front yards.  Normally Halloween inspires me to blog, but this year I just didn’t feel it, for a variety of reasons.

I do have one thought in the general field of spookiness.  We are currently in a zombie craze, centered on The Walking Dead.  And before that we had a long period of vampire popularity, centered on the Twilight books and movies, as well as various television shows.

My hope is that the next stock horror creature to capture the public’s imagination will be the mummy.  Compared to vampires and zombies, mummies are more closely based in historical reality (except of course for the rising from the dead part). We would get a chance to visit the ancient and alien world of the pharaohs, where the Nile winds its way through the desert sands in the shadow of strange stone monuments. 

Plus we’d get to use cool words like sarcophagus, sphinx, and obelisk.

Star Wars and Otherwise Name Confusion

Before I saw the newest Star Wars movie, I blogged my worries about it.  

Ever since I saw it, I have been wanting to blog my reaction.  I don’t know if I’ll ever get that post finished. 

I do feel that I have gotten a little closer now that I have resolved my confusion regarding Riley Keough, Rilo Kiley, and Kylo Ren.  

My Star Wars Worries (or, Star Worries)

The new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, will be opening on Friday.  I don't plan to see it until the end of December, and I will do my best to avoid reviews until then.  But I'm going to go ahead and express my worries.  

I come from the generation whose younger years were essentially defined by the original trilogy–the movies, and, maybe even more importantly, the associated toys, provided the common mythology of our childhoods.  And it was my generation whose entrance into adulthood was greeted by the prequel trilogy.

The prequels clearly weren't as good as the original trilogy.  But I still enjoyed them.  I remember walking out of The Phantom Menace and feeling the old feeling of wanting my own lightsaber, wanting to swing it as I sneaked around the dark corners of a space station, and hear the vroop vroop sound that it made as it cut through the air.  

At the time of the prequels, the general feeling was mixed—that there were some good parts, and some parts that weren't good.  But in the ensuing years, popular sentiment was evolved such that now the only socially acceptable opinion on the prequels is the following three statements:

1. "The Star Wars prequels were the worst movies ever made."

and therefore

2. "They ruined my life."

and therefore

3. "George Lucas must be killed."

(And, I would note, the omnipresence of these sentiments has pretty much destroyed what enjoyment I did get out of the prequels.)

I doubt that the new movie will generate the ill will that the prequels did.  I'm sure that J. J. Abrams knows which buttons to push, as well as which buttons not to push (such as the Jar Jar button), to get the desired audience reaction.  But at the same time, I can't help thinking that the new movie might come across as a transparent copy of the original trilogy.  

The comparison that comes to mind: The prequels were like what would have happened if the Beatles had gotten back together in the late Seventies and made some albums that nobody liked.  The Force Awakens is like what would happen if somebody were to hire professional songwriters to write an album in the style of Sixties Beatles, and then get America's best Beatles cover band to record the album.  

And so, ultimately, I worry that with the new movie, the situation will be the reverse of what happened with the sequels—everyone else will love it unreservedly, and I will be left feeling that maybe it wasn't quite satisfying.

Halloween Gets Real

The Halloween season is coming, or perhaps it has been here for a few weeks.  As my friend Brian recently said, Halloween has taken over the whole of October, just as Christmas controls the whole of December.  And I can't help noticing that a Spirit Halloween store has been operating in the site of a closed Office Depot in the local shopping center since late August.  

I have blogged much blogging about Halloween over the years.  (Just click the Halloween tag below to read the old posts, and analyze them for inconsistencies.)  Halloween fascinates me because it's the time when we pretend that our monstrous fantasies could be real.  But mostly Halloween for me has been an abstraction. No one ever invites me to any Halloween parties, and I am probably too old to go trick-or-treating (based on the fact that if I want candy, I can drive to the store and buy some.)  That changed last year, when my place of employment held an event in which we were invited to come to work in costume.  I went with my Spock costume from 2001—pointy rubber ears, a blue pullover sweater, and a Starfleet insignia that I made by cutting out a piece of cardboard and painting it gold.

Now I am starting to worry about what to do this year.  Should I be Spock again, or try something else?  I want something simple, because it's just a work event and there's no cash prize for best costume. Possibly the simplest costume would be Han Solo, because it requires only a white shirt, black pants, and a black vest.  But I don't think that I could carry it off.  Han Solo is a charismatic figure, and I don't have that kind of charisma, or really any charisma at all. 

Another simple option would be to dress like Harry Potter, because, well, I kind of look like Harry Potter already.  But I've never read any Harry Potter books or seen any Harry Potter movies, and generally have no knowledge of Harry Potter.  And someone would say to me, "Are you ready to stop Wingledorf from stealing the magic Thumblewump?"

And I'd just say, "Whaaaa . . . ?"

Or maybe I could try a noncommittal and apathetic costume, in which I wear a really long scarf, and tell people that maybe I'm Harry Potter, or maybe I'm the fourth Doctor Who.

Yoda Best

A week or so ago I was walking by some tennis courts in a park adjacent to the local public high school.  I noticed a great deal of writing in chalk on the concrete walkways near the courts.  From what I could tell, the writing was a tribute from the members of the high school's girls tennis team to two team members who were graduating.  

Part of the tribute was the words "YODA BEST" (i. e., "you're the best"), accompanied by a drawing of Yoda's face. Normally, observing the activities of today's high school students makes me feel really, really old—or rather it makes me understand that I am really, really old, because I actually feel very young; deep down I feel as if I'm only a few years older than a high school student myself.  But here was something that made me feel that maybe I wasn't all that old after all—high school students referencing a character whom I knew when I was in high school.  

Indeed, by the time that I was in high school, Yoda already seemed like a relic of the distant past, just as Yoda probably seems to the student who did the chalking (although, to them, the distant past might only mean the prequels).

It's been almost exactly 35 years since we first saw Yoda.  

Questioning the Nerd Prom

Last weekend, Washington witnessed the 2015 White House Correspondents' Dinner, or, as it's come to be called, the "Nerd Prom".  I object to this name, because I don't think that any of the people involved are actually nerds.  They may not be football players, but successful journalists need un-nerdish traits like charisma, well-developed inter-personal skills, and some measure of physical attractiveness.  At the same time, they don't need knowledge in any sort of technical or abstract field. (I imagine that if the average White House correspondent doesn't hit a key on his computer for fifteen minutes and the screen saver comes on, he immediately panics and calls in the tech support person.)  

Or, to look at it another way, have any of those people ever even played Dungeons & Dragons?

Someone should walk around the room with a camera and ask the assembled personages their opinion on the following controversial topic: "Should elven fighter/magic-users be allowed to wear metal armor while casting spells?"

And we could see who is capable of formulating a response.

Five Questions About The Hunger Games

Since the premiere of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1 a few weeks ago, I've developed some questions about the series.  (I could probably answer these questions by reading the books, or watching the movies, or just doing some internet searching, but I have no desire to read the books or watch the movies, and I am too lazy to do the internet searching.)

1. What is a mockingjay? Is it a mockingbird, or a blue jay (or some other kind of jay)?  Or is it some kind of bird that doesn't exist in our world, which would imply that the setting of The Hunger Games is an alternate universe which diverged from our own sometime after the evolution of anatomically modern Homo sapiens around 200,000 years ago, but still long enough ago to allow for the evolution of a novel species of songbird?

2. Why is everyone hungry? Since they live in an advanced technological society, shouldn't they know how to grow crops?  Did they lose the knowledge of how to plant corn?

3. Why is a brief period of gladiatorial combat between teenagers sufficient to distract an entire population from the fact that they're starving?

4. Why does everyone love Jennifer Lawrence so much?

5. What is a mockingjay? 

Cthulhu Is Real!

I have not blogged for a long time.  There are a lot of things that I want to do, including blogging, but spending most of my days at work makes me too tired to do much of anything else.  But now I have come across something that roused me from my torpor.      

I have blogged in the past about organisms being given scientific names that honor rock stars and other celebrities.  

I have also blogged about my enjoyment of the gothic horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft.  

And now the two elements have come together.  In a recent paper in the online journal PLoS ONE, a group of biologists have named a new species of parabasalid (a type of single-celled eukaryote) after Cthulhu, the otherworldly entity who is the defining character in Lovecraft's fantasy universe.  The new organism, Cthulhu macrofasciculumque, lives symbiotically in the digestive tracts of termites.  (Normally I restrict my blogging about biological nomenclature to extinct organisms, but I ventured out of the realm of paleontology for this one.)

The paper describes the derivation of the genus name as follows:

The name is based on the fictional many tentacled, cephalopod-headed demon found in the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, specifically The Call of Cthulhu. The tentacle-headed appearance given by the coordinated beat pattern of the anterior flagellar bundle of Cthulhu cells is reminiscent of this demon. The name is supposedly impossible to pronounce as it comes from an alien language, but currently it is most often pronounced “ke-thoo-loo”.

Lovecraft scholars might quibble at the description of Cthulhu as a "demon".

The scientists also named another genus of parabasalid, Cthylla, after a daughter of Cthulhu created by author Brian Lumley in a Lovecraft-inspired story.  (I was not aware that Cthulhu had any children.)  

What is most surprising to me about all this is not that it happened, but that it didn't happen a long time ago. Given the popularity of Lovecraft's fiction among smart, nerdy people, I would have thought that "Cthulhu" would have been made a genus name thirty or forty years ago.  And I also would have thought that the name would have been used for something more impressive than a protist that lives in the gut of a termite.  (What is is that they say about real estate–the three most important things are location, location, location?)

Ornithological Notes on The Hobbit

I finally saw The Hobbit, despite my earlier difficulties.  One thing that stood out to me was the use of CGI songbirds, particularly in association with the wizard Radagast the Brown (who, I found out in researching this post, is also the seventh Doctor Who).  I thought that I would share some ideas on the identification of these birds, although in all likelihood someone somewhere else has probably done a better job of this already. 

The birds that live under Radagast's hat looked like House Sparrows (Passer domesticus).  I also seem to remember that they were both males, but I'd have to watch the movie again to be sure.  

The bird that alerts Radagast to the location of the Necromancer is very clearly an American Robin (Turdus migratorius).  I found it somewhat disconcerting to see such a characteristically North American bird in the setting of pseudo-European Middle Earth.  

And the bird identified as a thrush that flies to the lair of Smaug at the end of the movie actually is a thrush, though I couldn't identify the exact species.  

Radagast the Brown's talent for communicating with birds was acknowledged in the world of paleontology in 2002, when his name was applied to Paraortygoides radagasti, a fossil bird from the Eocene.

Remembrance of Dragons Past

My friend John alerted me that there is a new website where one can purchase pdf downloads of out-of-print Dungeons & Dragons publications.  As a former D&D player, the site generates a great deal of interest in me.  Part of it is nostalgia for items that I remember from my younger years.  But a bigger part is curiosity about all the things that I have never seen before, because evidently there was a lot more published for D&D than what I could find at the local Toys R Us when I was in sixth grade.  

My attempts to play D&D never seemed to work out the way that I wanted. (Playing a full and enjoyable D&D campaign remains an item on my bucket list.)  In my experience, the problem with Dungeons & Dragons is that, in order to play it in a satisfying manner, one needs both maturity and free time, which vary in inverse proportion over the course of one's life.  I started playing D&D in middle school, when my friends and I had lots of free time to play, but very little maturity; as a result, our games tended to fall apart or break down into pointless arguments.  I played some in high school, when people were more grown up, but it was harder to find time to play And I even played a little in college; at that point, the other players and I were mature enough that I felt that I was finally playing the game the way that it should be played.  But the responsibilities and opportunities of college life took up too much of our time to allow for much D&D; our gaming group only got together two or three times.  

I wonder if, in thirty or forty years, we'll start seeing people in nursing homes playing Dungeons & Dragons, in the way that today's nursing home inhabitants might play bridge.