Linear Clouds

Linear clouds—that sounds like a jazz album.

A Fun Post-Halloween Activity

Halloween is eleven days behind us.  Yet, while walking around yesterday, I saw that many people still had their porch pumpkins.  Perhaps Halloween has become such an important holiday that we want to extend the Halloween spirit into the first weeks of November, in the same way in which we wish to extend the spirit of Christmas through the end of December.  

Thus, I am providing step-by-step instructions for a fun activity by which one can keep a little bit of that special Halloween magic alive.

1. Assemble a group of a dozen or more of your friends.

2. Provide each member of the group with a dark, hooded robe which will fully obscure his identity.

3. Provide each member of the group with a battery-powered lantern, ideally one with a design reminiscent of archaic candle- or oil-based lanterns.  (Bonus points are awarded if you refer to your lanterns as “lanthorns”.)  

4. Shortly before midnight, congregate in an uninhabited area such as a cemetery or woodland.  Don your robes and activate your lanterns.

5. Emerge from the uninhabited area and walk silently in single file down the sidewalk, holding your lanterns in front of you.  

6. Select a house which is clearly occupied, but whose occupants no one in your group knows.

7. If possible, fully surround the house, or, if prevented from doing so by fences or other obstacles, form a semi-circle in the front yard.  

8. Begin chanting in deep and ominous tones, preferably in Latin.  

9. When the homeowner emerges to question or challenge your group, do not acknowledge him in any way except by increasing the volume of your chanting and the menace of your intonation . . . 

Okay, on second thought maybe it’s better to put Halloween behind us and start looking ahead to Thanksgiving.

The Osteology of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons, Part 10: The Owl

I finish this year’s set of Halloween skeleton posts with the owl (available for $19.49 at Target), which contains a unique and compelling mix of mistakes.  

As with other fake bird skeletons, this one has bones where the tail and wing feathers should be.   

And the sternum (which connects the ribs at the front of the body) looks much like the sternum of a human being, and not at all like the deeply-keeled avian sternum.  

But the biggest issue is the presence of ears.  Certain kinds of owls do have tufts of feathers on top of their heads which superficially resemble ears, but these tufts are not anatomically associated with the internal ear, and are not involved with the sense of hearing.  And even if owls did have external ears in the manner of mammals, mammalian external ears are cartilaginous, and not part of the bony structure of the skull, a mistake common to fake Halloween skeletons of various mammals.  Thus we see a compounded double error of confusing feather tufts with mammalian ears, and presenting mammalian ears as bony projections from the skull.

The Osteology of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons, Part 9: Snakes

It is interesting to note that all tetrapods (the land vertebrates, i. e. amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) have essentially the same skeleton.  The bones vary in size and shape between species, but whether it’s a salamander, an armadillo, or a condor, the basic skeletal elements are mostly the same.  The biggest potential variation is that some elements can be lost due to evolution.  Snakes (which are, evolutionarily speaking, a highly successful group of legless lizards) are an extreme case, lacking almost everything except the skull and the vertebrae and associated ribs.  (There is also a hyoid bone and, in a few species, tiny remnant hind limbs.)

There are numerous plastic snake skeletons available.  

This one (available at Amazon for $14.94) lacks ribs entirely.  

This other one (available at Target for $12.60) has ribs, although they are not exactly realistic.  

In both of the above cases, the skull is much too massive and lizard-like, unlike the highly specialized, and generally weird, skulls of actual snakes.  

There is even this two-headed skeleton, which was once available at Spirit Halloween.  It suffers the previously observed problems of lacking ribs and having an unsnakish skull.  But two-headedness is indeed a real phenomenon in snakes and other reptiles.  It has been known to occur in the squamates (the lizard and snake group), the turtles, and even Hyphalosaurus, a Cretaceous choristoderan, but as far as I know there are no examples from the archosaurs (crocodilians, pterosaurs, dinosaurs, and birds).

The Osteology of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons, Part 8: The Octopus

I have addressed the matter of Halloween skeletons for invertebrates before with a post about a spider “skeleton” in 2017.  (There is also a scorpion “skeleton” available.)  But I felt that I had to take note of this octopus “skeleton” (available for $14.99 at Spirit Halloween), because it takes the fake invertebrate skeleton concept to new heights of ridiculousness.  A spider at least has a rigid exoskeleton, which might lead someone to think that it has a bony internal skeleton.  But doesn’t pretty much everyone know that an octopus has no virtually hard parts?

Introducing a New Year of Halloween Skeletons

The Halloween season is here again, the time of year when it feels as if there should be some cool adventure to be had.  I don’t know exactly what it would be.  A full zombie apocalypse might be too much to ask, but something should happen.  And of course it never does.   

Also it is the spooky time of year when the days are overtaken by darkness, and I am again inspired to undertake my unrealized dream of writing fiction, particularly some sort of fantastical horror.  And sometimes I’ll get an idea, or even start to write something, but it never works out, because I lack storytelling ability.      

And again I find myself critiquing the scientific accuracy of fake animal skeletons used as Halloween decorations.  On would think that after two years and seven installments, I would run out of material.  But I keep finding more (mostly) wonky skeletons.  Using fake skeletons, both human and animal, in Halloween decorating has become a huge trend; indeed, in 2017, the year in which I started this series, the Wall Street Journal had an article on the popularity of such decorative skeletons. 

Here are links for the series from the past two years:

The Home Depot Tyrannosaurus

The Raven

Assorted Mammals

The, Um, Spider

The Home Depot Triceratops

The Bat

Frogs

The Graveyard of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons (not technically part of the series, but related)

Ric Ocasek

Rick Ocasek, the leader of one of my favorite bands, the Cars, died in September.

My time writing this blog has seen the deaths of members of some of my favorite bands, specifically Ray Manzarek, Keith Emerson, and Greg Lake, as well as of others who, though not among my absolute favorites, were still immensely talented musicians whose work I enjoyed, like Tom Petty and David Bowie.  I haven’t blogged about any rock star deaths (with the exception of a brief mention of Clarence Clemons), but I felt that I had to blog on Ocasek because the Cars were a band for whom the height of their success aligned significantly with own life; Heartbeat City was one of the first albums (if not the first album) that I ever bought, back when albums came in the form of cassette tapes.  

The Cars were kind of a classic rock band, and kind of an alternative band.  And some people even see them  as something of a punk band, or at least punk-adjacent, but to me they sound more like an art rock band that played only shorter songs.  And whatever they were, they had lots of Top 40 songs in the Eighties, which shows how much better popular music in the Eighties was than popular music today, because today a band that awesome (if one still existed) couldn’t get within a mile of the Top 40.  

*        *        *        *        *        *        *

Coincidentally, just prior to Ocasek’s death, I was considering writing a humorous blog post about giving up on the modern world entirely, and going “Full Generation X”.  

(I don’t know what particular aspect of modern life would spur me to abandon it, but I suspect that it might be K-pop, which, for those who don’t know, is an entertainment phenomenon in which a group of twenty to thirty 14-year-old Asian Michael Jackson impersonators performs synchronized dance moves.) 

Once I went Full Generation X, my personality would undergo profound changes, including:

*I would speak only in quotes from the movie Heathers.  

*My memory would start to get fuzzy around the last year of Seinfeld, and would end entirely following the final season of Friends.

*Whatever cognitive processes that had once occurred in my brain would be replaced completely by Cars songs.