2010: Week 42 Blots

BLOT: (24 Oct 2010 - 11:50:24 PM)

13 Days to Halloween (7) - Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan"

We are now at the halfway point of this year's horror suggestions. Believe it or not, I do not plan these things in advance. Sometimes, an idea for something will strike me a day or two early, but I mostly go with what struck me sometime during the day as being worthy of inclusion. If I do this next year, and I probably will, I plan to plan ahead. It will get rid of some of the brain drain that the thing causes.

For tonight, though, let me direct you to Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan", one of the most cited pieces of Weird Fiction not penned by H. P. Lovecraft. Written in the 1890s (published 1890, then expanded four years later into its current form), "Pan" is one part a simple and heavy-handed Victorian denouncement of science and feminine wiles and one part the progenitor of the sort of fiction that Ramsey Campbell would come to write: a moody, uncertain exploration of nature's reality. The title might be misleading, since it is not [generally] about a satyr-shaped nature god but about peeling back the flimsy "glamor" that humans require in place in order to live in a world more awe-inspiring and terrible than they can properly deal with. In this light, it is an echo of something that Nietzsche says in The Birth of Tragedy: "Those illuminated illusory pictures of the Sophoclean hero, briefly put, the Apollonian mask, are...necessary creations of a glimpse into the inner terror of nature, bright spots, so to speak, to heal us from the horrifying night of the crippled gaze." Lines which themselves reflect a moment from Moby Dick: "All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!" The Machenian-cum-Campbellian sentiment is perhaps most charged by Lovecraft's opening lines of "The Call of Cthulhu": "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."

These two halves, or parts, of "The Great God Pan" are unfornately heavily weighted towards the simplistic "She's a witch a slut and she kills men of good standing!" storyline. In the recent Chaosium print of The Three Impostors, the best parts of "Pan"—only at the beginning and the ending—take up about 10 of the novella's 70 pages. The rest is an interestingly styled hint at sex and strange wonders, and more than once made me think of some Victorian era Hell-Bound Heart. Those other 60 pages are not without merit, I just think you could get the entire gist of the story, and all of its horror and implication, by sticking to only the first section, named "The Experiment". During this section, a scientist tells his friend that he has found the way to pierce the veil and to see the truth of the world, what the ancients called "seeing the great god Pan". The subject of his experiment is a young girl, named Mary, whom the scientist considers his plaything since he rescued her "from the gutter" and has no compunction against working on her brain in such a way. Machen briefly hints that the girl is in love, trusting this older scientist, and gives in. After she wakes up from the experiment, she is obviously seeing some truth that the others cannot, and strange wonder gives quickly away to terror. She does not recover, laying in bed broken. The scientist waves it away with, "'Yes,' said the doctor, still quite cool, 'it is a great pity; she is a hopeless idiot. However, it could not be helped; and, after all, she has seen the Great God Pan.'"

From here, we learn of another girl, named Helen, who was regularly out in the woods as a youth. Those who would sometimes follow her or hang out with her would report seeing strange, horrible things. One friend, in particular, was broken by some experience in which Helen took part. Another youth, a boy, reports seeing a strange man with Helen. Later, Helen is in the city, and lots of strange going ons occur, mostly involving well-to-do gentlemen sleazing it up around her. I am not sure if auto-erotic aphyxiation was a thing in Victorian England, but modern readers might note that most of the men killed are hung from bed posts, or wall hooks, or similar. It becomes known that the two women are somehow connected, and one of the male characters goes off to tend Helen's vagina-centered evil.

If you do read it, I suggest you first stop at the end of section one, and then only later go back and read the other seven sections.

You can read the full thing, and a decently typeset version thanks to kobek.com. Click that link for the PDF.

TAGS: 13 Days Until Halloween

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 42
BY MONTH: October 2010

BLOT: (24 Oct 2010 - 12:24:42 AM)

13 Days to Halloween (9 + 8) - Hodgson's "The Voice in the Night" and Lustmord's Rising

Due to a number of factors, didn't get to write #9 last night so I figured I would compress it and #8 into one entry today.

First up, we have a short story by the old master William Hope Hodgson: "The Voice in the Night" (click to read, pdf generated by ManyBooks). Hodgson's Nightland and House on the Borderland have both been quite inspirational in the strange horror and weird SF genres, and his paranormal investigator Carnacki is an early proto-type for pretty much any series involving a detective and the unknown. However, much of Hodgson's work was written in a deliberately opaque style, with massive sentences and subtle word play. "The Voice in the Night," one time adapted by Ishiro Honda—yes, that guy—into a weird Japanese horror movie called Mantango, manages to avoid most of Hodgson's less favorable techniques and focuses more on mood and the unseen.

A man rows up to a ship sitting still in a becalmed sea and begs for food. After he gets the food, he starts telling his story. He and his fiancee were abandoned by the crew of a sinking vessel and left to fend for themselves. They come across a ship floating off of an island, and try to make temporary shelter, there. Except everywhere are strange patches of fungus. Over time, they began to find the fungus growing on their skin, and they started craving the fungus as a food stuff. Which pretty much brings us to the story's present, and the strange lumbering thing seen in the raft, and the truth about the fungus on the boat.

"Voice" is an early example of the genetically infectious contaminate stories, where something ingested begins to take you over (Stephen King has two entries into the genre: one involving infection from a beer can and another involving, and I quote, "meteor shit". The concept's drift through Japanese horror is worth noting. There have been several movies about infection taking over, spreading throughout technology, driving you to do something, to spread the infection further. Books/Movies like Ringu are famous for it, but even a number of their slasher and gonzo gore types some character becoming infected and altered from within. Looking back along Japanese genre movies, Matango, which alters "Voice" but sticks to the basic elements of horror from it, is an early example of the theme, which means Hodgson in part helped to inspire one of the common ideas of Japanese horror.

On another arm of the medium spectrum is an album by Lustmord, the Welsh Godfather of Dark Ambient, recorded live in 2006 (on June 6, 2006, even): Rising. Often written out as Rising 06.06.06. While many of Lustmord's albums would make pitch perfect soundtrack albums for haunted houses and such, Rising is a great starter set to give you a wide range of several of his more visceral experimentations.

In it, he plays off several discomforting hues from his sound pallette. Something like tortured whales scream out with grinding intensity, followed the clarion call of the damned. A low, intermittent drone peeks out from the back. You can hear these three simple pieces from the Lustmord bag of tricks in this sample (2mb mp3, about 2 minutes). That is from track 2: "Decompression". If you get a chance to reach for one moody-as-hell horror soundtrack this year, this is the one I recommend.

TAGS: 13 Days Until Halloween 2010

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 42
BY MONTH: October 2010

BLOT: (22 Oct 2010 - 01:19:05 AM)

13 Days to Halloween (10) - Adam Green's Frozen

Let me put to you a simple, maddening fact: horror remakes are utterly superfluous. We are talking about a genre carved with the stone of simple premises. An X comes to Y and terrorizes Z. Aliens crash land in a small New Mexico town and chase a group of school kids out camping? DONE.

See Frozen, Adam Green's movie about three twenty or so college students who decide to go back up in the ski lift one last time and, after a miscommunication about who is up the mountain, get caught six stories above the ground during a winter storm with hard, icy snow beneath them. It was Sunday night, it will be Friday morning before the resort re-opens. And they are just dumb enough to do most things wrong: aren't quite dressed warm enough, left their cellphone back in the lodge (which a lot of skiers do, apparently, to get away from it), kind of snuck off last minute so no one knows exactly where they are at. Et cetera.

The movie starts with a close focus on the three of them, and will spend most of its time on just the three of them. Or at least, you know, what's left of them. The horrors are mostly real world: frostbite, numbness, lack of food and water, and wolves. It is moody once it starts, and keenly desperate, and low-fi. You watch the scene as Emma Bell's Parker pulls her frozen hand away from the metal bar, and then silently stares at the ruined, broken flesh...and it works. She gives in and urinates on herself in one scene, and then breaks down and starts crying, and you undrstand. Life sucks for her. You get the emotion and you feel, well, cold. Very cold.

Putting aside the so-called natural dialogue that doesn't quite sit, and the not-quite realistic wolves—they are actual wolves, not CG, which is cool, but they are played off as ruthless rather than more animalistic—the biggest problem with watching this movie is going to be the "I could have don that better!" syndrome. If you watch it with more than one friend, it is guaranteed that someone is getting out a chalkboard and is going to map out the relative tensile strength of jacket-ropes and angular momentum used to soften impacts of falls. Try heading over to something like IMDB.com, you'll see what I mean (no links for Satan).

Here is my recommendation. Turn the lights off. Turn the thermostat down to about 65 degrees. Sit back, and watch it all in one go with no distractions. Stay in the mood for this one.

TAGS: 13 Days Until Halloween 2010

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 42
BY MONTH: October 2010

BLOT: (21 Oct 2010 - 02:06:06 AM)

13 Days to Halloween (11) - William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"

There are many ghost stories and campfire tales that become keen in their last lines. You see the practice as far back as Ambrose Bierce [at least, I've always intended to go back further and research], who liked italicising final sentences so that you realize that someone had been a ghost the whole time: "There, on the dresser, was his mama's pink comb!". By the time HP Lovecraft picked up the habit, and EC Comics made an entire industry out of final frame twists; there was fixated in short horror the idea of the finishing blow. These twists did not quite work in longer horror, where the twist usually had to be embedded in the story and not simply spouted off at the end. Some studios, such as Amicus, had fun with a few surprises, but it was after horror's first (Universal) and second (Hammer) heydays that movies and longer horror tomes delved more and more into final-frame trickery, probably due to a generation of horror fans raised on the milk of EC teats. The once noble "twist" became a tired cliché of creature features adoring the final frame of a supposedly vanquished creature roaring back to angry life. New an non-fans cite "sequel bait", but it's not so much sequel bait as a lot of horror writers don't understand the purpose of the final punch. They are throwing in your face that the monster cannot be beaten, not really. This is false. All things can come to an end. The final punch is not for cheap shots, but to kick the legs out from under the reader/viewer: you undermine their comfort zone. And, if you do it right, it sticks with them for a bit.

But what about a side genre to this, a story that does not become horror until the final few lines? A lot of the MR James and Edith Wharton (I KNOW!) ghost stories were around this sort. Some somebody would meant some other somebody, and surprise, they were a ghost! Nothing too shocking there, because you were told you were reading a ghost story and so of course someone is going to be a ghost. What if you, instead, were reading a short story about an old town eccentric, an old woman whose one true love disappeared all those years ago, a child of the South whosepoor life was defined by the men inside of it. And what if you were not told that the last section, alone, makes it at least nearly a horror story? And, while I am asking questions, you were told that William Faulkner wrote it?

"A Rose For Emily", like CP Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper", can be read with or without the horror trappings contained within it. It is not hard to picture two stage productions—one focusing on the macabre and one focusing on kind of a genteel melodrama—coming to completely different terms with the handling of the story. I would say this is not unimportant (remember, kids, Uncle Doug always seeks for the hidden allegory in high horror). For now, though, read it in the simplest light and ask yourself one question: what the crap do you really know about all those neighbors to whom you say hello but never dig one whit deeper?

You can read the rest here: "A Rose For Emily".

TAGS: 13 Days Until Halloween

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 42
BY MONTH: October 2010

BLOT: (20 Oct 2010 - 12:23:03 PM)

What We Actually Fear vs What Horror Movies Tell Us to Fear

When the above graphic first came to me, it was much shorter. The top section (then, the section to the left) was simply bankruptcy, failure, and infidelity. The bottom (then right) section: zombies, vampires, ghosts. The middle was just clowns. I thought about it right as I was going to sleep. My last thought I remember from that night was, "Oh, and spiders!" When I woke up the next morning, brain parasites had been added.

The reason the graphic came to me was because of movies like Frozen and Open Water. Movies where it is simply wo/man versus the elements. A horror movie about being stuck in a ski lift doesn't really sound like a horror movie, but imagine being actually stuck in the ski lift. Freezing. Over night. Or drifting out in the ocean, getting tired and increasingly a target for things like sharks. Think about the time that you locked yourself out of your house and wasn't sure who to call, or the time you got stranded with no phone down an unlit road, or lost on a hiking trail. Those real life incidents are nothing like horror movies, but they are terrifying enough, in their own right, to make you change your habits (have a spare key made, always charge your cell-phone, get a trail map first) for the rest of your life.

There is a disjunct between the things we actually fear—rejection and a messed up bank account—and the things horror movies are full of—the restless dead and space mutants. This is not altogether an accident. Horror movies are a form of fantasy as much as anything else. "How can you watch that garbage?" Because I don't actually have to worry about meteorites creating a race of super bugs.

Just in keep in mind that most good horror movies use the unreal elements to discuss real things. Zombie outbreaks represent a break down in our ordered lives. Aliens represent the threat of outsiders and new diseases. Vampires represent lust and fear of death. Axe wielding maniacs represent our distrust of others. Ghosts are often signs of guilt and the belief that we can fix others before we fix ourselves. Demons are emblematic of the universe being against us. And they are also fiery eyed monsters. And zombies are also flesh devourers. And ghosts are also shrieking, long-haired monstrosities. And aliens also drain our spinal fluid. Have a good time and contemplate the essential nihilistic nature of the universe: it is win-win.

Back to the graphic at hand. I knew when I made it that someone will come along and go, "But there was a horror movie about that!" or, "What about?" or, "I'm actually scared of that!" I know. That's partially why Ghosts and Children straddle the line between things people might be actually afraid and are also outside of it. Because we can fear just about anything. The graphic isn't mean to be accurate in a scientific journal sort of way—it talks about Jon Mikl Thor shower scenes for goodness sake—but more just a "Doug was having fun" sort of thing.

I might make a longer, larger version. And I might not. Anyhow, enjoy.

TAGS: Horror

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 42
BY MONTH: October 2010

BLOT: (20 Oct 2010 - 01:14:11 AM)

This might sound silly, but you should check out The Parking Lot Movie

Tonight I was sitting back, tired from work and needing to relax a little bit, and I caught PBS's Independent Lens, where they show indie movies (mostly docs?) on Tuesday night. The movie playing was The Parking Lot Movie. If you were to ask me if a movie about a group of semi-social intellectuals working in an indie-minded parking lot would be worth watching, I would have thought you were being silly. I would have been wrong. This is a seriously watchable movie. Sure, watching the guys go on and on about deep thinking and then seeing clips of them stand on customer cars and stuff (in at least one scene) can grate a bit. But anyone who got a college degree and wasn't sure what to do with it. Anyone who has longed for a slightly grimier life. Anyone who has worked a demeaning job to make ends meet, and had to put up with crap from someone just because they judged you by surroundings. Anyone who has learned the value of a good boss and great coworkers. You need to see it. You'll appreciate at least a bit of it. Everyone else, I guess just watch it and sneer.

The Parking Lot Movie Official Trailer from The Parking Lot Movie on Vimeo.

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 42
BY MONTH: October 2010

BLOT: (19 Oct 2010 - 01:42:44 PM)

13 Days to Halloween (12) - Lansdale + Coscarelli's "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road"

If I was ever forced to pick five horror writers and had to stick with just those five for the rest of my life, Joe R. Lansdale would be on that list. His horror output might be outweighed by his Weird Texas Butt Kicking genre, but even his least true-blue horror tale have a sense of menace and out-of-place'dness. Combining elements of sometimes horror scribes and sometimes cynics like Ambrose Bierce and Robert E. Howard with an unflinching love of Texas and blue collar, red neck poetry, Lansdale delights in a no-holds-barred form of writing. Pushing the reader up against an uncomfortable wall and then pouring more on. He does not, at least not always, subscribe to the sexual deviance of Edward Lee or the unflinching word gore of Jack Ketchum, but instead lays out the strange, violent inner soul of humanity living in an inhuman universe. People die, get molested, skinned alive, and are tortured by inner demons. We are just along for the ride.

"Incident On and Off a Mountain Road", a name reminiscent of Bierce's "An Incident on Owl Creek Bridge", was originally pubished in 1991 in Night Visions 8, a hardcover collection of original horror stories and was collected in High Cotton (which I recommend to just about anyone interested in Landsdale's short, horror fiction) recently. It is about a woman driving on a mountain road in the middle of the night who hits a car left stranded. When she gets out of investigate the crash, she finds the car's owner being assaulted by a large, monstrous man.

In the premier episode of the entirely too short-lived Masters of Horror, Don Coscarelli keeps by-and-large to the original short. Bree Tanner starts out all twee. Fragile. So ignorant of obvious clues that in flashbacks she laughs at a man talking about killing and self-empowerment on a first date (later to be her crazy, abusive husband). These flashbacks, laying out her tragic story, are also her empowerment as she uses past lessons and travails to overcome current ones. She embraces his philosophy of do the unexpected. She experiments and plays at traps and tortures, though many fail to prevent the onslaught. The episode pushes her closer and closer to the edge of do-or-for-real-die, and no more playing around. That's pretty much the issue at stake: can she be monster enough to survive the monster in front of her?

"Incident" is roughly in the same category as I Spit on Your Grave, but better balances the abuse against the woman with the abuse the woman dishes out. Where Spit failed—making the revenge killings feel like cheap gore shots as opposed to an honest exploration of how monsters are made and how not every victim is undeserving—"Incident" manages to hold the theme steady by introducing all the various monsters upfront. It then later contrasts the behind-the-scenes nature of life's real evils against the over-the-top backdrop of Moonface and his country domain.

TAGS: 13 Days Until Halloween Night, 2010

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 42
BY MONTH: October 2010

BLOT: (18 Oct 2010 - 03:57:59 PM)

13 Days Until Halloween Night (13) - Edgar Allan Poe's "Berenice"

Written 1835, the same year he married 13 year old Virginia Clem, "Berenice" is sometimes cited as Poe's first horror tale. Not true, but it looks to be the first time he published a horror story under his own name. It might be of interest to know that the most common version of the text is expurgated. Upon its publication, public disdain at the "unnecessary" depravity of its ending led to a removal of four paragraphs. In the wider context of the thing, those four paragraphs do very little besides make the main character's actions a slice more sympathetic, but it seems to have worked a bit to settle down the public. It was reprinted in the second volume of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabasque, and the copy I have has the full version, but copies I have seen in all of the Complete Tales sort of reprints has been short of those four paragraphs.

So, for my first of 13 Halloween goodies, I'll start with this: Poe's first [with name] horror story, and a classic example of censorship in the horror genre. It is also a good example of Poe's largest failing: his overwrought prose.

The unedited text of "Berenice" taken from Southern Literary Messenger

TAGS: 13 Days to Halloween Night, 2010

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 42
BY MONTH: October 2010

BLOT: (18 Oct 2010 - 12:03:08 PM)

The Out-of-Town Sarah, The 13 Days to Halloween, The LJ Revamp, and the Busy Weekend (weddings, homework, other stuff, oh my!)

For reasons I am not sure, I like to do these "catch-up" posts in reverse chronological order. This one will be no different. Warning, a little bit of an info dump.

We'll start with my Livejournal revamp. My friends list currently shows about 50 friends. Of that number, about 30 have not posted in the last month and I'd guess as many as 20 have not posted within a season or two (ten or more have not posted in over year). I'm not going to delete anyone, because I've learned through experience that even those not posting are occasionally coming back to check up and comment, and some will go through journal restarts in the future, so I will leave my old friends where they are. I am going to go out, and have been going out, to find people with like interests and those who quote the same sort of books and movies that I do, and have been adding them. Not a whole lot, nothing like SAS (serial adder syndrome), but maybe a half-dozen or two. And, in a month or two, maybe another half-dozen or two. I mentioned to a friend, recently, that LJ has gone through three stages for me. First, there was the time when my friends list was entirely like-interest. Then, around 2004-2007, it was largely like-region people that I knew personally. Now, since about 2009 on, those have moved on or just stopped updating, and so I am returning it to more of a like-interest format.

In my search for people that would be cool to add, I found someone doing a "31 days to Halloween" movie/clip countdown. Which reminds me, today is something like 13 days to Halloween Night (I think, math is a strong point of mine, but today is not very mathematically vibed...it might be be 12...that's ok, too). At any rate, tonight will see the first of 13 Days to Halloween Night, the thing I try to do (and often fail) every year to share some free or lesser known mood-setting stories and movies and radio shows and such. I think I will start with Poe's "Berenice".

Sarah went out of town this morning for a week-long conference. I have to admit that I don't know which one but I know roughly where it is located so I guess I could find it if I needed to find it. At some point, she is going to be one of the speakers. This is kind of a big deal, in that way some otherwise non-issues can be a big deal in particular contexts. So many of her peers (not chemists, per se, but the particular filed of chemistry she is in) are older men. For there to be a mid-20s woman getting up in front of them to speak and network, I know it's nerve-wracking for her and an experience worth bragging about. Hopefully they will be polite and not scoff too much. From what I have seen, she is already starting to get their respect bit by bit, so I am sure she will be just fine. Might blush a bit while actually doing it, though.

While she is gone, I am going to focus on getting a couple of projects knocked out of the water, so that we will hopefully have some spare time for each other next week. Our sixth anniversary falls next Tuesday, which is also the day we are going out to Scottsboro to talk to a Chemistry class. My half, the latter half, is about scientific ethics and Sarah will talk some about scientific practicalities. The gist of the dual talks will be, "Is science worth it?" and hopefully we can reach something like a "Yes, but it's not a free pass" in the middle. She will talk real-life failures of safety protocols and the dangers of contamination.

For food last night, we ate at Viet-Huong. I got a small vermicelli soup with beef brisket and a bowl of charred pork on more vermicelli. Except a small soup is something like a quart, which made it entirely too much food. However, both of those things are recommended for anyone who eats there and has always stuck to the clay pots and might want to try something different. Next time I go back, I'm going for the large soup with some bean sprouts and cucumber and tofu or something on the side. Make it a meal in a bowl. Earlier that day, we met with the teacher to whose class we are going to be giving the talk. Got the idea of time and sign in procedures. I have not actually re-entered the high school environment in a long time (since a brief trip to Hillcrest in 2004 or so, my first time in a high school since 1995). I wonder how it will feel being there more on the educator side?

Saturday was by and large taken up by the wedding of Laura (née Nabors) and Brandon Cripps. It was a pleasant outdoor affair, down at the old Depot in Huntsville. Sarah and I both got misty-eyed. It was pretty. The only "quirk" to the ceremony was a car that parked up on the Parkway kind of near the wedding and then the guy stood there and just watched for a bit. Fooking snipers, how do they work? After the ceremony we went in to the "Roundhouse" and had food and drinks for a couple of hours and got a chance to relax with Mandi and Jon, and Katie and Jason. People we haven't been able to see for a bit (last time I saw Mandi might have been several months ago).

Which brings us back to Friday. For some reason, I had it in my mind that there was something worth talking about on Friday but now, on Monday, I do not remember. I went to work, and the library was a little crazy because they were having a build-up event to that night's Midnight Madness. Meaning there was much shouting and playing in the library. Academic libraries are a weird mix, sometime. More studious and quiet most of the time, they have a propensity for being much louder, too. The only other thing I remember from Friday is...OH. OH. I remember it...

While at work, my cell phone ran out of juice. Sarah picks me up and we go over to the bank so she can get the money she needs for her trip, and can talk about a notice we got in the mail that was fine, as far as notices go, but had been torn open and we have no idea if it was accidentally or purposefully done so. I am out in the car and decide to plug in the car charger for the cell phone so it can start charging. At the time, we were going down to Sam & Greg's and were going to hang out in the park for a bit. After about two minutes, at the most, into charging my phone, lights go a little weird in the car. Turned out that was all it took to shut everything down and completely drain the battery. Sound ridiculous to you? It does to me. Here we are, with a phone barely charged above a zero, and a dead car battery. I can walk down to the campus PD but I feel a little weird asking them for a jump or assistance. I do walk down there and there is one woman behind the desk, typing up some sort of report and a guy in line. I am not sure if she was doing it for him or if he was waiting for her to finish. After about five minutes of no response from either of them, I walk back down to the car. Sarah has gone into the bank and asked if they can help her, but they take it as a request most unusual, and hand-wave about how they can't leave to do such a thing (despite, you know, one of them coming outside three minutes later to walk around on her smoke break...). The official vehicles near the bank can't be used to jump us off because that is some violation of their policy. And, the others that drove by just kept on driving by and staring at us. Not, you know, glancing. A few goose-necked with a force that probably required corrective procedures to put their spines back into place.

The upshot of the whole thing was Mai, Alicia's friend from Grant and current UAH student, and Mai's boyfriend had stopped by and he was able to give us the jump start we needed. Since we have power cables, it took all of about 30 seconds once he showed up. Since then, the car has ran fine. We've kept the radio off and generally not ran the A/C. This weekend, we'll replace the battery, finally. Was going to do it much earlier but Sarah's parents wanted us to hold on until they dug up the old warranty on the current battery so it wouldn't cost anything. Which means we've had to put up with a handful of stallouts and such in the meant time. Screw it. I'll just pony up the 100 dollars.

Then, breaking the reverse chronology of this post, we picked up How to Train Your Dragon and had a nice, relaxing night in.

And that catches you up. On to a little homework and some fun-time reading.

TAGS: Me in 2010

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 42
BY MONTH: October 2010