Oh, I love the old-school, PBS cooking shows. They don’t just read the recipe (I can read darned good on my own, TVM)—they teach you technique. And the hosts aren’t buffed and sanded and polished into mannequins—they’re doughy and round and soft from all the good eatin’ they do.

I admit to being a little disappointed that Mary Lee is the namesake of the Ocearch founder’s mom. I liked to think her name was an homage to this pithy poem courtesy of Cap’n Quint:
“Here lies the body of Mary Lee; died at the age of a hundred and three. For fifteen years she kept her virginity; not a bad record for…

WOW. That’s one chilling video. It’s so tempting to try to bend wild things to our will (we are kind of an asshole species that way). It’s also the height of arrogance to think it’s possible (or even okay) to do this. I think back to the chimpanzee who mauled a woman—hadn’t he lived with his human for years? And was…

This post is worthless without pix.

I’d prefer to define the opposite of “well-curated” as “uncurated,” meaning “wild and free and unconstrained by all your materialistic capitalist bullshit, you pathetic slave to the system.”

I love the gravitas of the voiceover. I wonder how he kept a straight face?

Love THOHH! Another great, scary read is The Woman in Black, by Susan Hill. Oh dear. It’s short so you can read it in one evening, which I did. In October. On a stormy night. By the end of the book I couldn’t get up from the couch—I had the worst feeling that if I moved, something would loom up out of the hallway…

BWP is such a polarizing movie. I saw it with friends when it first came out and it ruined me—I slept with the lights on and wore earplugs for 3 weeks after, and didn’t off-trail hike for a year. The other folks who saw it with me thought it was garbage and teased me mercilessly. But dude standing in the corner?…

OH GODDAMMIT

Oh goddammit.

One caution—be prepared to completely suspend disbelief. Normal, non-movie people would have left the place after the first clown incident (or burned the building down). But if they had, there would be no movie.

Oh FFS, don’t go in the basement. EVER. I don’t believe in ghosts, but basements are where the devil lives.

There was a great Halloween episode of This American Life a while back—it opened with a family that was experiencing what seemed to be classic manifestations of a haunting. It turned out the heater was faulty, and releasing dangerous-yet-nonlethal levels of carbon monoxide, which apparently can make you imagine all…

This isn’t on Netflix (I don’t think so, anyway) but it’s on Amazon Prime—Hell House LLC. It’s found footage and dayyum, I had to mute the sound more than once (I’m okay with just seeing horror, but I freely own that sight AND sound are sometimes too much for my old heart). Creepy clowns, man. Creepy. Fucking. Clowns.

Oh crikey. The Invitation messed me up. Are they psychos or just weirdos? Who’s the weirdest weirdo—that guy? That guy? Maybe that girl over there? I like that red lantern. WAIT! No I don’t! One big takeaway for me: never, ever let yourself get parked in.

I am so grateful when cyclists use lights and reflective clothing while riding at night. I drive on a lot of poorly lit back roads, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found myself uncomfortably close to a cyclist who’s wearing dark colors and who only relies on the little reflectors all bikes come with.…

During the luncheon after the death of my brother, one of my (slender) sisters-in-law looked across the table at my second plate of food (which was mostly little noshies that I was just pushing around in a “my brother’s dead” daze) and said, “Why are you still eating?”

At. My. Brother’s. Funeral. Luncheon.

Jeez Louise, that’s horrible. Has she ever--EVER--given you a sincere apology? Is she kind and loving to you now? If not, she’s still culpable. I hope you keep her at arm’s length (or, better yet, a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole).

Me: Toybox killer? Sounds gruesome and bad. Best leave it alone.

I know I’m late to the party, having just seen LLL on DVD, but this is exactly the problem I had with the movie. It tries too hard. “Lookit us! We’re quirky and vivid and so, so alive! Let’s dance on cars and up in the clouds!” The best movie musicals seem effortless and right—Gene Kelly closing his umbrella and…