(click to embiggen>It’s Friday! And it’s the second Friday of May!
Most of the plants on the veranda are blooming and growing. I repotted one lavender that got drowned during the monsoon like weather we had in April and still waiting for it to recover. Knock wood. In its former pot I planted a rosemary plant last weekend which in a single week has gone from about three inches tall to ber eight, so that’s good! Alas, while I still love my flowers, my sinuses continue to hate all the pollen, so there’s been a lot of hay fever stuff going on all week.
It’s Friday! That means it’s time to present my Friday Five: This week you get the top five (IMHO) stories of the week, plus the top five stories of interest to geeky people, and top five videos (plus notable obituaries and a recap of my blog posts).
Ash Williams (as portrayed by Bruce Campbell), unlikely savior of the world.Scary movies give me nightmares. And I have been known not just to talk in my sleep when having a dream, but I’ve been known get up, find other people in the house, shake them awake and urgently tell them about the thing that is in the house trying to kill us. This is why I almost never watch scary movies. Fortunately, sleepwalking in general happens less often the older we get, so it’s slightly less of a problem than it used to be.
So frequently friends will tell me about how awesome a particular horror film is, and I’ll just smile and nod.
There was one movie, however, that people kept bringing up again and again. Not just people I knew. Army of Darkness, I had been assured be even a few critics, was a masterpiece of cinema–hilarous and scary all at once. And the star is Bruce Campbell, whose work I had loved in The Adventures of Brisco County Jr, for instance.
I should mention that for the most part, horror and related stories almost never cause me to have bad dreams. And I have written stories and designed gaming scenarios that has caused more than one friend to scoff mightily at the idea that I can’t watch scary movies without nightmares. What can I say? I don’t think it should be that surprising that things I see only in my own imagination will have a different effect on me than things I actually see with my eyes.
Eventually, my friend Sky and my husband Michael convinced me to watch Army of Darkness. I sat on a couch between them, and I am not ashamed to say that at times I was clutching both their hands, and I hid my face in a shoulder during some of the bloodier scenes.1
But I also laughed my ass off. It was wonderful! The film is a great and irreverent take on the notions of chosen ones, reluctant heroes, and merciless evil. It finds so many ways to put humor into situations no person would be expected to survive.
And, yeah, I had a few nightmares that week, but fortunately not the kind where I was screaming in my sleep or shaking my husband awake.2
In case you aren’t familiar, Army of Darkness is a sequel. In 1981 Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and a bunch of friends (include Sam’s brother, Ted) made a lowish budget film The Evil Dead, in which Campbell first played Ash Williams. The plot is that a group of five college students go to spend a weekend at a cabin, find an old tape recorder, play the tape which proves to be a voice reciting from the cursed Book of the Dead. The spell unleashes a bunch of demons that possess members of the cast, mayhem ensues. The mayhem got gorier and gorier as things when along. As the possessed cast kills each other off, their bodies (and sometimes only parts of their bodies), are reanimated and continue to cause ever more grisly, brutal deaths.
A few years later, with a bigger budget, they made Evil Dead II which begins with a reshot and re-edited summary of the first film then picks up where the first left off, with Ash battling both the demonic books (now renamed Necronomicon Ex-Mortis) as well as the demons it summons.
And then Army of Darkness follows Ash’s adventures when he was magically transported by the 1300 where he has to fight an entire army of the evil undead, now given the name Deadites. The third film amped up the humor significantly, with a lot of the horror elements used more for comedic effect. It was still scary, though. This film was by far the most successful in the series.
A fourth film, titled simply Evil Dead is kind of a remake and kind of not. Bruce only appears as Ash in an after credits scene.
As time went on, I became a bigger and bigger Bruce Campbell fan. Not such a big fan that I went back and re-watched the earlier movies, nor the recent remake. But when a couple years ago it was announced that Starz would be showing a horror comedy series based on the series, I was quite excited. Because of the licensing and distribution deals that the Raimi brothers and Campbell had made to get the later films produced, they couldn’t make direct references to the most successful of the movies. They could reference the plot and characters of the original film, and use some elements (the name Deadites and Necronomicon Ex-Mortis), but that left them plenty of room.
Ash vs Evil Dead picks up the story of Ash as he’s well into middle age, using cheesy stories of how he lost his hand (in the first movie he had to cut it off because it was been possessed by a demon, while somehow he remained in control of the rest of his body) to seduce random women in bars. In an alcohol- and pot-fueled haze, he allows one of these women that he persuaded to come back to his small trailer, to read “poetry” from his old book, and evil is back.
What I love about the character of Ash Williams is just how much of a hero he isn’t. He’s a pathological liar (who is usually bad at it), he hits on women constantly, he says lots of casually racist and sexist things, he boozes too much, he drives while drunk and stoned, and so forth. He occasionally tries to run from the danger, but somehow he always manages to pull himself together and try to kick evil’s ass.
It’s a style of anti-hero with a long career in storytelling. I find it fascinating how closely Ash fits the mold of Samson (yes, the Old Testament Biblical character). The Biblical Samson is not, by any means, a holy guy. In the original Hebrew scripture, the word for “to have sex” appears a few dozen times in total–nearly two-thirds of the use of the word occur within the portion of the book of Judges sometimes referred to as the Samson saga.
Seriously, one of those Biblical stories involves Samson partying at a brothel for hours. The Holy Scripture literally says that he screwed every single woman in the brothel so many times that they were sore and some could barely walk and they pleaded with him to go home. Drunk, Samson staggers through the city. But the gates of the city have been locked, and the Philistines have set an ambush, intending to jump him while he is drunk and worn out from all the sex. But before they can, Samson simply tears the gates down and stumbles home.
And this is my favorite part: the scripture says he dragged the gate behind him for miles without remembering that he still had hold of it, and only midway home noticed, and he tossed it into the middle of the field before sneaking into his mother’s house and crawling into bed.
Ash Williams of the Evil Dead series doesn’t possess Samson’s legendary strength, but he manages to survive being beaten, battered, flung great distances, burned, stabbed, run over by demon possesed vehicles, et cetera, et cetera.
Yes, the series was crazy and gory, with literal buckets of blood being spewed all over the actors and sets. But it was also hilarious. Although the Deadites are undead, the show isn’t a zombie story. For one thing, the Deadites are fast. They aren’t mindless. The demons that inhabit the corpses are able to access the memories of the deceased, so they taunt the heroes along the way. They make plans and concoct schemes.
In other words, they aren’t a mindless threat, they’re actually bad guys.
I’ve had a lot of fun watching Ash’s adventures on the small screen the last three years. I was sad to learn that it wasn’t being renewed, but also happy for all the laughs we’d gotten along the way. Bruce has announced that he is retiring this character—if there are any more Evil Dead stories to tell, Ash Williams (or at least not this Ash) won’t be a part of them.
That’s okay. Ash showed us that you don’t have to be perfect to be the hero. He’s earned some rest.
Footnotes:
1. I’ve learned there are things I can do to reduce the severity of nightmares I’ll have after watching a scary movie. Watching on a small screen helps. Being able to pause or walk away when things get too tense is extremely helpful.
2. I’m more likely to wake him up by saying something angry than to scream, truth be told.3
3. I also have gotten better and making myself wake up. Seriously, just a few weeks ago a dream started to have some elements from one of the gorier scenes in a recent episode of the series, and me in the dream said, “No, I don’t not want to have this nightmare! No!” And I woke.4
4. I didn’t wake my husband up in the process, so I don’t know if this was one of the times when I said outloud the thing I was saying inside the dream, but there have been occasions in the past where I did exactly that.
(click to embiggen)A concept we often talk about when critiquing someone’s fiction is the “willing suspension of disbelief.” The phrase was coined by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, when he said that if a writer could infuse their tale with a human interest and a semblance of truth, the reader will react to even the most fantastic tale as if it were real. The semblance of truth means, among other things, that events within the story don’t feel out of place. Once we have accepted that frogs can have a passionate debate about the nature of government, for instance, we are not at all surprised when later in the tale a stork expresses a different opinion. The suspension of disbelief is broken if the writer introduces incongruities or forces the reader to stop following the tale to try to understand a confusing phrase. One friend often phrases it as, “bounced me out of the story.”
There is a flip side to this concept of being bounced out of the story. It is implicit in the relationship between a reader and a story that when one first opens a book (or opens a reading app, et cetera) the reader is ready to give the story the benefit of the doubt. Which isn’t to say that a reader is obligated to keep reading if they don’t enjoy the story or it becomes confusing or whatever. It just means that for the first sentence or so the reader will accept what is being offered.
Different readers have different definitions of that initial willingness to accept the story. I once had an English teacher insist that a good story shouldn’t begin with a compound, complex sentence. An arrogant smart aleck student in the class1 pointed out that the classic novel, A Tale of Two Cities, opens with a single very long sentence:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
One reason that opening works is because it doesn’t sound, in one’s head, like a run-on sentence. It has almost a musicality to it that builds and builds as it goes along. My favorite bit is the “we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…”
Somedays when I read the news, I find myself convinced that we’re all going that other way and in a handbasket of colossal proportions.
The notion that someone could trademark an adjective and forbid other people using that word in their stories (or even just the titles of stories) is a chilling one. I hope that, like the “space marine” trademark issue from five years ago, that this trademark bully will be stopped.
Because that’s what this is: bullying. The cocky author has been sending cease and desist messages to any other romance author who has used the word in a book title, including books that were first published long before she started writing herself. She’s been threatening to issue takedown notices to Amazon (just like the space marine trademark bully did years ago), which can result in lost sales as well as messing up their review and ratings histories, even when Amazon re-instates the listing. Also, some books were taken down when the cocky author contacted Amazon directly without first sending a letter to the author. The RWA and their lawyer has since contacted Amazon, to ask them to stop taking action on any cocky romance books until the legal matter is resolved. Fortunately, the books were restored.
It’s also a likely case of the Dunning-Kruger effect. This is the notion that incompetent people aren’t able to recognize their incompetence. In this case, I say that in part because of how the cease and desist messages are worded. Rather than having an actual lawyer draft the letters (which would cost money), she is writing her own, and her messages include the statement, “my lawyers have advised me that I will win all the monies you have earned on this title, plus lawyer fees will be paid by you.” Which clearly is not a statement a competent lawyer would make. The lawyer might say that if she prevails in a lawsuit that she might be entitled to the money earned and so forth, but they would never say they were even guaranteed to prevail.
And someone has already posted a parody book called, Too Cocky for the Law: Cockier Than the Rest (Cocky Legal Book 1), and have included the word cocky and many synonyms in the description. I have heard that the proceeds of the book are going to help with the legal fees of the trademark challenge, but I wasn’t able to confirm that.
I have been very tempted to create a parody e-book with the title Cocky Space Marine, but since I have crazy deadlines at my day job and a couple of fiction writing deadlines also looming, I really shouldn’t… even if the story almost writes itself…
During the weeks we were shuttling car loads of stuff from the old place to the new, I poured the last bits of a couple of bottles of bourbon into jars with a sliced orange, lemon, a couple of vanilla beans, and various spices to infuse for a few weeks to make a batch of Rock n Rye. After filtering and decanting, I made this label when we set out the libations at the Christmas party.One year ago we made the official move from the place I had lived at since 1996. We had been packing for months, and then after signing the lease for the new place, started bringing car loads of boxes and small things for three weeks. We had a bunch of friends help us move many boxes on two Saturdays, but hired professional movers to move all the heavy furniture and similar big awkward things on May 4. Since that’s when the bed moved, that was the first night we slept at the new place, and officially that was the first day that I no longer lived within the Seattle city limits. For thirty-two years I lived in Seattle—a few different places in the Queen Anne neighborhood, a couple in Fremont, and then 21 years in Ballard. I wasn’t happy about the move (no one likes to move, right?) but I wasn’t exactly happy about how much stuff I found squirreled away in the back of closets and such that we never used and I’d forgotten we ever owned.
I expected that moving from a residential neighborhood in the city to a suburb to be a bit of an adjustment. I wasn’t quite prepared for how quickly the new neighborhood became familiar.
There are lots of things that I love about the new place, and I’ve babbled about those things probably too much on this blog. For instance, the new place is bigger. We got rid of a lot of stuff before, during, and after the move, which helps make most of the rooms feel even larger than they were.
A few of the surprises are how quickly some of my driving habits changed. One of the major thoroughfares in the region is state highway 99, which is known as Aurora Avenue in Seattle, Shoreline, and Edmonds. Several of the other suburbs of Seattle label it Pacific Highway (which is nearly the same as old federal name for the highway as it existed before the founding of the Interstate System). Within the Seattle city limits, no U-turns are permitted on Highway 99. During the 32 years that I lived in Seattle, I always thought it was weird when I drove into suburbs either north or south of the city, to suddenly see “U-turn Permitted” signs at every intersection. It seemed like a quaint throwback to a bygone era. I’m not sure why. Maybe because so many places I’ve lived (not just Seattle) banned U-turns.
But in the city I now live in, most of the highway has a median with trees running down the middle of the road, rather than a turn lane that can be used to get to a business on the other side of the road. The u-turn becomes a necessity in that case, and since almost all the intersections where u-turns are permitted have stop lights, it isn’t a particularly risky maneuver. Now I find myself deeply affronted when I cross the city limit and start seeing the “No U-turn” signs.
I keep being a bit amazed at just how much I love the veranda. We had a small yard and were allowed to plant whatever we wanted in two flower beds, but the lawn was so small and right next to the sidewalk in a neighborhood that had a lot of foot traffic, I just always felt a little weird if I set up a chair and tried to read or something. Also, having no patio limited furniture options. Our veranda, a 38-foot long deck, is completely different. I have a lot more flowerpots and planters than I had before, and I’m growing a lot of flowers. We have more comfortable lawn chairs and a really cool folding wood table my hubby found at Ikea. So I can do things such as sit out on the veranda, enjoy the cool breeze, and watch the trees and squirrels while I type up this blog post on my laptop.
Then there’s cooking summer dinners on the stand-up George Foreman electric grill. A lot easier to deal with than digging out a grill from the basement, trying to set it up so it was level on the lawn, and having to clean it and pack away at the end. I can clean the smaller electric grill quickly and leave it out on the veranda each night. And yeah, in the summer grilling outside is very preferable to heating up the house further by cooking inside.
We have a lot more windows. And when I open a couple we get an immediate and very pleasant breeze running through the house. That’s not just about the number of windows, but also the open floor plan of the apartment and the fact that every window has mini blinds rather than very heavy curtains.
I was disappointed during the move when I found we would have to give up the sweet deal we had on internet and TV service with the CenturyLink fibre-optic service and Prism TV and have to switch back to Comcast. Funny thing, though, two years of having actual competition in many markets once it was ruled that the streaming services over internet, including Prism, didn’t violate the monopoly deals that the traditional cable companies have with many cities brought Comcast prices way down. I’m paying even less for internet and the parts of cable TV that I kept after the move that I was with Century Link/Prism — and Century Link/Prism had been literally half of what I had had to pay Comcast four years ago for comparable service. So that was a win!
Yeah, the package I have now has fewer channels… but I’m using Netflix and Hulu for a lot more shows, and their subscription rates added to the cable bill adds up to less than the previous price.
Another surprise was the refrigerator situation. I won’t bore you (further) with the story of how Ray and I wound up with our own fridge plus the one provided by the landlord at the old place (which Michael and I upgraded a few years after Ray died), but since there wasn’t really a good place for the second fridge in the new apartment (and it was getting old enough that it was going to need replacing soon) we were going to have to get by with just the one. I’d had two fridges for 22 years, and wasn’t sure how I’d adjust. Turns out the problem wasn’t fridge space, but freezer space. It was easy to adopt habits about the sorts of things kept in the non-freezer compartment, but we were constantly chafing at the lack of adequate space to hold the stuff I wanted to freeze.
There was an obvious solution, but we had to wait. When we were securing the new place, the property manager emphasized that the first lease period was considered probationary. So we decided that certain purchases would have to wait until we were offered a second lease. Those were: extra large planters suitable for planting my grandma’s irises in, a storage cabinet for the veranda, and a small chest freezer for that one spot in the kitchen.
Just how much relatively each of those things felt like a burden to both Michael and me? Well, while we were walking back from the property manager’s office a few months ago with a copy of our just sighed new lease, we said almost simultaneously to each other, “So, which freezer do we want to buy and when?” Less than 5 days later we had the 5.5 cubic foot freezer in the kitchen, and less than a week after that between us running on separate shopping trips we had filled it up. Now I have to check the freezer each time I leave the house to go to the grocery store to get a good picture in my head of what we could fit in there if I happen to find something on sale at a really good price.
I should also mention how much I loved, loved, loved being able to host the Christmas party at our place this year. There were a lot of things I liked about renting the suite at the hotel the last three years, but dang, I so love having my best friends under my roof at that time of year.
I can’t believe I’ve gone nearly 1500 words on this and not mentioned our library. Having a space to set aside and call The Library (though it is only most of the non-fiction books) and having enough room to re-arrange all the books and get them sorted in a way that we can find books without digging through piles of books in front of some of the cases is just wonderful. It doesn’t hurt that being able to geek out about book sorting with my husband fills me with a warm fuzzy feeling.
There are things I miss about the old neighborhood, to be sure. We haven’t found replacements for all of our old fave restaurants, for instance. And I’m still a little miffed at just how far apart the various grocery stores I shop at are now, compared to the old place. But, moving was good for many reasons. And I feel very lucky we found a place that we both like so much.
The weather is doing it’s usual May thing already: some days that hint at summer, interspersed with cooling and drizzle. And, oh! That is pollen everywhere! I’m maxing out on my allergy meds and it’s barely helping!
It’s Friday! That means it’s time to present my Friday Five: This week you get the top five (IMHO) stories of the week, plus the top five stories of interest to geeky people, and top five videos (plus notable obituaries and a recap of my blog posts).
I’m hardly the only person who dislikes going to the dentist. I usually spend the entire time I’m in the chair gripping the arms tight, my eyes closed, and fighting with all my might not to run away. Couple that with the fact that I almost never feel pain in my teeth, no matter how badly they are abcessed, has usually meant that when I would see a dentist, there were always a lot of teeth that needed some work. So there rest of this post is going to be about the procedure I had this week, along with a lead-up to how I got there. If reading about dental stuff isn’t your thing, don’t click through… Continue reading A sneaky oral surgeon – or, adventures with the dentally anxious→
Some of the plants growing on the veranda… (click to embiggen)Our weather continues to be a little weird. We’ve been in this cycle for some months now where we’ll have a week or two of weather this is markedly colder and/or wetter than usual, followed by a week or so of weather that is markedly warmer and drier than usual, with the occasional string of days that is almost exactly average for this time of year. It’s like spring and winter have gone on a bit of a bender together, spring is stumbling around a bit disoriented, while winter his hanging around at the door, meaning to leave, but it keeps thinking of one more thing it wants to say.
But despite this stuttering stop-and-start spring, trees are pollinating, flowers are blooming, other plants are coming up.
On my veranda I have a pots with lavender, pansies, violas, and a few fuchsias mostly going strong. My four larger planters that have a bunch of the irises I dug up on the last day we were cleaning the old place in Ballard have some shoots coming out. Two of the planters are still recovering from me leaving them out in the heavy rain too many days in a row. Fortunately irises are flood tolerant.
The picture above is one of the planters that did not get flooded. It’s also the one I transplanted the contents of one of the smaller flower pots into. That’s the pot I’ve mentioned before that a squirrel in the old neighborhood planted a filbert. I let the little tree grow in the pot last year, then moved it (and the two pansies it had shared the pot with) to the larger planter. Both of the pansies have perked up and blooded along with the tree which is getting very leafy. There are five of the irises coming up in this planter, which is really good.
I should mention that these are the irises I refer to as “Grandma’s irises.” Many’s years ago my grandmother dug up the irises in her yard to thin them out, and handed off about a dozen or so rhizomes to anyone who would take some off her hand. I planted my twelve in one flower bed at the old place. A few years later, I dug them up to thin out and gave away about half the the 70-some plants that I had by then, and replanted the half I kept. I did it again a few more times over the years. Anyway, just before we finished moving out at the old place, I dug all of them up, trimmed off the leaves, and transported the rhizomes to the new place. I gave bunches of them away to several friends (and mailed two batches off to sisters-in-law), and wound up with a bunch in a box here.
Ideally, you’re supposed to dig them up in the fall, when they’re going dormant, then replant them sometime before the next spring gets too warm. For a variety of reasons (one being that I didn’t want to spend a bunch of money buying really large planters while we were still in our initial probationary lease period at the new place) I decided not to try reburying the ones I was keeping last summer, but rather hoped they would go dormant and make it to this year.
Given how quickly irises multiply, I really only need a few of them to come up in order to, a few years from now, have a large mass of beautiful purple flowers again. The fact that as of last night’s count, between the four planters, I have 13 healthy-looking new sprouts coming up makes me quite happy that I’ll have Grandma’s irises for years to come.
At least two of the lavenders from last year are not looking terribly healthy this year. One of them is in a flowerpot without a drain, and I think the plant has just been drowned. It’s still showing just a bit of life, but I’m not at all confident I’m going to be able to save it. The other one I’m less sure why it isn’t coming back as strong as the others. I may try re-potting both and see if that helps.
We’re still getting a steady stream of chickadees, juncos, and sparrows at the bird feeder. Lately they’ve been getting into scuffles with each other around the feeder more than usual. I’m assuming that that’s hormones because it’s nesting/breeding season. Not that I need bird song and such to remind me of that. The high pollen counts are keeping my hay fever it high gear.
Font Folly 