Category: Just for Fun

Alexander the Great, who claimed to be a god (or at least half a god), died in 323 B.C. Some 300 years later, Augustus Caesar visited Alexander’s tomb in Alexandria, Egypt, and saw the body, which was preserved in solidified honey. In 215 A.D. the Roman Emperor Caracalla popped in to pay his respects to Alexander. After that, Alexander and his tomb disappear from history.

There was a ton of ballyhoo in 1991–remember?–when a Greek archeologist claimed to have discovered the lost tomb of Alexander. The ballyhoo went away when she said mystical talking snakes told her where to look.

So where is it? The ancients believed that whoever possessed Alexander’s body would rule a prosperous and stable empire. Plus you could probably get a fortune for it if you sold it on eBay.

So a lot of people are still trying to track down the elusive conqueror, whether to sell him, make him the centerpiece of a new theme park, or clone him and run him for president. The possibilities are endless. But first you have to find the tomb.

My cats say he’s hidden somewhere in Canada, they don’t know exactly where. I have also heard (never mind from whom!) that the mummy has already been resuscitated and is now a big man in reality TV.  Certain commentators think the Bilderbergers have him. There is even a theory that the body of Alexander the Great has been processed into capsules and ingested by important people who paid $1 million each for them because they want to be even more important.

If you have any solid information as to Alexander the Great’s whereabouts, and you don’t know what to do because Unsolved Mysteries is long gone, please contact this blog at its secret toll-free number.

 

Very often I find I need something to just blow the cobwebs out of my brain–whoosh! Sometimes comedy will do it: a good, hard laugh is excellent medicine.

But sometimes a stiff scare will do it, too. I don’t mean being scared by something real–I mean, what could be scarier than the knowledge that we have you-know-who in the White House? No, I mean a good, hearty, imaginary scare, administered by a work of fiction. One that gets you all cranked up and then–ta-da!–it’s over. And don’t you feel great because it wasn’t real?

Here are a few of the books I’ve found to really do the trick.

1. The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James. These are in a class by themselves. No one, but no one, ever wrote better ghost stories than M. R. James. Wait’ll you read, for the first time, Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad–positively guaranteed to freak you out. But if that one doesn’t get you, The Ash Tree or Casting the Runes surely will. A lot of these stories have been anthologized to death; but if you haven’t read them before–oh, baby!

2. The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft is a novelette, really. However, it packs a wallop. Its combination of claustrophobia (if you could just get out of Innsmouth!) and paranoia (who’s that trying to sneak into my hotel room in the middle of the night?) is mighty potent.

3. The Haunting by Shirley Jackson goes on scaring readers long after gaudier, gorier haunted-house stories lose their power. By understating and soft-pedaling the special effects, Shirley Jackson gets under your skin and gives you a fine case of the willies.

4. Dracula by Bram Stoker has always scared me–the older I get, the scarier this story gets. I realize opinions are divided; some readers think Dracula is hokey. But I’ve never read anything scarier than poor Jonathan Harker trying to find his way out of Dracula’s castle before night falls again, and the harder he tries, the more lost he gets–until he winds up in the very heart of the place, where you definitely don’t want to be…

5. The Horror from the Hills by Frank Belknap Long was inspired by a nightmare experienced by H.P. Lovecraft, according to Long himself. Wow, that must’ve been some dream! No wonder Lovecraft was so weird. This isn’t a full-length novel, but if you’re looking for padding, go to Stephen King. The long and the short of it is, an ancient, obscene idol comes to life (but wasn’t it alive all the time, and just pretending to be an idol?) and wreaks havoc in New York: and it ain’t gonna be easy to get rid of it.

The great thing about this kind of horror is, you close the book, and you’ve escaped. The real world is full of imaginary horrors–e.g. Global Warming, the War on Women, Income Inequality–that are even worse because they are imaginary; and one is hard-put to escape them.

If only those shambling creatures from Innsmouth would chase down Al Gore…

 

 

Let’s face it–we all have at least one family member who’s a liberal. It feels kind of like being related to a horse thief or a pickpocket. Yes, it makes us cringe. It’s embarrassing to be seen in public with someone who believes in Global Warming and thinks China has a really super government.

We get tired of fighting with this person all the time. How can you reason with anyone who thinks Al Gore is a sage? You’re better off arguing with a tree stump. You can’t give in to any of his absurd opinions, and you can’t quite bring yourself to disown him. You could try asking him or her, very nicely, to walk ten paces behind you if the two of you have to go anywhere, and pretend you don’t know each other. But that probably won’t fly.

I find the best way to get along, although it can be a challenge, is to find neutral topics to discuss together. Maybe you share a common interest in movies, salamanders, beer, or whatnot. Of course, you never know when an innocent conversation might suddenly take a turn for the worse. You’re chatting happily away about Journey to the Center of the Earth and suddenly he brings up Avatar. The only hope of salvaging peace is quickly and slyly to shift to a another subject–“Say, do you remember that old lady who lived across the street from us when we were kids: the one who used to confiscate any whiffle-balls that wound up in her yard? I heard she poisoned her husband…” (Here we resort to fiction, just to get away from Avatar. We can repent later.)

Maybe some of you out there have found more efficient or humane methods of coping with this situation. Please share them. When it comes to living with a liberal, we all need good advice.

When I was old enough to read, but not old enough to stay up and watch all the cool stuff on TV that my mother and father were hogging to themselves, I used to pore over the TV listings in the paper to find out what I was missing. The following examples fascinated me–maybe because I never got to see them.

1. Jai alai, pronounced “Jay allay”–what in the world was that? It must’ve been really something special, to be on so late at night. Maybe Jay Allay was a guy who told lewd stories.

2. To Be Announced. I never had a clue as to what that show was about. Unlike all the others, it came on at different times and on different stations. I don’t think it’s available anymore.

3.Scudda-hee, Scudda-hay, or whatever it was called. I’m told it’s a movie about mules. I could easily look it up, maybe even watch it on youtube. But why give up a lifetime of wild speculation?

4. The Naked City. Imagine that: a whole city full of nudists. Supposedly there was a nudist colony near where my cousins lived, but we never ran into any stray nudists. Maybe they wound up on TV.

5. The Boy With Green Hair. This movie was always on one channel or another, always very late at night. I thought it might be a science-fiction movie. Little did I know that, later on in life, green hair would be commonplace, along with tattoos, earrings on men, and bits of metal piercing various parts of the body–like the stuff you’d see on the old Lowell Thomas travelogues about New Guinea. Only those people, of course, were primitive and didn’t know any better.

 

There are lines spoken by characters in various movies that have crept into my own everyday language, serving as a kind of shorthand. Some of these lines have slipped into a lot of people’s speech–maybe even yours.

1. Mandy Patinkin, to the villain with six fingers, in The Princess Bride: “Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” The fact that he’s holding a sword when he says this lends credibility.

2. Roy Scheider in Jaws, having just looked down the gullet of the meanest shark in the ocean: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” Yes, many situations turn out to be a lot more challenging than you expected.

3. The Mexican bandit, Gold Hat, to Humphrey Bogart in Treasure of the Sierra Madre: “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!” You can replace “badges” with just about any word you happen to need at the moment. As in, “We don’t need no stinkin’ cat license!”

4. The Witch to her slowly-being-hypnotized victims in The Silver Chair: “There is no sun…” Just like there’s no left-wing bias in the “news” media.

5. Stan Laurel to Oliver Hardy in Block-Heads: “Remember how dumb I used to be? Well, I’m better now.” Uh-huh.

I could keep this up all day, but those five above will always be among my favorites.

What are some of yours?

The papers and the airwaves have been full of news of “something big” planned by “Al-Qaeda on steroids,” the biggest terrorist strike ever, we’re on the alert, embassies shut down, Benghazi really pumped them up to think they can blow our brains out anytime, anywhere…

Now, don’t you feel like a right dickey-doo-dah for not wanting the NSA spying on you? Now can you see they only peek into your bank account to keep us safe from jihad maniacs?

So if “something big” really does happen, they’ll say “See! We told you!” And if it doesn’t happen, they’ll say “See! We nipped it in the bud!” Either way, it’ll be, “And we never would’ve known about it if we didn’t have the NSA spy-on-everybody program!”

Why is this business so oddly reminiscent of the Great Mark McGwire–Sammy Sosa Home Run Race? What’s that nasty smell in the background?

In other news this weekend, we hear of a newly-discovered “sex tape” that reveals “how Monica Lewinsky seduced Bill Clinton.” Does anybody believe there would be any difficulty involved in “seducing” Bill Clinton? Are we being asked to believe that this predatory wench led our poor, unsuspecting president astray?

America’s news media–all fantasy, all the time.

And now for something completely different…

Just a subtle reminder that this blog exists to drum up interest in my books–the Bell Mountain series of fantasy novels. Just click on “Books” and you’ll see them all. Will you please at least look at them? I mean, really…!

In contrast with the fantasies and tall tales put out there by our “news” media, my fantasies are clearly labeled as products of the imagination, and beyond the price of a book–paperback or Kindle–will cost you nothing.

I have no idea what “news” fantasies wind up costing America, but I’m sure it runs up into the trillions of dollars.

At least you can put a book on the shelf and read it again sometime. So, while we still have some freedom left, c’mon–give my books a whirl.

For me, the answer to that question very much depends on what kind of a day it’s been for me. Yesterday, for instance, we had the plumber here for three hours (after he stood us up, two days in a row) and then the crown fell off one of my teeth. In one day, a couple weeks’ earnings went up in smoke.

To relax, that night we watched (on youtube, at no charge) an episode of Detective Inspector Banks. Somehow this failed to take my mind off my troubles. In this story, a high police official is blackmailed into feeding confidential police information to a gangster, and winds up committing suicide. Meanwhile his wife accidentally murders their beloved daughter… and so on. You get the picture.

So for reading in bed I turned to Freddy and the Ignormus, by Walter R. Brooks, in which Freddy the Pig (not a nickname–he really is a pig) comes up against one of the most puzzling cases of his whole detective career.

Under the circumstances, Freddy was my favorite detective.

At other times it’s Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, or Australia’s Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte. I also wish there were more George Gently episodes, but the new ones aren’t finished yet.

Which fictional detective floats your boat?

As to the reasons for liking or not liking detective stories in general… well, I’ll have to get into that another time. Maybe after I’ve seen the dentist.

PS–I know if I link to “Napoleon Bonaparte,” it’ll just take you to that little guy from Corsica. So try Bony’s creator, Arthur Upfield, instead.

 

Miller dinosaurs–I’ll always love ’em!

I’m prone to nostalgia, and there are many things I miss–like drive-in movies, wax dinosaurs by the Miller Company, half a shelf-full of Andre Norton at the library, the Constitution… But there are also things I don’t miss. True, our culture deteriorates steadily, and its overall condition was better in the past than it is now. Still, here are a few relics which I hope never come back.

1. Jeans commercials. I still break out in a cold sweat if I think I hear You’ve got the look… This was back in the 1970s, and they got chumps to pay exorbitant prices for a pair of jeans, thinking it would make them hip or sexy. The ads generally featured a really skinny couple ogling each other like a pair of gargoyles. One brand was advertised as “dangerous.” Feh!

2. Tony Orlando and Dawn singing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon.” I am well aware that we have music today that makes this piece sound like a Bach cantata. But it struck me as pretty horrible at the time, and it strikes me as pretty horrible now.

3. Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuco. This pair of schlubs rose to prominence a couple decades ago with their vomit-inducing story of sex among hideous orang-utans. Stupid gavone gets involved with idiot young floozy, who shoots his wife so she can have him all to herself… yechh! This case generated I dunno how many made-for-TV movies, plus whole books and an infinity of newspaper and magazine articles. If it ever came back, it would probably cause the end of the world.

4. Hippies. All right, they haven’t really gone away. They grew up to become the Democrat Party and trash the country. So they’re much more harmful now than they ever were. Still, it was mostly the hippie movement that made the 1960s the decade in which America began irretrievably to roll off the cliff. If you are unfamiliar with hippies because you’re too young, just imagine a bunch of Occupy Wall Street-ers who are too lazy to start a riot.

5. “Scientific proof” that you should buy the sponsor’s product. Guys in lab coats with charts showing “the valley of fatigue” and demonstrating the “nasograph.” True, this kind of thing was vastly more harmless than “scientific proof”–that is, false data–that the earth is warming and we’d better give the government huge, undreamed-of powers, plus all our money, so schmucks like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and that golem in the White House can save us from “climate change.”

That’s enough from me. I’m sure you can think of a few cultural icons you rejoice to see no more. Don’t be bashful–tell us about them.