Saturday, February 26, 2011
First It Was the Thin Mints Melee . . .
Peacefmonline.com: "For his refusal to carry out the orders of the father to cook an alligator soup for him, Osei Alex of Tanoso Camp, near Samreboi, 15, was assaulted by the father Nana Yaw Osei who inflicted cutlass wounds on him."
Monoply Update
Mail Online: "The earliest ever version of the board game Monopoly has sold for a whopping £90,000.
The set was one of 5,000 made in 1933 by Charles Darrow, the purported inventor of Monopoly, and is the only one to have survived to this day.
The dog-eared set is made out of a piece of oilcloth and is in the form of the original circular shape that is 33 inches in diameter."
The set was one of 5,000 made in 1933 by Charles Darrow, the purported inventor of Monopoly, and is the only one to have survived to this day.
The dog-eared set is made out of a piece of oilcloth and is in the form of the original circular shape that is 33 inches in diameter."
Photos at the link.
401 S. McKinney Street, Mexia, Texas
This old house still exists on Google Earth. It was built by my grandfather more than 80 years ago, and it's the house where I spent most of my growing up years. My parents continued to live there after their kids grew up and left, and my father died in the same bedroom where his own father died 50 years earlier. The rooms in the place were huge compared to those in a modern house. The bedroom my brother and I slept in had twin beds end-to-end along one wall, with room between them. Our sister's room was smaller. It had a double bed on one side of the doorway between our rooms and an upright piano with its back to the wall on the other side of the door. The other rooms were much larger. There were 12-foot ceilings.
There was a basement, too. I didn't know of another house in my hometown with a basement, and I felt quite smug about having one. I couldn't stand up in it after I was a teenager, and it wasn't very big. But it was a basement.
That's just the physical stuff, and it doesn't really matter much. What matters more are the family dinners on holidays, the times we'd sit out in the back yard in the summer, doing homework at my desk (that bedroom I mentioned had two desks, a wardrobe, and a gun cabinet in it besides those twin beds, and it wasn't crowded), deciding who got to bathe first in the only bathroom, watching TV with the family in our parents' bedroom, coming home from school to eat lunch in the kitchen with the family, washing dishes in the little sink, hearing my mother sing "Let the Lower Lights be Burning" when she worked in the kitchen, lying in my bed and reading one SF magazine after another, the collection of baseball cards I kept under my bed in the wooden box my grandfather made me, sitting in my room listening to Al Helfer call The Game of the Day in the hot summertime with a little buzz fan blowing on me, my mother sprinkling water on the sheets at night to cool them during the terrible hot drought years of the '50s, my father whistling when he came home after work, my sister practicing her piano lessons ("Shrimp Boats," "The Little White Cloud that Cried"), my brother creating his own piano compositions (the immortal "Aye-yi-yonga"), my high school graduation gifts on the dining room table (and Judy's and my wedding gifts there some years later), some mighty good dogs, some crazy cats, and so many more things.
The house still exists on Google Earth but not on this one. My brother owned it, but it had been vacant for a while. Thursday night, someone got inside and set fires in every room. The house is a total loss. The only thing my brother could save was the cast-iron door knocker that had been nailed up beside the front door. Ah, it was a beautiful door, too, let me tell you. Maybe you can see it in the picture. And I think that's all I have to say about that.
Pimp those Grillz
Gold Teeth Deflect Bullet, Save a Life, But Still Get Banned From School: "Gold is the new pearly white.
These glittering grills could become even more popular after Walter Davis, a New Orleans man allegedly shot in the mouth by his younger brother, was saved when the dental accessory stopped the bullet."
These glittering grills could become even more popular after Walter Davis, a New Orleans man allegedly shot in the mouth by his younger brother, was saved when the dental accessory stopped the bullet."
Drive Angry
Take a '70s exploitation movie (lots of gratuitous nudity, extreme violence, vulgarity, shoot-outs, car chases, many, many explosions), add 3-D and Nicolas Cage with his Con Air hair, and you have Drive Angry. Yes, that's right, that's what my pathetic "life" has come to. The only two movies I've seen in a theater in months are Season of the Witch and Drive Angry. Even sadder, I had a great time. Don't judge me.There's no way to make any sense of most of the backstory, so don't even try. Just go along for the ride (there's a great series of muscle cars involved). Billy Burke plays a guy named Jonah as if he'd just stepped out of a '70s drive-in flick, and he's dressed for the part, too. Amber Heard is great as Piper, the woman Cage takes along for the ride. David Morse and Tom Atkins provide some fine support, and William Fitchner practically steals the movie as the Accountant. Cage plays this one like he played Season of the Witch, as if his mind might be elsewhere, but it works. You can have fun in the last half hour or so by watching the amazing changing make-up job on half his face.
Judy, who, as you'll recall, hated Spamalot, went with me to this. I thought she'd never forgive me, but as we left the theater I asked her how she liked the movie. She said, "I liked it. It was funny and crazy, and it never slowed down." So there you have it. Go figure.
Eddie Serrato, R. I. P.
WNEM Saginaw: "Eddie Serrato, the original drummer on Question Mark and the Mysterians' song '96 Tears,' passed away Thursday morning."
Would It Hav e Been OK if He'd Been Sober?
Little Rock, AR: "North Little Rock Police responded to the Kroger on Pershing Blvd about complaints that there was a drunk man in the store urinating on chicken."
Hat tip to John Duke.
No Comment Department
Photographing cows or other farm scenery could land you in jail under Senate bill | The Florida Tribune: "SB 1246 by Sen. Jim Norman, R-Tampa, would make it a first-degree felony to photograph a farm without first obtaining written permission from the owner. A farm is defined as any land 'cultivated for the purpose of agricultural production, the raising and breeding of domestic animals or the storage of a commodity.'"
Best Short Story Collections
Best Short Stories - AbeBooks: "The best short stories make every word count. These are among the finest."
Friday, February 25, 2011
And Now It's Spuds
Sandusky Register: "Who should cook the potato, and how? Those questions triggered a knock-down fight between a 30-year-old woman and her 50-year-old mother in Port Clinton."
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