Totally provoked.

 

Santobsessed.

 I think in America we have a kind of mental development of Santa that runs like this:

1. Clement Clarke Moore publishes his famous poem in 1823

2. Thomas Nast draws Santa in 1863

3. Coca-Cola gives us a common picture of Santa in 1930

4. Rankin and Bass do the rest, starting 1964 

But there's a lot that gets left out of that outline. We've been Santa obsessed for quite some time. A search for "Santa Claus" on Discogs returns 27,895 hits. A quick look at the priceless Gutenberg Project site reveals books about Santa Claus that I did not know existed, and maybe the same is true for you. Sixty-one titles pop up on the site if you search there for "Santa Claus." For example:

A Reversible Santa Claus by Meredith Nicholson (1917)

This is a curious book by a curious writer; Nicholson was, among other things, a US envoy to three different countries. But he had been an Indiana newsman and loved to write, apparently. Here's the Amazon description of this book: 

A reformed thief known as Billy “the Hopper” – named for the ease with which he’s always made his escapes - has retired with one last haul and settled down on a chicken farm with his wife, Mary, and another former thief, Humpy. Mary used to be a pickpocket. Humpy used to raise chickens in jail, so he’s got valuable experience. All three of them are glad to be living a quiet life within the law, but one day the Hopper sees a wallet sticking out of someone’s jacket on the train and is unable to resist pocketing it. This sets in motion a chain of events that results in the Hopper inadvertently kidnapping a toddler.

Not sure how much actual Santa Claus is in this one, but it's the book on this list I'm most interested in reading. I'm wondering how "reversible" works into the "Santa Claus" too. Does that mean Hopper comes down the chimney and takes stuff away, like a proto Grinch?

🎅🎅🎅

A Kidnapped Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum (1904)

Some of you may recall that Oz creator Baum had written a biography of Santa, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, in 1902, which was adapted for TV by Rankin-Bass in 1985. This one is really a short story, but one of the first in the Evildoers Threaten Christmas subgenre that has proved so durable. In it, the Daemons who live in the caves near Happy Valley and hate Santa all the time decide to kidnap him so he can't bring happiness to the children. But the various magical creatures that help Santa (not elves -- ryls, knooks, pixies, and fairies) manage to get Santa's presents delivered. Santa is released on Christmas Day by the frustrated bad guys. (Sorry; spoiler alert!) Well done, knooks & co. 

🎅🎅🎅

A Defective Santa Claus by James Whitcomb Riley (1904)

Although not so well remembered today, Riley was another Indiana writer, exceptionally popular in his time for poems and stories for and about children. The book is actually a poem in dialect that, like so much of his work, harks back to simpler times in the 1800s. 

🎅🎅🎅

Christmas in Storyland, edited by Maud Van Buren and Katharine Isabel Bemis (1927)

I don't know anything about the editors of this volume, but it's exactly what you'd expect -- a book of Christmas stories for children. Santa plays a part in many of them, naturally. That same year the editors also released Christmas in Modern Story: An Anthology for Adults. Back when "adult audiences" just meant "the kids won't like it."

🎅🎅🎅

Lill's Travels in Santa Claus Land, and Other Stories by Ellis Towne, Sophie May, and Ella Farman (1878)

Lill with The Man Himself. Moore's reindeer names 
are used in the book (Dasher, Dancer, et al.) 

The book doesn't say which author wrote which story (there are four in the book), but the star is definitely Lill, who in the first tale explains how she happened to come upon Santa Claus Land while walking and met the big guy. At the end she tells us that Santa Claus Land is not in a fixed place, and she has been unable to find it again. 

🎅🎅🎅

Tommy Trot's Visit to Santa Claus by Thomas Nelson Page (1908)

Tommy Trot looks like what is now a pretty standard Christmas story for kids. One summary says, "The story follows a young boy named Tommy Trot who goes on a magical adventure to visit Santa Claus at the North Pole. Along the way, he meets a variety of friendly creatures, including a talking reindeer and a group of mischievous elves. As Tommy explores the enchanting world of Santa's workshop, he learns valuable lessons about kindness, generosity, and the true meaning of Christmas." Which sounds like movie adaptation of The Polar Express, although a non-psychotic version. 

Page also wrote A Captured Santa Claus (1902) (very different from the Baum Kidnapped story, featuring Civil War veterans) and Santa Claus's Partner (1899), so he knew from Santa stories. He also had a very romanticized view of the Old South that pretty much guarantees his books for adults will be painful to modern eyes. 

🎅🎅🎅

Santa Claus' Sweetheart by Imogen Clark (1906)

In case you wondered where Hallmark got the idea to do Christmas movies:

The story follows Jessica, a young bakery owner who finds herself falling for a mysterious man named Nick who bears an uncanny resemblance to Santa Claus. As their romance blossoms, Jessica discovers that Nick has a special connection to Christmas that transcends the ordinary. Clark's delightful narrative captures the spirit of the season with its themes of love, hope, and second chances. Through vivid descriptions and endearing characters, she transports readers to a charming world where miracles can happen and love is always in the air. "Santa Claus' Sweetheart" is a perfect read for anyone looking to experience the joy and wonder of Christmas all year round.

A short novel, looks pretty sweet. 

🎅🎅🎅

Santa Claus' Message: A Christmas Story by E. Franklin Tregaskis (1921)

I have found almost nothing about E. Franklin Tregaskis beyond this Australian story, a short one that takes place in a crapped-out gold mining settlement called Twenty-Foot, where only two men are still trying to get something of value out of the ground as Christmas approaches. One is an old-timer, the other a man with a family, and there's been no rain to sluice out what thin pickings might be had. Then a mysterious message appears... Anyway, this shows that Australia's been Santobsessed just as we have.

🎅🎅🎅

I haven't even mentioned all the storybooks on Gutenberg that have some Santa Claus in passing, or the plays for children that are up at the site (because parents always want to see the kiddies put on a performance). And who knows how many other Santa stories are out there that Gutenberg hasn't gotten to yet? 

All of this is to say that our love of Jolly Old Saint Nicholas is not new; it is a very sturdy part of the American culture, and God bless Santa Claus. May his stories always point the way to the One whose great story among us we celebrate on Christmas Day. 

Librarians eaten.

I hate this stuff.

What they think they're doing: Showing that "different" things aren't scary.

What they're actually doing: Showing that heroic men are idiots.

Here's the deal: Dragons are mythical creatures intended to be scary, even if they are good, as in Chinese mythology. A cuddly dragon is a non-dragon creature of some other kind. That's the point of dragons. 

I'm sick to death of dragons being the good guys. Dragons want to eat us. Dragons are no good for human companionship. Dragons suck. Boo dragons. Leave them alone.

Where did it start? Ogden Nash's "The Tale of Custard the Dragon," about a cowardly dragon (who does in fact eat a human)? Anne McCafferty's Dragonriders of Pern series? Wherever it did, we find now that the world is on its head, that the dragons are always (surprise!) good and the guys who want to take them out bad. Whether it's Dragonslayer, Dragonheart, How to Train Your Dragon, it's hard to find a dragon in fiction that's not the good guy. It's like finding a police office or priest in fiction who is the good guy, especially if he's white and male -- like finding hen's teeth.

It's all part of the crap that gave us Wicked and all the new Disney pictures that root for the bad guy. (As long as the bad guy is, you know, a girl -- Captain Hook and Gaston remain bad.) The ladies are just misunderstood, you know. Men were mean to them, probably. That's why they're bad. 

Or maybe they're just power-hungry crapweasels. I don't care what made the green babe mad in Oz; if she sends a pack of wolves to rip up a little kid, kidnaps her with terrifying flying monkeys, and threatens to slaughter the little girl when the sand runs out of the hourglass, to hell with her. Drop a freaking house on her. SHE'S THE BADDIE. How she got that way is irrelevant; she chose her path. 

As Germán Saucedo wrote recently in First Things:

The clear images of true evil present in the best fairy tales, ballads, myths, and legends offer both a vision of what is to be avoided at all costs, as well as a vision of virtue. As such, the “sympathetic villain” genre is a symptom of a society that disagrees on what is good and what is evil, or that tries to explain evil away as trauma, psychopathy, or pathology. But to identify and avoid evil, we must first learn to recognize the good. The insistence on subverting villains is a sign we have lost confidence in our belief that we can know what heroism looks like, a heroism that displays the good that would oppose their unrighteousness. In a world without any moral certitude or any agreed upon system to define true virtue, what is wickedness anyhow? It would be just a matter of perspective.

In this light, we see that stories like this tell us a lot more about the storyteller than they actually do about good or evil. 

One dragon story that takes a more serious approach to the topic was based on Fred Saberhagen's Swords books, which I discussed here last year. An Armory of Swords features stories by other writers about what happened to various normal people whose lives were touched by the mighty god-forged Swords that were circulating the world. In "Dragon Debt" by Robert E. Vardeman, my favorite story in the collection, a young man comes into possession of Dragonslicer, the Sword of Heroes... and also a small, helpless baby dragon. A moral dilemma ensues in which the stakes are not small. 

The point of dragons is that they're dangerous, and dealing with them requires valor, not tea and cookies. Pretending they are all nice and lovely is just pretending that there is nothing really dangerous in the world, which we know is false. As C.S. Lewis wrote in the essay "On Three Ways of Writing for Children," "Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker."

Meanwhile, the librarian type in the meme above are the sort who expect their native goodness to make everyone but the genuinely evil side with them -- and when people don't, they go on TikTok demanding the ruin of their lives. 

I've had it with dragons, but when the one pictured above turns on his bookworm buddies and eats them, I will offer him a mild nod. Not that I want the wicked dragon to win, but smugness and stupidity must be punished if we're to understand why these are bad things. 

54° 40' or fuggetaboutit.

Since President Trump picked on PM Trudeau a few days back, the meme machines have gone into overdrive once again. 

A lot of gags hang on the idea of Trump annexing Canada, making it into the 51st state ("Gay North Dakota" etc.). Of course the New York Times, which hates Donald and loves Justin (and both his dad and his "dad"), was mad at Trump. In other news, rain is wet.

It led me to wonder -- what if, not by war but some more peaceable means, Canada did become part of the United States? What would that look like politically? Would it be good for either country?

If Canada was admitted to the union as a single gigantic state, it would become our largest one population-wise, but only barely: With 40.1 million citizens, it would just beat out California's 39.5. However, it would be able to throw its weight around in Washington, because like the Golden State it would have 52 members of the House and 54 electoral votes. 

What if we admitted the Canadian provinces and territories as 13 individual states to split its power? Then it would likely dominate the Senate with a reliable club of 26 Canuckcaucus senators. 

This could be a good deal for Canadians. All of the authority, none of the responsibility. 

Nor would it necessarily be a bad thing for the original fifty, even with Canadian socialism. 

While we may dislike all the Trudeaus here, and clearly a lot of Canada do too, somehow they kept and keep winding up at 24 Sussex. But obviously we are also very good in the USA at sending dunderheads to higher office. We used to joke about the French minority calling the shots for the vast hinterland, making them learn French, but wherever you go in the USA, for Spanish you may marque dos. Unhinged and unaccountable bureaucrats make crippling rules without warning or voter input in both nations. Is there any real difference anymore? 

Canadian Mark Steyn calls his native land the Deranged Dominion, but it was the United States legal system that served him with years of torment and a bad free-speech judgment. He probably suffered more at the hands of Americans thanks to that than he ever did in Canada, even including time spent shoveling snow. Our healthcare system is morphing into socialized misery -- or fascistic misery, with companies in cahoots with the government, and patients getting screwed. Euthanasia can't be far behind, and if the system keeps getting worse, may be welcomed. ("It beats doing all this paperwork!") So can Americans even claim to have benefits of liberty superior to those in Canada? 

I wonder sometimes. 

I wonder if we would all be one huge country now if, as could very easily have happened, the American colonists had lost or given up in the dark years following the signing of the Declaration. 

I'll end with this promise: If it all somehow does come together into the United Canadian States of America, I swear that as Prime President I will enact my goal of refusing to allow any state that does not normally and naturally get ice to have an ice hockey team in the NHL. You have my word. 

Distasteful food words.

Handy in the kitchen

Do you like to eat food? Sure, we all do! But sometimes it bothers me that English, which is such a useful and interesting language, manages to have the ugliest words to describe food. Sometimes I wonder how we stomach the stuff with words like these. 

Seriously, look at this list and think of the words as words rather than what they mean. Eating is a pleasure; food is lovely. Why do we have gross words like these to ruin the experience?

Moist -- famously a top hated word in the English language, possibly because it is squeaky and is used equally for baking and fungal infections. 

Vegetables -- I've complained before that vegetable is a horrible wreck of consonants and vowels, more suited for something that clogs the toilet than a class of healthy comestible. Shortening it to veggie just makes it a toilet clog for children and idiots. 

Succulent -- An X-rated verb masquerading as a G-rated descriptor, and using the word when being arrested in an eatery probably just makes the situation worse. 

Slurp -- Another word for boneheads and a violation of every table manner since tables began; if there wasn't a punk band called The Slurps then I'm disappointed in the genre. 

Juicy -- About as bad as moist and for similar reasons. It also makes you spit a little at the end, which makes it a little more demonstrative than we really need. 

Scrumptious -- Anything that is described with a syllable like scrump ought to be involved in crushing, like a trash compactor. Supposedly a bastardization of the less-painful sumptuous. 

Toothsome -- Who thought this was a good word? It's usually used to connote good flavor, but teeth have no taste sensors. If your teeth are getting strong feelings from your food, it's time to see your dentist. But that brings us to:

Mouthfeel -- We know what it means and there's no real substitute word, but does it have to be so... vivid? Oral tactility is now my preferred phrase. 

Yogurt -- You get no sense of the creamy goodness of yogurt with this ugly Turkish word. The cows would go on strike if they knew. 

Munch -- Violent and stupid. Used for comical purpose by people who can't tell jokes. 

Chomp -- Violenter and stupider. 

Yummy -- Another word for small children, dingdongs, and dummies, and damn near incites me to violence. Grow the #@#^&! up.

Dripping -- Not really a food word although often used to describe supposed benefits of foods that are moist and juicy and a big fat mess. I ain't cleaning that up. 

Delicious -- Two shusches in a row make thus Latin import a wet mess. Pity, as it is the fundamental word for describing things that taste good. Shortening it to delish is almost as bad as veggie. 

Barbecue -- Not too too bad, but compared to its lyrical Spanish origin (barbacoa), it's definitely more violent and ugly. Shortening it to 'cue is just stupid. 

Mouthwatering -- What whets your appetite better than a word that makes you think of obvious, uncontrollable drooling? 

Luscious -- Delicious's drunk brother. 

Well, that's my list, and I daresay it's probably only the offenders who came to mind today. You may have other such words that hit the nails-on-the-chalkboard-o-meter, which I invite you to share in comments. English is such a wonderful language but can be so gross. 

Book thief!

Voltaire is supposed to have said, "Only your friends steal your books." I have not been able to find the quote to verify it, although it sounds like him. I have also heard a version as "Enemies steal your money; friends steal your books."

Nevertheless, there is truth to it. 

A friend of mine has recently found himself with time on his hands, and mentioned that for the first time in many years he is looking for books to read. I happily loaned a few from my library, most of which he enjoyed. 

Then he gave them away to other people. 

This is one reason why friends steal books -- if they are not true book lovers, they don't see the value in keeping a book at hand. Then they pass them along, figuring everyone should enjoy this nice book. I honestly had not anticipated this, but when he told me that he gave one of my books to his son and another to a friend, I knew I'd never see them again. 

"That's my book in your pocket, isn't it?"
“No, I’m just happy to see you. And
I have a rectangular schmeckele.”

I can sort of understand it, and yet at the same time I don't. No one does this with anything else. If I leant him a coat or my car or some tools, I know I'd get them back. He is very honest. I'm pretty sure if I'd leant him a DVD, he would not send it along downstream for someone else to watch. And yet hardcover books and many paperbacks are more expensive than CDs and DVDs. Maybe they expect you’ll watch a movie over and over, but no one ever rereads a book.

When I've stolen a book from a friend, I did it the old-fashioned way -- forgot to return it. Sometimes the book didn't grab me, or I had no time, and was determined to get back to it, only to find years later that it had been in my possession far longer than it ever had been in his. That's not larceny, which requires intent, but I still didn't give the book back.

Well, my pal still is looking for things to read, so you can figure what I have done -- I've bought him some as a Christmas present. I hope he enjoys them, and the same to whomever he sends them to next. I will not have to worry about those books. 

I need a montage.

I need a montage. 

It's Saturday, and I have three projects running that have me stressed. Two are copyediting jobs that also light fact-checking (for some values of "light"). Suffice it to say, if an error gets past me, many people among the readers will know it, and I am going to be in huge trouble with the publishers of these books. The third job is short, for a young audience, and is so poorly written that I'm concerned about how to get it to make sense without also making an enemy for life with the author and editor. I am paralyzed with anxiety and annoyance (anxioyance?).

So I need a montage. 

At this point in a movie or TV show, a friend or new acquaintance would enter my life and give me some words of direction or encouragement. As the light of hope and resolve comes back into my eyes, the opening chords of an upbeat pop hit are heard. Then, with the music overlaid loudly, I am shown in various scenes hammering away at the jobs, maybe with a few comical cuts (going for coffee, pencils breaking, Post-its being posted, going for more coffee, pounding the keyboard, looking through enormous books of facts, crawling for more coffee). It looks rough, but after two minutes the music is over and I'm DONE! 

That's the important bit -- being done. The audience doesn't need to go through all that stuff because it's boring and hard, and no one goes to the movies for homework. But without a montage for my life, I have to go through the boring and hard stuff. So I need some serious film editing. 

Well, some people still say that when you're in danger of death, your life passes before your eyes. I certainly hope that the boring parts are edited out -- unless of course that keeps the life-passing-by stage running longer, giving me more time to be rescued. "We thought we'd lost him, but he was rewatching the time he had to edit an encyclopedia of the Eisenhower administration, and that bought us some time!" 

Could be. That was a huge project.

Always check references.

 

Don’t bother to wake me up.

 

I'd hoped to have a fantastic blog entry for you on Monday, but you know what they say: Wife Happens. In this case my wife forbade me from getting on the computer on Sunday. Why? Because I normally do at least some work seven days a week, and I don't sleep well at night, and she thinks there's a connection. 

Besides, on Saturday (November 30th!) I had expressed my frustration with having no time to get any Christmas decorations up -- it seems like all my neighbors had theirs done by 12:01 on Thanksgiving afternoon -- and she suggested that rather than complaining I start doing. And stop judging the neighbors' outsides against my insides! 

(Feh. Like there's any other way I can judge them.)  

So, that's what happened to Sunday. 

We all know there are two types of insomniacs: those who can't get to sleep and those who can't stay asleep. I have become #1 of the #2 types, and I'm not referring to my bathroom breaks. I have zero trouble getting to sleep, but I am a champ at waking up at three and lying there like a lump, unable to return to sleep. Reading, prayer, meditation, nothing works. I'll give up around five, because if I get up the dog gets up, and he'll have to go out, and I imagine five is the earliest you can be out walking about the neighborhood and not look like a suspicious character. 

Can I use the extra time productively at least? Of course not, because by the time I get the dog back inside I am finally ready to sleep again, and so hit the sofa until eight... or nine... or... 

OTC sleeping aids don't help. Diphenhydramine and doxylamine can make me go to sleep even faster than I already do, but they're out of my system by three a.m. and HELLO I AM AWAKE AGAIN.

I'm not sure what's happening, but it's been going for a while. I'm going for a checkup in January so I will load it on the doctor's shoulders. I've tried everything, doc; now it's your turn. 

Have any of you out in Blog Land had experience with some of the new prescription sleep drugs? I neither drink nor take any Fun Drugs anymore, so I am not interested in anything that could be sold on a street corner. Do the prescription sleep aids really help you get to sleep and stay that way for the expected eight hours, without feeling like an extra on Dawn of the Dead?

My luck, I'll get a perfect solution to the problem, and then the dog will become insomniac, dragging me out in the dead of night. Maybe it would be my just desserts. 

No capisce?

Over the last couple of decades I have been pushed further into Grumpy Old Editor territory by the claims of political correctness, as it was once known. From the time I heard that African American would no longer be hyphenated but Irish-American would, I knew something was going on that was not dictated by logic or reason but by emotion and power. And indeed, from those humble beginnings have come no end of mischief. (I refer to the reader to my discussion of AFABs and AMABs in April, for example.)

One preference that irritates me for very practical purposes is this: that foreign words are no longer supposed to be set in italics when appearing in English text. You surely have seen passages like this in books in the past:

"Pardon me, Passepartout, have you seen the ticket office for the next stage of our journey?" 

"Alas, M. Fogg, la billetterie is shuttered for the day." 

In this pretend passage from the Verne work, we can gather what Phileas's helpful companion is saying and we have possibly learned some French vocabulary as well. But the insidious thing I have done with italicization is othered the French by making their language look like some weird -- well, foreign thing. And boy, won't the French be mad! I'm sure they never do anything like that to non-French words in their own text!

My point is, the italicization of a foreign word was never intended to make any non-English speakers feel like they didn't belong; it was intended to alert the reader that the word is in another tongue and help the clarity of the text. 

There are a number of foreign (I'm sticking to foreign over non-English) words that look the same as English words but are not -- and that's where clarity is threatened. Try this passage:

Mr. Van der Plotz ran up to me in quite a state of distress. "You shall not believe this!" he said. "I was minding a beer near the stream when suddenly an angel pulled at my shirt! I was slim enough to realize it was a roof! Fortunately, the man was aloud, and I was able to leap into the stream, escaping with no more than a bad, although my boots are coated in blubber. It quite upset my rooster!"   

From our example, it seems Mr. Van der Plotz has lost his senses. But let's identify which words were actually in his native Dutch by the use of italics.

Mr. Van der Plotz ran up to me in quite a state of distress. "You shall not believe this!" he said. "I was minding a beer near the stream when suddenly an angel pulled at my shirt! I was slim enough to realize it was a roof! Fortunately, the man was aloud, and I was able to leap into the stream, escaping with no more than a bad, although my boots are coated in blubber. It quite upset my rooster!"

"Oh!" I said. "You were watching a bear when a fishing rod snagged you? But you were smart and saw that it was an attempt at robbery! The man was elderly, so you were able to escape into the stream, suffering only an unexpected bath and muddy boots. And now your schedule is all upset."

"That's what I said!" he huffed. 

Yes, this is a silly example, but I hope it makes the point -- we treat foreign words as foreign in text because they are. We'd all like to be able to read any language, but that's not how life works. In most nations on Earth you will find only one or two common languages, and having limited language in a populace is useful for -- what's that word again? Yes, clarity. In a book, a reader needs a helpful indicator that a word has arrived from a language different from that in which the bulk of the text is written.

The war on precision and clarity in the supposed service of removing offense is itself offensive. This nonsense is brought to us from our universities, of course, paid for by tax dollars, outrageous tuitions, and rich people who should know better. If the intent was mainly to sow confusion, what more could the academicians do? The ivory tower has become a Tower of Babel.

But it was delicious.

While many people remember the tragic Great Molasses Flood that struck Boston in 1919, few now recall the Tremendous Canned Jellied Cranberry Roll that nearly flattened the city center in 1913. 

Gearing up the gratitude.

With Thanksgiving nearly upon us in the United States, it behooves us to remember things for which we should have gratitude. Gratitude is the best cure for many social and emotional illnesses, which is one reason it is so despised by people who hate America. 

So first, I'm grateful that socialism was pushed further away from the body politic by the results of our last election.  

Closer to home, I'm grateful that the early snowstorm we had last week is a melted memory now. As it turned out, on our block we missed having long-term issues by a matter of inches. 

The local utility company is pretty good about getting out there when the sun is warm, taking down branches that will fall on power lines when the weather turns cold. But when the problem is a tree more than a dozen feet into someone's property, I don't think they have the authority to go tree-cutting. When our early storm hit, some trees still had leaves, weighing down the limbs, which subsequently fell off. And in one case, an elderly tree was entirely weighed down. 

Timber!!!

As you can see, it landed a ways over the curb, into the street. The homeowner has yet to chop it up; he may be pricing the job out. Fortunately it did not go far out enough into the street to be a danger to traffic.

Even more fortunately, it literally missed the power lines by inches. 

It looks like the tiny upper branches probably brushed the lines as the whole thing came down. If it had been just a little taller, lights out. 

We came close to having a bunch of houses without energy as Thanksgiving approached, with a problem that couldn't be resolved until the downed tree was completely removed. 

So I'm grateful for electricity and the genius of those who learned how to harness it for the benefit of humanity and civilization. And I'm grateful that the weather did not result in a local cut of electricity. And I'm grateful too that Communism has not taken over our country, because in many ways that means all the lights go out.

Crushalogs IV: The Revenge.

As a continuing social project, I am examining the volume and weight of catalogs I receive in the mail as the Christmas shopping season gins up into high gear. This is the fourth time I have done this. It's not as scientific an examination as I would hope; I have done these on different dates in November, and I have not spaced the years out evenly. 

In a nutshell, or perhaps a mailbox, I have been curious as to whether online advertising is killing the mail catalog business, so I have been looking at whether the sheer weight of catalogs has been decreasing as time goes on. Are they still considered an effective way to reach potential customers? If so, the overall catalog weight should be increasing or staying about the same. If not, it should be dwindling like the number of non-"commemorative edition" publications on the supermarket checkout magazine racks. 

Here are the results from the three previous entries:

Crushalogs I: November 4, 2016 -- Several weeks earlier in November than this year, and I estimated more than 10 pounds to that time; the catalogs seemed to be thicker eight years ago, but I may have exaggerated the total weight. Bad science, me! 

Crushalogs II: November 8, 2019 -- I also did not make either a count or a weight of the catalogs in 2019. I do note that in 2019, as in 2016, there was a giant dump at the beginning of November. This year it seems to have been parsed out over the month. I wonder if that is because Thanksgiving is so late in 2024?

Crushalogs III: November 19, 2022 -- Two years ago I did weigh the catalogs, and got a total of two pounds. Well, I think I can beat that weight this year! 

So let me load the catalogs into a plastic shopping bag, and then use the old luggage scale... And: 

Almost four pounds! So it looks like catalog mailings are up this year, double by weight from '22. It seems like in a lot of areas, smart businesses are pulling back from the new technological approaches and going back to what works. Maybe catalogs really are the way to reach holiday shoppers. After all, TV viewership is down, landline phones are way down, but if you live somewhere, you have a mailbox. It's a lot easier to focus on a few quality selections in a catalog than deal with the firehose of dubious miscellanea from online stores (hello, Amazon). If a company doesn't just chuck a lot of cheap Chinese crap at its clients, its catalog will likely be of higher interest. 

MAI Fulfillment says one of the advantages of mail catalogs is that they offer measurable results for businesses, justifying the large expenses of design, printing, and mailing. It depends on what kind of customers are being targeted, I supposed. 

What will 2025 bring to the catalog business? Oh, who knows. I have no idea what's coming down the road. I'm grumpy enough now. Maybe next year I'll go full Grinch and steal all the catalogs from all the mailboxes in Whoville and use them to build a giant bonfire to scare off the Whos. Not likely, but who can say what the future holds?

You’d better watch out!

We had a very dry and pleasant and even warm autumn to this point, so now we're getting it in the shorts. First there were wildfires, which I have never seen in the lower tier of New York State. They followed on the heels of drought warnings as day follows the night. Containing those bastard fires was extremely tough for our local firemen, and a big salute goes out to them. 

When it rained all day yesterday, it was a big relief. People always say "We needed the rain," but we really needed it this year. It usually rains here a lot, especially in November, which is normally a big gray wet smear of a month. And this is why we almost never have to deal with wildfires. 

Prior to the rain, a lot of the locals started to get their Christmas decorations out. I just can't do it before Thanksgiving, but I didn't fault them for taking advantage of the clement weather. I too have hung ribbons and lights in cold so miserable I could barely feel the fingers that were doing the work. But I just couldn't focus on doing the job this soon.  

Note that for some folks, the beginning of
Yuletide does not mean the end of 
Gloattide. 

I know when I drag the decorations out of the cellar, I will get that powerful feeling that I had just put them away. It happens annually, and the feeling is stronger each year, because of the ol' toilet paper situation, that life -- like a roll of TP -- goes faster the further along you are. 

And alas! I probably should have put my porch lights up already as well, because as I write this at 3:30 in the morning on Friday, it is snowing like (to use the technical, meteorological term) bejeezus out there. The dog sensed that this would be a bad time to have to go out to pee in the yard, so he woke up at three and started whining. And here we are. 

Compounding this, it's garbage day! Which means I don't know if I should take the can up to the street or not, as the trashmen will have to avoid the plows. The plow might even nail my Rubbermaid, which sounds vaguely pornographic. So now I don't even know what I'm doing. 

Jupiter pluvius, I guess, but sometimes his schedule is very inconvenient for me. 

Scrape the scum!

We had company coming to stay for a couple of days. While we have had many dinner guests, it has been some time since we had a sleepover party. Whee! And that meant it was time for Molecular Level Cleaning. 

We love the family, and this also provided a motivation to get that pesky, er, spring cleaning done. Okay, so we were a little late. 

It was a bit of an adventure. The kind of thing where the curtains are getting washed, the beds are lifted to vacuum the carpet below, and at some point you just look around and say HOW DO WE LIVE LIKE THIS? 

By the time the discouragement sets in, though, you're in too deep. The only way out is through. And I like to think that we presented a very pleasant and low-dust (and even low-dog-hair) environment. 

It's getting to the point where it's time to scale down. Time to get a smaller place. Time to stop having to make a monthly mortgage payment, that's for doggone sure, and a smaller place ought to let us pay cash with the proceeds from our larger home.

What kind of smaller house? Well, I don't know. I have always felt that my grandmother had it good in her old age. She literally lived in a cottage, a winterized beach cottage of which there were many in the outer boroughs at the time. (Real estate speculators and Hurricane Sandy have put paid to a lot of those since.) It was a little place, three rooms, but manageable for her and all she needed; she would get up in the morning, have a bit of breakfast, do her chores, perhaps toddle to the market, and watch TV or enjoy the sunshine. She didn't have to put up with annoying people on the other side of the wall, or a stupid roommate, or anything like that. I thought she had it made. 

I have always sort of thought that she had a great retirement plan. And then I realized that this retirement plan was to be a woodland creature in a British children's book.

Mrs. Squirrel realized she was out of tea. "Oh, dear, best go round the shops." So she put on her scarf and a lovely hat and left her cottage in the woods. 

"Hello, Mrs. Squirrel!" said Mr. Trash Panda, popping up from his smelly dumpster. "Lovely day, is it not?"

"Quite so, Mr. Panda!" said Mrs. Squirrel, who did not feel close enough as a friend to call him Trash. "I'm just going to the shops. Do you need anything?"

"No, thank you kindly, as someone has thrown away half a pizza."

And so on and so forth. 

It's a pleasant thought, but I must bear in mind that my grandmother had my dad a few miles away to help her out as needed (she did not drive). Also, she herself was tough as nails. Whereas I and my wife will likely flee New York and not be near family, and I personally am about as tough as Bubble Yum. 

Plus, if the housing market craters, I may have to move in with Mr. T. Panda or perhaps in a hollow tree. Getting older is hard, even when you're not scrubbing the hallway. 

Self-manslaughter.

I was thinking of a family member who had an awful car accident a couple of decades back. Actually it could have been much worse; the car hit a low concrete barrier at speed and flipped. Physically she came through just fine. Mentally she was not well afterward. In fact, she was not at all well beforehand. 

The woman in question had lost her husband of many years, and was driving back home to their empty house after coming up to New York for the funeral. When I found out about this accident -- to a woman with a perfectly clean driving record -- my thought was then as it is now, that her intense grief led to an involuntary suicide attempt. Not self-murder, but self-manslaughter. 

Probably all but the most even keeled or self-possessed of us have had those times when we're so overwhelmed with anger or sorrow or some other form of emotional pain that for a brief period we would blow up the world (or our own world) just to stop the pain. For most it would not bring us to suicide, but it could certainly make us so out of control that we could cause some horrific harm to ourselves by accident. This is very like manslaughter -- there was no intention of killing someone, but a terrifying lapse of control has led to just that -- except the victim is us.  

According to the CDC's provisional data for 2023, heart diseases are still the top cause of death in America, followed by cancer. Accidental deaths are next by a considerable margin, not even a third of heart disease deaths. But they're all awful, because they each took the life of someone who could have lived another day. 

And now I wonder -- how many of them could technically have been caused by self-harm, which is eleventh on the list? I wouldn't be surprised if psychiatrists and statisticians have looked into this, but I doubt there's a way to know. Maybe a population sample that seeks out those who died accidentally to see how many were known to be suffering distress -- but who can say? A lot of men, and women too, try to hide these feelings for a variety of reasons. There's no way to know who was going along, outwardly in control, who suddenly had a moment in which he or she said I can't take one more second of this -- or felt that way without putting it into conscious words -- and made a small mistake with fatal consequences. 

If you're feeling that way as you read this, I ask that you not wait until it escalates but tell someone. The 988 crisis hotline has a good rep. And if you're in a stage of catastrophic distress but don't think it will rise to the level of danger, still try to find a positive way forward. The lady with the car accident I described lived almost four years longer and died of natural causes, but not for one day did she ever move forward out of her grief. She didn't deserve to suffer that way. 

Finer heroes were never bread.

 

Cards for kids.

I saw an ad for some kind of tea online, an ad that tried to hit all those FOMO buttons. Each loving leaf of this tea was carefully curated by twelfth-generation tea growers in their paradisical tea garden in Teadonia blah blah blah. It occurred to me that so much of Internet advertising is essentially trying to find a way to get you to pay five bucks for a teabag. Because if you don't, you're missing out, you don't know what good tea is, and you're a loser. 

I mentioned to my wife that the young adults who might fall for this kind of appeal are likely the same ones who complain that they are unable to pay back their student loans. She raised an excellent point about a real hole in their education, one I would like to share today. 

But first, I want to say that I do sympathize with kids getting hammered by student loans. Colleges have become obscenely overpriced in the last thirty years, using guaranteed loans to guarantee themselves enormous raises while continuing to promote the idea that the only path to a fulfilling career is through their gold-plated doors. Knowing that much of college teaching is provided by underpaid adjuncts, we all should be asking: What the hell are you bastards doing with the money? That's all beside the point, but I wanted to note that I am aware college debt has gotten out of control since I was a fresh-faced undergrad. 

Now: To business! 

My wife and I were talking about the days when we lived in a much more cash-centric society. You could not put anything from an impromptu piano purchase to the change for the air machine to inflate your tires on plastic. Sure, some places took credit cards, fewer took ATM cards, and some people still wrote checks at the supermarket. For everything else, you got some cash and that was it until the next trip to the bank. 

This, as my wife put it, is why young adults now don't think through the ramifications of overpriced tea and the like. The junior varsity credit and debit cards they were given as kids, the ones that were supposed to teach them to manage money, removed the crushing fear of being caught short in a difficult spot. In our youth it was: No cash? No taxi. No cash? No Big Mac. Didn't bring your checkbook? Better not spend too much on the groceries or you'll have to make the Return Request of Shame. ("Um... Can I put the steaks? And the Frusen Glädjé? And the, er, toilet paper?") I prided myself on keeping a running estimate as I went, and I don't think I ever got caught short. 

Fear is a great motivator and can be a great teacher. You can learn about the wonders of store brands, the importance of learning to sew, the glory of not paying $65 for a pair of adult booties from Bombas. But when you're not thinking about the money you're spending and counting on that high limit and overdraft protection, you may feel fearless -- but it may be a whole different feeling when the texts from the bank and credit card company start pinging on your phone.

I never really thought those starter credit cards were a great idea. Better to open a savings account for the squirt and actually put cash into it. Yeah, the interest the banks give on savings is so poor these days that it actually counts as an insult, but that's not the point. The point is learning the value of money and why it's important to be careful with it. 

Insert obligatory final line here, wishing that Washington would learn the same lesson. Well, I can dream, can't I?

Offloading trouble.

In the final days leading up to the election, I heard several things that upon reflection made me think of the famous story by Ursula K. Le Guin called "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." The imaginative premise of the story, in brief, is that there is a city of perpetual happiness and peace called Omelas, but its happy state rests entirely on a dark secret -- that one child be held in perpetual misery and darkness. Everyone else is joyful and free, but that child must remain in a state of sheer horror or the whole thing collapses. 

What brought it to mind was that, over and over again, I would hear from citizens of this free country demanding that the government guarantee so-called positive rights -- a right to food, education, health care, housing -- rather than the negative rights of just staying out of our faces -- not interfering with speech, religion, person freedom, etc. The more I heard this, the more I got to wonder why supposed adults would expect that someone else must always be required to foot the bill for them, and in many or even most cases even to free them from the bare requirements of survival, or even the consequences of their own actions. 

For example, no authority stops someone from being irresponsible over sex. They are free to do as they like. But they also want to be free from the consequences of the behavior. Someone else must pay for the health care, the drugs, the abortion, the child care and all that entails (if they keep the baby). If not, it is unfair and shows the system is corrupt and evil. 

I've heard of no-fault divorces, no-fault insurance, and no-fault claims, but what they want are no-fault lives.

In a way, though, all of us are citizens of Omelas, in the sense that the bulk of our own citizens benefit from the work of other citizens in jobs we would never want to do. Cops, prison guards, firemen, stool sample examiners, high-rise window washers, sewer workers, nurses in Alzheimer's patient wards, teachers in bad neighborhoods, and so on. We'd rather not think about them. We worry more about the garbage than the garbagemen.  

In one way most of are and really can't help but be citizens of Omelas. That is, the reason we are free and at liberty to fight one another rather than fight other nations is because, for all its faults, we still have the finest military in the world. Most of are too old or too young or just not physically capable of going to war. Whether we like to think about it or not, our active military and our veterans have made our largely pleasant lives possible. 

They have also made us proud. They have endured and suffered, in some cases beyond most of our understanding, so that we may have a chance to be happy and free -- even free to ignore who they are and what they have given for us. 

So I want to thank our veterans on this post on this Veterans Day. They really have secured the blessings of our liberty. May God bless them and may our nation be grateful to them. 

Catching up.

Sorry I've been away from the blog. Let's get caught up, shall we? 

For those of you concerned that I was eaten by the black bear that's been hanging around -- no, it did not happen. His doctor probably warned him I was bad for his cholesterol. No new bear sightings, not since this trash can raid on October 29. Well, it was either the bear or the raccoons are getting organized. 

I was and am grateful for the results of the elections last Tuesday, although as usual New York boned up. Ludicrous nonentity Kirsten Gillibrand returns to the Senate to be Chuck Schumer's flunky. And the state assembly has pulled a fast one, getting a proposition past the voters that will open the door to all kinds of shenanigans. This is what people who did not do their homework saw on the ballot: 

Abstract of Proposal Number One, An Amendment

Amendment to Protect Against Unequal Treatment

This proposal amends Article 1, Section 11 of the New York Constitution. Section 11 now protects against unequal treatment based on race, color, creed, and religion. The proposal will amend the act to also protect against unequal treatment based on ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, and pregnancy outcomes, as well as reproductive healthcare and autonomy.  The amendment allows laws to prevent or undo past discrimination.

It passed because New Yorkers are dumb and don't read, and they saw nice words like protect and against unequal and autonomy said all right. Okay, well, who isn't in favor of protecting against unequal treatment, right? It was sold as a means of protecting abortion, which former gubernatorial candidate John Faso accurately explained was horse hockey in the Albany paper. 

Of course, what this will actually mean is, first off, boys will be walloping girls in girls' sports. But that's just the beginning. It also undermines parental authority, in opposition to existing state law. When the state takes a 10-year-old away from his parents because he wants to get his willie chopped off and be a girl and they don't want him to do that, maybe someone will point out to those parents that they should not have voted this way. 

It is literally the only proposition on a ballot I have ever seen that the archdiocese and every priest in it begged parishioners not to support. Oh, well. Vote in haste, cry your eyes out the rest of your life. 

But the rest of the nation did all right, and I am grateful to them. So let's move on to thanksgiving! 

Thanksgiving decorations are more of a thing this year, or so I notice around the neighborhood, and maybe that's not a coincidence. This house chimed in on a popular Thanksgiving meme:

Another house brilliantly stuck it to a blog post of mine from TEN YEARS AGO. Way back in 2014, I wrote:  

Christmas is green and red. Halloween is orange and black. St. Patrick's Day is green. First day of school is red and black (schools and blackboards). New Year's is white, black, and silver. Easter is anything, as long as it's pastel. I suppose it's only a matter of time before porch lights are available for all these holidays and more. But Thanksgiving is restricted to the colors of late fall, and by the end of November there are virtually no colors left. The leaves have fallen, been raked up, mulched, gone. Bare trees remain, and pine cones. Thanksgiving is brown. Who does brown lights?

Well, now they have those strip lights that can be turned to any color in the spectrum! And guess what? I found a house lit up in brown lights for the season! Very nice, and I applaud their effort and the desire to celebrate the great Thanksgiving holiday. 

I couldn't believe my brown light tirade ran a whole decade ago. But yeah, I've been blogging on this site for almost eleven years, and on another host prior to than for a couple more. Maybe that's enough out of me already. 

Boo who?

Around Halloween we were chatting about the UNICEF boxes, the cardboard boxes that some poor kids had to schlep around to go schnorring on behalf of the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. I think I did it once. Sometimes in school they'd put the guilt screws on you, and you felt obliged to participate. Well, I figured that UNICEF boxes had gone the way of leisure suits and Pet Rocks. 

Nope.

It's back.

When I was a kid, living in the Five Boroughs, there were plenty of true believers among the parents. They had grown up under the threat of World War and nuclear holocaust, and they believed that the United Nations was an important means to bring countries together and do good throughout the world. Sure, the Communists were always on the march, and the UN reps were always fighting, but as long as the Soviets or the Chinese didn't actually declare war on the United States or Western Europe, then surely the UN was working. It was acting as a "cooling dish" to prevent hotheads from bumbling into war, and a meeting place to try to work out treaties in the presence of other nations, preventing a treaty-based honor system that would require half the world to go to war against the other half as in 1914. 

UNICEF was another helpful idea. It would show that the nations of the world could work together to help children, all children, everywhere, when disaster or famine or illness struck. The pennies, nickels, and dimes we collected along with our fun-size Krackels (yay!) and Hershey Special Darks (boo!) would help the UN perform this mission. 

I'm not sure where it really started to go wrong. Publicly wrong, anyway. It was as the Cold War was coming to a close. In 1988, the Nobel Committee gave its Peace Prize to the UN Peacekeeping Forces for "reducing tensions where an armistice has been negotiated but a peace treaty has yet to be established." By 1996 it had been noted that in half the nations the UN Peacekeeping Forces went, there was a "rapid rise in child prostitution".

Does anyone expect anything good out of the UN anymore? It seemed like its World Health Organization might be useful, but its reputation went in the garbage with just about every other major health organization during COVID. A genuine investigation into how the pandemic started and who started it would turn things around, but these groups would rather ride the train to hell than admit fault, rattle the Communist Chinese, or (worst of all) give the plebes any chance of vindication. All the UN is good for is condemning Israel and sometimes the United States, working with terrorists, and demanding that we beasts in the West take more rapists and murderers into our bosom (as if we don't have enough of our own). 

So no, I will never recommend anyone give to UNICEF or any other concern in which the UN is involved. I don't know how well UNICEF does what it purports to do, but the United Nations as a whole has never lived up to its promise, so why should UNICEF? There are better charities. 

The word books are here!

This doesn't matter to anyone outside the publishing industry, and only to about half of them, but The Chicago Manual of Style has coughed up an 18th edition, and made the front cover a friendly-but-eye-hurting yellow rather than their previous trademark orange.  

For those who don't know (and certainly needn't care), the manual is a big book, a list price $75 book, that standardizes everything in the book publishing process from the smallest punctuation to the largest production demands. Newspapers don't use it; they follow the Associated Press style guide. Medical publishers generally follow the AMA's style guide, I believe. I own those, too. And then there's Words Into Type, a sort of rival of CMS, but not given to as many editions. It's often used as a supplement, because there's nothing a 1,200-page cinder block of a book needs more than a supplement. 

The University of Chicago Press began dispensing publishing wisdom in 1891, as a sheet that contained the information for the publisher's compositors and pressmen, who had to deal with scruffy manuscripts from scruffy professors (or so I imagine). 

Even at such an early stage, “the University Press style book and style sheet” was considered important enough to be preserved, along with other items from the Press’s early years, in the cornerstone of the new Press building in 1903.

That sheet grew into a pamphlet, and by 1906 the pamphlet had become a book: Manual of Style: Being a compilation of the typographical rules in force at the University of Chicago Press, to which are appended specimens of types in use—otherwise known as the 1st edition of the Manual. At 200 pages, the original Manual cost 50 cents, plus 6 cents for postage and handling.

It's the bible for most book publishers, as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is for the headshrinkers, or the Pocket Pal is for graphics and reproduction guys. (You may insert your Pocket Pal joke here.) 

The CMS doesn’t change much between editions. The 17th was published in 2017. The last few have been busy keeping up with technological changes. And yet it's important to have the most recent one so that we're all quite literally on the same page. If I get into a fight with an editor or writer over the capitalization of celestial objects, I want to refer them to 8.143 (the 143rd section of chapter 8) to show that aurora borealis is set in lowercase. As you can see, the CMS plays referee.  

Despite this, I used to work at a company where the copy chief absolutely refused to use the 15th edition, demanding that we galley slaves stay with the 14th. I do not know why he had it in for the 15th, but he was not kidding. Down with the 15th! was his cry. Soon after I was laid off from that job, the 16th edition came out. I am still afraid the shock may have killed him. 

I haven't looked at the 18th much yet. I worry that they've decided to stuff it with a bunch of politically correct stuff -- how to handle newly coined pronouns, how to address someone who identifies as a wallaby, that kind of thing. It can’t be helped. At least the book remains a noble defender of the serial comma.

Now that I've whipped you into a Chicago Manual of Style frenzy, you will be glad to know that you can buy merch.

The number on the back makes me laugh. Like you play third base for the Chicago Manuals of Style. Can’t tell the players without a scorecard.

Monkey wrenches.

A company I work for was recently purchased by some firm you and I never heard of. While being tangentially in the same business arena, one is a publisher and the other one is an investment firm. 

Knowing the track record of the money mooks at places like Boeing in recent years, I am not optimistic. My main contact says that so far there's been a little departmental shuffling, but no major changes. 

I will be the first to admit that publishing is a mug's game these days, the overeducated spooling the unnecessary to the uninterested. It had reached a grand height in the 1990s, when Condé Nast built its new tower on Times Square, and has been in precipitous decline since. (Condé had its own tower by 2015.) Still, some ends of the business are attached to lucrative industries like finance and healthcare, so they have reason to continue to expect profitability. The company I work for is like that, so there's no reason to think it was bought to be sold off in parts, or to have the stock price run up and then dumped for profit by buccaneers of finance. 

However, there is every reason to fear that, once the dust clears, the new owners will move in the monkey wrench crew to improve things. 

These improvements are very much like artificial intelligence. They are forced onto the unwilling to perform functions that are unnecessary and wind up costing jobs for people who have performed well for years. The work is then outsourced or given to cheap hires that perform poorly. The bottom line is temporarily improved, the stock price rises, then clients flee as everything gets weird and shoddy. Then it's sold off for parts.

Improve Back Better

Don't get me wrong; I'm a big fan of capitalism. The profit motive in a high-trust society like America has been until recently is the best means of raising people in large groups out of poverty ever devised.

I'm against stupid capitalism, however, where companies are run by people who neither know nor care about the actual business and everything goes to hell. I'm sure you can list a dozen examples of companies that died that way, usually the death of a thousand cuts rather than a staggering collapse. Often companies are just caught by surprise by technological advances. But in the end, it mostly comes down to a lack of the intelligence and devotion that made the companies great in the first place. 

If your company is bought out, as has happened to me in the past, I wish you very good luck. Keep an eye open for the monkey wrench crew, come to fix things. It's usually a sign to get the résumé together, if you haven't already. 

Eat the children!

Sometimes I wonder if people celebrating Halloween even want trick-or-treaters to show up at their door. The little kids, anyway. The yard decorations are absolutely horrifying, and a long ways from the stuff that was around even twenty years ago. 

The Angel of Death prepares to bite the head off a little girl

 

How can a ghost have stitches?
I always heard "Witches get stitches."
Or something like that.

Stack o' skulls and the Murder Clown
Acrobatic Team

I realize that compared to a lot of over-the-top yard displays, these folks are barely more than a papier-mâché pumpkin and a green witch Glitter Plaque. But I think when I was a little kid I would have had to at least screw up my courage, maybe shut my eyes and run to the front door -- less for the candy than from the greater fear of being labeled a chicken or a baby. 

Skeletons scared me when I was a boy, I can admit now, and no rational discussion of the utility and importance of human bone structure could cure me of it. I went through a phase where every time I had to turn a light on in a dark room, I anticipated a skeleton waiting for me. I never told anyone, and God help the kid with that same phobia today, because there are plenty of lifelike skeletons to be had for prank purposes. Fortunately, after a couple hundred skeletonless light engagements, I stopped worrying about it. But let's just say that having a vivid imagination is not an unmixed blessing. 

The other confession I have to make is, scary as this stuff is, it was nothing compared to the shooting gallery illustration. This "fun" bit of artwork was in an arcade, either in Seaside Heights or Coney Island -- I have not been able to find it online -- and featured an idiot man with a rifle barrel turned backward, as happened in Looney Tunes many times. But instead of just being blackened with gunpowder, the rifle had blown a hole in his head and a hole in the abdomen of the woman behind him. Both reacted with some surprise. I could not look at it; it would ruin my day if I did. The concept of "body horror" was not so well known then, but that was how it affected me. What made it really sickening (like, made me want to throw up the contents of my mind) was that it was supposed to be funny. 

Maybe I was the weird kid, I don't know. But to my credit, no matter how scared I was, I would get up to every door on Halloween to demand my candy. I could not back down in front of my peers. Plus, candy comes first on Halloween. The pumpkins and ghosts and the rest are really an add-on. You gotta get the good stuff.