A sci-fi "holiday"and...

...a "si" holiday! I'm two days too dazed! (What else is new?)

I had no idea that yesterday was a holiday, until this lady walked into my place of work:

I asked why she was wearing Jedi clothing, and she told me "Because of the date."

[Read the whole post here!]

"The Executioner"

From Marvel's WHERE MONSTERS DWELL #26, cover date January 1974. Originally appeared in UNCANNY TALES #9, cover date June 1953. Art by Myron Fass.

Click on each image to see the larger version.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL TDSH READERS!

Viva Dia de los Muertos!

Some words and photos in honor of the Mexican Day of the Dead. Click on any picture to enlarge them.

Feliz Dia de los Muertos! (Beats writing about the horrors of election day!)

Please visit the links provided for still more photos and/or interesting text.

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Excerpt of the Ray Bradbury short story "The Next in Line," from his collection, The October Country:

In the market, the remainder of candy skulls from the Death Fiesta were sold from flimsy little tables. Women hung with black rebozos sat quietly, now and then speaking one word to each other, the sweet sugar skeletons, the saccharine corpses and white candy skulls at their elbows. Each skull had a name on top in gold candy curlicue; Jose or Carmen or Ramon or Tena or Guiermo or Rosa. They sold cheap. The Death Festival was gone. Joseph paid a peso and got two candy skulls.

Marie stood in the narrow street. She saw the candy skulls and Joseph and the dark ladies who put the skulls in a bag.

“Not really,” said Marie.

“Why not?” said Joseph.

“Not after just now,” she said.

“In the catacombs?”

She nodded.

He said, “But these are good.”

“They look poisonous.”

“Just because they’re skull-shaped?”

“No. The sugar itself looks raw, how do you know what kind of people made them, they might have the colic.”

“My dear Marie, all people in Mexico have colic,” he said.

“You can eat them both,” she said.

“Alas, poor Yorick,” he said, peeking into the bag.

Related link: Day of the Dead

Area dentist buys back candy for kids overseas!

From the local CBS affiliate's web site:

Now that Halloween is over, many people do not want candy in their house with good reason.

However, a local dentist is offering a good way to get rid of it and you'll get money for your troubles.

That's where Dr. David Petti comes in. He's buying candy back from people for $1 a pound. The maximum is five pounds, but that's quite a bit of candy.

The rules dictate that you have to be under the age of 18 and have an adult or guardian accompany you to his office in Plum.

The next question is, where is all this candy headed off to?

"We're going to try to send it over to the troops in Afghanistan," Dr. Petti said.

It would be nice to send candy over to soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan, but there's a bigger reason for treating the troops.

The soldiers over there oftentimes give candy to Afghan children and one-by-one it wins hearts and minds.

"That's what they're doing, they're actually handing over only some of their candy to them. I just think it's a good thing. They work pretty hard for us over there," Dr. Petti said.

________________________

To read the rest of this story at the KDKA web site, click here.

Snow time like the New Year

Click on the pic above to enlarge and read it.

SEE YOU IN THE NEW YEAR! (Will resume blogging Jan. 2)

Happy Fangsgiving, everyone!

This is a great holiday. It's the one day of the year you can tell your friends and family to "Get stuffed!" without anyone getting mad!


Art above by Norman Bridwell, from the 1972 Scholastic book Monster Jokes and Riddles.

Today is "The Other Halloween"!

I have always been impressed with the breadth and depth of the blog Frankensteinia, the internet's premier site for information and commentary on all things related to Mary Shelley's immortal Frankenstein. It's the blog of accomplished, award-winning comic artist and writer Pierre Fournier (seen right.) For your humble drunken severed head, it's a near-daily place to visit.

So with beaming pride and joy I get to feature a guest post by Monsieur Fournier today! I share with you "The Other Halloween," a reminiscence on the Feast of St. Catherine, a holiday most Americans are unfamiliar with. His childhood recollections include its similarities and differences with Halloween, and a reminder that, in the words of an old song, "every gain must have a loss."

Take it away, Pierre!
__________________________________

The Other Halloween

It’s Autumn. The leaves are falling, gold and red. Comes a magical day when kids get all the attention and are given sweets. It’s November 25. The Feast of St. Catherine!

I am Quebecois, born and raised in Montréal and, as such, my early Halloween experiences were vastly different from those of other kids in America or English Canada. I grew up in the Fifties, back when a strict and very conservative Catholic Church still held an iron-fisted sway over Quebec life and politics. We had Halloween, but being both a pagan holiday and an Anglo-Saxon tradition, it didn’t have much of a presence in our young lives. Besides, with St. Catherine’s Day looming, we had all the candy in the world to look forward to.

St. Catherine was a martyr who went up against some creepy Roman Emperor, giving him hell for worshipping false gods. She even converted the Emperor’s wife, sealing her own fate. Icons show her brandishing a sword, signifying her crusade, and a wheel symbolizes the torture device that miraculously shattered at her touch. They settled for a beheading. Hers would be one of the voices that spoke to Joan of Arc. Her main claim to fame was to be a sort of patron saint to “old maids”. In medieval France, women who were still unmarried at 25 were called Catherinettes. On St. Catherine’s Day, the girls would get together to share an elaborate meal and pray for husbands, wearing “St. Catherine’s bonnets” as a sign of their status and, I guess, availability.

In 1653, a young French nun, Sister Marguerite Bourgeois, sailed across the Atlantic to become the first schoolteacher at the new French Colony in Montréal. It was Bourgeois who introduced the Feast of St. Catherine in the New World, and she transformed it into a holiday where the Sisters, the ladies of the colony and the young girls learning household skills would spend the day making taffy for the children. It is said the candy was used to draw Native American children to the white man’s school and into the Christian faith. Bourgeois’ devotion to St. Catherine also led to the saint’s name being given to one of the first roads in Montréal. Today, the city’s main commercial artery is St. Catherine Street.

In the Fifties, when I was growing up, you were allowed to bring candy to school — an otherwise subversive act — on St. Catherine’s Day. Classes were sometimes cut short and games were played in the schoolyard or in the gym. I remember one year when my teachers made the traditional taffy and all the kids participated in the pulling thereof, getting the stuff all over our hands, clothes and hair. By the end of the day, we were an unruly, sticky mess, jagged on molasses.

Halloween wasn’t entirely ignored. The holiday had been introduced to us by the Irish settlers who easily assimilated into Québécois culture through mutual religion, Catholics banding together against the dastardly English oppressors. Percolating through Québec culture, Halloween would gain traction and emerge with unique differences. Kids dressing up and going door to door asking for candy was called “courir l’Halloween” — “Running Halloween” — but there was no trick to the treating. We’d simply say “la charité, s’il-vous-plaît” — “Charity, Please!”

There was no concept of Halloween as celebrating the Dead. No skeletons or ghosts, no monsters, no spider-webbed tombstones. It was a traditional costume event with cowboys and Indians, pirates and princesses. The most popular costume was rags — beggars asking for charity — wearing old mismatched clothes or torn shirts and discombobulated hats. Day old beards were painted on with burnt cork. Handouts were usually hand-made candy, taffy or candied apples with their fire-engine red coatings that would shatter like glass. You’d also get pennies, which were still worth something in the Fifties. A comic book was a dime, and you could get a bag of Tarzan potato chips for two cents.

Eventually, inevitably, things changed. The Feast of St. Catherine fell to secularization and the commercialism of Halloween. Today, our store displays of spooky costumes and props, pre-packaged candy and all the trappings are identical to those found anywhere in North America. Halloween is the same all over, and that, to me, is a little sad. The slight but essential cultural distinctions made it more interesting. Vive la différence.

**********************************************************************************

Pumpkin photo by Pierre Fournier.

Bélanger candy photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/loizzeau/2965280732/

Birthday of a severed head!

Above: I was one lucky drunken severed head the year Coffin Joe (or is it Coffin Ray?--I can never remember) helped me celebrate my birthday!

As today is my birthday, I feel free to post on anything I feel like sharing. Well, I feel like sharing photos I took on a window-shopping outing I took last June--though it wasn't on my birthday. Among other places, Jane and I went to Mars and visited a costume shop! (Click on the pics below to enlarge.)

Mars, Pennsylvania, that is--and the surrounding area. Here's the front of the costume shop we visited:

Here's the side:

A sign on the door that made me laugh:

Cool costumes, props, toys and masks awaited inside.

A severed head greeted us:


Below: Boney McPirate screams, "Avast, ye mortals!" (Or is that "'alf-assed, ye mortals"?):

The same picture is more dramatic with the flash off:

Legal aliens:


Jane the Voodoo queen finds a toy to play with!

Some very lonely-looking Frankenstein Monster masks from the movie Van Helsing:

After the costume shop, we went back to Pittsburgh and visited Big Lots, where I took a photo of a cool monster figure that I successfully resisted buying:

We saw a giant leprechaun on the way back. Thank God he had his gold (and a few mellowing beers), or else he might have been dangerous in the high traffic area:

Then we saw a giant eggman (John Lennon would have been pleased):

Once we reached Pittsburgh, we drove around, and saw buildings that made us think even more of giants:


Across the street, an axe for a rockin' 50 foot woman:

And next to the credit union, a closed and forlorn, possibly abandoned warehouse for a wholesale toy and novelty company, with interesting but lonely faces in the windows:



I went to the front door, which was painted over, mostly:


But I got the camera up against a hole in the paint and found, amongst piles of junk, a mysterious message written on a column:


All of this would have been enough to make my day great, but waiting at home was a package from my good friend Jim Bertges. Inside, an old Aurora guillotine model with a figure that had my face on it! Good for hours o' head-choppin' fun! Hoo-hah!


Today can't be any better than that day. But with the great birthday wishes I've already seen posted online, and with ones sent to my e-mail inbox, it's gonna be just as good. I couldn't be happier!

Happy birthday wishes to anyone out there born on this date, and happy non-birthday wishes to everyone else!

Happy Easter from me and the blowfish!

I awoke this morning to find I've been visited yet again by the ghostly Easter Blowfish, who brought me a basket of colored caviar!

He's so much more interesting and useful than a bunny rabbit. For example, according to Wikipedia, the pufferfish "is... reported to be one of the main ingredients used in voodoo to turn people into zombies.

"According to ethnobotanist Wade Davis, the pufferfish is the key ingredient in the first step of creating a zombie, where the tetrodotoxin creates a 'death-like' state. In the second step, hallucinogens are used to hold the person in a will-less zombie state."

At my house, we don't sing about "Peter Cottontail", we sing about this creepy cutie!

"Here comes the Blowfish from the sea
"Bringin' roe for you 'n' me
"Look at him floppin', Easter means more fugu!

"Leaving ev'ry gal and guy
"Some of his flesh for them to try
"Might mean death but whadda ya gonna do?"

Happy Easter!

Stale jokes

For St. Patrick's Day and the Lenten Season, I present two old chestnuts:

Who's Irish, and stays outside your house?
Paddy O'Furniture.

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After her wedding, a naive girl from the country crawled into bed for the first time beside her new husband, a very religious young man. She snuggled up to him and reached over to caress him. He brushed her hand away, rolled over and began to fall asleep.

“So why aren’t we going to make love on our wedding night?”, she asked finally.

“Because it’s Lent,” came the reply.

That made the new bride cry. Between sobs, she yelled, "TO WHO, AND FOR HOW LONG?”

I'm a little red-faced...

And it isn't because of my now-empty bottles of Guzzler's Gin. No, just embarrassed that I haven't been posting odd news, horror-related items, WTF stuff and aspects of my strange life like I'm supposed to around here.

Well, did YOU have a good Thanksgiving? Jane and I had a new main dish this year: roast chupacabra with prickly pear stuffing. Yum!

You only have to watch out for the extra teeth in the back legs. (No one knows why they grow there, since they serve no purpose.) Bite down on one of those, and you can lose a crown!

We had a nice dinner, then settled down to watch the 1979 film The Changeling, a ghost story with George C. Scott and Melvyn Douglas. A good movie; very creepy at times. I recommend you follow the old tradition of ghost stories at Christmas time and watch any of the following spirit-filled flickers, presented in no particular order:

The Changeling (1979)

Contains some shocking and surreal moments; well-acted.

The Haunting (1963)

One of the spookiest moments in film history appears here.

The Orphanage (2007)

Unsettling with an unexpected 'happy ending.'

Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990)

A romantic, funny ghost story; watch if you've seen Ghost-- it's better!

Beyond Tomorrow (1940)

A sentimental Christmas story of three ghosts who try to help a young couple they knew in life.

The website "Scary for Kids" shares their own list of "Best Ghost Movies" here; some of them are probably too intense for anyone 12.

Halloween in a corner of Kosovo

I was lucky enough to receive an e-mail from my friend John M., a soldier serving now in Kososvo. John led an effort at the Universal Monster Army to have members there donate items for local children.

At the UMA, John had started the effort in August, first describing the area he served in. It sounded like something we monster-movie-lovers would be intrigued to see! (The following is culled from different comments by John.)

"Well kids, it's been fun out here. Lots of adventures....the ruins of Novo Brdo castle...looks like Castle Frankenstein. I also drive past a lot of huts that look like a blind shepherd lives in them. Very picturesque... At night you can hear the wolves howl.

"I have a cultural exchange program going on in various isolated villages and have set three goals for myself before I leave. First, I am teaching 'Dueling Banjos' to at least one musician in each area. They have these balalaika type instruments up here and I figure it will unnerve whoever comes to relieve me. Second, I want to teach the kids to recite the classic prose 'Even he who is pure of heart...etc. etc.' Finally, when the wolves DO howl, I'd like to teach them to say 'Ah, the children of the night. What music they make.'

"I was especially amused by one of the Polish officers I work with. He popped his head in the other night and said "Goot Eeevening..." My roommate said 'Who the hell was that, Count Chocula?' I about fell over laughing.

"Just to let you guys know what I'm doing, I am tasked with sensing what the local population is feeling about the social, political and financial climate. I go out with my team six days a week to meet with people and see what's up. Then I come back to base and submit a daily report about anything significant. I deal with poverty stricken farmers out in the country, beggars on the streets, wealthy business owners and Euro jetsetter, every social strata you can imagine. No overt danger as yet, although the roads get a little scary at times. Remember Harker's trip in the carriage to Castle Dracula? Been on THAT road. In an SUV with bad tires..."

Then, when Halloween loomed, he shared this:

"I learned Halloween is celebrated over here even though Kosovo is a mainly Muslim country. Seems they admire Americans so much they adopted the secular version of Halloween."

So members generously sent stuff for Halloween. John sent a message to several people about it.
Here, with his permission, is the e-mail I received from him and the accompanying photos:

"Hey Kids!

Just wanted to give you a glimpse of Halloween in my little corner of Kosovo.

"It was INSANE!
"We had well over 1000 people, the vast majority of them unaccompanied children, show up in front of the municipal theater and along the street. Imagine a large street event, like Mardi Gras or the Central West End Halloween Party in St. Louis, but with children instead of drunken adults. There were many creative costumes reflecting the culture and perceptions of American horror. Some were downright surreal and scary. Very effective use of makeup and scrap material. Attached are some photos.

"Anyway, the children started showing up around 5PM and milled about like some Tiny Town riot scene. Kids were throwing firecrackers, roving in packs like wild animals and howling and screaming for no apparent reason. I was thinking it was part Lord of the Flies and part Peter Pan Wildboys with a bit of Logan's Run thrown in. I had eight soldiers with me, and we had a hard time keeping ahold of our equipment, let alone maintain an authoritative presence. I finally hammered out a situation where we paraded the children in costume across the steps of the theater to applause. Then we split up into three groups and made our separate ways back to the trucks.

"The children kept hounding us for 'fotografia' and candy. I took a lot of pictures out of self-defense. We finally connected with our 'sponsored' children and teachers in a secluded area to hand out the treat bags we had assembled. Thanks to the generosity of fellow UMA members, folks from home and some of the troops over here, we were able to hand out 180 nicely done treat bags, along with some loose items for the deserving individuals we met along the way. Raymond's squishy heads did double duty as treats and therapy balls for the Handikos children (handicapped organization we sponsored and brought to the event). They LOVED them and it was amazing to see the looks in the kids' eyes. Candy, rubber bats, skull rings; this is what Halloween memories are made of...

"Anyway, thanks to all who sent stuff. The Halloween event went over well in spite of the anarchy. I swear I was stressed more last night than any other time during my mission so far. I had Iraq combat vets ready to break. Had to send two home early. Seriously. We laugh now, but it was pretty intense. LOL!

"Fangs A Lot!"

Thank you, John. I salute you!

Update: I received more pictures from John, showing some of the staff who packed the treats for the kids, some of the goodies given out, and a few pics showing the decor of the event. About the decor, John writes, "Here's pics of the chow hall entrance as decorated by some of the local Albanian Kosovars. The faces are sculpted dough for the most part, and some of the cats and rats are sculpted aluminum foil."

Here they are for you to get a post-Halloween kick out of!