Here is Howard Shore’s main theme to my favorite horror film, The Silence of the Lambs. Happy Halloween!
A bit of parenting advice
A message from Roald Dahl. Be SPARKY, people! #Quote #RoaldDahl #DannyTheChampionOfTheWorld, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.
Courtesy Roald Dahl, in his amazing book Danny the Champion of the World. If you haven’t read this beautiful, funny, moving, and exciting story, what’s keeping you!
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A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
A sketch
We stood on the balcony of our room while on vacation, looking across the street at the moonlit beach. There were people still about on the Promenade — not many, but it wasn’t deserted, not quite yet. Most of the people who were out were young. Couples in love, or couples who might be in love someday, or couples who weren’t couples but who were just hanging out because they weren’t couples with anybody else yet.
Along came a couple. Definitely a couple. I could tell, despite the fact that they were only in my sight for less than ten seconds. They were riding the same skateboard, him in back, her in front, their hands joined, their bodies leaning in unison. He was tall and lanky, she was tiny — probably the only way a couple could even fit on the same skateboard. But it was dark, and he realized that the skateboard was heading not for a smooth transition from street to sidewalk, but rather, right for a curb. So he slowed, but not slow enough, and stepped back, off the skateboard onto the street. But she didn’t know this was going to happen, so she was still on wheels and moving forward a lot faster.
They never let go, though. She held tight to his hands and he held tight to hers, and as the skateboard surged forward without him on it, she simply allowed herself to lean back, back, ever farther back, until he was supporting her by the hands as she stopped the skateboard but was lying backward at a forty-five degree angle. They hung there, the two of them, having narrowly avoided a crash. She gave out a scream, but it was a scream of delight, the scream of a girl on a thrill ride with a guy she loved, and he laughed, and then she laughed too. Then he kicked the skateboard up onto the sidewalk, they jumped on again, and with two kicks of his left foot, they were off again and out of my sight.
Through that whole thing, they never let go of each other’s hands.
This was four months ago. I hope they’re still holding hands, somewhere.
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Four Days to #NaNoWriMo!
In four days, NaNoWriMo 2013 kicks off! I’m still torn over whether to just keep going on GhostCop (not the actual title) until the draft is done, or put it aside and return to it at a later time in favor of Lighthouse Boy. I’m leaning toward the former, mainly because I don’t like leaving unfinished manuscripts, especially once I get more than 60000 words in, which is where I am right now. Hopefully it doesn’t take an entire month to finish the book. I doubt it will, because I really don’t see this book being all that long. We’ll see!
Anyway, I am now starting to ramp up my production. My plan, as last year, is to attack the first few weeks with vigor, so that if I need to back off along the way for any reason, I have a cushion built in. Or something like that. Who knows. My main plan is to just write my ever-lovin’ ass off. The only difference for me, really, between NaNoWriMo and AnyOtherMo is the page on the calendar!
(Hashtag in post title in use for when this post appears as a Twitter link.)
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One perk of owning lots of overalls
Every year around Halloween, I enjoy going on Twitter and seeing all kinds of this going on:
Apparently everyone is gonna be a minion this year for Halloween bc this thrift store is sold out of overalls lol
— Jessica Lesaca (@jessicalesaca) October 28, 2013
If anyone has overalls/suspenders please let me know ASAP!
— YuanQiu (@YuanQiu98) October 28, 2013
If anyone has overalls it would be much appreciated.
— Emma LaRue (@emmamaelarue) October 28, 2013
Does anyone have overalls I can borrow??? Pweeeaaaassseee
— Kaylee Fee (@CadetFee) October 28, 2013
Why are overalls and yellow shirts so hard to find?!?! What in earth.
— Julie Renee (@julierenee6) October 28, 2013
average day in the life of Sam… wandering around Value Village looking for overalls.
— Sam Irwin (@ski_1997) October 28, 2013
I’m starting to feel like Dwight Schrute in that episode of The Office, when it’s Christmas so he finds out what the hot new toy is, buys every single one in Scranton, and then eBays them all for a tidy profit. Except I’m not selling my overalls, so it’s really not like that at all.
Anyway….
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: I’m not sure if this is weird or awesome:
Beard yeast might sound icky at first, but it’s really grown on one Oregon brewmaster.
Rogue Ales, a brewery and pub based in Newport, Ore., is developing an ale made out of yeast harvested from the beard of award-winning brewmaster John “More Hops” Maier.
The whole thing started as a joke. Brett Joyce, president of Rogue Ales, told KPTV on Sunday that the folks at Rogue Ales had been trying to harvest a new yeast strain from their hop yard for some time, but with little success.
Then the thought occurred to Joyce, “Why not look for a different place that might have some magic yeast in it?”
Brewery employees took nine follicles from Maier’s beard, which Maier says has not been shaved since 1978.
:: Albino whale shark. Wow.
More next week!
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Wow.
Filament Eruption Creates ‘Canyon of Fire’ on the Sun, originally uploaded by NASA Goddard Photo and Video.
That is all.
“A magnetic filament of solar material erupted on the sun in late September, breaking the quiet conditions in a spectacular fashion. The 200,000 mile long filament ripped through the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, leaving behind what looks like a canyon of fire. The glowing canyon traces the channel where magnetic fields held the filament aloft before the explosion.”
Click through for more.
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Something for Thursday
The bad news is that the BBC’s third season of Sherlock won’t air until January. Ugh! Meantime, here’s a bit of Sherlockian music!
Miklos Rozsa wrote a wonderful score for a film called The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Here is a suite from that score:
A nice contrast is this score by an underrated and underused composer named Bruce Broughton, for the film Young Sherlock Holmes. I always had a difficult time with this film, owing to its odd conversion of Holmes into an Indiana Jones-like adventurer and its somewhat downbeat ending. The music, though, is quite good.
And then there’s the BBC’s theme, which is incredibly earwormy:
By the way, my personal favorite portrayal of Sherlock Holmes came in an episode of Magnum PI, in which Patrick Macnee plays a friend of Higgins’s who has gone delusional to the point of believing himself to be Holmes. It’s a really good episode, called “Holmes is Where the Heart Is”. Worth checking out, if you have access to the show…I believe it’s on Netflix.
The game’s afoot, folks!
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A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
Do you listen to podcasts? If so, which ones, and why?
Yes, this is a thinly-veiled solicitation for suggestions. I already listen to a few, but I wouldn’t mind finding more. I listen to the podcasts on the Trending Buffalo site (some of my favorite local commentary comes from this site), The Human Bible (endlessly fascinating if a secular take on the Bible is your thing), and I’ve listened to Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Star Talk podcast (although that one has ads inside it, which kind of bugs me, especially when I’m listening in the car and can’t access my tablet to skip past the ads). Oh, and I listen to Night Vale, so I’m aware of that one.