As a result of a practical joke by the dogs gone horribly wrong, Mrs. Spookyblue turned an ankle earlier this week. She’s fine, but we swapped vehicles for a few days; hers is a 5-speed, my boat truck is an automatic.

Last night I heard a sound like angry squirrels arguing under the hood of her car. When I popped the bonnet, bits of serpentine belt were strewn all over the engine compartment. What actually remained on the pulleys looked like it had been through an acid bath.

It so happens that we have my dad’s pickup truck on loan as part of the fish pond rehabilitation and Rodan deterrent project. I figured that since it held up so well hauling tons of creek rock, it should get me to work in the morning, and it did. I made an appointment with a wrecker service to tow the car to the garage (that had two months ago installed the now destroyed belt), and took lunch to meet the driver.

Dad’s pickup truck is a 1979 Chevy Custom, and comes with a set of instructions; pump the gas three times before starting, the radio’s just for show, don’t un-tape the glove box unless you mean it, etcetera. It’s what is euphemistically referred to as a “fishing truck”, or what you take to the pond in the pasture on the back forty. The heater percolates a certain goat-ish aroma.

Now. I am a lucky man, blessed from all sides and watched over by agents of mercy, one of whom having been dispatched to hold this rattle trap together until it was deemed safe enough for one of the wheels to fall off. And it did. Not less than a mile from Snug Harbor, the left rear wheel went walkabout and I ground to a loud halt on the brake drum.

A careful inspection revealed that all five bolts were stripped, but my luck held as I was able to retrieve the tire, undamaged, from a ditch. I even found a lug nut. The wrecker driver came upon me and made a real effort not to laugh while he hitched up the truck and took me home. I guess my luck rubbed off on him too because he made an extra $40 on that trip.

Frankenstein never scared me. Not much, anyway. Dracula and my sixth grade math teacher were a lot worse. None of those guys compare to five seconds on three wheels in a vehicle designed to operate on four. “Luck as falls”, in existential phraseology, means keep smiling, don’t panic, and above all, appreciate muddy boots, dog drool, tetanus shots, Band-aids, and writing the check to the tow truck driver.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein makeup (pictured above) is easy to do. Apply liquid latex to the “seam” areas. When dry, pull bits slightly away from the face to give the impression of raised skin. Blend yellow and brown cream makeup and add purple to the stitch lines. Draw stitches with black grease pencil. This Frankenstein (my niece), being moderately allergic to latex, carried her “scars” with her for a few days into November.

Category: Halloween, Stuff   Tags: existentialism, Frankenstein, makeup

You’ll need a stick, a skull, and a case of Mountain Dew.

“Crow” is the consequence of a dangerous experiment in paper construction. He exhibits certain scarecrow characteristics, but his kind requires a unique definition.

Brigand: Outlaw, robber, thief, member of a roving band practicing “brigandage”. Perfect.

Crow’s build project is now available in our Halloween Projects section.

This over sized stick monster took about a week to build. He’s mostly newspaper with a few other odds and ends thrown in. I think there’s even a pool noodle crammed in there somewhere.

Hide some free time in a sock and bury it in the backyard before starting this project, or it’ll mostly get brigandaged away.

Build your own inscrutable paper mache skeleton. On a stick.

Category: Halloween   Tags: brigands, crow, Monsters, paper mache, skull

Spoilers ahead…

Alex Proyas, director of “The Crow”, and “Dark City”, had to have been swigging cold medicine from a jug while making his latest film “Knowing”.

John Koestler, widowed professor of astro-fizzy-mo-something, is played by Nicolas Cage. Or Marvin the depressed robot from “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. I could never really tell which. Cage (It really is him, according to the credits) struggles with the meaning of life since the passing of his wife, drinks a lot, and is preoccupied with telling his son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) to do his homework and go to bed.

Caleb swipes an artifact from a time capsule that was buried in 1959 because “it might mean something”. On it are scribbled apparently random numbers. Apparently random, that is, to everyone except Cage’s character who almost immediately deciphers the list which contains the dates of every major disaster for the last 50 years.

The audience is led laboriously along a meandering, but well rehearsed, path populated by dreary throw-away characters you care less about than the rubber-masked background extras in later “Planet of the Apes” movies. It’s an hour or more into the story and we’re in the home of the crazy woman who, as a child, wrote out all those numbers that were “whispered” to her. What does she use for wallpaper? Hundreds of newspaper articles about past disasters. Closeup of a date. And another. Another. Another. We get it already!

The final scene: After everyone you didn’t care about on earth gets vaporized by a super solar flare, extraterrestrial ice sculptures deposit the children they’ve saved on an obviously alien world (Make sure we see the extra moons in the sky, the alien wavy-worm grass, those extra moons again. Got it.) Who are they? Why, the “whisperers”.

But that’s not really my biggest complaint. Forget the odd but increasingly predictable mixture of UFOlogy and Christian iconography. I can even forgive the last minute introduction of Koestler’s parents so he can confess that he finally believes in an afterlife (I guess), and will have someone to die with.

Here’s my gripe. “Knowing” is like watching a biathlon. The athlete’s goal is to shoot as many targets as possible in the shortest time. Aim. Fire. Next target. In one scene, Cage’s character slogs through the fiery wreckage of a crashed airliner. 1) Man on fire stumbles by. 2) Look shocked. 3) Make bee-line for the blanket lying beside a second man on fire. 4) Douse flames. 5) Watch people engulfed in explosion. 6) Pull corpse from a shattered window.

Hit your mark, say your line, display emotion R7C4. Every action is programmatic, a method.

Proyas focuses on his characters more than action to move the plot, and I suppose that I’m being overly harsh. But, like the interviewer who is fixated by a gravy stain on the interviewee’s shirt, I’m distracted from the resume. I like sci-fi-end-of-the-world stories. I also respect a director who doesn’t rely on CGI to carry the band (cough .. George Lucas .. cough). Two of the three big “disaster” CGI scenes are brutally violent, and the final vaporization of earth’s surface is very well done. They add to the story without becoming characters themselves.

A few tears shed by Koestler as he hugs his son for the last time would have gone a long way toward washing away some of the gravy stains, but they weren’t in the script, weren’t rehearsed, so they didn’t make it into the final program. “Knowing” is a weekend rental at best, but follow it up with “Deep Impact”, or “When Worlds Collide”.

Category: Movie Reviews, Stuff   Tags: knowing, movie review

A lot of mail passes through the Snug Harbor dead letter office, and I always enjoy reading these letters. Sure, there have been a few exceptions. Like the guy who wanted me to find a police scanner frequency for him. He didn’t introduce himself, never asked me a question, just wrote, “New Albany, Indiana”. I’m sure it was actually typed “nalbnnn”. I took a good thirty minutes composing my reply. It was informative, eloquent, and sans frequencies. Probably more interesting than this so I’ll shut up about it.

The best emails, my favorites, are stories about projects. How a particular build is going, how the kids are getting involved, how the neighbors went crazy over the weekend and built 5 new zombies which set off a friendly competition to see who would have the most by Halloween.

And sometimes I get a picture. I always save them, usually add some note to them, and almost always lose them. Almost.

Category: Halloween   Tags: Grumble sighting