Bat Signals

A while ago I said to Knut “You know, I think Dumbledore is gay.”

He thought I was crazy.

Of course, it turns out I was right! In this vein of extreme cleverness, I’m going to try my hand and predicting the next Chris Nolan Batman movie.

There will be Catwoman in the form of Rachel!

Evidence:

Lucius explains that the new batsuit will hold up against cats.

Rachel’s body was never shown.

Rachel’s funeral was not shown or referenced.

The explosion at the warehouse started somewhere in the background, so the size is unknown.

Joker previously generates a situation where it appears that there will be an explosion that does not happen (the gas grenade in the bank manager’s mouth)

Joker was aware that Rachel is extremely special to Batman (he says so during the Trump Tower fight)

Joker clearly has no problem altering other people’s mentalities or bodies for amusement (Harvey Dent, prisoner with bomb under his skin)

Supposition:

Rachel’s character was really fleshed out into a memorable character. A dramatic funeral would have fit the tone.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is far too cool to kill off and she has frequently played characters with strange quirks (Secretary)

The room where Maggie is held appears to be a basement. It appeared that the building that was blown up had lots of windows and the explosion appeared to come mostly from the first floor.

Rachel’s final letter said that she loved Harvey Dent, Harvey Dent turns vengeful after her (presumed) death. It would be a nice parallel if she then avenged him, attacking Batman (Dent’s killer).

My other hope which is based ENTIRELY in my imagination is:

Alan Cumming as… THE PENGUIN!

Alan is a native South African. While he gained fame an a brutal drug lord, he found his real place running guns, mines, and drugs into the Ivory Coast and Congo in exchange for blood diamonds. His beaky appearance, black and white clothing, and above all his love of “ice” gave rise to the nickname “Penguin.”

Now Penguin, is lured to Gotham City where jewelers from around the country meet to bid on diamonds during a week long conference. And Penguin is has decided he’s going to be the only seller…

Lightnin' Cubs!

Last night we went with our Norwegian pals Simen and Sturle to the Cubs game. The game started out beautifully. It was sunny and warm. The lads enjoyed hot dogs and tried nachos for the first time. Note to Europeans: the beer vendors won’t accept EU driver’s licenses.

The Cubs weren’t playing well, but we were enjoying it. Witness Sturle!

They called a rain delay at 7:40 pm. There was TONS of lightning. I can’t believe they didn’t call it before then, because it looked really dangerous. We were all looking at the lightning behind the scoreboard but we eventually realized it was much worse behind the press box. It didn’t look like it was going to stop so we decided to leave at 8pm. After walking past two Elvises high fiving each other (one of whom apparently then ran onto the field and skidded across the huge tarp laid over the infield), we heard this garbled announcement. Turns out they were telling everyone to leave the stands and get into the concourse.

A couple of workers tried half heartedly to stop us leaving the stadium, but we walked out and I realized they were blowing the tornado sirens. I have never heard those in Wrigleyville before. We jumped onto the Red Line and it was raining so hard and blowing so badly that water was spurting out through the crack between the doors and pooling in the floor of the car. There was lightning everywhere and the conductor must have been driving at top speed.

When we got off at Bryn Mawr, we stuck under the awnings for the first block, but the little half block to our apartment had us soaked to the skin and cringing from the thunder. About 15 minutes after we got inside, there was this gigantic fork pronged lightning bolt that looked like it hit near the Bryn Mawr station. All the car alarms in the neighborhood went off.

I’m glad we didn’t stay for those last couple of innings! They were insane to start playing again

Who Ya Gonna Call?

I love the movie Ghostbusters. I was only 4 when it came out and hadn’t seen many movies in theaters at all. In fact, this is the first film I remember going to.

Yes, children, believe it or not there was a time not too long ago before VCRs, DVDs, and on demand TV. If you missed the last few minutes of a film on tv, you might never find out how it ended. Scary, huh?

Ghostbusters does sound a little intense for a child so young, but I was insistent! I remember sitting on the swing outside of my uncle’s house while my father explained the premise (he and my brothers had gone to see it). He said that these ghostbusters captured ghosts in a tiny capsule. I was hooked.

So eventually, when it came to the Pickwick (which was a 3rd run theater at the time. I think a ticket was $1.50) I was taken to see it!

The bliss!

Except for one part. Right at the beginning, our heroes are called to investigate a ghost sighting at the Public Library. She is a transparent torso of an elderly lady. When Venkman tries to speak to her, she looks up from her book, raises a finger to her lips, and shushes him.

Venkmen backs away and confers with the Spengler and Stantz. Stantz says “Leave it me” and then shouts “Get her!” while the trio rushed forwards. The lady ghost turns towards them.

And then!

Mom claps her hand over my eyes.

I have a vision of a white flash, but don’t see what happened.

This haunted me. My imagination created a grotesque twisted skeletal creature with a skull like an elongated bowling pin. And then my imagination gave me nightmares.

It wasn’t until several years later that I saw the film again and saw that the library ghost turns into this rather charming ghoul. She’s actually sort of cute. I actually tense up a little bit at that part, remembering the twisted being of my imagination and am always relieved it’s not there.

FOGHORN Returns!

The Foghorn Magazine has returned!

And it comes bearing a new article by.... wait for it...

ME!!

If you want to read the sort of bloody curdling tales my darling mother reveals, read CHEERFULLY MORBID at the Foghorn Magazine. 

I guarantee you'll be shocked and amazed at what people in Crookston, MN in the 1950s got up to!

Thumb, Can, Ahhh... Memories...

Today is my first wax casting class. I’m a little nervous because I’ve never done any metalwork or jewelry making. I am generally pretty good with tools and small objects (ie, Fimo stuff) but it’s a whole new medium.

The class is actually a birthday present from my lovely sister-in-law and brother. Mina thought the wax casting class would be ideal for me, and is charmingly hoping to recap her investment in my talents :)

I did take wood shop and plastics in junior high, along with a bevy of art classes. I loathed wood shop because we had to do a lot of hand filing and sanding. My kingdom for a power sander! I was the only kid willing to use the grinder because I just hated the boring repetitive sanding.

Our woods teacher came directly from the shop teacher mold. He was a tall sturdy guy who somewhat resembled Pete Postlethwaite. He used the word “can” a lot. As in “You stand on that and you’re gonna slip and fall on your can.” On the first day, he would lift one giant scarred paw and say “You see this? This is where I cut my thumb off the first time. It was on that very saw” and fifteen sets of eyes drifted towards the gleaming blade. “The second time,” he continued “was on a circular saw. YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO BE CAREFUL!!”

Even as a fourteen year old I wondered about that. Anyone who works with power cutting tools could have an accident. You just need to be distracted for a second. However, after you’ve completely cut your thumb off once, don’t you think you would be really really careful? He cut off the same thumb on two separate occasions! I mean, “fool me once…”

This speech then had less of the effect of warning us to be careful of the machine and more of the concern about what we would do if he cut his thumb off again in class. I mean, I presume we’d grab the drafting teacher, but should we look for the thumb? What do we do with it after we find it? Put it in that weird sawdust janitors use to clean up vomit? The only ice would be two flights down the stairs, would that take too long?

Fortunately, it stayed firmly on throughout the trimester, but it was a niggling worry.

Wish me luck on my class! Hopefully it’ll be lots of fun!

Ruminatin' on Roadkill

Roadkill causes the strangest behavior in people. This is my normal reaction:

1. Oh no! Look away.
2. Wait, what kind of animal was that?
3. A raccoon! Ewww… it’s all over the road! Look away.
4. Poor raccoon.

I’m pretty sure this is how most people react. Some, of course, have more interesting reactions like “Hmmm… that’s a good sized deer. I bet we could make sausage” or “A skunk?! In downtown Chicago?!”

I also can’t figure out how animals migrate to either the median or the side of the road. Possibly they retain some Schrodinger’s Cat abilities; because some are so squished they couldn’t have made it on their own. Alternatively, people wouldn’t just throw ‘em onto the shoulder. I suspect ravens might have the intelligence to move a meal to a place where they could gobble unmolested, but ravens are pretty rare overall.

(A note to city dwellers, if you think you’ve seen a raven, you haven’t. You’ve probably seen crows or grackles. Once you’ve seen a raven, you cease to mistake anything for a raven. You also giggle at tiny mysterious Goth girls calling themselves “Raven” because ravens are huge muscular threatening birds with the sort of alien intelligence in their eyes. They’re fascinating, but not in a pretty fluttery birdie kind of way.)

What’s interesting is that the above reaction occurs whenever I see something lying in the road no matter what it is. Only this morning I caught myself saying “Oh, poor coat!” and then thought “Wait a minute!!”

Media

I am convinced the media creates most of the fear in the world. I mean, if you just go along from day to day, you worry about things like getting hit by cars, leaving the stove on, or getting catching a cold from your colleagues. Watch CNN for an hour and your simultaneously worried about drought, floods, serial killers, bioterrorism, zombies, giant subterranean man eating clams, rabid gila monsters, glue sniffing teens, monogamous gay couples, and japanese long horned beetles.

Most of these are either not really a threat or strictly the kind of threat that we can figure out how to defend ourselves against, except for gila monsters and gay couples. They just want to be allowed to be themselves and live comfortable productive lives.

Which leads me to this great page!

Benjamin Radford writes great essays dealing with the slight of hand of the media, the hype, and the misinterpretation of data. He also contributes to Skeptic Magazine (look for his hilarious account of a haunted house investigation!)

The book is great, and he has several essays posted for free. Here are some of my favorites:

The Today Show's Fake 'Stranger Danger' Test

A Closer Look at Internet Predator Laws

Is Barbie Really an “Ideal”?

Predator Panic: A Closer Look

Life and Death of Peanut Men

I’ve always been crafty.

Mom is always amazed when she sees bored children since we were always investigating _something_. Jamie and I made quite excellent volcanoes in the sandbox with the garden hose (Mom built the sandbox! It’s genetic!) and Tom pretty consistently took every mechanical thing we own apart to see how it worked. I once tasted every flower in the backyard except for the dreaded deadly nightshade. Begonias are sweet and juicy. Tulips taste bitter and waxy, which is fortunate because they’re poisonous.

I also invented a weird gel by mixing white glue, washing powder, and spray starch. This had a strange gummy consistency but only stuck to itself. Very peculiar, but I recreated it several times. I believe it may have been a colloid.

I had a couple of craft books for kids (I was born in 1980, but most of the toys we played with were late 1970s) that featured kids in groovy outfits building exciting things. I can still feel the longing to create a life sized alligator out of paper mache and chicken wire, just like in the photos. They did have some smaller scale projects including peanut men.

Peanut men, or ladies, take advantage of the usual bi-legume peanut shell shape. To make, draw a little face on the upper half of the peanut shell. Add eyelashes or curly hair lines if the peanut exudes a feminine mystique. Stick a toothpick through the join of the two nuts for arms. Cut another toothpick in half and stick the two halves into the bottom shell for legs. Then find two single nut peanuts and stick them onto the leg picks. If you balance correctly (always a tricky situation for the under 10s) they’ll stand up.

I made a whole set of these on a hot summer afternoon and left them on a paper plate near the TV in the kitchen for the family to admire. The flaw here is that these people are made of delicious salted in the shell roast peanuts.

When I got up the next morning, disaster! Peanut shells and toothpick legs were spread with wild abandon. Salty carnage, the peanut men had been savaged by hungry dads during the night.

Chilling Tales for a Hot Day Redux!

It’s a hot sunny day, but I still think we could use the chill… of a GHOST STORY!!

This is my personal ghost sighting! I have seen one ghost and one UFO and I’m always disappointed when people don’t treat me like a crackpot whenever I tell the stories. When I see Bigfoot, someone better treat me like a crackpot! Possibly my otherwise rational and practical outlook is unfairly shielding me from the outraged reactions I deserve.

*grump*

Here goes! Imagine I’m holding a flashlight under my face…

Blind Turn

July of 1999 was warm and humid in Illinois, even at two O'clock in the morning.

I was reasonably carefree 19 year old girl behind the wheel of my grandmothers 1985 blue-rinse Oldsmobile with my friend Ryan beside me. We had had a fun evening with friends, first going to a movie at the big Randhurst theaters and then having a midnight snack at a 24 hour restaurant before heading home.

Ryan and I were busy talking and laughing and gossiping about friends from high school when I decided to take a shortcut.

We lived in the old Northwest suburbs of Chicago where the rich folks of the city built their summer places before urban sprawl set in and engulfed them. The short cut I had decided to take was through the old Lutheran campgrounds, a leafy, unlit, heavily forested site on the bank of the Des Plaines river consisting of perhaps 15 white painted cabins, a small swimming pool, and lots of privacy. Churches and other organizations often had day camps there, but very few of the cabins were in use these days. It was a lovely alternative to drive along that quiet path rather than go past all of the Dairy Queens and gas stations that littered the major roads.

Ryan and I, still talking and laughing, turned off Busse Road, making the sharp turn downward sloping path that led under the overpass by the river. The road had gone into a blind turn when I interrupted Ryan’s chatter by hitting the brakes and shouting "Oh My God, that woman is going to get herself killed!"

Directly in front of us, hidden previously by the concrete wall of the overpass, was a woman bicycling almost in the center of the right lane. She shone whitish in the brightness of the headlights, a thin older woman in a floppy knee length skirt on an old fashioned bicycle without reflectors or any lights. I was furious, not only because she was bicycling on such a deserted road at that time of night, but because she made no indication that she had seen or even heard my car.

I passed by her carefully in the dark, giving her a wide berth. I looked in my rearview mirror a second later just to make sure that she was okay. She was no longer there. I yelped in surprise. Ryan turned around to look for her too, but she had vanished. We looked at each other in shock. There was absolutely nowhere where she could have gone. One side of the road was thick rough Mid-Western forest that was hard to navigate even on foot and impossible by bicycle; the other side was a 10 foot high wall of concrete that held up Busse Road. Behind us was only the Des Plaines River lapping at the bank and there was not a soul in sight.

I don't think I've ever driven quite as fast or quite as badly as I did driving the rest of the way home that night. The only thing we, two normally chatty and unsuperstitious people, said to each other during the drive was "What happened back there?"

We've talked about it since and Ryan definitely is still shaken by it. We still don't understand what happened or where that woman could have gone or who she might have been.

I've been down that road dozens of times since and nothing else has ever happened.

Has your blood turned to ice? Good to hear!

A Chilly Story for a Hot Day

There’s something about gloomy rainy summer days that puts me in the mood for GHOST STORIES!! Wooooooooooooooooooooo…
After all, it was a rainy day in June that inspire Mary Shelley…

I love ghost stories. I don’t much care for those Real! Life! Ghost! shows, mostly because I find the thought of lingering after death as a blip on a magnetic field reader or a speck of dust in a lens flare to be terribly depressing. The stories however, are delicious…

Chicago has many good ones. This is the most famous.

RESURRECTION MARY

Chicago was a bustling city in the 1930s and the South Side was home to some big industry. Fortunately, the Polish and German descended workers loved a good time after a hard day’s work and the dancehalls flourished.

A young man was on his way to one of these dances, driving shiny new car down Archer Avenue. He saw a pretty young blonde woman in a white dress walking along the side of the road. Being a gallant fellow and one never to pass up the chance to meet a cute girl, he pulled over and asked if he could give her a lift. She explained that she was also going to the same dancehall and that she’d appreciate the ride.

They arrived at the dance, and while the mood was lively and the music fine, the girl seemed quiet and withdrawn. When he danced with her, she felt cold so he offered her his jacket. She accepted it but soon asked if he could drive her home.

He was a little annoyed to leave a good party, but agreed. She gave him her address which was on a busy cross street that he knew well. He helped her into the front seat and they were soon zipping back down Archer Avenue. She clutched jacket around her and huddled in the corner of the wide bench seat. He was a little uncomfortable driving with such a strange quiet girl and kept his eyes on the road.

After many minutes of staring down the long deserted stretch of road, he decided to start up a conversation for politeness’ sake at least. He turned his head to look at her and his easy smile froze. The passenger seat was empty. It was as if she had never been there at all.

He sped home.

The next day, the young man worked up his nerve and found the address that the girl had given him. His palms sweated a little as his rang the doorbell, but it was a sunny day and he was ready for some explanation.

A middle aged woman answered the door and welcomed him in. As she busied herself in the kitchen preparing lemonade, his glance fell on a framed photograph on the piano. It was of a pretty blonde girl.

“This is the girl!” He told her.

“Oh,” the woman said, putting down the tray and taking the photo from him. “You’re one of those boys. This is my daughter, Mary. Have you met her?”

“Yes,” he said, “I saw her walking down Archer and I gave her a ride to a party. I even gave her my jacket.”

“My daughter,” the woman said slowly, looking directly into his eyes, “Died five years ago. She was on her way to the dancehall and was knocked down by a car.”

“But, but,” he stammered, “I picked her up! We danced! She asked me to bring her here, but while we in the car I looked over and she was gone! Right there on Archer Avenue!”

“I know,” she said sadly, “If you lent her your jacket, I know where we can find it. If you could just take me down Archer.”

Feeling helpless, he escorted the woman to his car and barely speaking they drove down Archer. About halfway down, she directed him to turn right into a driveway. He looked at the gates over this driveway. They read “Resurrection Cemetery.” He felt each hair on the back of his neck raise, despite the warmth of the sun.

With practiced steps, the woman lead him between the rows of graves, until he recognized with dread his own jacket, apparently floating in air. It was carefully draped over a modest gravestone. The stone bore the name “Mary.” The woman handed him the jacket, gave him a sad smile, and explained “She’s always trying to come home.”

Good, eh?

There are various other bits about that same cemetery. A chapel that lights up at nights with now one inside, steel bars in the gates with slim hand prints burned into them, and a marble statue of a little girl who goes skipping through the graveyard at night.

Mary herself even shows up. Many people report picking her up and having her vanish. Some say they see a young woman dart into the middle of the street at night. When the car is unable to stop, it goes right through her. A particularly gruesome one goes that a couple sees a woman in a white dress walking along the side of the road. When they look at her in the rearview mirror, she has only a black void for a face.

Even on the most cheerful summer night, Resurrection Cemetery is creepy. A common Catholic custom is to leave lighted candles in little red jars on the graves. Seeing all those little red flickers reflected in the granite is enough to make you believe in the will o’ the wisp.

Well, has a scary story like that chilled you down in this hot muggy weather?

Top Secret Activities— REVEALED!! Part 1

The big secret over here at the blog was the preparations for Eli’s birthday party!

We had two big secrets.

Iron Maiden Eddie Cupcakes

These chocolate blue frosted cupcakes are topped with jaunty little picks each featuring a different picture of Eddie from Iron Maiden album covers. Eli is a huge Iron Maiden fan and he loved these.

I can’t believe I found 24 different Eddie photos without having to use fan art.

I used Google Image Search to find Eddie pics and then I cropped them down so they just

 featured Eddie’s face.

Using Photoshop, I put the images onto a letter sized file. I was able to fit 12 Eddies to a sheet.

I then printed them onto to printer friendly Shrinky Dink plastic, cut them out, and shrunk them in the oven. The printer plastic is opaque, so they had a finished Eddie side and a plain white side.

I sealed the little images (Apparently nail varnish is the thing. They even recommend certain brands!) and superglued the backs to little plastic toothpicks. I added a little pirate sticker to the back for extra support (pirates being the most metal stickers I could find).

The images translated remarkably well! Especially the Killers album and the Wicker Man.

I’m glad I read the instructions, because you have to lighten the images by at least 50% (which is easy on Photoshop. You just use the brightness/contrast levels). Some of them were a little dark even so. They also have only one side that is printable and you tell by licking your finger and seeing to which side it sticks (very scientific).

I gave them to Lauren ahead of time and she couldn’t resist showing them to Eli early. He was able to name the album each Eddie was from, including live and exports! I know he’s a member of the Iron Maiden fan club, but he probably ought to be the president. They went very well with his Iron Maiden themed birthday cake.

Pictures from the big event are soon to follow.

BRAAAAAAAAAINS (And Beer)

Saturday was the First Annual Chicago Zombie Pub Crawl! Yeah!

We had been excited about it for weeks, carefully deciding what kind of zombies we wanted to be, fervently hoping there would be more people that just the four of us.

The day of, Knut, Lauren, Eli, and I got together to do our makeup. I don’t think any of us had ever worn zombie make up before, so it was a little challenging.The website for the crawl had some handing tips, including spreading gelatin on your skin and letting it dry for a weird cakey scabby look. I smeared myself liberally and gave Lauren a huge gross head scab. Initially, we were going to wear flat white face paint, but once Eli put it on, we realized it was a little too harsh for today’s modern zombie on the go. I hunted around for my barely used foundation for an age, but never found it. However! I had some super concentration concealer-like stuff meant to go under eye makeup, so I mixed it with the face paint for a slightly more subtle pallor. I dusted my whole eye area with a combination of iridescent green and black eye shadow and used a bit of blue to highlight my skin scabs. A little fake blood and I was ready for BRAAAINSSS…

Knut’s makeup was pretty subtle. He wanted to be a researcher from 28 Days Later, so I applied the face paint very thinly, gave him pale green under eye circles, and lined his eyelashes with red liner. Showtime!

We parked a little farther up Clark Street and hurried towards the meeting spot, pretty nervous. We didn’t see any other zombies. Had they left without us? Was it the wrong date? Were we the only ones who showed up? Then we turned a corner and were nearly crushed by a wave of 50 or so zombies heading for the bar. Excellent.

The PH group who had organized the event gave us our t-shirts, our zombie pins, and helped anyone who needed it with their make up. Got your goodies? On to the bar!

While we were waiting in line to get in, a non-zomb asked to take a picture of us. We put our arms around each other and posed. Then he showed us the photo. I was the only one in it! Huh. Simon’s a small kind of dank bar. Fortunately, zombies like dank as much as they like $2 beer, so we packed ourselves in. This was much to the chagrin of the non-zombs sitting and drinking at 5pm on a Saturday. A little row of hecklers commented about everyone who came in, coming up with exceeding clever nicknames like calling an awesome girl dressed like a 1980s aerobic instructor “Volleyball Zombie.” It strikes me that when you’re in a bar that has rapidly become 95% or more zombie, you are no longer the cool ones. Once inside, we hung around, admired each other’s wounds, and chatted. With the exception of one guy who wanted to talk about soviet experiments involving extreme animal cruelty, it was a lovely bunch. However, zombies are not content conquering only one establishment. On to the next bar!

Charlie’s Ale House is an airy bar and grill and we frankly adored the expressions of their dinner salad consuming patrons and zombies flooded the bar. Our little group leaned onto a group of regular humans at a little table and they fled through the window! Ha! This gave us the perfect vantage point. Here we could grab at passersby moaning “braaaains” from the comfort of a bar stool. We also got to chat with our awesome new zombie friend, Zombie Steve! The zombie party really hit its peak here. First Knut randomly yelled “Braaaaains!!” and the whole bar followed suit. Seven or eight times. A seven foot high Grim Reaper waved and spoke to us. A zombie performed a spectacular robot dance on the sidewalk. Zombies began running out and pressing themselves on stopped cars. Humans took photos of us from the other side of the street. Awesome.

After our tenure at the bar, we shuffled en masse to Hamburger Mary’s attic. The music was an odd choice (Zombie Abba?) but they eventually figured out what we wanted--- Thriller on repeat! Yeah! We danced, we drank beer, and we groaned on sofas, zombie boys nicely let zombie girls use their bathroom. It was probably the best party night I’ve ever had.

My favorite part though, was in the first bar. We were chatting to this charming zombie couple (I didn’t get their names! Darn!) and he was telling us how worried he was that they would be the only two who showed up. I love the thought of 100 people putting on their dead makeup, worrying they’d be all alone and finding at least 100 of their zombified peers ready to toast their lack of health.

If you'd like to see more photos (we've got lots of great ones!) go here.

Blog Carnival: Bulls!

I am a Taurus and from Chicago and I have been known to talk crap; but I’m going to focus on those noble beasts of Spain.

In August 2005, we spent a week in Spain; which was one of the best vacations I’ve ever taken. Spain wasn’t a spot I had ever particularly planned to visit, but our friend’s parents had a bungalow there where we could stay just minutes from the beach.

We went to bullfights. It’s such an odd experience. There we were: Knut, Simen, Tor Bjorn, and I sitting in the Marbella arena. I was looking fab in a green paisley dress and awesome lavender Panama hat (Buy one!! They are amazing! And if they lose shape, you can iron them!), and a bull was led into the ring. I had this awful realization that that bull was not going to walk out like it walked in. I whispered to Knut “I don’t think I can watch this!”

Then the atmosphere sort of changed.

When the matador is good, he puts the sword directly through the animal’s heart. It dies on its feet. It dies before it hits the ground. It dies fighting. Maybe that’s a better way to go than shoved up a conveyer belt and into a bolt gun. And we saw several bull fighters get gored. It’s really not a one sided fight.

Not a popular view certainly, since most of us prefer to remember Ferdinand the Bull and his love of sitting in the shade. I also won't say it's not barbaric, but there is sort of a primal reaction to it.

In any case, the bull has become a cult figure in Spain, strongly reminiscent of the ancient Mediterranean cultures. You can appreciate what a powerful character the Minotaur would have been, when you see their foaming rampages and the huge gorges slashed in the wood of their pens.

The bull ring in the southern town of Ronda was especially beautiful. This charming stone head graces the entry way to the ring and the steps to the upper level are decorated entirely with bull themes, like the excellent fellow above. Clearly whoever made these items knew all there is to know about bulls! I love the Moorish tile traditions in Spain and was even more delighted to see these Delft like tiles.

The ring also has a nice collection of antique matador costumes, equipment, and beautiful posters. There were even a few taxidermy heads of particularly fine bulls, some of whom were so grand they were given reprieve and spent out their lives grazing and siring more bulls.

They are beautiful and romantic and fearsome. And when they go for the matadors, they go straight for the cojones.

A Crafty Horror Story

Since I’ve got things coming along with the (surprisingly popular) Cthulhu necklace, I decided to have a little horror segment. This is a true story that will shiver the bones and curdle the blood of any crafty type.

When I was a lass in the 1980s, during the final era where kids went home for lunch, walked to school in big packs, and moms made 7 layer Jello for class Pizza Day; my mother made Raggedy Anne and Andy dolls for the church Christmas Bazaar.

They were beautiful dolls. The faces were all hand embroidered. The stripes matched up perfectly on the seams. A tiny wooden heart was inserted under the fabric of the chest so you could feel it when you hugged the dolls. The yarn hair was pieced in by hand and Anne’s dress and pantalets were edged in pretty lace. I never had one myself (something along the lines of “shoemaker’s children go barefoot”), but they were much admired.

Mom brought them to the bazaar and settled down to man the payment table. Before long, a disheveled woman came up carrying the dolls and set them down in front of her. Mom had a closer look and noticed that the price tags had been changed. She has set the price at $20 for the pair (a steal if you ask me, but she is a modest creature) and the price tag now read $3 for each.

She looked up at the woman and said “I’m sorry but the price isn’t right on these.”

The woman looked innocent and explained that she was going to buy them for her senile mother who liked to pick things apart!!

Needless to say Mom didn’t let that sale go through.

Ugh, that story makes me feel so icky even though I’m the one telling it. As frustrating as the thought of someone changing a price tag on your piece, there just isn’t anything worse than someone who doesn’t appreciate your hard work and dedication to making something. How lovingly you choose the fabric, how carefully you matched the seams, how many stitches you picked out because you wanted the face to be perfect.

That’s one of the nice things about etsy. You wouldn’t be there if you weren’t appreciative of the handmade.

Cthulhu Dreams... about looking pretty!

I was goofing around thinking of all those rubber bracelets people wear and the novelty ones people have come up with as a result. I particularly liked a gray one with "Apathy" written on it.

Not because I necessarily disagree with the sentiments, but because I think your moral compass is a bit skewed if you need to look at your wrist to decide whether you should flip people off or punch puppies.

So I began to wonder... What Would Cthulhu Do? He wouldn't mind if you ate the last cookie. Heck, he wouldn't mind if you ate the souls of your enemies while you're at it.

Cthulhu is an ancient god who appears in H.P. Lovecraft's horror stories. He described as a hideous tentacled thing that oozes evil. He's a little more snuggly in my version.

Presenting the What Would Cthulhu Do? necklace!