So tonight, after work I decided to try the new Fahrenheit place (on Franklin Street, next to Panda Garden, where Benjamin's was), since Paul (my boss) apparently co-owns it.

Eh, ceilings were short, air was warm, place was crowded, music was annoying. I was initially miffed at having to pay a $3 cover charge (I always want to ask, "If I don't like the band, do I get a refund?"), but at least they had Guinness on tap. That, and Emily Burnham and her beau, Zach, were outside (which was a good sign). I was supposed to meet up with Laura (the Maitre d', where I work) but I wasn't entirely sure where she was (darn you, vague text messages!) so I hovered around a spot that seemed to give me a pretty good vantage point of folks coming and going. In hanging around there for a pint's worth of time, I encountered Becker (pal of Paul's -- haircut is some mix of a mohawk and a mullet), Lawton (who used to work at Cristor's, but I knew before then through mutual friends), Tony (Sohns, owns the Rock & Art Shop), and eventually Justin Barnes (he's the shorter one, with the trophy and all of his teeth) and Libby (co-worker of mine. On the right with the grey dress).

After talking with Justin & Libby for a bit, one of the (rather scarily skinny) waitresses came about with some centrifuge-looking tray-thing that had test-tubes in them. Justin offered to buy me a shot (the test tubes had liquor in them, you see), but I was rather, "Eh..." since I'm not one for drinking in public. But then the waitress started listing off what they had -- something I can't recall, something else I can't recall, and she only got as far as, "Jag-" when I held up a finger and chirruped, "Jägermeister, please!" Justin found that amusing enough that he bought me a second one.

Oh, I do so love my Jägermeister. Unfortunately, I had to return the test-tube, so.. 1) I didn't get a test tube & 2) I had to down it instead of nursing it (which is what I prefer, since I do so love the taste of Jägermeister).


Fortunately, later in the night, we went back to Luna (where I work) and Laura (who never showed up at Fahrenheit, buy the way) bought me yet another shot of Jägermeister. Fortunately, Jägermeister and I are very good friends and treat each other well, even though we don't see each other very often.

Oh, and I met a very nice gay girl named Emma, who had a very nice hat and long teeth. I'd tell you more about Emma, but that covers all I know about her (Justin introduced us as I was sitting down at Fahrenheit, and then she later showed up at Luna).

In following a link from Scary-Go-Round, I discovered Tweep, tonight. I quite like it! It has the feel of the sort of thing I'd whip up, were I to do a regular comic. Only problem is that I now have seven years of weekly comics to catch up on. But I -did- manage to get up to March of 2005, tonight. (PS: The drawing style will change over time)

In other news, I'm really quite hoping I'll be able to catch sight of some fireflies pre-July 4th, this year. I've dropped a note to someone asking if she'd like to go try to hunt some down Thursday, after I get out of work (PS: Someone is back in town again -- no details are being released to the public at this point in time, though).

Oh! And Dylan (a co-worker of mine) has a pal named Stephanie, who is doing some art project that involves painting one side of a suspended door, and setting up the other side as 'fabricated rustic'. She wants to put a picture of someone's face in the pane of the window, facing the painted side, with hair over the back of the picture for the 'fabricated rustic' side. Since I saved my hair, when I cut my hair the other month, it's looking like that'll be what she'll be using once we're able to hook up so I can get it to her. Until then, there's a ziplock baggie at work, labeled, "Hair, Human. Servings: 2"

Carrying two dozen glasses halfway across town doesn't sound so bad, until you realize glass = fused sand = rocks, and that it's about 60 lbs of rock in total. I think it's the fact that they're clear that one doesn't think of them as all that dense.

Noto Bene: Since this is Bangor, note that 'halfway across town' is a bit tongue in cheek.

The other day, on my way to work, I was thinking about female Greek/Roman (I actually think it's just one of those) Mythological names and the suffixes thereof. Why? No clue. If it's worth the going it's worth the ride.

Obviously, most end in -a. But then when I was thinking of various names from the Odyssey and the Iliad and all, I noticed that Eris doesn't have that. For a moment I wondered if it was due to her nature -- if there was a God of Discord, might he be named Sue? But then Artemis came to mind and blew that out of the water.

But! Then Paris came to mind, and he's a he! So is it that Paris has a rather swishy name, or do Eris and Artemis have rather 'butch' names, or is "-is" a gender non-specific suffix?

A few weeks ago, during a rainstorm, my aunt and I heard this loud *crack* near the house, but couldn't see anything odd. Yesterday, around 2 in the afternoon, I heard a more creaking *crack* followed by a metal jangle. I'd presumed it was just some metal-thing of my uncle's falling off of a tree-branch, but well, when I looked out into the side-yard...










Our guess is that the distant storm cracked the branch (if you can call that just "a branch"), the wood slowly died (or more likely, was already dead but now loose), soaked up some of the last week's rain, and that made it heavy enough to topple over.

Is anyone out there ready, willing, and able to fiddle around with the leading character/shape/whoosit in this picture so it doesn't look like a 45-second MSN Paint job (..which it is..)?

I forgot to post about my dream the night before last.

So! It seems there's some treatment that can render one unkillable in a rather indestructible way. They had set up a thing to do some FDA testing of it, using volunteer subjects. After a treatment, the subject was pretty much unbreakable until they did something (or enough stuff happened to them) that would've killed them, had they not been treated, at which point they required another treatment to next cheat death.

One side effect of the treatment was that folks would gradually grow more and more beatific with each dose. Initially it wasn't much, but before too long their skin would start growing pale, their personality would take a turn for the stoned/zen, and their hair would start to blanch as well as beginning to drift about their heads, like they were slightly weightless. After more treatments, the pale skin would start to downright glow, they'd hover a few inches off the ground, and an invisible choir would sing a sustained note around them.

Usually when it got to the absurd later stages of the side-effects, the folks running the program would drop them from the testing, since glowing hovering folks accompanied by their own personal theme-music choir are a bit beyond 'baseline'. They'd give them $20 in severance, thank them, and send them on their way.

PS: Submitted this one to Slow Wave

Although Feist hasn't been in for about a month, a pal of Feist's came in to work today. She has fire-truck red hair (that she normally has in pigtails), has an oversized purse with a white Iron Cross on it, apparently does something up on the UMO campus that involves breeding zebra fish, and I -think- I may've mentioned her pants before. Tonight, I asked her about said pants since I think she's worn that style every time I've seen her come in. Apparently they're the standard pants by Melodia Designs; although they aren't anything I'd wear, they're still awfully slick. When one is standing still, they seem like rather standard Mod trousers, but when one walks, the side bits flare out and make them look a bit like bellbottoms.

---

I was talking with someone about accents the other day and I was reminded of a thing that I can't wait for technology to catch up with. Ok, you know the Google Language Tools and Babelfish and all where you can (poorly) translate one language to another? Imagine that, but for spoken/recorded language, and just doing accents (like RinkWorks' Dialectizer, but in a more serious way). As in, plug in a recording of someone using a particular accent, click "Translate From" and select their accent, then click "Translate To" and select what accent you'd like to hear that said in.

Amusement factor aside, what it could be slick for is to plug in your own accent, then translate it "from" an accent that isn't your own, into your own. That way, you can attempt to hear what other folks hear your accent as.

For those wondering about the crossover (and to help those who might be Googling for it, since Google can't dig up and cache things from FaceBook) between Mssrs. Hitchcock & Meloy, it works out like this.

* Robyn Hitchcock is playing the lead acoustic guitar in "An Interlude", off the Decemberists' LP Hazards of Love.

* Colin Meloy (of the Decemberists) is singing in "Saturday Groovers", off of the Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3's LP Goodnight, Oslo.

I was able to eventually Google up the second one, but the first one I could only find citations of "some instrumental off the album" and Mr. Hitchcock being given carte blanc to do what he wanted. If you're familiar with the Robyn LP Eye, dear reader, you'll recognize a lot of the stylistic bits of "Chinese Water Python" in the Interlude guitar.

Edit to Add: And this'll also help as a reference to me for what punctuation one puts around song names and album names! I had to do some checking to remember my High School meme of "Quotes for the art you can't pick up and buy, italics for the the art you can pick up and buy" (EG: You can grab a book of poems, but you can't really buy 'a poem')

I was talking with someone recently who sort of belongs to a Christian sect (yes, I'm being vague here). The reason for the 'sort of' qualifier is that they were basically excommunicated from their organized faith. The reason for the 'basically' qualifier is because I think excommunication is strictly a Catholic thing, but it's still a, "You did something we frown on, so you're shunned and ostracized" affair like excommunication.

For the curious, no, the frowned upon thing wasn't anything really and truly vile by most folks' standards -- just a thing that the particular sect is rather peculiar about.

Although the only big groups I can think of that do this are the Catholic Church with excommunication and Jehovah's Witness with defellowshipping (Judaism has something similar when you do something that renders you 'unclean', but their uncleanliness is a temporary thing, generally), I'm sure there must be other major religions out there that have this same practice (I'd offhandedly think the Amish would, should someone decide to embrace the Amish way after their 'wild oats sowing' passage, but then start playing with gameboys and wearing zippers). Now what I'm wondering is, wouldn't you expect there to be support groups for this?

Imagine you're a devout Catholic, you go out, do your Catholic things, tra la lalum, and *whoops* get excommunicated. Although the Holy See put a big red check next to your name, you yourself still are quite devoutly Catholic (sort of like the idea that Satan stays in Hell because God told him to go there, and Satan still loves God and follows his orders) even though you can't pop down to the local cathedral anymore. You'd think (well, I'd think) there'd be some sort of Deadbeat Club for such folks who still have faith in and want to practice Religion X, yet the local orders of Religion X consider you a pariah.

Mr. Corey Paradise was doing the DJ thing at work again, tonight, along with the lovely and charming Ms. Cullen Schneider. As usual, I quite enjoyed his choice of music (I Zimbra, Planet Claire, I Fought the Law, etc..) Cullen and I talked about Gibson and Isaac, Corey and I talked about liking sauerkraut and disliking hops, and a grand time was had by all. He currently is set up to do the DJ thing the first Friday of each month, but it looks like he might bump it up to twice a month.

On the way home from work, the maybe-trans-something person was there; She (?) was picking up some beer for someone (who was suspiciously waiting outside the store, away from the counter-view) so it was just a quick smile and nod affair. This time, she was wearing a dark t-shirt and jeans, and eh.. after clearly seeing her waist to hip ratio and keeping in mind how slim she is, I'm again leaning more towards the liklihood of Y-chromosomes. In retrospect, I probably should've talked with her to up her credentials, in case the beer buying was of dubious legality.

For those Commonwealthy folks who watch Primeval, you know the main character guy? Is it just me, or does his acting seem a little wooden? I can't tell if it's him, or if it's something about his accent.

For some reason, I haven't had any dreams for a while whose storylines really stuck with me. Instead, it's just been bits and pieces.

( Four Dream Details )

In news unrelated to dreams, I now have a new (for me) computer from Paul! Alas, I can't get it to work if I just plug my current hard-drive in as the primary, so it looks like I'll be upgrading to a Windows XP system when I get around to actually using it. I'm not looking forward to trying to get the FireFox settings, bookmarks, and AddOns on that one to match the way I have it on this one.

Oh! So I meant to mention last week that I ran into that nice maybe-trans-something person again! It'd been about a year since I last saw (let's just settle on a pronoun, now) her, so I was wondering and/or worrying if anything bad had befallen her.

Ok, so long ago and far away, when I was walking up Hammond Street hill from work downtown towards the corner store on Hammond & Ohio, a slightly tall (probably about 5'9") youngish (late 20s? early 30s?) slim half-Spanish looking woman asked if she could snag a cigarette off of me. This would happen about once a month, since she lived/lives in the last apartment building along Hammond before you hit Hammond Congregational. After a bit, I noticed that something seemed a bit odd about her fingers; I don't know what it is, but they just seemed a bit wide for a woman's fingers. The second time I noticed it, I started to wonder to myself, "I wonder what the odds are that this person was born with Y-chromosomes?" (which is, of course, a hard thing to slip into street-corner conversation). I didn't think much more about it until one summer evening when she dashed off her porch to ask for a smoke, and was either wearing a very thin T-shirt or was wearing a white T-shirt in the rain (I really can't recall which). Either way, it was quite apparent that she had about as much in the chest department as my scrawny male self has.

What's odd is that other than the fingers and the chest (or lack thereof) thing? Everything else about her seems 100% female. Her voice sounds dead-on female, even when she's quite drunk walking up the hill, all her body language is 100% female, everything seems to fit. It's like Bangor has its own Jaye Davidson.

I worry when I don't see her for a bit, since I usually see her a bit drunk and I can easily imagine something rather horrid going on if some thuggish individual in a bar manages to confirm my suspicions about her. But last week, she was walking drunkenly up the hill on the far side of the street (to be honest, I noticed her due to scoping out her legs before I realized who it was), and then tonight she was jogging up the hill (wearing jeans and a hoodie this time, only slightly drunk).

Before all that this evening, I finally got to talk with Jerusha about music. I asked, "So, do you listen to any unpopular music? If this were 15 years ago, I'd presume you'd be the sort of person who'd be hanging around the Bagel Shop, talking about REM, the Pixies, Violent Femmes, et cetera". Seems she does, in fact, listen to those bands! She also mentioned Kings of Leon, Flaming Lips, Johnny Cash (both the classic works and the odd bits he did with Def American), and Elvis Costello. After talking with her a bit, I played a few snippets of E. Costello's "The Juliet Letters" for her, which she loved all to crazy. Based on some of her other music tastes, I loaned her "I'm Your Fan" since the name Leonard Cohen meant nothing to her. Yes yes, I could've gone with an actual Cohen album, but the only actual Cohen LP I have at work and on CD is "The Future"

---

And in utterly unrelated news, are there actually any animals that have teeth "as sharp as razors"? I know that there're critters whose teeth mesh together well enough that they can do nail-clipper snippy things, and I know that there are some needle-fanged things with quill-sharpness, but are there any animals whose teeth are so sharp that you could accidentally cut your finger on them if you were playing around with them? Better yet, mammals with such teeth (since I bet sharks have layers in their teeth, so it works out like mica sheets or some such broken-shell affair)?

It stems from my thinking about vampire fangs and how I'm not sure they'd really work like they're shown to in most stories, unless they were "magically sharp"; I can't think of any standard criter teeth that would actually be exacto-knife sharp.

---

...pation.

Last night's dream involved some things called Turkey Ants (I'm guessing at the upper-case 'T' there, since I'm betting it's much like Canada Geese). Take your basic ant, but make it around thumb-sized. Now picture an ant holding another ant's head (by the neck-side) in its jaws; they had this odd dumbbell-shaped head.

The house was a mix of my Hammond Street apartment and my home back in Denver, and the Turkey Ants had done a number on chewing up the house between the walls and under the floors. Along where the wall meets the floor, things were fairly swiss-cheesed. It seems they'd also been gnawing on the wiring's insulation, since pouring buckets of pesticide (I guess they'd never heard of spray-poisons in my dream) down the gap ended up blowing the fuses for that part of the house.

After clearing them out from one corner, they'd start to chew through another corner in some other part of the house, but there were less of them each time so it was a race to see if they'd end up being offed before the entire house's electrical system was blown.

Oh! And as per the shortbread recipes from the previous post? The first one from Ming whatever-his-name-is (who apparently runs some restaurant in Boston called Blue Ginger) was just ni-ii-ice! It was blatantly a 'starter' recipe, though, since it felt like it was waiting for something else to be added. Relative to that one, the Fannie Farmer one fell quite short. So my future experiments will probably involve taking Ming's recipe, tossing some ginger and vanilla or hazelnut in there, and swapping out a bit of the flour for corn starch (just to see if it adds or detracts from the texture, which was quite good in its own right).


I'm also quite happy that it's getting on fiddlehead season. For those outside of New England, the locals have a disturbing habit of eating fern shoots and calling them 'fiddleheads'. When I first moved here, I was quite repulsed by the notion of eating ferns, but they're actually quite tasty! If one likes collard greens, I bet one would like fiddleheads. As such, I just did up a bowl of pasta w/ fiddleheads and diced onions, in a ginger-curry cream sauce. Mmm-mm!

At work, I finally had a chance to socialize with one of the new waitresses, Jerusha (who was introduced to me as something that sounded like "Drewisha". She's the trombone player on the right in this picture with the black hairband). I asked her if anyone ever nicknamed her "Jerry", and we were both surprised that nobody has (although we both think it's rather fitting and nice-sounding).

Three shortbread recipes I'll be toying with in the near future:

Ming Tsai's Classic Shortbread

3 3/4 c. flour
1 1/2 c. butter
1 2/3 c. sugar

2 tsp salt
2 tbsp vanilla
3 egg yolks

15-20 minutes at 325 degrees

Bon Appétit's Simple Shortbread

2 c. flour
1 c. butter
1/2 c. sugar

1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp vanilla

30 then 30 more minutes at 250 degrees

Fannie Farmer's Scottish Shortbread

2 c. flour
1 c. butter
1/2 c. confectioner's sugar

1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder

20-25 minutes at 350 degrees

They're all about the same (the first one is pretty much twice the latter two), but the egg yolks in the first one sound like a promising addition. Not sure if I'd care for how much sugar is in the first one, though. Although I already asked over on FaceBook, anyone out there in TV Land have any tried and true shortbread recipes (moreso if you're Commonwealthy, better yet if you're Scottish)?

I'd toy around with other cookie recipes, but I'm pretty much all set in the cookie department by having shortbread and spicy gingersnaps under my belt (literally and figuratively).

PS: Don't try to swap out shortening for the butter. I mean, you'd think it'd work given that it's shortening bread, but well... yeah, don't. You end up with some things akin to if you boiled then baked some mushroom caps.

---

I finally got a new (well, new for me) computer from Paul! Alas, it's not quite as easy of a swap-out as I thought it'd be. I popped the hard-drive out and tossed mine in and... it didn't recognize either of the CD drives nor the EtherNet card. I plugged in my previous EtherNet card and CD drive, and it still didn't see them. Just to test, I put everything back into mine again and everything was hunky dory. I get the feeling this'll be a project to save for a weekend.

It was nice being able to cruise around with a Pentium 4 processor (my current one is running on a Pentium 2) for a few minutes, though? Mind you, I couldn't do much with it during those few minutes.

---

Today (the 20th) is the one-year anniversary of my meeting Priscilla, for better or for worse.

I know there were a few other things I meant to mention, but I can't recall what they were. I'm a few books into the Southern Vampire Mysteries (they've an interesting setup for were-things. A were-thing has a particular critter-type that they've an affinity for. If two were-things have a kid, the first-born is a were-thing but the rest aren't. Were-things can just be a person or a critter, but if a critter-form were-thing mauls a normal person, that person might become infected. If infected, they can't turn into a full critter but the half-person half-critter form, based on what sort of critter-form they were mauled by. Infected folks can also crank out were-kids if they hook up with another were-thing). Seems the origin of fairies having pointed ears might tie in with pointed ears being indicative of the being lacking a soul. This year's Goth Fly a Kite event finally has a poster/flier. If you don't mind Domino's pizza, the new Fiery Honolulu Hawaiian pizza's pretty good (if you consider Hawaiian pizza with red and green peppers, jalapeños, and Tabasco to be "pretty good"); a far cry better than their abandoned Oreo Pizza idea, although that's not saying much. On Monday, SciFi is showing a marathon of old school Land of the Lost. Yep, I don't think any of those were the aforementioned things.

So before going to work today, I decided to do a little checking on the rumored effects of elf-shot (see, there's this new fae character over on Windy City MUX who's toting around a longbow, so I got to thinking about what could be done with that).

In the general Wiki article about elves, I found two rather keen things.

1) The term 'stroke', in regards to a little bit in your brain going *pop*? Came from saying the person was felled by an elf-stroke. It seemed the most logical, back in the day, to presume that a person lost control of half their body and died due to an invisible elf whacking them with a blow.

2) For those who've read the Dead Witch Walking Hollows books, does this sound familiar to Jenks pixing folks?

The elves are typically pictured as fair-haired, white-clad, and (like most creatures in the Scandinavian folklore) nasty when offended. In the stories, they often play the role of disease-spirits. The most common, though also most harmless case was various irritating skin rashes, which were called älvablåst (elven blow)

Feist came in again today!

Ok, it's not really Feist.

See, the other week there was this pale girl with dark hair and a bright shirt sitting near the end of the bar (where Priscilla sat when I met her) and for some reason she really reminded me of Feist. I pointed it out to Melissa (the head chef at work. She's on the far right with the black sweater over the white dotted dress), since she was the only other person there who'd know who Feist was (Mel and I bond over Pixies, Breeders, Morphine, Lemonheads, Star Trek, vampire novels, etc..), and she agreed with me, so the nickname "Feist" has stuck.

I meant to go up to her and say, "Say, weren't you here just last week?" but some folks she knew came in and they moved to a table away from the bar (and away from me easily asking rhetorical questions in passing). I told Mel about this an hour or so later, "I'd actually like to impress her a bit more by asking if she was here last week, wearing a yellow t-shirt, black pants, drinking white wine, taking notes from a hardbound book with a tan cover and a green spine, measuring about 4" by 6", but I think that might come across as a bit creepy."

Mel narrowed her eyes, pinched two fingers together, and silently mouthed, "...just a little bit creepy, yes...".

There once was a lady from Bude
Who went swimming one day in the lake.
A man in a punt
Stuck his pole in the water
And said "You can't swim here; it's private."

Apparently the Kentucky Derby (or for you Commonwealthy folks, Darby) was today, and since we've that accursed television at work, we had some special involving mint juleps or some such thing.

Based on one person who came in (who apparently used to hit the New Moon Café, when we were on Main Street), I think I can add to my exceedingly short kink-list, "Women in flat-top straw hats". Now, this could very well just be a ramification of my thing for women in 1920s/1930s drag (button-down shirt, dress pants, suspenders (or for you Commonwealthy folks, braces), et cetera), or it might be some Lalla Ward thing from my childhood; I really have no clue.

And the fact that she looked like if Justus' girlfriend had a slightly older sister didn't really hurt, either.

This is a test! This is only a test! If this were an actual post, there'd be something a bit more surreal and/or geeky.

Come to think of it, pointing that out rather makes this post rather meet those criteria, no?

ETA: Cool! It worked! I can now post from DreamWidth and have it appear here as well.

I wonder if I can bounce from here over there?

AUGUSTA, Maine — Gay marriage legislation in Maine has moved to the full Legislature. And in initial voting, supporters have won the opening tally.
After extended and emotional debate Thursday, the state Senate voted 20-15 to give its preliminary approval.

Immediately, however, one of the senators who voted No — Republican David Hastings of Fryeburg — introduced an amendment from the floor that would send the issue directly out to statewide voters in November.

That move prompted Democratic Majority Leader Philip Bartlett of Gorham to request a recess.

The House of Representatives has already adjourned until next Tuesday, so the bill can't come up for preliminary consideration there until then.

Still, were I to place a bet on if it'll pass or not, I've no clue which way I think I'll go. The idea of "But we've never done it that way, before" runs pretty thick in Vacationland.

Spukkäse Fernwirkung?

At work today, due to actions yesterday, I got to do my little Mr. Wizard act.

Ok, so yesterday I grated a mess of Gruyere cheese and a mess of Parmesan cheese. Unfortunately, they're both very "white cheeses" so when I set them, in similar containers, on a counter to put stuff away before bagging them up, I forgot which was which. And since I'd grated up the last blocks we had around, I couldn't compare them to grated samples of known cheeses.

Today, I had Mel try to identify them properly, and got to demonstrate a bit of quantum physics in the process.

I showed her both bags, explained what I accidentally did, and said, "Ok, let's say some recipe called for either 100% Gruyere or 100% Parmesan, both would work. Both of these bags would obviously fit the bill. In a manner of speaking, these bags hold the same thing and that "thing" is 100% Gruyere and 100% Parm at the same time." When she was down with that, I handed her one bag and dashed across the room with the other bag. Tossing the second bag in the walk-in, I closed the door and dashed back. "I want you to taste that cheese and identify what it is".

She tried it, and deemed it Parmesan. I pointed to the walk-in door, "BAM! In doing that, you instantly made the bag in there Gruyere. It used to be in a state of flux, but now it's quite positively Gruyere. Through a closed door, on the other side of the room, faster than the speed of light, you just changed reality by observing a different part of reality!"

If you plan to do this trick at home, I suggest you fill one salt shaker with salt and another with sugar. It makes the identification act easier.

Let's say I'm in Chicago, and I'm caught hauling a corpse away that I just dug up from a graveyard.

Am I going to be charged with a State or a Federal Abuse of Corpse crime?

This site covers a ton of crimes, but I'm not finding anything about graverobbing.

On my way home from work today, I got to thinking about Lovecraft's Long's Hounds of Tindalos and how they irk me.

Ok, so the basic story (as far as I remember -- I'm sure one can dial up some Lovecraft online archive since he's often considered public domain these days read it here) is that there's some guy who's scrying into the past. He's having a grand old time, until he sees some nasty gaunt mastiff thing with a whipcord tongue that seems to be able to see him seeing it. Spooked, he cuts the connection. Over the next while, he keeps getting visions of this hellhound coming for him (I can't recall if it's through other scrying sessions or if it's in dreams) so he does a bit of research. Turns out it's a "Hound of Tindalos" who, if our reality exists in the curves of time/space, exists in the angles of time/space. What this means is they have the ability to travel through time (after a while) and can manifest in angles. The guy realizes that the hound is heading for him through time, so he flips out and starts daubing plaster all around the corners of his room to keep the hound at bay. ( Then the story ends after a while ), with his gay lover academic associate reading all this post-facto in some diary.

What irks me about it is that the "hound" looks like a hound and is hounding him. If it was called a "hound", looked canine, but didn't track him? Wouldn't be so bad. If it was called a "hound", had a thing for tracking, but didn't look canine? Also wouldn't be so bad. But the combo just kind of gets under my skin.

What I'd prefer is if the visions were dreams and involved what appeared to be an origami orchid made out of smoke that is folding and unfolding in a cascade. The smoke fades in and out, but instead of doing it in swirly random ways, it's doing it in what seems like some obscure mathematical pattern. From this cascading origami smoke orchid (AKA: COSO), the image of a hellhound initially glared at him.

In the subsequent dream visions, the cascading of the COSO has the gist of it gradually expanding, although it sometimes has to contract itself for a few moves to allow for the next phase of expansion. Each dream ends with the hellhound running towards him from the COSO, and later savagely leaping from the COSO.

Blah blah blah, eldritch horrors, things I can not.. nay, must not describe, you know the drill.

But instead of it all being in a diary, we conclude with:

When the hound began to manifest, I realized the image of the mastiff was but my mind attempting to find a symbol to express the entity. The arabesque form I had seen was closer to its true visage, although no more than a looming shadow is the face of an approaching executioner.

Fade to black, roll credits.

There's yet to be an official poster for this year's Goth Fly a Kite, but here's my standby in the meantime.



Date: Saturday, June 13, 2009
Time: 12:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: Fort Williams, Cape Elizabeth, Maine

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