Next Year's Halloween Post

Above is the unofficial winner of our slack Halloween costume contest, a zombie offering up slices of his brain. He wins every year, of course. I had hoped to post the old H.P. Lovecraft heebie-jeebie well before the party Saturday night, then before bringing the kiddles out trick-or-treating Sunday night and bringing them back loaded to the pumpkin tops (Cousin Brady: "This is too heavy! Help, Daddy, I can't carry it any further! Cousin Daddy: "It's your candy, you took it from those people, and you can either carry it home or you can leave it here." Silence...then the sound of a plastic pumpkin bottom scraping and bumping across sidewalk.) Anyhow, here goes Lovecraft's 'Halloween in a Suburb:'

The steeples are white in the wild moonlight,
And the trees have a silver glare;
Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly,
And the harpies of upper air,
That flutter and laugh and stare.

For the village dead to the moon outspread
Never shone in the sunset's gleam,
But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep
Where the rivers of madness stream
Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.


A chill wind weaves through the rows of sheaves
In the meadows that shimmer pale,
And comes to twine where the headstones shine
And the ghouls of the churchyard wail
For harvests that fly and fail.

Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change
That tore from the past its own
Can quicken this hour, when a spectral power
Spreads sleep o'er the cosmic throne,
And looses the vast unknown.

So here again stretch the vale and plain
That moons long-forgotten saw,
And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,
Sprung out of the tomb's black maw
To shake all the world with awe.

And all that the morn shall greet forlorn,
The ugliness and the pest
Of rows where thick rise the stones and brick,
Shall some day be with the rest,
And brood with the shades unblest.

Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,
And the leprous spires ascend;
For new and old alike in the fold
Of horror and death are penned,
For the hounds of Time to rend.

Thumbs Up From The Other Side

A son is coming down like a cosmonaut from Nirvana. His sonogram is titled 'OPEN HAND.' I am inexpressably happy, scared again, and I'm filled with all the hopes and greeds and fears containable by animal revetments.

If you see him there above, he's thumbing his nose with his left hand and giving a thumbs-up with his right. He looks for all the world like Evelyn Waugh waving to me and my girl from the far corner of the dark-wood-panelled Connaught in London. Behind coke-bottle glasses, his eyes send out babyphores: "Hallo, there. There's a big line outside, but I've got the table! Come on and join me."

Mon p'tit panier blanc, mon joli coeur et encore, quand y'a l'ascenseur. Yes we will join you. Where we live, my son, we open worlds and give the waters back to skies. We all begin and end in dreams, and await you.

First Daughters Invade, Occupy Argentina

Jenna and Barbara Bush have been camping around in South America. Clearly, this is where their family's future lies, and it looks like they've been detached to bring US influence back to its rightful, pre-eminent place in America's southern hemisphere. I must say their methods are quite refreshing. Unorthodox, when compared to their family's methods in the Mid-East and elsewhere, true, and all the more refreshing for it.

They've been buying land in Paraguay, celebrating their birthday together (they're twins, after all), dining with Presidents, ducking their Secret Service escorts to teach orphans and run naked down a hotel hallway, uncharacteristically giving their purse and cell phones to the poor, and getting one of their minders savagely beaten. Some would construe these acts as merely confused, hormone-drenched sluttery, but I see them as sheer genius, a means of controlling wayward regimes in a diabolical and possibly novel way: by having so much fun and grabbing so many embarrassing headlines host governments surrendur and beg them to leave. The strategy appears to be working. For example, the President of Argentina and the new US Ambassador there just sued for peace. I for one see a sinister hand in this: "Ok, we'll leave, but you'll have to listen to Mr. Kissinger's demands first. Here, he's on the cell phone."

Despite the Bush twins' soft-power innovations, they share some distinct parallels with more familiar, one might say time-honored, Bush family methods. There's the love of a good party, of course. There's the trademark tenaciousness, which may occasionally manifest itself as staying the course in the face of all warnings and evidence, no matter how dire. And then there's the deliberate vagueness about timelines. But they certainly seem to making progress on our behalf in South America, and for that they should be commended. Who knows? Maybe they'll make time for Venezuela.

Colorado Satan Worshippers Caught, Fined

I've been pondering retirement, or rather the lack thereof, and was kind of day-dreaming for the sort of place I could take my cattle prod collection to. The kind of place which would welcome my wife and me, with our trusty fifty-cal Browning mounted on our kevlar-armored urban assault vehicle's RV's turret ring, and where we wouldn't have to mail away for more ammo. Turns out there may be a place for us. Remember those Christmas wreaths that used to be shaped in the form of a peace sign? Wrong. They weren't peace signs. They weren't even Christmas wreaths. They were hideous insults to the brave soldiers serving our country, not to mention unclean symbols of His Satanic Majesty's dominion over earth, and some good people in a gated community in Pagosa Springs haven't forgotten it. They've had the courage to object to the offensive, devil-worshipping insignia on Lisa Jensen's basement wall in the picture above left:

Some residents who have complained have children serving in Iraq, said Bob Kearns, president of the Loma Linda Homeowners Association in Pagosa Springs. He said some residents have also believed it was a symbol of Satan. Three or four residents complained, he said.

Pagosa Springs, here we come! Although a while back I heard of a town in Nevada that passed an ordnance which prohibits flying any flag except the good old Stars and Stripes. That's pretty darned appealing. It'll make the choice tough, but hey, we've got a few years to decide, and a lot could happen in other places. I mean, we Americans are all about competition.

Eiffel Nouveau

This is a cool idea. Take a cheesy tourist trinket commemorating some landmark, go to the landmark, and hold the cheesy trinket up in front of it so it's super-imposed.