It’s tough for us horror weirdos when Halloween ends and we start getting bombarded with treacly Christmas entertainment. Fortunately, there’s always some weirdo who puts out a nasty Christmas horror movie, and may Satan bless them for their efforts.
On a recent episode of the Tomb of Terrors podcast, host Old Man Brad extolled the virtues of the new Silent Night, Deadly Night. I had never seen the original, so I decided to correct that before seeing the new one.
The only thing I really knew about the original was that Siskel & Ebert absolutely lost their minds about it when it came out. (yes, I was watching Siskel & Ebert in 10th grade. Wasn’t everybody?) I mean, they hated slashers in general, but they seemed profoundly offended by this one, clutching their pearls about THE CHILDREN and how evil it was to have a killer in a Santa suit. (Had they seen Christmas Evil in 1980?).
I went out to see some bands play on Friday night. (Ray Liriano Experience, Muck & the Mires, and The Chelsea Curve, all of whom were absolutely fantastic! These are all Boston bands, but if you have a chance to see any of them in Boston or anywhere else, do not miss it). I did not come home smelling like cigarette smoke.
If you’re younger than, I dunno, 50, this may seem like a weird thing to remark on. Why would you come home smelling like cigarette smoke after seeing bands play?
In most cases, when people say a novel is good or bad, they’re wrong. Because novels can offer a variety of pleasures: an involving plot, interesting characters, beautiful prose, keen observations, titanic imagination, dialogue that is better than real life speech but not so much better that it sounds fake, an atmosphere that you enjoy getting lost in, or just a vibe that hits you in the right place at the right time.
We all value certain of these pleasures more than others, and no novel offers all of them. And our preferences for things done well and tolerance for things done badly can change from book to book.
Whenever someone (thinking currently of Zohran Mamdani, but insert anyone’s name here) advocates having the government do something to acutally help people, you typically get two responses.
One is from the corporate centrists, who say, “well, of course we’d like to do something like that, but it’s just not realistic.”
The other, from the right, derides the whole idea as “people wanting free stuff.”
A common argument for a confiscatory wealth tax is that it will save society from billionaires. This is both true and a good argument, but there’s a side benefit here that is not really discussed: confiscating obscenely hoarded resources will save billionaires.
Last Friday I was in San Francisco and rented a car so I could go see ancient redwoods. They gave me a Tesla model Y, which marked the first time I’d been behind the wheel of one. I rented a Chevy Bolt in Cincinnati last spring and loved it, so I figured a Tesla would be cool to drive for a day.
I love horror movies, and I’ve been in a bit of a slump lately, feeling impatient and annoyed with “elevated” horror because it so often means “boring” horror, and yet also impatient with horror movies that are just retreads of other horror movies.
One little-known consequence of the ongoing Government Shutdown is the fact that the US Funkalogical Survey does not currently have the ability to provide early housequake warnings.
“Without this crucial early warning system, Americans have no way of knowing if a housequake will break out in their home,” said William Collins of the Clinton Institute of Funkalogical Studies. “Americans need to stay vigilant. Things can get very funky very quickly.”
White House spokesbot Karoline Leavitt responded to questions about the Americans facing sudden and dangerously funky housequakes in predictable fashion. “The President has never been in a house where things got funky. Housequakes are fake news.”
Asked for comment, Camille, director of the US Funkalogical Survey, sent the following: “Shut up, already. Damn.”
I’ve been reading about some of the controversy around the Riyadh Comedy Festival, at which wealthy American and British comics performed. Some other comics have said that these folks shouldn’t have played the festival because they’re providing good publicity for a repressive regime that, lest we forget, literally carved up an American journalist. Queer sex is a death penalty offense in Saudi Arabia. Women have been legally allowed to drive a car in Saudi Arabia for only 7 years, and some of the women who fought hardest for that right are still in prison.
Given the fact that the Saudi regime is horrible even in comparison to most other horrible regimes, I’m gonna side with the critics on this one. But let’s look at some of the comics’ justifications, shall we?