(An ongoing writing project in which I catalog and quantify my extensive TARDIS collection.)
With the success of Doctor Who line of toys, particularly its Electronic Flight Control TARDIS, Character Options decided to expand its figure line beyond the 9th and 10th Doctors and the other companions and characters from the 21st century incarnation of the show. Naturally, since Tom Baker is still my favorite Doctor, I had to have that one and ordered it as fast as my ebay ordering fingers could move. It’s a pretty brilliant figure, capturing the likeness and manic glee of Baker’s Doctor, along with a rubber recreation of Baker’s famous scarf (an accessory that had been infamously missing from the previous attempt at a Tom Baker action figure, the one issued by Dapol in the late 80s–though not the original Denys Fisher doll). They went on to release figures for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 7th Doctors as well as a 11 Doctors set timed with Matt Smith’s start as the 11th Doctor, and which included the previously unproduced Paul McGann 8th Doctor.
With a 4th Doctor in hand, I began taking photographs in the mossier sections of our yard, along with my recently purchased David Tennant TARDIS. While it did make my inner 4th grader leap for joy even he had to admit that it wasn’t as satisfying as if it was a genuine 4th Doctor TARDIS. But such a thing did not exist. A large part of me hoped that one day it would, but it seemed as distant a dream as the TARDIS toys I’d dreamed of as a kid. Even better, I dreamed on, wouldn’t it be cool if Character Options produced TARDIS toys for each of the Doctors? After all, there were several different TARDIS props over the course of the original series.
7th Doctor
4th Doctor
1st Doctor
Then, in 2011, Character Options partnered with company Underground Toys to make my dream a reality–sorta. They announced that they were producing a handful of the classic TARDIS models to be packaged with the action figures for their corresponding Doctor. Except they were only going to do three of them. Included in their run would be the 1st Doctor’s TARDIS with accompanying William Hartnell figure (a new sculpt based on his first appearance as the character); a 4th Doctor’s TARDIS, complete with a Tom Baker figure (same one I already had); and the 7th Doctor’s TARDIS complete with a Sylvester McCoy 7th Doctor figure. Compared with the 21st
From left to right, the modern day TARDIS and the Sylvester McCoy TARDIS
century TARDIS, the original series props were smaller, narrower, and very often ricketier. (Just watch Spearhead from Space to see the TARDIS practically shake apart as Jon Pertwee falls through its doors in his first appearance–watch from the 2:07 time code.) The toys matched that scale, being a bit smaller than the modern toys. The sculpts on these were basically the same barring a couple of details. The 1st Doctor TARDIS was differentiated by the St. John’s Ambulance badge on the right door–a detail that had been painted over and abandoned until Matt Smith’s 11th Doctor TARDIS would restore it in 2011. The 4th Doctor’s TARDIS was shorter due to having a flat roof instead of a tiered and pitched one. It was painted a dingier shade of blue. It’s door sign was also white letters on a black background instead of black on white. And Sylvester McCoy’s was basically the 4th Doctor’s TARDIS with the 1st Doctor’s roof, painted a lighter shade of blue. (In reality, a new and taller TARDIS prop was brought in during the later years of Baker’s run and was kept as the main prop for the next three–getting a repaint or two along the way.)
While I felt it was a lost opportunity to do a different TARDIS for each Doctor, these three were pretty representational of the classic run. Unfortunately, they were also pretty expensive. If they were available for sale in this country it was usually as imports or on ebay, where prices soared, rising up to the $80 range. I didn’t feel like I could justify buying even Baker’s, let alone all three. And the longer I sat on the decision the more expensive they became–especially Baker’s.
Finally, in 2012 or so, I stumbled on a GoHastings listing for the 7th Doctor’s TARDIS for an admirably reasonable price and grabbed it while I could. Sure, it wasn’t Baker’s flat roofed version, but truth be told I really hate the flat roof. I never noticed the roof was flat when I originally watched the series. It was only after becoming accustomed to the pitched roof of later years that caused me to be bumped by the toy’s flat roof. It’s jarring and un-TARDIS-like to me, yet ironically it is the TARDIS that I first fell in love with. In truth, the McCoy TARDIS was more in line with later day Baker, except for the lighter paint job. Out of the box and on my shelf, though, it doesn’t look nearly as bright as the image above.
The McCoy TARDIS is definitely a different creature compared to the Flight Control 10th Doctor TARDIS, mostly for the worse. I expect it’s not cheap to produce such a fine item as the Flight Control TARDIS with all its bells and whistles. The McCoy TARDIS basically just has a bell and no whistles. Now some of this is due in large part to the fact that the original TARDIS props did not have much in the way of lights. It basically had the lantern on the roof, if they were lucky. So the toy’s sole light is the lanter. Gone are the interior lights (not to mention the backdrop of the TARDIS interior). Gone is the lighting behind the Police Public Call Box signs. The toy still has TARDIS takeoff and landing sounds, but there is no spin function and no other flight sounds nor interior sounds. It’s pretty bare bones. The toy also loses some functionality in that while there is a telephone within the door cabinet beneath the left front window, the box in which it sits takes up so much space behind the door that you cannot open that door even half way. (I took mine apart and removed the phone, but then it looks odd when you open the cabinet, so I put it all back.) And I don’t know if this is universal to all copies of this toy or just mine, but while the Flight Control TARDIS features a right hand door that can be propped open and releases on a spring via a button on the interior floor, this one’s button doesn’t so much work and the right hand door is difficult to close flush with the housing. (I basically have to smack the face of it into my hand to let gravity and force to do the work of closing it.)
The McCoy figure that came with it is actually my favorite version of the character’s costume, with the dark jacket, the panama hat and question mark umbrella. I have traded it in place of the McCoy that came with the 11 Doctor’s set, who had a white jacket and no hat.
As a toy, the 7th Doctor’s TARDIS is not so functional for play, but that’s not what I have it for to begin with. As a piece of shelf art, it’s great. So despite its functional issues, I’m still giving it four TARDISes.
PS – A few weeks back, some amazingly huge mushrooms grew in my yard. I thought it was a good opportunity for some photography, so I took a couple of sizes of modern day TARDISes out there to put next to it. I posted the resulting image to Facebook. A bit later, my buddy Joe commented “Not legit until you take one in a rock quarry.” This comment was due, of course, to Baker-era Doctor Who’s frequent use of quarries as stand-ins for alien worlds. I replied “Gimme three hours.” Not only did I know where a ostensible rock quarry was, it was not far from my house and I had a period correct TARDIS model on hand for the photo shoot. I found plenty of locales for the photos, including the one at the top of this page and the second one here. (I had to edit out some power lines in the one above, but I left the giant dumptruck in the distance to the right side of the photo, figuring Daleks probably had them too.)
In the summer of 1980, I returned from an out-of-town weekend Saturday/Sunday summer camp to my home in Starkville, MS. I pulled the power knob of our 9 inch Zenith television to the on position, flipped between the three channels we could pick up with the rabbit ears, found myself on channel 2, and began staring at Mississippi ETV. What I found myself watching was episode 2 or 3 of the Doctor Who story Revenge of the Cybermen, originally broadcast a mere five years earlier in the UK. This moment was a pivotal one in my life, for it was my very first exposure to the BBC show Doctor Who. From that moment on I have been a fan and still count Tom Baker as my favorite actor to have played the Doctor to this day. I, of course, was back for the next installment the following day at 6 p.m. and as much as possible I tried not to ever miss an episode of my new favorite show. (By the way, I’m now astounded I was so taken with the show based on Revenge of the Cybermen of all stories, because it’s not especially great and contains maybe the laziest Cybermen designs ever. I honestly prefer the cloth-faced original Mondasian Cybermen designs to the ones from Revenge… with their lazy-assed plumbing flex-hose head-handles. The worst.)
As a child in 1980, going into the 4th grade, though, this show was magic, with dark tales of science fiction and horror given illumination by the contrastingly light performances of Baker and his onscreen traveling companion Sarah Jane Smith, played by Elizabeth Sladen. I loved their relationship, which was clearly one of great fondness for each other. I loved the Doctor’s long coats and immediately set about trying to find one of my own (it would be a few years before I managed it). And, of course, I loved his scarf, but it would be another 20 years before I was finally given a replica of the Doctor’s first one, as knitted by my mother-in-law; instead, I had to make do with wearing my dad’s girlfriend’s cream-colored muffler for the first few years instead, which only looked like Baker’s scarf after being filtered through my imagination). I loved the Doctor’s grinning manner, his gadgets and I loved his habit of offering everybody Jelly Babies (which, in lieu of, I had to make do with Gummy Bears). And I especially loved his mode of transportation, the TARDIS.
Standing for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space (though some sources vary), the TARDIS was a blue police public call box that was, though dimensional shifting, bigger on the inside. (Had to get my dad to explain that one to me.) The Doctor would step through the doors of this glorified, over-sized phone booth, into apparent darkness, and then the camera would cut to the TARDIS interior set and we’d see the Doctor entering through two giant blocky doors faced with pizza-sized circular roundels, into the bright white control room, the central feature of which was a five-sided control console with a bobbing clear cylinder filled with lights and gizmos. The Doctor would hit a switch, close the doors behind him, and with the manipulation of more dials and switches would cause the TARDIS exterior to fade from view, accompanied by its famous wheezing mechanical groan of a sound effect. Magic, I tell you! My wee mind was captivated by it all. I shortly began trying to craft my own Time Lord adventures by playing Doctor Who in the back yard, using the patio as my control room, a dog house as my control console and the chain-link side gate as my relatively smaller TARDIS door, leading me and my muffler to whatever monster was menacing the front yard.
Princess Sally
Dr. Mum
Since there were no Doctor Who action figures available in the U.S. (and they were pretty thin on the ground in the U.K. at that time) I also tried to create my own action figure adventures. Having no Doctor replica on hand, I substituted the most curly-headed, side-burn-bearing action figure I owned, a green-suited diver from the Fisher Price Adventure People scuba diver playset. And for a companion, I used the armless and legless red-headed princess from Fisher Price’s medieval castle playset. (Cause I’d somehow misplaced the lady diver who came in the scuba diver set.) These might seem like poor substitutions, but they were all I had. My TARDIS was even sadder, though. I had nothing approximating one, so rather than get my dad to build one out of cardboard (which I’m sure he would have done) I just used a mason jar.
My Doctor Who toys were so low rent that I eventually gave up pretending they were even related to Doctor Who at all and just made up my own analog characters. I called my Doctor, Dr. Mum, named after the 1970s/80s cream deodorant, a small round container of which I used as my logo in imagined recreations of the theme song. (My theme was hauntingly similar to that of Doctor Who, I assure you.) I called the companion Princess Sally (since she a crown she had to be a princess), and I called their Mason jar spaceship the Blue Crystal (which was in no way blue, though the Mason jar itself lent something of a crystalline quality).
Denys Fisher Doctor Who toys
The idea of owning an honest to goodness TARDIS toy, however, was something beyond the realm of possibility for me. I didn’t even wonder at the time if such a thing existed. I did not yet know about the Denys Fisher TARDIS toy of the late 1970s, recycled out of the Star Trek Enterprise toy set Fisher also made (a set that I actually had owned since age 5 or so). I did not yet know about the corresponding Tom Baker Doctor Who doll Fisher made, with real removable scarf. And I didn’t know anything about the Leela companion doll and would have found her confusing since PBS weren’t showing any of those episodes yet. Instead, I had my dreams. (The first TARDIS toys I ever saw were ones I imagined in actual dreams. And they were awesome.) It would be years yet before I got wind of even a TARDIS model, or set actual eyes on the TARDIS tin bank with the grinning image of Tom Baker beaming from its open door, let alone a TARDIS toy and action figures. In fact, by the time I saw such things I was well out of the typical action figure purchasing age range–not that I’ve let that stop me much, hence why I’m typing this.
Not quite all of my TARDi
As my wife can tell you, I now own an excessive number of TARDISes. Most of them are in my office, taking up the space across the tops of two full book cases and, technically, spilling down the side of said case in the form of TARDIS string lights. Others live elsewhere, from my bathroom to my car, to my living room, to, occasionally, my bed. While it’s an impressive collection, by no means does it encompass the number of model/toy TARDISes that have been manufactured over the past 50 years. It’s actually pretty small comparatively (which is what I keep telling my wife). I have, as of this writing, around 49 of them (a nice number, though there is always the chance I’m forgetting one or two somewhere). We’re talking three dimensional TARDISes, too, not just pictures of them–of which I have more than a couple. I tracked down my first two back in 2002 or so. And since the show came back in 2005 and proved itself popular, new TARDIS products have hit the market each year.
Why do I have so many? Why do I love them? Wellllll, there are many factors to the answer, but, if you distill it down to a base, I collect TARDISes because I feel like I owe it to that 4th grade boy back in 1980 who didn’t have even one TARDIS and who had to make do with a Mason jar.
I really dig my TARDIS collection. As an ongoing exercise, and in an effort to produce more content for this blog, I’ve decided to write about each of them here, in no particular order, and with no real time table for doing them all.
You’d think after logging my 10,000 Malcolm Gladwell hours doing it I’d be better at drinking coffee. Yesterday I burned the ever loving shit out of my mouth, though.
Here’s where I think I went wrong. I had a warm cup of coffee that I wanted to reheat. I also wanted to put a dollop of coconut oil into it cause, y’know, health. This I did, setting the microwave for the standard 1:11. While it was rotating around inside, I decided to just go ahead and make a new pot of coffee, so I took a tumbler cup and began filling it from the filtered water of the fridge, conveniently beside the microwave. And because it’s a Samsung refrigerator this meant I was standing there filling that cup for the full 1:11.
(Hang on…. Open letter time:
Dear Samsung,
How come your water and ice outputs have to be so damn slow? Other fridges just pump it on out, filling a cup with ice or water in seconds. Why yours gotta be such a slow pissy trickle?
Your friend, who paid an inconvenient amount of money for this fridge, which has had to be repaired twice since its purchase,
–eric
The microwave dinged, I opened the door, pulled out my cup, saw a delicious looking skim of coconut oil on top, and took a deep pull on that mug in manner that might suggest I expected it to be a cold brew iced coffee. And instantly I knew a horrible mistake had been made because my lips and mouth were on fire.
I made the split second decision to abandon my sipping plan and dumped my half mouthful of coffee right onto the kitchen floor. Fortunately, I still had possession of the tall cup of cold fridge water, and I put it to my mouth and let its cooling touch caress my charred lips, tongue and gums.
I spent the rest of the day sucking on ice cubes and nursing my lips with antibacterial ointment and Burt’s Bees. My sense of taste is still diminished, and it hurts to eat anything, but the inside of my mouth wasn’t burned too badly.
Beestung lips were a thing for a while. How bout scalded, blistery lips?
Just returned from my first trip to Cleveland and my first Midnight Oil concert.
As many Americans did, I became aware of Midnight Oil in the mid-80s with their hits Beds are Burning and The Dead Heart. My buddy Gordon bought the album those came from, Diesel & Dust, and played it in his car until the album was etched in my noggin. I soon bought it myself and got even more into it. What I didn’t realize was that these guys had been playing together in one form or another since the year of my birth some 13 years before. I soon purchased Red Sails in the Sunset and loved it as well and eventually found my way to the album I call Countdown, but which is more accurately titled 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. But it was their 1990 album Blue Sky Mining that cemented them as one of my all time favorite bands. Despite all the problems in the world that riddled me with angst, somehow it seemed like things would all turn out okay as long as Peter Garrett and Midnight Oil were calling out the injustices, the politicians, environmental catastrophe, and government corruption in their lyrics. Between them and The Church, I was really starting to dig Australian rock.
Whenever I would catch them in TV appearances, such as on Late Night with David Letterman, I would often make the joke that I’d love to see them on tour some day, but early on tour, because I was afraid Garrett’s voice, which is like gravel coated with velvet dust, would surely be shot by the end. But Midnight Oil never played anywhere close enough to me that I heard about it and I couldn’t afford tickets anyway. And then, in 2002, Midnight Oil sort of unofficially broke up so that Peter Garrett could go into politics, finally getting to try and make a difference beyond calling attention to the world’s problems through music. Every couple of years since, I’d look at their website to see if there was any word of a reunion, but none seemed in the offing. Most recently, I’d read that Garrett had retired from politics and had put out an album with his kids, but it just didn’t sound like Midnight Oil to me.
Then, back in late May, the wife and I were going down a YouTube music video rabbit hole, watching videos for bands she loves such as the Allman Brothers and Stevie Ray Vaughan. I pulled up my laptop, hoping to add some of my favorites to the mix and decided Midnight Oil would be the first. What should pop up at a search for them, though, but a new video of the band announcing that not only were they back together but they were embarking on a world tour starting in May. Of course, by the time I saw this announcement in LATE May most of their U.S. dates had passed, including a fairly close one in Pennsylvania, or were tragically sold out. Then I saw that after tour legs through Europe and Asia, they had added a few more U.S. dates in August, including one at the House of Blues in Cleveland. I’ve never been to either that venue nor that city, but at 5 and a half hours driving distance it was doable.
“You want to go?” I said hopefully to the wife.
“Sure. They’re not my thing, but I’ll go see them.”
I immediately bought us tickets for actual balcony seats, not standing room only floor space. They were maybe the most expensive tickets I’d ever purchased for a band, and it was certainly the furthest distance I would be driving to see one (even beating out that time we went to see Ladysmith Black Mambazo for our anniversary), but at long last we were headed to see Midnight Oil.
I had no real thoughts about Cleveland before going there, other than knowing it as the butt of many a geographical joke in the 80s and 90s, along the lines of “Well, things may be bad, but at least we’re not in Cleveland.” I suppose, like Detroit, things were pretty terrible there for a long time. The Cleveland of today likely still has its problems, but we saw lots of growth and renovation and the repurposing of spaces. There is vitality there and it’s a gorgeous city with some pretty astounding architecture, particularly in its many Gothic-revival churches. We stayed in Ohio City in an AirBnB located in what looks to have once been a pretty run down area that has revitalized in recent years. It was in walking distance of 25th street, which is where a bunch of awesome restaurants are located, as well as the West End Market. I might be in town for Midnight Oil, but the wife was there for the West End Market–which is deservedly legendary. Just stall after stall of vendors selling astounding meats and cheeses and veggies and breads and dumplings and fried things and cheese–did I mention the cheese? (Whiskey cheese is goooooood.) We were glad we’d thought to bring a cooler with us to take home all our perishable purchases.
Our first night there we dined finely at the Great Lakes Brewing Company, whose house-made tater tots were like five regular tots mashed together in one dense, savory, log. Despite the fact that they only gave me four of them, it was still too many. The GLBC’s Nosferatu Imperial Red Ale is a new favorite. The next day we breakfasted at the West End Market Cafe, where I had Hungarian hash to my wife’s chicken & waffles–both very nummy.
And, being in Cleveland, we had to go to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Took us two tries to actually get there because we attempted to drive their on our own the first time. We had hoped to find a parking garage central to both the museum and the House of Blues, but with an Indians game happening that wasn’t possible. Turned out to be way way cheaper and infinitely less enraging to return our car to the Air BnB and take an Uber back. (Always remember Uber, kids. They’re a terrible company, and Midnight Oil probably wouldn’t use them, but, dammit, they conveniently get you where you need to be.) The museum was definitely a good experience, though it is something of an assault on the senses. Almost anywhere you inside will leave you buffeted by hundreds of different directional audio sources for the music of the honored artists and commentary about them. It’s kind of overwhelming, but largely worth it.
We Ubered from the museum to the House of Blues. Our car even took us through the back alley, nearly the loading dock where a bunch of roadie-looking dudes were hanging around. After the drop off, we started looking for a place to eat and were walking along a blocked off street between the HOB building and a row of restaurants and shops. We were just passing an alley that led to the HOB loading dock area when Midnight Oil themselves exited that alley and walked right past us. I turned, wide-eyed, and beamed back at my wife who mouthed “Was that them?” I nodded like a madman. I wrote my friend Chris Hudspeth from college, who is an even bigger Midnight Oil fan than me, and told him what had just happened as he was one of the only people I knew who would appreciate it as much as me.
We wound up returning to dine at the House of Blues itself–which I had suggested earlier as a joke. I know, I know. Never dine at the venue, but dammit they were offering an early seating pass to anyone who dropped $40 there, and they had perfectly cooked fried chicken. And as a bonus, while waiting for our food a couple of non-Peter-Garrett members of Midnight Oil came out of the HOB and chatted and smoked on the sidewalk next to us while hungry autograph hounds lurked nearby. The band seemed quite gracious about it all.
I can report that the concert was amazing. I was especially impressed with their opening band, The Living End, who I was unfamiliar with but will become more familiar with after that show. They can play the shit out of a guitar, drums and standup bass–the later instrument being stood upon multiple times during the course of the show. They reminded me of a better Green Day. As for Midnight Oil itself, they were everything I wanted them to be and played almost all of my favorite songs and a couple of latter day hits I’d forgotten about. And it would have been a perfect show but for the efforts of the two people in front of us who tried their level best to ruin the show for the row behind them. I call them Mr. and Mrs. Dipschidt.
Meet the Dipschidts
Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Dipschidt (of the Ohio Dipschidts), were two people we met before the concert began, as they sat down in the seats directly in front of us. And as far as people go, they were very nice, commenting to us on how awesome they thought the venue was. As we were to learn when the concert began, however, they were also the very sort of people who utterly cannot enjoy a moment for the moment, but must document that moment eight ways from Sunday throughout the entirety of that moment or it is somehow worthless to them to be there. These two would-be documentarians, therefore, kept holding their phones up in our sightline, blocking our view of the stage, to take photos and video throughout the concert. Now, they were not alone, as there were plenty of people snapping photos during the show, myself included. I got no problem with a photo or two. Even a photo or two per song I’d be okay with. But the Dipschidts needed such hard core photographic and video coverage that if interventions had not been made they would likely have continued blocking our view for the whole show. We weren’t alone. The Dipschidts moved their phones around so much that they also managed to block the view of the two people seated deeper in our row on the other side of me.
After it became clear that this behavior was something they intended to engage in for the duration, I leaned forward and tapped Mr. Dipschidt on the shoulder. I intended to keep things polite and let him know that the two of them were blocking the view of the four people behind them. I wasn’t even going to ask him to stop, but to just keep their phones lowered to their own face level, where we could still see over them. As I touched his shoulder, though, Mr. Dipschidt immediately lowered his phone from my view and wouldn’t turn around to see who was tapping him and why. Maybe he didn’t want my comments picked up on his audio, but I suspect he well knew what the issue would be and that it was probably not the first time a hand had tapped him at a concert. The lady of the couple seated next to me thanked me for my effort, but it only helped for a couple of songs. Meanwhile, Mrs. Dipschidt, seated in front of my wife, was not trying to video the whole concert, but till needed multiple pictures throughout every song. (I kept imagining her showing them to her friends later. “Okay, and this is what Peter Garrett looked like during ‘Redneck Wonderland.’ And this is what Peter Garrett looked like during ‘Feeding Frenzy.’ And this is what Peter Garrett looked like during ‘Truganini.’ Oh, and this is another picture of what Peter Garrett looked like during ‘Truganini.’ And here’s what he looked like after he took off his button up shirt, then wiped the sweat off his bald head with it before chucking it to the guitar tech off stage, then revealed that he was wearing a politically-minded t-shirt beneath it the whole time, and then sang ‘My Country.’ Oh, and here’s what he looked like during ‘Arctic World.'” ) She kept raising her camera into the wife’s sightline, holding it there as she focused and zoomed in and zoomed back out and got her composition right and made sure it had time to properly refocus, and then took a picture before doing it all again for the next one. So, again, I leaned forward and tapped her on the shoulder. And, just as before, as soon as my hand touched her shoulder the camera dropped from view and Mrs. Dipschidt remained face-forward. I believe I even detected a coldness to her shoulder. And, naturally, another song or two later, both phones went right back up in the way again.
Many things began to flow through my head, not the least of which is the knowledge that this scene would be playing out very differently had my friends Glen or Joe been present. More than anyone I know, Glen and Joe have no tolerance for cell phones in settings where cell phones are a detriment to the viewing pleasure of others. I’ve both witnessed and heard them call people out by loudly shouting “PUT YOUR PHONE AWAY!!” across movie theaters. And I’ve seen the people with their phones out quickly put them away as all eyes turn to them. I could continue to tap them on the shoulder every time their camera crossed my field of view, or maybe there was another avenue.
It occurred to me in that moment that it would be fun to lean over between the two Dipschidts and offer to demonstrate for them the new HD Rectal Filter feature of the Galaxy S8. I mean, as we all know, the S7 was known for taking pretty decent pictures of the interior of the sigmoid and descending colons (while the Galaxy Note 7 was known for burning them). But boy howdy can the S8 really get crystal clear 2960 x 1440 pixel images of the transverse colon, provided someone is really diligent in cramming it up there for you.
Before I could get myself in trouble, the couple beside us got up to go report the Dipschidts to the ushers. Presently an usher came down, stepped into our row and leaned over to speak sternly to Mr. Dipschidt. I couldn’t hear exactly what she said, but the wife later reported that the usher had told Mr. Dipschidt that he was allowed to take still photos but was not allowed to record video. He nodded emphatically, yet continued to roll video through the whole dressing down, his strobe of a flash beaming into the heads of the people in front of him. However, when the song concluded, he and Mrs. Dipschidt put away their phones for a blessed while. It was not to last.
Mrs. Dipschidt simply could not remain in the moment and enjoy the concert they were at while they were at it any longer. She again took her phone out. Seeing this as a signal, Mr. Dipschidt whipped his out too and they whiled away the latter half of the concert taking photos and video mostly from face-height. (The picture included is from that period when they were “behaving” themselves.) In fact, in order to try and get better shots from the new lower angle, Mr. Dipschidt was often forced to violate Mrs. Dipschidt’s sightline of the stage, causing her to crane her neck to see around the phone. That never got old for me. And for her part, Mrs. Dipschidt was unafraid of trying a few shots back in our sightline, but she kept them limited to only a handful of pictures per song. (“And this is what Peter Garrett looked like when he faked the whole audience out by saying it was their last song of the night, but then it turned out it was not their last song. And here’s what he looked like coming back on stage with a different politically-minded t-shirt.”)
As soon as the encores hit and the Dipschidts were within spitting distance of the end, they must have figured it wouldn’t matter if they got kicked out, so up went the phones again and Mr. Dipschidt resumed his videography. To retaliate, the couple beside us began loudly screaming the chorus to “Now or Never Land,” off key, at Mr. Dipschidt’s phone to screw up his audio. This he was unable to ignore, and glared back at them, but he kept his trap shut. I’m pretty sure even Peter Garrett himself got in on the protest. As he was singing the next song from the stage, he pointed up into the balcony directly at Dipschidt’s camera flood light and gave him the flat palm-out/eye-shielding universal sign language meaning “that’s super bright, please turn it off.” If he noticed, Mr. Dipschidt did no honoring of the request.
The concert ended and we left the House of Blues without acknowledging the Dipschidts.
Our final morning was spent breaking fast at Jack Flaps, who served me what are now pretty high on my top 10 list of favorite pancakes eaten and which are currently arm-wrestling for top spot with Austin’s The Original Pancake House. After that, we headed back to 25th street to check out a book store, the cheese stall at the West End Market once again, the Great Lakes Brewing Company for some more Nosferatu, and eventually wound up at Penzy’s Spice Store, located in part of the ground floor of what had once been a massive and ornate bank building, now subdivided into retail spaces.
After checking in with the wife at Penzy’s, I stepped outside to our car to get my Nosferatu out of the sunlight. On my way back, who should I see standing on the corner waiting for the light to change but Mr. and Mrs. Dipschidt. Mr. Dipschidt was even wearing his Midnight Oil t-shirt. It was a real moment of decision for me. I mean, do I say something to them? Do I run up behind them and tap them both on the shoulder to see if they notice? Do I let them know that the only reason the two of them hadn’t ruined the entire concert for us was because Midnight Oil rocks too hard to allow that? Do I just push them into traffic? As I watched them, though, the WALK signal illuminated and the Dipschidts crossed the road and were gone to enjoy their day.
Remember your concert etiquette kids: Take a few photos, try not to ruin the experience for your fellow audience members, and put your phone away. Don’t be a Dipschidt.
The end of the world is an event that has been predicted for millennia. It is always on the horizon, but so far has not come to pass. Mr. Daniels, however, has his own prediction and, unless he’s wrong, the danger of the end of the world is very real indeed.
And it just might begin at Starbucks.
This live-reading of “Nigh” was recorded at the 2015 Summer Conference of West Virginia Writers, Inc., on June 12, 2015.
The writer Lee Maynard passed away on June 16, 2017, in New Mexico. He was an notorious son of the Appalachian literary scene due to his less than flattering depiction of growing up in West Virginia in his novel Crum—infamously banned from sale at Tamarack. For all of the sex, violence, and combustion of outhouses Crum depicts, however, it remains a beautiful novel and a love letter to West Virginia. It speaks volumes about the power of place, family, and friendship in our lives—strange and bewildering and infuriating as those things may sometimes be.
For the past 15 years, Lee has been a regular presenter at the WV Writers Summer Conference, often accompanied by his friend and collaborator Pops Walker.
In this episode of the WV Writers Podcast, we talk to Pops himself about Lee and his work. Also included are Lee’s previous podcast appearances, including a recording of one of Lee’s readings with Pops Walker, a resonant interview he did with Cat Pleska in 2009, and other recorded material.
TO DOWNLOAD: Right mouse click on the link below and choose Save Link Target As to save the file to your computer. Listen to it at your convenience using Windows Media Player (or whatever product Mac offers for media).
The Mexican Gray wolf is among the rarest of North American wolf species. Few humans have seen them, fewer still have heard them growl, and far fewer have heard the pangs of hunger from the stomach of one.
One old man, seated on the cliff of an Arizona mesa, could possibly lay claim to all three of these feats if only he could be bothered to pay attention. He is a puzzle that most of the local wolves have given up on–save for one. The strange, silent, unmoving, and seemingly invulnerable old man makes for the ultimate unattainable prey, as the wolf’s own teeth (chipped from previous attempts) are a constant reminder.
When more men arrive at the mesa, the wolf’s frustration and hunger give way to hope–if only he can survive against these two-legged predators, intent on harming one of their own.
The Mothman of West Virginia is reported to be a winged creature, the size of a man, but with glowing red eyes. There have been a few plays written about this creature. This is one of them.
Presenting the stage adaptation of Eric Fritzius’s short story “…to a Flame” as recorded during its performance during the Opera House PlayFest, at the Pocahontas County Opera House, in Marlinton, W.Va., in 2016.
The adaptation stars John C. Davis as Jeff, Dwayne Kennison as Virgil Hawks, and the author himself as Rik Winston.
On a day in 1983, Martin Riscili receives the most important phone call of his life. His late father’s mobster “associate,” Jimmy Jambalaya, has just phoned to alert Martin to his imminent death by Jimmy’s own hand. His house is watched. His phone line is dead. Jimmy’s on his way. And the only thing Martin can think of that might yet save his life is his grandmothers’ quilt.
If only he could remember where he put it.
A story of crime and punishment and contractual terms with forces beyond our understanding.
This is a live radio-style adaptation was recorded live on October 12, 2015, at the Greenbrier Valley Theatre in Lewisburg, W Va. It stars Sarah Elkins as Melissa, Shane Miller as Martin, the author himself as Tino and The Warrior, and a special appearance by Dr. AC as Jimmy Jambalaya.
Though it is the longest story to be found in A Consternation of Monsters, it is also probably one that was one of the quickest for me to develop because the core idea for it arrived in my head close to fully formed. Though I hinted at this recently in my interview with J.D. Byrne, there’s a little more to tell about the story.
For a while in the early oughts, I was a part of an email writing and critique group consisting of several writer friends of mine from college. And because it began in the year 2000, and we all loved David Fincher movies, we were obliged to call ourselves Write Club. (And subsequently make the joke “First rule about Write Club is… well, you know,” let’s say 480 times.) For a handful of years there, we took turns issuing monthly writing challenges to one another, with solid, umovable deadlines that often became less solid as they approached. But eventually the deadline would fall and fall solidly and we were honor bound to turn something in for the others to critique. Early drafts of a few of the stories in Consternation were spawned by this method, including “The Hocco Makes the Echo,” “Nigh,” “Old Country,” and, of course, “Limited Edition.” In fact, I give credit to the very Write Club member who dreamed up the prompt that brought “Limited Edition” into being as part of the dedication to Consternation. “…to Joe Evans, my ideal reader, who also gave me the line about the fork.”
The “line about the fork” was a simple one. It was Joe’s turn to issue a writing prompt to the rest of us and his was this: we were to write a story that must include the phrase “Something told him that in all the world, there was no other fork quite like this one.”
As a writer, I’ve had a handful of what I call Blues Brothers moments in which I–much like Jake Blues in the church at the beginning of The Blues Brothers–receive, seemingly from on high, a direct transmission of knowledge propelling me on a mission from God and/or from my subconscious. These are magical moments in which a mosaic of images and information seem to fall into place in my head and my visualization and imagination centers go into overdrive as they struggle to process the info dump they’ve just received. In the moment, I feel almost pinned in place by the celestial beam from above.
An instant after I read Joe’s line about the fork, one of those Blues Brothers moments happened to me. I was pinned in place in my office chair and suddenly knew exactly what the fork in his sentence meant, the implied-yet-still-loose-enough-to-maneuver-in backstory of not only it but similar and related objects, how this fork would come into the story, who would possess it, who would want it, and a the most logical and fun setting in which such a story would occur. I also knew which pre-existing character of mine would also be appearing in it, due to the fact that her known occupation–as seen in “The Wise Ones”–synced up nicely with the subject-matter. I even knew why she would be there. Those were the basic beats that fell into my head and those beats never changed throughout the writing process. (I take such gifts from my subconscious quite seriously and try not to deviate from their structures, lest I do damage to plot points put into motion of which I may not yet be entirely aware. I’m a firm believer that my brain is smarter than I am and that it’s often watching out for me when I’m not paying attention.)
Now, it’s one thing to say that a story fell into your head and another thing to write it. There are all sorts of details about the story that I was not given in my Blues Brother’s Moment download, which I would have to either imagine or, as turned out to be the case, heavily research. My setting for the story, granted to me by my noggin, was a tour stop for the American version of the Antiques Roadshow–the public television show in which antiques appraisers offer commentary and assign value to items brought in by the general public. It was a show I liked, though not one I was in the habit of regularly watching at the time being as how I didn’t get PBS. However, I adored the BBC America broadcasts of the original UK version, so I was familiar with the basic format. Fortunately, there’s quite a bit of information about the show and its mechanics to be found online. Quite a bit. I was able to learn how it was shot, how the tour worked, who the appraisers were, who the hosts have been, who the executive producers are, how the antiques that made it onto camera were chosen, how many items actually made it to camera in a given stop, how the antiques were categorized for review, and, most amusingly, which practically worthless antiques repeatedly turn up in the mitts of folks who hope and fervently believe they are about to become fabulously wealthy. (At the time of my research, it seemed to be the one that turns up in the opening paragraphs of the story.) In fact, there was so much information about the show that I decided I didn’t really need all that much, beyond a few key pieces to help establish the tone of the setting, and the sort of locations the show is usually filmed within.
I also had to research my basic subject: the fork. We take forks for granted because in the U.S. we’ve never experienced a time when they were not in our lives on a daily basis. And it was the ubiquitous nature of the fork that suggested further plot avenues to take, given the nature of the fork in question. (Which, I’m a little embarrassed to say, does not actually make an appearance in the podcast excerpt. You’ll have to buy the book to learn what’s up with it.) I had to know how and when the fork actually came into common use as an eating utensil–because it struck me as logical that human beings basically just used their hands to feed themselves for most of our existence. Still, the fork is such a universally useful tool that it also had to be a very very old one. And it is. So much so that I could find no origin point for it, though the historical record gave me a date range in which they came into more common use at the dinner table–which was around the same time that the dinner table also came into popular use. The research also yielded some fun little factoids, such as the amount of suspicion heaped upon the table fork for many years after its introduction, due to its very existence being an afront to God himself by daring to improve upon the hands he had already given us.
My main character of the story, antiques appraiser C. Phillips Hovelan, walked into it mostly formed. He wasn’t a direct part of the Blues Brothers Moment, but his presence was suggested and his personality felt right. He isn’t based on anyone in particular, though he does remind me of a particularly acerbic college professor I once had. I’ve certainly never seen any appraisers on Antiques Roadshow who were such outright assholes as Phil in the story. He just seemed like the sort of character archetype who would fit the situation, and one who would be a nice foil to the other main character, my old friend Miss Zeddie.
Until I wrote “Limited Edition,” Miss Zeddie was exclusively known as either Madam Z or Omega–names revealed in other stories found in Consternation and elsewhere.The trouble is, my fellow Write Clubbers were all also co-creators in a collective fictional universe we developed over a period of years during college to serve as the setting for various role-playing game adventures. A core of three of us, Joe Evans, Sujay Shaunak, and Marcus Hammack, actually ran the RPG adventures as game-masters and each of them were in charge of their own corner of the universe. I was not a game-master, but I love to world-build and set about creating extensive databases and timelines for the characters and concepts we encountered during our games. Eventually, Sujay and I spun things off into prose stories to help fill in some gaps in our storytelling that weren’t so easy to accomplish in the games themselves.
Madam Z had first appears as a non-player character in a couple of our games. She was a wise and mysterious old woman who served to guide us during an adventure or two. And she’d been created (as I detail in my recent interview) by Marcus Hammack–who I also thank in the dedication. I was enchanted with her from the start, thinking Marcus had these grand plans for her, and imagining what her backstory might be. Only later did I learn that he had basically come up with her on the spot, had no grand plans for her at all, nor any notion of what her backstory might be. As disappointing as this was, it was to my gain, because after Marcus graduated and left town I kind of inherited her for use in my prose stories.
Because my fellow Write Clubbers would recognize her immediately, though, if I called her Madam Z, I decided she needed a secret identity for the story–one which would definitely hint at her true identity for them, but maybe not on first appearance. I called her Miss Zeddie. They could figure out it was her, of course, but maybe not at first, just as readers of Consternation might not know at first that she’s the same old woman from another story.
Z’s true backstory will be revealed at another time and in another story. (I only gave Joe Evans a glimpse at her earliest origins this past summer when I slipped him a 100 word short story the very title of which is a spoiler. It had been a secret I’ve held for over two decades now. I figured I owed him.) Knowing Z’s backstory, knowing her major goals in her apparently very long life, I knew exactly what she would do if placed into this new story, given the other factors. In fact, I saw her having a much deeper role in the mechanics of the story itself. And, given the personality quirks of my main character, Hovelan, I knew how poorly the two of them would get on, which suggested other side stories to the main one, most of which is what the podcast excerpt covers.
As I researched and began writing, I found I had two stories that intertwined–the story of Hovelan and Zeddie, their bitter rivalry, their seeming ultimate showdown, and then the rematch over much higher stakes than either is entirely aware of; and the story of the fork.
And while there are three other important characters who appear in the story, two of which appear in the podcast excerpt, one of whom also makes an appearance elsewhere in Consternation. But I will leave the matter there for now. Everything you need to know is in the story itself and to write about any of them will run into spoiler territory. Just know that there are other stories featuring most of these characters, some of which have actually been written.
As for Write Club, that was something that just kind of stopped. I think we may have all collectively missed a deadline and were too embarrassed to acknowledge it. And, after all, there’s that whole first rule of Writer Club thing. (#481) We’ve actually talked about re-starting it over the years and occasionally one of us will tell another that it’s their turn to give a prompt. I expect we will sooner or later. It’s not a bad idea. I managed to get a handful of stories I’m proud of from the process, not to mention the sage advice on ways to improve them. With my upcoming collections in various stages of completion, perhaps it’s time to head back down into the warehouse basement with the boys and chalk up our hands for more bare-knuckle writing. (Maybe we’ll pick a better name next time.)
Author J.D. Byrne was kind enough to invite me to conduct an email interview with me for his blog.
We cover many subjects, including audiobooks, mechanics of genre stories versus non-genre (or mundane) stories, and the as yet unchronicled subject of the origin of the story in this week’s podcast, “Limited Edition,” as hinted at in the dedication of A Consternation of Monsters.
You can find it at his website, JDByrne.net and at the link below.
The Consternation of Monsters Podcast returns with a story of bitter rivalries, stolen opportunities, forgery, and the angel of death, set in the cut throat world of public television antiques appraisal–a world in which one of the most powerful objects is a fork.
This podcast is an excerpt of the audiobook adaptation of the short story “Limited Edition” found in the collection A Consternation of Monstersas well as the unabridged audiobook.
While in the bedroom dressing one day a couple weeks ago, I happened to look out the window and spotted a dog run past, into the back yard. This would not be abnormal, as we do have three dogs. However, it was not one of ours. The dog I saw was very hound-dogish, probably around 50 pounds, black, white, and brown. It sniffed around, had a squat, and trotted off into the brush at the edge of the yard.
“Huh,” I said, figuring it was a dog from the neighborhood–one I’d not seen before.
Our actual dogs, who had been lazing on their dog pillows the whole time, suddenly came alive at my “huh,” somehow sensing the intruder or that I’d seen something of interest, and began barking the sort of vicious, ferocious barks that only come from the throats of dogs separated from their enemies by a pane or two of glass. The other dog suitably cowed (or at least now absent from sight), they settled down again, secure in the knowledge that they’d demonstrated enough ferocity that their jobs as defenders of the realm were safe.
The next day, I saw the dog again, this time lurking in the front yard. Our dogs didn’t notice and soon it wandered off and down the trail at the edge of our yard. I didn’t think too much about it. I wondered briefly if it was an escapee from the humane society, which is down the hill and across a couple of fields from us. But I didn’t wonder this too long.
Over the next couple of days, I saw the dog a few more times. Sometimes our dogs saw it as well. Sometimes not. My general policy, on the rare occasions we have such visitors, is not to feed them lest they stay and become dog #4. Soon, though, the wife began to notice it too and she has no such policy. It was getting cold out, she said, and it would need food to keep warm in the night. Fine. We put out a bowl and it was empty within an hour or two.
Last Sunday, the wife called me over to look at something on her phone. It was a picture of the dog we’d been seeing, as posted on one of the local Facebook yard sale sites. The author of the post was a lady named Amy who works for the nearby humane society. We contacted her and it turns out the dog was indeed, as I’d wondered, an escapee from the HS. This dog, whose name is Prue, was a young female pup that had been adopted by a family elsewhere and had been scheduled for delivery before her untimely escape from one of the volunteers who help walk the dogs. They’d apparently chased her all around the woods near our house until they’d reached the trail behind our house, which led them to our house where they found themselves staring down the barrel of our dogs. Our dogs have shock collars and stay in the yard, but the pursuers of Prue did not know that, so they said, “Today, my jurisdiction ends here,” and went back to the barn. (I learned this from them a couple days later.) Amy said that Prue was part of a litter of puppies of the treeing walker breed of coon hounds. The other pups had acclimated to humans. Prue ran from them on sight. She apparently did pretty well with other dogs, but was super timid when it came to people.
We let Amy know that Prue was a regular around our house. The following day, she had a great big live trap delivered and set up just off of the trail. They put some breakfast biscuits and canned food in it and we hoped for the best.
In late afternoon, we saw Prue creeping through the brush behind the house. I decided I was going to try and make friends with her, and went down to sit on the back steps of the house, armed with an open can of stinky wet food and a spoon. She saw me and fled like the devil was chasing her. What I later learned was that the wife could see Prue’s escape from inside the house. The dog ran around to the front yard and made for the trail. But she paused, near the fence behind which was the live trap, and sniffed at the air before trying to find a way through the fence to get at what she was smelling. Then, naturally, our dogs got wind that something was up and began barking their fool heads off, startling Prue and sending her skittering into the trees, not to be seen again.
It got cold that night. We hated the thought of the poor dog outside, let alone possibly stuck in the live trap where the winds could just whip through her. We checked the trap at bedtime and then the wife set an alarm for 2 am to go check again. The only thing in the trap at that hour, though, was a cat. It wasn’t one of our cats, but it was apparently just as pissy as the wife let it out. She then had difficulty setting the trap again in only the light from her phone, so she propped the door open with a stick and hoped the dog would somehow trip it going in. It did not.
The next morning, I reset the trap and put some new canned food within it to replace what the cat had eaten. In the afternoon, Amy texted to suggest we move the trap closer to the house. I was all for this, and suggested the boardwalk on the far side of the garage, out of eyesight of the dogs, but not from the laundry room window. We could check the trap without leaving the house.
There was a minor blizzard Tuesday night. We had a few inches of snow and lots of wind. Temps were in the teens. There was no sign of Prue. The wife made a concoction of ham and microwaved wet dog food and put it on top of the cage, hoping the smell would bring Prue in. We saw no sign of her, though, and soon the bowl was frozen solid.
“She’s found herself a place to hole up,” I suggested. There are, after all, any number of places to do that in this neighborhood–the crawlspace beneath one of our outbuildings the most logical to us. We still hated the thought of the dog shivering outside in the weather.
I was relieved the next morning to spot Prue in the yard–nowhere near the trap. And she stayed away from it, even after I’d rewarmed the dogfood/ham concoction and even climbed inside the cage to put it at the back, behind the trip mechanism. It occurred to me while I was in there that if I tripped it I’d be trapped in the cage, in the cold and might not be able to get turned around to let myself out. This did not happen.
Days passed and different treats were left in the cage to entice the stubbornly absent, though still living dog. We’d see her around, but if she saw one of us she was gone in a flash. The only dog to be caught in the cage was our dog, Sadie, who couldn’t resist going in for a weenie.
“Well, at least we know the trap works,” I texted to Amy the next day.
On Thursday, at Amy’s suggestion, I moved the cage down to the far back corner of our yard. Clearly, we reasoned, it wasn’t doing any good near the house, and we couldn’t let our dogs free in the yard without watching them every minute to keep them from getting trapped and eating all the bait. We had to put it somewhere outside of their collar range. (Or at least the collar range of Maya and Moose, as Sadie doesn’t usually wear her collar, since she knows her boundaries and stays within them. Usually.) I thought that maybe if I put the trap just out of the yard, in the brush I’d seen Prue lurking in a few times, she might care to investigate it.
Prue did not care to. A possum, however, did. He did not think the trap was awesome, and hissed at us, refusing to stop climbing the bars and escape when the door was left open for him. He also ate all the wieners.
On Saturday, Amy came by herself, armed with a bag of WalMart chicken tenders. She said she thought that this was the day we’d finally catch Prue. And, late in the afternoon, it seemed we were about to.
A Prue sighting from within the house
I’d let our dogs out to potty in the front yard and had strolled around to see if Prue might be in the trap. She was not, but Maya picked up the scent of the chicken and went over to sniff the air at the border of her collar. Then, her face darted to the side and she bolted around the back of the house. The other two dogs were still around front, so I knew she must have seen Prue. I dashed back around front and herded Sadiemoose into the house. Sure enough, I could see Prue in the back yard through the windows. And Maya was there too. And they appeared to be… playing. Prue was still skittish, but she actually seemed to be having fun. She would creep up to Maya (who, being a St. Bernard, was twice her size) and lean close to sniff at her. Then Maya would lunge playfully and Prue would bolt a few feet away before starting it all again. I ran to get the wife and we came and watched them–trying to find new vantage points along the back side of the house as the dogs romped and played closer and closer to the location of the trap.
Then we saw Prue stop and sniff the air, then move away, following the scent, moving down to the trap itself, leaving Maya to jump around at the edge of her boundary. Prue sniffed at the chicken through the back side of the cage. Then moved along its length and closer to the open door. Then, just when we thought she was going to step inside… she bolted away and back toward the front yard and was gone again.
“Noooooo!” I screamed as quietly as I could.
We moved all around the inside of the house, trying to get a view on where Prue had fled, knowing she wouldn’t be able to resist going back. We had to lock Sadie and Moose in the bedroom and close the curtains on them, because they woudln’t shut up.
Soon enough, Prue did return to the hill above the trap and then was back at the trap itself, and to its door. As we watched, we saw her step into the trap itself and take another couple of tentative creeps forward. And then she bolted and was gone again, this time running fully across the front yard and disappearing down the trail on the complete opposite side of the house from the cage.
The wife began smiling.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“No. What?”
“Well, you know… if she likes Maya so much, and is already hanging around the house… maybe it’s a sign that she’s really our 4th dog?”
“Uh uhhh!” I said. “This dog is strictly visiting. And as soon as she’s caught she’s getting shipped out to her new home, very far away.”
I wrote Amy a text, telling her that we almost had Prue, but that the dog was too smart for us. We did note that she at least had fun playing with Maya. Amy said it sounded cute and that she was still optimistic.
Prue goes home
Eight minutes later, Amy texted me a picture of Prue with the note: “Look who came home!!!!” I don’t know if it was playing with Maya or what, but Prue apparently decided that being on her own was for the birds and it was time to go back to her pack. She had turned up outside of the humane society and followed one of the dogs there right into the building.
I told Maya what a good dog she was. Maybe she had nothing to do with Prue’s return to home base, but I like to think that playing with Maya made Prue miss her buddies back at the Humane Society and that she decided being out on her own was for the birds. The fact that she ran immediately back would seem to maybe support this.
We never went down to spring the trap. It was still baited, so we half expected to find another possum in there. I joked that if we caught a skunk then I was leaving that to the humane society to release.
Instead, we caught Sadie again.
Yep, the siren call of day old chicken tenders was too much for her, and she was found trapped in the cage Sunday morning, after we let her out to potty. We left her in there for 20 minutes or so, since the weather was nice. She lay down and chilled out, but was super happy when her “pa” came to rescue her.
The Seward Whale Strike Tragedy, they called it. Twenty-five people dead. The worst accident in Alaska’s tourism history since Will Rogers’ plane went down in ‘35. Only one man left alive knows the truth of what really happened — the man everyone agrees caused the tragedy to start with. And if there’s one thing he’s sure of, the thing they hit that day was no whale.
Presented here is his testimony, as transcribed for an interview with Paranorm Violations Magazine.
Last Friday, our friend Belinda Anderson called to see if I and “the kids” wanted to go on a walk with her down at the fish hatchery in White Sulphur Springs. By “the kids” she meant of course the only offspring my wife and I have dared to produce, our three dogs, Sadie, Moose and Maya. I thought it was an outstanding idea, as the past two days had been nice, with temperatures in the 60s for the first time since November. I was also eager to get a look at the fish hatchery, to see how it was rebounding from the devastating flooding in the area last June.
Trouble was, I had a Sophie’s choice to make when it came to “the kids” because I had three dogs and only two leashes.
We actually own three leashes, but the third retractable leash was in the wife’s car, at work, and I couldn’t find so much as a cloth leash in the house. Even if I’d had all three leashes, though, the task of taking our three dogs on a walk with only two human beings present is not one I ever relish. I always wind up having to walk at least two of them, passing Moosie off to Belinda since he’s only 45 pounds of brown obedient dog to deal with. I then have to walk Sadie and Maya, who are 80ish pounds each, don’t really like each other much, and have a tendency to run in opposite directions when they’re not making a braid with Moose’s leash. But, hey, I only had the two leashes, I reasoned, so that meant I had to leave one dog at the house. And since Sadie and Moose have seniority, Maya was have to be the one to get left behind. Not that this makes the job of leaving her any easier. If you leave Maya outside with her shock collar on (her “purty collar”) she just howls and jumps on the car with her huge St. Bernard feet and claws, trying to get in with the others. And if you leave her in the house, she’ll just park herself in the stairwell window and leap on the glass there, potentially tearing down the blinds, while simultaneously rolling huge doggie tears that will break the heart of any dog parents backing out of the driveway, facing her.
Instead, I left her in our bedroom and closed the door. I figured probably have a nap on our bed, maybe do her nails, and really get in some “me” time while we were gone for an hour or so. Then I’d give her extra treats when I got home, take her for a walk down the trail and all would be forgiven. Thusly planned, Sadie, Moose and I left for our walk at the fish hatchery.
An hour or so later we returned to find Maya waiting in the yard.
Er.
This wasn’t good.
Maya being out of the house meant one of three things: A) the wife had come home early, and had let Maya out (not likely, as her car was not in the driveway); B) an intruder had broken in and let Maya out; or C) Maya had somehow managed to escape the locked house on her own. I wasn’t sure which of these options I liked the least.
We know from experience that Maya can get into the house if the doors are unlocked because she knows how to operate the exterior handles of both the back and front doors (one of which normally requires an opposable thumb). However, those doors were both locked, not to mention she’d been left in a closed bedroom the door knob of which she has yet to master. Given her weight, though, I was immediately afraid that she might have managed to break the glass of our floor-length bedroom windows, which are practically door-sized themselves. She had no blood on her, though, so if she broke out she did it cleanly. This would require investigation.
Slowly I unlocked and opened the front door. No intruders killed me. The back door, I saw, was closed and locked and the bedroom door was still in place and closed. I opened it to find that indeed she had gone through a window, just without breaking the glass. What she appears to have done was chosen the one window in the room that is covered by a screen, clawed through that screen and used her weight to force open the window on its track. She could have tried any of the other screenless windows, but, no, she had to go through the one with the screen. The window has two latches, but only the top one was closed. It gave to her force without actually breaking, though. Once it was open enough to squeeze out, she was free. Only later did we discover that she’d also peed all over Sadie’s dog bed, which was directly in front of her escape window.
I was angry, sure, but mostly at the screen being torn. Her escape was otherwise pretty impressive and definitely sent a message that she doesn’t want to be left behind.
When we were about to climb into bed that night, we discovered yet another doggie protest action, one which did not feel good to discover in sock feet: the dog bed directly beneath the window through which Maya had escaped was soaked through with what we can only assume is dog pee. At least, there were no empty 32 oz cups of water handy. And it was Sadie’s bed, Maya’s usual arch nemesis. She probably decided that if Sadie got to go somewhere, at least she wouldn’t have a dry bed to sleep in later. Either that or Maya just really had to go and didn’t quite make it until her escape could be enacted.
The job of replacing the screen has got us in a screen replacement project for the five or so screens our various doggie residents have destroyed over the years. They’re such a pain in the ass to replace, though, that after we did the one Maya tore up, we decided to make it a one-screen-per-day kind of project. Or maybe one a week.
For Christmas this year, my wife got me something I’ve been wanting to have for the past several months: an Ancestry.com DNA kit. Now the true reason I wanted one to begin with has more to do with a short story idea I had than any major desire to research into my own genetic background. But, like many of us, I’ve always been curious about what that background might entail.
The first time I voiced my desire to get a DNA kit to her was while watching the TV adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s series Outlander. It’s a show set in Scotland and all the dudes on the show look cool in their kilts. I’ve always wanted to wear a kilt, but wouldn’t dare do so unless I actually had Scottish heritage myself. Otherwise it would be like that time in college when I bought a Rasta hat, only to be asked by a real Rastafarian if I was a believer or just wearing it for the fashion. His question, unfortunately, was my very first clue that the hats were associated with religious beliefs, and that people of that religion might not be too cool with me appropriating it for the sake of fashion. If I was going to go around appropriating Scottish culture, I wanted to at least have my genetic ducks in a row. I announced, during Outlander, that I was going to get an Ancestry DNA kit and if I was anything greater than, say, 10 percent Scottish I would be purchasing a kilt and tartan which I would then wear exclusively, at least until winter.
Unfortunately, I already knew that I was probably not all that Scottish to begin with. From everything I’ve been told, I come from Franco-German stock, with ancestors originating in Alsace Lorraine back when it was part of Germany. But then again, I reasoned, that’s only on my grandpa Fritzius’s side. I know nothing about my dad’s mother’s people, the Blaylocks, nor anything about the genetic history of my mother’s people, the Dunnams and the Huttos. There had also been some rumors of Native American blood somewhere on my Grandma Blaylock’s side–rumors which she always seemed cagey about, and which my dad believed must be true since Grandma was being so cagey about it all. Dad also suspected that we might have some Jewish ancestry woven in there somewhere too, which, considering our alleged European origins, was not beyond the realm of possibility. And the fact that my paternal grandparents vehemently denied this as a possibility only served to make the rumor seem stronger. As much as I longed for Scottish heritage, I was also completely okay with Native American or Jewish heritage. Or a combo of the three would be even better.
The wife ordered my DNA kit, which arrived just in time for Christmas. The kit basically involved spitting into a little plastic tube, pouring some spit fixer in after it, and shakin’ it up but good. (The downside, for me at least, was that in order to get a solid DNA sample, I had to refrain from consuming anything but water for an hour or so before the test–lest I turn up as genetically descended from a Dorito.)
As per instructions, I put the tube of fixed spit in their postage paid package, filled out my info online, and sent it off. Immediately, I began dreaming of the exotic lands my people may have come from. I didn’t actively start shopping for kilts, or anything–cause I’d first need to know my clan tartan, and all–but I could always dream. I was looking forward to receiving my results, all spelled out, with no actual research required on my part. After all, I spent a goodly number of years working in a public library in which I devoted more than a little bit of time ridiculing Genealogy People. In case you’ve not encountered any or are not one yourself, Genealogy People are folks, usually in their 70s, who frequent libraries looking for local records that will lead them to their ancestors, or who use library computers to sign in to their Ancestry.com accounts to do such leg work. To a person, Genealogy People are completely unafraid of accosting library staff, or anyone else who has the misfortune to venture into their proximity, and going on and on and on at extraordinary length about the mind-numbingly boring details of all of their research. I once had to gnaw off my own leg to escape such an encounter. God love `em for having a hobby and being passionate about something in life, but I refuse to become a Genealogy People.
Over the following weeks, Ancestry.com would send emails apologizing that my results were taking so long. They said they were completely backed up with spit vials from the Christmas rush and were getting to mine as quickly as they could. They would then further tease by offering to let me research surnames on their site so I could get a head start. I toyed around with this, trying very hard not to get excited about any of it, lest I catch the dreaded and fearsome Genealogy People virus. I did note that there were some Dunnams who’d turned up in census data in Scotland, but they were not necessarily ones related to me specifically. I’d have to do actual research, or get a full Ancestry.com membership to see if someone else had already done the research, before I could know any of that. If you thought about it, though, regardless of where the Dunnams, Huttos, Blaylocks, or Fritziuses were known to have lived, I could be partly anything, really. There were a good number of generations and a couple of continents between my grandpa’s Alsace Lorraine ancestors and today, with four contributing genetic donors for each successive soul along my genetic line. I might be part African, for all I knew–though my wife took particular glee in shooting down that likelihood. I was hoping for something that at least seemed exotic and distant. The possibilities were intoxicating.
“Ooh! Ooooh!” I exclaimed one night, while we were watching an episode of Vikings.
“You’re not a Viking!” the wife shouted, immediately guessing what I was about to say.
“You don’t know!”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “They’re all big, blond and Nordic looking. You’re short, dark, and stumpy.”
“There were stumpy Vikings, too!” I said. “I’d be a kick ass stumpy Viking. You’ve seen all those long boats I made in the garage!”
She refused to entertain the idea, nor to fetch me any mead.
The notes from Ancestry not containing any of my results continued on for weeks. Then, they sent another note still not containing my results but which said they were at long last actively working on them. And a week later they sent another note saying that they’d finished my results and would soon be revealing them to me, just not in that particular email.
A few days later, I was rudely awakened by my wife at the crack of 7:30. She’d been reading her iPad in bed, had checked her email, and saw that my genetic results were finally in. I blearily roused, squinting at the screen where a pie chart had popped up showing me the spectrum of my genealogy.
Turns out, I’m mostly just a white guy.
Yep.
Bout as white as they come, in fact.
It seems my ancestors primarily hale from darkest Great Britain, to the tune of around 40 percent. (Your average native Great Britainer is around 60 percent, so I’m in the genetic ballpark.) Initially I was excited about this. After all, Scotland is a part of the UK. Looking at their colorized map, though, the darkest of my tiered color ranges largely excluded Scotland and Wales, which fall in the next lighter shade down (as are the Netherlands and a chunk of France). I’m 27 percent Irish, which means I can get 27 percent of a Celtic tattoo and will forever more be compelled to have a shot of Jameson with my Guinness when I’m down at the local Irish Pub. What was a surprise to me is that I’m only 13 percent Western European, with Alsace Lorraine smack in the middle of the map there. I’m also around 9 percent from the Iberian Peninsula, which centers out on Spain and Portugal. Who knew? I’ll take it.
Oh, and I was delighted to learn that I’m approximately 6 percent Scandinavian, and two percent Finnish/Western Russian, so all my stumpy-legged Viking longboats may yet come in handy. I’ll sail down the Greenbrier and pillage Alderson, or something.
In the less than 5 percent genetic estimate range, I’m apparently 1 percent Greek and/or Italian, 1 percent Eastern European, and, in point of fact, I do appear to be 1 percent African. North African, to be general, with a possible origin spread across Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and maybe the edge of Libya thrown in. That’s how genetics works, right? I’m 1 percent from all of those places.
What I am apparently NOT: I’m 0 percent from anywhere else in Africa, 0 percent European Jewish, 0 percent Pacific Islander, 0 percent middle Eastern, 0 percent anywhere in South America, and 0 percent Asian (except for 1 percent that they say originates from Caucasus, which I think is where they invented white people, so I guess that gives me bonus honky points).
All in all, I guess I’m happy with my results. It is odd to think that I’m not nearly as French and German as I had assumed I would be, but I’ll take Great Britain. Some of my favorite things in the world come from there anyway, from Doctor Who to Neil Gaiman to Douglas Adams and Monty Python. If that’s my heritage, I guess I’m in good company. I still would have liked a more specific tie to Scotland, but if that’s to be determined I’ll likely have to join up with Ancestry and do some actual research. And then I’ll be dangerously close to becoming a genealogy person, and will soon be blogging exclusively about it. Maybe I’ll save it for my 70s.
As a child in 1980, going into the 4th grade, though, this show was magic, with dark tales of science fiction and horror given illumination by the contrastingly light performances of Baker and his onscreen traveling companion Sarah Jane Smith, played by Elizabeth Sladen. I loved their relationship, which was clearly one of great fondness for each other. I loved the Doctor’s long coats and immediately set about trying to find one of my own (it would be a few years before I managed it). And, of course, I loved his scarf, but it would be another 20 years before I was finally given a replica of the Doctor’s first one, as knitted by my mother-in-law; instead, I had to make do with wearing my dad’s girlfriend’s cream-colored muffler for the first few years instead, which only looked like Baker’s scarf after being filtered through my imagination). I loved the Doctor’s grinning manner, his gadgets and I loved his habit of offering everybody Jelly Babies (which, in lieu of, I had to make do with Gummy Bears). And I especially loved his mode of transportation, the TARDIS.
You’d think after logging my 10,000 Malcolm Gladwell hours doing it I’d be better at drinking coffee. Yesterday I burned the ever loving shit out of my mouth, though.
for millennia. It is always on the horizon, but so far has not come to pass. Mr. Daniels, however, has his own prediction and, unless he’s wrong, the danger of the end of the world is very real indeed.
t. Twenty-five people dead. The worst accident in Alaska’s tourism history since Will Rogers’ plane went down in ‘35. Only one man left alive knows the truth of what really happened — the man everyone agrees caused the tragedy to start with. And if there’s one thing he’s sure of, the thing they hit that day was no whale.
Last Friday, our friend 
Slowly I unlocked and opened the front door. No intruders killed me. The back door, I saw, was closed and locked and the bedroom door was still in place and closed. I opened it to find that indeed she had gone through a window, just without breaking the glass. What she appears to have done was chosen the one window in the room that is covered by a screen, clawed through that screen and used her weight to force open the window on its track. She could have tried any of the other screenless windows, but, no, she had to go through the one with the screen. The window has two latches, but only the top one was closed. It gave to her force without actually breaking, though. Once it was open enough to squeeze out, she was free. Only later did we discover that she’d also peed all over Sadie’s dog bed, which was directly in front of her escape window.
Things are about to get racial.