Linky Friday: Devil May Care
“Come,’ he said, ‘come, we must see and act. Devils or no devils, or all the devils at once, it matters not; we fight him all the same.” – Bram Stoker, Dracula
Linky Friday: Devil May Care
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQWP6cRsWoM&w=560&h=315]
Linky Friday: Devil May Care
[Dv1] The Mahoning Valley has seen this movie before, and heard about savior trade deals only to be disappointed. Instead of the Black Monday of Youngstown Sheet and Tube 40 years ago, this time the devil is in the details on the new USMC trade agreement and the future of the Lordstown GM plant.
[Dv2] Not only is it a bad PR look, but someone should let them know the devil is already inside the house.
[Dv3] There’s that phrase again; “After Paris, the devil is in the details,” according to Brookings Institute on the Paris Agreement.
[Dv4] We actually are having a national debate over the meaning of “Devil’s Triangle,” and since it’s 2018 that means a fight over the Wikipedia page defining the term.
[Dv5] Flames shoot from a hole in the ground as high as 12 feet in the air for 40 minutes, and weeks later nobody seems to know why. It is Arkansas, so anything is possible.
[Dv6] “Gothic self-pity and contempt, and sympathy for the devil: Sarah Perry introduces Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiQx5O7EZJQ&w=560&h=315]
[Dv7] “‘Dancing with the devil’: Retired EMT survives life-threatening infection”
[Dv8] There’s that phrase, again: “Tax breaks for the rich and a ‘bargain with the devil’: Colorado candidates for governor spar over education”
[Dv9] Nice lede you have there: “Houston could have become a real-life Westworld, but instead the city council has unanimously voted to pass an ordinance that effectively blocks a proposed “sex robot brothel” from opening.”
[Dv10] So after nearly 40 years of being a cult classic, the Evil Dead films and lore have taken the next logical step…and become a stage musical.
[Dv11] “I’ve read Dracula a million times; it always started with Jonathan Harker on the train. But that’s page 102 of the manuscript; the first 100 pages were stripped out,” adds Barker. “His publisher pushed it back, ‘We can’t do this [say it’s a true story];’ Jack the Ripper was running around, people were scared to death at the idea of a vampire.”
[Dv12] So how exactly did the “evil nuns terrorize” thing get started, anyway? NPR is on the case.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feIaNfFONWo&w=560&h=315]
[Dv13] As a Christian, I don’t see a problem with this: “The Satanic Temple Indiana Chapter is “adopting” part of a rural Zionsville highway and the Indiana Department of Transportation this week installed roadside signs displaying the group’s name.”
[Dv14] Asking the hard questions and debating the great issues of our time: The Takeout on “Is candy corn delicious or Satan’s earwax?”
[Dv15] Contrarian opinion: “Mullane: Lighten up, snowflake, the country ain’t going to hell”
[Dv16] The Smithsonian takes a look at a book that covers various concepts of hell.
[Dv17] I have been, and continue to be, a Tesla skeptic, and their current excuse of being in “logistics hell” is not helping change my mind. They seem to be really good at big ideas and innovating tech, but if you aren’t good at the important things (such as turning a profit and getting your product to consumers) you are not going to be successful, despite media hype.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6EWsbaKWI4&w=560&h=315]
[Dv18] The downside to teenage campaign volunteers who care too much: “Abigail Spanberger’s campaign for Congress fired four teenaged campaign volunteers after they apparently left a rude note on the front door of her Republican opponent, Rep. Dave Brat.” “Rot in hell, Dave,” was the message left on the front door of Rep. Brat’s home.
[Dv19] As the father of four daughters, my short answer is, “Ask them, I’m not.” How in the Hell Are People Paying for Weddings? Vol. 2
[Dv20] “Everyone Wants to Go to the Moon Again—Logic Be Damned”
[Dv21] “Damned at birth:” “Anne Hamilton-Byrne is 97 years old and reportedly shrunk and frail. But her influence lives on in the lives of the children who were taken at birth, locked away, drugged with LSD, beaten, brainwashed and starved. The children were given new names, dressed in matching clothing like a bizarre version of the Von Trapp family, many with their hair bleached to make them look like siblings.”
[Dv22] Before “Children of the Damned,” there was the first film “Village of the Damned.”
[Dv23] “The Americans are here,” a German officer wrote, according to historian Edward G. Lengel. “We can kill them but we can’t stop them.” The hell that was America’s bloodiest battle, 100 years ago.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLGfato5o6k&w=560&h=315]
Dv19: Same thing I always respond when the topic comes up. Weddings are cheap. In their barest form, they only need three people: the people getting married and the officiant. Your state may require one or more witnesses. But that is it. Everything else is optional. So too is the party afterwards, which is what people really are talking about when they talk about the cost of a wedding.
So how do people pay for it? The smart ones by looking at what they have available to splurge and planning the proceedings accordingly. The dumb ones by going into debt. Easy peasy.Report
Dv5: Typically Arkansas, lighting their farts on fire and then acting all ignorant about it.Report
true Arkansas story: I join the military to get out of WV and they send me to Arkansas. I’m sitting with my tech school class as they hand out first duty assignments for after graduation, 9 get Ramstein, Germany 2 to Yokota, Japan, 1 to Travis, California and I get Little Rock. Figures.Report
Send Andrew to Little Rock, he’s from WV, he’ll fit right in.
If only military assignments followed such logic, rather than just being the toss up between the Fairy Godmother Department and the Practical Joke Department.Report
Should have been there when my troops found out their sergeant who doesnt drink drink or gamble got orders to Vegas. They were crestfallen.Report
The Practical Joke Department does occasionally knock one out of the park.Report
I figure Dv5 is some dude who tried to get the “critter” to come out of its hole, but is also shockingly smart enough to keep his mouth shut after doing it.
Though, IDK, some kind of weird anaerobic decomposition process that led to methane buildup would be more interesting….Report
More likely something to do with frakking.Report
[Dv11] I assume the first hundred pages of Dracula that were removed by the publisher were part of a framing device; it was a convention of gothic literature to have stories-within-stories, which was believed to make the narrative more authentic. In the published book, there is a very short prologue describing how someone (the author?) had assembled the following materials from a variety of contemporaneous records, and have only been edited to remove irrelevancies. Each chapter is from a journal, diary or letter.
I’ll speculate that the reason for removing the first hundred pages had more to do with it being boring and defeating the purpose of the framing device because now we are wondering whether the person that gathered these records is a reliable narrator.Report
[DV12] As a two-fer from taking a course in Gothic literature in college, anti-Catholicism was also a convention of the early English gothic. See the Monk.Report
Check out The Little Professor at http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/
She’s probably the world expert in 19th century anti-Catholic literature. Scan down for some of the plot synopses. She really reads this stuff so we don’t have to.Report
This also happened to Golding Lord of the Flies. By luck, a junior reader at the publishing house picked it up and flipped to around the 100th page. From there it was gold, but massively boring up to that point.Report
and was the conceit used in the book version of the Princess Bride.Report
Such is the problem with life. It doesn’t get interesting until… what? Marriage? That’s somewhere between 24 and 38! And that kludgy rule doesn’t cover some people at all!Report
Which starts with a really elaborate framing story, and every 10 years or so an edition comes out that elaborates it further. My favorite bit so far is Steven King considering this version of the story cultural appropriation because Goldman, unlike King, isn’t ethnically Florinian.Report
“Dracula” is the Victorian Era version of a “found footage” story, as you say. All gathered from first person diaries, etc. It’s also a “super advanced tech” story, describing the cutting edge use of typewriters and recorders. Both of those things seem to get lost because time moved on and the tech seems quaint now, but I imagine at the time those advances added an strong element of cool.
Note 1: It’s rather amazing how little The Count actually appears in the book, and how the climax is basically a chase scene as opposed to thrills in a dark castle or cemetery.
Note 2: Carfax Abbey is modeled on St. Mary’s Cathedral in Whitby, England. But directly in the shadow of St. Mary’s is the little sea coast town of Sand’s End — honest-to-god one of the creepiest places I’ve ever been. Looking up at the shadowy cathedral in the distance and dealing with the people in that town almost made me a believer in the Count’s spell. Brrrrr.
Note 3: Off-topic: “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” was a mystery, not a thriller, with a Big Twist at the end. None of us ever got to have that shocking “don’t reveal the truth” effect because it got so popular so fast. Bet a lot of people had a hell of a great moment when the truth of the mystery was revealed.Report
DV16: “1000-1300. For centuries, the idea of hell was confined to cloisters.” Huh?Report
My favorite is Wolfgang Pauli’s: “God made the bulk.; the surface was invented by the devil.”Report
Dv11 – This is something I’ve always found peculiar about children’s television as well. The show hardly ever starts just with the beginning of the action that I personally found interesting. There’s always some ridiculous setup first. Guys in costumes or clowns or Mr. Rogers putting on his sweater. Then after all that happened, FINALLY the part of the show I wanted to see would come on. They’d roll the cartoons or the puppet show and it felt like it took forever to get there. I remember thinking with crystal clarity “Can’t you put your shoes on earlier, Mr. Rogers, and just get to the puppets already?”
So according to the logic of Dv11 maybe that gimmick is meant to ensure children don’t get too mixed up about what is real and what isn’t? The setups before the cartoons roll is some sort of dividing line between reality and fantasy, maybe?Report
That is an interesting angle to take. I suppose someone somewhere probably made the argument that steady routine is a good thing for children, and may well be. In general I’m of the opinion that you should get airborne with as little runway as possible.Report
I’ve seen this as advice for beginning writers: Once you’ve finished a story, throw away the first 10 pages.Report