Creepy Syllabizing...

I just wrote the following on my Fall 2012 syllabus for ENGL 215 ("Creepy Lit"):

"W 11/28: Watch pilot episode of The Walking Dead"

That strikes me as very weird, very cool, and just a bit risky. But I think it will work. Good TV writing is, after all, literary, so studying a solid pilot like this one will help put a nice cap on our semester-long discussion of literary genres/forms. 

Sounds like a good idea to me...

If there ever was a site that needed some "a pre-emptive approach" to ghost problems, it would be an old ayslum, right? What I can't get my mind around, though, is that somehow, public officials have signed off on the ghost-busting services. Sounds like the makings of a cool movie, one that my siblings and I would enjoy, perhaps on Christmas morning.

Nightmare material...

This is almost certainly a big old hoax, but I will still admit that the hair on the back of my neck stood up when I watched the video. Gnomes creep me out...

I knew it!

Finally, some scientific validation that my fear of clowns isn't that strange. Check out this article from Reuters, although I warn you that the picture at the top made my heart freeze in fear. Seriously, for a good five minutes afterwards, I could still see it when I closed my eyes.

Thanks for the nightmare material...

Am I the only one who finds this thing pretty freaking scary?



Meet Zeno, a new robot creation from Hanson Robotics. You can read all about him here. FYI: the creator's son is also named Zeno. Tell me this isn't some B horror movie plot waiting to happen.

And it just gets scarier! According to its creator: "It sees you and recognizes your face. It learns your name and can build a relationship with you." Yeah, a relationship of fear and terror as it chases you through the house, calling you by name.

Stonewall Jackson's arm and other famous peoples' parts

Check out this interesting article. Who knew that Napolean's ummm....manhood...was a collector's item, currently owned by an American urologist? So very strange.*

For some reason, this article also got me thinking about Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher who requested in his will that his body be preserved and displayed in a cabinet. You can read all about that creepiness here. Seriously--that picture of his body sitting there creeps me out big time. It doesn't matter that it's a wax head. In fact, the whole head business only adds to the creepiness.

A very random post, I know.

*I think my blog is losing coolness points (Amber will have to confirm this, since she's the self-appointed judge of such matters) because I chickened out about using the original title I wanted to give this post: "Napolean's Penis." I just couldn't bare to see that in large print or on the sidebar of recent posting.

Chatham Lighthouse

As I mentioned in the previous post, we stayed in Chatham, where Vogel's parents have an awesome house. Chatham has a really cute and fun downtown area, but what I was most interested in, at least initially (being my father's daughter), was the Chatham Lighthouse, pictured below.



Right opposite the lighthouse is a beach where we went swimming one day. The first night we were there, though, we stopped by the lighthouse and I tried to take some pictures. Since I am just learning how to use my camera, and since it was really dark there, I couldn't figure out how to turn off the flash. The result was a couple of really spooky and cool photos. Vogel loved them. It was very foggy and humid that night, so what you are seeing (I think) is the moisture in the air. You are also free to think that they are ghostly entities. Accidents make for cool pictures, huh?





Another day, we stopped by a bit earlier in the evening and took these pretty shots. (And Vogel might kill me for putting her picture up here, but she'll get over it. And she LOVED that Java made it into the previous post, so maybe she won't mind?)





More to come later...

One last note: since my laptop is still broken, I didn't have access to any photo-editing software. The images from the previous post, you might see, are still quite large--too large for a blog and the space blogger allocates. (I am talking about file size here--not so much image size. Also, I couldn't crop anything either). My computer here at school doesn't have anything on it to scale things down, so I downloaded GIMP, a free program that works great. Props to freeware!

Oscar, the death-predictin' feline...

Leave it to the Daily Mail to give us this awesome story--it's interesting, sweet, and just a wee bit creepy. In a nutshell, it's about Oscar, a cat who lives in a nursing home and has successfully "predicted" the deaths of at least twenty-five patients. If this story was written by a cat-hater, like say, my friend Tasha*, that writer might have suggested that Oscar needs to be investigated for his complicity.

Once you get over the creepiness, you might like this story for the same reason I do. It shows how crazy-intuitive animals can be. I've heard about them predicting natural disasters or seizures, and time and time again, I've been amazed at how my own animals seem to know when (based on my mood) I need them to be sweet or playful. (It's not foolproof, though. As I write this, Wesley has just brought me a toy mouse he's soaked in his water bowl--not sure sure what signal I've given off that tells him I need this...)

Of course, you could also take the more cynical approach that one of the experts quoted in the article takes: "It is possible his behavior could be driven by self-centered pleasures like a heated blanket placed on a dying person, Dodman said." Welcome back to slightly-creepy land. (And doesn't that sound like something Bing would totally do?)

*For the record, Tasha was a big fan of Bing, especially when he was a kitten. I'll always remember her holding little baby Bing and exclaiming, "I hate this cat--because I love this cat!"