Cleolinda everywhere

I don't want to sound like Gawker's Crazy Us Weekly Guy (you know, the one who was trying to prove that he was destined to run the magazine and marry Jessica Alba, using Crazy Math), but I do kind of believe in signs. Like, just as little bits of encouragement saying, "You're on the right track." Which is probably the same way Crazy Guy looks at it, but... we won't dwell on that idea. I was researching ghost stories and general weirdness today, to get an idea of the kind of local legends I could put together for a fictional place, and I remembered that we had a copy of More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark around here somewhere. Now, I had never actually read this book; the one I read in middle school was the original Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, with the terrifying head on the cover. Seriously, the stories themselves aren't even that special; it's the frickin' illustrations that have terrified kids for like twenty-five years now. (Man, I want the boxed set so bad.) My point is, I had never actually read this book before; it was my sister's, and I remembered seeing it in a box when we moved. So I go fish it out now, and what's the first thing I see when I open it? For Lauren on the dedication page. Lauren is my real name. That's what a frickin' "sign" looks like, Crazy Guy. Not "the first letter of the name of the character she played is the third letter of my favorite vegetable."

(Friday's topic of research: herbal abortifacients. Yesterday's topic of research: gout.)

 "Snakes" Down the Drain? You know, I never thought it was going to break records. Number one, it's about snakes, which automatically removes a lot of people from the Potential Viewer list. I mean, there's a reason I've had so much trouble finding people to go with.

Did I go? Well... I woke up on Saturday with a sore throat and have been wrestling with a summer cold ever since. My stepfather was off at a gig last night and my mother asked if I wanted to go see a movie, and I was like, "Yeah, not so much with the leaving of the house right now (ACHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!)." "You don't want to go see a movie?" she repeated. "That's it, I'm calling Dr. A. You need an antibiotic or something." So she went and got dinner and some DVDs, and we watched V for Vendetta, and I sneezed a lot. Good times. (I am very disappointed in the extras so far. It's like, Generic HBO Featurette; Designing the Blandly Vague Sets of the Future; More Stuff About Guy Fawkes Even Though You'd Have Already Hit Wikipedia If You Cared; They're Not Comics, They're "Graphic Novels"; and We're Calling It a "Cat Power Montage" Because MTV Wouldn't Run It as a Video. WHERE ARE MY COMMENTARIES AND OUTTAKES? WHERE ARE MY STUNTS??! Shit, there's more in-depth stuff than this on the website. It wouldn't be so disappointing if they hadn't done such a good job with the extras for the first Matrix. I know this ain't no Matrix, but come on, a commentary takes two hours of your life. Pony up.)

(Meanwhile, "Pirates" nears $1 billion at box office.)

From bubosquared: Get free stuff, stuff Focus on the Family!

Daniel Craig to play Lord Asriel. Dammit, I was really hoping they'd carry Timothy Dalton over from the stage production. You know, since I'll never get to see that.

blinkliz: "Would you mind linkspamming this, if it strikes you? Teacher fired for being FEMALE." Now, I read the link, and the thing is, she was fired from teaching Sunday school after a weird power shift in the community. Which is at least a train of logic I can see--I mean, it's Crazy Logic, but I can see how someone would be like, THE WEAKER SEX SHALL NOT TEACH THE SCRIPTURE! before I could see them being like, "Let's fire all the female schoolteachers! ...Wait."

Stuff I found while browsing the "Weird NJ" section on Wikipedia (and yes, eventually the Weird NJ site itself:) Worst. Amusement park. Ever. Just to give you an idea: "The park at first disputed that the electric current caused his death, saying there were no burns on his body, but the coroner responded that burns generally do not occur in a water-based electrocution." A completely different death-inducing, water-based attraction there: the Wave Grave Pool. I kind of love it.

(Speaking of Weird NJ and its sister site Weird US, if you have any freaky-ass stories to tell, I highly suggest that you submit them. Because I want more stuff to read. Also, it seems that half the states of the Union have their own Midgetville, murderous clan of Melon Heads, Gravity Road, abandoned asylum taken over by satanists, Road Where Terrifying Things Happen, and colorfully named psycho-beastie. The latter genre is one of my favorites--the stories range from the mostly-animal Big Foot/Jersey Devil end of things to the mostly-human Bunnyman of Northern Virginia end. Favorite story in that vein so far: The bloody box of La Llorona. Most of these things, you stop and realize that if they were true--particularly that last one, where the police got involved--you'd have something about them in the news. They're still great stories, though. I'm more in the market for older stories, but you know how the internet is. You start out reading about haunted roads and you end up on a page about a French washerwoman with a horn growing out of her forehead.)

(You think I'm making that up, don't you? Don't click this link. I'm telling you.)

Sebastian, the blinged-out cat.

From particle_person: For those of you buying stars, did you realize that you're neither buying nor naming a star in any actual sense of the words? It's pretty much like buying a deed to real estate on the moon. Which, by the way, if you're interested I can sell to you at the low, low price of ten dollars an acre. Hurry, supplies are going fast!