Monthly Archives: August 2025

August 22, 2025 · 4:29 pm

I think I won the week

I’m not sure why but things went really smoothly this week. It’s been a while since I’ve been this focused when I was writing, and that’s despite having a bad run of insomnia. I’m not complaining — okay, I’ll complain about the insomnia but not the focusing.

Part of it was probably TYG still feeling relaxed from her time off. Plus I didn’t have any contractors or errands to cause a major distraction. Well, until Thursday afternoon. We’ve been having wasps turn up in the house —

— all clearly sick enough they’re easy to catch and toss outside. Still, the possibility of one stinging us or the dogs is alarming so we had the Orkin man come in and put down some protection. That worked for a week, bhtne on Wednesday evening, as I was going up to bed, I felt something strange under my foot. Yep, another wasp, though again too poisoned to fly away or sting me. Good thing: I’ve been stung and I don’t care for it.

So yesterday afternoon we had Orkin do another check; they suspect they’re coming in through the chimney so we’re getting a chimney sweep out to clean it.

That aside, I had nothing to focus on but writing and it showed. I wrote Chapter Five of Jekyll and Hyde, covering films modeled on the Fredric March 1932 version and the 1942 Spencer Tracy. I got a good start on Chapter Six, dealing with Edward Hyde as a fun-loving party animal. These chapters are still in flux — McFarland wants them roughly equal in length so I may have to shift material around to make that happen. However the written analysis will still work whichever chapter things finally go in.

I wrote one article for The Local Reporter on Carrboro’s fire department getting a Class One rating. A second article looked at one of the town’s programs for managing stormwater. I often meander when I’m working on the newspaper stuff but not this week.

At Atomic Junk Shop I blogged about the incredible educational opportunities in old comics ads — just look at the options below —

— 1970’s surge in “relevant” real-world stories and Avengers offering Marvel’s first take on women’s liberation.

John Buscema sure makes the story look cool though.

Oh, I also got several real-world errands and paperwork tasks done. And discovered my short story Bleeding Blue is up at Stonecoast Literary Review. Here’s my Story Behind the Story from June explaining the writing process.

Working until 5 PM has worked out well. So have various other tinkerings with my schedule, which I’ll blog about at some point. I imagine eventually whatever I’m doing right will grow stale and I’ll have to tinker more — that’s usually how it works out — but until then, woot, go me!

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August 22, 2025 · 5:30 am

Flower power

TYG recently stuck a rose out back on the remains of our old compost pile, not really thinking anything would happen. But it did!

Out front, these pink flowers around our mailbox have thrived longer than we expected.

The red ones expired in a recent storm but they had a good long run first.

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August 21, 2025 · 5:15 am

Another round of misogyny links

The idea husbands are entitled to spousal sex even if the wife’s not in the mood is a longstanding one. Right-wing babbler Michael Knowles is all in: “Ladies, you owe your husband sex. You owe it to him. It’s called the marital debt.” No, it isn’t.

Another day, another forced-birth advocate who gets his mistress an abortion.

Pro Publica finds Texas doctors withholding treatment for miscarriages for fear of being charged with abortion. Texas has one novel solution to the conflict over its laws: banning lawsuits against forced-birth bills. They’re quite happy to have people file lawsuits over abortion pills, though.

Louisiana’s after out-of-state doctors, even though their actions are legal in their state. Missouri’s suing Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood is suing the Felon Administration.

“Women are the kind of people that people come out of.” — deep thoughts from Pete Hegseth and his spiritual mentor.

“His view of women in the U.S. military would be beneath serious comment were he not, through the malpractice of the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate, the sitting secretary of defense.”

Elon Musk went hard to deliver Wisconsin’s Supreme Court judicial election this year to a Republican. The Dem won which led to the court striking down Wisconsin’s near-total abortion ban.

Neil Gaiman goes to court to sue the woman who accused him of assault.

“Don’t concern about the environment and advocacy of “clean energy” sound kind of, well, feminine? Real men burn stuff and don’t worry if the process is dirty.” — Paul Krugman on how warped masculinity warps the fight against climate change.

Russell Vought, lying fascist homophobe forced birther.

“A Minnesota teen filed a charge of discrimination against a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant on Tuesday after she alleged that a server followed her into the women’s restroom and demanded she “prove” she was a girl.“

I’m sure some of our right-wingers look at Argentina rolling back women’s protection and think “Yummy!”

“The State Department is poised to burn millions of dollars—quite literally, in a French incinerator—paying $167,000 to set ablaze a $9.7 million stockpile of U.S. taxpayer-funded contraceptives.”

An Uber driver reports a passenger who “joked” he was going to set ICE on his Latina date because she didn’t put out.

The Felon promised support for IVF if he won. Unsurprisingly he lied.

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August 20, 2025 · 5:15 am

Women on fiction covers again

This 1960 Robert Abbett cover shows what codes as “beachwear” back then.

I’ve no idea what’s going on on this A. Leslie Ross cover, but I like it.

Art is uncredited. The Seven Sister are seven sex workers caught up in an investigation.

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August 19, 2025 · 12:06 pm

New Mamdani-related links

Mamdani offering free mass-transit is supposedly socialist — but Andrew Cuomo’s quite happy to propose something similar. I don’t believe for a minute he’ll follow through if elected, though.

Katie Pavlich, who claimed in 2021 that we’d achieved herd immunity over covid, now lies that Mamdani is “an open communist who believes in blowing up buses and cafes as a sign of resistance called intifada”

I’m sure it’s a total coincidence that with Mamdani as front-runner, Homeland Security is suddenly cutting $64 million in counter-terrorism funding for the Big Apple

I’m not surprised right-wingers hate Mamdani. I’m PO’d yet another “sensible” Democrat (Hakeem Jeffries) sides with Mamdani’s critics. As pointed out at the links, the criticism (that Mamdani lives in a rent-controlled apartment rather than pay market rate) isn’t even accurate. And Jeffries has his own sweetheart housing deal.

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August 19, 2025 · 5:04 am

Jekyll and Hyde: One book, one TV show, one movie

I’m not sure how I stumbled across JEKYLL AND HYDE ADAPTED: Dramatizations of Cultural Anxiety by Brian A. Rose but my initial thought was AAAAAAH! My searches before I signed the McFarland contract for Jekyll and Hyde led me to conclude nobody had done a survey of Jekyll and Hyde films before me; my editorial contact concluded the same.

Fortunately Rose and I are not playing in the same ballpark. Rather than discussing all the movies, his interest is how the different adaptations express different fears in different times. Thus, Jekyll acquiring a fiancee in the Victorian stage adaptations positions not just Hyde but Jekyll’s scientific research as a threat to the domestic values Victorians prized. The 1932 Fredric March version, showing Hyde as a neanderthal, distances evil — it’s not us, it’s our awful ancestral instincts — whereas the films showing Hyde as more or less human acknowledge evil as part of us.

I find most of Rose’s conclusions unconvincing — I don’t buy Paul Massie looking human in Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll is meant as a statement about the nature of evil, for instance. And he’s completely wrong to argue George Carew in the 1920 Barrymore version is a hypocrite — Carew is not at all hiding that he’s a libertine, he’s quite proud of it.

Another problem is that the book is written in heavy academese (“This is a postmodern reinscription of the traditionalist values and perspectives that ordered earlier melodramatic versions, but one that eschews earlier eschatological answers.”) which makes it hard for me to focus on Rose’s points. And some of them are good, such as noting Spencer Tracy’s version probably influenced filmmakers more than March’s superior production (small wonder — to avoid competition with the Tracy, MGM hid the March take away for 30 years). March is the last version for decades to show Jekyll doing charity medical work and up until the 1990 Michael Caine film, the Jekylls looked human rather than March’s ape-man (Tracy is also the first Jekyll to have his test animals acting strange, something repeated in several later films). This book wasn’t worth the $90 I paid for a used copy but it does have its uses.

As I mentioned last week, Tubi’s search function introduced me to a series I’d never heard of before, a 1969 Italian four-episode show called simply Jekyll. It’s another plodding attempt to adapt Stevenson faithfully and another adaptation where I see the seed of what might have been an interesting idea.

Lanyon here is a brilliant surgeon and Jekyll’s mentor before Jekyll went into research. Lanyon grumbles that Jekyll’s been seduced by the grant money available for cool research proposals and the media attention — good surgery doesn’t get your name on TV but if you announce a research breakthrough it might, even if it proves smoke-and-mirrors later. Exploring that aspect of science would have been interesting but nope, they do nothing with it.

JEKYLL: Jekyll gives Utterson his revolver just in case Hyde gets grumpy! In flashback, Hyde pressures a woman to drown her dog but she drowns herself instead! In the aftermath of this tragedy Jekyll’s friends lament his decision to tamper with god’s domain! I wondered how they’d squeeze one more episode out of it and they did it by extending Jekyll’s backstory to excruciatingly slow length. “Man created by man is the holy grail of molecular biology.”

Rewatching SCOOBY-DOO: Mask of the Blue Falcon (2013) right after seeing early episodes of the series was a little jarring: I was conscious some of the voice actors were different from the originals, which didn’t hit me when I first saw the film. That said, this is a fun adventure as the attempt to reboot the Blue Falcon TV show (in this version a live-action show) as a grim-and-gritty vigilante not only pushes the original star to the breaking point, it brings down the wrath of the hero’s arch-nemesis, Mr. Hyde. Whom I’ll note is dressed in the usual Fredric March-style Victorian outfits and top hat. This is the largest role Hyde’s gotten in any Scooby story, though it’ll still end up in the appendix I suspect.“Mr. Hyde is the monster that taught us to be afraid of monsters.”

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August 18, 2025 · 5:15 am

OMG, I didn’t know white men were unemployable in the movie industry because of DEI!

According to freelance reporter Sharon Waxman in the NYT (not a direct link), Hollywood is once again hot, horny and white! Woke is dead! After years of chasing diversity, Hollywood is kicking it old school! If Joe Eszterhas of Flashdance and Showgirls is working again we’ve ended the nightmare era in which (Waxman says) “I’ve heard quiet frustration from a reasonably accomplished white male screenwriter who felt cast out by the top talent agencies. In the process of “recentering” Hollywood, some people suddenly felt shunted to the side.”

Well, who can argue with people feeling shunted to the side! Because as Ta-Nehisi Coates says, white men’s feelings must be taken seriously. Never mind that alongside Sinners, we have plenty of films this year alone that include lots of white people — Superman. The Phoenician Scheme. The Fantastic Four, though I haven’t seen it yet. From what I’ve read of 21st century Hollywood, POC and women have not squeezed all the white men out of their writing gigs either — though I have read (don’t have the link handy) that some agents have claimed otherwise (e.g., “I’ve been trying to get you that gig but since #metoo they don’t want to hire men.”). As for actors not being hot …. um no. Movies still have plenty of sexy people in them.

So maybe Waxman’s simply pitching an angle to land an NYT op-ed? Writing how white men are oppressed or feminism is/should be dead, seems to be an easy sell, as witness this NYT piece, and this one. And putting it terms of feelings and vibes is an easy way to avoid dealing with actual facts, like saying “some see racism” in the Felon’s anti-diversity policies. Or fascist toady Charlie Kirk declaring he feels unsafe if he sees an airplane pilot is black — see, he’s not necessarily racist, it’s just a feeling. In the same way, modest gains by women and POC make some white people feel “their” country or “their” industry is being taken away, regardless of the facts.

Now, a few more (somewhat random) links.

“They’re all cults centered around the most toxic idiots on the internet. They’re all troll armies. They all have an undisguised loathing for women and POC. And most importantly they’re all movements and moments that give people permission to be their absolute worst selves.” — from an LGM post about how certain podcasts and websites “liberate” people but not in a good way.

“Obama is the cool, chill party where everyone has a good time and wants to do it again. MAGA is like a party I was at where a bunch of skinheads showed up. For a bit it was kinda exciting with loud dancing and ska music. But by the end of the night, the cops had come and taken away a dog that got drunk, a couple of people had gotten hit and went to the ER, there were a bunch of holes in the wall, and most people had begun to clear out a couple of hours in.

I get that there’s a fraction of people that enjoy this crap, but it takes a certain suspension of disbelief to tell yourself the wild abandon of the first hour or two is going to still seem like a good time by the end of the night.” — from a comment on a Lawyers, Guns and Money post

Chaya Raychik’s Libs of TikTok account has no qualms tweeting out racist bullshit about black mental inferiority.

Charlie Kirk suggests YouTube is just as good as college.

“One of the most telling aspects of this MAGA obsession is the focus on the punishment of the “elites” who are behind it. At a basic level, the victims never really take center stage. And that is the heart of it. In the MAGA world, pedophilia isn’t a crime or abuse that needs to be stopped. It is more a legitimating tool which provides a license for cleansing acts of retributive violence and revenge.” This is a point that Fred Clark at slacktivist has made repeatedly, and just recently he made it again.

“You’re Cuban. Your greatest priority is to destroy our national sovereignty and identity.” — Matt Walsh ranting about a Latina Republican official who pissed him off. And was born in the USA.

William Buckley is often held up as a responsible conservative. Politically he’s not that far from MAGA.

“They actually don’t have the wisdom from having burned your fingers a number of times.” — from an article looking at one young computer whiz who became a DOGE slash-and-burner.

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August 17, 2025 · 5:23 am

Perversion of Justice, a book title that could not be more apt

PERVERSION OF JUSTICE: The Jeffrey Epstein Story by Julie K. Brown has the same kind of horror-show effect as Empire of Pain — a chilling reminder of how evil people can be and how easy it is for evil people with money to get away from it. There’s a scene early in the book where Brown references one of the victims, identified by police as “Jane Doe #103.” That number drives home what a vile thing Epstein was.

Like Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill, this is partly the story of Brown’s own investigation. As a reporter for the long-struggling Miami Herald — she quips at one point that when she was working on the story, she was getting paid almost as much as when she started at the paper — she’d taken a break from her regular beat (prisons) to write about sex trafficking in South Florida. The name Epstein came up a lot, and then Alex Acosta, the federal prosecutor who helped Epstein get his sweetheart deal, was nominated as a cabinet secretary. Suddenly Epstein’s bust and plea bargain were a hot topic.

Brown traces Epstein’s life from private-school teacher, where he made the connections that launched him into an investment-adviser career. Even back then, he committed some crimes (selling fake bonds, for instance) and skated where his associates did time. Eventually he wound up very, very rich. And connected politically. And free to let his inner monster out.

The way the forces of law and order bent to accommodate him is every bit as awful. There were decent cops working to nail him and some decent prosecutors but the odds were against them. People in the state prosecutor’s office did their best to sabotage the Epstein case; frontline prosecutors folded eventually; the Department of Justice likewise did its best to sink the case (though the DOJ later concluded Alex Acosta, point man on the case, did nothing wrong). The Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office made the sweetheart plea bargain deal even sweeter; there’s one point where Brown describes deputies waiting outside Epstein’s office while he Skypes an associate and masturbates. In the Virgin Islands, Epstein also operated with impunity. And he doesn’t even have Elon Musk class wealth, leaving an estate of $630 million.

After Epstein’s death I thought the odds were reasonable it was suicide: what did he have to live for? It wasn’t like he could skate the way he did in Florida … was it? Turns out his lawyers had an angle, that the plea bargain’s immunity provisions blocked New York state from charging him. And while pedophiles are not popular in prison, Epstein was pouring money into the commissary accounts of other cons, buying loyalty. It was possible he’d have beaten the rap again … so yeah, murder.

The book isn’t perfect. Brown writing about her investigation is one thing; she gets way into her personal life as a single mom with two kids and as I often say, the writer’s personal life ain’t what I’m reading for. But that’s a minor flaw in a book that’s otherwise a chilling look at how the rich can cheat justice and law.

As Laurie Penny puts it, talking about Elon Musk: “No longer will any of us who wish to be leaders of men be obliged to grow up and learn things. No longer will we be subjected to woke ideas like manners or bedtime or please try for a just a moment to understand that other people matter. If you’re rich enough, you probably don’t even have to potty-train anymore. That’s what power means now. It means you can regress as loudly and violently as you like, and the rest of us have to put up with it.” (Which puts me in mind of my post about Jekyll, Hyde and the Purge franchise).

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August 16, 2025 · 5:02 am

Welcome to the Hotel Transylvania …

The HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA trilogy will definitely get a mention in my Jekyll and Hyde appendix even though Hyde’s presence is small even for a monster mash. I’m not sure I’d have registered him at all because the glimpses are brief and he’s just a monstrous figure in a top hat — plus director Genndy Tartakovsky throws in so much visual detail (it’s reminiscent of his work on Samurai Jack) it’s easy for one figure to get lost in the shuffle. I’m still happy my work on the book led to me watching these because dang, they’re fun.

The premise of HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA (2012) is that Dracula (Adam Sandler) lost his great love to a torch-wielding mob back in the 1800s. Retreating from the human world he created the eponymous resort, somewhere monsters can stay without having to hide. In the present day, his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) has turned 18 meaning she’s finally free to leave the hotel and explore the human world. Dracula’s terrified of what might happen to her and desperate to talk her out of it; complicating things, a hiker named Jonathan (Andy Samberg) wanders into the hotel. Dracula has to pass him off as another monster until he can push the guy out the door. Worse, Mavis has “zinged” on him, a form of love at first sight — and Drac can’t stand the thought of his little girl with one of Them.

The film is funny, visually delightful and has a great voice cast, including Kevin James, Fran Drescher, Steve Buscemi, Molly Shannon and David Spade. Hyde appears briefly in a couple of group shots and like I said, I wouldn’t have noticed him if I hadn’t researched where to watch. “Can’t you see we’re in the middle of something very normal here?”

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 (2015) has Mavis and Johnny marrying, then Mavis giving birth to a kid to the delight of his “Vampa” Dracula. Except — is it possible the kid is just an ordinary human? And what will Drac’s father in law (Mel Brooks) say about that? While Dracula starts testing the kid to prove he’s a monster, Mavis and Johnny visit the human world where Mavis discovers the joy of convenience stores and Slurpees (“We have to try all the 48 flavors!”). If anything, funnier than the first one. “We don’t need to kill any more — we’ve got Pop Tarts!”

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 3 (2018) has Mavis and Johnny dragging the gang out of the hotel and onto a cruise ship. Mavis figures after her dad’s been running the hotel for a century, he could use a break so why not a lovely vacation cruise to Atlantis? Too bad the captain (Kathryn Hahn) is a descendant of the Van Helsings, out to recover an ancient mystical artifact that will help her cyborg grandfather take his revenge on Dracula. Will Dracula zinging on Captain Erika be enough to avert the apocalypse? Hyde has a slightly larger scene this time, getting mouth to mouth from a gremlin, though I’m still not sure I’d have spotted him watching cold. In any case, good fun. “Now that we have the instrument of destruction, our family legacy will be fulfilled — but first we’ll lure them in with a dance party!”

THE BAD GUYS (2022) are anthropomorphic animal outlaws whose attempt to cap their career (“No thief has ever succeeded in snatching the Golden Dolphin.”) leads to capture, than an attempt at reform under the guidance of the guinea pig Richard Ayouade, the Kindest, Most Wonderful Humanitarian the World Has Ever Faced. Why, just look at how he selflessly housed a mysterious glowing meteorite so he can study its energy, which of course he will only use for humanitarian purposes … Unsurprisingly the Bad Guys end up framed for a crime they (for once) did not commit, while the guinea pig taps the meteor’s power to pull off a billion-dollar heister. Funny and extremely meta (“Will this be the feel-good redemption story all of us need?”), with Sam Rockwell as Wolf and Awkwafina as the hacker Ms. Tarantula. “Out of all the people in the world, I hate you guys the least.”

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August 15, 2025 · 4:18 pm

A week of dread, a week of doom — wait, some of it was pretty good

For one thing, TYG has this week off. She’s so relaxed when she doesn’t have to work, doesn’t have to worry about them calling her in for an emergency, doesn’t have to set her schedule to fit anyone else … While she always has lots of projects for her vacations, she doesn’t usually get many of them done but she accomplished much stuff this week.

And Tuesday she took the pets all day so I could have a day off of my own. I almost never manage a full day without pets demanding attention let alone timing it so I’m not working. We tried it last summer during her vacation but it didn’t work so well: there was a brief, routine dog checkup that morning, it appeared something was horribly wrong with Plushie’s eyes but it turned out it was a misreading by the doctor. Which was wonderful to hear but by the time we figured that out, the day was shot.

So Tuesday I took a long walk in the morning — it was the end of a brief cool spell here — then went and sat in the local cafe, Bean Trader’s, drank multiple cups of tea while doing some planning in my notebook, and reading without any dogs to distract me. Then I ran a couple of errands, hit the comic-book store — I very rarely get around to that — and as it’s current location was close to a Petco and a Target, went to them too. Didn’t buy anything at Ultimate Comics — the things I liked were too pricey for me just now (and I have a half-dozen TPBs I haven’t finished yet) — but I replaced our broken-down kitchen Lazy Susan with a new one and picked up a box of cat litter.

Then I came home and did various other things by myself the rest of the day. Way relaxing.

The rest of the week? Kind of chaotic. Monday Plushie had his recheck exam at the physical rehab place. His weight is down and his condition has improved overall so the exercise we’re doing clearly work, yay! But that did add an extra hour to our usual visit.

Wednesday we had a guy in to clean our dryer vent after TYG noticed the laundry closet steaming up when we used it. I thought I’d been tracking that as I do most of our recurring maintenance gigs but it looks like it’s been a couple of years. Good thing — turns out the hose had completely disconnected from the drier.

Plus I went to my dermatologist for an annual checkup that morning. Turns out I had a couple of potentially precancerous skin things so she froze them off. Stinging pain, but way better than the alternative.

Then Thursday we had the housecleaners in. As I’ve mentioned before, now that we have to keep Snowdrop and Wisp from running out, I wind up sitting in the upstairs bedroom with them (after we’ve chased them up there) for a couple of hours, plus the dogs.

The pets make it hard to write, and my brain’s sluggish when things wrap up so I’ve learned to block off several hours and assume I’m not getting any work done. This time it was even worse. We found a couple of wasps or hornets in the house this week —

— so we had the Orkin man give an inspection. It looks like they built a nest in our chimney; he took care of that and put some insecticide on the flue where it should keep them from coming in. Plus we had a general handyman we’ve used before come in because TYG wanted him to hang some pictures (trust me, it’s much easier to pay someone) and do a couple of other odds and ends. So I wound up in the bedroom longer and got my schedule even further thrown off. On the plus side, getting all that stuff out the way at once means we don’t have to deal with multiple disruptions.

Plus I wound up spending a lot of time working on Local Reporter articles — some of the stuff I’d anticipated didn’t come in so I had to scrounge around for alternatives. That can eat up time. I was pleased with my work though: one article on replacing a public works building flooded by Chantal, one on an expansion of the city cemetery.

All of that left me with relatively little time to do much else. I did get some work done watching stuff for Jekyll and Hyde but overall my work was a nothingburger. Though I did get some stuff posted at the Atomic Junk Shop (blogging happens outside regular work time) — one on a historical-fiction inaccuracy that annoys me, one on a couple of weird stories from 1970.

I must admit I do love that Gene Colan panel though.

Next week should be smoother. I have most of my interviewing and research done for my newspaper articles, there are no dog appointments as yet, and no appointments of my own. Fingers crossed.

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