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I would like to, once again, beg the world of fiction writers and those who make horror movies. The time has come to stop. There are not more stories to be told, OK? Bram Stoker knew it when he wrote “Dracula” and it really should have stopped then. There needs to be a hold put on anymore television shows, movies or books about zombies and vampires. Please, I am begging you, make it stop.
I don’t know when it all started. When I was in high school every girl seemed to be reading the Ann Rice books and the whole “Vampire Chronicles” thing. They got all dreamy and gooey-eyed about Lestat and imagined him swooping in and turning them into vampires in that ultra-sexy way that Rice wrote about. At some point, however, the popularity faded away and that was a good thing.
Now the undead are more popular than ever. The problem is that the stories have just gotten weaker and weaker as time has gone on. Look, I am a huge fan of the TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel” and think they are two of the best-written television series ever. However, once those series ended, I was happy to let go of my desire to see anything about vampires.
Vampires are really lame when you look at it. Sure they live forever, but they have to drink people’s blood to do it. Yuck. Plus, when they do that it sometimes turns the person they bite into a vampire and then you have that to deal with. They cannot even go out during the day. How scary is it to have a monster that can’t get his or her hand on sunscreen or can be put off by really clean windows? They are strong and they live forever, but most of them are the mopiest people you ever want to be around.
Zombies are even more ridiculous. Yes, I loved “Night of the Living Dead” and the other George A. Romero movies. I also enjoyed the remake of “Dawn of the Dead” and really liked “Shaun of the Dead.” However, those movies are enough. Zombies just wander aimlessly and bite people and then that turns them into zombies and, well, you have that whole thing all over again. There have been enough zombie movies and enough zombie comedies and there just aren’t any more stories to tell. We have had people trapped in houses, trapped in malls and trapped in cities with big fences around them.
As for vampires we have had older men who preyed upon women. We have had younger men who were all sexed-up and preyed upon both men and women. Now we have vampires who are no more than teenagers preying on other teenagers. They all look pale and miserable and gray and it is just relentless and stupid. Who cares? We have at least two television shows about vampires and the only one that seems remotely interesting has Anna Paquin naked in it a lot which at least is not all bad.
We have had vampires who were little kids. We have had vampires who appeared to be one sex but were really another. Whitley Strieber, in his novel “The Hunger” had vampires that didn’t even have fangs but used like ankh-shaped knives to make their kills. We have deconstructed and reconstructed the vampire myth again and again and now, there are no more stories to tell.
So stop. Create some new monsters. Anything. Please!
It amazes me sometimes when you look at the world and, more importantly (at least for this blog), nature itself. People like me who create stories and who think they specialize in creating stories of horror and suspense think we are pretty good and pretty creative. We like to think that we can create things so horrific that people will be glad that they only exist between the covers of a book we happen to have written. Then, of course, you read about what happen in the world of the wild animals and insects and find out that nature has things that are so much worse than anything we could come up.
My thoughts on this were brought to the forefront of my brain after watching the classic 1970s horror movie “Kingdom of the Spiders.” I am sure you have seen this movie. It stars, of all people, William Shatner. Yes, Shatner in one of his few non-Star Trek roles as a farmer and veterinarian in a small town. The problem is that the town is soon invaded by these horrific tarantulas. Of course, in true movie fashion, these are not just normal tarantulas. No, humans have been spraying so many chemicals that we have killed off much of the natural prey of tarantulas and they have moved north and now group together to attack things like cows and horses and, of course, humans like William Shatner.
It’s a classic. The spider’s venom, it turns out, is 5 times more poisonous than an average tarantula. There are scenes of the entire town running around with tarantulas all over them. This is the kind of movie you could not make today the way it was made then because of how the live tarantulas are treated throughout. They are very obviously stomped on and there are scenes were cars are running over the things, squishing them left and right. You can’t do that anymore.
Anyway, it got me thinking about tarantulas. That’s what those kinds of movies do to people like me. It turns out most of them are very harmless and they would much rather a human just leave them alone than attack them. Their venom is harmless they are just very big and hairy and ugly. However, when reading about them I read about their natural predators and wondered, who the heck is hunting these big giant hairy monsters. This is where the horror of Mother Nature stepped in.
It turns out a tarantula’s primary enemy is something called the spider wasp. Yes, a wasp. These vicious little animals attack a spider and inject venom that paralyzes the eight-legged monster. It then carries the spider back to the place where it intends to build a nest. It then builds the nest around the paralyzed, but still alive, spider. It then deposits an egg on the abdomen of the spider and seals up the nest and goes off to find more spiders. Still paralyzed, but very alive, the egg eventually hatches and what do the little baby wasps do? Well, after hatching, they sure are a bit hungry and they immediately eat most of the spider. They leave just enough of him there so that when they mature a bit more they have more to eat before flying off to find their own spiders to torture.
So, see, the next time you think you’ve heard just the absolute worst thing a human can do, spend a little time studying Mother Nature. She’s probably got you beat by a country mile, or more.
I love social media. I mean, here I am blogging away and blogging is part of social media. I am also on Facebook and Twitter and I even have a MySpace account, but I never check that one anymore. I love Facebook. I enjoy Twitter. I am a voyeur and I admit that I love peeking in on people’s lives and Facebook and places like that are like opening the door to your room and telling the world to come on in and snoop through your photos and videos.
The one problem I have with social media is that it is slowly eroding our ability to communicate in things like, oh, I don’t know, full sentences! Before there was social media there were the chat rooms and if you were the kind of person who was a stickler for grammar there was no place to make you want to gouge out your eyes like chat rooms. It is amazing to me how few people actually know proper grammar.
Let me start out by saying that, although I make my living as a writer, but I am not a grammar specialist. Where I fail, consistently, is with punctuation. I never know when to use things like dashes and colons and semi-colons. I like to use commas but I know I use them wrong and sometimes my tenses get mixed up. In short, I am always going to need a very good editor, but that’s OK, all writers do. Look at the Bible, apparently men once decided even God needed a good editor, but I digress.
Still, I hate when people use the wrong version of “their,” “there,” and “they’re.” Most people seem to have forgotten the word “they’re” even exists. For those of you who are staring at that word baffled and confused it is what is known as a contraction. It is actually two words that have been mashed together. In this case the words are “they” and “are.” So, when you want to convey where two of your friends have gone somewhere you would say, “they’re over there” because you would be contracting the words “they” and “are.” What you tend to see these days are sentences like “there over there.” Huh?
The other word that appears to be an endangered species is the words “too.” Most people don’t even try. You are supposed to use the word with the double Os when you are conveying also. In other words, “My friends went over there and I decided to go too.” Or something like, “My neighbors across the street got a new lawn ornament and then the guy down the street had to go and get one too.” If you are going some place, however, you want the single-O version. “I went to the store,” is a good example.
These days, hardly anyone even acknowledges the existence of the word “too.” I feel bad for it. It is just a simple word that requires an extra turn of the wrist to handwrite that extra O. It takes even less effort to type it out on the keyboard.
Twitter may be the coolest thing around but its limit of 140 characters could be the biggest detriment to the English language ever seen. People are going to be lopping off letters and things like that like crazy in order to fit their sentence into the space. I find myself doing it all the time. So, don’t be surprised if we are all speaking entirely in code before too long. Its jst a mttr o tme.
It takes a lot of guts to join the military. What is interesting is that the people who have spent time there often shrug and say things like, “Hey, it’s just a job.” Really? I sit at a desk all day and type on a computer at my job. At no point do I need to dress up in armor, wear a helmet, carry a gun, or wonder what that thing on the side of the road might be and if it might explode in my face if I look at it too closely. Even if we were not at war, my job still would not require me to operate military equipment of any kind, do drills, or carry that weapon.
Even when this country is not embroiled in war, it takes guts to join the military. Sometimes we forget that branches of our military help out when disasters hit, for example. They are placed in dangerous situations all the time and they do it because they feel a sense of duty and obligation. Sure, there are a lot of them, I am sure, who join because they feel they have no other option or just to get scholarship money to eventually go to college, but every person from the military I have ever met comes out with that sense of duty
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If you want to believe Hollywood (and why the hell would you?) then the end of the world is coming very soon. If you believe the ad campaigns for what looks like the most ridiculous big budget movie made since “Battefield Earth” the end of the world is supposed to come one December 21, 2012. Now, because nothing is truly original in Hollywood, this is what some people believe the Mayans, an ancient race that faded out centuries ago, did when they stopped producing their calendar. It’s all involving a lot of strange math and ancient religions and I cannot possibly explain it properly.
Of course, there are many people who have been looking for Doomsday for a long time. When you look around, you kind of have to wonder. Sure, there are those who say that Global Warming isn’t happening or, worse yet, that it is but there’s just nothing we can do about it. So, the ice caps melt, the continents flood and animals die out by the millions, but hey, as long as they can keep drilling for oil, we’re all good, right
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It is a sad truth for people that their beliefs become so powerful that it often leads them to violence. This has been going on for a long, long time. Of course, these days, it seems like those who follow the Muslim religion are the ones in the cross-hairs. But, the Christians need not forget that plenty of violence and hatred and evil has been done in the name of their beliefs. The problem is always when beliefs, of any kind, lead to violence.
There are some countries where the sport of soccer it taken so seriously that when the national team loses, the coaches and players fear for their lives. Can you imagine that? If you said, yes, then you are someone who needs to get some help. The fact is that there might be someone, somewhere, in this country who is so wrapped up in his or her sports team and, were they to lose a tightly contested race of some kind, might explode into violence because of it
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I remember when I was in about seventh grade and the principal for my school was teaching a class. He said that we would all be amazed at how fast the high school years would go past. I remembered sneering and snorting in derision at that. It seemed like forever that I had been at the school I was at and I had first started there in fourth grade. Here it was, three years later, and it seemed like it had taken eighteen years. Certainly four years of high school would seem like forever.
I didn’t know, however, that at that time the giant fast-forward button would be pushed on my life. I think, however, that this button gets pushed on everyone’s life at that time. It seems unfair. During those previous years, when you were doing stupid things like jumping in mud and riding bikes all over the place and other stupid things, times seems to stretch out forever. Life seems long and full of good things and the summer seems to be an eternity. I remember those three months of summer vacation seeming like a lifetime
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I was in the second grade when I got my first crush. I remember staring for long periods of time at my second grade class photo at the pretty little blonde girl named Jennifer, or Jenny, in the front row. I told everyone she was my “girlfriend.” I thought that was all you had to do. You saw a girl you liked, you declared her your girlfriend and, voila, she was. It was my dad who burst my bubble in asking me if she KNEW she was my girlfriend and had to agree to it for it to be official. I knew I was in trouble right then and there.
It would have been so much easier if it had worked the way I originally thought. Granted, supermodels would have it tough. Imagine Cindy Crawford, in her prime, having to date the one-and-a-half million men who would have called her their girlfriend. So much for photoshoots and calendars with that dating schedule. Although, she might have not made that awful movie with the Baldwin brother either, so it’s a wash there
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For me the best holiday of the season is the one that, generally speaking, involves the least amount of work. I don’t understand people who spend days and weeks decorating their homes. I see no purpose in such a thing when, really, you only get a short time to enjoy it. The enjoyment versus work ratio just doesn’t cut it for me.
I know people who spend almost a year preparing their Halloween costume. They then spend hours sewing or crafting some kind of clothing and then maybe more time in a woodshop to create props or things that flap or whatever. They spend hours and hours on these things to then….what? Wear them for a few hours and then toss them into a closet forever? Don’t tell me it’s fun because that much work for so little use just cannot be fun. If these people would turn their attention towards building fuel-efficient cars or curing diseases, maybe we’d all live in a better world
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Sometimes it amazes me how people who are so devoted to religion react when people make jokes about them or their deity. I am thinking, in particular, of Christians and Jews and those who follow one version or the other of the “biblical” God. They get so worked up whenever someone produces anything, says anything or does anything that questions things or pokes fun at things in their religion.
I am thinking about the movie “Monty Python’s the Life of Brian” when I write this as the IFC channel has been showing this great Monty Python documentary all week and re-showing their movies and TV shows. When that movie came out, Christians reacted like crazy and started picketing theaters as they are wont to do. Of course, all this did, like it always does, is generate more publicity for the film and, thus, generally make it more popular than it would have been if they had shut up about it. To me, this shows that God really does have a sense of humor
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