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the touchpad on my new used laptop STILL won't work.

Maybe it needs a new cooling fan.
That's what Happened to mine.

My blog has been much-neglected of late, but I finally got off my duff and did a little writing this weekend - a chilling tale of botanical horror simply entitled THE FLOWER.  Enjoy . . . if you dare!




https://lewisliterarylair.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-flower-brand-new-horror-story-for.html

That's hilarious, kakihara. I only got detention for one incident and at my school it was called ASA (After-School Assignment) and no one could believe I had it, they were all like, "Right, you got ASA, uh-huh." But I did, I got it in the fall of my tenth grade year for shoving this goshawful girl named Andrea one morning when she was blocking my locker and badmouthing my mom, and as luck would have it she fell onto her backside then got up and ran away crying, but good grief she had it coming and had been a pain in my life for many grades, so I couldnt bring myself to regret it. I think even the people who put me in detention were a bit amused I was there and knew what a shrew Andrea was. And like you I thought, "THIS is supposed to be punishment? This is a vacation compared to regular class." Alas we didn't get National Geographics to read. (I almost mentioned brown native breasts up there and should have. Well done. Two points.)

Y'know, someone oughta do a topic, "DID YOU GET IN TROUBLE IN SCHOOL?"

Heck, I bet even Indy has a story or two, and RC....he'll be off the scale.

Henry Bowers is amazingly crazy. I love it.

In the last scene Pennywise had another appearance. This time he was on the frozen lake offering a balloon to Benjamin who ran away in terror.

At least he's smarter than Georgie.

I passed my final by the way.

He had the freak-out of the century while I was gone and was tuckered out. He was silent the whole night.

Lucky!

Whoa ER, that one had teeth! Very scathing, I like it! It touched on something that is infecting every single aspect of our lives and its getting more forceful everyday. The mention of National Geographic got me thinking though, remembering things. Back in 7th grade, somewher between '92 and '93. That particular time left such an imprint on me. It was a transitional time. I was beginning to learn about things like consequence and social orders. The years that would follow would be increasingly awkward and painful. At this time I was not yet self aware enough to realize just how uncool I was, it was the end of a certain childhood freedom of not knowing or caring how others might think of  you.

That particular school year was mostly spent in ISS (in school suspension). It was great. If you got in enough trouble, you were sent to a room with the other delinquents, usually for 3 to 5 days at a time. You couldnt talk or interact with the others. The only thing you had to do was copy an entire page from a book, once you did that, you were free to draw or read or day-dream.  This gave me time to sharpen my super-hero drawing. The comic boom of the 90s was in full effect, so at that time, my drawing skills were in demand. Being able to draw wolverine and magneto paid off big time, I could trade drawings for goods and services, I had enough cry-babies, tear-jerkers and air-heads to last me a life-time.

The wardens name was Coach Buford. I think he used to be some big-time foot ball coach, he looked like one. He projected a silent strength. He pretended to not see a lot of things, he didn’t want any trouble, the perfect government employee. A year later he would retire and only later it would become clear why he was so low key. After working a lifetime in the system with a year left until retirement with a full pension and benefits. Theres no way I would risk that by having an incident with an illegitimate punk or one of his irate parents. Smart man. Its not worth it. He was like us, doing time.

One of the “perks” of being in ISS was being able to read, and reading material was provided. In the corner was a huge pile of  National Geographic. Most of them were old, some going back to the late sixties. I can still remember their funky smell. Who knows where these things came from or how they accumulated, many of them had a little sticker on the corner with a home address. I never saw one with the same address. How did they get there? 

There was always a surprise with those old “Nattys”. I liked to pull from the bottom of the pile. Whats it going to be today? Angkor Wat? Great whites? Tiwanaku? Malaria?

Oh, I can still remember the thrill of stumbling upon a picture half naked indigenous woman with mud caked boobs, and I was doing it in front of an authority figure. I was beating the system!

Just got a brand new one a couple minutes ago.
Here's dialogue between one of the staff at the house and the human personification of everything wrong with this planet.

Her: "If you don't calm down now I'm calling 9-1-1!"
Him: "Oh yeah? WHY DON'T WE JUST FLY MORE PLANES INTO BUILDINGS! 9/11 IS A TRIGGER WORD FOR ME!
9/11 WAS JUST FREE PUBLICITY FOR NEW YORK CITY!"

What the hell? What did any of that mean?
He calmed down before she called the cops. I'm disappointed.

Before this he was screaming about how his Dad called and interrupted his masturbation.
He thinks the entire house needs to know he was fapping.

Ghostbusters



After being kicked out of the university they work for, a group of scientists start a business capturing ghosts.  Along the way, they have to put up with the EPA, a surely secretary, a possessed client, a 50 foot marshmallow man and an ancient Sumerian god. 

I said I needed to watch a few more good movies, so here we go.  One of the BEST movies every made.  if you havemn't watched this movie this Halloween season .. what's wrong with you? 

 

I recently ended a love affair that began in the days of my youth.

It happened when I made the tough decision not to stay a member of the National Geographic Society, as I had been since I was seven.

Perhaps it is a symptom of the problem when I point out that the notice sent to me from National Geographic (from a Florida-based mailing house, no less, not even from the HQ on the Mall in Washington DC) referred to my involvement with The National Geographic Society as a “subscription renewal” which may seem a minor thing but it’s not. You see, as Alexander Graham Bell and the other founders intended back in 1888, one joined The National Geographic Society in order to lend financial support to the noble endeavor of “increasing and diffusing geographical knowledge,” and the cheerfully gold-spined periodical that came in the mail was merely a monthly report that kept a member informed of some of the wonderful undertakings toward the pursuit of knowledge dues made possible. There was never an intention that the journal of the National Geographic Society be “merely” a magazine.

I think the cancer started when National Geographic began to appear on the shelves of supermarkets and (back then) book stores. That was….a mild rules violation right there, something longtime President Gilbert Grosvenor wisely resisted for years (his mantra was “We are not Life Magazine”) but no one kicked because, hey, more readership meant more funding, which meant more exploration, right? But it was a symptom of the decay that had already begun to fester deep within the skeleton that was supporting the world’s most distinguished instrument of information.

What the real final straw was for me I could not tell you. It wasn’t the “gender” issue this January, though that was an insult to biologists and rational thinkers everywhere with its efforts to argue that bi-gendered homo sapiens sapiens actually have as many as seven distinct sexes. Nor was it the four-part “food” series that was in actuality little more than anti-Malthusian bleeding hearts stoking the fires of First World plentitude versus Third World need. And it wasn’t even in itself the staff and editors working “global warming” into almost every feature each issue, or even the fact the once literate tone of the journal had given way to colloquial prose that included the occasional four-letter word. No, it was that these things were indicators of how the mentality had shifted among the board of directors, taking this once-strictly non-political gift to the world and turning it into just another blatantly slanted tome that tried to make us all feel bad about ourselves. (Hey, if I want to feel bad about myself I’ll listen to my ever-wise eight-year-old explaining why I am wrong about almost everything I think I know.)

And enough of that was far too much. I began to feel the Society had become like the Catholic Church circa 1500, in need of a purifying Reformation to draw standards back to their roots. I hungered for more articles on archaeology, on the outer planets, on the mission to save the dome of Hagia Sophia, on the efforts to reach absolute zero, or the quests to explain how the neutrino can exist and yet have no mass. I wanted less ink spent on how Third World peoples lack toilets, what Whoopi Goldberg thinks of the state of education, or why suburban Americans should beat themselves daily for enjoying the fruits of modernity gifted to them by the ingenuity of their ancestors.

I wanted to learn about blue whales in ways that included more than the (shameful) fact humans had once hunted them. I fondly recalled times when a piece about the Mariana Trench did not devolve into a spiel on how plastic bags litter the ocean waters. Remember when half the content of an issue could be a delightful travelogue written by some family driving a camper across Europe? When was the last time National Geographic published something fun like that? These days where are the informative pieces on South Africa’s revitalized packs of painted wolves? Where is a bit about the centennial of the horrors of the Somme campaign? How about an issue dedicated to Siberia’s taiga, those great stretches of sub-arctic forest which are the legitimate “lungs of the planet” and not, as so many now think, the fetid Amazon?  (I went to Brazil for my honeymoon and trust me, South Park nailed it, the Amazon is a Hell-ish nightmare.)

Above all I wanted to encourage editor in chief Susan Goldberg to learn the difference in “excellence” and “elitism” and quit hitting that Western Guilt button! I’m terribly sorry people in Rwanda don’t have skyscrapers and good libraries, and terribly glad we do, but isn’t it contrary to natural selection to think all population groups within a species could face different geographical challenges and nutritional benefits across many generations and yet result in exactly the same levels of competence within that species? Europe and Asia were great places to dwell, I’m sorry so much of the sub-Sahara wasn’t. Hey, I don’t make the rules, Charles Darwin did. Maybe God created everyone equally, but blind nature certainly didn’t. Deal with it or not, “Nat Geo” but stop complaining. (And FYI, for the record I hate when the journal is called “Nat Geo”.)

Oh, I still treasure National Geographic as a concept, this source of knowledge that enshrined the grand 19th century spirit of pure scientific exploration well into the nascent 21st century, but I love what was, not what is. Which is fine, since on digital I own every issue ever created, and, truer to the heart of what I’m talking about, have physical copies of every volume back to 1943, and about seventy issues dating earlier than that, so I have plenty of quality material to keep me going. In fact I love few pleasures more than finding a spare hour to lose myself in the columns of those old issues, their pages redolent of the libraries and scholarly bookshelves of times gone by. The digs of Heinrich Schliemann and Howard Carter, the London of the Tudors, the Maasai Mara migrations, the Leakey family in Olduvai Gorge, the graceful stalking of a leopard after her prey, the blindness of cave fish, the wildlife of the Korea DMZ, the Volga delta, the wonders of a Vermeer, the madness of Ivan Grozny, the inexplicable flight of the bumblebee…these are what I want National Geographic to be, not a record of the miseries of African secondary schoolgirls not having the same standard of feminine protection American women take for granted.

And I doubt I am alone in wistfully remembering when National Geographic had all that.

So let the current crop of agenda-propelled hijackers learn nothing from the plight of a fellow publication, the once glorious Smithsonian, as they dourly pilot the National Geographic Society straight into a volcano, weeping the whole way down about how evil and ethnocentristically self-entitled people in the developed world are. I might mourn but I’ll have decades of classical reading to comfort me. As for my “subscription”, well, I never had one. I was a dues-paying member and I wish the current management grasped the fine point of that. Maybe I’ll come back when they learn the difference, though I doubt they ever will.

to Klingon operas