Its no secret The League has not served his country, or, really, anyone.
We are very proud of the service done by The Admiral (not actually an Admiral, but formerly of the USAF) who served in Vietnam and of our Grandfather's service in the 82nd Airborne during World War II. And let me point out that Jamie's own dad was Army for many years (on the front lines against tooth decay, but that's just one way to fight a battle, people).
We looked with awe at these men and women's service when we were younger, but as time has marched on, that's deepened to true gratitude. I have never had to pick up a gun, I have enjoyed my freedoms without worry, lived without worry of any attack upon me or my family, and there are millions who have served to ensure that could be true.
It is impossible to say that its easy for me to see the purpose of some of our wars and military actions. To pretend the US has always been in the right in all military application is dishonest and to suggest otherwise means we cannot learn from past error and judiciously consider when we put troops in harm's way. But we've always had brave men and women who were able to be there when Uncle Sam asked. They've done it for little pay, for little glory, but because they could serve, and that's something we can't treasure enough.
The League of Melbotis salutes all veterans today, whether infantry or sailor or technician or dentist.
The great thing about everyone showing up as Green Lanterns? Until there's 7300 of you or so, there really aren't too many. That's Reed and Your Friendly Neighborhood League.
I want to thank so many of our friends for coming by on Halloween night! I know there are infinite options on such a night (and its one night that if you stayed in and watched horror movies rather than show up for a party, I might believe you weren't just blowing me off), so thanks to all for getting dressed up and joining us at League HQ.
We had a lot of trick-or-treaters, who started around 6:30 and wrapped it up around 9:00. Our first guest showed up to watch the game around 7:15, and so we were sort of dividing attention for a bit there. Happily, almost everyone wound up in a costume of one sort or another.
In the end we had:
Supergirl: Jamie Green Lantern: Ryan Zombie thing: Jason (Jason also helped hand out candy and gave the kids a spooky experience) Green Lantern: Reed Tippi Hedren from The Birds: Nicole Rod Taylor from The Birds: Matt Tippi Hedren from The Birds: Tania a cat burglar: Justin Cop: Bill Crook: Lynn Project Runway contestant: Jonathan Project Runway model: Billi Jo MadMen Don Draper: Steven MadMen Joan Holloway: Lauren Super Pat: Pat Knight from The Holy Grail: Juan G Punky Brewster: Letty Star Fleet Officer: Julia
Here are pictures by Julia that I swiped from Facebook
Julia actually worked out her Starfleet rank. She's a Chief Engineer.
Super Pat! His power? Cheering on the Horns, anytime, anywhere.
Green Lantern and Supergirl wish you a mighty Halloween.
Don Draper (Mr. Harms) and Joan Holloway (Ms. Roth) enjoy the festivities
Garcia forgot his Holy Hand Grenade
Look, I'll be honest. Jason's costume totally freaked me out.
Matt and Nicole deal with a Hitchcockian dilemma
Billie and Jonathan rock the Project Runway thing
I know in the current age that parents have decided that they can't let their kids trick-or-treat, but our street is always swarming with kids, whose parents, I guess, aren't afraid of the urban legends about poisoned candies.
That's kind of nice.
Its also the only time we talk to our neighbors, people all seem to be in a good mood, and the kids aren't creeped out when you talk to them.
I swear I've been meaning to do this post for a couple of years, and always wanted to save it for Halloween.
Shortly after moving to Houston (just prior to the start of my sophomore year) I was renting a lot of movies. I hadn't really made friends yet, so my weekends had some time to fill, and I think my folks were just happy that I wasn't sitting around looking gloomy about having had moved if I was wearing out the heads on the VCR.
One fall weekend, I rented "The Rocky Horror Picture" show. I believe it had been an anniversary, and so there was a big to-do about the film's release on VHS.
I had been scheduled to see it at the Village with, I think, Carla G (Carla N, back then) before moving, but once KareBear caught wind of the shenanigans at the theater, I was informed I could wait until I could darn well drive myself.
It should also be noted that the theater at Northcross Mall in Austin (now gone) had been among the first in the country to have late-night screenings of Rocky Horror. So Austin was quite into the tradition back then.
I was already quite taken with the movie from the opening (featuring the lips of Patricia Quinn singing about "The Day the Earth Stood Still"), and was perfectly happy with the Time Warp prior to Columbia making her first appearance.
It was most likely Columbia's tap-dancing, glittered self that sparked my interest.
But I knew two things: (a) Gold glittered hats now seemed like a much better idea and (b) My folks must never, ever see this movie
The movie itself is a love letter to a kind of science fiction I'd only begun to discover via Mystery Science Theater 3000, and with which I was quickly becoming enamored. As a consumer of genre fiction, I got the set up, but a lot of the rest of the territory was not covered particularly well in other material I consumed. Omni-sexual mad scientists, fetishizing muscle men, and even Meatloaf were all fairly new to me...
But I was focusing a bit on the girl with the nasally voice and tap shoes.
As we all know, Columbia wasn't the only one who got one of these outfits
Unlike a lot of other DITMTLOD, Columbia is a supporting role in a single movie, so there isn't a whole truck load to say. Her character has a somewhat interesting arc in the movie, and she gets to fawn over a rockin' Meatloaf in the role of Eddie. And I guess I thought Eddie was pretty cool, too.
In many ways, I'm not entirely clear on why Columbia rather than Magenta or Janet.
Like a lot of other DITMTLOD, I really didn't have any analog for Columbia. Certainly none who tap-danced and sang. But, in general, she seemed like a neat idea. I also suspect that, at age 15, my developing brain was feverishly trying to cram ideas and firing synapses into into the correct spots in my psyche in something analogous to the the old board game, Perfection.
Anyway, whether it was her natural charm, her joie devivre, that she looked good in glitter and tap shoes, I've no idea, but I still have a warm place in my heart for Columbia.
You see a lot of Columbia costumes come Halloween time, at least for sale. Aside from wandering 6th street, you don't see all that many of them. I assume they're sold for use at performances of Rocky Horror, which, I might note, 20 years on, I still haven't seen.
Little Nell herself has been in a few movies, including the late 90's version of "Great Expectations" and the little-discussed sequel to Rocky Horror, 1981's "Shock Treatment", which I've never even seen on a shelf to rent. I have little understanding of her career or trajectory post-Rocky Horror, but she turns up in VH1 docs about the movie and that sort of thing, and I believe may work in clubs or restaurants.
But a Halloween salute to Columbia, in the movie which has become a Halloween favorite.
Not just content to be terrifyingly headless, he's also got to have a flaming Jack O' Lantern. That Headless guy really knows how to turn it up a notch.
Halloween is tough when I think upon that which I'd like to post.
I do not find vampires frightening. If decades of cartoons and cartoonish post-Lugosi Dracula imitators didn't drain the idea of blood suckers of menace, then surely the post Anne Rice world of foppish emo-boys and the Xerox of a Xerox that's sprung since then, culminating in the glittering Foley's catalog models of Twilight, emasculating the horror of Dracula while simultaneously rewriting the narrative to suggest that the eternal damnation of being one of the undead was nothing but the modern day "bit by a radioactive spider".
Frankenstein is a tragedy, not horror. The most frightening thing about "The Mummy" is how dull the original movie is after the first ten minutes. Its tough to be scared of "Creature from the Black Lagoon" when its a movie that takes place almost entirely on sunny days in a nifty looking swimming whole, and Julie Adams' production value completely distracts you from the story.
The story of the Wolfman, however, is one I find intriguing, even if the original film starring Lon Chaney Jr. isn't going to hold up terribly well (especially the FX). Like Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, the concept itself explores the horror of the beast living inside, whether we put it there, its madness, or the beast was there all along. It doesn't matter.
Similarly, if I liked Paranormal Activity, it wasn't because of fine acting, but because it reminded me of a small budget version of "The Haunting", a movie in which There Is Something Out There, And it Is Evil, and It Is Going to Keep Coming Until We Are Dead.
There's nothing comforting about either evil, disembodied spirits or restless souls of the dead.
At least not in the laughable, let's-cheer-for-the-killer manner that's made franchises out of masked psychos. In the unknowable way that led to animism when turnip-eating peasants walked down the road in the dark and told themselves that the fear could only exist if there was, in fact, something out there.
I find it sad that I have no ghost stories of my own to share, and no other-worldly experience to relate for you to read at your desk (and shouldn't you be working?) on the day before Halloween. No tale of driving off and finding that a hook was hanging from my door handle, or that Jamie and I barely dodged sure doom if we hadn't left Make Out Point that one, eerie evening.
All of the stories I know are either made up, or are real and nobody wound up laughing at old Ichabod Crane as he fled from the Headless Horseman.
Even the one ghost story we thought we had when we were kids turned out to be a raccoon that had somehow gotten into a house that was for sale.
Instead, all I can relate is how I'm traveling, as I meet people, I'm making sure they don't ever have anything to worry about ever, ever again...
Jesus, people can be cruel. If it's not my build, its my personality.
But, ah... I think I've gone on enough for one post.
Do you guys get some sort of default Holiday in November that we don't get? I don't know how this works.
It's not actually a "New World" if people are already living there. Here's to 500 years of poor decision making and syphilis. Don't go to the post office.
In lieu of an actual post, I'm going to kick off October with something creepier than Michael Meyers in a tutu:
Vintage Halloween stuff
I don't know what it is that makes vintage Christmas classic and endearing but vintage Halloween stuff terrifying, but there you are.
I don't know.
yeah, there's a little kid in blackface in there. Classy.
All my life I've mostly lived in relatively new structures, but when I sleep in a place like, say, the Olema Inn and consider how old the place is, and how many generations have slept in that room, and you look at the vintage light fixture and molding and wonder how many people have stared at that... and then think about all the kids over all the years who trick'or'treated before you ever put on a Chewbacca mask... all those kids who are nowhere to be seen, and in masks that were seemingly made in Hell's Novelty Factory...
Anyway.
Broom. Bike. Whatever.
The League has very specific issues.
Maybe I get a little sad looking at all these pictures, thinking of all these people who lived and had Halloween and trick or treats, and now they're most likely gone, and does anyone know who these people are anymore?
Is it the outdated ideas of the costumes? That its not colorful princesses and ninjas and Buzz Lightyear?
I have no idea. But the sort of static faces of the masks, and a lifetime of horror movies certainly isn't helping.
dang, yo. even if a headless guy with a hatchet was standing at the foot of my bed (my recurring fear when I was in 3rd grade), it would not freak me out as much as if these kids were on my doorstep.
I'm going to go hide under a blanket with a flashlight now.
I've put up a poll at the official LoM site (in case you're getting your LoM from Facebook or RSS). Jamie and I are trying to decide if we should have our annual Chris-Kwanzaa-Kah party, or if we should consider a Halloween Party.
Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, so it makes it possible for us to throw wide the doors of Haunted League Manor and celebrate the night of ghouls and goblins.
I actually remember buying this copy of Monster Mash at a K-Mart in Michigan when I was little. I thought the Wolfman looked awesome. And I have never known why a "monster band" was made up of chimps.
Our primary concern is that nobody is going to show, of course. And while the Holiday Spectacular is something to get ready for, its also decorations we have up for a while during the Holidays. If we spend a bunch of time making League HQ as spooky as necessary for a Halloween-mitzvah, this is sort of a one-shot-deal.
Anyhow, I'd initially thought: We're going to do a Halloween Party, and I am going to make everyone come as a super-hero! And it'll be a super-party! But now I see that's faulty thinking on Halloween.
Let's get the whole gang together!
While Costumes WILL BE REQUIRED (that includes Sophie, Maxwell), we're looking forward to what Leaguers decide makes for a festive Halloween.
So, if Leaguers can take the ten seconds out of your day to vote in our poll, we'd really appreciate it. This is sort of our bellwether for the likelihood of The League's 2009 Halloween Heckstravaganza.
I'd say the Fourth was a success. Lots of folks came by. We started around 4:00 and wrapped up around 1:00. There was cooking out (over the hottest fire since Mt. St. Helens), there was standing around, there were cocktails, there was neil Diamond, and there was singing. And IHOP.
Not sure what the weekend holds for posting, so I want to take a minute to salute the U.S. of A.
Whenever I might get a little down about the way our nation is headed, I get a little reminder, such as our friends in Iran, who are now in a struggle to see justice done, to be able to believe their voices and themselves and their ideals are known by their leaders and government. The past few weeks should be a reminder to us Americans and to our government that the government should never be too far from being us, that it should exist and operate with our consent. And when we challenge that government's will or authority, we are so, so astoundingly lucky to live in a nation where our government does not take to the air suggesting that voices raised in defiance should be permanently silenced.
But we're far from perfect. We receive daily and weekly reminders of the failures of government. I'm still keeping my eye on the events in Ft. Worth, which fell on the anniversary of Stonewall. Its not even surprising any more when governments cease-up as our politicians who run on their moral convictions disappear for long weekends over-seas with their mistresses. Our states go bankrupt (well done, California). That's this week's news.
At the end of the day, though, we are not our government. While I celebrate the ideals embodied in the constitution, even that document wasn't ratified until well after July 4th, 1776 (but that time for honest discussion did lead to the Bill of Rights, of course). If we're going to celebrate the day, I celebrate what, despite our differences, we do when we do it together. It doesn't matter if it's watching fireworks while the local symphony puts on its annual performance of the 1812 Overture, or whether its voices raised together as we mumble our way through the National Anthem. Or showing up at the food pantry, or to walk together to raise money for a cause. We're all of that, too.
It's foolish to buy the lines thrown around during elections when one politician suggests the other doesn't love his country because someone said the nation has a past of which it ought not necessarily be entirely proud. Its in seeing the flaws, the broken dreams and lost lives as counter-measure to what good the country has done that you can see the promise of what we'd like to offer every person within these borders and beyond. It tells us what we can do better. And when we live through a time in which we feel the government has steered wrong, we can imagine that the winds of change will blow and the ship will find its course.
I need to see more of the country. I'd very much like to see its capitols and landmarks. Its parks, and its beaches. See what my fellow Americans are like in places like Boston and Los Angeles. I don't get out enough.
But... Happy B-Day, America. Hopefully we won't accidentally set you on fire with a bottle rocket.
like everything else iconic in history, this didn't really happen, either
So, of course, part of the problem is that my idea for a Holiday Special was pretty much what Colbert did in 2008. Talented and amazing The League may be, but we strongly suspect that we're not going to outdo Colbert on this thing.
I'm thinking a 10 minute video (anything longer suggests effort), but we'll see. Could be longer or shorter. Might not get around to it at all.
But here's the thing: It's going to be a lot more fun if I can get you guys to participate.
I know that July 1st might seem a spot early to bring this up, but we'll probably start producing this thing as early as October. So that's, really, like 3 or four months away.
...our benchmark for quality
Some rules...
A) This is a family show, Leaguers. I don't mind a few swears, but The KareBear and Judy are going to watch this thing. So, you know... B) Anything sent in needs to be fairly decent quality. By that I mean, if the camera is laying on its side, or we can't actually hear you, then I'm probably not going to be able to use it. Don't worry, we're going to have issues here, too. C) It HAS to be about the Holidays in some way. It can be about Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, etc... We're working with a theme here, Leaguers.
Bowie and Crosby got nothing on my Leaguers
Here's what we're looking for:
1) Volunteers for guest appearances. If you'd like to actually appear in a portion of the video, lemme know. That would require a few hours on some weekend. We may require you to sing and dance. No, seriously.
2) Send in your video. This isn't a call for random people to send me a video. You pretty much MUST QUALIFY AS A LEAGUER (you know who you are. Exceptions granted for Lynda Carter, Christina Hendricks, Shatner or other non-Leaguers of note. In fact, those three are welcome to come over any time.). I'm not placing any restrictions on what you send in. If you make a jerk of yourself, you make a jerk of yourself. However... Keep it short. No longer than 1 minute. Unless you're sending in the best video of all time. Then we can negotiate.
3) Original Songs. If you want to send in a song for The League to sing, we're up for that. Or you can sing it yourself. But... it should be about 90 seconds.
4) Poems, stories, etc... I don't really know what I mean by this, but send your stuff in, and we'll see if we can't figure out how to squeeze it in.
So if you're wondering: No. I don't have a script yet. I kind of want to see what we get, to an extent. But I'm starting to get some ideas together, thinking about how to put a song or two together, that sort of thing. And, of course, planning to decorate for Christmas early this year, if need be.
Anyhow, I hope you guys want to participate in some way.
