The other night I was listening to Coast to Coast AM as the local NPR affiliate was off-the-air. George Noory was interviewing a scientist (?) on the topics of ghosts and hauntings. The scientist claimed that it is “unscientific” to reject these phenomena out of hand. Laying in bed, I grumbled to myself that science is usually based upon verifiable observations and hypotheses and theories, all of which are missing in this discussion.
Then again, I didn’t let myself make the case too strongly. It was late, I was tired, and my room was pitch-black. As the scientist said, many have been surprised to spot a spectral being at the foot of their beds unexpectedly. No, I obviously don’t believe in any of that stuff, but I do believe in my own fallibility. “Ghosts and hauntings are probably bunk,” I thought to myself. “But let’s not be so sure about that right now. I just want to get to sleep.”
Since then, NPR/BBC has been back on the air, freeing me from this wishy-washy doubt (and replacing it with a kind of doubt I’m much more secure in holding late at night).
Two of the orchids are blooming this week, and a third looks set to go off at any time. The one with the smaller, more colorful flowers smells like a Jamaican hot pocket, sweet and spicy. Every time I notice it, I’m startled and then pleased.
Emmett and I watched “The Thing with Two Heads” last night. I was hoping for more hijinks, but it was played mostly straight and was entertaining enough. The mid-film chase scene was a bit excessive, but funny in that. Imagine a two-headed linebacker zipping around on a dirt bike for 25 minutes running cop cars into one another and off of cliffs and into ditches.
Today I may see Russ Meyer’s “Mudhoney,” described by the IMDB thusly:
It’s 1933, in the midst of the Depression and Prohibition. Calif, a stranger with a past walks into Spooner, Missouri on his way from Michigan to California. He hires on with Lute Wade to earn some travelling money, but gets entangled in a bad family situation: Lute’s daughter is married to Sidney, a good-for-nothing drunk that frequents the rural equivalent of a whorehouse and beats his wife and is just waiting for Lute to kick the bucket to get his money. When Sidney and a local wacko preacher begin orchestrating a smear campaign against Calif, he finds it difficult to conceal his past and his growing affection for Sidney’s wife.
TLA Video has a different take:
Set in Depression era Missouri a drifter stumbles upon a house of “ill repute”: a drunken wife-beating preacher, an ultra-busty deaf and dumb blonde and a group of dentally challenged rural folk. Excellent trailer trash cinema loaded with T and A.
Sold me.