Mince Pies and Cigarettes. And a Skull. And a Seance...

Mince pies and Cigarettes

I should wait until Christmas to post this, but I have to say it's the most wonderful alien story I've ever read.  Think of it as an early Christmas present!

Jean Hingley and her husband Cyril lived in a small council house in Rowley Regis, near Birmingham, England. On January 4, 1979, Cyril went to work, and after he left, she saw a light in the back garden. She figured it was the light in the car port, but when she went to turn it off, she saw an orange light hovering over the garden, which gradually turned white while radiating a sound that she described as "Zee...zee...zee..." Then "three beings" floated past her and went through the open back door of her house. The winged creatures glowed with a bright light and hovered about a foot above the ground. They were wearing silvery-green tunics and silver waistcoats, with transparent "fish-bowl" style helmets over their heads. They had no eyebrows or ears. Their faces were corpse-white with glittering black eyes.

Sketch based on Hingley's description of her callers.

Amazingly, Mrs. Hingley did not run screaming around the neighborhood with her apron over her head. Instead, she petrified with fear, as did her Alsatian dog, Hobo. But then the fear went away, and she "felt as if I were lifted up...I felt as if I were a different person; as though I was in Heaven although I was still at home. I seemed to float into the lounge." There she saw the 3 attacking her little artificial Christmas tree, shaking and tugging at it, and when they were done, they floated around the room, touching everything.  

She asked them, "What are you going to do? What do you want with me?" (My note:  I'd have been pitching a fit right about now.)

They replied by manipulating something on their chest, and voices emerged from it saying, "We shall not harm you."
"Where have you come from?" Mrs. Hingley asked.
"We come from the sky."

The trio went back to shaking the tree. Then they started bouncing on her couch.  (My question:  Were they three year olds?) Anyway, she said she was "happy" in their company. "Do you want a drink?" she asked. They asked for water, and when she  brought it, they lifted the glasses, and a blinding "power light" came on around their heads. "I didn't actually see them drink but when they put the glasses back on the tray the water was gone." 

She asked them if she should tell people about them. "Yes. We have been here before. We shall come again. Everybody will go to Heaven. There are beautiful colours there." The beings said they had already visited Australia, New Zealand, and America. "We come down here to try to talk to people but they don't seem to be interested."  (My Note:  Try it these days and someone will call ICE.)

Then Mrs. Hingley went into the kitchen and brought out a tray of mince pies. "They each lifted a mince pie from the plate as though their hands were magnetic." But when she lit a cigarette, they leapt back and floated to the back door, carrying their pies. She followed, apologizing, and saw "an orange coloured glowing thing" in her back yard that appeared to be a space ship. It was eight to ten feet long and four feet high, with several round portholes. The ship had something like a "scorpion tail" at the back, and a wheel on top."  The creatures floated into the ship, flashed its lights twice ("as if to say 'Goodbye,'") and disappeared into the sky. Mrs. Hingley's dog finally came back to life and began looking for the creatures.

Her visitors left Mrs. Hingley feeling "warm and happy," as though she had been "blessed." When she told a neighbor what had happened, they advised her to call the police. She did, but the police didn't know what to make of the story. She also called her husband and told him that she'd had "visitors with wings." 
"Birds?" he asked.
"No. Men with wings."
"Why don't you go and have your hair done and tell the girls about it."  (My note:  it's hard to get much more British than that, unless he'd told her "why don't you just put your feet up and have a nice cuppa tea.")

Mrs. Hingley said that her eyes were sore for a week after the "close encounter," and she felt too unwell to work for some time. Cassette tapes handled by the aliens were ruined, and for a time her radio and TV ceased to work. But she loved it, saying, "Some people have written to say that they think the visitors were elves or beings from the Fairy Kingdom, or even robots, but I don't know what to think. I know I shall never forget them if I live to be a hundred."

Sources:  #1 the main source is from Undine's Strange Company:  A Visit to the Weird Side of History (LINK)  AND  #2 from Slacktivist (LINK).  I cannot urge strongly enough that you subscribe to one or both of them.

The Skull

"A million year old human skull may have belonged to a relative of the mysterious Denisovans and provides clues to the rapid evolution of Homo sapiens in Asia. It suggests that our species, Homo sapiens, began to emerge at least half a million years earlier than we thought, researchers are claiming in a new study.  It also shows that we co-existed with other sister species, including Neanderthals, for much longer than we've come to believe, they say.

"Genetic evidence suggests it existed alongside them, so if Yunxian 2 walked the Earth a million years ago, say the scientists, early versions of Neanderthal and our own species probably did too.  This startling analysis has dramatically shifted the timeline of the evolution of large-brained humans back by at least half a million years, according to Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, a co-lead on the research.  He said there are likely to be million year-old fossils of Homo sapiens somewhere on our planet - we just haven't found them yet.

"The earliest known evidence for early Homo sapiens in Africa is 300,000 years ago, so it is tempting to conclude that our species might have evolved first in Asia.  But there is not enough evidence to be sure at this stage, according to Prof Stringer, because there are human fossils in Africa and Europe that are also a million years old that need to be incorporated into the analysis."  (LINK1 and LINK2)

(MY NOTE: My deep genetic tests via the National Geographic Genome Project show that I am definitely Homo Sapien but also have Neanderthal (4.6%) and Denisovian (2.1%) DNA. My ancestors - and probably everyone's ancestors - fooled around with each other. A lot.)  

Now I have been practically popping opening champagne bottle over this news

because I have been postulating (if not preaching) for decades that intelligent hominids have been around for at least a megaannum (that's one million years, folks), mainly based on the fact that as soon as the last ice age (The Younger Dryas) ended around 11,700 years ago, humans started right up domesticating animals and plants, irrigation, pottery (the oldest so far is 20,000, from a cave in China), building, and erecting megaliths, and what may be (so far) the oldest temple found on earth, Gobekli Tepe, just as if everyone "knew" what to do to get what we would call a major civilization going again.  Same myths, stories, and "inventions".  And haunted memories of a paradise lost and/or a perfect city shattered by natural disasters.

It's almost like the ice melted, and humans were racing to get back to the Old Days, but without the Old Ones (read your Lovecraft like the rest of us).

But let's move on to the really weird stuff.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon

I think I've mentioned this book before, but I want to mention it again.  Seance on a Wet Afternoon was written in 1961 by Mark McShane, and a movie was made of it in 1964, which is about the time that I read it on my grandmother's front porch in Kentucky on a rainy afternoon from the paperback pictured to the right.  I've never seen the movie.  I don't want to see it, because I know they gave the movie a Hollywood ending, which the book (actually a novella) definitely didn't deserve. (As if, and this will become more relevant later on, CoPilot offered to finish the movie off for them.)  I consider the book (actually a novella, but back then you didn't have to write 100,000 words to have a novel) a masterpiece of suspense.  

Myra Savage, psychic, truly can see into other people’s minds, and can even sometimes sense the future, but her real goal is communicate some day with the Other Side, mainly because she knows that this would finally give her the fame (and fortune) that she deserves. So she concocts The Plan with the help of her husband Bill, unemployed due to his asthma, and will do anything Myra tells him to do.

The Plan is simple: Bill will snatch a child from her schoolyard and paste together a letter demanding ransom. After a few days of citywide panic, Myra will lead the police to the child and the money, and all of London will know her name. What could possibly go wrong?

If you can guess the ending, the real ending, you're more of a psychic than Myra, because this does not go where you think it will go...  

BTW, I hope that if the aliens ever come back, they don't encounter a Myra.  May it always be a Mrs. Hingley and her mince pies.

****

PS:  I am ecstatic to announce that I have finally found the way to get rid of that #*$%&@&* CoPilot on Microsoft 365.  You know, the one that keeps offering to write my essays or finish my sentence?  Well, the last straw was that one morning I was writing my dreams into my dream diary, and it offered what it thought should be the way the sentence went, and I blew my stack because my dreams are my dreams and I don't need anyone to tell me where my dreams, my stories, my plays, my essays are gonna go, and don't even TRY to tell me what I'm going to or should say next, dammit!

So, this is what you do, for those of you who don't know yet:  open Microsoft Word.  Hit "File".  Go down the column on the left to "Options" and click on it, and turn CoPilot off.  

Oh, what bliss...  

September 15, 1963. A Mysterious Well. And Dioramas of Death.

Headline this weekend after Charlie Kirk's assassination:

"America Enters a New Age of Political Violence!"

No. You can call it sad, tragic, traumatic, etc., but not new. I'm writing this on September 15, 2025, and 62 years ago on September 15, 1963, at 10:22 on Sunday, a bomb ripped through the all black 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing 4 young girls and wounding anywhere from 14-22 people as they were getting ready for Sunday Service. According to one survivor, the explosion shook the entire building and propelled the girls' bodies through the air "like rag dolls".

Four white men, Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, and Bobby Frank Cherry, from the Cahaba River Group, which had splintered off from another Ku Klux Klan group because they thought the KKK was too restrained, not violent enough, in the fight against integration, were the bombers. It being Alabama in the 1960s, the original FBI investigation ended without indictments, and it wasn't until 2001, after President Clinton appointed Doug Jones as the US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, that ALL the bombers (except Cash who had died of old age) were finally indicted, tried, and convicted.

Addie Mae Collins (age 14, born April 18, 1949),

Carol Denise McNair (age 11, born November 17, 1951),

Carole Rosamond Robertson (age 14, born April 24, 1949), and

Cynthia Dionne Wesley (age 14, born April 30, 1949)

And then came November 22, 1964 – the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, and in 1965 they started televising the Vietnam War… and we all sat, eating our dinners and watching the war every single freaking night - including the little girl running naked and screaming because she'd been covered in napalm, the MyLai massacre, the Vietcong man being shot in the head, his brains blowing out, and then dropping dead on his side - until it ended in the early 1970s when we got to watch everyone in South Vietnam trying to get on the helicopters as they left. And August 1, 1966, when Marine veteran Charles Whitman went up the Main Building Tower at the University of Texas, onto the observation deck, and started shooting people down below. In the next hour and a half he killed 15 people (one a pregnant woman), and injured 31 others before he was finally shot and killed by 2 Austin police officers. And in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were both assassinated, followed by the bloody 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

And it's never stopped. I am sick to death of endless violence, pundits, politicians, splinter groups, condolences, sorrows, and horrors.

I have decided that the real problem is that we humans don't like humans very much.

But enough of that.

Let's talk instead about the little mysteries of life.

I've been having some work done on our yard, including ripping out five large - 2' x 4' - uneven flagstones in the back that were simply a health hazard to me and my husband as we potter around living our Beatrix Potter lives with the bunnies, the ever chattering squirrels, the sparrows, and the cawing crows. Especially in winter when the flagstones were slick with ice and/or snow.

Anyway, my guy (everyone needs a "my guy") came and was working away. One flagstone, two flagstone, three flagstone, four flagstone - and he was at the door saying, "You've got to come see this!"

So I came out, and this is what I saw:

That's a well, with carefully built brick walls, and some kind of concrete thingy in the middle. Now, our house was built in 1919, and there was no sign of a well on the survey map that came with the house when we bought it. We never dreamed there was a well under that flagstone, and I will say to its credit that we, and probably a lot of folks, have walked across that flagstone many a time and it never shifted an inch.

But my curiosity was aroused (most odd things arouse my curiosity, and since life has a tendency to be full of them, I spend most of my life curious and investigating), so this week I've been calling around, trying to find out:

1. how far the city limits were in 1920 (in 1880, the east-west city limit of Sioux Falls was 14th street, which is REALLY small);
2. was there running water out this way in 1920? (there was a private water company which set up shop in the 1890s but then closed down, and the city took over some time in the very early 1900s)
3. where was the outhouse?

I've talked to a lot of people at the City this morning, and basically, everyone had a well throughout the 1800s, and into much of the 1900s. And by much of the 1900s, I mean that as late as the 1970s, when with a population of 72,000, the city decided to put in another reservoir up in North Sioux Falls somewhere. That would cost money, so there was a referendum, and a number of people in the neighborhood voted against it. The reason? Because if they got a reservoir, then the neighborhood would have to get indoor plumbing. Strangest hill to die on I've ever heard of.

I was also assured that probably the outhouse area has long disappeared, being filled in, and then... decades passing. Which is a shame in some ways, because it might have been interesting to excavate that. People used to throw all kinds of trash in the outhouse because where better?

And I'm still debating whether to get the well cleaned up and pumping again... But then we'd have to lift off that damn flagstone again. Decisions, decisions.

***

Meanwhile, who here has heard of Frances Glesner Lee (1878-1962)? She was a Chicago heiress to the International Harvester fortune, who wanted to go into medicine, but was told ladies didn't do that. So she hand crafted (including knitting and sewing the various fabrics, making miniature cigarette butts, etc.) "the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, composite crime scene models recreated on a one-inch-to-one-foot scale. These macabre dioramas were purpose-built to be used as police training tools to help crime scene investigators learn the art and science of detailed forensics-based detection." Miss Marple would have LOVED her.

"Red Bedroom"

Go here (LINK) and (HERE) to learn more about her and see more of the dioramas. Or watch the video below:

I wonder if any of them show a murder in or near a well? BTW, our well had no bad smells coming up, just cool earthy air.

Great Expectations

My note: I originally wrote the sketch of this piece back before I was getting my cataract surgery, but didn't use it because (I think) at my request, Leigh guested my spot and gave me time to get the cataracts out and heal up. Our latest amazing disruption is getting new computers which I believe to be if not the 3^rd, at least the 2^nd circle of hell. But we're back up and running, and here it is!

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times."
— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—"
— William Wordsworth, The Prelude

Both of those quotes are based on the French Revolution, but that doesn't matter. Really. Youth always knows that this is their time, their time to grasp the rose, the pluck the flower from the nettle, to live with all the intensity of a thousand suns. That or they know that the whole world is against them, and nothing they can do will change it. It's later in life when people look back and go, well…

"My life has been mainly one of disappointments" - Almanzo Wilder (husband of Laura Ingalls Wilder) to his daughter Rose Wilder Lane in an interview taken in his old age in the 1930s.

Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder

And here's Rose Wilder Lane reminiscing of her youth in Old Home Town, p 23, published in 1935:

"It was a hard, narrow, relentless life. It was not comfortable. Nothing was made easy for us. We did not like work and we were not supposed to like it; we were supposed to work, and we did. We did not like discipline, so we suffered until we disciplined ourselves. We saw many things and many opportunities that we ardently wanted and could not pay for, so we did not get them, or got them only after stupendous, heartbreaking effort and self-denial, for debt was much harder to bear than deprivations."

And it was a hard life: the Wilders were happily married, but only one child, Rose, survived.  Both Laura and Almanzo got diphtheria which gave him a stroke and permanently damaged his strength and agility.  They lost repeated crops and finally had to leave DeSmet, South Dakota, to make a new home in Missouri. It was a life of hard, hard, hard work, and certainly not much of a financial profit to show for it. But they enough to live on, and were together for over 50 years... And that was the ideal, back then.  

***

I used to teach my students not just the dates of kings and wars and literature, politics, philosophy, and inventions, but as much social history as I could cram in about how people actually lived. (See The $3,500 Dollar Shirt)

For example, the Middle Ages, when (among nobility and royalty) the oldest son was the heir (unless, like Talleyrand, they were disabled)*, the second son was put into the church (whether they had a vocation or not), and the rest were either put out as pages or squires or into the church as well. The eldest daughter got the best match in the parish, unless she was disfigured in some way, and then she went into the convent along with her sisters (again, no vocation required). Frankly, medieval monasteries were the equivalent of a larder or a form of birth control – where you put all the extra children - or all the children for whatever reason - and left them there, unless / until they were needed.

But of course the nobility and royalty were the smallest percentage of the population. Most were peasants – try about 80% – and then there were merchants – about 10-15%. And again, your future was locked in as much as if you lived in caste-system India.

A peasant's only future was in being a peasant - unless they showed remarkable talent as an artist (like Pieter Breugel the Elder, Botticelli, or Caravaggio) or in some craft, or ran off/were conscripted to join the army/navy for war (see or read The Return of Martin Guerre)**. Women would marry another peasant, or – if unmarriageable for some reason or other – would become a servant. An exception was Joan of Arc, who had visions, and became a soldier and a saint in the service of Charles VII of France, and got executed as a witch for her pains.  

Towns, as always, were where the freedom from inevitability beckoned: people would run there, hoping to become an apprentice (which required a payment to the master teacher) or a servant in a wealthy house (which didn't).  Many, of course, ended up as beggars.  

And there was always the wilderness - the great forests that still existed and could hide more than Robin Hood and his merry men.  

And that really was everyone's life until the Industrial Revolution (jobs for women as well as men in the factories!) and then the technological revolution of the early 1900's, when the Model T (1908) and the radio (1920) made travel and entertainment widely available and affordable.  And advertising sprang up, seemingly out of nowhere, in the mid 1800s... and voila! Suddenly not only did all these new things exist, but people had to have them.

We have been changed, entirely, from a world in which most people simply accepted their lot and lived it, taking their pleasures as they found them:  

Peasant Dance by Breugel

But now we live in a world of choices, hopes, dreams, possibilities, all supplied to us through TV, movies, advertising, endless freaking advertising... And abundance. We live in a country where we can go to the grocery store, drugstore, hardware store, etc. and get anything we want. Or if we don't want to go out, we can do it all from our computers, and put it on our credit cards or Venmo or whatever the latest is.  

Today, most of us have central heat, air conditioning, lighting, plumbing, smartphones, televisions, computers, cars, food (pizza, hotdogs and donuts at every gas station, tacos, burgers, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, fried chicken and biscuits and whatever the latest craze is on every block), endless freaking entertainment 24/7, etc. We have choices about where we're going to eat, drink, work, and live, and what we're going to do (or not) for our living. Granted, it costs money. But we also have a lot of ways to make money, or to borrow it, some legal, some not. We've got it made.

But we want more.  

And almost every political race for almost 60 years has pushed the idea that we're unhappy and discontented and we should be, from Nixon's "This time, vote like your whole world depended on it" to Reagan's "It's Morning Again in America" to, of course, "Make America Great Again." And it's worked.

Because we want more.  

The most comfortable time and place to live in all of history - and for some, the richest as well - and it seems that everyone's seriously discontented most of the time, and feels that they're not doing / being / having enough.  We want more.  Even the billionaires want more.  And more.  And more...

***

So, what does all of this have to do with crime?  Simple.  When there is never enough, and you always need more than you have or are, well, anything can happen, from alcohol /drug /media addiction, to robberies, embezzlement, fraud, ponzi schemes, endless scams to try and drown out the feeling of utter failure… And when nothing else works, there's always suicide, murder, mass murder, and if you have enough influence or power, war.  

And the wealthy are actually just as insecure as (and apparently more greedy than) the rest of us:  They hoard every penny; they don't pay their bills.  They buy enough politicians and voila! no taxes, no regulations, no inspections.  Your employees sue you?  Take them to court... forever.  The employees will drop out first.  Hang on to every last penny no matter what.  J. Paul Getty, at one time the richest man in the world, when his grandson was kidnapped and he received a ransom note and an ear, refused to pay - he said he "couldn't afford it."  And when asked, how much money would it take to make him feel secure, said, "More." 

Probably the earliest novel about envy, greed, and shattered hopes is Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy".  Clyde Griffiths, born poor, working crap jobs, an having an affair with Roberta, another poor worker - and then he meets Sondra Finchley, the rich daughter of a factory owner, who likes him.  They date.  He wants to marry her; and he just might, except Roberta's pregnant.  What's a guy to do?  Murder...  (The 1951 film A Place in the Sun is probably the best adaptation of it: Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters...)

A less romantic take but just as classic (in its own way) is American Psycho:

Patrick Bateman: New card. What do you think?
Craig McDermott: Whoa-ho. Very nice. Look at that.
Patrick Bateman: Picked them up from the printer's yesterday.
David Van Patten: Good coloring.
Patrick Bateman: That's bone. And the lettering is something called Silian Rail.
David Van Patten: It's very cool, Bateman, but that's nothing. Look at this.
Timothy Bryce: That is really nice.
David Van Patten: Eggshell with Romalian type. What do you think?
Patrick Bateman: Nice.
Timothy Bryce: Jesus. That is really super. How'd a nitwit like you get so tasteful?
Patrick Bateman: [Thinking] I can't believe that Bryce prefers Van Patten's card to mine.
Timothy Bryce: But wait. You ain't seen nothin' yet. Raised lettering, pale nimbus. White.
Patrick Bateman: Impressive. Very nice.
David Van Patten: Hmm.
Patrick Bateman: Let's see Paul Allen's card.
Patrick Bateman: [Thinking] Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh, my God. It even has a watermark.
Luis Carruthers: Is something wrong, Patrick? You're sweating. (IMDB)

And then he's off to kill somebody… Anybody.  

Great expectations are very dangerous.

---

*Talleyrand. The eldest son of his house, he was put out to nurse in the countryside for his first few years (normal for the time; following the king was a full-time job) where he was permanently lamed in an accident. His parents then made his younger brother the heir, and put Talleyrand boy into the Church, where he became the most dissolute, loose-living, atheistic Catholic Bishop since the Borgia pope. He was also one of the few noblemen who survived the French Revolution AND the Directoire AND Napoleon AND the Bourbon Restoration… Tough and wily.  

**The Return of Martin Guerre - One of Gerard Depardieu's best roles.

---

To Sleep, Perchance To Dream...

NOTABLE DREAMS IN HISTORY

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein:
Shelley said she was inspired by a nightmare to write her famous novel, Frankenstein, which is considered a foundational work of science fiction.

Elias Howe's Sewing Machine:
Howe's dream of being captured by warriors wielding spears with holes near their tips led him to realize the needle should have the eye near the point, a key innovation for his sewing machine design.

Niels Bohr's Atomic Model:
Bohr's dream of the solar system with planets connected by strings helped him conceptualize the structure of the atom, with electrons orbiting the nucleus.

Paul McCartney's "Yesterday":
McCartney famously composed the melody for the song "Yesterday" entirely in a dream.

Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity:
Einstein recounted a dream where he was sledding downhill at increasing speeds, which led him to contemplate how the appearance of stars would change at near light speed, ultimately contributing to his theory.

Srinivasa Ramanujan: The Man Who Knew Infinity:

Ramanujan said that, throughout his life, he repeatedly dreamed of a Hindu goddess known as Namakkal. She presented him with complex mathematical formulas over and over, which he could then test and verify upon waking. Once such example was the infinite series for Pi.

Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Dmitri Mendeleev's Periodic Table of the Elements:
Mendeleev, struggling to organize the elements, reportedly saw the periodic table in a dream, where elements fell into place based on their properties.

James Watson's Double Helix:
Watson, while working on the structure of DNA, dreamed of two snakes intertwined, which sparked his idea for the double helix structure of DNA.

Otto Loewi: Nerve Impulse Breakthrough:

In 1921, Loewi dreamed of an experiment that would prove once and for all that transmission of nerve impulses was chemical -- not electrical.  Twice, because he forgot the dream and couldn't read his midnight writing, so it repeated itself the next night!

Robert Altman:  Three Women

I've written about this one before - one of my favorite films.

Links:  Wikipedia and World of Lucid Dreaming

Now, I haven't had any dreams that are that important - except to me - but I have always dreamed in full color, often with full (if sometimes incoherent) plot, dialog, people, animals, you name it.  One dream I've never forgotten happened when I was somewhere around 6 or 7:  

I was walking in a jungle, in a cold, cold rain, with seven evil dwarves promising to get me out of the jungle.  An elephant came up to us and said, quite clearly in my mind, "They're liars," which I knew instantly was true,  and "Come with me." His trunk went around my waist - and I can still remember the feel of it under my hands, rough and wrinkled and firm - and lifted me up on his back and then he pushed through and past the dwarves and on out of the jungle...  There were a lot more adventures, which I'm not going to bore you with, but I still remember clearly, and the elephant made sure I stayed safe throughout.  Elephants are always good in my dreams...

I also had a dream where I was in a swimming pool, and everyone else could go through this passage down at the bottom and get out - whatever out was.  But I couldn't.  And then, in a sequence of dreams over a week or two, I was given gills, and then I could breathe underwater, and I finally went through that passage, and came out into a glorious sea, full of color and fish and creatures...  Ever since, the sea has been wild in my dreams, but a source of great happiness and freedom.  

I've also had precognition dreams, i.e., seeing the future.  These are rare, but when they come I know it.  Some are so trivial that it's like, WHAT????  

Example:  I dreamed that I walked into the church we were attending and looked at the cover of the latest new devotional, which had not yet arrived.  A week later, it arrived, and the cover was exactly what I had dreamed.

Example:  My husband and I were going on our first overseas trip to see his relatives in England and Ireland.  One night I dreamed that we were in Victoria Station, and I looked across the lobby and saw my former English professor.  Well, we did indeed arrive at Victoria Station, and we were looking for where to catch the bus, and across the room... you guessed it, my former English professor.  

Others aren't so trivial.  

Example:  About 35 years ago, we were going on vacation to Charleston, SC, with a couple we knew, and I dreamed that I looked up from packing, and saw my husband, outside, with someone attacking him, and the blood running down his face.  So I warned him to be careful while we were there.  Well, what happened was that my girlfriend and I got about a block ahead of the men, talking, and out of nowhere a car pulled up behind us, two guys jumped out of the car and came running towards us doing the drunk "Hey, baby, you're lookin' hot!" which is not the compliment men think it is.  Allan ran forward and got in between them and us, and one of them turned around and told him to piss off, he didn't and the guy punched him. But my husband can take a punch, and they got down to it, until the other guy dragged his pal away.  NOTE:  We called the cops, they found them, two drunk soldiers on leave, and arrested them.

Now something like that could obviously happen on vacation.  But this next one couldn't:

At one of my jobs I had to travel to other offices. The night before heading out, I dreamed that I ran into the wife [who I'd never met] of one of the employees, Joe [name's changed], who'd left Joe and their children for another man, and I was really pissed off about it, as was everyone else.  She kept saying, "But I couldn't help it! You don't understand!  He was so beautiful!"  Well, I woke up, and the next morning, I'm running around the office like a maniac, trying to get ready to go, when I got a call from the secretary. I snapped "I'm on my way!" And the secretary said, "No, no, no. I'm calling because I've got to tell you, Joe's wife died suddenly last night."  After I managed to get my breath back, I told her I was on my way, and told the people in my office what had happened, and asked (as casually as I could) what Joe's wife looked like. He described her, and it was indeed the woman I'd seen in my dream. Whew...  

NOTE 1:  I've had a lot of dreams where the dead have come to me, beginning when I was about six years old and my grandfather died.  I was by his graveside, and a big wind came up and swept everything away except a letter in my hand, which I read and learned by heart in that dream.  There were messages for my grandmother and mother, so when I woke up, I told them both what my grandfather had written to them.  I think it helped my grandmother; my mother freaked out, and I never told her my dreams again.  He also had a message for me, which turned out to be very, very true in my future life.  

NOTE 2:  Two things about precognition dreams.  (1) I always know one when I have one because I get what I call "spiritual vertigo" - at some point I realize what I'm watching is separated from where I am by a physically unbridgeable bottomless abyss, which makes me wake up dizzy and nauseated. (2) And they're very frustrating, because I can't change what happens. I see what I see, and it's going to happen.  Sigh...  In other words, they're not fun to have. 

And yes, I've also had dreams that sparked stories, including the Crow Woman & Dark that Rides stories, as well as "The Ghost of Eros" (Black Cat), "Blue Moon" (AHMM), and "Shut In" (BOULD Awards).  I'm still trying to write a story based on one dream; someday I'll get it.  

Still…

Beauty can stop the

sun and the sea, but dreams are

the language of time

— Eve Fisher

 

In Memoriam: Little Shrimp on the Prairie

Some of you will remember that I've been covering, off and on, any news about the Little Shrimp on the Prairie, i.e., Tru-Shrimp's Madison Bay Harbor since 2018.

(See HERE for my adventures with Dark Ally as we went to Bellaton, searching for the lost Salt Water Aquariums of South Dakota Agriculture.  It's worth it for the scene where we found with 5 listless shrimp floating in a hopefully saline home aquarium, probably begging for their blessed release...)  

And, even though Tru-Shrimp got counties and towns to pony up development, money, and lots of publicity, and even though they promised endless pounds of shrimp from their dark saline towers, nothing has yet been built. Anywhere.  

And now it's official, folks, it never will be:  Sob, sob, sob... (feel free to read that anyway you like.)

"In December, 2018, the [South Dakota] Governor’s Office of Economic Development, or GOED, announced plans for a cutting-edge shrimp production facility in Madison, South Dakota. GOED granted $5.5 million to the Madison Lake Area Improvement Corporation for the project.

The Lake Area Improvement Corporation loaned the money to Tru Shrimp, the company, at 2% interest. The company is now known as Iterro. They planned to build the facility in 2019. Then, they pushed it back to 2024. As of today, it has yet to be built...

Rep. Marty Overweg is the Vice-Chair of GOAC. He said they need answers.

“They took that out and got private investors, South Dakota investors, to invest in their company also because the state of South Dakota gave them the startup money of $5 million," Overweg said. "So not only did they stick us for $5 million, they also stuck a whole bunch of South Dakota people who privately invested in this company. And this is bad business. I mean this is a drop ball, huge mistake.”  

(Uh, Marty, this is what South Dakota does best - look at EB-5, Gear Up!, and many, many more...) 

Iterro and the Madison Lake Area Improvement Corporation did not immediately respond to a request for comment."  (LINK) 

(And if they did, Iterro would undoubtedly answer, "How about never.  Is never good for you?") 

And to anyone who wonders how on earth this happened:  Greed.  Simply greed.  Tru-Shrimp might as well have been selling shrimp-shaped trombones - NO ONE WAS GOING TO MAKE MONEY EXCEPT TRU-SHRIMP.  But there's one born every minute, and a lot of them wear suits and ties and seem sane on the outside... 

Oh, and before they ripped Madison off for $5 million in tax dollars, they ripped off Luverne, MN, for $5 million in tax dollars before ditching them.  

So that's their MO, and if someone comes to your small town or city somewhere on the priarie - or anywhere else - says, "Guess what! There's a company that wants to come here and raise shrimp!" RUN, do not walk, away from them, holding all your money tightly to your chest, because otherwise they'll rip it away from you the way you rip an exoskeleton from a shrimp.  

Me and Dark Ally offer our thoughts and prayers:

Oh, how we hardly knew ye.

*******

And now for something completely different...  

Some days it seems like that's all that's out there, doesn't it?

This is why I miss Colombo, Maigret, Tommy & Tuppence Beresford, and other detectives who actually like their spouses and their jobs.  And I keep reading Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, Dame Frevisse and Cadfael, Nero Wolfe and Jackson Lamb's Slow Horses misfits. They all know who they are and are pretty comfortable with it, no matter how weird and wonderful they get.  

And speaking of being comfortable with who you are, if you haven't yet, check out 1989's mini-series "Summer's Lease" with the late, great Sir John Gielgud playing (at 85!) the cheerfully sponging, endlessly lecherous, sometime journalist Haverford Downs, who manages to slide into his only daughter's family vacation to Italy. There they find their host has disappeared, and there's a very suspicious death...  Gielgud won a Primetime Emmy Award for that role and he deserved it.  Here's episode one, from YouTube (which has all the rest of the episodes, too):

Enjoy.

MEANWHILE, BSP!  

A review from London's own "Murders for August" by Jeremy Black:

"Paranoia Blues. Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Paul Simon (Down and Out Books, 2022) is an excellent volume edited by Josh Pachter, following similar volumes for Joni Mitchell (2020), Jimmy Buffett (2021), Billy Joel (2021) and the Marx Brothers (2021). Each story is matched to a song. Hardboiled America is the setting, and the themes are grim but also well-realised. The writing is spare and aphoristic, violence is to the fore, and it would be good if several of the novelists mentioned this month could match the quality of the writing here. There is no space to review all 19 of the stories, but they are impressive, kicking off with Vietnam echoes and killing in the New York subway system in Gabriel Valjan’s “The Sounds of Silence”. R.J. Koreto’s “April Come She Will” addresses fraud and blackmail, with some marvellous lines: “For men, the possibility of sex is actually better than sex itself…. August, the end of summer, a time when relationships die”. Robert Edward Eckels had stopped writing in 1982 but resumed at 90 to write “The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine”, an account of office theft, poor management, and measured retribution. Frank Zafiro’s “A Hazy Shade of Winter” deals with the travails of an elderly mob enforcer: an instructive perspective. Anna Scotti’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is a brilliant and humane account of hardship, care, and a concealed suicide. Tom Mead’s “The Only Living Boy in New York” takes Civil Rights into violent crime in New York including a spring-loaded leather strap on the protagonist’s wrist. Excellent book."  

I am proud to say that my first "Cool Papa Bell" story (which is also its title) appeared in it.  Cool Papa Ted Bell, former shortstop for a minor league Florida team, is serving life for murder. He feels "kind of bad about it now", but not enough not to turn to the tried and true when he finds Aryan Nation gang The Brand is beating up the infirmary orderly. In prison, justice comes in all kinds of forms. And I never said he's reformed...  

Available at DownandOutBooks:

https://downandoutbooks.com/2022/10/31/new-from-down-out-books-paranoia-blues-crime-fiction-inspired-by-the-songs-of-paul-simon-edited-by-josh-pachter/

And my second Papa Bell story, "Round and Round" is in "Janie's Got a Gun", edited by Michael Bracken.  That one's a ghost story set in a penitentiary, and I can assure you that the ghost is real...  

Available at https://whitecitypress.com/product/janie/

And, of course, both are available on Amazon.com...

Enjoy!
  

Once Again Proving that Reality is Stranger than Fiction

In case you're wondering why I haven't been on the SleuthSayers much lately, I had cataract surgery on each eye, one on one week, and the other 2 weeks later, and an endless supply of eyedrops in between and going on, as far as I can see, until mid-August.  

The surgery actually wasn't as bad in one way as I feared it would be. But they put me (and everyone else) in a giant chair (well a chair made for people much taller and bigger than me), a surgical chair, and that wheeled around, lowered, sat up, flattened out, etc., like a hospital bed. But the top of my head just reached the  bottom of the headrest, and while they brought me a pillow, it all just didn't fit. (I've found the same thing with today's furniture, again, all made for giants, which is why I go furniture shopping at the Hotel Liquidators store.)

Meanwhile, the surgery itself was fascinating for a young adult of the early 70s.  Besides the endless eyedrops, after scooting down to the headrest like a caterpillar (if only I had transformed into a butterfly by the end of it!) I was taped down to the headrest (and, btw, my arms were also encased like a caterpillar; and yes, there was a part of me that thought instantly of the movie Coma).  

And then things happened.  No pain, no scalpels, but it definitely was psychedelic. A group of what looked like rocks, different colors, that changed, and vanished and came back and did that some more.  And then it was over. And they sat me up and rolled me back. Two hours and they were done. My eye dripped all the way home, and all evening along with my sinuses were dripping. But it was done. Ditto the other eye.  

Meanwhile, things did not slow down just because I was seeing fuzzy: 

For the criminally minded, we've had the usual weekly/twice weekly arrests of child predators and child porn. We've had a lot of hit and runs of late. And we had two beheadings in South Dakota this year:

• Yankton, South Dakota (January 2025): Craig Allen Nichols Jr. was charged with murder and manslaughter after the decapitated body of his girlfriend, Heather Bodden, was discovered in her apartment. Bodden's head was located in a trash bag inside the apartment, along with bloody clothing and weapons. Nichols had a history of prior arrests and had been recently released from a mental health facility.  Well, he's in jail, he's going to prison, one hopes to the mental health unit.  
• Clark, South Dakota (July 2025): Bowen Fladland was charged with the murder of his mother, Marlene Fladland, after her decapitated body was found in their front yard. He allegedly admitted to assaulting her, kneeling on her neck until she was deceased, and then using a tool to remove her head. Fladland had a history of domestic violence against his mother, including a prior aggravated assault conviction.  He's in jail, and he's going to prison, probably to share the prison's mental health unit with Mr. Nichols.

Then again, they both might get the death penalty. If so, they'll still end up in prison in Sioux Falls.  

BTW, is this a new trend in murder?  

Anyway, speaking of prison, our prison task force is finalizing a location in Sioux Falls for a new state prison with a $650 million budget (which is after 3 cities turned us down for the new prison), our legislature passed a ban on sanctuary cities (we have none), and the state ended the fiscal year with a $63 million operating surplus, which will be set aside for a rainy day, and when that comes, we still won't see any of it. I know South Dakota.

We also had 200 new laws come into effect as of July 1, 2025.  

My least favorite:  Senate Bill 100, which allows college students to conceal carry firearms on campus if they have an enhanced permit. 

“There is a lot of concern that we’ll see in coming time that it is unfounded and that we can get along just right, honoring and respecting our Second Amendment rights the way they were intended,” Governor Larry Rhoden said. God only knows what that sentence means. 

All I know is that all of my fellow retired colleagues from SDSU agree that we are SO glad we are no longer teaching, because there's a percentage of students (small, but enough) who are unstable and have a tendency to go off like a firecracker. Plus most of us taught a class or two in the Rotunda, which was just what it sounds, a rotunda containing pie-shaped classrooms with tier after tier of seats for students, leading down to the poor teacher at the bottom, who was a standing duck if one of those unstable students decided to exercise their "Second Amendment rights the way they were intended."

My favorite is HB 1067 which defines the term “must” to mean a mandatory directive and does not confer any discretion in carrying out the action so directed. And then goes on to say that "shall" means the exact same thing.  Soooo glad that's cleared up. 

And another polygamous sect has taken over the compound in rural Custer County, about nine miles southwest of the small town of Pringle, blends into the landscape just like other properties in the southern Black Hills that used to belong to the Warren Jeffs group of The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). Thankfully, Mr. Jeffs is now serving a life sentence in a Texas prison for sexual assault on a child. 

But there's apparently more where he came from, and this time it's the Order, – aka the Kingston Order, the Kingston Group, the Davis County Cooperative Society (DCCS) or the Latter Day Church of Jesus Christ (LDCJC), and while they're not officially affiliated with the FLDS, they practice most of the same stuff:  polygamy, incest, child abuse, child labor violations and fraud, according to the Associated Press.  (LINK)  

BTW, if you want to see the place, some of the buildings at the property have recently been posted as available for rent on Airbnb.  

Sigh…

Well, at least I can see better.

What We Get Wrong About Violent Crime

 by Eve Fisher

On May 2, 2025, The New Yorker posted an article by Malcolm Gladwell, "What We Get Wrong About Violent Crime".  (LINK) Now I'll read about anything by MG - don't always agree with him, but he's generally interesting - and this was worth it.  

Here's the official story that sparks it:

"Late on a Sunday night in June of 2023, a woman named Carlishia Hood and her fourteen-year-old son, an honor student, pulled into Maxwell Street Express, a fast-food joint in West Pullman, on the far South Side of Chicago. Her son stayed in the car. Hood went inside. Maxwell is a no-frills place—takeout-style, no indoor seating. It’s open twenty-four hours a day. Hood asked for a special order—without realizing that at Maxwell, a busy place, special orders are frowned upon. The man behind her in line got upset; she was slowing things down. His name was Jeremy Brown. On the street, they called him the Knock-Out King. Brown began to gesticulate, his arms rising and falling in exasperation. He argued with Hood, growing more agitated. Then he cocked his fist, leaned back to bring the full weight of his body into the motion, and punched her in the head.

When the argument had started, Hood texted her son, asking him to come inside. Now he was at the door, slight and tentative in a white hoodie. He saw Brown punch his mother a second time. The boy pulled out a revolver and shot Brown in the back. Brown ran from the restaurant. The boy pursued him, still firing. Brown died on the street—one of a dozen men killed by gunfire in Chicago that weekend.

In the remarkable new book “Unforgiving Places” (Chicago), Jens Ludwig breaks down the Brown killing, moment by moment. Ludwig is the director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, and he uses as a heuristic the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s version of the distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking."

System 1 - "Expressive Violence" - fast, automatic, intuitive, emotional:  hurting someone in a sudden burst of frustration, anger, confusion, or drug addled state.

System 2 - "Instrumental violence", acts such as a carefully planned robbery, whether of an individual or a bank. Or a serial killer. 

Now, according to Ludwig, our criminal justice system is largely based on the idea that most violence is System 2, instrumental, i.e., planned, BUT the real problem is System 1, expressive violence, i.e., spontaneous. "The ongoing bloodshed in America’s streets is just Maxwell Street Express, over and over again."  I totally agree.

South Dakota's incarceration rate is 370 per 100,000 residents, which is higher than the national average, and higher than any other democratic country in the world.  We are, as all our gubernatorial and legislative candidates are proud to say, "tough on crime."  Most inmates (around 80%) are in for non-violent crimes, mostly drugs and/or DUIs.*  Of the violent crimes, most are (in percentage order) in for assault, sexual assault, manslaughter, sexual assault of a child, robbery, first degree murder, burglary, kidnapping, child abuse, 2nd degree murder, weapons charges, arson, and stalking.  If you added up all the sex crimes, they'd outnumber assault, but that's another blogpost. Let's just say that there's a lot of sex crimes in South Dakota, and every week someone is arrested for one, but no one really talks about it.

*Sentences are harsh up here, and very little in the way of drug and alcohol treatment or rehabilitation is provided.  So a significant number are revolving door inmates - they get out, they come back, they get out, they come back...  

In my years volunteering in prison, I've met inmates convicted of any and all of the above.  And heard a lot of stories.  

The inmate who'd served 30+ years for a drunken teenaged bar brawl that got taken outside.  Both tried to kill the other, and one succeeded.  

The middle-aged inmate who'd tweaked out so often on meth that his brain was still addled after 20 years hard time, but he could clearly remember the time he was tweaked out, and his meth buddy was grabbing a beer that he thought was his, and he went ballistic and stabbed him.  

The inmate who killed his wife because he couldn't take one more minute of living with her. "What's wrong with divorce?" I asked. "Too damn expensive," he said.

The inmate who killed someone in a drug deal gone bad and left him in a car in the middle of winter outside of town...  Took a long time for that body to be found. 

The inmate who assaulted and damn near killed a guy who owed him 6 soups (Ramen, the prison favorite and a form of currency).  "What was I supposed to do, let him get away with disrespecting me like that?"

BTW, much of the violent crime in the prison is based on someone's perceived disrespect - which must be instantly dealt with, before other inmates start perceiving you as weak, i.e., prey.  

And many more.

Basically, almost all of the violent criminals I've met are System 1 criminals.  As Ludwig writes, 

"System 1 thinking is egocentric: it involves, everything through the lens of ‘What does this have to do with me?’ It depends on stark binaries—reducing a range of possibilities to a simple yes or no—and, as he notes, it “focuses more on negative over positive information.” In short, it’s wired for threats. System 1 catastrophizes. It imagines the worst."

I ran into this all the time in our AVP (Alternative to Violence Project) workshops.  We'd be doing exercises on the root causes of violence, on anger (which is always a masking emotion - no one runs out and gets angry because it's fun), on act/react, etc.  A lot of responses were, "Well, what the hell am I supposed to do when someone disrespects me?" "You let someone take your stuff, you'd better get them right away, or everyone'll think you're just a punk." "You HAVE to react, around here."  

Thankfully, we always had inmate facilitators who would explain that you didn't HAVE to do anything you didn't want to.  But first you had to learn to slow that reaction, that anger down...  Deep breaths. What's going on? Is this worth time in the SHU?* What would really happen if I just walked away?  

*Segregated Housing Unit, i.e., The Hole.

It didn't always work, and it often took a long time to become part of someone's way of thinking and acting, but when it did... it was remarkable.  Our facilitators, and our inmate graduates, stayed out of the SHU, and stayed out of gang wars.  Which were always based on respect/disrespect issues, i.e., System 1.

"Brown’s encounter with Carlishia Hood pushed him into System 1 mode. He made an immediate egocentric assumption: if he knew that special orders were a norm violation, then Hood must know, too. “Given that System 1 assumption,” Ludwig explains, “from there it is natural that Brown believed the person in front of him was deliberately holding things up.”

"Hood, meanwhile, didn’t know about the special-order taboo, so she was operating under her own egocentric assumptions. She “knew she wasn’t being disrespectful and deliberately trying to hold up everyone else in line, so the curse of knowledge led her System 1 to assume that Brown surely also knew that,” Ludwig writes. “So why was he getting so bent out of shape? She didn’t mean to be inconsiderate to the people behind her in line; she just wanted the Maxwell Street Express people to change whatever it was that she wanted changed on the burger.” Neither had the cognitive space to consider that they were caught in a misunderstanding. They were in binary mode: I’m right, so you must be wrong. From there, things escalated: 

Hood says to her son, who’s standing behind Brown, “Get in the car.”

Brown seems to think that comment is directed at him—another misreading of the situation.“WHO?!?” he says. “Get in the CAR?!?”

Hood says something that’s hard to make out from the video.

Brown says, “Hey lady, lady, lady, lady. GET YOUR FOOD. GET YOUR FOOD. If you say one more thing, I’m going to KNOCK YOU OUT.” You can see his right fist, clenching and unclenching, over and over.

She says something that is again hard to make out on the video.

He says, “Oh my God I SAID if you say one more thing, I’m going to knock you out.”

At which point he punches her—hard.

Hood’s son is standing in the doorway, watching the assault of his mother. Had he been in System 2 mode, he might have paused. He might have asked for help. He might have called 911. He could have weighed the trade-offs and thought, Yes, it’s unbearable to watch my mother being beaten. But, if I kill this man, I could spend years in prison. But he’s filled with adrenaline. He shifts into catastrophizing mode: There is nothing worse than seeing my mother get pummelled by a stranger. Brown punches her again—and again. The boy shoots him in the back. Brown runs. Hood tells her son to follow him. There is nothing worse than letting him get away. Still in System 1, the boy fires again. Brown collapses in the street."

And that, my friends, is what most homicides look like. Out of nowhere. No good reason. Shit happens.  

BTW, this is one of my favorite parts:  

"Much of what gets labelled gang violence, Ludwig says, is really just conflict between individuals who happen to be in gangs. We misread these events because we insist on naming the affiliations of the combatants. Imagine, he suggests, if we did this for everyone: “ ‘This morning by Buckingham Fountain, a financial analyst at Morningstar killed a mechanic for United Airlines.’ Naturally you’d think the place of employment must be relevant to understanding the shooting, otherwise why mention it at all?”

"The Chicago Police Department estimates that arguments lie behind seventy to eighty per cent of homicides. The numbers for Philadelphia and Milwaukee are similar. And that proportion has held remarkably steady over time. Drawing on data from Houston in 1969, the sociologist Donald Black concluded that barely more than a tenth of homicides occurred during predatory crimes like burglary or robbery. The rest, he found, arose from emotionally charged disputes—over infidelity, household finances, drinking, child custody. Not calculated acts of gain, in other words, but eruptions rooted in contested ideas of right and wrong."

Meanwhile, our criminal justice system is designed with the idea that people weigh the costs of their actions and act accordingly.  In the heat of the moment, especially if alcohol, drugs, and/or mental disturbances are involved, no one thinks about "Well, I'll go to prison for life if I do this", especially if they're young. Teenagers run on surging tsunamis of emotions that wipe out all sense of sense.  Too many adults - in and out of prison - are still emotionally teenagers, because they've never been taught how to deal with their emotions.  And these days our entire advertising system is aimed at getting you to buy (products, ideas, politics, wars) without thinking. We have got to spend time and energy training children, teenagers, and adults how to navigate life the way it is: constantly changing, often volatile, and sometimes downright violent and dangerous. We live in a world full of drugs, alcohol, guns, and violent social media content, and we're still commonly assuming our towns are Mayberry, and everyone's the Waltons. Gotta cut that OUT.  

Three other things we've got to cut out, according to Ludwig is to 

(1) "stop talking about criminals as if they occupy some distinct moral category." As I tell people when I've done presentations about AVP and prisons, everyone is one bad decision, one bad night, one bad choice, away from going to prison.  Everyone.

(2) "stop locking up so many people for long prison terms." Mass incarceration drains adults from troubled neighborhoods and their families, and the longer you keep someone in prison, without rehabilitation or education, the less able they're going to be to deal with the world outside.

(3) "spend more time thinking about what makes one neighborhood safe and another unsafe." Ludwig cites a randomized trial in New York City’s public-housing projects, which found that upgrading outdoor lighting experienced a 35% decrease in serious crimes. Help bad neighborhoods clean up.  

"[Ludwig] describes one of the program’s exercises, in which students are paired off. One is given a ball; the other is told he has thirty seconds to take it.

"Almost all of them rely on force to try to complete the assignment; they try to pry the other person’s hand open, or wrestle or even pummel the other person. During the debrief that follows, a counselor asks why no one asked for the ball. Most youths respond by saying their partner would have thought they were a punk (or something worse—you can imagine). The counselor then asks the partner what he would have done if asked. The usual answer: “I would have given it, it’s just a stupid ball.”  Exactly. It’s almost always a stupid ball."

Now to just convince them - and us - that almost everything is almost always a stupid ball.    

Little Girl, Watching Movies

Imagine a young girl, tween, early teen, sitting by herself in front of the TV on an early or late afternoon, watching the station that showed a lot of old (and once in a while reasonably new) movies. Tarzan movies (Johnny Weissmuller, of course), sci-fi, horror, dramas, comedies, and weird movies that no one else, apparently, had ever seen.  

It was quite an education.  Here are some of the highlights:

Sci-fi Movies:

Forbidden Planet - One of the best of the lot (the other will be found further down). My first meeting with Robbie the Robot.  While it took me years to figure out it was a take-off of Shakespeare's The Tempest, I loved the whole "monsters from the id" line, and the invisibility of it.  Very exciting. 

Unfortunately, most of the sci-fi movies were schlock, and the worst was probably The Queen of Outer Space - Zsa Zsa Gabor and a lot of starlets in cone bras...  

NOTE:  Cone bras apparently were everywhere in the 1950s. Why they were so popular for so long, I have no idea...  See https://www.wmagazine.com/fashion/cone-bra-corset-trend-history.  

Probably second worst:  The Attack of the Giant Leeches - B&W 1959. Has to be seen to be believed, and even then...  Trivia note:  one of the stars of the Giant Leeches was actress Yvette Vickers who was the Playmate centerfold in the July 1959 issue of Playboy, just a few months before the movie's release, which I'm sure increased attendance.  

Lesson to be learned from old American B&W sci-fi movies is that every man, monster, robot and alien wants pulchritudinous white women.   

Japanese movies, however, were different:   

Matango, a/k/a The Attack of the Mushroom People - 1963 Japanese horror movie directed by Ishiro Honda (who directed and co-wrote the original Godzilla and many more).  A group of castaways on an island are unwittingly altered into monsters after they eat certain mutagenic mushrooms...  Although I didn't know it at the time, it was almost banned in Japan because they felt that the monsters resembled facial disfigurements caused by Hiroshima and Nagasaki; although of course, that might have been the whole idea.  Spooky, yet strangely moving, hard to forget.

Movies that scared me silly:

1984 - Made in 1956, starring Edmond O'Brien, Michael Redgrave, Jan Sterling, and Donald Pleasance. The scene with the rats was perhaps the scariest thing I'd ever seen, and it gave me nightmares.  Interestingly, I've never met anyone who actually saw this movie in a theater - I guess it bombed at the box office.  

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers - 1954, and set in a fictional California small town. You know the plot. You know the term "pod people".  But it still packs a punch as person after person is duplicated and replaced...  And they find the pods...  And Becky falls asleep...  Well...  

Trivia NOTE: Future director Sam Peckinpah played the bit part of Charlie, a meter reader.  

The Haunting - 1963.  Based on the Shirley Jackson novel, starring Julie Harris, and Claire Bloom. I think it's the most frightening movie* ever made, simply because you never see anything. You hear it. And by the time those two great actresses, Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, are done with you, you feel it.  And it has the scariest line I've ever heard in a movie:  "God! God! Whose hand was I holding?"   (*Spielberg agrees with me.)  

Not that scary, but one of my favorites:

Rear Window - I was a tween when I saw it, and I could hardly wait to be old enough to live by myself in Jeff Jeffries' (Jimmy Stewart) apartment, watching and listening and following all the crazies around me.  

NOTE:  Interestingly, I rewatched it a couple of weeks ago, and for the first time I noticed one fatal flaw in the movie:  Jeff, who's a professional photographer, has his left leg in a cast, from hip to toes, and is in a wheelchair 90% of the time, so no wonder he spends all his time watching the neighbors.  No problem there. And he figures out that one of them killed his wife, and he's trying to find evidence, long distance, using first binoculars, and then a massive telephoto lens on one of his cameras.  He finally sees Thorvald, after his wife supposedly went on a trip, with his wife's purse, pulling out jewelry, including the wife's wedding ring.  So what's the flaw?  WHY DOESN'T JEFF TAKE A BUNCH OF PICTURES OF THORVALD AND HIS WIFE'S STUFF?  He's a professional photographer.  He's got a telephoto lens which could pick out the feathers on a flying swallow.  Surely he's got film in the house.  I don't know why I never noticed that before...  

Still love the movie, though.

Movies that for years I couldn't persuade people actually existed:

We're No Angels - Still my favorite Christmas movie of all time, with Humphrey Bogart, Aldo Ray, Peter Ustinov, Leo G. Carroll, Basil Rathbone, Joan Bennett, and St. Adolph...  Read my love-letter to the movie HERE.

The Producers - Yes, Mel Brooks' classic 1967 film. I was old enough by then to get most of the jokes, and I nearly died of laughter at the line "don't be a dummy, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party!" My introduction to Gene Wilder, Zero Mostel, Dick Shawn (hilarious as L.S.D.), and Mel Brooks, as always, going over the top.  Loved him ever since.  

Harold and Maude - I saw Hal Ashby's 1971 classic in the theater, but most people didn't like it. I laughed so hard I was crying. After 10-11 years, it finally hit cult status, and I could finally share it with my friends.  Huzzah!

Highly Educational:

Tarzan and His Mate - 1934, pre-Code B&W, the 2nd in the series with Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan and Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane.  This is the film with the nude Jane/Tarzan swimming scene.  I remember it well...  You can see it on YouTube HERE.  

If I couldn't have Jeff Jeffries' apartment, I wanted Tarzan and Jane's treehouse.  And lifestyle. And I wouldn't have minded having THAT Tarzan...  

Sheer silly fun:

The Pickwick Papers - (1952)  I started reading Dickens early in life, and this adaptation is, imho, the most Dickensian I've ever seen.  B&W, with full throttle performances, perfect costumes, manners, mannerisms, everything.  I bought a copy of it years ago on DVD.  I love it.  

Mrs. Leo Hunter, reading from her own composition, 

"Ode to an Expiring Frog".