Farewell Darkness, Welcome Light!

"We don't believe; we fear." Inuit spiritual healer Aua to explorer Knud Rasmussen (some time between 1921-1924).

"In the distance the dark outlines of the little hut emerge. Here, always on the same spot, I have for some time been startled by a remarkable fantasy. I imagine that something has risen out of the unquiet water in the last inlet before the hut, a dark form which is making its way towards me, bent, noiseless, and ineluctable. Again and again I try to banish this phantom, clear and sharp though its outlines may be in my imagination. How astonished I am then in the winter night, to find in an old case of books left behind by the hunter Nois an old number of Allers Familienjournal, containing an article on spectres which reproduces a faithful likeness of my own phantom. There is the hobgoblin and the legendary sea-serpent, and there also is the black figure as it rises out of the water and, stooping, slowly and inexorably approaches its victim. The caption reads: ‘A spectre of the shore which appears to fishermen.'"
— A Woman in the Polar Night (1938), by Christiane Ritter, translated by Jane Degras, p. 98.*

"Winter’s a dangerous thing to love. It’s pure and it’s gorgeous and it owns this land. It owns us. We sit in our houses with the heat turned up and think what a pretty day it is out there, with the sun gleaming on the snow or the snow dancing in the air. But a tree falls in the ice, and the power goes out and we’re ice men again. We’re out on the road and we’re full of the power of our automobiles and at the same time we know one little slip, one little mistake in judgment or speed or just the chance encounter with a pebble or a bird or a deer and there we are, with winter laughing all around us. You live up here, and it doesn’t take long to understand why crime rates drop like a stone come November. Winter takes the place of crime; winter takes the place of night; winter takes the place of the bogey-man and the mothman and the raptors and everything you’ve ever been afraid of. Winter rules everything, and if you don’t know that, you don’t know anything. And you will die."
— Eve Fisher, Drifts, AHMM (Jan/Feb 2006)

***

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!
   - Traditional Scots Prayer

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Savior's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallowed and so gracious is the time.
--Marcellus.

So have I heard and do in part believe it.
--Horatio.

"So says the immortal Shakespeare [Hamlet, act 1, scene 1]; and the truth thereof few nowadays, I hope, will call in question. Grose observes, too, that those born on Christmas Day cannot see spirits; which is another incontrovertible fact.

"What a happiness this must have been seventy or eighty years ago and upwards, to those chosen few who had the good luck to be born on the eve of this festival of all festivals; when the whole earth was so overrun with ghosts, boggles, bloody-bones, spirits, demons, ignis fatui, brownies, bugbears, black dogs, specters, shellycoats, scarecrows, witches, wizards, barguests, Robin-Goodfellows, hags, night-bats, scrags, breaknecks, fantasms, hobgoblins, hobhoulards, boggy-boes, dobbies, hob-thrusts, fetches, kelpies, warlocks, mock-beggars, mum-pokers, Jemmy-burties, urchins, satyrs, pans, fauns, sirens, tritons, centaurs, calcars, nymphs, imps, incubuses, spoorns, men-in-the-oak, hell-wains, fire-drakes, kit-a-can-sticks, Tom-tumblers, melch-dicks, larrs, kitty-witches, hobby-lanthorns, Dick-a-Tuesdays, Elf-fires, Gyl-burnt-tales, knockers, elves, rawheads, Meg-with-the-wads, old-shocks, ouphs, pad-foots, pixies, pictrees, giants, dwarfs, Tom-pokers, tutgots, snapdragons, sprets, spunks, conjurers, thurses, spurns, tantarrabobs, swaithes, tints, tod-lowries, Jack-in-the-Wads, mormos, changelings, redcaps, yeth-hounds, colt-pixies, Tom-thumbs, black-bugs, boggarts, scar-bugs, shag-foals, hodge-pochers, hob-thrushes, bugs, bull-beggars, bygorns, bolls, caddies, bomen, brags, wraiths, waffs, flay-boggarts, fiends, gallytrots, imps, gytrashes, patches, hob-and-lanthorns, gringes, boguests, bonelesses, Peg-powlers, pucks, fays, kidnappers, gallybeggars, hudskins, nickers, madcaps, trolls, robinets, friars' lanthorns, silkies, cauld-lads, death-hearses, goblins, hob-headlesses, bugaboos, kows, or cowes, nickies, nacks [necks], waiths, miffies, buckies, ghouls, sylphs, guests, swarths, freiths, freits, gy-carlins [Gyre-carling], pigmies, chittifaces, nixies, Jinny-burnt-tails, dudmen, hell-hounds, dopple-gangers, boggleboes, bogies, redmen, portunes, grants, hobbits, hobgoblins, brown-men, cowies, dunnies, wirrikows, alholdes, mannikins, follets, korreds, lubberkins, cluricauns, kobolds, leprechauns, kors, mares, korreds, puckles korigans, sylvans, succubuses, blackmen, shadows, banshees, lian-hanshees, clabbernappers, Gabriel-hounds, mawkins, doubles, corpse lights or candles, scrats, mahounds, trows, gnomes, sprites, fates, fiends, sibyls, nicknevins, whitewomen, fairies, thrummy-caps, cutties, and nisses, and apparitions of every shape, make, form, fashion, kind and description, that there was not a village in England that had not its own peculiar ghost.

"Nay, every lone tenement, castle, or mansion-house, which could boast of any antiquity had its bogle, its specter, or its knocker. The churches, churchyards, and crossroads were all haunted. Every green lane had its boulder-stone on which an apparition kept watch at night. Every common had its circle of fairies belonging to it. And there was scarcely a shepherd to be met with who had not seen a spirit!"

The Denham Tracts, edited by James Hardy  (SOURCE)**

Whew.  

***

Anyway, there's a reason why Christmas comes in the darkest time of the year (in ancient Rome, the winter solstice was on December 25... calendar time has changed with the centuries).  Four days after the winter solstice, when the 4-7 minutes you gain are barely noticeable, you need light, torches, songs, feasting, and and a Yule log that will burn all the way to Twelfth Night, to beat back everything and anything of monsters and death and endless darkness.  Even now, on January 8th, we've only gained 15 minutes of light.  And it's worse the further north you live in December, and in the Southern Hemisphere, the further south you live in June.  In each case, the polar night lasts around 4 months.  That's a long time to live in the dark.  

Except, of course, for the aurora borealis / aurora australis.  Light in absolute darkness...  (From Wikipedia):

The earliest depiction of the aurora may have been in Cro-Magnon cave paintings of northern Spain dating to 30,000 BC:

The oldest known written record of the wintertime aurora was in a Chinese legend written around 2600 BC; an autumnal aurora is recorded centuries later, around 2000 BC.  

The Aboriginal Australians say the aurora australis is bushfires, or a kootchee (an evil spirit creating a large fire), or the campfires of spirits in the Land of the Dead.  The Maori of New Zealand, the Dene and other northern Native Americans, all see their departed friends dancing the sky around the campfires.  Way up north, the Sami and the Inuit share similar beliefs of northern lights being the blood of the deceased, 'some believing they are caused by dead warriors' blood spraying on the sky as they engage in playing games, riding horses, or having fun in some other way.'

John W. Thompson, Jr., a Civil War survivor of the Battle of Fredericksburg, wrote "Louisiana sent those famous cosmopolitan Zouaves called the Louisiana Tigers, and there were Florida troops who, undismayed in fire, stampeded the night after Fredericksburg, when the Aurora Borealis snapped and crackled over that field of the frozen dead hard by the Rappahannock ..."

Speaking of the Lights making sound - they do. They really do.  

  

So light candles! Keep the hot drinks flowing, the sweet treats coming, and late at night, cuddle under the covers, and listen to the light crackling in the sky...  

The darkness is vanquished!  

The light is finally returning!    

*Back in 1933, Viennese Christiane Ritter spent a year on the remote archipelago of Svalbard, far above the Arctic Circle, with her husband and another hunter.  It's an amazing record, and I highly recommend it.  

**From "Folklord and Mythology Electronic Texts", edited and/or translated by D. L. Ashliman, University of Pittsburgh.  (HERE)  A wonderful source for just about any folklore you would want to know about.  Enjoy!

Christmas Movies for the Ages — at Our House At Least

(This first appeared 10 years ago, but I think it's always good to look at (my) classics again!)

I love a good Christmas movie or story, but I take my entertainment with a little salt, thanks. Or at least a shot glass. And a little murder just adds to the fun.  Here's a list of my favorite Christmas movies, the ones my husband and I watch every year, and yes, we know the lines by heart:

We're No Angels, 1955

I first saw this when I was ten years old, back in the 60's, watching it on a black and white TV set, all by myself. I laughed until I cried, and I remembered lines from it for years afterwards. It warped me for life.

"I read someplace that when a lady faints, you should loosen her clothing." - Albert (Aldo Ray)

Three convicts escape from the prison on Devil's Island on Christmas Eve. There's Humphrey Bogart as Joseph, a maniac and master forger, Peter Ustinov as Jules, an expert safe-cracker, in prison only because of a "slight difference of opinion with my wife", and Aldo Ray as Albert, "a swine" of a heart breaker who only fell afoul of the law after asking his uncle for money (the illegal part was when said uncle said "no" and Albert beat him to death with a poker – 29 times, mam'selle). Oh, and their fellow-traveler, Adolphe - or is it Adolf?

"We came here to rob them and that's what we're gonna do – beat their heads in, gouge their eyes out, slash their throats. Soon as we wash the dishes." – Joseph

Anyway, these 3 convicts need money, clothing, passports - and they find it all at Ducotel's General Store, the famous Ducotel's, "the one who gives credit". Along with Felix (Leo G. Carroll), the most inept, innocent, and financially challenged manager in history, his beautiful wife, Amelie (played by Joan Bennett), and their daughter Isobel (Gloria Talbott, in full super virgin mode).

You can see where this is going: they get hired, they get interested, they get all warm fuzzy, they change their ways, everyone is happy. Right? Well, not quite. Because the big fat plum in this pudding is Basil Rathbone as Andre Trochard, who owns Ducotel's, and has come to Devil's Island - with his sycophantic nephew Paul - to do the books on Christmas Day. I love a good villain, and Basil Rathbone is as snooty, snotty, sneering, vindictive, scheming, insulting, arrogant, belittling, and generally nasty as they come. ("Your opinion of me has no cash value." – Andre Trochard.) He makes Ebenezer Scrooge look like a warm pussy cat.

Andre Trochard - "Twenty years in solitary – how's that for a Christmas present?"

Jules – "That's a lovely Christmas present. But how are you going to wrap it up?"

There's no Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, or Future in this one; no "God bless us, every one"; no Tiny Tim; but there's theft and forgery, fraud and deceit, murder and mayhem, all done with sharp, hilarious dialog. Go. Rent it now. Pour a Chateau Yquem (you'll understand later) or its equivalent, pull out a turkey leg, and enjoy! Merry Christmas! Compliments of the Season!

The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942), Monty Wooley, Bette Davis, Jimmy Durante, and more. The worst house guest in the world is also the most erudite, witty, arrogant, and popular man on the planet. Sheridan Whiteside was Kaufman and Hart's masterpiece (especially as played by Monty Wooley), based on (of course) the real Algonquin Club's founder, leader, gatekeeper and spoiled child, Alexander Woollcott.

Jimmy Durante, Mary Wickes (in her breakthrough screen role), and Monty Wooley

The play - and the movie - are chock full of characters who were based, almost libellously, on real people. Banjo = Harpo Marx. Beverly Carlton = Noel Coward. Lorraine Sheldon = Gertrude Lawrence, of whom Beverly Carlton says, in my favorite movie line of all time,

"They do say she set fire to her mother, but I don't believe it."

And Mary Wickes as Nurse Preen, who has to nurse the impossible Sheridan Whiteside:

"I am not only walking out on this case, Mr. Whiteside, I am leaving the nursing profession. I became a nurse because all my life, ever since I was a little girl, I was filled with the idea of serving a suffering humanity. After one month with you , Mr. Whiteside, I am going to work in a munitions factory. From now on , anything I can do to help exterminate the human race will fill me with the greatest of pleasure. If Florence Nightingale had ever nursed YOU, Mr. Whiteside, she would have married Jack the Ripper instead of founding the Red Cross!"

Somebody had to finally say it.

A/k/a Reborn (1981). Directed by Bigas Luna, "starring" Dennis Hopper as the snake-oil selling Reverend Tom Hartley, Michael Moriarty as Mark (a thickly-veiled Joseph), and (I kid you not, spoiler alert!) a helicopter as the Holy Spirit. While it has horrible production values, and was obviously made (in Italy, Spain, and Houston, TX) on rather less than a shoestring (I think all the money was spent on the helicopter), this may be one of the most interesting versions of the Nativity that's ever been done.  

"You're going to have a baby? I can't have a baby! I can't even take care of myself, much less a baby!" Mark.

The Thin Man (1934). William Powell and Myrna Loy. Machine-gun dialog, much of it hilarious. A middle-aged peroxide blonde and an incredibly young Maureen O'Sullivan. More drinking than anyone would dare put into a movie today, at least not without a quick trip to rehab for somebody, especially Nick Charles. And mostly true to Dashiell Hammett's plot.

"Is he working on the case?" "Yes, a case of scotch!"

Okay, a quick break for myself and the kids and the grandkids: A Muppet Christmas Carol (with Michael Caine), A Charlie Brown Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas (narrated by Boris Karloff) A Christmas Story. Love, love, love them ALL.

"You'll shoot your eye out!"

Okay, back to more adult fare:

Love Actually (2003), mostly because I start laughing as soon as Bill Nighy starts cursing. (What can I say? I'm that kind of girl.)

"Hiya kids. Here is an important message from your Uncle Bill. Don't buy drugs. Become a pop star, and they give you them for free!" Truer words are rarely spoken in a Christmas movie…

© IMDb

Totally NON-secret NON-guilty pleasure: Blackadder's Christmas Carol (1988). Rowan Atkinson (Blackadder), Tony Robinson (Baldrick), Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Miranda Richardson, Jim Broadbent and Miram Margolyes as Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, and Robbie Coltrane as the Spirit of Christmas…

© IMDb

"Mrs. Scratchit, Tiny Tom is fifteen stone and built like a brick privy. If he eats any more heartily, he will turn into a pie shop." God bless us, everyone.

Scrooge (A Christmas Carol) (1951). Alistair Sim. This is my favorite version, mostly because it feels like Dickens to me, because I love Fezziwig's sideburns, because of the hysterical charwoman, but mostly because Mr. Sim's Scrooge really ENJOYS being a hard-hearted miser from hell. Which makes his delight, after coming back from his Christmas travels among the spirits, more believable. Or at least I always find myself grinning from ear to ear...

"I don't deserve to be this happy. But I simply can't help it!"

Hey, there's 12 Days of Christmas, and this is only the first one – there's PLENTY of time to watch them all!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Sudden Death Syndrome and the Missing Corpse: The Walshes

Mostly from CNN, but this picture is from the Boston Globe:

Ana Walshe

Ana Walshe was 39, a Serbian immigrant who worked for a real estate company in Washington, D.C. She made $300,000K a year (which wouldn't be that outrageous in our capitol city). Ana had over $1 million in insurance policies and substantial amounts of money in her bank accounts.

Brian, on the other hand, had pled guilty to federal crimes over a scheme to sell counterfeit Andy Warhol paintings, and was awaiting sentencing at the time of Ana’s disappearance.

The Walshes and their 3 children lived in Cohasset, Mass., but Ana worked in DC and stayed in a townhouse there. Brian claimed Ana left for work on Jan.1 between 6 and 7 am he hadn’t heard from her after sending a text message that her plane landed in Washington, D.C. Ana’s phone last interacted with Verizon on Jan. 2, at 3 am near the Walshe home. Brian and a coworker alerted authorities on Jan. 4, 2023, that Ana was missing.

Cohasset Police Department Detective Harrison Schmidt, the lead investigator on the case, responded to the Walshe home on Jan. 4, 2023, where he found Brian with his three children (ages 2, 4 and 6) eating McDonald’s. He testified that Brian claimed Ana left early Jan. 1 for an emergency work meeting in DC, and showed him texts and photos Ana sent about her JetBlue flight. Brian also claimed he lost his phone New Year’s Eve but his son found it later in the son’s room.

BTW, the detective conducted a walkthrough, they drained the pool, and probably the most interesting feature was that the trunk of the family's Volvo was lined in plastic.

And now, Brian Walshe's Google search history on multiple devices including his son's iPad: [my emphasis, because that's just plain COLD]

January 1:

4:55 a.m. - How long before a body starts to smell.

4:58 a.m. - How to stop a body from decomposing.

5:47 a.m. - 10 ways to dispose of a dead body if you really need to.

6:25 a.m. - How long for someone to be missing to inherit.

6:34 a.m. - Can you throw away body parts.

9:29 a.m. - What does formaldehyde do.

9:34 a.m. - How long does DNA last.

9:59 a.m. - Can identification be made on partial remains.

11:34 a.m. - Dismemberment and the best ways to dispose of a body.

11:44 a.m. - How to clean blood from wooden floor.

11:56 a.m. - Luminol to detect blood.

1:08 p.m. - What happens when you put body parts in ammonia.

1:21 p.m. - Is it better to put crime scene clothes away or wash them.

January 2: Walshe went to a Home Depot and paid $450 in cash for supplies, including mops, a bucket, goggles, tarps, a hatchet and baking soda.

12:45 p.m. - Hacksaw best tool to dismember.

1:10 p.m. - Can you be charged with murder without a body.

1:14 p.m. - Can you identify a body with broken teeth.

January 3:

1:02 p.m. - What happens to hair on a dead body.

1:13 p.m. - What is the rate of decomposition of a body found in a plastic bag compared to on a surface in the woods.

1:20 p.m. - Can baking soda mask or make a body smell good.

No grisly searches about how to dispose of a body or clean up blood occurred before the morning of January 1, 2023. (HERE)

Items found in a dumpster included Ana’s Hunter boots, a hatchet, and a hacksaw with DNA evidence linking to both Ana and Brian.

Evidence recovered from dumpster in January 2023
shown during Brian Walshe's murder trial. — Pool

Now the defense attorney, Larry Tipton, admitted that Brian lied to the police and made incriminating searches, but said he didn’t kill his wife and only panicked to dispose of her body, because Brian thought that no one would believe he didn’t cause her death (which is a very nice euphemism for 'kill her'). 

NOTE:  Whatever you do, do not "dispose" of a body the way Brian Walshe did, because it's illegal.  He pled guilty to illegally disposing of his wife's body and misleading police after her death - something, BTW, that the jury (so far) doesn't know.

He said there were loving text messages between the couple, and while there was stress, it was from the fraud case, not Ana's affair (with William Fastow, who helped her buy the townhouse in DC), which Brian knew nothing about. The defense attorney also declared that Ana died of Sudden Death Syndrome (at which point I nearly spit my hot tea across the room), and that he would bring medical experts to inform the jury and all the rest of us just what that is. [I can hardly wait to hear that…]

BTW, I can't help but think of the married Colorado dentist who fell in love with another woman & started looking up things on the internet like, “is arsenic detectable in an autopsy?” and “how to make murder look like a heart attack." And not only left a suspicious internet trail a mile long (PRO TIP: never use your own computer, cellphone, or your child's cellphone), but he actually ordered a rush shipment of potassium cyanide that he told the supplier was needed for a surgery. To his office. Where, of course, an employee opened it and went, "Wait, what does a dentist need with cyanide?" And that wasn't the only poison he ordered delivered. Sadly, all of this did not come out early enough to save his wife's life. (AP News) (Originally cited in my blogpost, "Great Mistakes in Criminal History" HERE.)

MY QUESTIONS:

1. Isn't Sudden Death Syndrome just a fancy term for murder?
2. And how can you prove that it is or isn't SDS if you can't find the body?
3. And if the only way to prove SDS is to look at the body, or at least the parts that might be recoverable (ugh…) then why won't Brian Walshe provide that, and prove himself stupid and panicky, but inherently innocent, albeit with a strong stomach?
4. My standard question whenever people murder their spouses - isn't it easier, cheaper, and safer to just get a damn divorce?
5. What part of "dying in prison" do they not understand?

The Ghosts of Turkeys are Among Us

"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." —  WKRP In Cincinnati "boss" Arthur Carlson.

But, of course, they can fly.  I saw two of them the other day hanging out around the penitentiary (I do not even inquire as to the motivations of turkeys, or who they were visiting), and when our car came one of them flew right up, landed in a tree, and started rearly expectorating.  

I have a lot of turkey stories, including the memorable time which I shared before in 2021 - but a good story is a good story.  I was walking on a trail in Lake Herman State Park here in South Dakota. Now that park has (had - things have changed) wild turkeys, deer, fox, coyotes owls, hawks, seagulls, pelicans, and once in a while some eagles, roaming free. And this day, the flock of wild turkeys was right there, in the middle of the trail, eating and gobbling. Well, I did a big loop around them, because I didn't want to disturb them, then got back on the trail further up, and walked on.  But after a while, I heard there was this tremendous rushing sound behind me, almost like water. So I looked over my shoulder, and by God, there was the whole flock coming towards me. RUNNING towards me. So I stopped. And they all skidded to a stop around me.

So there they were: gobble-gobble-gobble. Hooking their necks and looking up sideways at me. Gobble-gobble-gobble. I mean, it was interesting, but I didn't have any corn with me or anything, and I don't speak Gobble, so after a while I said, "Well, you caught me, now what are you going to do with me?" Gobble-gobble-gobble. And after a while, they finally got tired and went on. And so did I, chuckling away. But later, I thought, "I wonder if that's how a wooly mammoth felt, surrounded by humans in the Ice age?" and then, "If turkeys ever learn how to make tools, we're screwed."  

"Vengeance is mine! Gobble-gobble-gobble!"

Flock of Wild Turkeys, 

waiting for someone like me to come along

by Sarov702 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=132330541

The Great Wild Turkey in Flight

by Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren - Wild Turkey, CC BY 2.0,
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47672945

Speaking of turkeys, Allan and I were talking the other day and I said, "Have you ever noticed that Inspector Jacques Clouseau, Deputy Barney Fife, and Retired Corporal Foggy Dewhurst all have the same personality?  It's just different accents and countries."

Peter Sellers, The Inspector Clouseau Movies

Don Knotts, The Andy Griffith Show

Brian Wilde, Last of the Summer Wine

The most concise description of them all is a self-important, arrogant, interfering, and generally inept know-it-all who is nearly always wrong.  Hilarious without knowing why everyone's laughing.  And yet, somehow, loveable...  You know.  Turkeys.  Love them all.

And now for something completely different:

A Native American Prayer of Thanks:

Great and Eternal Mystery of Life, 

Master of the Universe, 

Creator of All Things, 

I give thanks for the beauty 

You put in every single one of Your creations. 

I give thanks that You did not fail 

in making every stone, plant, creature, and human being 

a perfect and whole part of Your Sacred world. 

I give thanks that You have allowed me 

to see the strength and beauty of Your creation. 

My humble request is that all of the children of earth 

will learn to see the same perfection in themselves. 

May none of Your human children doubt or question 

Your wisdom, Your grace, Your perfect, unending love. 

Amen.

Humans are a Puzzlement...

"Never say you know the last word about any human heart"

— Henry James

And as for the human mind… Of course, this is what makes communicating with each other so difficult, whether in person or in writing. And not only do we not know what's going on inside of someone else, we don't even know ourselves, and I'm not talking about repressions or neuroses. I'm talking about how the way we're built literally shuts us off from things about ourselves that are perfectly obvious to everyone else.

We don't know what we really look like. For one thing, all we ever see of ourselves is in a mirror.

(NOTE: This is a plot point in Agatha Christie's Funerals Are Fatal.) And when we do see ourselves in a photograph or a video, we're often shocked, shocked, shocked at what we see! Not to mention how we often carry around an image of ourselves from some time in our past. For example: I hit my current magnificent height of 5'5" when I was in grade school, and one of my best friends did too. We towered over everyone around us. And ever since, I've seen myself as tall. So it came as a shock, back in the late 1990s, to hear someone describe me to someone else as "kinda short". Kinda short? KINDA SHORT??? And then I realized that I had to look up at almost everyone around me. Damn. Still getting over that one.

We don't know what we really sound like. We hear everything we say from our own little skull's castle of flesh and bone and various fluids. Now I have always known that I have a very deep voice for a female (an alto or a baritone, not sure which, but I have been told that it's "sultry") because in grade school I often got cast as a boy in the school plays. I also have an odd combination of a Southern California and Kentucky drawl. (BTW, I can do a dead-on impression of Mitch McConnell.) I never heard a recording of myself until I was in almost 20, and I realized that I sound sarcastic even when I'm saying "So, how's it going?" Sultry and sarcastic: sounds like the subtitle on my future detective's card.

We don't know what we're feeling, and we don't know what to do with whatever we're feeling. Seriously. Ask any toddler, teenager, parent, or boss who is having a complete and utter meltdown. If they can breathe long enough to talk.

Kat Dennings doing a GREAT teenage girl freakout in The 40-Year-Old Virgin

I know I did a lot of Alternatives to Violence Project workshops up at the pen where the inmates couldn't handle most negative emotions, and rather than face boredom, sadness, frustration, anxiety, or fear, they would explode into anger. And of course, you can't just say, "oh, gee, I'm angry" and calm down. As many inmates - and others - told me, "You know how it is. You get disrespected, you gotta react. You can't let anything go, because then somebody's gonna f*** with you, and it's only gonna get worse." BTW, sadness often led to isolating, cutting and/or attempts (or success) at suicide.

Now that might sound like adolescent behavior, but studies have shown that a large number of people are first arrested as juveniles, with over two-thirds of those in state prisons having a first arrest before age 19, and 38% before age 16. So where and how are they supposed to grow up?

But then, I don't think humans do a very good job of teaching emotions. (Lately I don't think much of our skills at teaching reading, writing, history, science, civics, and arithmetic, either, but that's for another blogpost.) You want to see some real unbridled, spit-flecked meltdown rages? – go online, where the ubiquitous Usernames, Gamertags, etc. go after others the way Jack the Ripper went after his victims on the foggy streets of Whitechapel.

We don't know how to share any of this with others, because... We think they see, feel, hear, know what we see, feel, hear, and know, and oh how wrong that is.

Here's an example. I used to teach a community ed writing class back in the Reagan years. And the first thing I started with was talking about words, and what people see when they hear or read a word. So I told them, write down the first image or emotion or memory that comes in your head when I write a word on the board. And the first word was always "Apple".

Answers: red, yellow, green, Apple Music, Apple computers, 1980 Apple IPO, apple tree, apple scent, apple pie, sliced apple, whole apple… all of those were among the answers given.

So, every time we write what we think is a very obvious, simple description... it's not. We know what we see in our mind when read / hear it, but we have no idea what's firing off in other people's minds when they read / hear it. It's a wonder anyone understands anything. But then I'm the person who found the first five chapters of Moby Dick hilarious.

We don't know why we do at least some of the things we do. Because we assume that how we were raised, the food we ate, the way it was cooked, the way the clothes hung in the closet, the way the laundry was done, the way the garden (if any) was planted, the way we dressed to go out (if we went out), that was what was normal. And then you meet people who don't live the way you did... Obviously, they're doing it wrong. Or maybe you finally meet the people who are doing it right, but don't know how to imitate them.

We don't know why we're attracted to certain things, from the colors we prefer in our house (I've always been a big fan of cobalt blue) to people with a certain hair/eye color. Or why certain things repel us. I don't and can't wear jewelry, and never have, because back when my mother first put a little necklace on me (I mean, after all, I was a girl, and girls are supposed to love and wear jewelry), I smelled the most terrible smell... And it happened every time she tried to bejewel me. I have no idea why, and I don't WANT to know why. There's a nightmare there, and I don't want to have it.

We don't know why we annoy other people; nor why we are annoyed by someone else. And that we don't usually analyze. Obviously, they're jerks. See Robert Browning's

Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

I	II
Gr-r- r – there go, my heart’s abhorrence! Water your damned flower-pots, do! If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence, God’s blood, would not mine kill you! What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming? Oh, that rose has prior claims – Needs its leaden vase filled brimming? Hell dry you up with its flames!	At the meal we sit together; Salve tibi! I must hear Wise talk of the kind of weather, Sort of season, time of year: Not a plenteous cork crop: scarcely Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt; What’s the Latin name for “parsley”? What’s the Greek name for “swine’s snout”?

To hear the whole poem, listen here:

Don't you wonder why our narrator is so infuriated with / about Brother Lawrence?

We are so strange, and we know so little, about ourselves and others - and that right there is the biggest set up for any mystery, any at all. That's being human.

How to Feed a Hungry Ghost

“The traditional view of death in China is different from the traditional view of death in the West,” says Nick Tackett, an historian from University of California, Berkeley, who studies traditional Chinese death rituals, especially those from Song and Liao periods. The spirit of the deceased separates into two parts, which one might call two souls. One of which resides—and ideally remains—in the tomb, and one of which resides in the ancestral tablet,” a plaque kept in shrines in homes or temples. After burial, souls need to be fed constantly, Tackett explains. “Regular offerings at the ancestral altar and periodic offerings at the grave helped satiate the souls of the deceased.”

But if something goes awry—forgetful relatives who neglect their feeding duties, an improper burial, or some unfinished business on Earth—a dead person’s soul can wander out of the tomb, hungry. These ghosts rarely meddle in the affairs of the living, but starting on the 15th day of the seventh month of the Chinese lunar calendar—roughly sometime in July/August—the gates of the underworld unlock, allowing flocks of hungry ghosts to roam freely for a month, the appropriately titled Ghost Month, also known as the Yulan or Zhongyuan Festival. (LINK)

BTW, in the West, the two novels (neither of them mysteries, but...) I know of that are based on hungry ghost legends (The Hungry Ghost by H. S. Norup and Peony in Love by Lisa See), both have hungry ghosts that are beautiful young girls. In Asia, not so. They're ugly, they're frightening, they're starving, even if they are your mother:

Mulian confronts his hungry ghost mother in the Kyoto Ghosts Scroll
late 12^th century. (public domain)

This is why one of my characters, Professor John Franklin says, repeatedly, that “European and Asian vampires are predators, pure and simple. American vampires are children who like to play with their food...” 

Now there's a laundry list of things to not do during Ghost Month, for fear of attracting the hungry ghost:

• Whistling
• Staying up late
• Buying a home or apartment
• Leaving clothes out to dry

But to appease the hungry ghost, you can burn

• Paper money
• Paper goods (from clothing to an automobile)
• Servants
• Houses
• Children
• Mistresses or wives

But how does one become a hungry ghost?

• Suffer a violent or unhappy death
• Neglect or desertion by one's living relatives
• Evil deeds: killing, stealing, sexual misconduct
• Evil desires: lust, greed, anger and ignorance

Especially greed, because greed is insatiable in life, and even more insatiable in death, because there's no way to satisfy it as a ghost. They are all mouth and stomach, nothing else.

Speaking of greed, Japan has its version of hungry ghosts as well:

Gaki are the spirits of jealous or greedy people who, as punishment for their mortal vices, have been cursed with an insatiable hunger for a particular substance or object.

Jikininki ("people-eating ghosts") are the spirits of greedy, selfish or impious individuals who are cursed after death to seek out and eat human corpses. They do this at night, scavenging for newly dead bodies and food offerings left for the dead. But jikininki lament their condition and hate their repugnant cravings for dead human flesh. (Sort of like Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Diaries, True Blood and others.)

MY NOTE: The Japanese also believe in the possibility of turning into a hungry ghost while alive because of jealousy and greed. This happens at least three times in The Tale of Genji when Rokujo a former lover of Genji the Shining Prince, sees Genji's pregnant wife Aoi, and her jealous spirit roars out of her body and becomes a Shiro, who possesses Aoi, makes Aoi extremely ill and in the end kills Aoi. Before that, Rokujo's Shiro might also have killed one of Genji's first loves, Yugao. And after Rokujo herself dies, her Shiro possesses and almost kills the love of Genji's life, Murasaki.

And then there's zombies and/or vampires. These go all the way back to Neolithic times. In Neolithic Greece they used to put millstones or heavy pottery shards on the neck or chest and then a heavy stone on top of the grave to keep the body in the grave and away from the living. No revenants allowed, thank you. They believed in werewolves as well, and knew that werewolves could turn into vampires. In fact, blood drinking demons are everywhere in ancient mythology, probably because it made sense. I mean, if all the gods needed blood sacrifices, why wouldn't the demons as well?

Anyway, one way my household has dealt with things that slither and slide and go bump in the night was to use one of Allan's sculptures as the guardian of our threshold. Life sized, folks. You're breaking in. You have a small flashlight. You look around, and this comes lunging at you out of the darkness.

"The Corner" by Allan Fisher

Very effective. Happy Halloween!

Let Them Eat Grass

I ran across this clip of an interview with Peter Thiel, multimillionaire financier of JD Vance, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and creator of Paypal:

Apparently, the billionaire tech bros aren't sure that humans (other than themselves) should survive.  Probably totally utilitarian.  We're simply not needed, once AI and robots take over all the jobs, and create / grow all the things they need, from yachts to tomatoes.

BTW, According to the New York Times and The Guardian, Trump reportedly said in a campaign meeting that if it were up to Stephen Miller, there would only be 100 million people living in the United States, and they would all resemble Miller.  This would mean that 200 million people in this country will have to be either forcibly migrated or killed to satisfy his vision.  Last I heard, that's called genocide.  But then, the KKK, Proud Boys, White Christian Nationalists etc., want the United States to be freed of anyone of color, Jews, and anybody who has commingled with them.  

Now I have, sadly, read The Turner Diaries, and I know that its fans really are all salivating over mass murder / genocide that will take them back to a white paradise where everyone has 40 acres and a thousands guns to protect it.  One of them, after the Oklahoma City bombing, came rushing into the courthouse to crow that war had been declared and there were no innocent victims.  

But I would expect no less from billionaire tech bros like Thiel, Musk, et al, because they really don't like humans, even each other.  And as for us: we're inefficient, we require resources (like food and water), we need sleep... basically, we're grungy and unimportant.  We are the peasants to the tech bros' Renaissance Princes.  

But it has been ever thus.  In Barbara Tuchman's brilliant A Distant Mirror:  The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, she writes of how the peasants were seen by the upper classes 600 years ago, with this virulent excerpt from the contemporary Le Despit au Vilain (vilain = peasant):

"Tell me Lord, if you please, by what right or title does a peasant eat beef? And goose, of which they have plenty?  And this troubles God.  God suffers from it and I too.  For they are a sorry lot, these peasants who eat fat goose!  Should they eat fish?  Rather let them eat thistles and briars, thorns and stray and hay on Sunday and pea-pods on weekdays.  They should keep watch without sleep and have trouble always; that is how peasants should live...  It is they who spoil the common welfare."  

It's important to remember that throughout the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and well into the 19^th century, it was the peasants who did all the hard work and paid all the taxes, not the royalty, nobility or the church.  Their rights were limited, they had no say (much less something like a vote) in their government, and their property was always at hazard of being seized.  And I mean seized, as in the clearing of the Highlands in Scotland (1750-1860) and the Enclosure Acts in England (between 1604-1904 there were 5,200 Acts passed) which drove peasants / crofters off their land and replaced them with profitable sheep...  

And then there were the peasant revolts during the Calamitous Fourteenth Century - a time when one-third of Europe died from the Black Death - as the peasants tried to get more rights and more money for their hard labor. The reprisals for the Jacquerie in France, and the Wat Tyler Rebellion in England were savage. Historians cite the slaughter of about 20,000 peasants for each revolt. Keep those peasants humble and eating black bread and beans.  Or grass.  

And, about 100 years later, during the Reformation, Martin Luther was stunned and appalled by the German Peasants' Revolt of 1525, when the peasants took Martin Luther at his word ("there is neither slave nor free," etc.) and rose up against their overlords, in search of actually being paid by the nobility / church for all their hard labor, instead of being taxed into oblivion. Instead of being on their side, Luther condemned them as un-Christian and urged the princes to crush the revolt without mercy, saying that "there's nothing more poisonous than a rebel -- killing one is like killing a mad dog." The nobles took him at his word. As many as 100,000 peasants were killed before it was all over.  

"Should peasants eat meat? Rather should they chew grass on the heath with the horned cattle and go naked on all fours."(Spielvogel's Western Civ. I text, p. 195.)  They pretty much did during the Great Famine in Ireland (1845-1849), when the potato blight killed off the main source of food for Ireland. 

 

NOTE: The reason the Irish were living almost exclusively on potatoes was because the English overlords who'd claimed all the land took all the other crops - grain, meat, etc. - for taxes. One of the great scandals of the Great Famine is that Charles Trevelyan, who was in charge of the administration of government relief, limited the Government's food aid programme, claiming that food would be readily imported into Ireland once people had more money to spend after earning wages on new public-works projects (which may or may not have existed). In a private correspondence, he explained how the famine could bring benefit to the English; As he wrote to Edward Twisleton: 

"We must not complain of what we really want to obtain. If small farmers go, and their landlords are reduced to sell portions of their estates to persons who will invest capital we shall at last arrive at something like a satisfactory settlement of the country". (Wikipedia)

Meanwhile British landlords continued, throughout the Famine, to export grain at a profit from Ireland while a million people died of famine and another million or two emigrated to escape.  The emigrants received the usual warm welcome:  

And now it's back (as if it ever died).  How else to interpret our current society where billionaire Elon Musk, for example, pays no taxes, while my husband and I pay taxes even on our hard-earned Social Security?  Where Congress has Cadillac health insurance and pensions, while saying the US can't afford the universal health care that every other industrialized nation has?  Where the BBBill "requires the leasing of at least 50% of public lands that private companies desire to lease for drilling, mining or logging"?  Where the estate, gift, and generation-skipping and transfer tax exemption will increase from $13.99 million in 2025 to $15 million in 2026? (LINK) If we're so damn useless, why do they need our money, our public lands, our health care?

Curtis Yarvin
photo by David Merfield

NOTE:  Curtis Yarvin, influential philosopher among the tech bros, is all about the "Dark Enlightenment", a society in which democracy is abolished and city states are back, run by corporations, with absolute rulers subject only to the corporate board.  And you will take what wages that Corporate State is willing to give you and like it, or you will be cast into outer darkness. 

But, on a good note, Mr. Yarvin is spooked.  Just last week he wrote:

The second Trump revolution, like the first, is failing. It is failing because it deserves to fail. It is failing because it spends all its time patting itself on the back. It is failing because its true mission, which neither it nor (still less) its supporters understand, is still as far beyond its reach as algebra is beyond a cat. Because the vengeance meted out after its failure will dwarf the vengeance after 2020—because the successes of the second revolution are so much greater than the first—I feel that I personally have to start thinking realistically about how to flee the country. Everyone else in a similar position should have a 2029 plan as well. And it is not even clear that it will wait until 2029: losing the Congress will instantly put the administration on the defensive." (LINK)

    Please, Curtis, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

NOTE: Peter Thiel gave private lectures on Christianity that connected government oversight of Silicon Valley to an apocalyptic future, according to recordings reviewed by The Washington Post. He argued that those who propose limits on technology development not only hinder business but threaten to usher in the destruction of the United States and an era of global totalitarian rule, according to the recordings. And he said that “In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta [Thurnberg] or Eliezer [Yudkowsky, a prominent critic of the tech industry’s approach to AI].

Thiel, whose net worth is around $27 billion, also used his private talks to criticize financial regulations. He said such rules were a sign that a singular world government has begun to emerge that could be taken over by an Antichrist figure who could then use it to exert control over people.  “It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money,” Thiel said, according to the recordings. “An incredible machinery of tax treaties, financial surveillance, and sanctions architecture has been constructed... Wealth gives the “illusion of power and autonomy,” Thiel added, “but you have this sense it could be taken away at any moment.”  (LINK) 

MY NOTE:  Memento Mori Peter, and the world's smallest violin playing for you.  

The fact that what wealth "We, the People" (hi! remember us?) have can be taken away at any moment is irrelevant, of course.  They are the Renaissance Princes, we are the peasants, but with AI, robots, etc., they can get rid of most of us and have AI and robots do all the work.  New Enclosure Acts, new Clearances, and  AI will do all the programming, robots will build and repair all the worker robots, and all things will go tickety-boo like superior clockwork.  Whoever thought that billionaires would be the ultimate optimists?  Once you get over the idea that icky humans have got to be killed, I mean, culled. 

(LINK)

If that's the future, I'm with the Antichrist… and apparently I'm going to be in good company.

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...