Wanderings

One of the few artists and illustrators from the golden age of science fiction still living is Edd Cartier. Along with Virgil Finlay, Kelley Freas, Hannes Bok, Lawrence Sterne Stevens and Ed Emsh, Edd Cartier drew the illustrations and painted the covers of the pulp magazines of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. You can pick up almost any copy of an Astounding Science Fiction magazine from the early 1950s and find the fantastic work of Edd Cartier.

This Saturday, before Erica and I went out garage sailing, I decided to bring my camera. I had not brought a camera along on my travels since last fall. I am glad that I did. We followed yard sale signs down through the small towns in New Jersey until I was thoroughly lost. We stopped on one street where there were three different sales. I stopped at the one at the end and bought two Galaxy magazines from the 70s. One thing led to another and I found that I was talking to the son of Edd Cartier, the writer Dean Cartier. The nice old guy “supervising” the garage sale was none other than Edd Cartier, himself.

Edd at 93 is sharp and friendly and was glad to talk about his friend John W. Campbell, Jr. and his friendships with Isaac Asimov, L. Ron Hubbard, L, Sprague deCamp and others. I am afraid that I made a pest of myself. I wound up Buying two books from Dean and having his father autograph them. I bothered Edd and Dean for at least 45 minutes and I wish that I had not had to leave.

Here I am with Edd checking out his book. (I’m the big doofy one.)

I am afraid that I was a little bit of pest and I got into the house and took pictures of the framed art.

The statuette is a bust of Lovecraft, the World Fantasy Award!

Edd is holding his book Edd Cartier: The Known and the Unknown. Dean wrote the text, and it is chock full of Edd’s art. It is a limited edition and mine is numbered 603 out of 2000.

One thing, I had to promise not to reveal Edd and Dean’s address. That is no problem because I had no idea where I was or how I got there.

When you upload an image to blogger, naturally blogger.com keeps track of it. One of their programmers wrote an app to watch what was being uploaded. It is mesmerizing. I am amazed at the continual beauty of the images being uploaded.

Warning! if you click you will be hooked.

I slowed the speed down a bit, as I need a little more time to take each picture in,

Blogger Play

The thing about Squidoo.com is that it has a google page rank of 6 – page rank gold. A link from squidoo is worth more than other sites. I am going to put a few of my essays there and go crazy with the links. You can also make money from the ads on Squidoo. I run off at the mouth and much of it makes it here or on my other blogs. I am going to try putting some of the unpublished ones out and get links back to my other sites.

13 Great Ghost Movies

John played fast and loose with what he calls a Ghost Movie claiming that he couldn’t think of that many good ones. I disagree. Harvey is not a ghost story, even if it is one of my favorite movies.

Basically I don’t think there are ten great ghost movies, as the genre is inherently ridiculous, and I’m not aware of ten great ghost movie spoofs. So for my list I have taken the liberty of expanding the definition of ghost to include not only a disembodied formerly living being, but also a psychological projection (which, after all, is what so-called ghosts really are) — and also to include situations where a dead being haunts the action of the flick like a ghost. If this definition is too liberal, please feel free to junk my note. Yet I think the validity of my liberal definition tends to be proven by the fact that coming up with even ten films to fit it is still going to be a hard slog.

The Uninvited — Among the many reasons it’s the best of its kind is because of the presence of the mentally disturbed Gail Russell (who died very young) and which I think is only fitting, as all so-called spiritualistic phenomena is the result of psychological distress — that is, when it isn’t atrributable to either unexplained natural phenomena or simple human fraud.

The Innocents — A disappointing rendition of a Henry James story, but still better than just about everything else in this wretched genre.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir — Not a great movie, but still better than most in this genre.

Rebecca — Hitch’s first Hollywood picture and one of his best, includes a superfluity of gothic trappings, and shows the haunting effect of the dead upon the living. It also illustrates the idea that the evil that men (and women) perpetrate in this world lives on after them. If you consider this a ghost story, then this is probably the greatest of them all as far as the big screen is concerned.

Keeper of the Flame — Tracy and Hepburn’s strangest movie, which like Rebecca also shows the effects of the dead upon the living. There is also a political lesson in there concerning the inherent fascism of the so-called elite, a lesson for which most Americans, alas, remain clueless to this day.

Harvey — Harvey = psychological projection = ghost.

An American Werewolf in London — If you can make the stretch into thinking that the undead might be ghosts, then this is a very entertaining flick, whatever genre you might happen to label it w/.

Citizen Kane — As in Rebecca and Keeper of the Flame: a dead dude continues to freak the living. Kane’s a ghost story, dude.

The Seventh Seal — If the grim reaper isn’t a ghost, then what the heck is he?

Hold that Ghost — All I know is that it beats the heck out of Ghostbusters.
. .

There are probably two ghost comedies I could use to fill out my list to ten — Ghostbusters not being one of them — but I can’t think of them.

I got this from Jim. There are some here that I’ve never seen and I will have to check out.

The Uninvited
Field of Dreams
The Innocents
Its A Wonderful Life
Between Two Worlds
Stairway to Heaven
The Haunting
Portrait of Jennie
Topper
Ghost Breakers

Here Comes Mr. Jordan
A Guy Named Joe

October is coming. I will be reading Something Wicked This Way Comes for the 40th time. I will be looking for something good to watch on Halloween. Here is a list of 13 great Ghost Stories. I expect you to email me your lists so I can put them here.

• The Uninvited (1944) – by far the best ghost movie. It has a good story and is not just some scary special effects.
• The Innocents (1961) – based on Henry James’s Turn of the Screw
• The Haunting (1963) – based on Shirley Jackson’s chilling The Haunting of Hill House.
• Blithe Spirit (1945) – Wonderful screwball comedy involving dead people. My Dad saw the stage play in London during WW2 when he was stationed in England.
• 13 Ghosts (1960) – I saw this with the special glasses in the Rockland Theater in Nyack and it scared the hell out of me.
• Topper (1937) – I actually liked the TV show better. Cary Grant made a great ghost, though.
• The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) – The most romantic story in the list. You’ve got to love Gene Tierney.
• Ghost (1990) – Sappy, but I like the crazy guy on the subway.
• The Shining (1980) – Here’s Johnny! Way over the top, but still a scary story.
• House on Haunted Hill (1958) – One word: Vincent Price.
• The Canterville Ghost (1944) – has one of my mother’s favorite actors, Charles Laughton.
• Poltergeist (1982) – Perhaps too slick, but a cool ending and the clown was cool.
• Hold That Ghost (1941) – best Abbot and Costello movie.

I didn’t like The Sixth Sense. I wanted to put one of the Laurel and Hardy ghost movies, but I can’t remember the name. There were too many Stephen King ghost stories and I disliked most of them. Others choices that I did not list might be any of the many Christmas Carol movies. I think there are a lot of great Japanese ghost movies, but I haven’t seen any. I have not seen Blair Witch or other modern movie because I don’t have a DVD player, I don’t rent movies, and I don’t go to the little cramped things that pass for movie theaters around here.

I crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge today and deliberately didn’t look south towards the city. On a clear day you can see the Manhattan skyline. On that day, all I could see was a pillar of smoke. I don’t like to think about it – too much pain and too many tears.

I went home early that day via the Bear Mountain bridge, 20 miles to the north. My brother Larry and I gathered a bunch of kids from the old neighborhood, ages 5 to 10. We brought them to the top of Clausland Mountain where you can see the city. I pointed to the smoke and said “Remember this. This is the most important event of our times. It changes your future.”

(picture is view from Clausland Mountain looking away from the city, north, towards the Bridge and Hook Mountain)

I know Don through poker, but it turns out he’s a distant cousin. Anyway here’s his list and comments (and the thing was played by James Arness, better known as Matt Dillon in the 50′s horse opera):

I put these on my Netflix queue. I believe I saw The Thing years ago. Does Peter Arnes play the thing? My list is very similar to yours with some personal favorites added.

The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951
Forbidden Planet, 1956
2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
Star Trek II – The Wrath of Khan, 1982

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956
The War of the Worlds, 1953

Frankenstein, 1931
The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957
A Clockwork Orange, 1971
The Time Machine, 1960

The Man Who Fell to Earth, 1976
Starman, 1984

Enemy Mine, 1985
The Terminator, 1984

Some personal favorites:
Twelve Monkeys
Outland
Star Wars IV and V
Robinson Caruso on Mars
The Fifth Element
Dark City
The Matrix

More to come…

I learned today that the black pipe used for gas installation uses NPT or tapered thread and not NPS, which is not tapered. The difference is that the tapered pipe self-seals and does not need pipe dope. (I’m going to dope the hell out of it anyway, just to be safe.)

I am sure you are glad to hear this, because I will be cutting and threading black pipe to finish my furnace install. If you will remember the old furnace burned up. The new furnace failed last March, and I spent a week in August reinstalling the new furnace. I am all done (no leaks) except that the gas pipe, which used to be a Rube Goldberg maze, is not done. I ripped it all out, but I did not have a pipe threader to install the new pipes. My brother Ward has Uncle Eddie’s tap and die kit. I never thought that I would need it. I bought a 3/4″ 14 NPT hex die today for $16 from a company in Michigan. It should be delivered from a warehouse in PA so I should have it by Thursday.

If the blog stops after Thursday it means that the gas piping didn’t go well.

I’ve been comparing clicks on my pages with Google ads to what is reported by MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog is a free utility that keeps track of links to and from your pages. It is interesting because it reports on where you readers are going when they leave your page. MyBlogLog typically reports about ten times as many links to ads as Google reports.

I have discovered some of the probable reasons why.

1) Google clicks don’t count if the surfer doesn’t remain on the target site for some minimum time, thought to be 20 seconds. A surfer must stay long enough at a target site to do a little reading. I don’t know how they determine this unless the site has Google analytics, but it is what I read.

2) MyBlogLog is not actually recording clicks, but is recording the mouse location when the page closes. In the case where a Google banner is right under the menu, they record a Google click when none occurred. This is especially true of StumbleUpon tool bars and someone on the nets was able to trace a large number of non-clicks to StumbleUpon. Since my sites get lots of StumbleUpon-ers, I assume that this is happening.

3) The more ominous reason is that Google has decided that clicks to you pages are likely to be fraudulent or not result in a sale or positive action at the target sites. This would require Google Analytics to be installed at the target site, which usually is. If you have real slacker surfers or evil or drunk surfers then their clicks are worthless and Google makes some kind of judgment about clicks from your site.

I panicked last night and I started replacing Google ads at HarpTab.com with Chitika ads. Chitika ads are moving banners that look very much like ads, but are said to pay well. I was very disappointed. After 10,000 banner displays, I made 30 cents. This is not good news. I was making a very low amount from the Google ads, but at least I made something and there were days that I made $10 or more from HarpTab.com. Lately I’ve been making about a buck a day. I think that I’ll let the Chitika ads run a few more days as a test. I’ll let them “cleanse the pallet” at harptab and maybe when I come back, the Google ads will do better.

By the way, there is an excellent article on Banner Blindness at Jakob Nielsen’s AlertBox. The current article is about how a link that looks too fancy will trigger an ad reaction and surfers will avoid it. Links should look like normal links. Surfers will actively avoid anything that looks like an ad.

Here’s a list of healthy food that you should be eating every day. I don’t eat these every day, but I love them all.

I just bought 5 bricks of frozen leaf spinach, because Erica was tired of the broccoli mix.

Erica grows her own blueberries, but she finished the last of the season and has to go back to store bought.

Our tomatoes did not come out well this year (deer got to them), but local tomatoes are still around, cheap and tasty (not the green apples made to look like tomatoes that you buy in the grocery store).

I have cans of organic low sodium black beans in the pantry. They are hard to find without the tons of salt. We have not been eating them very often though, so I’ll have to start up again.

We usually buy almonds instead of walnuts. I like both and will eat either like candy if given the chance.

We use yogurt as a substitute for mayonnaise. I put it on sandwiches and to make salad dressing. Russian dressing is yogurt with some ketchup added for color. I buy low salt organic ketchup when I can. We use yogurt in tuna salad. I like the Greek yogurt. It is stiffer and and has a sharper flavor than the American brands.

I do not eat anything with oats in it regularly. I like oatmeal and should make it for breakfast, but in the morning I am concentrating on getting to work on time and don’t eat anything except strong coffee.

I like to have sweet potatoes twice a week, but they are not on the list. Sweet potatoes are nearly a perfect food.

8 Foods You Should Eat Every Day | Healthy Living Blog

I am a believer in the coming singularity.

I would love to go to the Singularity summit, but it has been slash-dotted and I can’t even get the page to load. The link is to the SlashDot article. I’ll try again after the brouhaha has died down.

Slashdot | Smarter-than-Human Intelligence & The Singularity Summit

Madeleine L’Engle passed away. I love her books and she will be missed. I found a tape of an interview with her recently at a garage sale. I converted about a minute of it so I can share it with you. It will give you a flavor of who she was. She explains why A Winkle in Time was rejected over 40 times.

Please listen

This is from something called the Trumpet club and the tape was made for educators, but I can find no information on the internet. It appears that the NY Times obit is quoting from this interview. I have the whole thing, (about 20 minutes). If you are interested, I can send you a link to the full mp3.

I know Eric through my brother. He is a manic guitar collector as is my brother. He is also a bicyclist and has a vintage recumbent bike. I occasionally see him zipping along, lying on his back, miles from Nyack.

He sent me a short Sci-Fi list:

I’m not enough of a fan to pull 20 of my favorites out of my head (or ass)….here’s some I can remember that you haven’t listed…

Bladerunner
Alien
Aliens
Terminator II
Jurassic
The Fly (Help ME!!!)