Trying My Hand at Oil Painting

Books Read in 2010

1. 3/Jan/10--The Futurist by James P. Othmer (2006).
2. 4/Jan/10--Dick Smith's Do-It-Yourself Monster Make-Up Handbook by Dick Smith (1985).
3. 7/Jan/10--The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (2002).
4. 11/Jan/10--Farnham's Freehold by Robert A. Heinlein (1964, 1992).
5. 11/Jan/10--The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (1979, 1993).
6. 16/Jan/10--Tripwire by Lee Child (1999).
7. 1/Feb/10--The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy (1988).
8. 4/Feb/10--Slow Learner: Early Stories by Thomas Pynchon (1984).
9. 7/Feb/10--In Suspect Terrain by John McPhee (1982).
10. 11/Feb/10--The Log From the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck (1951).
11. 14/Feb/10--Tales of the MADMAN Underground by John Barnes (2009).
12. 15/Feb/10--Hit and Run by Lawrence Block (2008).
13. 19/Feb/10--This Is Not A Game by Walter Jon Williams (2008).
14. 28/Feb/10--Gilligan's Wake by Tom Carson (2003).
15. 4/Mar/10--Richmond Noir ed. by Andrew Blossom, Brian Castleberry, & Tom De Haven (2010).
16, 8/Mar/10--Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack (1993).
17. 14/Mar/10--Deep Storm by Lincoln Child (2007).
18. 19/Mar/10--The Armageddon Rag by George R. R. Martin (1983).
19. 22/Mar/10--Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (2008).
20. 27/Mar/10--Thunderhead by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child (1999).
21. 29/Mar/10--Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life by Neil Strauss (2009).
22. 19/Apr/10--The Lives of John Lennon by Albert Goldman (1988).
23. 30/Apr/10--Homicide: A Year On the Killing Streets by David Simon (1991).
24. 10/May/10--Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier (1999).
25. 21/May/10--A Walk On the Wild Side by Nelson Algren (1956).
26. 21/Jun/10--Knee Deep In Paradise by Brett Butler (1996).
27. 8/Jul/10--The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke (1978).
28. 13/Jul/10--Pattern Recognition by William Gibson (2003).
29. 5/Aug/10--Walking the Appalachian Trail by Larry Luxenberg & Mike Warren (1994).
30. 21/Aug/10--Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway by Cherie Currie & Tony O'Neill (2010).
31. 22/Aug/10-- Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader by Lester Bangs, ed. by John Morthland (2003).
32. 23/Aug/10--Turn Left At the Trojan Horse by Brad Herzog (2010).
33. 24/Aug/10--Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain (2000).
34. 26/Aug/10--The Walk by Lee Goldberg (2004).
35. 28/Aug/10--Look Me In the Eye: My Life With Asperger's by John Elder Robison (2007).
36. 31/Aug/10--Role Models by John Waters (2009).
37. 7/Sept/10--Barefoot Sisters: Southbound by Lucy & Susan Letcher (2009).
38. 18/Sept/10--Dishwasher by Pete Jordan (2007).
39. 26/Sept/10--The Portable Henry Rollins by Henry Rollins (1998).

On the Last Day of the Year...

...I met up with my friends Anne and Tad at Barnes & Noble, partly to catch up with what's going on in their lives (they have lives, you see; I'm envious) and partly to donate a slew of Hot Wheels®/Johnny Lightning® cars to their son's cause (and why I had a slew of Hot Wheels®/Johnny Lightning® cars is a tale for another time). Little did I suspect this would be the source of a Spooky Story.

Okay, not spooky exactly; it was simply one of those coincidences/synchronicities/small world occurrences that make my life just a little more surreal.

We were all hanging out in the Children's Section drinking coffee because (1), the Children's Section is much cooler than the café and (2), the café was too crowded anyway (oh, and {3}, no one cares if you sprawl on the floor in the Children's Section; adults are so fussy about such things, especially if you start to twiddle with their shoelaces), yakking about this, snarking about that when these two adorable kids and their mom wander in and position themselves directly in front of us (click to embiggen):

Check out the book titles to the left of the little girl.

I quickly cleaned up my language, made damn sure Anne was sitting close enough to me to be seen as part of my entourage (because big hulking solitary males sans offspring and/or significant others in the Children's Section are a legitimate cause for parental concern), lowered my (booming) voice, and continued my monologue about visiting Mom in Waynesboro Christmas Day.

Mom: "Are you from Waynesboro?"
Me: "Well, yes, originally. I was born in Richmond, grew up in Waynesboro, then went to school in Blacksburg, then New Orleans, then worked in Boston, Charlottesville, and now back here."
Mom: "My husband's from Waynesboro!"
Me: "Really?  (being polite) What's his name?"
Mom: (name)
Me: OMG! He used to live across the alley from us! (blah, blah, blah, this and that, boring reminiscing)

And then everyone went on about his/her business, Anne, Tad, and I finally leaving to transfer Hot Wheels® from my car to theirs.

Then on the way home it hit me: "Wait a minute... her husband can't be the man I'm thinking of, the up-and-coming local lawyer with the hot wife (who sunbathed in the back yard viewable from my bedroom window) and the miniature collie who lived in the old Doyle house. That man would be in his... ten, twenty thirty... O! M! G! HIS SEVENTIES! HER HUSBAND IS HIS SON! THE... GRANDFATHER... OF THOSE KIDS!"

And I felt terribly, terribly old for the rest of the day.

Welcome, 2011!

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art-- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself."
--Neil Gaiman

"Happy New Year. Stand on the neck of 2010 and throatpunch the future."
--Warren Ellis

Book Covers I Love

Because I'm feeling nostalgic but don't feel like writing diddly-squat (click to embiggen).

Mom and Dad and Jimi Hendrix--A Christmas Memory

I'm no Truman Capote and there will be no tales tonight of dotty aunts, illicit liquor, fruitcake-making, nor presents exchanged by those who had nothing to give.

This is a story, a brief one, about Mom, Dad, and Jimi Hendrix.

Back when my father was alive and my mother lived in the Real World we'd go through this little dance every December: "What do you want for Christmas? Do you have your list ready?" Dad, being typical of his generation, never did. If he needed something during the course of the year he bought it, so his "list," such as it was, consisted of whatever occurred to him at the moment someone asked. "Well," he might say, "I can always use socks... and underwear... maybe a white shirt with French cuffs... uh... that's about it."

Yawn.

Mom, on the other hand, was a little more prepared: "Which list do you want? Things for the house? Things for me? The expensive list? The less expensive list? The cheap list? Silly items? Serious items? Wait... they're here in my purse somewhere... (rustle of papers)"

And me? I had a massive list of books I'd heard about over the course of the year-- like that surprised anyone. "You know, dear," Mom would say yearly, "we love buying books for you, but it's more exciting when we get to go to different stores looking for things." I understood. Their book-buying spree was simply a trip to Barnes & Noble in Charlottesville where Dad would accost some cute, young female clerk, hand her my list, then wander off with Mom to the coffee shop where they'd sip the brew o' the day and wait for the CYFC to check in periodically asking if this was too much or too little or too few. It probably took all of an hour.

(I gather I could have had a slew of dates based solely on the various CYFCs' reactions to my book lists; I'm nothing if not an eclectic reader and I certainly come across as immensely, cool, suave, hip and sophisticated... on paper)

Anyway, one year after another "You know, dear..." statements I decided to mix it up a bit-- add some silly books to the list  (That Darn Squid God being one of 'em), throw in a few non-sensible (if not nonsensical) items (Psycho House snow globe, glow-in-the-dark planets 'n' stars ceiling stickers, etc.), and because it amused me to do so, a request for The Most Hideous Tee-Shirt I'd Ever Seen, a tie-dyed, DayGlo Jimi Hendrix print. Oh, sweet CROM, it was ugly!

I'd spotted this particular item at an artsy-fartsy gift shop called Coyote across from U. VA and figured even if my parents didn't buy it (and I didn't expect them to), they'd get a kick out of wandering around amongst the hipster bric-a-brac, this being about as far from anything they could imagine as I could imagine.

I underestimated them.

Christmas morning that year as I began to unwrap one particular package Dad ahem-ed and said, "Once you open that, your mother has a story to tell you."

Yes, it was the Hideous Hendrix Tee. "The only one they had was on the wall," Mom said, "and we had to make that nice young girl behind the counter climb a ladder to get it down. She kept looking at us and then the shirt and then back at us the whole time..."

Let me set the scene for you a little as I imagine it. It's the 'Eighties. My parents never went anywhere without being impeccably dressed, Dad in a three-piece suit, hat, gloves, long overcoat (the height of fashion in 1963) and my mom dressed as if going to a fancy winter party except without the otherwise obligatory hat and white gloves ("I could never stand wearing those things; I was so glad when they went out of style"). Some petite U. VA student working part-time while polishing her undergraduate thesis on Like, Y'Know, Intensely Feminist Themes in Really, Truly Obscure Medieval Literary Fragments.

Dad continued. "So she's looking at the two of us and your mother" (the very proper, very well-read, very formal 9th Grade English teacher) "leans over and whispers, 'Dear, we were at Woodstock.'"

Twenty-five or so years later and thinking of this story still almost makes me wet my pants.

And yes, I do still have the Hideous Hendrix Tee:

Sleep-Deprived, Caffeinated, With Brain Set to "Random"

Today, of course, is the Winter Solstice and the morning after the last lunar eclipse of 2010, for which I gave up a perfectly good night's sleep to trudge around in the cold and dark with a pair of binoculars and a big-ass cup of coffee. Being as I was alone and unsupervised (but not with easy access to a computer... this time), my mind began to wander to the Greater Fishersville Flying Nipple Flap.

In the early '60s I was a Flying Saucer Fanatic. This is not as weird as it might seem today; for one, in the early '60s most people were interested in flying saucers/UFOs-- we were in the midst of the Third Wave of Ufology-- and I jumped on the bandwagon with all the enthusiasm a geeky 9-yr.-old could muster. I mean, Flying Saucers! Weird Things in the Sky! Maybe from SPACE! Possibly full of ALIENS! HOT DAMN (or words to that effect)! People were seeing UFOs all over the country, all over the world; the newspapers and magazines (that's what we had before the Intarwebs and Twitter and Facebook and HEY, YOU KIDS! GET AWAY FROM MY WOOLLY MAMMOTH!) were filled with reports of sightings, which was quite the boon to the publishing industry who rushed all sorts of books of greater and lesser quality into print.

This book was fun. Wish I still had my copy.

Even my hometown of Waynesboro, VA had a rash of sightings, my favorite, 45 yrs. later, being The Man Who Saw the Flying Nipple on, appropriately enough, December 21, 1964.

A gunsmith had a close encounter with a beehive-shaped UFO in rural Fisherville, Virginia. At five o’clock in the afternoon Mr. Burns was driving east on highway Route 250 east of Staunton when a 125-foot wide, beehive-shaped UFO slowly crossed the roadway ahead of him, causing his car to stall. As the metallic looking UFO descended it narrowly missed hitting some power lines. There was a bluish glow from the bottom. As it left, it rose to about 200 feet in altitude, tilted slightly, then disappeared quickly into the northeast. The car could then be restarted. Geiger counter tests showed abnormally high radioactivity in the area. (Sources: Donald B. Hanlon, Flying Saucer Review, March-April 1966, p. 14; Gordon I. R. Lore and Harold H. Dennault, Jr., Mysteries of the Skies: UFOs in Perspective, p. 171; Mark Rodeghier, UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interference, case 136; Richard Hall, The UFO Evidence (Volume II): A Thirty Year Report, p. 3).

Source: http://www.ufoevolution.com/forums/calendar.php?do=getinfo&day=2019-12-21&c=1

At approximately 5:00 p.m. on the evening of December 21, as he drove east along Route 250 between Staunton and Waynesboro, Virginia, Horace Burns, a gunsmith in Harrisonburg, saw an immense cone-shaped object cross low over the highway ahead of him.


It was moving in a north to south direction at a slow speed estimated to be about 15 mph. The point of the cone was tipped slightly forward in the object's line of flight.


It crossed the highway approximately 200 feet ahead of Burns and settled in a meadow to the right of the road, landing gently, "like a bubble." At the moment the object crossed the highway, Burns' car motor failed. The object settled in the field as he brought the car to a stop on the shoulder of the highway.


Burns got out of the car to get a better look. "It was 125 feet in diameter, at least, and 80 to 90 feet high," he later reported. Its circular, sloping sides rose toward the top in six large, concentric convolutions that decreased in diameter and were surmounted by a dome.


The object was so large, Burns said, that when it crossed the road ahead of him it had more than filled the entire width of his windshield. In the gathering darkness, Burns could not make out with certainty the exact nature of the object's surface material but it gave the appearance of a dull, metallic finish.


He saw no features such as windows, ports, doors, or seams on the object; however, extending around its base at a height of about six feet was a band of bluish-white light, sharply-edged and about 12 to 18 inches wide. The light was steady and did not flicker or dim. No landing gear was evident and the object seemed to rest lightly on the ground on a somewhat convexly curved undersurface.


Burns watched the object for from 60 to 90 seconds at a distance no greater than 150 yards when it suddenly rose straight up to a height of several hundred feet and, emitting a soft "whoosh" like rushing air, took off in a northeasterly direction at an exceedingly high rate of speed, again with its top tilted slightly forward in the line of motion. It disappeared from view in a matter of seconds.


Following its disappearance, Burns drove home and told his wife about his sighting, swearing he wouldn't tell another soul because "they'd think I'm crazy."


However, a few days later, a local radio program announced the formation of a UFO investigations group at Eastern Mennonite College, under the direction of Dr. Ernest G. Gehman, a professor of German at the college. At his wife's urging, Burns got in touch with Gehman by way of the radio station to report his observation.


On December 31, Dr. Gehman traveled alone to the landing site and made a geiger counter test of the area. An extremely high reading was obtained, and was verified by the arrival of two DuPont research engineers who, having heard about the landing, had driven to the site the same day Dr. Gehman made his investigation.


In fact, Dr. Gehman had been able to locate the landing spot (later verified by Burns) by the readings on his Geiger counter.

Source: http://www.nicap.org/newlook/section_VI.htm

Virginia History: More UFOs Sighted Locally and Statewide
Published: 12:04 PM 5/2/2010
By Charles Culbertson/contributor, mail@stauntonhistory.com

The December 1964 sighting of an alleged unidentified flying object on U.S. 250 just east of Staunton sparked massive public interest, an investigation by the U.S. Air Force and a number of what might be called "copycat" sightings.


One of them involved several Staunton teenagers who claimed to have had a close encounter with a spaceman.


By late January 1965, the story of Grottoes resident Horace Burns' sighting of the mysterious craft (which he said landed in a field between Staunton and Fishersville) had gained national media attention and was beginning to generate a rash of other sightings throughout the state.


UFOs were allegedly seen at Marion, Fredericksburg and South Boston.


Locally, UFOs were reported seen in Greenville and the Jollivue area.


"Despite mounting reports of UFOs, the Leander McCormick observatory on Mt. Jefferson at Charlottesville hasn't spotted a thing," wrote the Jan. 25 Staunton Leader. "Larry Frederick, chairman of the astronomy department at the University of Virginia, explained that the objects could be meteors since the last six weeks have produced some 'showering' activity."


Frederick said another possibility was that people were seeing the high-intensity landing lights of jets which "follow the main north-south and east-west flyways that criss-cross the area."


The most creative sighting was reported by a Staunton teenager who said that while riding on U.S. 250 at Brands Flat with some friends, he saw what looked like a man walking toward the road from a field.


The teen thought nothing of it until the man sat down alongside the road and began to examine the cars passing by.


The youth said he then realized that the man might have come from one of the spaceships recently reported in the area. He said he and his friends got out of the car and ran toward the man, who escaped over a hill.


Two other little men appeared and also ran away, he said.


"They left us way behind," said the teen, who described the men as about three and a half feet tall and wearing one-piece, skin-tight garments that were silver in color.


The boys reported their sighting to Staunton police, who sent 10 reservists and a photographer to the scene to investigate. They turned up nothing.


After they left, the teenager who had first spotted the "spacemen" and the photographer stayed to continue the search.


They said they came upon a "glowing" aluminum barn. The photographer allegedly entered the barn and was hit by something. When he and the teenager started to run, the photographer turned to take a picture of the barn.


The teen said that as the camera's flash bulb went off, its light showed one of the little men standing by the structure. That alleged photo has never been published, at least not locally.


Local UFO hysteria reached its height Jan. 28 when a number of Staunton residents carrying guns spread out along U.S. 250 to search for aliens.


"Gun-toting Staunton area residents who pursue 'little green men' were sharply criticized today by Augusta County Sheriff John E. Kent," reported the Leader.


Kent said "it is dangerous as well as ridiculous" for grown men to take to the fields and woods to look for nocturnal creatures who stray away from their spaceships and disappear.


Staunton Police Chief R. Ruff Cline said he believed "the whole thing is a hoax."


After that, local interest in UFOs and spacemen seemed to diminish, with the Leader firing a final satirical shot with a front-page photo of a spaceman in a flying saucer — concocted by staff photographer Dennis Sutton.

Permanent link: http://www.ufocasebook.com/2010/virginiahistory.html

So there you have it-- strange things happen on the Winter Solstice!