Journal

Sunday, December 21, 2003

The days are getting longer.

And a very happy Winter Solstice to all our readers.

I forgot to do a card this year, which I feel slightly guilty about, especially when I see an old year's card doing good things for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

Diana Schutz (at Dark Horse) donated her Dangerous Alphabet print, and it's up on e-Bay at present.

(There's an interview with Charles Brownstein, the Fund's director, at the Pulse.)

Spent much of this afternoon playing with a small child and her nativity set. Present at the Virgin Birth, I learned, in addition to a mummy a daddy and a baby, were some cattle, three wise men (one of whom was, I was confidently informed, carrying chicken salad back from the shops), a one-eyed polystyrene snowman, and Cruella DeVille.

I had not known this previously.

I'll get a few hours sleep tonight, then tumble into a car, which will take me to the airport and home. With luck I'll sleep
in the car.

...

What I think I like about this news story:

Joanne Webb, a former fifth-grade teacher and mother of three, was in a county court in Cleburne, Texas, on Monday to answer obscenity charges for selling the vibrator to undercover narcotics officers posing as a dysfunctional married couple in search of a sex aid.

is that the undercover narcotics agents deemed it necessary to come up with a convincing cover story in their quest to buy an illegal-in-Texas vibrator, as if the lady holding the passion parties wouldn't simply have sold them a vibrator without a convincing reason.

...

Have you ever read "The Specialty of the House"? (author forgotten but found in Alfred Hitchcock sampler) If yes, what do you think about it?

If it's the story I'm thinking of, I thought it was a reasonably solid, if, from the title on, slightly predictable, though slickly done "aha, now you will be the main course" people-eating story. (My favourite of all of them is still the subtlest, Dunsany's "Two Bottles of Relish".) (Just Googled "The Speciality of the House", and found http://members.tripod.com/~HORROR_guide/specialities.html a whole page devoted to such stories -- and their real life equivalents. Ick.)

Am about to have a wonderful Solstice Dinner. The wine will be Chateau Gruaud Larose 97 Saint-Julien. As far as I know, I will not be the main course.