Hey. You want to read something really scary?

From Reuters, via Boing Boing:

Germany's Merck halts supply of cancer drug to Greek hospitals

You don't have to take medication every day (like me and other folks on maintenance drugs) to be scared of this.

Sloooooooow. Progressions.

I'm always amazed at how quickly flares appear and how endlessly long it takes them to be soothed away by heavy medication. Still feeling on toppa the world, though, and down to 5 mg of pred, the final taper - although watching the last presidential debate gave me a couple of sympathetic ulcers. Might have to abstain from media on the whole until the election is over.

In other news, my buttons arrived. Now if I can only summon the courage to wear them.

Yep, I do.

Halloweenie

I haven't done any posts on horror yet, and Halloween is days away! This is SCANDALOUS.























Recently I had the pleasure of rewatching the Wicker Man. This time I managed to snag the director's/extended cut, which I hadn't yet seen. I watched the shorter/United States theatrical release about three years ago and while I liked it overall, it was with some confusion with regards to the action and motivation. Why the hell did the villagers do as they did, live as they did, believe as they did? Why the hell was Britt Eklund banging her hands and thighs and breasts against the wall? Why was Sergeant Howie so damn uptight? While the story was mostly intelligible and certainly still creepy, it had a lot of loose threads.


I'm happy to say that the extended cut has no such problem. The characters and plot make logical sense in this version, and there are great historical bits about Summerisle and the Lords of the island (which means more Christopher Lee - always a good thing). Therefore I unequivocally recommend it over the short cut. It's not too much longer and it gives you a more complete, satisfying story.

(Naturally I'm going to spoil all sorts of stuff, so if you're holding on till Halloween Night for your maiden viewing of the original Wicker Man, you'll want to skip this post.)

We don't get complete infodumpery in the director's cut, but we do get more evidence for the characters' behaviors and motivations. The opening scene is incredibly important in this regard, and sadly absent from the SC. We see Sergeant Howie in full pious mode: lecturing his fellow and subordinate officers and getting shit from them in return. For example, he comes on duty with his colleague McTaggart:

Howie: Any serious problems while I've been away?

McTaggart (grinning/sardonic): No, Sergeant, nothing serious. Just the usual - rape, sodomy, sacrilege - you know.

Note: I grabbed the above quote from the site The Various Versions of the Wicker Man, which is a very interesting site and has a great breakdown page of differences between extended and short cuts: Portions Absent from the Short Version. (Warning: links contain some NSFW and spoilery material.) After looking at this site, I think the only answer for Sewious Wicker Man Fans is to watch all available versions, although I prefer the extended cut.

Anyway, so we learn all about Howie's exceedingly Christian lifestyle. He gets irate at Jesus graffiti. He attends church and listens the sermon with a rapt expression. He's a virgin - something that is at first implied and later confirmed. Character-wise, that's some important stuff to cut.

Yay, hymns!

Plot-wise, we get the scene where the cops receive an anonymous postcard tip about the disappearance of Rowan Morrison. We do get this info in the SC, when Howie shows the anon postcard to the guys at the Summerisle dock after he flies in, but I think that seeing the handwritten card (addressed to Howie specifically) in addition to Howie's lifestyle is a lovely and ominous setup for Lord Summerisle's later revelation at just how thoroughly and seriously they planned out the ritual.

Some other nice stuff you get more of in the extended cut are music and songs. "Gently Johnny" especially is lovely and creepy, sung by the patrons of the Green Man pub as an underscore to Willow's seduction of Johnny. There's also a random, awesome scene of Christopher Lee timpanning poetry like a badass on the virtue of nature to flowers and some randy slugs.

Hot slug action.

This is my favorite Christopher Lee performance. Not only is he in a kilt half the time, lording it up as ruler of the island, but his role in the festival procession as the hermaphrodite is hilarious and creepily serious.

"Cut some capers, man! Use your bladder!"

His face is by turns calm, jubilant, hard. When he says, "A little child is even better, but not nearly as effective as the right kind of adult," I get chills. When he leads the islanders in singing Sumer is Icumen In, he's goofily exuberant. I am enamored, man.














Being a fan, I am not at all surprised that Lord Summerisle has a tumblr.




It's gorgeously chilly out today, so I'm watching Madhouse, carving pumpkins and making cider. If you haven't seen Madhouse, you should check that out, too, if for nothing else to see Vincent Price and Peter Cushing having a fabulous time.

Slow progressions

HOORAY! Solid food has completely reentered and commandeered my diet once again!

Of course, this solid food includes a lot of boiled-into-pulp mashed/pureed veggies, toast, bananas, but there are moments. Last night I had a daring helping of pot roast and a completely irresponsible quarter-cup of bleu cheese cole slaw. I'm still being good about alcohol, though. There's a wine festival coming up soon -- I'm abstaining. I was supposed to go paint a faux masterpiece and drink wine in a semi-supervised setting, and I'm abstaining from that, too. (Okay, so that's more due to lack of funds, but still. Marking it in the ledger.)

A. and I are going to see Dust Up tonight! We should probably watch the Vice Presidential debate, but I'm pretty sure they'll be awfully similar, so it's all good.

Uh, oh. You have bun-face.

How Not to Write about Libraries -- some guidelines for reporters

A great article from Jessamyn West on how to describe the library when writing a news story. Hint: you know how some librarians wear buns? Yeah, so does everyone else. Good start, though.

Tidbit:

2. Quit it with the wardrobe policing.

You try working nights and weekends in a landmark building with a heating and cooling system that dates back to Carnegie times. Dressing in wool and layers is practical and smart, as is keeping your hair out of your face when you might have to crawl under a desk to fuss with a computer.

 

S'all good, bra

What do you ladies do with your old bras? This is an old one I've poofed up to look more appealing, but really, it's a pile of stretched out, warped, unsupportive, shoulder-chafing Lycra. I'd be embarrassed to give it to Goodwill. So naturally I poked around online to see if anyone had ideas about bra recycling. I came across the following overly-recycled, exceedingly enthusiastic recycling ideas:


1. Give it away to a secondhand store! 

Yeah, yeah. I guess there are people out there who have multitudes of semi-wearable bras and haven't thought of this option.

2. Make a bra quilt!

I'm trying to figure out the construction of this one, and I can only assume that to make a practically useful bra quilt, you'd have to use the cups only, tons of them, and and layer them together sort of like feathers (which might be prettyish, but also pretty nubbly texture-wise, I'd think). Otherwise I think you'd just end up making a regular quilt and then stitching the bras on top. Which sounds really unattractive to me, and not very cuddly. But I have small imagination for the artistic value of my old bras, I guess. Quilts and bags and purses made out of old pants, I can get behind those. Which leads me to:

3. Make a bra purse!

Look at all the bra purses on etsy! While I do think some of those are cute, they're not really my thing -- I'll take a big bag or pockets over a clutch purse anyway. Also, the above stretched-out sad bra is pretty plain; it would need a lot of doctoring up with lace and beads and other pretties before I could feel good about giving it to someone else. (Still trying to figure out how to do that. "Merry Christmas! Here's something I made for you! What's it made out of? Oh, this and that...you know me, I'm crafty!")

4. Make a sachet for your closet and dresser drawers!

This isn't a terrible idea. In fact, I might take it another way - fill the cups with peppermint oil-scent and stick the thing outside behind the chairs and grill on our patio, where I recently discovered enough piles of mouse turds to support a massive invasion force.

5. Patch your clothes!

Hrrmm. The stretchy parts of the fabric aren't great for this, because they're stretchy and meshy. Not exactly great patching material unless you're doing, I dunno, tights or nylons? (I suppose patchwork tights could be interesting, and Halloween is coming up.) The straps, ditto, also all the little clasps and underwire nonsense. The cups would be okay for patching jeans, though - and if you're a gardener or a catcher, you could have some built-in knee pads. Or you could try singlehandedly to bring shoulder pads back.

6. Make bra art!

The concept behind this is basic: you stick your old bra in a pretty frame, hang it on a wall, and make your friends and family admire it and your thrifty, craftin' style. I have no further comment on this, but instead offer my own idea:

Bra beer cozie(!)

Think about it. It's padded (or at least, the one you use for this "craft" should be) to hold in moisture! It's soft! Just cut the cups off the bra and twist them around and pretend to sew them into one big cup shape, and stick a beer in it! Genius! Cup and can size might not marry. If you can't get a perfect fit you might want to experiment with different brands of beer, or tallboys. Just stop by Victoria's Microbrews and they'll give you a free beercan fitting, no purchase necessary.

So, those aren't bad ideas, even with the exclamation points tacked on the ends. I don't think bra quilts and art are necessarily good ideas, but they're better than my automatic-trash impulse. I do think my searching ability gave out after coming across the above six ideas more than ten times -- in some cases, word for word -- in various blogs and sites, so I wonder, do you have any ideas? Let me know. I got a serious case of warped bra here.

Inappropriate happiness, here I come!

chemical structure of prednisone, from wiki and credited to Bryan Derksen

That's right, folks. It's prednisone time. Devil Pred. Moonface Maker. Instigator of any and all Popcorn Freakouts. That Tricksy Pharmaceutical Which Lures Ye in With Complectional Clearing -- aaand, I'm getting distracted. Which is probably a side effect, though, so even though I've only taken two doses so far, clearly any irregularities in my logic from yesterday on are due to evil, evil, pred.

I do so love that side effects list. It's such an amazing sell for the drug. You go from "headache" and "slight dizziness" to things like:

• changes in the way fat is spread around the body
• bulging eyes
• changes in personality
• extreme changes in mood
• decreased sexual desire

 Also, if you stop taking it too quickly, you can have changes in skin color and major, major salt cravings. Salt. Cravings.

I don't know if I've ever detailed the popcorn incident here for you guys, but let me lay it out for you now. Picture me - well, not yet as the above. Maybe instead as good ol' Nancy Crater, et al.

Captain's log, (star)date 2003-whatever-whatever. I'd recently graduated from undergrad, been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, and moved up to northern Minnesota to live with A., who was then my boyfriend. It took me a while to find a proper gastro (aka ANY), plus I had some issues with medical records and the effective transfer of such from one Minnesota hospital to another. The biggest issue being that the new hospital system wouldn't take me on without a transfer of record.

(Let's take a moment to appreciate the key lesson learned, everybody: always get a copy of your medical records before moving. God fucking forbid you should have to depend on these whaddyacallits, these telephones and fax machines and other strange newfangled contraptions.)

Finally I got with my new doctor. We had the obligatory drug discussion, and because none of the lower level drugs had done a damn thing, I started taking Imuran. However, Imuran is interesting. It's an immunosuppressant that, yes, suppresses your screwy immune system, and obviously such a drastic thing takes a long time to really kick in: six months, to be exact. So to keep me alive, vertical, and functioning in the meantime, they also gave me a six-month prescription of prednisone.

Months one and two were amazing. The blood disappeared. The constant knifelike ache in my gut - gone, like it had never existed. I could eat real food again. Yay for good and all! Also, my complexion got really nice. I was glowing, and I assure you, I have never glowed before in my life. (I'm not sayin' I ain't Nancy Crater, I just recognize both my good and my non-glowy points.)

In month three, however, I started to show some of the less-than-stellar pred side effects. My effervescent face sank into mooniness. I was less and less able to sleep through the night, and I had some of the most bizarre and vivid dreams ever. I got snappish and emotional, and A. put up with it, probably since the memory of nice-ish me wasn't too far off.

Somewhere in one of those later months I had a bad day at work, and I decided that the best cure for a bad workday was a giant bowl of popcorn. Obviously. So I went home and made a beautiful giant bowl of popcorn with butter and salt, just brimming with deliciousness, and put a movie in and went back to the kitchen to get a glass of water and accidentally knocked the whole delicously-brimming thing off the counter. The bowl was ceramic, so it shattered. And I looked down at that popcorn, and I think in some part of my mind I was all, oops, ha ha, you dumbass, but that part was completely lost in what I actually did, which was that I pitched a fit, had a meltdown malestrom of shrieking/crying/swearing that made no goddamn sense at all outside of, I don't know, a massacre.

Luckily/unluckily for both of us, A. was home. He successfully managed not to freak out at me freaking out, pulled me together with something really blasé like, "Okay. It's popcorn."

Cue me crying, etc., somehow unable to deal with

"Yeah, yeah, I know. But it's popcorn."

(Reader, I married him.)

Shockingly, it was just popcorn. And probably that loaded phrase "popcorn incident" inspires some lurid imaginings. But really, it was just spilled popcorn.

In any case, post-absolutely ridiculous popcorn non-trauma, this story has a somewhat happy ending. I'm not likely to be on prednisone for that long of a stretch ever again. But the changes to my personality were so sneaky and slow, and so completely interwoven with the heavenly feelings of sweet, relaxed gut relief that I'm incurably wary of the stuff. I'll take it for a month, and try not to laugh at anyone's pain.

I probably will make popcorn, though. And soooon.

There's something about August.

I was digging through my older entries and realized that most of my flares happen in fall - August or September, to be specific. Since I'm feeling crabby, I'm tempted to blame them on my inability to deal with (or warm to, heh) the Texas heat, but it's a phenomenon that started before A. and I moved here. It's possible I don't deal well with any heat? Or perhaps there's something about fall that sets my gut a-squirming. Season of change? Forgotten back-to-school jitters? The harvest moon?

Things have gotten quieter on the intestinal front, but there's still some delightful cramping and blood going on. In addition, my thinking is getting typically insular, my vision is tunneling, and my fingers are dried out and wrinkly from too many trips to the bathroom and the subsequent required handwashings. I am eating homemade chicken soup (the real kind, not my cheap-ass speciality). I am throwing all my meds down the hatch. I am contemplating calling the damn doctor, who will be sure to put me the Devil Pred. This is all eerily reminiscent of last year, when I finally finished the damn taper at the end of October.

Hmph. Stupid flare. Stupid Pred. Stupid everything.

Urgh, the sequel

New mini-flare occurred this weekend, predictably, I suppose, after a week-to-month's buildup of too many consecutive baked beans, beers, mildly spicy stuff, popcorn, cheese puffs, Indian food, and two glasses of dark cola. I should be grateful it's not a flare-flare, a flare with teeth. But it's still kicking my ass into this week.

One of the hardest parts is eating. In addition to the emergency I'm on a self-imposed bland diet to shut down the crazy intestinal spasming, and what gets me irate about it is how difficult it is to do. And I'm not talking about the delicious food cravings that start after a few days in. It's really hard to cover your daily caloric requirements with applesauce, yogurt, rice, bananas, etc. Two dubious internet resources and a calculator show me I'd have to eat over ten servings of applesauce to make it. And forget about nutritional requirements, because they are not the priority.

In any case. After a couple of meals it feels like you're stuffing pillowfuls of glop down your throat, because bland diets are, by nature, bland bland bland. And you start to feel adverse to eating, and then because you're eating less anyway you start to feel weak and hopeless, and bland bland bland - er, blah blah blah.

Why yes, I am a ball of delight in times like these. Come back any time! Here, have a dog picture:

Puppydog would gladly eat all that applesauce for me. Yep, uh huh.

Luckily I have some good books on hand. After watching the Mark Gatiss BBC Horror thingie, I was reminded by Google that he'd also written some books, so I picked up The Vesuvius Club. So far it's ridiculous, scandalous, silly, exciting, mysterious, and almost exhausting to read -- but in a compelling way. I'm only 70 pages in, but I can recommend it that far wholeheartedly.

How much horror can YOU face?

You may remember that I love me some horror.

So I was delighted to discover this weekend that my favorite Mycroft, Mark Gatiss, wrote and produced a horror doc for BBC a few years ago (which I found while looking up stuff about John Carpenter, you know, as you do) called A History of Horror.  I poked around and found it where most online videos are to be found, and let me tell you, friends, it is absolutely great.

Gatiss also does some poking around himself into movie archives, and shows off stuff like Lon Chaney's makeup kit, and documents from a censor board's opinion of all that dirty sexy Christopher Lee vampirin' going on in Horror of Dracula. I spent most of the episode exclaiming things like, "Oh, that movie? Yeah, it's my favorite, too, Mark! Let's be best friends!" Ah, but that's a horror of a different color.

The second installment is fantastic, if you're a Hammer and/or Peter Cushing fan like I am. There's an especially great moment at or near the 50 minute mark, where a brief interview bit is shown with Cushing and Vincent Price on the set of Madhouse. As an aside, if you haven't seen it, Madhouse is wonderful, a great combination of horror, mystery and send-up of Hollywood/movie biz.

I'm saving the third installment for tomorrow. So far I can't find it anywhere to purchase online, but who knows? Maybe it'll pop up somewhere soon.  It's a nice companion piece to books like Danse Macabre and Projected Fears, and I'd recommend it to any horror fan.

Also: needless to say! But if something's needless, you can count on me to spell it out. Between this and Tank Riot's Zombies! episode, my to-watch horror movie list has ballooned to freakish, atomic-influenced proportions.