“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
― Stephen King
Photo credit: By “Pinguino” (“Pinguino’s” flickr account) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.
All posts by Eric Robert Nolan
Yeah, my old Halloween decorations are pretty modest.
The ones that I received as a gift last week are a thousand times cooler.
And I still haven’t gotten around to creating or buying a proper glow-in-the-dark skull, as my efforts to craft one last year ended so roundly in disaster.
Still, the light-up plastic pumpkin is pretty neat. There was a little boy up in Northern Virginia who was utterly fascinated by it. I wanted so badly to give it to him, but of course you can’t give an electrical item to a young kid.
Speaking of pumpkins, you can see below that I did get a real one this year. What should I do with it? Draw a face? Carve it into a Jack-o’-lantern? I have zero artistic ability, so I’m only going to embarrass myself. If I do anything with it, I have my heart set on the mask design for Matt Wagner’s “Grendel” comic book villain. But I’m still open to suggestions, and I can always get another pumpkin.
Too good not to share.
Thank you, Andrew Stanley Partridge.
“Two Sisters (On the Terrace),” Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1881
Oil on canvas.
This is the very same painting that Donald Trump falsely claimed to own. (The original is housed at the Art Institute of Chicago, which publicly corrected him.)
I sound just like Brendan Gleeson right now. I am AWESOME.
Tonight’s agenda — speak exclusively in British slang; tell all the nobs to bugger off, and sort out all the bellends. Then meet up with a nice bird who isn’t a tart.
Nice one. Right, my British slang is proper, innit? Oh, you don’t think so? GET OUT OF IT, THEN.
Tally ho!
Sally forth!
And let slip the dogs of war! (Or something!)
Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York!!
[Update: God damn it. I realized just now that Brendan Gleeson is IRISH.]
Disney Cartoons’ “The Haunted House,” 1929
I think I said this last year around Halloween — I’m a sucker for antique animated shorts. They’re sometimes darker and trippier than you’d expect, and they’re a weird glimpse into the past. This was released on December 2, 1929, at the very start of the Great Depression; it was just over a month after the stock market crash.
That time when Sherlock and Watson grew up.
“Sherlock” Season 4, Episode 2. The three-way conversation in this scene gets me every time. It might have been the best segment of the entire show in some ways.
Yes, there were some strange tonal and stylistic changes in this last season. But Season 4 also offered some of the show’s best screenwriting and acting. The depth and maturity of this scene alone makes all the previous episodes (which were all outstanding) seem sophomoric by comparison.
This was the season when the two lead characters stopped resembling only fun, quip-a-minute 20-something yuppies and became mature adults and equal partners. This and the change in the show’s tone were both brave creative choices on the part of the writers.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — I’ve loved the Sherlock Holmes books and stories since I was a kid, and this might be the best film or television adaptation I’ve ever seen.
Promotional shot for “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” (1948)
Universal Pictures.
Cover to “Fight Against Crime” #20, 1951
Story Comics. The artist here is unknown, as far as I can tell.
Throwback Thursday: “Manimal” (1983)!
“Manimal” (1983) was an infamously bad TV show. It was so bad that it became a routine punchline on “Mystery Science Theater 3000” about a decade later.
I dunno. I remember being pretty keen as a kid to watch this dude turn into a panther. (Panthers, by the way, were kind of a thing for a while in the 1980’s — on posters, stickers, notebooks, etc. The girls had their unicorns and the boys had their panthers.)
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 