Category Archives: Uncategorized

It’s true what they say — never shop stupid.

Which one of you bastards swapped out my chicken noodle soup with this “cream of chicken” monstrosity?  Because this stuff is a Lovecraftian horror whose secret ingredient is human suffering.

Seriously, this is what chicken would taste like if a diabolical AI had prepared it using only a rusty, radioactive blender and incomplete recipes gleaned from the ruins of a Cold War gulag — and if the chickens themselves had cholera.

Alright, alright — it maybe isn’t THAT bad, but I was jonesing for some real SOUP, and not this puzzling, paste-based concoction.

And of course the fault is mine.  (It always is.)  I grabbed the wrong package off the shelf at Kroger when I got excited over the sale price.  A lot of Campbell’s Soups look alike.



Cover to “Detective Comics” #682, Graham Nolan, 1995

DC Comics.

batman-detective-comics-682-troika-part3-dccomics-dixon-nolan-hanna

A Yuletide Flu.

So I had a Merry Sickmas.  We think it must have been some version of the flu, though it was curiously absent of any respiratory symptoms.

Trust me — the fever, fatigue and confusion were bad enough.  (Alright, yeah, the confusion for me is sort of a constant thing.)

It turns out I’m not the only one who was under the weather.  There are apparently a couple of different bugs going around; I know people from New York to Ohio for whom contagion was an unwanted present.

Anyway, pictured below is how I turned the corner on my illness.  (It’s been a slow process, but I got sick last Sunday and I feel like I am finally almost better right now.)  A fellow writer out in Arizona sent me this delectable fudge as a Festival of Lights gift, and it was one of the first things I was able to eat.  (The tiny little spoon it came with was just perfect for beginning with little bites.)

And it was at precisely that point when I stopped getting sicker and started getting better.  Fudge is superfood.



“Fidelity,” Briton Riviere, 1869

Merry Christmas, all!!

“A Happy Christmas” greeting card, 1890’s

The above image is a photograph of a Victorian Christmas Card from the 1890’s and is from Archives New Zealand’s former Post and Telegraph/Telecom Museum Holdings collection.

Source: Archives New Zealand from New Zealand, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Are you … MacReady for Christmas?

I apologize.  Not for the violent satire of beloved childhood characters but for the terrible pun in the headline.

“The Secret,” Hanno Karlhuber, 1994

Oil/tempera on hardboard.

Roanokers, look out your window!! (8:23 AM.)

Illustration of a Christmastime scene by Joseph Schubert, mid-19th Century