FutureMacNuggets!!
One of these chickens is an enterprising bird that my friend and her family have dubbed “Adventure Chicken,” as she frequently escapes the enclosure. Adventure Chicken actually stuck her head in my tent when I wasn’t looking.
Tag Archives: Eric Robert Nolan
Warrenton, Virginia, Labor Day Weekend, 2016
Camp Nolan II. The anti-bobcat bat is inside beside my bed.
The soda-holding flamingo.
This pretty lady and I became fast friends.
She even wanted to become my bunk-mate!
A homely locust.
CVS is selling Halloween decorations already. But it’s okay, because some of them are damned cool. This is a rat skeleton I purchased. Then a trio of us placed it inside a certain Mary Wash alum’s tent at night, with a glow-stick inside its ribcage.
The results were somewhat lackluster, as you can see below. Our host however, ensured he received his a proper scare this weekend by firing off a starting pistol while he napped.
Flora.
“PET ME,” says the Puppy!
A butterfly joined our group for quite a while. The trick to attracting them, apparently, is organic tomato sauce.
“An Ode for Fellow Replicants,” by Eric Robert Nolan
(Dedicated to Philip K. Dick)
What if the Internet is an android’s dream,
and we are the electric sheep?
Dick would know at once
our artificial people:
every boy a Roy,
every girl a pleasure model,
trying to pass as real,
inwardly concerned with their design —
“Morphology. Longevity. Incept dates.”
On Facebook,
“More Nolan than Nolan”
is my motto.
If I, in my genuine moments,
could greet my jpeg face
hiding in his electronic words,
he’d go offworld or die.
After all,
“It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker.”
[Author’s note — the film quoted and paraphrased above is Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982), to which this poem is an homage. “Blade Runner” is itself an adaptation of Dick’s 1968 novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”]
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2016
Photo credit: By olga.palma – facebook enganchaUploaded by JohnnyMrNinja, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16525385
“Ya wanna know how I got these scars?”
I’m trying to explain to two friends that I am terrible at playing Scrabble. And I misspelled it as “Scarbble.”
I’m pretty sure that’s the definition of irony.
Scarbble. It’s when you cut a motherfucker for cheating.
OMG — COOLEST BIRTHDAY CARD EVER!!!
From a dear friend and her family!! It unfolds into a “Captain America: Civil War” poster! (I feel certain her boys had a hand in picking this out.)
You know you’re a weird guy when the posters you love at age 44 are the same as those you would have loved at age 14.
The question the poster poses can only be purely rhetorical, BECAUSE OF COURSE I SIDE WITH CAP.
A short review of the Season 3 premiere of “The Strain.”
“The Strain” is zany, over-the-top, serialized comic book horror that often veers too close to high camp. I keep waiting for either “South Park” of “Family Guy” to lampoon it. It’s sometimes pretty brainless, and it often seems like the product of a group of hyperactive 14 year old boys sitting down to imagine a vampire apocalypse.
But what the hell? The damn thing works. It isn’t as smart or as grown up as the moody “The Walking Dead,” “Fear the Walking Dead” or “Stranger Things.” But it’s got a fast pace, a kinetic energy and an unpredictability that all of those shows lack. It’s just … more fun. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love it. And, as my interest in slow-moving zombie dramas starts to wane, this might become my favorite horror show currently on television.
It’s damned ambitious. The writers here desperately want to show a full scale monster armageddon, and they don’t seem to care much that they’ve got a limited budget or a finite number of extras. (We are told, now, that the vampire plague is spreading throughout the country, and is no longer confined to New York City.)
And it’s still scary. Guillermo del Toro’s screeching, leopard-fast vampire baddies are still unnerving. They’re goddam albino apex predators and they’re repulsive. And I think their appeal is surprising after two seasons of audience exposure. I predicted a while back that this show’s horror elements would lose their momentum, and I’ve pleasantly been proven wrong. (Hey, if you’re a horror fan who loves monsters, you eventually crave story antagonists other than doomed, pitiful zombies.)
Last night’s Season 3 premiere offered little that was new. But it did offer Navy Seals fighting vampires in the NYC sewers, and that was frikkin’ sweet. I’d give it a 9 out of 10.
Throwback Thursday: Olivia Newton John’s “Xanadu” (1980)
No, I was never a fan of Olivia Newton John, nor am I old enough to recall her stardom in any great detail. I need to mention “Xanadu” at least once here at this blog, however, as it is forever linked in my mind with the summer of 1980.
This song was played endlessly at the beach by sunbathing teenage girls. They mostly went unnoticed by me, as this was the summer before I entered the third grade, and I hadn’t developed much interest in girls just yet. But thinking of this song immediately returns me to the beach again as a little boy. (My parents sent me there with my siblings a lot, something for which retrospect has taught me to feel thankful.)
I have a lot of memories of going to the beach in the early 80’s — burning sand, screaming for the ice cream man, and sidestepping endless arrays of discarded bottlecaps in the gravel parking lot. (The local teenagers must have done a hell of a lot of drinking there; upturned bottlecaps hurt when you stepped on them.) This was also the summer that my friend Brian’s little brother, Brad, erroneously told me that Han Solo died in “The Empire Strikes Back.” (There were no “Episode” prefixes when the first Star Wars films came out.)
There was another hit by John that can transport me back the early 80’s. That would be “Physical,” which was played and sang ubiquitously in 1981 by the girls in my fourth grade class. (I still remember Linda, who lived on the next street, talking about John in awed tones: “A looooot of people think she is beautiful.”)
But I’d prefer not to think of that song, if I can help it. While “Xanadu” is arguably still fun and catchy, “Physical” is best left forgotten.
Check out the August 2016 Issue of Peeking Cat Poetry Magazine.
Hey, gang — the August 2016 Issue of Peeking Cat Poetry Magazine was released today. Check out my friend Dennis Villelmi’s “Spending and Saving” on Page 4; it’s my favorite poem that he’s authored.
A lighthearted short summer poem of mine, “Bumblebee,” also appears in the issue on Page 8.
You can order a softcover copy of the August Issue for just over $3 right here:
Or, you can download a free electronic copy of the magazine in PDF format right here:
Enjoy!
A review of “Special Bulletin” (1983), with link
There’s a pretty damn interesting chestnut from from 80’s-era nuclear nightmare films available on Youtube — 1983’s “Special Bulletin.” (The link is below.) I was surprised I hadn’t heard of it. I think most 80’s kids remember ABC’s “The Day After.” That infamous television movie was a cultural touchstone that scared a generation of kids. “Special Bulletin” was produced by NBC the same year, actually preceding “The Day After” by nine months. Instead of a world-ending war with Russia, the feature-length special imagined a single incident of nuclear terrorism in Charleston, South Carolina. (I myself had no idea that Charleston was the strategic military nexus that the movie explains it to be.)
“Special Bulletin” was filmed as a “War of the Worlds”-type narrative, consisting exclusively of faux news coverage, and it’s pretty damned good. (It won a handful of Emmys.) It’s just as frightening today — or maybe more so, given the increased threat of precisely this kind of terrorism from stateless groups.
The acting is mostly good, the directing successfully captures the feel of live news coverage, and the absence of a musical score further lends the movie a sense of realism. The story has a few surprises for us, too — the plot setup is creative and interesting, and much more thought went in the the teleplay than I would have expected. The film asks some difficult questions about the role of the media in affecting the outcome of high-profile crimes like the one depicted. (Would such questions be more or less relevant in the age of camera-phones, uploaded ISIS executions and Facebook Live? I’m not sure.)
I was also quite impressed with some of “Special Bulletin’s” thriller elements. (I’d say more, but I will avoid spoilers for anyone who wants to watch it below.)
One thing that detracts from the format’s realism is the fact that some of this movie’s actors are easily recognizable from other roles in the 80’s (although it’s fun spotting them as an 80’s movie fan).
Most viewers my age, for example, will recognize Ed Flanders and Lane Smith. The utterly sexy female reporter who arrives on location at Charleston Harbor is Roxanne Hart, who later played Brenda in “Highlander” (1986). (She’s still quite beautiful, guys, and she’s still making movies.) Most jarring of all, however, is a prominent role played by David Clennon, who any fan of horror-science fiction will recognize as Palmer from John Carpenter’s 1982 masterpiece, “The Thing.” This is still fun, though — he has that same disarrayed hair. Was it his trademark back in the day?
Pi in the Sky!
If that isn’t the Greek Pi, I don’t know what is.
Okay, maybe a howling dire wolf seen in profile. With … an RPG launcher strapped to his back? That’s f@#$ing awesome.
Or maybe it’s a continent … the magical lost empire, “Apophenia.”
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 