The Llama Joke

I heard this, a couple of years ago, and I don't have a great deal of time to come up with a blog topic, so you get the Llama Joke.  Enjoy.

You know that a one "L" Lama is an Asian holy man.

And that the two "L" Llama is a South American pack animal.

What's a three "L" Lllama?



A big Fire in Boston.


Get it?

Room 238

One of my favorite conspiracy theories is that the film The Shining is actually Stanley Kubrick's confession to faking the Apollo Moon Landing.  Sounds crazy right?  Those who believe this point out that Kubrick was working extensively with NASA on 2001 A space odyssey before and during the Moon flights, that he pioneered the use of film screen surrounds in that film that would have been necessary to fake the moon landing, blah, blah, blah...

But, where it gets interesting is when one explores the differences between Stephen King's novel The Shining and Kubrick's film.  I don't remember what room number the evil room is in the book, but it's not 238 as it is in the film.  238,000 miles is the approximate distance from the Earth to the Moon.  Mild.  I know.  Wait.  Those two creepy twin girls our young hero sees in the hallway on his big wheel?  Not in the book.  Gemini is both the sign of the twins and the name of the space craft used in the Moon Mission.  Meh.  I know.  This is where it gets better.  The kid, the hero?  In that scene with the twin ghosts that's not in the book, he's wearing and Apollo 11 sweater.  And when Jack is typing "A11 work and no play..." He types "A - the number 1 (not the letter L in smallcase) and another number one.  A eleven.  As in Apollo 11.

Also, there's a mysterious and impossible window in the manager's office in the middle of the hotel in the beginning of the movie.  And Jack Nicholson is reading a Play Girl magazine before that.

So, did Stanley Kubrick fake the Apollo 11 Mission and film The Shining as his confession?  You decide....

A Quick blog Post

So, I'm checking things off the old  To Do List and here I am come to Write a quick blog Post.  Sigh.  I got nuthin'.   Let me think. Hmmm.  Well.  I had to layoff one of my employees today, and I feel pretty bad about it.  Hopefully we can bring him back soon.   I edited and put up a couple of chapters (41 and 42 there on the MSTO (MoonSword Trilogy Online) Blog.  I'm about out of energy as got up early this morning (4 am) to leave early for work as the weather was uncertain (possible ice, sheet, freezing rain) and we have that in the forecast for overnight as well so I have to get up at that time again tomorrow morning.  Had to put out a ton of money to get brakes fixed on the ex's SUV today.  That sucked.  Sigh.  Had homemade Beef-a-roni for dinner with my dad.  Watched a little Jeopardy with him.  That one dude, he's pretty good.  Well, it's a pretty damned boring blog post, but it's what I got.  And that's a check off the list for blog post...

Seamus Scanlan's Writing.ie article on La Muse

Here's an article on my beloved La Muse Writers' and Artists' Retreat by my friend and fellow Muser, Irish playwright Seamus Scanlan:

http://www.writing.ie/resources/la-muse-retreat-for-artists-and-writers/

It's worth the read for a little background on my favorite place in the world.  A Note:  The editors of writing.ie shortened the name of the village from Labastide Esparbairenque to LaBastide for some reason.
Seamus is an awesome fellow, a vegan with a penchant for eating bread, though I do not know if he has amazing vegan powers like Brandon Routh's character in Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World.  You should check out his play that received rave reviews in NYC last year:

http://www.amazon.com/The-McGowan-Trilogy-Three-Inter-Related/dp/185132111X


It was Seamus who, on a deary November day recommended The Pillowman, an amazing play by  Martin McDonagh.  It's very dark but amazing.  I read it a just a couple of hours.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pillowman

Anyway, back to La Muse.  That's where I want to go when I die.  And hopefully sometime again before that....

Cover Art for New Edition of Moonsword

For the new edition coming next month to ebook I commissioned this cover by artist/designer Shayla Mist, who will be doing covers for the entire trilogy project.  I'm very excited about it!  Hope you are too!

An Odd True Story from Moonsword: The Tale of the Quarrel

There are a lot of things that are shockingly true in my fantasy novel Moonsword, however, all the people and places are fictitious, blah, blah, blah...of course. ;)  Many of my reactions are in there, some mirrored, some as they were, but one story is completely true:  the tale of the Quarrel or Bird War.  I witnessed this event in mid-April in the late eighties right in my father's house in the very room I type this now, in fact.  I woke in the morning to the sound of bird calls, lots of birds outside my window in the large ancient oak in the backyard.  Here's the account from Moonsword (just change Tolian to me):

Finally they approached the scene.  It was amongst the most unusual sights that Tolian had ever seen.   There stood an oak tree of great age and size.  It was taller than sixty feet and its branches stretched out wide.  It was bare of leaves, of course, but its branches were far from empty.  More than a hundred birds filled its mighty boughs.  Tolian quickly realized that half of the birds were blackbirds and the other half were bluejays.  The combined calls produced quite a ruckus, as they screeched and shouted at each other in clear antagonism.  They did not, however  engage in combat with each other, although from the attitude of the feathered creatures they would have welcomed the opportunity to pounce upon each other.  Instead, they took turns, one bird at a time repositioning themselves in the branches.  A bluejay would move to a branch just above a blackbird, and then begin anew cries of intimidation.  Another blackbird flew next to that blackbird, and together they barked fiercely at the threatening bluejay.

To Tolian it had the appearance of two armies squaring off against each other without yet striking blows.  Two bluejays took off together and landed above another of the blackbird army.  This action provoked a new bird call, different altogether than the war cries of the blackbirds and bluejays.

“Peet!” repeated the call.

Tolian then saw that there was another bird there in the tree.  A solitary Cardinal was watching the proceedings from the center of the great oak.  The rest of the birds fell silent astonishingly immediately.

“Peet!” called the red bird once again.

Both of the two jays that had just moved flew out of the tree and alighted in the boughs of a nearby cedar.  To Tolian it seemed (though impossibly) that the two birds had broken the rules of the Quarrel and had been expelled from the contest by the red-crested bird.  Once the two interlopers had departed the two armies once again renewed their war cries with vigor.  The cardinal watched every move with amazing intent.  Was it possible that these winged-animals had devised a bloodless way to settle territorial disputes, refereed, as it were, by the dignified cardinal?

True story...believe it or not!

Sorry I was just editing and adding chapters to the Moonsword Trilogy Online blog next door and I ran into this story and thought it might be interesting.

Weird Facts Thursday!!!!

So, here we are again, Thursday.  It's evening for me.  I've eaten my dinner with my dad and come to tend my blogly duties.  Which today means....WEIRD FACTS!

- In 1897 hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, across the United States witnessed the mysterious giant airship.  Over cities like Sioux City, Omaha and Cleveland, over woods and farms the giant ship was seen for several months as if it were on an impossible tour of the country.  One day it would be seen in Florida, the next in Ohio, and then in Nevada.  The ship was always described with similar details, which even modern aviation experts agree would not allow the vast ship to fly.  And more remarkably it was not uncommon for people to encounter the operators of the mysterious craft.  Occasionally a farmer would see the airship over his property to find men hoisting buckets of water from their wells to the ship.  Sometimes, the crew would ask the farmer if he minded, sometimes they hurried off, climbing ropes to get back on board.  And every once in while the crew would answer questions.  Most of them seemed like normal people, and they would claim they came from so and so town in so and so state (it differed each time) where the ship was built.  That they were testing the ship and soon they would be mass produced and common in the skies.  Some accounts indicated that some of the crew were not human, however, and small hairy creatures were often reported in the vicinity of the airship.

-When I read Daschel Hammett's classic The Maltese Falcon in France last October, I refused to acknowledge the descriptions of Sam Spade (who's a blonde bruiser in the book) and replaced him with Humphrey Bogart in my mind.  I loved it.  It's a great book.  Surprisingly modern, but what would you expect from the first noir detective novel?

-My favorite Beatle is George, not that I didn't like John Lennon.