In the lead up to Halloween (all the more fraught with terrors should we consider the state it’s in without help from the infernal), TYWKIWDBI serves us a ghastly collection of black-humoured wit from Edward Gorey (more on the writer and illustrator here, here and here). Most—if not all of the panels, are highly unsettling: one, an abecedarium, documents (going through the alphabet in order) precocious children meeting their fates in twisted and atrocious ways, and two an appreciation of Gorey’s equally dark limericks. Visit the blog for more unfortunate mayhem, if you dare.
Friday 7 October 2016
Thursday 15 September 2016
cabin in the woods
Apparently just in time for Halloween, a developers are hoping to release an augmented reality game to bring monsters into one’s own homes—for those among who aren’t already enough challenged by playing life on hard-mode.
The platform will take full advantage of the surveillance powers of our
smart phones to accurately plot the layout of one’s home (assuming that
many of us reside in places that must be mapped out, like the Overlook Hotel) and will monitor players’ heart rates and galvanic responses to gauge how frightened they are as they are running for their lives. What do you think about that? It won’t be like those whodunnit dinner theatres I suspect and I don’t imagine well catch a reprieve. Who is needing to invite more ghouls and demons into their lives? Announcing it so early, is this holiday-creep as well as holiday-spillage?
catagories: ๐, ๐ฅธ, ๐ง , myth and monsters
Thursday 22 October 2015
5x5: halloween edition
monster parade: ghoulish GIFs for thirty-one days of horror
psychopomp: high-fidelity hardware that aided mediums during sรฉances
a costume, not a culture: just because one can append the word sexy does not mean it’s a good idea for dress-up
revue: from Atlas Obscura’s crypt, an archived celebration of the season
catagories: ๐, ๐, ๐ง , antiques, myth and monsters
Thursday 8 October 2015
humbug or the great pumpkin
catagories: ๐ซ, ๐, food and drink, myth and monsters
Wednesday 1 May 2013
axis mundi or you got to pick up every stitch
I won’t say that May Day (der Tag der Arbeit) is a subdued affair beyond the land of the Franks by any means (there are quite a lot of protest rallies and demonstrations happening—which I was curious to see but I don’t think I should go looking for trouble today), but I did not appreciate the clear demarcations of customs and traditions and the holiday rather snuck up on me, without the Maypoles (Maibรคume) being set up.
It makes some sense, however, jenseits (this side) of the Limes—the limits of the Roman Empire and thus the civilised world, that conquests would have tamped out some heathen celebrations. The follow-on missions of Christianity did not attempt to totally quash but rather integrate and co-opt such behaviour. No one really knows the origin of the beams, temporary totem-poles, regaled and danced around, but some theorise that the tree represents the axis on which the world turns or the cosmological Yggdrasil that connects the nine worlds of Norse mythology. The bit about the ruckus of the night before, Walpurgis, might be a religious conceit, saying that witches gather to dance with their gods or commune with the devil—although it must have always been observed in some manner and with meaning (though now lost) as a cross-quarter day, exactly half a year on towards the harvest festival of Samhain (Halloween). Superstition holds that one will meet a witch on May Day, which old witch and probably why it is a good idea not to go looking for trouble since it knows where to find you.
Sunday 28 October 2012
in season: butternut-salmon lasagna
For this dish to serve 3 to 4, one will need:
- A medium casserole dish
- A large Butternut squash, enough to get 1½ pounds from (600 – 750 grams), minus the skin and seeds (a slender squash, as compared to a dumpy one with wider squash hips tends to have less seeds)
- A bit of butter, flour (about 4 tablespoons each) and salt and pepper and fresh dill (chopped) and nutmeg (Muskat) for seasoning
- 1 cup (250 ml) of cream
- 2 cups (500 ml) of vegetable stock or bullion
- A 9 oz (250 g) package of smoked salmon (fresh or from the refrigerated section)
- About 7 oz (200 g) of grated cheese (gouda or mozzarella)
- A 4 oz (about 100 g) package of lasagna pasta
- A large onion
Begin by shelling the squash and removing the seeds, and then slice the squash into small cubes and set aside.
Pre-heat the oven to 400° F (200°C). Peel and dice up the onion, frying it in a large pan until glassy in some butter over medium heat. Add a few pinches of flour to the pan (about a tablespoon in all) then pour in the broth and the cream, reducing the heat, and add the graded cheese, seasonings and garnish with the bundle of dill. Mix and leave on low heat for around five minutes. Take the uncooked lasagna noodles and arrange in layers in a casserole dish (grease with a bit of butter) apportioning slices of the salmon, squash and a dousing of the sauce, three layers deep. Pour the remaining sauce over the top, spinkling a bit more cheese over it, and allow to bake for about 45 minutes. Enjoy with a fine Moscato white wine.
Thursday 25 October 2012
bunnicula, count duckula
Lore and superstition regarding vampirism, even preceding the imaginations of the writers they’ve inspired, sanction standard horror and a well-developed, though flexible, codex of rules governing the undead, but can also be keenly abstract in their beliefs.
Folklore of some populations in the Balkans, but surely anchored to a place, a patch of land as much as a particular people, created the overall apparition of the traditional vampire but also held the nightmare that inanimate objects, left out in the pall of the full moon, could become vampires. Certain fruits and vegetables were especially prone to being turned, especially melons, squashes and pumpkins still on the vine during this witching phase of the Moon. It is not clear if the vampire produce took on a changed appearance—nor caused much of a bother, other than rolling about and maybe lurching and bumping into things, but they were no longer fit to eat and needed to be ritually destroyed. The notion that gourds could harbour a malevolent, though paralyzed, force is pretty spooky, and there have been some creative and slightly goofy modern retellings. The idea of possession, a curse settling into a plant also made me think of that troupe of evangelizing vegetables from that children’s Christian television show. The practice of making a jack-o’-lantern out of a pumpkin comes from a completely separate string of traditions and folklore from the British Isles—originally, probably from a hollowed out turnip with the practical objective of making a torch whose flame was protected from the winds.
Sunday 23 October 2011
jolly roger or goonies r good enough
Thursday 6 October 2011
ghost run
Tuesday 26 October 2010
jinkies
Saturday 31 October 2009
great pumpkin
Friday 31 October 2008
All Hallows' Eve