The premiere is Feb. 2, 9-11. Regular time is Tuesdays at 9. I'm so glad it's not another Thursday show.

Counting down till Feb. 2!

Only ONE FRIEND sent this to me today. The rest of you are on notice. (It's kinda like a modern Sweeney Todd.)

Body parts sold to kebab stand, police say
Three Russians also suspected of killing man, eating parts themselves
World Blog: Moscow, Russia


MOSCOW - Russian police have arrested three homeless people suspected of eating a 25-year-old man they had butchered and selling other bits of the corpse to a local kebab house.

Suspicions were raised when dismembered parts of a human body were found near a bus stop in the outskirts of the Russian city of Perm, 720 miles east of Moscow.

Three homeless men with previous criminal records have been arrested on suspicion of setting upon a foe with knives and a hammer before chopping up his corpse to eat, local investigators said in a statement.


"After carrying out the crime, the corpse was divided up: part was eaten and part was also sold to a kiosk selling kebabs and pies," the prosecutor's main investigative unit for the Perm region said.

It was not immediately clear from the statement if any of the corpse had been sold to customers.

Went to see this with my dad today. The first half was total disaster porn. Tons of fun. Then they tried to have an actual plot. Not so much fun. And like most disaster movies, the science was lame. My dad said he heard NASA's Web site's been flooded by inane questions about things that happen in the movie. (I can hear it now: "Are the solar flares going to cause the earth's crust to become unstable? Sheesh! I think I have to check out badastronomy.com to see what good ol' Phil Plait has to say about this.)

Best part of the movie? The fact that we missed the end. The theater had to be evacuated due to a fire. Really. See?

Yeah, I'd buy it if a murder took place there. Hell yeah if I didn't have to pay. And no, I wouldn't think twice if I was warned it was haunted. Sheesh, for me, that'd be a plus. Might bother T and the cat a bit though. :-) But me, I say bring on the ghosties, the ghoulies, and the things that go bump in the night!

(And before anyone thinks I'm being totally facetious, I DO believe in ghosts, I've seen ghosts, and my childhood best friend's house was indeed haunted. Suicide in the dining room. The chandelier she hanged herself from was still there too. She liked to show up as a glowy blue during sleepovers. But she never did anything other than look spooky and scare eight-year-olds.)

Tags: haunted house, possessed, spirits, writer's block

I'm so slow reading this year!

18. The Monster of Florence, Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi

America isn't the only place with serial killers. But for some reason, the story of the Monster of Florence didn't make it over here until a U.S. writer ended up involved. I'd heard about this story a year or two ago when I saw it on Dateline. Honestly, the judicial system there makes ours look stellar.

Couples on what we would consider lovers' lanes are murdered. The men are shot, the women mutilated. This goes on for decades with no clue as to who the culprit is. Journalist Mario Spezi gets the first case to report on by accident and continues to write about the case with every attack. He's considered an expert. Douglas Preston and his family move temporarily to Florence so he can research a novel. When he meets with Spezi in the course of that research, he discovers that the home he's rented is basically on the site of one of the murders. Preston becomes as obsessed with the case as Spezi, the two of them discovering evidence that disputes what the police have. When a new inspector takes over the case, both Spezi and Preston are arrested. (Not a spoiler--you find this out right away.) An excellent book and a scary one as well.

19. Dopplegangster, Laura Resnick (freelance)

Esther Diamond is an actress. With the play she's starring in closed, she needs to find work. As the case with many NY actresses, she falls back on waitressing. She's done this before, even though the restaurant is a known mob hangout and her new suitor is a cop, who is very unhappy with where she's working. Naturally, weird things start happening. She waits on a customer, then sees him outside acting as if he hasn't eaten yet. Not long after, he claims he's seen his double and that he'll die. This is, of course, the first in a string of mobsters seeing their doubles. With the help of Max the wizard and her cop, Esther tries to figure out what's going on. Fun. (pub date: Jan 2010)

20. Alien Hand Syndrome, Alan Bellows

A LibraryThing win. Stories of strange and unusual things, from medical to natural disasters to weird disasters (molasses flooding Boston) to you name it. I felt that it was a bit heavy on military weirdness, but that's a personal bias. It was strange. In a good way.

21. Sapphire Sirens, John Zakour (freelance)

A new Zachary Nixon Johnson novel is always a happy thing. In this latest installment, Zach is taken to the undersea kingdom of Lantis to discover who killed their queen. Loved it. (pub date: Dec 2009)

22. Tragedy at Two, Ann Purser (freelance)

Lois Meade's daughter's boyfriend Rob is found badly beaten on the side of the road. When he dies, Lois knows she must figure out who's killed him. Local suspicion falls on the band of Gypsies who stay at a farmer's every year. Lois, one of the few who doesn't automatically believe they're the culprits, looks beyond the Gypsies.

This one really brought home how badly Gypsies are still looked at and treated and stereotyped. I won't get on my soapbox about that here. It's really nothing new to me--I follow news about the Rom--but it's another to see it in fiction, thought the author was by no means condoning it--quite the opposite. (pub date: Dec 2009)

23. Sexy as Hell, Susan Johnson (freelance)

I'll state right away that I hate romance novels. I wouldn't have read this had it not been a freelance project. But if you like them, there's a lot of sex in this one. Not much else, but a lot of sex. (pub date: Jan 2010)

24. Haunted and Bewitched Ireland, edited by Bob Curran

Stories of ghosts, wizards, and witches in Ireland. Some of them I'd heard before, especially in the witch category, such as Bridget Cleary and Biddy Early. It's an absolutely beautiful book--the photos are simply amazing.

Tags: book reviews

The '80s have returned. And it was not good. Someone was actually wearing a Members Only-style gold/bronze lame (add accent, though lame works well too) with a matching headband. But not a normal headband, oh no. It was one of the ones that goes across the forehead. I was terrified. But then I saw a mounted cop on an extremely beautiful black horse. And everything was better.

I forgot to mention that we only got SIX trick-or-treaters this year. SIX!!! And five were before dinner! What's up with that? When I was a kid, if Halloween was on a Saturday, we were out all day and a good part of the night. With a break for dinner of course. Not that we ate much of it. But then I saw that Pat Robertson believes demons live in Halloween candy. That must be the reason.

I'm sad. One department had a whole zombie thing going. It wasn't mine. The Alice in Wonderland (complete with rabbit hole) was pretty awesome as well. So was Mario Brothers. And the group going as the art in our lobby (truly terrifying). There was also the Bunny Suicides, complete with blender and bunny parts. I didn't know bunny insides were made of styrofoam peanuts though. And that dept dressed as bunnies. The one with the "Derek Jeter blows" T-shirt amused me to no end.

Nobody went as swine flu! Aaugh! I could have done it! So annoyed. But here is evil me, with a coworker who was good enough to take a pic (she was a feather duster). (Hey, podling, this is my imaginary friend/coworker--she does exist!)

I have to say I'm really glad I didn't pay to see this in the theater. Or had to pay per movie from on demand. (Oh, btw, turns out Cablevision isn't as evil as I thought--according to the IFC site, Dead Snow was only scheduled to be shown till 9/1, so it went a lot longer than it had to. Right now it's available as a download or DVD from Blockbuster, but it might eventually hit Amazon vod. I might break down and watch it from Blockbuster, but only if I don't have to join to get vod. And since our new(ish) TV is a Samsung, I should be able to watch on TV, not the computer--my computer is not in a comfy place for watching movies.)

Anyway, back to Antichrist. Holy crap. First, I need to remember that clinical depression is treatable but not curable and that I really should not watch movies that were conceived when the director was in the throes of a deep depression. Second, EW. The penetration shot and stunt penis didn't bother me much, but other things did. Especially what they ended up doing to each other. Note: there may be some spoilers here, but I highly recommend that nobody see this movie, so I'm not cut-tagging it. Stop now if you really don't want to know.

I realize this movie was also supposed to be full of symbolism and allegory, but I'll be damned if I could figure out for what. And there were things that seemed to be clues to why the woman (I honestly don't even know the characters' names, if they had any) went so psycho. Why she thought her husband was going to leave her. So basics: toddler climbs out a window and falls to his death while parents are having sex. All in black-and-white to classical music. Mom falls apart, naturally. Dad is a therapist and encourages her to feel her grief not hide from it with pills and thinks her shrink is a quack. She keeps calling him arrogant but listens to him. Bad idea. Not supposed to treat people close to you after all. Talk about backfiring. She heads up to their cabin in the woods and he eventually joins her, pushing her to confront her fears. At some point she's become afraid of nature, calls it Satan's Church. She'd been working on a thesis about violence against women through the ages; at some point she seemed to start thinking the women were in fact evil and deserved it. Did I mention this movie was also quite misogynistic? Husband thinks that's nuts, of course, and she brushes it off. It's not explored again--rather large oversight there, doc. At some point he finds a bunch of books of books on witchcraft through history and a book of notes that becomes more and more crazy with the writing till there's practically only one word on a page. Brought up again? No, of course not. Wife finds autopsy report on kid--some odd trauma to his feet but nothing else out of the ordinary--she hadn't been told about it earlier cause she wasn't well. So in a picture, it seems the kid's shoes were on the wrong feet. Weird she says. Husband notices in every picture the shoes are on the wrong feet. Then flashback to her putting the kid's shoes on, on the wrong feet of course. Kid's crying like crazy. What does this have to do with anything? Beat the hell out of me. Eventually she's so convinced he's going to leave her (why?), that during sex, she knocks him out with a board, then drills a stone (whetstone, small millstone, something like that) through his leg so he can't leave. He's a little freaked when he wakes up and somehow drags himself out into the woods, eventually finds a little hole under a tree he can fit in. Finds a crow buried there. Oh, there's also a fox that talks to him earlier. Says nothing but "chaos reigns." Yeah. Crow's alive and making noise. She's running around yelling at him for leaving him, etc., hears the crow, tries to drag him out. Yeah, right. So she digs through the ground to get to him. He's almost dead from being practically buried alive. Back to the cabin, she starts with the sex again. Asks him to hold her. He does, and at the same time takes a pair of scissors and cuts off--I had to fast forward through that part. Otherwise I might have thrown up. Yes, that. More crap goes on that frankly I can't remember. Hailstorm starts, referencing earlier stuff about women being evil and witchcraft, implying she started it through her emotions (fuck, if someone did that to me, there'd be a lot more than a hailstorm coming). She ends up dead--believe it or not I forget how--and he burns her body (that's what it seemed to be anyway--a little hard to tell) on an upright tree, like a stake. Get it? Thwap! The end (the movie is done in a prologue, 4 chapters, and an epilogue) shows him limping away on a makeshift crutch and then tons of schoolgirls running through the woods around him, like a wave of them. I have no idea what that meant. Maybe I could figure it out if I really thought about it, but by that time, I was grossed out, tired, disgusted, and feeling somewhat depressed. And I really didn't care. Luckily the History Channel was doing a show about werewolves, which cheered me up a bit.

Not only have they been depriving me of BBC America since I moved to Jersey, but I tried to go home and watch Dead Snow last night. Once again, it wasn't listed on the menu. So I called them, rather annoyed that it's listed on the Web site as being available but when I look on the TV menu, it's not there. Seems the Web site wasn't updated. I told them it was rather unfair that the site's not updated as movies are taken down. And seriously, they have crap movies like Bride of Chucky and ancient movies like Beverly Hills Cop but an indy movie that got awesome reviews? Gone within two months. They should have at least left it running past Halloween. But no, I apparently had a whole 2 days to watch it after I signed up. And that was one of the movies I signed up for, dammit! Nor is it out on DVD yet. I'm cranky about this. If you couldn't tell.