November Words of Wisdom

Traditions are answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. 

--Roger Scruton

 

Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves. 

--Anne Morrow Lindbergh

 

To the degree you approach the truth, your solitude will increase...Keep going. Don't be afraid. --Michel Houellebecq

 

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. --Albert Camus 

 

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. --William Wordsworth 

 

Is politics nothing other than the art of deliberately lying? --Voltaire

 

How quickly we turn from damsel to dragon when we decide we've had enough of their shit. --Ann Marie Eleazer 

 

 

 

The morning fog

After the Wednesday/Thursday heatwave, we're back to our regularly scheduled late November weather.

 

I was hearing this song in my head until the fog burned off an hour later.

 

Ooooh, swirly!

I like trying non-traditional desserts for the holidays. I mean, there's absolutely nothing wrong with pumpkin pie, it's always welcome, but this Thanksgiving I went with pumpkin cake. And because I love Bundts...

 

 

Snagged recipe from here. Also, if you use a bundt instead of the pan in the recipe, it needs a lot longer than 30 minutes in the oven. More like 50-ish. Use the toothpick test to determine doneness. The result: well-baked on the outside, incredibly moist on the inside. And remember, dusting with powdered sugar makes everything prettier!

 

Happy Turkey Day!!!

Hope it's a fun one!!!

 

 

Recent reading: Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

AHMM and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine have been running late, and so have I in reading them.

Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine 

(September/October 2025)

 

Favorites from this issue: 

• "High in That Ivory Tower" by Joseph S. Walker: A jaded English professor tries to blackmail a filthy rich student, with unexpected results when the young man's father shows up to confront him. Bonus points for the shoutout to "The Cask of Amontillado" during the shock ending.
• "The Promise" by Ken Brosky: A PI looking for a missing crime witness has to drag his teenage daughter along for the job and is pleasantly surprised when she shows unexpected aptitude and enthusiasm.
• "Julius Katz Draws a Straight Flush" by Dave Zeltserman: Imaginative story about a PI and his AI assistant, who not only assists but authors tales of their legendary exploits, and how they brilliantly solve the seemingly innocuous case of a dead waiter. 4/30/26: This just won the Edgar Award for Best Short Story of 2025.
• "Tell Me a Story, Grampa" by Loren D. Estleman: The story Grampa tells young Randy is about an old, unsolved bank robbery that has become legend in their small town, with a very unexpected twist at the end that reveals the robber that everyone thought got away.
• "Murder in F-Sharp" by Stephen Ross: A teenage music student discovers the identity of the murderer of a teacher at his school, then uses this knowledge to ruthlessly manipulate two adults in his life - his father and his piano teacher. Another great, unexpected twist at the end.
• "The Selwyn Arms" by Marcelle Dube: A formerly homeless young woman investigates the murder of a kind neighbor after realizing local police are going to write it off as an accidental overdose or suicide. Probably my favorite of all the stories and I would love to see more of unlikely heroine Ethel Brownlee, especially with the unexpected news she receives at the end of the story. Plus, I'm a sucker for vintage buildings like the Selwyn.

 Next up, EQMM.

Happy Halloween!!!

A blast from the past - when I lived in Hollywood and carved Comedy and Tragedy punkins!

 

Boo!!! 

 

October Words of Wisdom

When the tyrant dies his rule is over. When the martyr dies, his rule has just begun. --Soren Kierkegaard

 

Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured? --Friedrich Nietzsche 

 

Find a secret place and be unreachable! And then, in the silence of solitude, the things you can not reach in the clouds will meet you there. --Mehmet Murat Ildan

 

Awesome old guys being awesome

Sir Anthony Hopkins has an autobiography coming out on November 4. I will be at my local Barnes & Noble with my credit card at the ready to snag my copy of We Did OK, Kid. In addition to being one of the all-time great actors, he is a total class act and his social media is an absolute joy. Really looking forward to this.

 

 

Happy 80th birthday to Hugh Fraser, wonderful portrayer of the sweet-natured Captain Hastings in the Poirot series. Fraser is also a novelist in his own right and has done the audio recordings for a number of the Poirot books. Hearing him mimicking David Suchet's Hercule Poirot is both impressive and hilarious.  Just love him.

 

Horror mashup of the gods

When two masters of the macabre collide:

 

Toasting Charles Addams and Edgar Allan Poe on this fine autumn evening.

 

No Kings! Bad Kings!

Seriously, will this team ever be good again? Just look at this abysmal start:

Click on the image to biggify and see how awful the Kings have been so far this season. And it probably isn't going to get any better on Saturday because that game is against the Carolina Hurricanes, a team that actually knows how to hockey:

Also, seriously:

 

 

Although I do think we have some career politicians, at both national and more local levels, that definitely think it's their divine right to lord it over us little people. 

 

Given the way the Kings are playing, it's too bad Saturday really isn't a "no Kings" day. In fact, if the Canes play to their ability it will be like the Kings don't exist, so same thing really. 

 

As for me I will be spending Saturday avoiding Los Angeles freeways and any other places where mostly peaceful protests are likely to occur, as I've seen enough of these to know how ugly they can get. 

 

Have a great weekend! Unless you're a Kings fan, and in that case best of luck to you.

Update: Called it.

 

Tied it up in the third only to lose in OT. That's so Kings.

 

This is going to be a sad but true season.

 

We have...no Kings.

 

Updated 11/16/25: A month later I'm eating these words. The Kings are currently on a brutally scheduled but so far undefeated road trip. They are 7-2-1 in their last ten games and have won four in a row. The result? First place in the division:

 

 

Not only that, they have one of the best records in the NHL all of a sudden. Only four teams have more points: Colorado (29), Dallas (27), New Jersey (27), and Carolina (25). Crazyness. But of course the Kings can't have good news without bad: Drew Doughty was injured in the latest win (ankle) and is probably out as much as six weeks.

 

Punctuation humor

 

File this under Funny Cuz It's True.

 

H/T to The Heinlein Files on FB.

 

Recent Reading: "The End of the World As We Know It"

The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King's The Stand

Edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene

Editors Golden and Keene assembled a large, talented group of writers to create stories set in the universe of Stephen King's classic plague novel The Stand. Some of the stories take place as the superflu is emerging and decimating the world's population, some as dream and nightmare-plagued characters are compelled to head to where they've been called by either good (Mother Abagail in Nebraska) or evil (Randall Flagg in Las Vegas). There are also a few stories set well into the post-Captain Trips future.

 

The good news: the authors did a uniformly great job of creating well-developed characters who come to life vividly and who mesh seamlessly into the world of Captain Trips. In fact, I'd say the book's strongest suit is how well the authors were able to recreate the world and the feel of The Stand.

The bad news was neatly explained by a YouTube video review of this book that I stumbled upon early in my reading. Unfortunately, I didn't bookmark it and I can't remember the account name so I can't link to it, but the YouTuber's overall assessment was that while a lot of the stories in this book are good,  none are really great, and that was exactly my experience. Maybe it's the sheer number of stories, but while some were interesting, there isn't one that is haunting me the way the source material did. I'm hard-pressed to remember more than the most recent ones as I write this. 

 

This is a massive book - 765 pages, 34 stories, forwards by Golden and King, and an afterword by Keene, plus an About the Authors section. I started it in late August and finally finished it last night. 

 

Fun factoid: With the exception of Randall Flagg and Mother Abagail (who appear repeatedly) of all the original characters in The Stand it was Larry Underwood - and his apparently immortal song "Baby Can You Dig Your Man" - who is name-checked the most in this collection. Wasn't expecting that, but Larry and his lone hit record pop up a lot.

NOTE: I bought this book prior to King's comment on X/Twitter about Charlie Kirk following his murder - an accusation that was false, acknowledged as incorrect, deleted, and apologized for. I had already started the book and since King already got my money, I wanted to finish it partly because I was curious as to how the authors responded to the assignment, and also because as a published short story author I was intrigued by the thought of what kind of story I would have come up with had I been a participating author.