Sally

 

This is Sally. Sally is a stray cat. Sally might have another name. As far as I’m concerned she’s Sally.

I’ve known Sally pretty much since I moved to my new apartment two years ago. She’s one of several strays who were around at the time, and the only one I can be certain is still around now. She’s hung out at my stoop periodically, originally because the people who lived next door had a cat bed out for her.

I’ve since learned more about her. I’ve learned she’s very slow to trust. That she even came round when I first moved in now seems remarkable. At the moment she’s again keeping her distance because I have another new neighbor, and they’ve begun putting things outside their door, and she’s evaluating.

She only recently returned to my stoop. You see, there was a dog. Not my dog. The neighbor from before this one. I perhaps contaminated myself by petting the dog, quite enthusiastically. It was a very good dog, and deserved the attention.

Sally didn’t agree.

Sally is a finicky eater. It took time to learn exactly what she liked. I only just nailed, it, too, and stocked up. And then the new neighbors had to unsettle things again.

Sally is not to be petted. No, not at all! She values her personal space. But she’ll follow me up the stairs, knowing I’ll have something for her. She’ll look into my apartment, mewl her thanks. And she’ll get on with it, and sometimes just hang out.

She’s got another human friend. As far as I know, they’ve never contaminated themselves, with dog or otherwise. They put food out reliably. She eats it. She comes round when it’s safe, here, all the same. Never pin yourself to a single source!

Sally is a stray. She values her independence. And she doesn’t mind humans helping out. She doesn’t mind sticking around. Within reason.

A Journal of the Pandemic #25

 

Baseball cards!

I didn’t think I was gonna talk about baseball cards during the pandemic, but here we are! Last year I thought, people maybe aren’t thinking baseball cards, and maybe that’ll make them more valuable than they have been since the glut of the ‘90s. It seems other people finally got around to thinking that, too.

I’ve only ever been a casual collector. Baseball cards are how I learned the classic “Bash Brothers” era Oakland A’s, which was my favorite team as a kid (and remains one I follow to this day), including Rickey Henderson, who I later learned played for about a million teams, about as many bases he stole in his career (and he hustled right to the very end in a bid to shore up his home run count).

When I was short of funds a decade ago I tried to sell baseball cards, but nobody wanted ‘em. They were worth nothing because there were so many cards, and collectors, from the time amply represented in my collection.

And I’ve bought baseball cards here an’ there ever since. Last year there was no trouble at all, as I said. You might not have been able to find toilet paper, but there were baseball cards! And I kept checking in, and then, a few months ago, I noticed there was none at all to be had, or found, at the local Target! I kept checking: no baseball cards.

Eventually I had a look online. Trading cards games apparently massively heated up, and whether or not this dragged in baseball cards, or if it’s a coincidence, I don’t know, but rabid collectors ruined it for everyone. 

Aside from desperation ten years back, I never really thought of baseball cards (or comic books) as a way to bring in money. There are plenty of people who flip these things for large sums of money, if they find themselves in possession of a valuable card (or comic) (or lunchbox! there’s a market for everything! apparently wrestler/actor/animal Dave Bautista collects lunchboxes) and know how to navigate the market. 

Dare I figure this out? Are baseball cards from last year as good as the new ones I haven’t seen from this year?

Hmmm…

Oz films 1914-1925

The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914) was the first theatrical version of Oz, based on the namesake book, seventh in the series, from 1913.

His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz (1914) predates The Scarecrow of Oz (1915), the ninth  book in the series.

The Magic Cloak of Oz (1914) is based on Queen Zixi of Ix (1905), an unofficial entry in the series.

The Wizard of Oz (1925) is a fanciful, loose adaptation of the first book, and unlike the three previous films has no involvement from L. Frank Baum, who died five years prior. Its biggest claim to fame is featuring a pre-Laurel & Hardy Oliver Hardy.

It’s interesting to watch this early Oz. They’re all silent films, of course, and rely heavily on slapstick of one kind or another, and capture none of the hilarious dialogue the books feature so generously. Baum was a theater man before Oz, and it’s evident from how showy his film versions are. The books are more about social satire, but that’s hard to convey, much less emphasize, in the early film format. 

Watching them is an object lesson in the elasticity of storytelling between formats, and a lucid tour of early Oz history.

Dark Matter: Danab Cycle

One of the pesky side-effects of suspending comments is that I can’t at least see people cheering (or pretending to!) a new release. I guess the book that is the reason for my newest release, Danab Cycle, is itself getting released next week. Danab Cycle is a tour of the short fiction I’ve been carving out of the Space Corps saga for the past decade, so it’s more important than the impetus that spurred it to publication. If you’re curious about what I’ve talked so much about over the years, it’s a great place to start.

...Technically if you do, there’s somewhat of a lie in it. Two stories in it, not one, have not been seen elsewhere or appeared in Sigild, unless you count those folks who thought one was possibly eleventh best. At the time I meant to distinguish that it had at least been seen by readers in some capacity, but I’m not sure I nailed the wording. Well.

Dead Butlers, In the Leviathan, Collider

A relative few minutes ago I finished up another comic script project, Dead Butlers, over at Sigild, an interlocking twenty-two page Batman pastiche that expanded past its original parameters (by ten script pages!). It was just one of those things that struck as an interesting idea and just sort of continued to blossom, and anyway was great fun to write along the way.

Yesterday I had a thunderbolt concerning In the Leviathan, a work in progress that suddenly came into vivid shape. Part of that is because I sent Nazi Crimes to one of my favorite cousins, and she almost immediately texted back incredibly enthusiastic initial thoughts, and we talked a little about the Montague story, and where I saw it heading, so somewhere in the back of my mind it must have been rattling waiting for that moment.

Concerning Collider, the project I really thought I was writing, finally, I had paused on after actually getting started on it, but it wasn’t feeling right and eventually I realized it was because I wasn’t telling it right. And so I hit the pause button and almost immediately knew what needed changing, and so that was pretty great.

I sent some poems to a literary journal tangentially related to my alma mater last weekend, so that was pretty interesting. No idea if they have a shot at acceptance, but it’s the first time in a long time I’ve submitted poetry anywhere. 

2020 Box Office Top Ten

The strangest year yet at the box office thanks to the pandemic, obviously the results will always look weird, so let’s have a look, via Box Office Mojo as of today, for the top ten movies released during 2020:

1. Bad Boys for Life - $206 million - For a year that also ended up known for the second wave of Black Lives Matter protests, it’s surely an irony that the third Will Smith/Martin Lawrence buddy cop flick ended up the highest grossing film at the US box office.
2. Sonic the Hedgehog - $148 million - I prefer to think of this as a Jim Carrey movie, his big mainstream comeback, and by far his biggest box office success in years.
3. Birds of Prey and the Fabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn - $84 million - Here’s where the skewed box office really sets in. You’d have to go back decades to find a year where a film made the top ten without having reached at least a hundred million (1995, Die Hard with a Vengeance at seventh place with $92 million). And this is the highest grossing superhero movie! 
4. Dolittle - $77 million - Stop me if you would’ve predicted this: Robert Downey Jr. starring in a movie that is quickly forgotten that somehow still ranks as one of the top box office draws of the year. Only in 2020, folks.
5. The Invisible Man - $70 million - One of the modern horror hits that I couldn’t care less about.
6. The Call of the Wild - $62 million - A movie released just before the pandemic hit that probably would’ve made about as much after theaters reopened.
7. Onward - $61 million - Likewise. A minor Pixar effort later eclipsed by Soul.
8. Tenet - $57 million - Christopher Nolan drew criticism insisting that it be released in theaters. Managed to be the biggest hit post-shutdown anyway.
9. The Croods: A New Age - $56 million - Family movies were an obvious boon in the pandemic era.
10. Wonder Woman 1984 - $46 million - Closing out the list is the biggest superhero release post-shutdown.

I guess I’m not even unofficially doing A to Z this year...

Across my network of blogs, some of which probably owe their existence to the challenge, I am apparently not doing the A to Z this year. This is possibly the first time since 2012 that this will be true. Which is kind of sad.

This wasn’t a deliberate choice. It just kind of happened. I did the challenge as an official participant many times, and unofficially (not linked into the sign-up) several times, too. I even did the challenge simultaneously on several blogs a few times. Once I got a novella out of it. 

The challenge has been good to me. At the moment, I am committed to working on a new manuscript, which cancelled out an ambition to tackle another serialized story in official/unofficial participation.

There’s always next year.