Author Archive

As the housing market continues to fragment into ever-narrower segments, the housing industry has responded with creative communities designed to address underserved markets. The following is a sample of these new communities reflecting the unique lifestyle of their target market:

1. Habitat for Profanity – A sweat-equity community built for poor people who like to swear.
2. Heaven – As you might expect, it’s a gated community. Background checks are mandatory and only those without sin are allowed to enter (entry also helped by knowing Felicity Huffman).
3. Almost Heaven – West Virginia community popular with John Denver fans
4. Uncommon Commons – An exceptionally ordinary development noted for its outrageous normality. If you’re especially mundane, have we got a home for you.
5. Birch Crossing – Although built in a serenely sylvan setting, be advised that crossing that birch too often could get you birch-slapped
6. The Necropolis at Forest Lawn – Available only to people 6 feet and under. This is a below-ground community for the permanently retired. Tagline: “Sorry I can’t come to the door right now. I’m buried.
7. Bayou Perish – Louisiana version of The Necropolis. Due to the Mississippi flooding, it’s an above-ground community for the permanently retired. Available only to people 6 feet and over. Tagline: “Y’all do realize we’re still part of the United States?”
8. Crestfallen Heights – As the contradictory name evidences, it’s very popular with the bipolar crowd
9. Infarction Junction – A heartfelt community were homeowners are called patients and, just like their vascular system, are encouraged to circulate freely. Be forewarned, speeding hearts racing down the Main Artery are not tolerated and are placed under cardiac arrest. Most homes are 4-chambered. You get the picture. Brochure promises “2 EMTs on every corner and a defibrillator in every garage.”
10. My Happy Place – Finally you can go to your happy place. If you lived here you’d be smiling already. A giddy development where all meals are happy meals and all insulation is pink cotton candy. Many homes are made of gingerbread.
11. The Barracks at Andersonville – Taking its cues from the Civil War prison, this lavish reimagining of a dismal POW camp is weirdly popular with guys who still watch Hogan’s Heroes…and the women who love them.
12. Honey Bucket Meadows – An upscale mobile home park (if such a thing is even possible) with an occasional blue splash of elegance
13. Iodine Estates at 3 Mile Island – The only development where both the homeowner and the home have a half-life. No need for a microwave. Just take your food out of the refrigerator and it will spontaneously warm. A healthy thyroid gland is a must.
14. Chair Noble – Not a housing development. I just wanted you to say “Chernobyl” without realizing it.
15. Fallen Manors – A rude development recently zoned for spitting, jaywalking and graffiti.
16. Isn’t it funny how we don’t really understand what we’re doing here and yet we carry on like we do? This is not a housing development, it’s just me making a mid-list observation as a humble acknowledgement of something much greater than our little ego selves. The doors of perception are open for business, now if we could just find the key. We now return to our analgesic entertainment already in progress…
17. English Spellings at Ye Olde Apothecary’s Shoppe – Experience thatched roofs, warm beer and bubonic plague – and that’s just on Drury Lane! Move here and you’ll learn to set your watch just by glancing at Stonehenge.
18. Bunny Hutch Corners – For the hare-raising experience of a lifetime
19. The Sands at Iwo Jima – For the flag-raising experience of a lifetime
20. Yeast of Eden – For the bread-raising experience of a lifetime
21. Lazarus Estates – For the dead-raising experience of a lifetime
22. Sugar Plantation at Chattel Village – For the cane-raising experience of a lifetime
23. Adam & Eve’s Garden of Earthly Delights – For the Cain-raising experience of a lifetime
24. Noah’s Park – For the rain-rising experience of a lifetime
25. Echo Chambers at Walla Walla – Double your pleasure in Walla Walla. The town so great they named it twice. Partial list of homeowners: Yo Yo Ma, Honey Boo Boo, Richie Rich, JJ Abrams and Chi Chi Rodriguez
26. Fresh Dressings at Wounded Knee – Not really a housing development, but I worked on this one too long to just delete it. Ummm, buy now and receive a free walker with the purchase of any teepee
27. The Cribs at Interscope Ranch – Hip hop living was never so bulletproof. Free rap or scratch classes at the Dr. Dre Community Center.
28. The Crabs at Mustang Ranch – Available in soft shell or STDs
29. The Heights at Acrophobia – Each home features a 30-story atrium with loft bedrooms accessed by ladders. Only the Navajo or steeplejacks need apply.
30. The Heights of Impropriety – OMG, voyeurs and exhibitionists living side by side. I mean it’s see and be seen in this fetishistic paradise. Weirdest VFR you’ll ever experience. Please note, during ground fog it’s IFR.
31. Fresh Kills – An actual city and landfill in NY. I’m not making this up: Fresh Kills, Worst Name Ever

 

 

 

 

 

 

In an unprecedented discovery, never-before-seen books of the Bible (scrolls actually) have been unearthed at an excavation site near Jerusalem. They were discovered by a team of archaeologists from UC Berkeley who were astonished by their outrageous fortune remarking, “Can you believe we finagled a grant to dig around the Middle East for 6 months? Unbelievable – oh yeah and stumbling upon these Bible books was pretty cool too.”

The scrolls, written in ancient Aramaic, were found in an amphora (large 2-handled clay vase) marked “Burn these when it gets cold – looks like King Solomon’s son is at it again with his heresies. What a waste of good papyrus.”

Fortunately for posterity, these written ruminations weren’t reduced to warming embers. UC Berkeley Press has collected and curated these strange and wonderful writings that give us a window onto the ancient world and has published them in a bracingly numinous compendium called “The New Testament for Dummies.”

It’s apparent from the tenor of these writings that this early version of the Bible was intended more as a Self-Help Guide Book to assist newly minted hominids in navigating the unhygienic world of ancient Babylonia without contracting typhoid. It was a time without organized religions. When spirituality was a personal experience practiced, not through intermediaries, but from direct personal interface with what today is called consciousness, but back then was called “that thing that makes me feel guilty when I covet my neighbor’s ta-tas”

But before acolytes realized what was happening, well-intentioned malefactors tricked worthy men into organizing the inexplicable cosmos into defined religions, and now religion has become this external thing you pay homage to rather than the deeply felt presence of immediate experience ~ UC Berkeley Press

Irrespective of man’s codification of the spiritual experience, the following is a list of the Bible scrolls recovered at the site, along with a brief summary of their contents. They are attributed to King Solomon’s son, Prince Kanye:

 

1. The One Commandment: This was simply the Golden Rule whereby you treat others as you would like to be treated. And it worked beautifully…until it was sent to committee, where they kept adding amendment after amendment.
2. Do Unto Deuteronomy as You Would Do Unto Mitt Romney: How someone from antiquity could foretell the existence of Mitt Romney is startlingly prescient.
3. 50 Shades of Truth: The less said about this book the better. Way too much focus on spanking.
4. Numbers: Not numbers but numbers. Let me explain. This long forgotten book was once a helpful list of 5-star dentists (middle eastern barbers really) in the greater Judea area who knew how to effectively use Novocain. Therefore, because of their anesthetic abilities, they were numbers (silent “b”) not numbers (audible “b”).
5. King Herod Deals with Hemorrhoids: The Great One tries to reconcile God’s Majesty with a prolapsed rectum.
6. Laminations: A precursor to Lamentations. This rather pedestrian scroll deals more with medieval flooring than the Human Condition. In Laminations, the prophet Linoleum speaks grandiloquently of scuff-resistant, non-permeable surfaces as a foundation for hygienic living. It is believed this is the first mention of cleanliness being next to Godliness.   
7. How to Avoid Getting Stoned: Not the “far out” kind of stoned. This book deals with avoiding the kind of stoning where suffocating rocks are pressed down upon one’s chest to encourage behavior modification. This method of negative reinforcement was really just a medieval reminder to not take the Lord’s name in vain, or to take narcotics in vein.  
8. Burning Taint: STDs to avoid while visiting Sodom
9. Up From Animals: We we’re barely more than livestock when this scroll was written. At that time humans were lucky to eat spelt or alfalfa sprouts. Most food was absolutely offal, or those awful falafels. Even more worrying was people’s fear that if they beheld heathens in the act of fornication, they would fall from grace and instead of being a pillar of the community, they’d become a pillar of salt.  
10. Flatulence of a Lesser God: To quote that prophet Bob Dylan “The answer my friend is-a blowin’ in the wind.” Yes, even in ancient Masada they had street food featuring taco carts. Most found it long-winded.
11. Goliath’s Kidney Stones: Why do you think he was always so ill-tempered? Spoiler Alert: It’s the stone David used to slay him.
12. Hummusphobia: Fear of Hummus afflicted many Anti-legumers who were uncomfortable with these same sex ground beans. Favored by the LGBTQ crowd – Legumes, Grapes, Beets, Turnips and Quince eaters.
13. The Book of Termination: An apposite companion piece to the book of Genesis, this apocalyptic End of Days quatrain presages the coming Social Security time bomb.
14. OMG, Guess What I Can Do?: Really a defense of God’s perfect justice. It explains how orgasm is God’s way of making up for Smallpox
15. Deuteronomy to Me One More Time: This tuneful verse somehow prefigures the Captain and Tennille’s “Do That to Me One More Time.”
16. Love Will Keep Us Together: Somehow, once again, the Captain and Tennille divined.
17. Muskrat Lust: Downright scary. This is where the Captain and Tennille divination should’ve stopped.
18. Book of Antiverbs: A response to the Book of Proverbs
19. Weights and Measures: Keeping things in Biblical Proportion. Scroll goes to great lengths in discussing cubits, stadions and reeds. I couldn’t fathom it.
20. Ob-la-di Obidiah: Jaunty little book proves that life goes on…brahhh. La la la la life goes on. So if you want some fun, sing Ob-la-di Obidiah.

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Long before Harrison Ford set out on his swashbuckling adventures my lifelong buddy and neighbor, Gary DeBaise and I had a few of our own. The year was 1974. I was 12 and Gary about 14. We were very aware of our territory (Syracuse! I’m so aware of you!) to the extent that we perceived an opening, a portal to adventurous mischief that would eventually lead to an intriguing secret never revealed. Until now.

 

In the cold and snowy depths of yet another Syracuse winter there wasn’t a lot to do. So Gary and I sat on bar stools in his parents’ built-in basement lamenting our lot and playing 3-penny hockey. We discussed the usual topics and wondered what else we might do this drab Tuesday evening. We strategized and schemed to formulate some kind of meaningful activity to participate in. Nothing. Then we tried to formulate some kind of meaningless activity, but we were already doing that. I wouldn’t call it an Existential Quandary. I think you have to go to college first and have read A Catcher in the Rye to experience that level of alienation. Nah. Not us. We were just energized teenagers with a whole lotta nuthin’ to do. And as we ruminated, it slowly came to us:

Once upon a winter dreary, while we pondered, bored and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious talk to avoid this bore—
While we plotted, not besotted, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of something gently rapping, rapping at our inner core.
“‘Tis some visitor,” We muttered, tapping at our inner core—
Telling us thus and nothing more – Go to the warehouse in the Mucklands.

Our winter was no longer dreary, and soon we embarked to the Mucklands, cold yet cheery

 

I could continue to tell the story borrowing from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, but me thinks the foreshadowing with such a dark and gloomy poem has already set the tone. Let me more commonly describe the chain of events for that evening’s adventure. This cool and clear night Gary and I had nothing to do as we sat in his basement exhausting the topics of girls, SU football and school dramas. And since we dare not steal any more Canadian Club from his parents’ bar, the idea of penetrating the old warehouses down by the swamp seemed mighty captivating. Plus it gave us something to do besides talking about penetrating Allison Belge. Penetrating the old warehouses we’d actually get to do. So we decided to heed our Muse, brave the cold to go down to the Mucklands where these buildings were located. The Mucklands was a dying swamp with random patches of reed-filled ponds and various drainage ditches leading to lagoons of standing water. It was located adjacent to an old Erie Canal route that newly built Interstate 690 and the old New York Central Railroad paralleled. Within this muddy wonderland stood a few abandoned World War II plants that were protected by a perimeter fence and stood as monuments to the newly developing “Rust Belt.” As we’ll see “protected” might not be the most accurate word to describe this fence.

 

Gary and I prepared for this vital mission like Seal Team 6 – warm coat, small penlight and a common screwdriver. Alright more like Seal Team ¼. Under cover of darkness we departed base camp (his house) at 1930 hours (about 7:30) and, not wanting to draw any undue attention to ourselves (even though nobody was paying any attention to us at all) we proceeded along usual routes to our target. So over the Midler Ave Bridge across 690 and down the steep embankment near the frozen pond we marched, taking great care to circumnavigate the pond just in case our collective 190 lbs. might cause us to break through the ice thereby forcing us to abort the mission. By thinking in military terms we knew we were deluding ourselves, but it made the endeavor so much more fun and purposeful – this was now meaningful activity.

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Some may find this Extra Toasty Cheez-It exposé a frivolous exegesis in subprime caramelization. Others, who already stopped reading at the word exegesis, will never know that as a teenager, a buddy and I broke into a casket warehouse and scared the living exegesis out of ourselves (more on that later*). In any event, this lifelong quest for a darker, toastier more caramelized Cheez-It never ends and I’m incredulous that Kellogg’s has the nerve to pass off these decidedly under-scorched cheese squares as Extra Toasty Cheez-Its. Extra Toasty Cheez-Its? Hardly. They’re still just a whiter shade of orange.

 

My plea for a darker cracker (seems a contradiction in terms both gastronomically and racially) goes out to all the bakers, cereal chemists and marketers at Kellogg’s who manufacturer this irresistible little quadrilateral known as a Cheez-It. When I use the word “manufacturer” of Cheez-Its it feels so cold, so distant, so mechanical. I prefer to believe my snack crackers are magically baked by benevolent little gnomes, or cherubic Keebler Elves or maybe even some Pips, that is, if Gladys Knight could ever spare them. In other words, if Disney had a Cheezitland I’d belong to the Frequent Eater’s Club.    Read the rest of this entry »

1. 

   It’s deja vu all over again.

   Two Lives to Live – A soap opera based on “One Life to Live.” It follows the multiple lifetimes of actress Judith Light.

2. Judas, is that you? – Embarrassing hijinks ensue when at a college reunion in 1975, Apostles recognize each other from the Last Supper.
3. Been There. Done That. – Kinda like Ground Hog Day, but with lifetimes.
4. How I Met Your Great-great Grandmother – Silas Finch describes to his daughter Marisa, meeting her great-great grandmother Prudence Howell (who was also his former wife) at the inaugural Dodge City Hootenanny in the 1850s. Lots of hoedowns and plenty o’fiddlin’. This show is rated “Cover Your Eyes” due to: Windblown hoopskirts, fleeting glimpses of bare ankles, loosely tied bonnets and the drinking of hard cider. Beware: Both the pretzels and the language are salty. 
5. Pull My Finger – Has nothing to do with reincarnation. Funny now. Funny then. Absolutely timeless.
6. Osgood’s Lament: Life Insurance is Now Obsolete – An all new comedy. With people now recognizing their eternity, they’re just not bothering to buy life insurance anymore. Show focuses on insurance man Osgood O’Connell transitioning from writing insurance policies to selling Instapots.
7. This Reincarnation Thing is Killing Me – A humorous take on interminable rebirths
8. Infomercial: How to Avoid Being Reborn as a Refugee– Ex-human traffickers offer tips on choosing the right parents in the next lifetime to avoid becoming an immigrant. Theme song: Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Have to Live Like a Refugee.”
9. Eternity – Will it Ever End? – A heartfelt and frustrating look at the time-space continuum from people who can’t get off it.
10. Shirley MacLaine’s Do You Believe Me Now? – Futurist and peripheral Rat Pack member Shirley MacLaine discusses how she chose to be Warren Beatty’s sister this lifetime.
11. Déjà vu – Similar to the show “Been There. Done That.” And if you like redundancy wrapped in duplicity, inside a croissant…then this multilevel French Baking show is for you.
12. I Love Lucy – Not that Lucy, but the 3.2 million year old, pre-human hominid from Ethiopia. This docudrama delves deeply into the past lives of a troop of Australopithecines roaming the Serengeti in search of food. The show is much more understandable when listened to with the audio program selected to “Grunting as a Second Language.” Why these barely bipedal prehistoric munchkins are all traipsing about wearing Tommy Hilfiger says more about the financial clout of the fashion industry than it does about life on the Serengeti.

 

The underwhelming tourist attraction known as Four Corners, located where the 4 corners of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet, is widely regarded as a kitschy crossroad of analog charm. Lately, however, it has become a jammed junction of interstate squabbling. What normally should be a celebration of shared boundaries is now a crossroad these states must bear. A very cross road. A 90° cross of imaginary lines with real consequences.

Four Corners is a manmade boundary drawn up during the Civil War when territorial contours were out, and crisp military lines were in. A surveyor’s simple, crosshatched fashion statement designed to tame the unruly landscapes of the Wild West. Looking at these stodgy, block-shaped states today one thinks they could’ve used a dose of Queer Eye for the Straight Line. But stylizing the intersection of Four Corners in 1863 was perhaps asking too much of a preoccupied Army Corps of Engineers embroiled in another, more lethal intersection – as in this case the intersectional War Between the States.

Four Corners is an attraction (if you can call it that) of dubious novelty. While it’s true that visitors can brag they’ve been in four states in one day, that’s not really saying much. Heck, I’ve been in 8 states just doing laundry – the states of anxiety, serenity, denial, hostility, bliss, arousal, gratitude and Nevada. Of course that was before they adjusted my medication.

My emotional stability aside, Four Corners has always been regarded as a goofy and uninspiring destination – the most anti-climactic place on Earth. For some it’s a bucket list item to check off. For others it’s a cartographer’s wet dream that has of late become an interstate nightmare. What began as a friendly 4-state quadripartite agreement of mutual benefit, has devolved into a relationship of Holy Acrimony. But state-wise you can’t break the bonds of Holy Matrimony because, unlike people, states can’t get a divorce. They’re stuck with each other. I mean the last time some states tried a dis-union it didn’t work out too well for either party.  

 

The Grievances

So how did a series of 4 right angles generate so much acrimony? I know 3 rights make a left. What I didn’t know was, in this case, 4 rights made a wrong.

New Mexico in particular has grown indignant at being walked all over as a result of this stately agreement. “But that’s the point,” countered Utah. “We’re all being trampled on. You should be rejoicing. New Mexico just doesn’t get it. We’re trying to promote foot traffic.” New Mexico claims its foot traffic is disproportionate and that more people are spending time tramping all over their “Land of Enchantment” than any other state. New Mexico believes there’s more wear and tear on their little ¼ corner and consequently they want more than just the usual 25% cut of revenue for maintenance.

Some envy crept into New Mexico’s statement as they expressed displeasure with the agreement. A New Mexican official elaborated, “We want the same status and celebrity as other states. Take a state with great star power like New York. They’ve got their own cheesecake, steak and even their own minute – Damn Yankees! Georgia has its peaches, Iowa its corn and Mississippi has it’s…ummm sharecroppers? Maybe the less said about Mississippi the better. The point is, what do we get here in New Mexico? We get to be ‘enchanted.’ Enchanted. Well la-ti-da. And to add insult to injury our northwest corner is treated like a national Port-a-Potty.”

To redress their claims, New Mexico is proposing to withdraw from the Four Corners Union in what they call a “New Mexit.”

In reviewing New Mexico’s concerns, Utah spoke for the group saying, “I think New Mexico’s been smoking what Colorado’s been growing, and maybe they’ve gotten a little too enchanted.” Utah has their own issues with the Four Corners Union stemming from the fact they didn’t even want to be a state to begin with. No, their people had greater ambitions. They wanted their own country. The country of Deseret. Do you know what you call people from Utah? – Utes, Aggies, Utahans? Nope, you call them Mormons. Reports indicate that Utah vows to build a tabernacle around their 90° quadrant and make Arizona pay for it.

Arizona, on the other hand, plans on constructing a giant Koi Pond on their little corner of God’s arid acre. They also announced they’ll stock it with piranhas if Utah doesn’t withdraw their asinine proposal.

And that brings us to Colorado. Due to recent cannabis legislation, Colorado wasn’t even aware there was a problem. “We spaced it,” said Larry Stone, owner of the Stoner’s House of Herbs, a marijuana dispensary. “Really, I didn’t even know we bordered New Mexico till just now.” He paused, looked at his watch and said, “It is now isn’t it?”

These days Rocky Mountain high Coloradans are skittish about visiting New Mexico calling it “The Land of Entrapment.”

 

4 Corners Dissension Spawns Opportunity for Others in the Very Esoteric World of Shared Boundary Theme Parks

While 4 Corners is stymied by its fraternal spat, other states aren’t standing still in stoking the micro-appeal of shared boundary theme parks. And in doing so these states have managed to do what many thought impossible – to make a geographic theme park even less compelling than 4 Corners. For example Wyoming, Idaho and Montana have devised a geographic wonderland at their common boundary point called 3 Triangles – a place where reclusive tourists, who are unable to withstand the social pressures of birdwatching, can stand in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana all at the same time! Who wouldn’t want to do that? – I mean besides me and everybody else.

The 50^th state of Hawaii has initiated a boundary-themed attraction where they encourage tourists to put one foot in the Pacific Ocean and one in Hawaii at the same time. They call it the Surf and Turf Experience. I call it wading.

The oddly shaped states of Florida and Oklahoma are trying to steal 4 Corners thunder by developing panhandle theme parks. I’m wary of a panhandle park. I think it will draw the wrong element. I mean who wants to visit a place filled with panhandlers.

Even the corporate-whoring state of Delaware has toyed with the idea of creating a fantasy tourist space where visitors can put their feet down, click their heels together and legitimately exclaim, “I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Del aware? No. Del unaware.

 

Binding Arbitration for Four Corners

To the great relief of Navajo Indians hawking trinkets and Fry Bread at 4 Corners, it appears a solution is on the horizon. The horizon being yet another shared boundary – this one between heaven and earth. To the surprise of many, it seems all parties have agreed to submit their grievances to binding arbitration – surprising because no one thought they were even into bondage. You don’t expect states whose boundaries are straight intersecting lines to be so kinky. But hey, if it offers a resolution, who am I to judge?  

It turns out this entire make-believe spat seems to be a fantasy of invented problems – a pretend tissue of made-up issues. A mere scaffolding for quips, asides and allegorical allusions. And I believe that’s altogether fitting and proper because, after all, these lines are imaginary – both the written ones and the cartographic ones. I believe the arbitration panel will find in favor of the author whose boundary dissolving essay demonstrates not that he is lost in a make-believe world of imaginary lines and pretend quarrels, but that he was merely suffering from March Madness.

How Movies Signify Urgency

Y’ever (yes, y’ever is a word – it’s a contraction of “did you ever”). OK. Let’s start again shall we? J’ever, I mean, y’ever notice this dramatic plot device in movies? The template for this dramatic device operates thusly: In the middle of a rather sedate scene, off in the distance, you hear the whooping gyrations of a helicopter’s rotor blades. Soon this feathery whoosh becomes progressively more insistent as the clamorous decibel level combined with the helicopter’s formidable appearance eclipses whatever trifling activity was happening in the scene. All are transfixed upon the chopper’s thunderous arrival. And all is transformed when the whirlybird drops down from on high and rudely inserts itself into the middle of a fancy lawn party or some such other incongruous venue. We moviegoers wonder – “What in tarnation is a helicopter doing here?”

 

Depending on the movie’s storyline, sometimes the helicopter lands athwart the path of our soon-to-be hero while he’s jogging on a lonely beach (wow, they must really need him, we think). The incongruity of the helicopter in a decidedly un-helicopter-like setting renders the scene all the more critical and signifies a moment fraught with urgency as it foreshadows something pivotal about to take place. The yakking rotor blades herald the significance of this pivotal moment, and wily directors employ this aural technique to segue us into a scene of mounting anticipation, replete with surges of excitement and a heightened level of arousal. In real life you see this dynamic with enthusiastic lovers who try to generate similar feelings, but without a script and definitely without the rotor blades.     

 

In each movie the scene plays out a little differently. The good guy or gal (hey, why don’t I just call them the protagonist) is awakened rudely in the middle of the night by the vacuous flutter of counter-rotating helicopter blades. In these movies our protagonist is either a retired elite Navy Seal counterterrorist type or a brilliant professor (is there any other kind?) who holds unique knowledge in some esoteric field like electro-magnetic warfare or translating runic glyphs. As the helicopter comes into view, a crescendo of thunderous clucking fills the theater’s Surround Sound with enough vibratory alarm to wake the dead – or in this case to wake our protagonist from deep REM sleep. Who wouldn’t straighten up and fly right upon awakening to the other worldly roar of rotor blades slicing through the air with the ominous chop of 10,000 guillotines blades being released in deadly syncopation? OK Mr. Director, you’ve got my attention. Now what? Read the rest of this entry »