And the ghosts fly their asses off tonight

Links and stray thoughts which go in this post because I didn't manage to put them anywhere else. It has been that sort of week.

1. rushthatspeaks is a brilliant reviewer. By the time you finish reading about Renée L. Bergland's The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (2000), you will have seen a ghost.

2. derspatchel is an excellent sports writer. I like being able to read the people I love.

3 . Thanks to Rob, I am now the proud possessor of an Achewood T-shirt. It's for the Tenmen, a fictional band composed of cats who play Rickenbacker everything. He thought it would go with my T-shirt for Stiff Kitten, another fictional band with a cat-theme. I am good with that.

4. I had a chili dog last night at M3. I had been curious about it ever since the new menu, but got sidetracked by the ability to order the chili in a bowl by itself, where it did very well (especially topped with fried cheese curds). Wednesday at the ballpark reminded me that I could not actually remember the last time I had eaten a hot dog—it might not even have been last year's Fourth of July. Fortunately, M3 was there to help. I wonder what other atavistic comfort food will suddenly come out of hiding and need to be eaten. I can make noodles and cheese any time I like.

(I doubt it's related, but I have been playing PJ Harvey's Rid of Me (1993) and 4-Track Demos on repeat since Wednesday, when I was putting on my boots to leave the house and "Yuri-G" came into my head and wouldn't get out. It's not my favorite song by PJ Harvey, because that is probably "To Bring You My Love," but it is a close second and seriously the best song I know about certain kinds of Greek magic. I wrote a story about it once. I don't seem to be listening to her more recent albums, just those two and their B-sides. An occasional reversion to Dry (1992), but only "Sheela Na Gig" and "Water." I don't know what I'm trying to work out.)

5. I dreamed about watching a pre-Code film I thought was called The Charmed People, but it turned out to be something called Betrayal—a sort of political exposé in the style of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but nastier, with no James Stewart wide-eyed and American innocent at its heart; it was notable for the amount of profanity flying freely around its backroom deals. It was being shown at an art museum that reminded me more of the Peabody than the MFA as part of a festival of forgotten movies, the argument being that Capra must have seen or known about Betrayal in the same way that [writer-director of well-known classic] was influenced by [some other nonexistent dream-film]. The actual film with the title The Charmed People turned out to be an awful twee-looking fantasy with fairies that were only a brogue away from Hollywood leprechauns; it was playing as part of an installation on an old cathode-ray television, looking like one of those DIY YouTube kinescopes where somebody throws up their handheld camera footage of a TV screen. I do not remember how Betrayal ended, because either the dream spun off in some other direction or the hammering at nine o'clock in the morning woke me up. It wasn't more contractors; it seems to have been the downstairs neighbor before the rain really set in.

Tonight and tomorrow are the last two nights of the Post-Meridian Radio Players' Spring Sci-Fi Spectacular II. Go and see it if you haven't already! Go and see it if you already have! The production even made the news! Like, actual news. Not the fictional broadsheets they used as programs for the Big Broadcasts, although those were awesome and I should like to add another to my collection someday. '38 and '54 are in boxes somewhere.

My books need not to be.