Never ask a crocodile to the junior prom

We got a little rain, but nowhere near as much as I expected as a side effect of Hurricane Alex, which struck Mexico as a Category 2. I think Houston is getting it worse than we are on the north side.

Happy birthday, Canada. You don’t look a day over 142.

So, it turns out that ABC couldn’t even burn off the last episodes of Happy Town over the airwaves. I thought #7 was going to be on last night but 7 & 8 were shipped off to Hulu instead. In the final seconds of the last episode, we do indeed learn who the so-called Magic Man is, but it’s one of those WTF moments. Many, many more questions than answers, fer shure. Like, was the Sam Neill character serious when he said he ruled the minions of darkness, or was he just scaring off a bunch of gullible hicks? And what was the deal with that German movie The Blue Room that looked like it had the guy the sheriff shot in it? Alas, thus ends the saga of a quirky TV show that might have had some potential but will forever exist only as eight episodes and eight million unresolved mysteries.

Two unexpected themes or situations come up in the Stories: All-New Tales anthology. The first, which I’ve mentioned before, is metafiction, which seems to have inspired a lot of writers, and the other is Christmas. There have been two Christmas-ish stories so far. The one about the twelve days of Christmas in in the 23rd century and the other that is sort of a spoiler, so I won’t mention it.

I finished Gene Wolfe’s “Leif in the Wind,” which was ultimately reminiscent of an Outer Limits or Twilight Zone episode. Then I read “Unwell” by Carolyn Parkhurst, which is about a manipulative older sister who can’t stand to see her sister (who, at 70, is about to be married for the first time) happy. She feigns illness to lure her sister away from her busy planning, but she has an even more twisted (and cruelly delayed) trick in store. “A Life in Fictions” by Kat Howard is the next in the list of metafictions, but it’s an interesting twist. The main character’s ex-boyfriend is a writer and every time he uses her as a character in one of his works, she vanishes from reality. As time goes on, she finds she’s losing grip on who she really is, no longer certain of her favorite color, or even what her name is. Jonathan Carroll is one of my favorite novelists, but I’ve only read one or two short stories by him. “Let the Past Begin” is about a man whose pregnant girlfriend (and she may not be pregnant by him) once had a strange experience with an eastern European seer who cautioned her that the father of her child had a curse that would be inherited by her child. He has cause to doubt her sanity. A fascinating story, very much with the feel of Carroll’s novels, but it cut off like a French film, without resolution and certainly before I expected it would end.