Stuff and Moonshine

but Marjorie Bowen’s “The Sign-Painter and the Crystal Fishes” is the oddest early-20th-century weird tale I’ve ever read. I can’t even compare it to Aickman, because it’s not quite as creepy — more gothic/romantic. Really the best way I can describe it is “like coming across the last episode of a six-part miniseries, that no one else you talk to afterwards seems to have seen or heard of.”

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/bowen/marjorie/sign-painter/

H. H. Holmes Testing Lab: "Quality since 1936"

You would think their motto would be something more like "absolutely no relation to the 1890s killer with the deathtrap hotel," but I guess that's harder to fit on a business card.

Bartender: ... and the only thing that saved me was that the guy the cops were looking for had brown eyes, so eventually they realized that I wasn't him.

Patron: Yeah. When Sally got mistaken for someone else she kept pointing out that the girl they were looking for was five foot two, and that she couldn't have grown an inch in a month. But they wouldn't listen. They thought she was this serial killer from Texas.

Bartender: They thought they'd found their prize.

Patron: I'd think that the average serial killer from Texas preys on honeycomb.

Bartender: Actually, I always thought Sally *was* a serial killer.

Decided to pull out Glass & Brick, my not-quite-steampunk story, and see if I can knock it into shape before the deadline for the Merril Collection story contest. I've slipped back into it easily enough, which I'm hoping is a good sign, but...it's a weird thing; all over the place, and even more so now - as of this afternoon, the story also includes giant (i.e. dog-sized) ants, which can be trained for various purposes, except that since they're ants, you have to use scent to command them. Well, and probably some gestures.

Now I'm guessing he bought up all this 1930s fraternal-society hazing equipment and just upped the voltage on the electric shocks most of them are wired to give.

No, not *quite* a palindrome.

I varnished my nails on the way home today - green_trilobite reacts gets headaches from the fumes, so I decided to do it in the open air while waiting at various bus/streetcar stops.

Naturally this meant that for much of the trip I had incompletely painted nails, and I was reminded that once, in high school, someone claimed that having one single nail varnished was a way of indicating one's religious affiliation as "Satanist." I never found out *why* this was supposed to be more pleasing to the Dark Lord than a full manicure, though I suspect the real logic was that parents would be less likely to spot one painted nail than ten.

Anyone else ever hear this one, or was it purely a New Brunswick legend?

ETA - quick search suggests it's a rock'n'roll thing - the people claiming it's satanic appear to be the same people claiming that D&D is satanic.

green_trilobite has acquired another crotocephalus. It's a species of trilobite that, uh, looks pretty much how it sounds. He has taken its portrait and posted it on flickr. Possibly NSFW.

In my attempts to not be rude I think I may have agreed to knit a hat for some guy named Norbert who was sitting next to me on the bus.

Been reading up on some early 20th-century crime cases; I’m tempted to say modern crimes can’t hold a candle to them for weirdness, but that wouldn’t be true. They are, however, pretty darn weird.
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