Buried treasure, on Netflix and everywhere else.

Think about the concept of buried treasure for a minute.  You have something valuable, be it gold coins, untraceable bearer bonds, (coupons attached) working prototypes of Apple's next three widgits, or a dozen copies of the Vanessa Williams issue of Penthouse in mint condition.  You have them in your hands, you have them where you can pour over them and just speculate about everything that you could do with them, and then you go dig a hole in the sand, drop them in, and cover them up.
What the hell are you thinking?
I haven't researched the reality of this concept, so for all I know, there might have been sane reasons for people once doing this.  Maybe Long John Silver and his crew were worried about the heat coming down on them from their last heist and decided to ditch the stuff on a nameless island and then just feign innocence when they were boarded by angry sailors who wanted their issues of Penthouse back.  Maybe.  But tell me that if you buried something  like that someplace where you couldn't keep an eye on it, that you wouldn't break out in a cold sweat from time to time at just the thought of someone coming along and saying, 'Hey!  See where the dirt's disturbed?  Let's dig right there!'  Then tell me and try to keep a straight face.
I've been a fan of the old ' The Nightstalker' series since I was a kid.  I can't remember the first episode that I saw, but I remember the series coming on late at night, and damn near my whole day would be spent in anticipation.  What would the monster be?  What would it look like?  Would it be one of my favorites, or was there a chance I would discover a new favorite?  Each time the series came to it's end I would feel like a bit of beauty had left the world, and each time when it was put back on the air I would regain a bit of the hope that I once had.  As time wore on, some episodes became favorites, and some just became parts of an incredibly cool TV series.
The other night when I couldn't sleep, again, I turned on the Blue-ray player that a friend got us for Christmas and connected it to Netflix.  This is the first Blue-ray device my wife and I own, because we like to be dragged into the modern world one step at time.  Browsing through the horror offerings, I stumbled upon an old friend.  When I ran through the episodes by title, one didn't ring a bell.  Getting more info, I couldn't believe it.  Here was an episode, 'Firefall,' that I had never seen before.  Somehow in all the times I had faithfully watched the series on broadcast TV, I had missed this one.
Watching it brought back all the reasons that I love 'The Nightstalker.'  Darren McGavin was THE smart-ass reporter.  He feigned cynicism, but when it came down to it, he always stuck his own neck out to do the right thing, usually falling on his ass sometime in the process.  His editor, long-suffering Tony Vincenzo, was every person who has ever stuck his head in the sand or turned his head away rather than look an ugly truth in the face, which was why he had to suffer.  Watching that episode and others, you see all the attention that went in to each one.  The scene where the rich older woman quickly raises her car window, only to lower it right back down at a gesture from Richard Kiel.  The fact that in 'The Vampire,' the title woman never says a word.  The flames that dance behind the doppelganger as he taps on the windows of the church.  There was also that creepy, soul-rending music that would go right into your spinal cord if you were watching this stuff late at night with no one else in the house.
That's treasure.  Makes me feel kind of silly to have never sat down and gone through the whole series before now.
Today my lady love and I went down to the Alamo Drafthouse and saw Joss Whedon's 'Cabin in the woods.'  I thought I had an idea of what it was about from the trailers.  It turns out that my idea was superficial at best, and the film was damn good.  Definitely worth seeing.

Edit:  Since I used Darren McGavin's real name, I should probably give Simon Oakland his due for perfectly playing Kolchak's editor/foil.

I love Sundays

It's almost one o'clock in the afternoon.  I slept in this morning, relaxed in bed for a bit after one of my wife's cats finally managed to wake me up, and then my wife made me lunch/breakfast.  Now as I'm writing this, I'm also going back and forth to work on Bittermint and browsing on Fearnet.  This is turning out to be a good day.
Putting Bittermint together has made me remember all the years when I was a hard-core gamer.  My friends and I would play AD&D from whenever we got together at someone's house on the weekend to however late we could stay awake. (My insomnia usually gave me an edge there) Looking back, I realize that it never really occurred to me that I was running almost all of the campaigns.  It just seemed to me that we all were having fun, and to me fun was all the planning and deciding what to put in, and creating something for my friends to explore.  My particular group of buddies always seemed to take great pride in wreaking havoc with all my beautifully-detailed cities and villages, like the time they took over a small, walled town and were completely surprised when the local lord sent troops in to take it back.
It was natural, me being the one to make all this stuff.  I still remember the first game I ever saw played.  My 5th or 6th grade TAG teacher had one of the guys in my class run a quick adventure so all of us could see how it worked.  The group was exploring an old dungeon at the behest of a wizard, and her character fell down into a pit trap.  As she was plummeting into the dark, she looked back up and yelled, "You stupid wizard!"  Of course, a couple of fireballs shot down after her.  I thought this weird game, which was somehow played without a board, was the neatest thing in the universe.  But I also wondered just how the wizard could hear her, since he was nowhere near.  I wondered where the dungeon was, and whether there was anyone living near it.  How do you think you would react if you were a medieval peasant, scraping your livelihood from the soil and never knowing exactly how next years harvest will turn out, and all these armed strangers keep heading out to that old set of ruins over the hill?  Some of them come back, some don't.  The ones that do, often drop gold coins at the tavern in town, just to buy a mug of ale to wash the taste of that hellish underground place out of their heads.  They've got all those swords and all that armor and magic, and you've got your little home-made knife.  But you're hungry.
Time to post this, and see what this new blogger format looks like.  Crossing my fingers.

PS:  Seems the '&' is not allowed in post labels.  Why?

Buying comic books on a lazy Sunday

On the way home from lunch today, I suggested to my wife that we stop at half-price books.  We used to make a regular habit of dropping in.  I even think that was one of the places that we went on our first weekend together.  Then we moved where there wasn't one just down the street, other ways to pass time were discovered, (including my current addiction, World of Warcraft) and life went on.
One of the first section that we hit was the graphic novel shelf.  I don't know exactly when comic books started to be collected into these larger volumes, or when longer stories were finally able to get printed in the format.  I've never researched it, much to my shame.  But damn is that a game-changer.  Books like V for Vendetta and Watchmen are seriously epic storytelling.  These days we can have story arcs that would have taken years to tell in the slimmer books, which would have lost most of their audience back then.  Even me.
When I was a kid, I used to save up my change for the weekend.  Then after sleeping until noon on Sunday, I'd walk over to the drugstore and head to the rack at the rear of the store where the treasure was, to the comic books.  I could, and did, spend hours pouring over every single one.  That's where I got some of my first tastes for horror, in House of Mystery, House of Secrets, and Weird War Tales.  They even had some of the larger-sized ones like Creepy and Eerie.  This was during the comic code time, so the illustrations weren't as gory as they might have been.  But having read some of the reprints Tales from the Crypt and others, I really think the writing was better.  This was where I first broke ground, this was where I first learned the rules and basics of what terrified people.
So this Sunday I got to grab a bit of that ancient magic, that secret, eager thrill of anticipation.  I picked up 300, which I had never read.  I also got some non-graphics like a Stephen King anthology and Battle Royale.  Can't wait to read them.