Family Road Trip

Took the family to Sarasota Florida and decided to blog on the way. Here is the result.
Be sure to read the collumn on the right before you start.
Enjoy.

Blind Monkey

Placecard holder in the greeting area of the Barnum household. Seen at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota. Amazing carving... the gold eyes are so creepy. I couldn't stop looking at it.

Hazmat Cleanup....

The entire Cambridge Fire Department and Hazmat Team was outside the building this morning as I arrived at work. The guy in the yellow suit is standing in a inflatable kiddie pool being hosed down by some noxious smelling fluid.
Something spilled or erupted or something... always a little disconcerting given that I work at the Chemistry Department... and across the street from the Physics Department...
....loopy scientists.

“The Colour Out of Space” was a true creepfest. Told by a surveyor of an ancient region west of Arkham where abandoned farm houses and grown over roads sulk in the weary tangle of nature reclaiming the area from the humans whom have all fled, no people able to take the queer feeling that the very land exudes, seepeing into the dreams and nervous behaviour of the inhabitants. The narrator comes across the “blasted heath” and the ruins of the Nahum Gardener farmhouse. His description of the heath and the well …the unnatural way the light bent around the gaping mouth of the foul hole…
this from the first description of the area around the heath…

“Then I saw that dark westward tangle of glens and slopes for myself, and ceased to wonder at anything beside its own elder mystery. It was morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked always there. The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them, and the floor was too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay.”

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Then at the climax of the story from inside the house….
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“Not a man breathed for several seconds. Then a cloud of darker depth passed over the moon, and the silhouette of clutching branches faded out momentarily. At this there was a general cry; muffled with awe, but husky and almost identical from every throat. For the terror had not faded with the silhouette, and in a fearsome instant of deeper darkness the watchers saw wriggling at that tree top height a thousand tiny points of faint an dunhallowed radiance, tipping each bough like the fire of St. Elmo or the flames that come down on the apostles’ heads at Pentecost. It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh, and its colour was that same nameless intrusion which Ammi had come to recognize and dread. All the while the shaft of phosphorescence from the well was getting brighter and brighter, bringing to the minds of the huddled men, a sense of doom and abnormality which far outraced any image their mind could form. It was no longer shining, out; it was pouring out and as the shapeless stream of unplaceable colour left the well it seemed to flow directly into the sky.”
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And further along, from the uphill slopes as the men escaped….
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“When they looked back toward the valley and the distant Gardener place a the bottom they saw a fearsome sight. All the farm was shining with the hideous unknown blend of colour; trees, buildings, and even such grass and herbage as had not been wholly changed to lethal grey brittleness. The boughs were all straining skyward, tipped with tongues of foul flame, and lambent tricklings of the same monstrous fire were creeping about the ridgepoles of the house, barn and sheds. It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison from the well-seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognizable chromaticism.”
The Colour Out of Space - H.P. Lovecraft

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wow. That is pretty good shtuff. Even without a cup of coffee. Lovecraft certainly had a firm grasp of the language and vocabulary… wish I could put together that last phrase at the end of the last quote there. He takes you by the hand and leads you to a dim old place, usually haunted by inconceivable things of monstrous or ancient origin, and then tells you all about it. Like King with his disembodied hand grasping yours in the dark and reach toward the light switch… eek. Creep o’ matic.
I like it. He seems to straddle, courtesy of his time period, the old and pre modern world strangeness of wilderness and spirits, and at the same time live in a modern world not far from our own. Including Einstien’s theories on speed of light and relativity in regards to the threatening secretive creatures from somewhere else.