📷 October Photo Challenge Day 31: Home. I look forward to the half-price sales tomorrow so I can afford to celebrate Halloween year-round at home. 🎃

📷 October Photo Challenge Day 30: Red

Discovered while trying to find screenshot of planet Meta signal: Big Finish is now making audio dramas for “Space: 1999”? Yes please thank you. 🚀

In the premiere episode of “Space: 1999” (1974), a probe has been sent to the rogue planet Meta. At the end of the episode they receive a transmission from the planet, represented as a computer-generated waveform. Looks familiar in recent press. Cosmic coincidence (or not).

“There are no lines in the real world, so don’t paint them.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

📷 October Photo Challenge Day 28: Underneath

📷 October Photo Challenge Day 27: Chaos. Perhaps more chaos theory.

Finished reading: Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation by Elaine Pagels 📚

Poe Country

📷 October Photo Challenge Day 25: Gravity. The Moon’s gravity is one-sixth that of Earth.

Ephemerama
A prolonged display or exhibition of things that last only a short time.

Finished Watching “Dark Shadows,” Collection 6. 📺 👻 Those orange candles. 🕯️ And they use the word for what Barnabas is for the first time ever on the show (!).

“Wave upon wave of terror is to follow in its wake….”

Richard II

The Lionheart and the Peach

Finished reading: King Richard: Nixon and Watergate–An American Tragedy by Michael Dobbs 📚 Incredible. Fascinating. Hard to put down.

(The fact that I went directly from an audiobook about King Richard I, by Marc Morris, to a book about Richard M. Nixon called King Richard is entirely coincidental. 👀 So is the fact that, according to this book, Nixon was named after Richard I, “Lionheart,” though that is a different Richard than Richard I, known as “Longshanks,” son of Henry III. Morris’ book explains the discrepency in numbering, having to do with the Norman Invasion. He didn’t refer to Richard the Lionheart as Richard I, though. Interesting too that the Morris book has “Great and Terrible” in its title, a point, though maybe not in those exact words, Dobbs makes about this “King” Richard, a dualism. [Though “terrible” in the 13th century probably meant “inspires terror.”] So the two books combined lead to the title of this post.)

I remember seeing on TV, when this was going on, a news report about protesters calling for the impeachment of the president. The camera panned down a line of people holding up signs. One after the other, the signs read “Impeach Nixon,” “Impeach Nixon.” At the end of the line was a little old lady holding up a sign that read: “Nixon Is a Peach.”

[Slight spoiler ahead about the book’s content]

I was disappointed that Dobbs wanted to structure the book a certain way that only covered the 100 days following Nixon’s second inauguration. It stops when the fight over the tapes begins. It’s an abrupt ending and I wanted to read about the rest. It’s otherwise an amazing book that draws extensively from the tapes themselves.

📷 October Photo Challenge Day 24: Connection. There are many connections behind the engine of a train. And on it. And if you miss your connection, there’ll be another one shortly.

Signal Station Identification

📷 October Photo Challenge Day 21: Space. Space swag gathered at the Apollo 50th Festival celebrating the anniversary of the first moon landing, Washington, D.C., attended on July 20, 2019.

I liked coming across this video interview with Roald Dahl from the 1980s. I’d read that he started the day with six sharpened pencils and when they were all dull it was time for lunch. ✏️

📷 October Photo Challenge Day 20: Sports. One can always hope for another. 🏈 🟪

Notes From the Shadows

Jaclyn Smith could have been in “Dark Shadows”?

In my watch of the TV series “Dark Shadows” on disc, currently in what is known as Collection 6, there is an interview with Roger Davis, who played the jailer/lawyer of Alexandra Molke’s character Victoria Winters. He said he was married to Jaclyn Smith for a time and they met when she auditioned for “Dark Shadows” when the production was looking for a replacement for Molke, who was leaving the show. Smith could have had the part – the producer was eager to hire her – but she turned it down. (In the end they decided not to replace Molke after all, choosing to write her character out of the show.) How TV history could have been different…

Davis also shared that when he got the part in the show he was in an off-Broadway play with Stacy Keach. Names of those well-known continued when he added that he was friends with Hampton Fancher, screenwriter for Blade Runner. He got some facts wrong here, saying that Fancher wrote a short story (then he said novella) titled … and here he got the title Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep incorrect, which was actually a novel by Philip K. Dick, the novel on which Blade Runner was based. He said that Fancher never got any money from the short story/novella/screenplay – it wasn’t clear – but that could hardly be the case. Certainly Dick saw little money from Do Androids Dream when it was first sold, because of what publishers were paying for science fiction paperbacks back then, and didn’t start seeing decent income until Blade Runner, according to his biography.

At any rate, this watching of “Dark Shadows” continues to yield rewards. 📺 👻

First day it’s felt like fall.

📷 October Photo Challenge Day 17: Compass. One of some notebooks I’ve made for myself. Meant to be used horizontally, hence the position of north.

📷 October Photo Challenge Day 16: Rotation

Finished listening to: A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain by Marc Morris. Read by Ralph Lister. 🎧 📚 (Audible) Well done, both in writing and the narration. It held up as I hoped.

📷 October Photo Challenge Day 12: Legend

“Don’t break the chain!”

– Jerry Seinfeld, on writing every day 📝