The Ghost of Freddy Jackson

People ask me things all the time.  Mostly it's "Why did you just run over me?" or "Don't you think you've had enough to eat?", but sometimes I'm asked about things that go bump in the night.

No, not that.  Get your minds out of the gutter.  I'm talking matters paranormal here.  Specifically, ghosts.

Do I believe in ghosts?

No.  Or yes.  It's too early to say.  Because what I do believe in is evidence.

And there are solid pieces of evidence which appear to support the supposition that deceased persons do indeed make the infrequent visit to this side of the veil.  I'd like to discuss just one such piece of evidence now, which is a photograph taken in 1919 that may depict the face of one Freddy Jackson, deceased but notably not absent.

Freddy Jackson was a soldier in the British Royal Air Force in World War I.  He served as a mechanic, maintaining combat aircraft aboard the HMS Daedalus.

Freddy didn't die in battle; instead, he had the (rather common) misfortune to walk into a moving airplane propeller.  He died, and was buried, and that should have been the end of his tragic if all too common tale.

But on the day Freddy Jackson was laid to rest, his squadron mates assembled for a group photo.  No one noticed anything out of the ordinary until after the photograph was presented back to the squadron.

They quickly realized that Freddy Jackson's face is there among them, plain and clear.

The photo is below.  Freddy's face has been enlarged; he appears to be peering out from behind one of his fellows.  The men of the squadron were adamant that the face is that of Freddy Jackson, deceased, who was being laid to rest when the photo was taken.

I've found nothing to contradict their assertion.  And remember, this was 1919.  Photoshop was sixty-plus years away.  Photography itself was a cumbersome art, and while fakery was indeed being practiced it was usually obvious and often clumsy.

This image is neither.

Is it the face of a dead man, returned to join his squadron for one last time?

I simply don't know.  But I find it intriguing.  More than intriguing.  It may even be suggestive of a phenomena beyond the realm of traditional science.

What do you think?  Do you have odd photos or ghost stories of your own?  If you do, and you'd like to share them, email me!  I love ghost stories, and I won't breathe a word of it here, if you ask that your experiences be kept quiet.

That's all for today.  The Secret Writing Project is proceeding nicely.  Ask me what that is too, but know that I won't tell!

Glenn Beck, Man of Intellect and Wit!

I don't listen to Glenn Beck or Fox News for much the same reason I don't shove sharp pointy things in my ears -- it hurts, and it serves no good purpose.

Even so, a headline sneaks through sometimes, as happened just now.  "Glenn Beck: Japan Earthquake might be a message from God."

First of all, Glenn needs to check his boundaries, because making ludicrous, asinine statements ascribing mass deaths to a petulant deity is Pat Robertson's territory.  Robertson is probably not happy that Beck beat him to the punch, and he might just decide to get himself a chalkboard and start scribbling nonsense about Masons and the Trilateral Commission on it in a tit-for-tat retaliation that could lead to a <gasp> Chalkboard Showdown of the Paranoid Delusions!.  Okay, that might actually be funny, especially if someone out there made a mashup video out of them going at it laid over a Nine Inch Nails song backtrack.

Seriously, though -- ten thousand people are dead, a nation lies in ruins, and Glenn Beck wants to gloat and make scary noises about divine wrath?

Glenn, I know you're not a big fan of bad ol' Science, but you might want to Google the Interwebs someday for 'Ring of Fire' or 'tectonics' or heck even 'Remedial Geology.'  You'd look less stupid.  And you could certainly stand a reduction in Stupid, pal.

I simply don't understand the popularity of Beck and his porcine running buddies.  Rush Limbaugh?  A huge fat oxy-addict with obvious insecurity issues and the brains of a fruit-bat.  Hannity?  A noxious little wisp of flatulence right out of Limbaugh's massive nether regions.

Why does anyone waste their time listening to these prancing imbeciles blather?

Beck's time at Fox is obviously on the wane.  That alone says something -- when Fox News hints that maybe your grip on reality is slipping, it's got to be because you just showed up in the studio with a live stingray strapped to your head and lit fireworks stuffed up your pants while you swallow live snakes and claim to be Batman.

Even then, I think you could get a pass, if your ratings were good enough.  It certainly hasn't stopped  Bill O'Reilly, who thinks tides are inexplicable, unpredictable supernatural events, and that each and every sunrise is a random chance event.

So why does it bother me that an idiot such as Glenn Beck spouts nonsense about the tragedy in Japan?

First of all, because it's a stupid thing to say, especially when people are hurting.  And people are hurting, Mr. Beck.  But I guess that doesn't mean anything to you since they aren't Fox viewers.

Next, it bugs me because I know that despite the blatant and profound idiocy of the statement, people out there were spitting tobaccy into their Dixie cups and nodding in beady-eyed agreement.  And that bothers me because these people breed.  We have enough stupid people already, thanks. We don't need another million trailer parks full of them.

Finally, it bugs me because Beck is actually getting paid to spew odious crap such as that.  The man gets a check.  Granted, no matter how much the check is for, it isn't enough to buy him brains, but still.  Stupidity should never be rewarded -- certainly not with talk shows or public forums.

In the end, it doesn't matter what Beck said.  Morons say moronic things, and the Japanese are neither helped nor hindered by some wild-eyed crying idiot sputtering into a microphone half a world away.

But still.  Why so many ignorant voices?

Oh.  Fox.

Never mind.

Movie Review: Battle Los Angeles

Will aliens never learn?

By now, you've probably seen the trailer for Battle: Los Angeles.  The trailer looked great -- a sky filled with marauding alien aircraft, strange figures moving stealthily through the smoke of battle, the pound and rattle of heavy artillery and automatic weapons fire.

As a sucker for effects-filled run-and-gun alien smash-em-ups, I awaited the opening of this movie with unseemly glee.  I was there opening night, crossbow loaded and ready to (quietly) dispatch any cell-phone talkers in the theatre, eager to finally see a movie that rivaled Aliens for sheer effects-laden fun.

Battle: Los Angeles did not disappoint.

There's no long windup.  We are briefly introduced to the small Marine unit we'll be following throughout the movie, and then the aliens just drop out of the sky and wreak epic havoc upon the city of angels.

We're also told the same thing is happening across the globe.  Cities are being wiped out as the aliens drop into the seas just off the coast and begin their deadly march inland.  No warning, no demands, no communication of any kind -- they just smash down, stand up, and start the slaughter.

The Marines are ordered to head beyond the defensive line, into the battle zone, to rescue a number of people trapped in a police station.  Go in, get them out, get them back to safety.

Of course, things don't work that way.  But enough said about that.

The action is intense and non-stop.  I mean it.  Non-stop.  These poor slugs don't get a minute of peace.  And the effects are miraculous; short of actually blowing the crap out of a none-too-affluent section of LA, including the freeways, I have no idea how they did this.  The look of this film is amazing.  I swear I was covered in a gritty layer of concrete dust by the time the credits rolled.

Do our brave Marines survive?  Does the obligatory child survivor oif the attack make it?  Do we finally show these upstart aliens how we do things downtown?

See the movie.  You'll have a blast.

That was the good.

Now for the ugly.  There may be spoilers ahead, minor ones, but if you're sensitive to these things please stop reading now and look to your right and click on a book and buy it.  Yes.  That one. Now buy another...


Nearly every alien invasion movie ever made shares some of the same dumb-headed flaws, which I shall enumerate below:

1) The aliens want our water.  Yes.  Our tasty, tasty H2O.  Forget the fact that the cosmos is literally awash in the stuff -- there's even plenty of ice on the Moon, for Pete's sake -- but apparently ours comes from sparkling artesian springs and lizard-faced space bugs just find the stuff irresistible. NOTE TO MOVIE MAKERS -- anybody with a high school chemistry lab can *make* freaking water.  Anybody with a space armada can just fly around and scoop the stuff up.  Fighting for it is just dumb.  But not as dumb as using water for fuel.  ANOTHER NOTE TO MOVIE MAKERS -- The amount of energy (chemical, kinetic, thermal, what have you) available in water is well-known.  You can break the chemical bonds between H and O all you want, but you're not going to power starships or weapons with it.  And even if you could, just grab it from places where heroic Marines won't fight you to the death for it.  Duh.

2) The aliens want our women.  Maybe they don't have any of their own.  Or maybe the entire alien attack fleet is composed of loser aliens who couldn't get dates.  But seriously?  I think maybe this speaks more toward the social lives of the script writers than anything else.  That wasn't a part of Battle: Los Angeles, but I wanted to mention it anyway.

3) The aliens want to eat us.  Again, the critters in Battle: Los Angeles showed no desire to do anything to humans but shoot them in the head.  Which is refreshing, since people don't taste too good and anyway they blew up all the liquor stores, so where would you get enough red wine to go with your meal?  Silly aliens.

Of the items above, only #1 applies, and that's if you count a news report blathering away in the background in a single scene.  I dismissed it, and enjoyed the movie despite it.

Favorite scenes from the movie:

1) The impromptu alien autopsy, conducted by a veterinarian and a seriously disgruntled Marine on a still-living alien.  Cutting up a twitching, chittering space baddie with a k-bar knife, looking for interesting organs to shoot -- that's just good fun.

2) The driving-an-armored-vehicle through a mob of surprised aliens scene.  Think octogenarian at a street market, but with .50 caliber guns blazing.  Hey, aliens!  What weighs six tons and just ran over your freakin' head?  This guy!

3) "We already ate breakfast."

So I give Battle: Los Angeles two furiously grinning thumbs-up.  It was loud, it was fast, it was fun.

Un-American Activities -- Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid!

Pick pretty much any moment from any day, and you'll find a group of highly-paid Congresspeople sitting in a room and wasting their time and our money.

And that's fine.  I long ago reconciled myself to the notion that government is the well-dressed equivalent of a dog's breakfast.  Nothing of note ever gets done, but the messes left behind are always epic.

But there are days such as today, where even my abysmally low expectations are set far too high.

I speak of course of Representative Pete King, and his hearings on the subject of Muslim radicalization within the US.

You'd think these imbeciles would learn something from the asinine antics of their brain-damaged forebears.  Joseph McCarthy, anyone?  Communists hiding behind every shrub, every fountain, every comic book?  Except of course there weren't any.  McCarthy ruined lives and careers but his army of hidden Communists never materialized because they never existed in the first place.

Sigh.  Pete King probably has a brass bust of Joe McCarthy on his mantel.  Or full-length nude photos of McCarthy in his desk.  Because King is determined to not only follow in McCarthy's footsteps, but actually exceed the man's dedication to the ideal of finding monsters hiding in every corner.

This time around, it's not Communists, but....<gasp> Muslims.  Or, as Joe King doubtlessly prefers to pronounce it, moo-slims.  They're radicalized, infers Pete.  Radicalized and ready to throw down some jihad any second now!  Blood and apple pie will run in the streets! Hide the wimmin and grab yer guns, boys, 'cause the mooslims is a' comin!

So what does Pete do?

He drags Muslim Americans onto the Hill, and grills them, ostensibly in the hope that they'll get distracted by the cameras and blurt out their sinister plans to blow up the nearest Dunkin' Donuts before nightfall.

That's what outrages me.  No American citizen -- be they Muslim, Baptist, Hindu, whatever -- owes Pete King or anyone else an 'explanation' of their beliefs or their patriotism.

That's supposed to be one of the central perks of being an American -- that you don't have to explain your beliefs to anyone, least of all a bunch of jackbooted government thugs.

I've worked in a university setting all my life.  I've worked with Muslims.  I've worked with Hindus.  With Buddhists.  I've even worked with members of even more exotic sects, such as Methodists and Presbyterians.

According to Pete King, I should have been blown up years ago.  Or if not blown up, converted to radical Islam.

Oddly enough, neither has happened.

Not even close.

Okay, I have developed a fondness for Indian food.  Maybe that's the sinister gateway to terrorism.  From Chicken Korma to radical Islam, in five easy steps?

Want to know about the people I've worked with, laughed with, talked with, over all these years?

They're just people.  The Muslims wanted to go home and see their kids like everyone else.  The Hindus, ditto.  Aside from differences in lunchtime preferences, and who drank coffee and who didn't, I didn't see any significant variations in behavior.

Just what am I supposed to be afraid of?

These 'hearings' are ridiculous.  Ridiculous and insulting.  And as far as I can tell, the only people engaging in overtly un-American activities are Pete King and his cronies, who are obviously engaged in demonizing Muslims as part of a painfully transparent effort to revive the post-911 paranoia just in time for the 2012 elections.

To my Muslim friends out there, I apologize.  Fat lot of good that does, huh?

I Spy

One of my favorite blog-related activities is checking the 'audience' monitor to see where readers of this blog are from.

This week, we've picked up readers in Iran, India, Singapore, Indonesia, the Netherlands, and Spain!  So hello to all you folks, wherever you hail from.

I imagine quite a few of my international readers first starting reading the old blog (may it rest in peace), which was basically a non-stop rant against a certain former presidential Administration and its penchant for instigating pointless military escapades.  I also devoted several hundred pages to describing the overly carnivorous eating habits of former Vice President Dick 'I Crave the Blood of Infants' Cheney, who I still consider one of the most evil men to have ever gutted a live wildebeast for his midmorning snack.

Well, sad to say, I've calmed down a bit.  Not because I'm a huge fan of the current occupant of the White House, but because I've decided it doesn't really matter who's sitting behind that desk.  They aren't the ones running the show.

But for my international readers, I will offer a brief summary of the current state of affairs here in the States.  To wit:

1) American Foreign Policy -- Troops in Iraq?  Check.  Troops in Afghanistan?  Oh yeah.  Billions poured daily into wars without goals or end?  You know it.  Payments to 'allies' such as Pakistan, which are immediately funneled into supplying the very people shooting at us?  Made daily.  The only conclusion I can draw is that American foreign policy is still being drafted by a super-secret combination of Ouija Boards which channel deceased Halliburton executives and are operated by meth-crazed Rhesus monkeys.

2) American Domestic Policy -- This one is easy.  400 -- that's four hundred -- Americans have more wealth than 155 million other Americans combined.  Which makes it easy for the super-rich to buy more than enough congresspeople to keep tax cuts for the rich and the industries they favor firmly in place, while the middle class vanishes like snow in a blast-furnace.  Everything else revolves around this simple axis of wealth.  Coming soon:  You'll either be rich in America, or very very poor.  Welcome to Third World Homeland.

3) The 2012 elections?  Get ready, folks, because this will be the single most stunning parade of sheer idiocy that you've seen since, um, 2008.  Gingrich, Palin, Santorum -- forget the carnival freakshow, because this is going to have it all, and then some.  And, as I said before, the real icing on the cake is the futility of the whole wretched star-studded spectacle.  It doesn't matter who wins.  The 'winner' is just a cardboard cut-out propped up on a stage for the rubes to throw things at.  The real decisions are made quietly, without any fuss, in a cherry-paneled room somewhere over snifters of brandy and five hundred dollar cigars.

See why I basically stopped even mentioning politics?

Anyway, welcome to the blog.  Drop me an email at franktuttle@franktuttle.com and say hello!

MidSouthCon 29 Approacheth!

First, a reminder -- hotel registration for MidSouthCon 29 is open until the 11th at the Con rate.  Eighty-five bucks a night for the Hilton isn't too bad, either.

This will only be my second convention.  I'm really looking forward to it -- it's fun to hang out with with my spiritual kin.  Too, I love the costumes.  And the dealer's room.  And the art show.  And the awards banquet, and the panels, and meeting various luminaries in the field.  It's a good time, and if you've never been to a SF/fantasy convention, MidSouthCon is a great first stop.

By the way, if I spot any Kindlers at the Con, I'm going to ask to take your picture (with your Kindle) and post it here on my blog.  I'm just curious about how many SF/fantasy fans are also e-book enthusiasts.

In other news, Markhat fans can expect the print version of The Banshee's Walk to hit the stands on June 7 of this year.

That's about it for now.  Time to get back to work!

Lots O Links!

If you hooked me up to a brain activity monitor right this moment, all you'd see are nice flat lines.  I don't know why, but I'm just spent.  There's not a clever thought or catchy phrase anywhere near my noggin now.

But a lack of anything significant to say has never left me silent before, and I'll be darned if I'll start now.

So -- links!

Passing the Narrows.  This is one of mine.  If you've got a Kindle e-reader or you have the Kindle app on your phone or other device, you can grab this for less than a buck.  It's a quick read, about a crew of desperate Confederate war vets taking their steamboat down a haunted stretch of the Yazoo River.  It first appeared in Weird Tales a few years back, and it's always been one of my favorites.  Guess who the character Swain is based on!

World War Z.  Yeah, this is zombie fiction -- but hang on a minute.  That's just the backdrop.  The book is nothing short of brilliant, in both its depiction of a world mauled nearly to death and the tiny acts of heroism and sacrifice that always go largely unnoticed in any massive catastrophe.  Read it, and I promise you'll never hear wind in the trees at night quite then same way ever again.

Living Ghosts.  This is music; specifically, the Amazon MP3 album by band Absinthe Junk.  If you want the iTunes version, well, search iTunes for Absinthe Junk -- if there's a way to link to an album in the iTunes store it's unknown to me.  But it's worth the effort!  Junk is sort of the angry love child of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.

The Black Company.  This is an old-fashioned paper book.  It's fantasy, but unlike any fantasy you're likely to have read before.  Gritty, unflinching, brutally honest -- this is war in the trenches.  Not for the faint of heart.

Fark.  We're painfully aware that the world is a chaotic, dangerous place ruled only by the laws of Whim and Caprice.  Fark is a weird news website that collects the freakish best and random worst of Planet Earth and lays it all out in a neat column for your perusal.  With snarky one-line descriptions, and a weekly Friday game of 'Match the Mugshots With the Crimes.'  If you don't Fark, you should...

Regretsy.  You've probably never heard of a website called 'Etsy.'  I hadn't.  Etsy dot com is a marketplace for hand-made items of all sorts.  Think about that for a moment.  Yeah.  Exactly.  Etsy may have started out as a showplace for folk art, but wide swaths of it quickly devolved into a hilarious free-for-all of hilariously mis-shapen pieces of 'found art' which appear to have not been crafted by hand but rather with foot.  I know, I know, it's not nice to mock the clumsy and the inept, but man is it fun.


Enjoy!

Signed and Away

Just signed the contract for The Bonnie Bell! 


Which makes the sale officially official.  Stamped and sealed, even.  I'd have sealed the envelope with a big red glob of hot wax, but things are done electronically these days and it's impossible to scrape all the wax off the monitor.

So that makes six entries in the Markhat series, with another already in progress.  I'm happy about that.  Happy and a little frightened, because we all know what happens to most series after a few books.

Seriously.  Take Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake books, for instance.  The first three were great.  But something happened after that, and I've not been able to follow the later books.  I'm not knocking Ms Hamilton; but for me, the series evolved into something I don't care for.

It doesn't happen with every series, of course.  Rex Stout managed seventy-odd Nero Wolfe books without a single fatal mis-step.  Jim Butcher's wizard-for-hire tales are bumping along as good as ever.  Kim Harrison and her Hollows books haven't jumped the shark.

Still, I worry.  But until I start getting rejections instead of contracts, I'll just stay the course and trust that Markhat and the gang know what they're doing.

Too, I have another project in the works.  A secret project, one that has absolutely nothing to do with finders or haunts or Trolls.  I think people will be surprised -- nay, amazed.

But that's a story for another time.  Right now I need to finish proofing the print galleys for The Banshee's Walk.  That involves reading the whole thing yet again, character by character and word by word, looking for any remaining hidden typos or sneaky format errors.

I live a life of glamor and excitement, I do!  Look -- is that a dangling participle, on which light yonder breaks?

The Lazy Man's Lament

The flu is gone.  It's time to get back to work.

I only wish my brain worked that way.  You see, being sick completely wrecked my self-imposed work regimen.  I didn't write; I couldn't.

What I could do is lie there and watch junk TV while all those fissures in my brain smoothed themselves out.  I had a solid week of nothing but the worst of the worst -- COPS.  Las Vegas Jailhouse.  Operation Repo.  Even, heaven help me, World's Dumbest.

And I loved it.  I loved every glorious empty moment of it.  I didn't have to create, or critique, or even consider.  All I had to do was watch.  Slime mold should learn to me as passive as I.  I was flatlined.  Coroners gathered at my door.  Undertakers made measurements.  Crows stood on one foot, ready to snatch up a tender eyeball at an instant's notice.

That is my natural state.  Mouth slightly open.  TV flashing.  Eyes blank and staring.  Nominal heartbeat and respiration, just enough to keep the TV remote in play.

Top of the food chain, Ma!

But now that my traitor body has fought off the invaders, I can no longer claim fever and fatigue keep me from the keyboard.  So here I am, fingers poised, ready to create Deathless Prose and Salable Manuscript.

I get as far as 'The' before some little voice whispers 'Hey, isn't 30 Rock on about now?'

It's a long slog back to productivity.

But here goes...

How Not to Survive the Flu

If you've been wondering where I've been, well, that shaking, coughing mound of what appears to be dirty laundry, over in the corner, covered under used tissues and empty bottles of Vicks NyQuil?

That's me.

I'd back up a bit if I were you.  That's better.

What felt like the onset of a mild cold last Monday evening was bone-aching, muscle-spasming flu by Tuesday morning.  I haven't been really sick in quite a while, but I'm making up for lost time.

I don't know what strain of flu this is, or what 4-letter acronym it goes by.  I'd suggest PAIN or HURT.  It starts with a few innocent seeming sneezes and then your brains are leaking out your nose and that cracking sound you hear when you cough is your sternum finally cracking.

Then it gets really bad.

The doctor put me on Tamiflu, which certainly put the flu in a bad mood.  My own efforts to self-medicate have been less than successful, possibly because in my delirium I mixed up a book of old folk remedies with a Betty Crocker cookbook and wound up trying a lot of chicken-based casserole poultices.

Here are some other treatments to avoid, during the flu:

* The old adage 'drink plenty of liquids' doesn't extend to include grain alcohol or Febreeze.
* Chicken soup does give me energy, because if I see another cup of it I'm going to throw that crap outside.  And believe me just walking to the door right now takes quite a burst of energy.
* Get plenty of rest, they say.  Oh really.  Because I was thinking about going outside and chopping a couple cords of oak firewood, but if prevailing wisdom says I should lie here and shiver in a pool of my own sweat, well, okay, I'll do that then.
* Zinc is said to have therapeutic benefits during colds and flu.  You know, I could eat my entire set of zinc cookware right now, and I don't think it would do anything but dull my teeth.  Okay, I ate a ladle, just in case, and nothing happened.

I'd write more, but I have to go huddle in a corner and shake now.  Am I not supposed to be at the top of the food chain?  All this over a microscopic twist of proteins, a mere virus, a thing with fewer brains and less muscle than Charlie Sheen?

I'd shake my head in disbelief if that didn't require so much effort.

Send pudding and potable beverages.