Blog Entries from Iain Aschendale

  1. "Hereditary" Movie Review (no spoilers)

    I just got back from Hereditary. No spoilers, but I found this movie very enjoyable in the classic horror sense of things. There are a couple scenes involving a cell phone, but they don't need to be there, and the rest of the movie could have been done anytime in the last forty or fifty years. That's a compliment, if you enjoy films like The Exorcist and The Omen, you may enjoy this film. There are no wisecracking evil menaces, no terrified teenagers in swimsuits or underwear, and no...
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  2. The Empty Chair

    Waiting in line this morning and a man in his fifties brazenly cut straight in front of me and a dozen other passengers to secure the best seat on the bus for himself and I find a spot sit down open the virtual paper on my phone and see an opinion piece demanding sensory friendly showings of movies and plays for people with autism and that Belgian law allows euthanasia of people with autism and that a middle-class white woman is complaining that someone laughed at her child’s name which is...
  3. Happy Thanksgiving!

    Base ingredients without seasoning usually are, aren't they? "So you're saying the white flour is tasteless, why even bother baking it and making a sandwich?" Seriously though, the stuffing gets made in the oven a day or so before. It's not safe to stuff a turkey that's going in the smoker, and I can't do it the same day because the genius who wired my apartment building put all the outlets on the same breaker, so running the oven and smoker at the same time results in a blackout. So...
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  4. Remembrance, or Read Us the Book* of the Names of the Dead

    Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen Topsy John Henry Parr Joy Miller Rachel Corrie Walter Scott Jean Charles da Silva e de Menezes Ahmed Bouchikhi Freddie Gray Darwin Lee Judge Otto Frederick Warmbier Neda Agha-Soltan Cameron Todd Willingham Alan Turing Renee Shin-Yi Chen Clarabelle Lansing Mary Ward Ye Meng Yuan Shannon Michelle Wilsey Brian Douglas Wells Elisa Lam Steven Parent *the Book is neither comprehensive nor completed
  5. The Pinnacle

    So a week or two ago I turned off my angry political FB account for a while because I realized the world was gonna go to hell whether or not I kept track of the details. Kept my "friends who are decent people, senior citizen family members, etc" account open though, and now my only feed is filled with glurge like this: Which is fine until you realize that with about 7500 generations of "humans" and common ancestry with chimps and baboons, if you go back far enough there's almost certainly a...
  6. Signal 3

    “Delta 3, status check.” “Delta 3, we're fi—n” “Delta 3, did you say you were fine, or you were fighting?” “Delta 3?” “WE'RE FIGHTING, WE'RE FIGHTING!” “Delta 3 10-4—“ BEEEEEEEEP “Delta 2, Delta 20, signal three code three, 742 Evergreen Terrace.” “Delta 20 10-4” “Delta 2 10-4” “Channel 9 North units hold all non-emergency traffic, Delta 3 is out with a blue 94 Chevy two-door, 10-28 foxtrot tango sierra one three six nine break” “Plate comes back to a [REDACTED] out of [REDACTED],...
  7. Orthopraxy

    I don't believe you. I don't ask you to believe me. But I'll do my best to treat you as you wish to be treated, even if I think you're full of shit, so long as that shit isn't spilling over into my life and messing with my day, and in doing so, I hope I'll have kept my shit out of your day.
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  8. Morning October 25th

    My alarm wakes me from dreams of Weimar street fighting, but these take place no on old sped-up black and white newsreels but the vivid colors and shaky cellphone cams of YouTube, police hovercraft spilling their skirts to blast protester and counter-protester alike down the street, thugs in makeshift riot gear tapping their shields to an internal rhythm before exploding against their opposite numbers their opponents their enemies them a man using the American flag as a spear a club bashing...
  9. Vortex

    I just put youtube's "80s classic alternative" mix on while I do some paperwork, and I can feel the Aquanet in my hair and taste the cheap black lipstick and smell the clove cigarettes and see the blacklight and smell the sweet chemical smell of the fog machine and feel the laces of my boots crushing my jeans into my legs and... and this song was ten years on from that time but that's what it's about in the end and now it's thirty years gone. Young Iain, dancing in that juice...
  10. In Our Faith...

    In our faith, we keep what we kill" -The Lord Marshal, The Chronicles of Riddick This post has nothing to do with what we kill. When Mrs. A's mother died, we had a funeral. The guest of honor's only sibling, her brother, was of course present, and... ...and when they wheeled the coffin from its place at the head of the chapel for us to place the grave goods... ...the flowers... ...the candy... ...and the flowers... ...her favorite hat and scarf... ...and the flowers... ...the doll...
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  11. Nature or Nurture

    On the way to work this morning, I was part of a crowd waiting to cross one of Osaka's main thoroughfares when a full-dress Harley rumbled politely by. The type with the hard saddlebags, dual BarcaLounger reclining seats, full climate control, and quite possibly autopilot for all I know. Not one of those loud, straight-pipe hairy biker machines, no, this had big mufflers on it that silenced all but the earthquake subsonics of the big V-Twin. And all the women at the crosswalk continued to...
  12. Posterity

    During the sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade (1202-1204), the plunderers: dressed their horses in ecclesiastical garments from the vestry of the [Hagia Sophia]. Drunken soldiers sang bawdy songs in the sanctuary of the church and sat a prostitute on the throne of the patriarch. Richard Tillinghast, Istanbul: City of Forgetting and Remembering But... Will history remember as much about you in eight hundred years as it remembers of her?
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  13. Speak (insert local language here) or die

    I was just reading an opinion piece by the president of a certain university, commenting on what a school should do when its graduates achieve either fame or notoriety. The author said that when [FEMALE GRADUATE NAME REDACTED] first became a major figure in the news, many "alumnae" wrote to comment on the fact that the school had yet to comment on her newfound status. I'd never heard of the term. I know that "alumni" is plural and "alumnus" is singular, but what the fuck is an "alumnae"?...
  14. Things Get Better, Even If We Want Them To.

    Mein host, whom I grew up with.... His parents made him wear orange to school on St. Patrick's Day. We don't live in a particularly Irish area of the US, of Chicagoland, but it was a tribal statement. I didn't know (Oh, hi there Steggy!) that Catholics were Christians when I was growing up. Of course, I have yet to see a Second [Methodist/Presbyterian/Baptist/] Church [of Christ], so what the Hell do I know about these things.... Anyway, he told me that his kids play with the Moroccan kids...
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