It's as if the weather is luring you in. See my brightness! Feel my felicitous breezes! Glory in my glow! And then, tomorrow morning, we'll spend an hour shoveling snow off the car, hoping against hope that at least one hardy barista will have made it to the Starbucks down the road so that you can at least get a damned cup of coffee. The thing is, I've been to the Lexington tournament about 30 times now. It's in the middle of winter and I know what can happen. Oh, sure, they might throw a warm day at you as a tease, but once they've got you in their clutches...
Music: Meanwhile, I don't recall ever coming across Rebecca Kilgore before reading today's obituary in the Times. If you're a Songbook person, you need to add her to your list: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DZ06evO0vxdLU?si=7cf4f5d15d2546e4
Movies: My generation was raised on the old Universal monsters. They were inescapable on local television. Fifth graders, the absolute target market for this brand of entertainment, would run into school on a Monday full of glee on having seen "The House of" one or another of the Wolfman or Dracula or Frankenstein, a film that would in fact include the Wolfman AND Dracula AND Frankenstein, and maybe an Invisible Man or two to boot. https://crimereads.com/universal-monsters-history/ does a good job of covering Universal's monsters from day one.
The other genre we fifth graders were the absolute target market for was what I guess you would call Creature Features, not the designation of the local TV station but the movies that were shown in the local theater as Saturday matinees. The place would be packed with kids, the noisiest, least attentive audience imaginable, while on the screen cheesy aliens of one sort or another were attacking earth or greeting earthlings to make soup out of them or whatever. One of these—a good one—I remember clearly to this day: Enemy from Space. This was an entry in the Quatermass series (not that I knew that at the time) in which meteorites land on earth carrying an alien substance. When a human comes in contact with that substance, they become its slave, going on to collect those meteorites to gather that substance which they put into great vats of methane-breathing Jupiter monsters. The only way you could tell if a human was on their side was a telltale rash on their arms. I have to say, this one kept me up a night or two in my youth. The third of the Quatermass pictures was titled in the US Five Million Years to Earth, released in 1967. This one gave me the heebie jeebies when I was in college! Earth was invaded by a plague of scary looking locust creatures from Mars millions of years ago, giving rise to the idea of the devil and still giving off evil vibes in contemporary Swinging London Town. I think they may have spawned humans, making their legacy that much more complex. I highly recommend these Quatermass movies.
None of which has anything to do with the weather in Lexington this weekend, but if things get particularly Satanic, you'll have heard it here first.
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