Monthly Archives: December 2014

Satan Drives the Bus – Wyatt Blassingame

Posted on by
Reply

pulpfiction01Allen Sargent is taking a bus trip.  He is killing time by profiling the other passengers. There is the short bald guy with the cigar who must be a salesman; the poorly-dressed country woman who had probably been working in the fields since she was six; the hard-faced blonde lush who had called the driver “baby”; the hard-boiled gangster with the scar who seemed scared; and “on the back seat, a negro sat alone.”

Well, ya can’t accuse him of racial profiling. Sargent doesn’t even bother to come up with a story for him. He’s like Franklin in Peanuts — just the black guy.

There is also a priest, an old shaggy-haired hobo type, the driver and Sandra Bullock.  OK, just a pretty girl — which I gotta think is a rarity for bus travel — but I re-watched Speed just before reading this.  Sargent thinks, “With her to look at, this trip might not be so bad.”

As he is drooling over Sandra, the old man jumps up in the aisle and proclaims, “It’s death!  Death and sin!  They are riding with us, and they shall strike; they shall kill us all because someone here has sinned against man and God!”  Sargent sits him down and gallantly inserts himself in the seat beside Sandra.

The guy might have been crazy, but he was right — minutes later, the salesman lets out a scream and keels over dead.  The driver says he will stop in Perry Corners and alert the police.

The “negro” stands and flashes a gun.  He says, “I’m Pete Meadows.  They’re looking for me in Minneapolis for a couple of bank robberies.”  He clearly wants to avoid the cops, but he doesn’t seem to get the concept of laying low.  He might as well have shouted out his home address and Social Security Number while he was at it.

The old man shouts about sin and death again, and this time the country woman drops dead.

The driver begins going too fast.  When Meadows complains, the driver lets out a maniacal, “laughter from hell!”  When he turns, he is sporting the face of a cartoon devil — triangular face, V-shaped eyebrows, pointed ears — signifying true evil, the pit of Hell, vile pestilence; or deviled ham.

Meadows tries to shoot the driver, but he is the next to drop dead, clawing at his throat, tearing bloody flesh from his neck.  The driver next turns his attention to the hard-faced blonde. She begs for time to make a confession to the priest, and the driver generously gives her 2 minutes.  This guy must have had the buses running on time because he kills her 2 minutes later.  And then the scar-faced man.

But there is a nice twist, and the things turn out to have not been so supernatural after all.  A pretty good yarn.

I look forward to the sequel, Satan Pulls the Train.

Post-Post:

  • First published in Ace Detective Magazine, October 1936.
  • Also that month: First commercial flight from US to Hawaii.
  • Pointless Duplication:  The bank robber was named Pete Meadows.  And the guy pretending to be a priest was also named Pete?  Why?

Palate Cleanser – Haircut 100

Posted on by
Reply

This phenomenal album is great to put on in almost any setting — at home, at work, riding a bike.  One of the benefits for listening at work is that you won’t be distracted by the lyrics — I have listened to this album a thousand times and know NONE of the lyrics.  Also good for that reason — Talking Heads.  Not good for that reason — Bob Dylan.

Maybe I should listen to the lyrics.  Other than the parenthetical  “Boy Meets Girl,” this seems like the gayest track listing ever.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl)
Love Plus One
Lemon Firebrigade
Marine Boy
Milk Film
Kingsize (You’re My Little Steam Whistle)
Fantastic Day
Baked Bean
Snow Girl
Love’s Got Me in Triangles
Surprise Me Again
Calling Captain Autumn

Pelican West Plus bonus tracks:

Boat Party
Ski Club
Nobody’s Fool (12″ version)
October Is Orange (day 1 and 2)
Favourite Shirts (12″ version)

Outer Limits – I Hear You Calling (S2E4)

Posted on by
Reply

olihear02Carter Jones (Ally Sheedy) is a reporter, one of the few like Sheryl Attkisson who will actually do something other than put on the knee pads and suck up to power.  While stuck in traffic, her cell phone picks up a call from a nearby car and she hears “Krieger is scheduled for removal this afternoon.  There will be no witnesses.”

She looks around and stares eye-to-violet-eye with Michael Sarrazin.  Rather than go home to prepare for a cocktail party at the home of some cabinet official, she shockingly pursues the story.

Her editor is old school, though, and wants her to cover the garbage strike.  He says Joeseph Krieger’s name gets “thrown around a lot.  He’s this country’s Salmon Rushdie.”

I kinda think of Salmon Rushdie as this country’s Salmon Rushdie (even if he is a British citizen).  Nothing to see here, move along.

She goes to Krieger’s house and sees the police taking photos of man-shaped purple ash residue on the driveway.  They throw her off the scene.  In her SUV, she gets a call from Sarrazin who says he knows her name, her address and warns her that she could suffer the same fate as Krieger.

olihear09In the archives, she finds a story from 2 weeks ago about a hiker that disappeared from a boat trip.  Purple ashes in the shape of a man were found on the dock.  She gets the world’s most intrusive email notification that tells here, “Do not pursue this.”

She goes to the dock, to speak to the captain of the boat, but learns that he hasn’t been heard from in 2 weeks.  The dockmaster tells her that Krieger was also on that boat. There was also a married couple on that boat.  Jones goes to their house and sees Sarrazin reduce them to purple ashes.

Since Sarrazin knows where she lives, she goes to her father’s house.  They don’t get along because, like Samantha Marsh, she has exposed environmental problems at her father’s employer that resulted in the loss of jobs.  Even if she did the right thing, she is really an asshole about the lives she disrupted.

She goes back to see the dockmaster, but he is now missing.  His sister is there also looking for him.  She says another odd-looking man was just there looking for her brother.  Jones is able to track him to a hotel  Sarrazin has followed her and also reduces him to purple ashes.

olihear14Turns out, Sarrazin is an alien.  One of his scouts had a virus which infected the people whom he has been eliminated.  He was merely preventing a massive outbreak on Earth. The last infected person: Carter Jones.

The good news is the people he zapped to purple ashes did not actually die, they were just transported to Sarrazin’s planet where the the virus is not a danger.  Which sounds suspiciously like my dog Skippy “going to live on a farm” when he got old.

Good episode and nice twist on the killer aliens.

Post-Post:

  • This would have been a much better title for the episode starring Marlee Matlin which had the blah title The Message.  It barely makes sense for this episode.
  • Hulu Sucks.  However, their beautiful IHOP commercials are mouth-watering. New: Caramel Bon-Bon Pancakes.

The Scalpel of Doom – Ray Cummings

Posted on by
Reply

pulpscalpelofdoom01After Death Flight and this one, I feel like maybe I’m not getting my $.99/25 worth out of some of these stories.  But I always seem to lose interest in the last few short stories in a collection. I’ve never known whether it was my short attention span or if the good stuff is skewed to the front [1].

Dr. Bates is resting in the office of his medical practice which occupies the bottom floor. He had a rough day with performing two operations and taking patients until 11:30 PM. Meanwhile, I sat for 3 goddamn hours at the urgent care clinic last Monday and only got as far as a nurse practitioner.  But I digress.

Dr. Bates gets a visitor at midnight.  18 year old Jenny Dolan needs him to attend to her twin brother Tom who is injured in the woods.  She drives Bates out to the spot as far as they can by road then they go on foot to a shack in the woods.

Bates diagnoses by the wound that Tom has been stabbed.  He diagnoses by his prison-issued clothes that he just busted out of the joint.  Tom starts waving a gun around, but Bates is able to grab it away.

Turns out Tom is serving time for a murder committed by Jenny’s hoodlum husband Jim during a robbery they pulled together. Tom was not injured in the escape, but was stabbed by Jim when Tom confronted him about abusing his wife.  Rather than seeing the error of his ways or being grateful for Tom taking the murder rap, he is more interested in where the loot is hidden.

Jim shows up at the cabin looking for the loot.  Jenny thought she had seen him lurking around her house.  So did he follow her to the cabin when Jenny brought Tom to the cabin?  Why not confront Tom at the house while she was out stealing a car?

OK, maybe he was afraid of being spotted by the neighbors.  So he hung around the neighborhood for however long not knowing if or when they would relocate?

He tailed them to the shack, then did not confront them immediately, or confront Tom alone while Jenny had gone to get the doctor.

But he does show when Tom is there with two allies and witnesses.  He pulls out a gun demanding again to know where the loot is.  He gets off a couple of shots but only manages to hit the doctor in the arm.  The doctor manages to take a scalpel to his throat.

The doctor drives Tom and Jenny to the hospital.  Although, as she is the only one not shot or stabbed, it seems like Her Majesty could have volunteered for the driving duties.

I guess, free of Jim’s terror, these two crazy kids will live happily ever after.  Except, Tom is still an escaped prisoner who was involved in the original crime that left a man dead, and Jenny is now a car thief.

[1] I’ve come to the realization that I have the attention span of a hummingbird; which is part of the reason for this blog.  Just in Stephen King’s collections:

  • Night Shift (1978) — Skipped the last 4 stories.
  • Different Seasons (1982) — Skipped the last story, The Breathing Method.
  • Skeleton Crew (1985) — I think I actually finished this one.
  • Four Past Midnight (1990) — On a roll, I think I finished this one too.
  • Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993) — Skipped the last 7 stories.
  • Everything’s Eventual (2002) — Stephen King says in the intro that the stories were ordered randomly based on a deck of cards.  I have no memory of the last 2, but am also spotty on a few others.
  • Skipped Just after Sunset (2008) and Full Dark, No Stars (2010) altogether.

On the other hand, I did finish Joe Hill’s 20th Century Ghosts (2005) and look forward to another collection.

Post-Post:

  • First published in Ten Detective Aces, February 1947.
  • Also that month:  Really nothing exciting.  I guess people were still sleeping-in after WWII.

Ray Bradbury Theater – Mars is Heaven (S4E1)

Posted on by
1

rbtmarsisheaven01Hal Linden (Barney Miller), or is it Barney Miller (Hal Linden)? No, it’s Hal Linden (Barney Miller), is the captain of a ship heading to Mars.

Linden, playing Captain Black, disembarks along with crew-members Henley and Larson to explore Mars.  After a few seconds, they determine that the atmosphere is “thin for breathing, but there’s enough oxygen.”  Showing the same scientific acumen as the crew of Prometheus, they take off their helmets.

Mars isn’t quite what they expect.  Their landing area is the expected barren red landscape, but then they hear a rooster crowing.  They hear birds.  After a short walk, they see trees, grass, tennis courts.  They’re in Club Red; except without the red.

rbtmarsisheaven02One of the men suggests they somehow landed back on earth.  Captain Black assures him, “we traveled 300 million miles, tracked by telemetry every inch of the way.”  As usual, no one could be troubled to pick up an almanac when this story was filmed.  When Mars is on the other side of the sun, it is still never 300 million miles away.  Even the original short story didn’t use this stat.

One man finds his old tennis racket, one sees his grandfather.  Black sees his younger brother and goes with him back to his parent’s house.  He is reunited with his dead mother and dead father.  It is revealed that the house he has come back to actually burned to the ground years ago, killing his brother.

In the short story, one woman — whatever the Martian equivalent of a blonde is, maybe a redhead — almost gives away the game when she threatens to have her husband come outside and “beat them with all his fists.”  Although, really, she could have meant all two of them.

That night, Linden finally begins to question what they have found on Mars.  He wonders if maybe the Martians knew they were coming.  That they may have used their minds to create this world for the humans.  To put them off-guard, to separate them so they could be picked off by people they trusted.

rbtmarsisheaven03

For some reason, the astronauts wear ASA patches instead of NASA.

As Black leaves the room, an alien hand clasps his shoulder.  We then cut to caskets resting on the barren red Martian soil, 3 helmets atop them.

The idea of finding a replica on earth is old hat now, also having appeared on The Twilight Zone.  When it was published 1948, maybe it was new hat.  I guess the title Mars is Heaven isn’t really a spoiler since it is revealed to not be heaven.

In the story, the Martians inexplicably retain their human form even after the astronauts are dead, and give them a proper burial.  Equally inexplicably, in the episode, we see the coffins but they fade from the shot and disappear completely.

Post-Post:

  • Pointless Duplication:  In the story, Black’s brother died 26 years ago.  He is now 26 years old.  The townspeople say the year is 1926.
  • The short story Mars is Heaven was included in The Martian Chronicles as The Third Expedition.
  • Coincidentally, director John Laing is also credited on an episode of The Hitchhiker which I just watched.  The first disk of that series was so awful, I couldn’t bring myself to write about it.  His episode was probably one of the better ones, though.
  • For some reason, Bradbury alone among sci-fi writers is given license to have breathable air on Mars and other basic scientific inaccuracies.