Haunted Hosue Week: Feverish Tenants

This has nothing to do with Halloween. Just thought I'd say that. This is actually a leftover from Haunted House week, which I nixed because Jeff already had a story set in a skyscraper (we've both been inspired by Poltergeist III).

Like with The Shoppes at Marblehead, Feverish Tenants dips into my years of real estate. Jeff's spent a lot of time skirting the medical field, so his stories have their share of on-the-job know-how gleaned from various medical publications. I was never so hungry for material as to go back into my pulverbatch of college jobs, which were largely making photocopies and shelving the one book a week someone would take out of an office building's internal library. But since I was writing most of these while immersed in real estate, more stories than you'd think hinged on - in this case - the occupancy rates of office buildings. - Sean

P.S. Hours of fun if you look up "pulverbatch".

Halloween Week: What Day Is This?

My costume this year consists of a stovepipe hat, fake beard, an assemble of jackets, vets and pants that I imagine resembes 19th century formal wear, and a big black porthole hanging over my stomach.

What am I? The Lincoln Tunnel. My girlfriend, in a blonde wig, holding tulips, and wearing a matching porthole, is the Holland Tunnel. Why are we dressing up? Well, What Day Is This?

I'll get three wears out of this costume (a costume party at a bar last Friday, a local kids' thing tonight Jen and I are volunteering at, and my school's party tomorrow). I normally consider it luck yot get two wears out of something. If anyone needs a cheap stovepipe hat after tomorrow, email me. - Sean

Halloween Week: Thoughtless Neighbors

Thoughtless Neighbors is based on my actual neighbor across the street, who has fake tombstones and fake spider webs on display 12 months of the year. The lawn is atrocious enough so it took me a while to notice the lawn being the final resting place for Frank N. Stein and Your Name Here. - Sean

Halloween Week: Resensitized

After watching about eight zillion horror movies, you start to wonder if anything will shock you. Someone getting their head chopped off? Been done. Killed by monsters? Done. Stabbed with a corn cob? Done, somehow. (Stephen King's Sleepwalkers will always be known as Death By Corn Cob in the Daily Scares world.)

Of course, a lot of this comes from knowing the overlarge cast of horror movies exists solely to get a lot of neat deaths. (In the Final Destination movies, they get economical and everyone gets two neat death.) But sometimes a movie will have compelling characters, people you actually find yourself caring about. Hint; if you're not fast forwarding through the talking scenes, then the movie is doing its job to make the characters compelling. And you'll hurt a wee bit when that fatal corn cob comes thrusting at them.

Resensitized takes a whole different approach to this. I don't know why Harry has his change of viewpoint, but I know he shouldn't be in his apartment when he does. I'm glad it had a cutout of Michael Myers in his apartment, to officially give this one a Halloween hook. - Sean

Halloween Week: Horror Marathon

My school showed Hostel II in a common room yesterday. I hadn't seen it yet, just like the 99.9% of the country that didn't bother either. This movie was widely blamed as the one that began the decline of "torture porn" movement, where whole movies are built around murdering someone in the most painful way possible. I personally put more blame with the Saw movies. Hostel and Hostel II both give you plenty of time to get to know the victims before they head off to that dank basement full of power tools. The Saw movies started with big plot holes, which got exponentially bigger as the series went on. Saw IV could just be an Itchy and Scratchy episode at this point.

The fellow higher education students in Horror Marathon are attempting to watch even more movies than me (just for reference's sake, after watching Hostel II I went home and watched The Hoax, two Sopranos episodes, and a Treehouse of Horror). They should be so lucky as to get to watch all the Saw movies. - Sean

Halloween Week: Dr. Evan's Boo-Ha-Ha

The worst Halloween party I went to was at a gym in high school. 1% of the people were in costumes. Want to take a guess if my friends and I were that 1%? We ended up shrugging our vampire capes off and sticking them in a broom closet, so we could stand around awkwardly and have a better chance of not being noticed.

The best Halloween party I went to was at some college friends' rented house. Three theater girls and one gay guy shared the house. The threat was that if you didn't come in costume, the gay guy would make you a costume - and he was Peter Pan, so he'd just be stripping you to your underwear and calling you a Lost Boy. EVERYONE wore a costume. Dr. Evan's Boo-Ha-Ha is in that vein, but with Dr. Evan doing more than just pantsing his uncostumed guests. - Sean

Haunted House Week: Puttyface

Puttyface is based on a photo passed around my former office. It was of two girls that had previously worked there. No one wanted the picture, but no one wanted to throw it out. So this photo was snuck into the photo collection someone with family pictures on their desk, and the time taken to notice the new photo wagered upon. There was no one to give it back to when it was eventually noticed, so the prankee became the pranker, and stuck it in someone else's photo collection. It's on my replacement's desk now, for all I know.

The completely incidental side note that sparked my idea for this story: I didn't recognize either of these girls, but my time there overlapped with both of them. I knew what they looked like, but that particular photo had them both in puttyface, so they didn't look like themselves. Occasionally it becomes permanent: Mark Hamill syndrome.

I should probably apologize for the attempted Michael Caine accent. This is one of the earliest stories I've written. I don't think there's any noticable difference between the older stories and the ones I wrote toward the end of my daily writing - either rock-solid consistency, or a stubborn refusal to get better from practice. I try to alter the voice of these stories, and so for this one added Cockney rhyming slang. Toward the end of these, when Jeff was hatching the podcasting idea, I stayed away from typing any voice I didn't think feasible coming from my mouth. And Puttyface is why. Don't ask me what robin or Mae West means: look it up. It'll be valuable learning in case you actually run into Michael Caine and wish to converse. - Sean

Haunted House Week: Ghosts of Lascaux II

No, you didn't miss anything. There is no original Ghosts of Lascaux story, just this one, part II. Or deux, as I'll attempt to pronounce. Not that anyone can be blamed for seeing a Roman numeral and wincing at the idea of another horror spinoff. Every good (and sometimes rightfully forgotten) horror movie is clawing its way out of an untended tomb like a persistent zombie. Was anyone calling for a Wicker Man remake? When a Stranger Calls? Black Christmas? Hands up, horror fans, if if you never even knew about some of the source material that these freshly squeezed turds ruin the good names of? And if for some accidental reason the remake doesn't put people to sleep, then there's a sequel to the remake, The Hills Have Eyes II or another Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I haven't seen the new Halloween yet, but I hope the persistent Zombie behind that one is the exception to prove the rule.

See what I did there? Zombie? Rob Zombie? God, I'm hysterical. Anyhoo, here's Ghosts of Lascaux II, for your emjoyment. If you like it, I'll write a III and IV and a Ghosts of Lascaux II vs. Demonic Toys. - Sean

Haunted House Week: Persistent Reg the Chimney Sweep

Welcome to Haunted House week. Hopefully these seven stores will make you look at the alarm system wired to every window of your house, your big mean dog, and the gun locked in the dresser ... and trade them all in for a crucifix and a deed that's not on Indian burial ground.

I've personally never seen a ghost, but I've looked for them. I've checked mirrors when I'm alone, investigated creaks, and even crawled under the floorboards of a colonial tavern. So far, nada. Zip. Only thing I found was an old 7-Up bottle. If ghosts exists, maybe they only show up to people who really don't want to see them. Never to the guy with the thermal camcorder, always to the six-year-old who saw his first X-Files episode.

We kick the week off with Persistent Reg the Chimney Sweep. Here in New Jersey, the chimney sweeps are aggressive as all hell. They'll call you up regularly, insisting you need this service or that. I live in an apartment, and I still get the calls. When I say that I don't have a fireplace ... they still try to sell me. That's persistence. I can see them building me a chimney, just so I'm now able to use their services. Good thing none of them sell artificial arms. - Sean

Witch Week: Cuss Words

Another little girl is the star of Cuss Words, which means again I've got to pretend I've got pigtails and a room full of Barbies for the reading. In actually, only one of those is true. And honestly, most of the girls buried in my root cellar were names Maria. But I think one of them had the middle name Barbara. - Sean

Witch Week: Mental Vacations

My concentration here in business school is going to be pharmaceutical management. Part of this is practical. I'm in New Jersey, home to lots of pharma companies. My school has an excellent pharma program, and the big companies recruit here. A pharma degree from here is worth more than one in another concentration. (And, of course, they pay more than Burger King.)

Part of it is idealistic. I would like to make a big difference to the world. Consumer product companies look fun, banks look impressive, and consulting looks lucrative. But who can say that their work directly benefits people, literally saves people's lives? Sure, you contribute to the economy by efficiently running a company, but you do that in any job. Pharma companies make drugs and vaccines that save lives. They do make money, and plow that into development of future drugs and vaccines. And hopefully I'll be at one of them soon.

With that off my chest, Mental Vacations is about a crazy voodoo lady. She's crazy enough to tie people up and do mind-swapping with sacrificial chicken blood. And she might agree with me on my rant. - Sean

Witch Week: The Shoppes at Marblehead

Jeff's in a three-day celebration of Columbus' accidental Caribbean cruise, so I'll double up on posts. The Shoppes at Marblehead uses my 2 1/2 years of real estate experience, the job I left to join grad school. Real estate was interesting stuff, the people very happy to talk and the workload more than I've ever had before. It wasn't the job so much as the second and third jobs piled on me when it was realized that I wouldn't quit with more work on me. That worked until I quit. A benefit of that is that 18 credits of brutal financial number-crunching feels like every week's a three-day weekend. (Ignore for the moment that I get Fridays off.)

This story also uses my knowledge of the town of Marblehead, where Jeff and I lived from kindergarten through half of third grade. Check the Massachusetts page of your atlas: the town's where I say it is. - Sean

Witch Week: Burn the Witch!

A clarification for our new Witch Week. There are no warlocks. No wizards. No Hogwarts students. No Wiccans. We are here for the ones you think of when you say "witches." If she's got a black pointy hat, a wart on her nose the size of McNugget, and likes to eat children, then she'll be welcome here. Green skin a plus.


Paradoxically, let's go to Burn the Witch! Which is not about a witch like that at all. But is also it. Historicaly, witches weren't burned at the stake back in the American colonial days, but hung. To properly have a story about being burnt at the stake, I had to go to the Dark Ages. I finally made it to the Cloisters in upper Manhattan yesterday, to see a lot of surviving art and architecture from that time. Half the statues have lost hands due to a millennium's worth of wear and tear. There were probably one too many Darth Vader jokes made about that. - Sean

Graveyard Week: Grave Robbers

Attention world: I do not want a fancy coffin for my funeral. I don't need it. I'll be dead. Find the bargain one, the one made cardboard and Hefty bags. That'll do. I shall die as I lived: cheap. Also, skip the flowers. And any coordinated release of doves around my tombstone. Do they make tombstones out of plastic? Something that cost $2? Sign me up for one of those. I want the entire funeral to cost less than a meal at Burger King. Take all the money you would have spent on a fancy hoity funeral, stick it in the bank, and when it hits a million airdrop it over whatever area was most recently hit by a natural disaster.

Also, do not bury me at the graveyard featured in Grave Robbers. That should go without saying. - Sean

Graveyard Week: Denali's Dead

Denali's Dead just didn't make the cut for Zombie Week, but (appropriately) it lives again! There's a bunch of stories that fit multiple categories. We might just be anal enough to go back and retroactively add things like Cold Comfort of a Coffin and Tintinnabulation into Graveyard Week. - Sean

Graveyard Week: Mr. L's Final Legacy

The titular character in Mr. L's Final Legacy is fairly obvious if you follow corporate scandals. Or even if you don't. Easy hint: rhymes with flay. Easier hint: it's Ken Lay, recently deceased CEO of Enron, the multi-billion dollar company that did ... what did it do, exactly? Something with natural gas? Or energy futures? Anyway, they claimed to be making billions, and none of the executives were eating macaroni and cheese, so everyone agreed to believe them and give Enron their money. What's the worst that could happen?

The worst that can happen is that you work for Enron. Or, as Cobb in the story does, hold a wee bit of a grudge about getting screwed out of your pension. Emphasis on the "wee". - Sean

Baseball Week: Spectator Sport

Hey, don't end the week just yet, Jeff! There's still the Saturday installment, Spectator Sport. This one happens to be very useful for categorization purposes, since there's football, basketball and hockey in addition to baseball. Part of me wanted to hold onto it for the evitable Football Week later on. (My substitute story would have just involved a criminal in Boston giving his illegal enterprises names that only a Red Sox fan could have come up with. I'll have to pitch a Bahston Week for that.) But we'll cook up an apprpriate amount of ways to kill people via football. Much easier to do with a contact sport. - Sean

Baseball Week: Stink Barrier

Today's story, Stink Barrier, comes from Canada, the great true north. Do they play America's pastime in Canda? The existence of the Toronto Blue Jays points to yes. The non-existence of the Montreal Expos points to no. For the purposes of not being cultrually inaccurate, I can assume that Kevin and his boys drove up from Seattle if it's only plausible that native Canadians would toss a hockey puck or curling stone around. - Sean

Baseball Week: Breaking the Wave

Rob in Breaking the Wave is obviously a Yankee fan. In most cities, a quick glance at the map will let you know what your cultural allegiances are to. Not New York. In all four major sports (I'm being generous toward hockey here, which last I checked is aired in the middle of the night on the Taxidermy Channel) New York has a choice of two and sometimes three regional teams. You can't just pick up an Atlanta Braves hat and wear it once a year. You need to choose. For most people,t hat choice was made well before they had conscious thoughts. But for those of us who don't have the hours and hours to devote to various team and league performances, we've got a tough call. Support winning team A and hope no one asks specifics about so and so's recovering knee. Support not-so-hot team B and hope that the team's poopy record is enough to ensure you're dyed in the wool. Or admit you don't have the die-hard interest to read the daily hours of statistics that true fans can't live without, and sign your manhood over to a small box alongside those guys who changed their name when they got married.

Wow, that has absolutely nothing to do with Breaking the Wave. Aside from Red Sox fans really liking this one.

Baseball Week: Extra Innings

Extra Innings is a horror story to certain people. To others, it's the greatest game ever played. My own view on the matter would hinge on the weather, my plans the next day, and how much money I'd care to blow on $4.50 hot dogs. I thought of this during the nicest perk of my old job: once a year, we got to watch a Mets game from a luxury box. Leather couches, air conditioning, great views from the seats outside, free food, free drinks, free caps and programs, and Mr. Met stopping by for a photo op. On that day, Extra Innings would be damn nice.