When the caleche stopped, the driver jumped down and held out his hand to assist me to alight. Again I could not but notice his prodigious strength. His hand actually seemed like a steel vice that could have crushed mine if he had chosen. Then he took my traps, and placed them on the ground beside me as I stood close to a great door, old and studded with large iron nails, and set in a projecting doorway of massive stone. I could see even in the dim light that the stone was massively carved, but that the carving had been much worn by time and weather. As I stood, the driver jumped again into his seat and shook the reins. The horses started forward, and trap and all disappeared down one of the dark openings.

I stood in silence where I was, for I did not know what to do. Of bell or knocker there was no sign. Through these frowning walls and dark window openings it was not likely that my voice could penetrate. The time I waited seemed endless, and I felt doubts and fears crowding upon me. What sort of place had I come to, and among what kind of people? What sort of grim adventure was it on which I had embarked? Was this a customary incident in the life of a solicitor’s clerk sent out to explain the purchase of a London estate to a foreigner? Solicitor’s clerk! Mina would not like that. Solicitor, for just before leaving London I got word that my examination was successful, and I am now a full-blown solicitor! I began to rub my eyes and pinch myself to see if I were awake. It all seemed like a horrible nightmare to me, and I expected that I should suddenly awake, and find myself at home, with the dawn struggling in through the windows, as I had now and again felt in the morning after a day of overwork. But my flesh answered the pinching test, and my eyes were not to be deceived. I was indeed awake and among the Carpathians. All I could do now was to be patient, and to wait the coming of morning.

Just as I had come to this conclusion I heard a heavy step approaching behind the great door, and saw through the chinks the gleam of a coming light. Then there was the sound of rattling chains and the clanking of massive bolts drawn back. A key was turned with the loud grating noise of long disuse, and the great door swung back.

Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver lamp, in which the flame burned without a chimney or globe of any kind, throwing long quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open door. The old man motioned me in with his right hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange intonation.

“Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own free will!” He made no motion of stepping to meet me, but stood like a statue, as though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The instant, however, that I had stepped over the threshold, he moved impulsively forward, and holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince, an effect which was not lessened by the fact that it seemed cold as ice, more like the hand of a dead than a living man. Again he said,

“Welcome to my house! Enter freely. Go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring!” The strength of the handshake was so much akin to that which I had noticed in the driver, whose face I had not seen, that for a moment I doubted if it were not the same person to whom I was speaking. So to make sure, I said interrogatively, “Count Dracula?”

He bowed in a courtly way as he replied, “I am Dracula, and I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in, the night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest.”

—from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1897 edition, text from Project Gutenberg

If you want a shorter ghost tale, mosey on over to Pocahontas County Fare and read Rebecca’s transcription of Marcum and the Yankee.

If you can’t afford to buy a pumpkin, try this pumpkin simulator that I found at Have Coffee Will Write.

My Liberal Identity:

You are a New Left Hipster, also known as a MoveOn.org liberal, a Netroots activist, or a Daily Show fanatic. You believe that if we really want to defend American values, conservatives must be exposed, mocked, and assailed for every fanatical, puritanical, warmongering, Constitution-shredding ideal for which they stand.

Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com

I’ll have to tell you, though. Some of the choices were hard. For example, which trio would you pick to pile into a naked pyramid: George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld OR Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and Samuel Alito OR Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Ted Haggard.

I ain’t gonna tell you which ones I picked.

Link courtesy of that Social Justice Crusader I See Invisible People.

When I was a child, after my mother made me turn my reading light out but the lights from the hallway still made a sort of twilight in my bedroom, the doorknob, one of those ancient assemblies with a huge keyhole shaped like a pyramid with a circle on top (nothing less like a mouth in the world), made a malevolent face. I had to hide my head under the covers to get away from it.

My mother, of course, was having none of this evil doorknob nonsense and as I grew into adolescence other horrors supplanted this childish demon.

The Faces in Places are generally more benevolent. The one below, credited to tinyfroglet’s Flickr stream, is downright sweet.

Still, the blog is going to ruin my day. Thanks to Donna Rhae Marder, who provided the link, I’ll be looking for faces everywhere.

Oh well, maybe I can write a poem about it.

Go check it out. Indulge your human penchant for facial recognition.

After weeks of drought, we had five inches of rain last week, and then last night our first frost. Pretty late really. But it spurred Charlie Whitt to write:

There was ice in the bird bath this morning triggering something inside like a mixture of dread for a long winter, and gladness that the heat of a dry summer is finally over. All and all though, I’m glad the politicians can’t control the weather. Lord, think of that.

But I don’t know, Charlie. What with global warming, Hurricane Katrina, and now California burning, it’s possible that politicians have already been messing with the weather.

Here’s a poem from Charlie that seems to describe the day:

WINTER MIND

The cold front brought continuous rain,
And when it had gone
Our air was blue with weak sun
That struggled vainly to warm damp earth.

Wood smoke rose from the chimney
As slender and gray as poplars
Standing stiffly asleep below the field.

Winter’s cold takes over
Limiting my excursions into the future;
Lengthening those to the past.

Memory is everything to a winter mind,
When nothing grows, and nothing is born.

—Charlie Whitt

Belligerence in the pursuit of justice may not be a virtue.

—Charles Bernstein (”Optimism and Critical Excess,” A Poetics. Harvard, 1992)

After a droughty summer that put us some foot or so behind in rainfall, we had 5 inches last week and these robins will find their birdbath where they can.

The tub holds roofing equipment.

In Bush’s Dangerous Liaisons in the NYTimes, François Furstenberg reminds us both of the origin of the word terrorist (A terroriste was, in its original meaning, a Jacobin leader who ruled France during la Terreur) and of the fact that these original terroristes considered themselves the defenders, not the enemies, of liberty (not to mention equality and fraternity). Their manifestations sound familiar:

Confronted by a monarchical Europe united in opposition to revolutionary France — old Europe, they might have called it — the Jacobins rooted out domestic political dissent. It was the beginning of the period that would become infamous as the Terror.

Among the Jacobins’ greatest triumphs was their ability to appropriate the rhetoric of patriotism — Le Patriote Français was the title of Brissot’s newspaper — and to promote their political program through a tightly coordinated network of newspapers, political hacks, pamphleteers and political clubs.

Even the Jacobins’ dress distinguished “true patriots”: those who wore badges of patriotism like the liberty cap on their heads, or the cocarde tricolore (a red, white and blue rosette) on their hats or even on their lapels.

Insisting that their partisan views were identical to the national will, believing that only they could save France from apocalyptic destruction, Jacobins could not conceive of legitimate dissent. Political opponents were treasonous, stabbing France and the Revolution in the back.

To defend the nation from its enemies, Jacobins expanded the government’s police powers at the expense of civil liberties, endowing the state with the power to detain, interrogate and imprison suspects without due process. Policies like the mass warrantless searches undertaken in 1792 — “domicilary visits,” they were called — were justified, according to Georges Danton, the Jacobin leader, “when the homeland is in danger.”

And this does not even get us to Robespierre. It’s a good read.

In Rudy the Values Slayer, Frank Rich ponders how it is that a man whose social values are “indistinguishable” from Hillary Clinton’s is now the Republican front runner. He reaches a conclusion I’ve been espousing for some time, “evangelical” Christians are not all foaming-at-the-mouth religious nuts, not even Southern Baptists:

There are various explanations for [Giuliani's lead]. One is that 9/11 and terrorism fears trump everything. Another is that the rest of the field is weak. But the most obvious explanation is the one that Washington resists because it contradicts the city’s long-running story line. Namely, that the political clout ritualistically ascribed to Mr. Perkins, James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Gary Bauer of American Values and their ilk is a sham.

These self-promoting values hacks don’t speak for the American mainstream. They don’t speak for the Republican Party. They no longer speak for many evangelical ministers and their flocks. The emperors of morality have in fact had no clothes for some time. Should Rudy Giuliani end up doing a victory dance at the Republican convention, it will be on their graves.

…

But the most significant — and happiest — explanation for the values czars’ demise as a political force is that white evangelical Christians and a new generation of evangelical leaders have themselves steadily tacked a different course from the Dobson crowd. A CBS News poll this month parallels what the Times reporter David D. Kirkpatrick found in his examination of evangelicals for today’s Times Magazine. Like most other Americans, they are more interested in hearing from presidential candidates about the war in Iraq and health care than about any other issues.

Abortion and same-sex marriage landed at the bottom of that list; fighting poverty outpolled abortion as a personal priority by a 3-to-2 margin.

As it nearly always is, Rich’s writing in this piece is a joy and I recommend you read the whole piece.

On a somewhat related note, I was struck earlier this week by a post at Political Animal, God and Mammon, Part 2, that draws attention to results of a Pew Global Survey showing that

As people get less religious, they get wealthier. Or perhaps the other way around. Or perhaps there’s something else behind both trends.

He has the scatter plot to prove it, which he picked up from Andrew Sullivan, who in turn got it from the original Pew report. Says Pew:

The survey finds a strong relationship between a country’s religiosity and its economic status. In poorer nations, religion remains central to the lives of individuals, while secular perspectives are more common in richer nations.1 This relationship generally is consistent across regions and countries, although there are some exceptions, including most notably the United States, which is a much more religious country than its level of prosperity would indicate. Other nations deviate from the pattern as well, including the oil-rich, predominantly Muslim — and very religious — kingdom of Kuwait.

Us and Kuwait, religious and rich. By their friends you shall know them.

Though I think Jesus considered religious and rich a sort of contradiction in terms.

We of the U.S.A. are also more intolerant than most other rich nations and more likely to want to use our army to get our way.

So I just have to wonder a little bit what religion it is we practice. Doesn’t look like the Christianity I was taught in a Southern Baptist Church.

Or maybe, given the contradiction with Rich’s article, what we need to wonder is who it is Pew is polling.

All week, Mr. Bush and the right have been trying to re-write history (again):

President Bush long ago accepted responsibility for the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. But now his administration and its allies are using the California disaster, with its affluent victims and reverse 911 telephone-warning system, to revisit Louisiana’s handling of the 2005 hurricane — and, in the process, to rewrite the story of one of the Bush administration’s biggest setbacks.

There is no doubt that state and local officials were partly to blame for the slow and inefficient response to Hurricane Katrina. And people on all sides of the hurricane vs. wildfires debate agree the storm, which put nearly an entire city under water, flooding evacuation routes and knocking out vital communications links, was a disaster of far greater magnitude, and thus California and New Orleans cannot be compared.

Yet the president drew the contrast on Thursday in California when, appearing with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, he said, “It makes a significant difference when you have somebody in the Statehouse willing to take the lead.” The remark was widely viewed as a veiled swipe at Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a Louisiana Democrat, who says she resents it.

See also this previous post and comments.

But it turns out that there is an ugly side to this Californian model of disaster relief:

Terri Trujillo, who helps the immigrants, checked on those in the canyons, urging them to leave, too, when she left her house in Rancho Peñasquitos ahead of the fires.

Ms. Trujillo and others who help the immigrants said they saw several out in the fields as the fires approached and ash fell on them. She said many were afraid to lose their jobs.

“There were Mercedeses and Jaguars pulling out, people evacuating, and the migrants were still working,” said Enrique Morones, who takes food and blankets to the immigrants’ camps. “It’s outrageous.”

…

Wayne A. Cornelius, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who studies border questions, said that if the past was a guide there would be more friction over the fires and their effects on illegal immigrants.

“San Diego likes its illegal migrants as invisible as possible,” Mr. Cornelius said. “So whenever something happens that calls attention to their presence, it is fodder for the local anti-immigration forces.”

PZ Myers at Pharyngula started this meme as a means of demonstrating evolution in cyberspace. It’s sort of interesting to follow the string and watch the questions mutate. And this of course is only one string. (Hector’s pup, it’s a hoot just to see what people call their blogs.)

I stole the photo from The Primate Diaries.

As much as I hate to be accused of poopishness (especially of the old variety), I think I will not make a direct attempt to propagate myself. My genetic information is not that robust and so I will be content to be one of those occasional dead-ends that arise on the evolutionary tree.

However, if any of my readers is interested in a case of spontaneous generation, you may considered yourself tapped.

The rules:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

• You can leave them exactly as is.
• You can delete any one question.
• You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.
• You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.
• You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

The lineage:

• My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
• My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
• My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Primate Diaries.
• My great-great-great-grandparent is Thus Spake Zuska.
• My great-great-grandparent is Kate.
• My great-grandparent is Finally Maturing.
• My grantparent is Parts-n-Pieces
• My parent is I See Invisible People.

The Questions and Answers:

• The best adult novel in SF/Fantasy is: The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (you may think this is a children’s book but you’d be mistaken)
• The best scary movie in American classic cinema is: Night of the Hunter
• The best singer/songwriter song in classic rock music is: The Weight by Robbie Robertson as performed by The Band
• The best cult novel in post-Beat fiction is: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Fariña
• The best high-carb food in Southern cooking is: home-fried potatoes