Halloween for one

It was another quiet Halloween in. The Old Man made pesto-stuffed pork tenderloin (pot-roast style, which was a little odd) and surprised me with a new Max Raabe CD. When I saw it had a cover of Nena's "Irgendwie, Irgendwo, Irgendwann", I knew I had to play it immediately. That track was so tailor-made for danbearnyc that I was reminded how much I miss him even after nearly three years. But, again, thanks to monshu there was candy corn and chocolate with which to drown my sorrows. (I complained that since we don't keep candy in the house any more I've lost much of my resistance to it.)

Then I went downstairs and watched Guillermo del Toro's Cronos, which had arrived via Netflix. (How retro, I know.) It's actually a pretty run-of-the-mill old school vampire film; the only really novel aspects are the etiology of the infection and the urban Mexican setting. It's even a little embarrassing to hear del Toro explain his heavy-handed Christ imagery on the accompanying interview. (In English, disappointingly. I mean, his command of the language is excellent, but I know only too well that you're always somewhat handicapped when it comes to expressing yourself freely in your non-dominant language.) I was frankly more horrified by one of the extra features, a lurid amateurish short film in the style of Mario Bava. (Del Toro even dubbed all the dialogue into Italian!) Unfortunately the "twist" ending doesn't work, being not only telegraphed but tipped (a problem presumably avoided in the Frederic Brown short-short story which provides the plot).

After that, I wound down with an M.R. James short story. (If you guessed that it was the one where some professorial type dies mysteriously from being pursued by some unseen horror, you're right.) Proof that I hadn't tried nearly hard enough to spook myself came in my humdrum dreams, which prominently featured work annoyances--not even anxieties, just ridiculous frustrations. Very different from what happened the night before, when the movie and the conversation afterwards became tangled up together and I ended up dreaming about using Korean Daoist techniques to keep the evils outside our cozy cottage at bay.

Meminimus eorum

Perhaps it was a bit dickish of me, but I gently pointed out to an FBF today that Spanish-speakers don't really say, "¡Feliz Día de los Muertos!" I blame the fact that US commercial forces have discovered the holiday and are heading down the same road with it as with Cinco de Mayo or Mardi Gras. One commentator in this usage thread compared it to saying "Happy Memorial Day!" but I have to confess I didn't find that as jarring sounding as I thought I would.

If I were back in St Louis, I would be participating in a memorial service for my mother's younger sister. Apparently her husband raised some money to contribute to a "healing garden" at the clinic where she got treatment for her cancer and there's to be a dedication ceremony followed, naturally, by drinks at a local pub. I suspect I'll hear more about it when I'm down next week for Dad's birthday and Mom fills me in; we may even have a gathering of our own where we start to come to grips with the boxes of family photos and genealogical materials we inherited from her.