From the Inkwell, From the Vein.....

I was saddened to hear of the passing of Roy Skelton, 79, yesterday. For those unfamiliar with him, he was a British actor and voice artist, remembered (at least by me) as the voice of Doctor Who 's Daleks and Cybermen. He did the voice work for the Doctor Who series from 1967-1988.  His death comes just 2 short months after the passing of Elisabeth Sladen, companion (and in my opinion, the only companion) Sarah Jane, also from the Doctor Who series. Some of my earliest teenage summers were spent watching episodes of Doctor Who in the wee hours of the morning, as the Public Broadcasting station in my hometown saw fit to only air the rerun episodes at 2am. My efforts to watch every episode probably explains why I had no regular sleeping pattern as a child. My geekness developed early and of its own free will. The summer days spent sleeping in so I'd be fully awake in the middle of the night to watch another Tom Baker (the only Doctor, in my opinion) episode, prepared me...

Finished Tom Baker's The Boy who kicked pigs , last night. This novel, er, novella, er---- whatever you call a 120-pg book that's 60 pages of illustrations--- is wonderfully masterful in its devilish satire. And, though its illustrations have a childlike, Tim Burton-esque innocence to them, this book (story) is definitely NOT for children. The book IS, however, for the sick and twisted, for the malicious-natured, for the brow-beaten and down-trodden. It is most definitely for anyone who has ever had an uncontrollable urge to make your disgust with humanity FELT as much as heard. The plot centers around 13-yr-old Robert and his obsession with kicking his sister's tiny tin piggy bank, Trevor. Every chance he gets, Robert sends the little tin pig flying through the room, into a t.v. set and eventually out the front window--- it is this last episode that makes Robert realize that kicking pigs makes him very happy, because it makes bystanders laugh (those involved in the car...

When the answers to the world's mysteries go unexplained... When the secrets of tragic events go unspoken... All too many times we are left with unanswered questions. The so-called unsolved mysteries plague those who live through and after the events. And when the questions go unanswered, the ingenuity of the human mind---which can leave no question unanswered---is masterful at filling in the blanks. Though, even with the manufactured details, many times the result leads to more unanswered questions than we started with.   Take as evidence the Flannan Isle mystery: An isolated island off the coast of Scotland, the location of a necessary lighthouse, and during the month of December in the year 1900, three lighthouse keepers vanished from the isolated island without a trace--- there was no boat on the island to lend to their escape and the only things that led searchers to believe something was not right were an untouched meal spread out on the table and an overturned chair ne...