The 9-2 Buffalo Bills are coming off their Bye Week to take on the visiting 5-6 San Francisco 49ers. The Bills are 7-point favorites.

THE SKINNY is Jim Gaffigan’s 11th stand-up special. The 60-minute TV special begins with Gaffigan making fun of his losing weight…with the help of Mounjaro. Gaffigan then moves on to his problems with being a parent and the confrontations with teenage angst. My favorite routine was Gaffigan’s story of how he and his family acquired a dog during the Pandemic despite his wife’s allergy to dogs.

Diane loves Jim Gaffigan’s humor. I’m a bit more reserved. I find Gaffigan mildly entertaining. His sardonic wit is okay in small doses. You might enjoy this new comedy special if you have HULU. GRADE: B

Alan Grofield is career criminal and professional thief. But he yearns for a career in theater. While Grofield is handsome and charming, his main passion–life on the Stage–remains elusive. Hence, Grofield’s involvement with professional thief, Parker. Grofield owns a summer stock company based in Mead Grove, Indiana which struggles to survive. He takes part in heists to get the money to keep his theatre company running,.

During the events of The Score, Grofield met his future wife and acting partner, Mary Deegan–a hostage taken during the heist in that novel. Surprisingly, Deegan insists on staying with Grofield after the heist. In Lemons Never Lie, Deegan helps Grofield run his summer stock theater and even stars as his leading lady.

Grofield appeared in eight out of twenty-eight Richard Stark novels–I’ve read them all. In Lemons Never Lie, Grofield is working at his own small theater and talking to Mary Deegan about plays they might put on and the actors they might recruit…if they had the money. That’s why Grofield considers a caper when Andrew Myers presents a plan to knock over a brewery. Grofield considers this heist unworkable and walks out on Meyers. This triggers a cascade of violence and retribution.  

Lemons Never Lie is a much darker novel than The Damsel, The Dame, and The Blackbird. But I consider Lemons Never Lie the best of the Alan Grofield books. Don’t miss it in this wonderful new Hard Case Crime edition! GRADE: A

I was surprised to learn in Peter Tremayne’s Introduction that Sister Fidelma made her initial appearance in short stories in 1993. The novels came later.

Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma mysteries are set in the Seventh Century, mostly between 664 and 666 A.D. Sister Fidelma is a member of the Celtic Church (who has conflicts with Rome over theology and rituals) and a dalaigh— an advocate of the law Cours of Ireland. Women could be equal with men in the legal profession of that time.

Sister Fidelma has a talent for investigation and these short stories display her rare ability to solve puzzling crimes. In the title story, “Hemlock at Vespers,” Sister Fidelma probes the death of a man connected to gold mines when he dies of hemlock poisoning.

I also enjoyed “The High King’s Sword” which challenges Sister Fidelma’s skill at solving problems. Politics plays a key role in the theft of the sacred sword.

If you’re a fan of Middle Ages (although these stories are more accurately placed in the Dark Ages) mysteries, I highly recommend Hemlock at Vespers. GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduction — ix

Hemlock at Vespers — 1

The high king’s sword — 35

Murder in repose — 69

Murder by miracle — 97

A canticle for Wulfstan — 127

Abbey Sinister — 167

The poisoned chalice — 203

Jon Chu’s Wicked features a wonderful cast, especially Cythia Erivo as Elphaba (aka, The Wicked Witch of the West). I liked Ariana Grande (aka, Glinda the Good Witch) and Michelle Yeoh (aka, Madame Morrible). The story of a misunderstood green girl who becomes a powerful witch takes a path to a school of magic where Elphaba and Glinda meet. They are hostile to each other in the beginning. My favorite scene in this version of Wicked is the song and dance extravaganza in the school Library. Elphaba and Glinda travel to the Emerald City to meet the Wizard of Oz…and defy gravity!

I haven’t seen many movies in a movie theater in 2024, but clearly Wicked is the best of the bunch–even though it’s only Part One. I’ll have to wait a year until Part Two comes out. Are you a fan of The Wizard of Oz? GRADE: Incomplete but trending toward an A.

Check out the “Dancing Through Life” choreography:

“In 1790, Andrew Ellicott wrote a ‘Description of the Falls of Niagara’: ‘For about seven miles, up toward Lake Erie…a chasm is formed, which no person can approach without horror… In going up the road near this chasm, the fancy is constantly engaged in the contemplation of the most romantic and awful prospects imaginable.’ ” (p. 37)

I was born and raised in Niagara Falls, a small city on the border with Canada, and over the years plenty of people have jumped into the deadly rapids and gone over the Falls in barrels and other contraptions. Most of them died. Yes, it’s horrable.

Jeremy Dauber’s American Scary is a chronological account of horror in America. Dauber starts with the Puritans and the Salem witch trials. America was horrible to indigenous people and slaves. This led to the brutal Civil War. “When the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry Regiment was defeated on the grounds of the aptly named Poison Spring by Arkansas Confederated forces, they didn’t take prisoners: when the Confederates were ordered to move wagons full of supplies they captured, they did so by competing to see who could crush the most heads of wounded and dying Black soldiers under the wheels.” (p. 97)

Dauber analyzes Ambrose Bierce’s “The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890) with its haunting ending. Dauber also notes that the late 1800s also produced two terms we are all too familiar with today: psychopath and serial killer. The late 1800s also saw a growing interest in ghost stories. One of the best and most famous is Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. (p. 119)

Newspapers printed daily stories of gruesome events. As Joseph Pulitzer stated: “If it bleeds, it leads.” From the carnage of World War I, American soldiers returned home and found new horrors in the pages of Weird Tales. Dauber shows how H. P. Lovecraft created a Mythos of cryptic aliens like Cthulhu and mysterious books like The Necronomicon. Lovecraft invited other writers to play in his world and writers like Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber did.

Years later, Robert Bloch and Alfred Hitchcock would shock American audiences with Psycho. Shirley Jackson increased the shock factor with “The Lottery.” Jack Finney freaked out a generation with Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Ray Bradbury jolted readers with Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Rock music also joined in. The Rolling Stones released Their Satanic Majesties Request in 1967. Around that time, Ray Russell published The Case Against Satan.

Movies of the 1970s like Death Wish and Dirty Harry presented vigilantes who fought the urban horrors. But the book and movie that kicked off an explosion of horror was The Exorcist. The paperback edition of The Exorcist sold over 50 million copies (p. 284).

The writer that transformed the horror market was lucky his wife fished a manuscript Stephen King had been struggling with out of the wastebasket (p. 294) and Carrie fueled an unprecedented writing career for the man from Maine.

“After the success of writers like King, Straub, Beatty, Tyron, and Levin between hard covers, a whole cottage industry of paperback originals sprung up starting in the seventies…” (p. 327) Bill Crider wrote several horror novels. So did Anne Rice. It may have been Rice’s An Interview With a Vampire, especially the 1994 movie version, that inspired a quirky movie and TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (p. 335)

Now we have to survive a new horror, a second Trump Presidency. American Scary can help us get through the next four years. GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduction: Red, White, and Black — ix

One: In the Hands of God and the Devil — 1

Two: New Country, Old Bones — 37

Three: When America’s Rivers Ran with Blood — 86

Four: Gaslights and Shadows — 127

Five: In the Shadow of the Jet Age’s Gleam — 185

Six: Revolutions and Chainsaws — 230

Seven: Weird Tales — 302

Eight: Cards from a Haunted Tarot Deck — 361

Acknowledgements — 419

Endnotes — 423

Index — 457

The 9-2 Buffalo Bills are on a well deserved Bye this week. But Week 12 started out with a bang with the 2-8 Cleveland Browns defeating the 8-2 Pittsburgh Steelers in the snow! And the Giants and Daniel Jones broke up. What surprises do today’s games hold for us? How will your favorite NFL team perform today?

Rice is nice, that’s what they say. I’ve always been a big fan of rice in all its many forms. JJ Johnson’s new cookbook takes you on a guided tour of rice recipes from around the world.

I’m still into comfort food after the Election results so I tried “Bebe’s Soupy Rice” on page 196. Delicious!

I also tried the “Brown Rice Waffles” recipe on page 225. Wow!

If you like rice, The Simple Art of Rice will open a lot of doors to new delights! There are plenty of quick and easy recipes in this book to produce tasty food in a flash. GRADE: A

Table of Contents:

INTRODUCTION –1

COAUTHOR’S NOTE — 9

MASTERING THE BASICS — 10

TYPES OF RICE — 22

A BRIEF HISTORY OF RICE — 28

RECIPES

EVERYDAY FAVORITES — 34

SIMPLE DISHES (PERFECT AS SIDES) — 126

LIGHT AND FRESH — 152

COMFORT FOOD — 194

BRUNCH — 222

CELEBRATION — 238

DESSERTS AND DRINKS — 290

HEALTHY EARTH, HEALTHY BODY — 308

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS — 317

FURTHER READING — 319

WHERE TO GET GOOD RICE — 321

INDEX — 323

On November 22, 1963, I was reading Great Stories of Space Travel in my High School Library when the announcement of President Kennedy being shot resulted in classes being cancelled and we were all sent home.

Tempo Books was the paperback line of Grosset & Dunlap. Great Stories of Space Travel was the 39th book in the Tempo series. It was published July 1963 and I bought a copy during that summer but didn’t get around to reading it until November 1963.

Great Stories of Space Travel collects eleven novelettes and short stories by mostly Big Name science fiction authors with a general introduction by Groff Conklin and his brief introductions to each story. The SF stories were previously published from 1942-1955 in various science fiction and other magazines.

I’d read several Groff Conklin SF anthologies before reading Great Stories of Space Travel and enjoyed them all. My favorite stories in Great Stories of Space Travel are Jack Vance’s “I’ll Build Your Dream Castle” and Eric Frank Russell’s humorous “Allamagoosa.”

Sometimes a book captures a moment in Time and I will never forget what I was doing on November 22, 1963. What were you doing on that date? GRADE: B+

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

• “Introduction” (Groff Conklin) — 7
• The Solar System
  • “The Wings of Night” (Lester del Rey) — 11
  • “The Holes Around Mars” (Jerome Bixby) — 33
  • “Kaleidoscope” (Ray Bradbury) — 53
  • “I’ll Build Your Dream Castle” (Jack Vance) — 65
• Beyond the Solar System
  • “Far Centaurus” (A. E. van Vogt) — 87
  • “Propagandist” (Murray Leinster) — 112
  • “Cabin Boy” (Damon Knight) — 137
  • “A Walk in the Dark” (Arthur C. Clarke) — 168
  • “Blind Alley” (Isaac Asimov) — 180
  • “The Helping Hand” (Poul Anderson) — 208
  • “Allamagoosa” (Eric Frank Russell) — 240