Shaun!

Funny, then stupid, then funny again. I don’t know why.

Cracked says …

Heavy Rain is an ambitious, complicated and tense murder mystery, which is exactly the sort of game that’s begging for glitches to interrupt the drama like a drunken clown stumbling into a funeral. In the heady emotional climax, protagonist Ethan has found his missing son, Shaun, just in time to stop a serial killer from serial killing him. You’re prompted to hit a button to howl Shaun’s name to the heavens in sheer joy, but what’s supposed to be a touching moment of fatherly love instead turns into a bizarre fit of familial Tourette’s.

Sometimes the prompt to shout “Shaun” shows up and refuses to leave. You can scream it anytime: Ethan yells it at his girlfriend for no reason; he interrupts the villain’s evil monologue with “SHAUN”; he hollers his son’s name in response to getting shot. Later, as Ethan’s lady friend is running from the killer, he keeps screaming “Shaun!” with the voice of a demigod that carries for miles. Eventually, Ethan recovers from his wound, confronts the killer, and blows him away on top of a construction crane. In the pouring rain, he delivers his badass one-liner. It is, of course, “SHAUN!!!”

It All Began As A Summer Vacation …

Burnt Offerings, the 1973 inspiration for Stephen King’s The Shining, was made into a movie in 1976 starring Burgess Meredith, Bette Davis, Oliver Reed, and Karen Black. I’m almost certain it’s one of those horror flicks that scared the everliving shit out of me when it aired on network television back in the day.

The story concerns a family who moves into an old house that regenerates itself by twisting the life force of the occupants who become violent and either kill each other or are killed off while the member of the household who becomes possessed by the spirit of the house survives and becomes a sentinel (in this case “elderly Mrs. Allardyce”), awaiting the next family to be lured once the powers of the existing sentinel wear down and a successor must be found.

We watched it on Amazon Prime the other night – for nostalgia more than anything. It’s pretty slow by today’s standards, but suitably creepy. I kinda want to read the book now, which is recently back in print.

Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No

On June 12, 1970, Dock Ellis threw a no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates. In 136 years of baseball history, only 276 no-hitters have been recorded. Dock is the only pitcher to ever claim he accomplished his while high on LSD.