Randy’s Blog

I have two excerpts from two wildly different sources to share:

First, I just finished reading a collection of ghost stories written by M.R. James, aptly titled "Collected Ghost Stories".

Apparently James is considered to be a master of the ghost story genre. There's nothing ghostly about the opening paragraph of his short story called "A Neighbor's Landmark", though. In fact, it appealed greatly to my inner book lover:

Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment. The putting of dispersed sets of volumes together, or the turning right way up of those which the dusting housemaid has left in an apoplectic condition, appeals to them as one of the lesser Works of Mercy.

How true!

Secondly, my Google News alert for bigfoot/sasquatch-related articles turned up an absolute gem last month. The article comes from the Atlas Obscura website, and is titled 17 Wonderful Reader Stories About Unique Holiday Heirlooms.

Here is the image and text of one of the stories:

Once, as my dad and I were driving from Columbus, Ohio, back to the D.C. area, we passed a big outdoor statue shop in the middle of rural Ohio. Finding a three-foot-or-so Sasquatch statue, we bought it and brought it home as a gag. The next Christmas, we put it in our family’s almost-life-sized glowing nativity scene, inside the manger and right behind Baby Jesus’s cradle, there to watch over Our Lord and Savior and protect him from the prying Romans just as Chewbacca protected Han Solo in a galaxy far, far away. There’s no particular reason we do this. Perhaps it is a mere testament to my family’s absurdist sense of humor surrounding issues of tradition and modernity. I like to think that while Balthasar, Melchoir, and Caspar traveled from Ethiopia and India and Persia to bring Jesus frankincense, myrrh, and gold, Sasquatch also saw the bright star and trekked from Cascadia, across continents and oceans, to bring Baby Jesus a gift of cedar-smoked salmon from the Pacific Northwest, and we merely do homage to that. In any case, though the statue itself does not look like a Christmas heirloom, we contextualize it into one every year.

I laughed out loud when I read that. I love it!