{"id":10229,"date":"2013-03-17T21:33:11","date_gmt":"2013-03-18T01:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=10229"},"modified":"2013-03-17T21:33:11","modified_gmt":"2013-03-18T01:33:11","slug":"sunday-27","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=10229","title":{"rendered":"Sunday"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and am I wrong that I’m glad it falls on a weekend this year so that I won’t have to push past throngs of green-clad drunks during my evening commute?<\/p>\n

It’s been an unremarkable couple of days. It snowed all of yesterday, although you wouldn’t know it, except for strange bits that accumulated some odd places (like around my parents’ car’s license plate frame) and didn’t melt. Otherwise, there was not accumulation.<\/p>\n

Last night, I watched two very different movies, Absentia<\/a>, a very low-budget but fairly decent horror movie, and Wreck-It Ralph<\/a>, which richly imagines an alternate world in which children still play in video arcades. (The last one I used to visit, Playland in State College<\/a>, closed down several years ago.) Still, it was cute and sweet.<\/p>\n

And today I wrote this, which is neither of those things:<\/p>\n

They called her the Bird Woman of Alcatraz, which was kind of dumb, since she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d never even been to Alcatraz, not even as a tourist, and couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have been as an inmate. But nicknames aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t exactly the most logical of things, so after a while I guess that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just who she was. It had stuck. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how everyone knew her when I first moved to town, at any rate.<\/p>\n

She had been imprisoned several times, that much was true — starting with her extradition from France in 1978, after which she was held in federal custody for seven years, for what turned out to be her own kidnapping. That must have been embarrassing, and there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a wealth of newspaper stories about the bungled case, the supposed evidence of the supposed crime, even in this little town\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s underfunded library. If I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been interested in any of that, I could have spent a weekend digging through microfiche, or combing the archives of court records online. I could have made a dozen phone calls, discovered if I still have any friends left at my old job. But I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t interested in any of that. Those stories had been written already, that well had run dry, and time, as they say, was ticking. It was just dumb luck that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been exiled here, and I needed to act before anybody else caught wind of what had happened. A scoop like this could put me back on top, but only if I got to her first.<\/p>\n

I could see the headline now: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Bird Woman Kills Superhero.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Or maybe, if something more grisly was needed to sell: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Mr. Impenetrable Eaten Alive.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

It was a work in progress. Obviously he hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been eaten alive. I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have a clue what a post-mortem would show; Impenetrable was reportedly from the planet Klaxos, had fallen to Earth when his home planet was destroyed in a fiery coup, and was reportedly the only one of his kind. (That point was still debatable.) We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d never even seen a blood sample, much less the bloody scene that the Bird Woman had left behind her. But everything I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been told — a few well-placed dollars in the county sherrif\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pockets — said that Mr. Impenetrable had<\/i> been eaten.<\/p>\n

Was it cannibalism if he was an alien?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, sometimes forty minutes and three writing prompts can produce gold. And sometimes there’s this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and am I wrong that I’m glad it falls on a weekend this year so that I won’t have to push past throngs of green-clad drunks during my evening commute? It’s been an unremarkable couple of days. It snowed all of yesterday, although you wouldn’t know it, except for strange bits … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14,28,114,12],"class_list":["post-10229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-movies","tag-personal","tag-weather","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10229"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10229"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10230,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10229\/revisions\/10230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}