I do enjoy a good haunted house

It’s really a shame I just now found out about the Haunted Basement in Minneapolis. And I had to find out about it in the New Yorker!

Housed directly beneath the Soap Factory galleries, in the building’s grimy, raw underground space, the Haunted Basement consists of a series of rooms, or scenes, each created by an emerging artist. Despite (or perhaps because of) its highbrow origins, it’s generally agreed to be the freakiest haunted house in town—only adults are allowed in, dressed in closed-toe shoes and a protective face mask, and armed with a safe word (“uncle”), just in case. Visitors enter in groups but often get separated as they move through the twelve-thousand-square-foot space; they can expect to crawl, climb, and run, to get covered in gore, and, in 2013, to be stuffed into a coffin by a toothless man in an orange jumpsuit. The entire experience lasts a brief but intense twenty minutes, though nearly a hundred people bailed out early this year by crying uncle.

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The end of the @micknugent saga

There has been a rather one-sided ‘conversation’ going on with Michael Nugent for the past month or so. It’s a little bit disturbing, and I provide here a chronology. If it’s too long for you, I’ll understand — I’ve found it hopelessly tedious — and the bottom line is that I won’t be talking to him again, and it ends here, as far as I’m concerned.

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What rude beast…

We have been fostering a cat for Stevens Community Humane Society for a while, and my wife finally insisted that we adopt the beast. A black cat. And we signed the papers on Halloween. This is an ill omen.

And then I tried to take her picture tonight, but she didn’t want to hold still, and it was dark, and I had to use the flash, and she tried to zap me with her death ray eyes.

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We all hate the ads

Ed Brayton summarizes the problem with our ugly horrible intrusive ads. We all want them fixed; the catch is that we don’t manage the ads, a much bigger company does it for us, and they haven’t been very effective at policing the stuff. They have just one job…

Anyway, Top Men are working on it, we’re doing what we can to slap down the worst excesses. As Ed says,

In the meantime, please do keep sending those tech help emails. When you do, give us as much information as you can — your OS, browser and version, the company the ad is for, a screenshot of it, anything you can. It’s important that I know this stuff so I can fix it. And even if we don’t reply to each of you that sends one, please know that I’m taking it seriously and working with Patheos to address the problems. And thank you for your patience and understanding.

Also, here’s the link for reporting problems.

Our weird local paper

I mentioned a while back, when Bill Nye visited Morris to speak to a sold-out crowd, that I’d be looking in our local weekly paper, the Morris Sun Tribune, to get a sense of the community response to the appearance of such a prominent advocate for science, who promotes evolution and the importance of responding to climate change.

I’ve been looking.

And looking.

It’s not quite what I expected.

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The most dad thing

It’s too late for this, I’ve got to get some sleep — I have to go catch a plane in the morning. It’s a list of the most “Dad thing” people’s fathers have ever done, and it just made me sad. It’s all these embarrassing or old fashioned or idiosyncratic stupid quirks from their fathers. There’s a depressing tendency to treat older fathers as behind-the-times dopes, Homer Simpson on the way to becoming Grandpa Simpson.

So I had to think of the most Dad things my father ever did.

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