Stephen Mark Rainey's Blog, page 138

Geonutz and Signals of Cosmic Chaos

What is that behind ol' Rodan? Contraption? Thingamabob? Doohickey? You decide.

Spent yesterday caching the back and not-so-back roads of Caswell County, NC, and Pittsylvania County, VA, with Tom "Night-hawk" Kidd, Michelle "AkitaResQ" Wild, and Bridget "Suntigres" Langley. We decided we needed a team name for signing the cache logs, so we pooled our respective geocaching handles (including "D" for "Damned Rodan") to come up with Team NADS. Night-hawk had already claimed some of the caches we found, so on those, the remaining three of us signed as Team SAD. Apt, wot?

For the better part of the day, we scoured Angler's Park in Danville for a couple of exceptionally well-done series of caches, "Cosmic Chaos" (GC3C644) and "Free Signal" (GC3C647). These required hiking several miles of terrain described by my friend Ed Kuykendall as "a miniature version of West Virginia," which pretty much says it all. The cache hider—a mysterious and certainly twisted genius known only as "All of Dem"—created some unique and challenging hide methods, particularly for "Cosmic Chaos." Given that we had mid-summer heat in mid-March, I'm pretty sure I sweated off at least some of the tonnage I gained over the winter.

We finished up with an enjoyable bunch of little park-and-grab hides called "GeoNutz," hidden by one of the most twisted geniuses of all, the nefarious "Klaussinator." No green beer for me on St. Patty's Day, but the olives in my post-caching martini were green. That counts, right?

Half of Team NADS...or two-thirds of Team SAD.

Did I hear a chainsaw? I think I glimpsed Leatherface as we were exiting ground zero.

AkitaResQ, risking a smushing beneath a precarious old tobacco barn.

One frog, three attitudes. At "Free Signal" (GC3C647)

Burton's DARK SHADOWS Trailer

Ever since my first glimpses of Tim Burton's take on Dark Shadows, I must confess I have been anything but hopeful. Having been so steeped in the franchise since my youngest days, both as a fan and an active contributor—via the HarperCollins novel series and the Big Finish audio dramas—to me, it is an intensely personal thing; a fictional world that I embraced long ago and have held in more than high esteem ever since.

While I am firmly of the view that there is nothing beyond lampooning, I am, to say the least, disheartened to see what Burton is doing to Dark Shadows. Now, the movie may end up being a hoot, à la The Brady Bunch movies (which, in spirit, it appears to most closely resemble). More likely, I fear, it will only spoil the franchise's integrity for those whose introduction to it is this thing. After Burton's take on the story—which will no doubt reach masses of viewers that make Dan Curtis's original audience pale—will a newcomer be able to visit the original series, enjoy the worthy 1991 revival show, read the novels, listen to the wonderful audio dramas, and feel the intensity of the world the Curtis and his associates labored long and hard for so many years to create and perpetuate? I have my doubts.

Whether Burton's Dark Shadows is a successful movie (who knows, I may even enjoy it as a parody), this trailer suggests...very strongly...that that Burton holds little or no respect for the creators and the series' longtime diehard fans. It's all about the lowest common denominator.

Again.

Trailers can be deceptive. So, we shall just see. He said...without enthusiasm.

A quick note to Mr. Burton: Barry White's "You're the First, My Last, My Everything" was from 1974, not 1972.

Big Bamboo

Old Rodan at "Sinclair" (GC38X18). It's a veritable antique sign museum.

What a beautiful day out there, and I mean what a day. A cache run through Asheboro/ Randolph County with Bridget "Suntigres" Langley. Lots of variety—everything from park & grab micros to superdynawhopping ammo cans to extreme terrain hides. My favorite had me ascending into the lofty heights of a big bamboo grove. Whoa! What a view! One cache (GC38X18) took us to an interesting setting out on the country: a little service station that has been converted into something of an antique sign museum. At one cache site, a mopey moo cow came to see what I was up to. Sadly, moo cow could not go out caching.

At the end of it all, I had added 40 caches to my total, which now stands at 4,420. It sure beats a day couped up indoors....

A nice bamboo forest. I started out here...

...and ended up here. Funny how that happens.

She's hoping to make Scotland.

Moo cow mopes because it can't go caching on such a nice day.

YOUNG BLOOD...The Movie

An unruly mob on location for Young Blood, the movie, in Martinsville, VA.
Be a bud. Don't drink blood.

Young Blood is the story of a small town whose children are succumbing to a veritable plague of vampires. And the parents don't like it. Not one little bit. Here's how it goes: "Most little girls play with dolls and have tea parties, but Anavey and her younger sister, Anastasia, would rather play with severed body parts and drink blood. These angelic girls seek to create an army of young, blood-sucking vampires, out to destroy the adults who control their lives and treat them unfairly."

Young Blood, from the fertile imaginations of Martinsville, VA, natives Mat and Myron Smith, is being filmed on location in my old hometown. Mat is the proprietor of Smithstonia Videography and Graphic Design—and has also created his own line of rocking home-made hot sauces (which I have tried and highly recommend). The movie's leading roles are played by Autumn Ward, Zoe Cox, Rebecca Kidd, and Myron Smith. Today, a large number of extras was needed for an unruly mob scene in uptown Martinsville, so I decided to knock off work a little early and book up from Greensboro to participate.

At 5:00 PM this afternoon, around 50 folks showed up at The Daily Grind in Jefferson Plaza to assume the roles of anguished townspeople who just don't quite know how to deal with the sudden, ugly change in their children. But what could be more American than to parade through the streets protesting? Thus, carrying signs and chanting "Destroy the little pains who feed upon our veins!" and "Be a bud! Don't drink blood!" we marched up and down Church Street, baffling the local populace and frightening at least one stray cat. Tensions mounted as the affronted owner of The Daily Grind decided not to let the mob use the establishment's restroom, since it was for customers, not pitchfork-wielding rabble. The coup de grâce came when, at the end of the scene, a pair of police officers armed with doughnuts arrived to break up the gathering and make some arrests. Doughnuts and pitchforks went flying in every direction. Several protestors—nonviolent, I might add, since they were just shy of shedding blood—were hauled away like so many rabid dogs. As emotions among the crowd reached a crescendo, Mat yelled "Cut!"

Whether it makes it into the final edit, who can say, but in answer to a reporter's question about the plague of juvenile bloodsuckers, I did get to utter a few lines about children in general being wired badly. It was a pleasure to participate in this little endeavor, not to mention make the acquaintance of several very nice local folks. I look forward to seeing the final cut of Young Blood, and when it's released, you can be sure you'll read about it here.

Visit www.youngbloodmovie.com or www.facebook.com/YoungBloodMovie for more info on the movie.

[image error] The young'uns are turning into vampires in Young Blood!

[image error] John Law has doughnuts to lob at the rowdy protesters.

[image error] Director Mat Smith sets up the scene of distraught citizens driven to the limits of
sanity by blood-frenzied young'uns.

Mat and Myron Smith, the duo behind Young Blood.

Photos by Stephen Mark Rainey, Mat Smith, Rita Johnston Smith, Smithstonia Videography & Graphic Design.

Return to Bigfoot Country

It's not quite Boggy Creek, but Bigfoot has his own library back here.

Almost a year ago, I discovered what I call the Bigfoot Trail, just a few miles up the road, near Lake Townsend (The Great Blue Heron Nursery, Bigfoot's Library). There's a fairly new cache on the trail, so after work this afternoon, I hiked out there to claim it. A good couple of miles out and back, and apparently a new mountain biking trail is in the works out there. I have mixed feelings about it; it's a beautiful area, and really quite suited to a new trail. I'm generally glad to see new trails going in around the Greensboro watershed properties, especially since they're all so well-used. But since I started hiking out there, the Bigfoot Trail has been isolated and almost eerie. Its most notable feature—apart from being home to the Bigfeet I've yet to actually see—is a spectacular Great Blue Heron rookery. I doubt the birds will be overly disturbed by trail bikers, but the serene, nearly primal atmosphere will surely change. While I can't lay any claim on the land, I feel a personal connection to it, a sense of being one of a relative few who have ventured into that locale in the recent past. It's the somewhat disheartening sense of having to share a "secret" place with a much larger number of people.

Fortunately, the watershed trails generally are well-kept, with scarcely any human refuse left out along them. And when trash accumulates, the local geocachers get together and clean it all up. I do love the Greensboro trails.

Today, overt signs of human activity out there were few, but somewhat dramatic. For some time now, heavy military transport jets have been coming and going regularly from Piedmont Triad International airport, and this afternoon, a half dozen or more C-5 Galaxy transports passed low over the trail in the course of an hour. Majestic things...massive...seemingly hanging almost motionless in the sky as they approach. From several points along the trail, my view of them was unimpeded, and being a long-time aviation enthusiast, I really enjoyed the spectacle.

Judging from the very fresh footprints, horseback riders were out there today. There's a new parking lot—as yet unopened—for the trail, which made for a rather disconcerting sight. But it appears that Bigfeet can't be bothered to use it because, way back there in the woods, I found the Bigfoot Mobile. Looks like a 1940s-vintage automobile, all in pieces, so ancient that the woods have completely enveloped it. Clearly, Bigfoot can't drive.

Today's hike was an enjoyable, if somewhat wistful return to a place I'm very fond of. Whatever the "official" name of the biking trail turns out to be, to me, it will always be The Bigfoot Trail.

Click the images to enlarge.

A C-5 Galaxy on its approach to PTI. The sound shook the ground around me.

Obviously, Bigfoot got his driver's license from a Crackerjack box.


Obviously, I had nothing to do with the wreckage...this time.
Great Blue Heron just looks down and laughs.

Stellarcaching

3-3-12: Brugger swinging with the dead folk

Back from Stellarcon weekend in High Point, and this year, much more than others in relatively recent memory, it was quite a good one. I headed over on Friday evening—doing a little caching along the way, of course—and went right into the first of several panels. It was a fun one about bad movie monsters, a topic so rife with material that the panel could have gone far longer than its one-hour limit. I headed out for a late dinner at Thai Chiang Mai, which was, as usual, quite decent, though very, very slow to arrive...no doubt due to a wall-to-wall crowd (which seemed to be the norm all over High Point this weekend; to my knowledge, there was no major event happening in town, but I was beginning to fear that High Point might fall through the earth's crust). Then back to the con to participate in the "Horror Through the Ages" panel, which proved to be a lively discussion about things that have scared people since the dawn of man. It might have been subtitled "Arachnophobia." Once done, I made my way through a dense and wonderfully eerie fog to a few more caches and then home.

Saturday, I grabbed Brugger and returned to the con for my reading ("The Jack-o'-Lantern Memoirs"), which had a very attentive audience. Not large, but attentive. Out for a most welcome lunch at Tex & Shirley's, where I allowed the server to talk me into trying their Manhattan pancakes...which proved to be fantastic. Then a few more caches, the most interesting of which we found at a scenic graveyard that had its own little playground to entertain the wee young undead. (Notice in the photo above that Brugger has displaced the unfortunate undead to take her turn on the swings.) A couple of drinks at the very pleasant Uptowne Tavern on Main Street (we didn't even make fun of the pretentious "e"), and then back to the con for the well-attended and energetic panel, "Writing as Therapy." A special shout out to writers Andi Newton, Chad Bowser, and Janine K. Spendlove, whom I had never met before and really enjoyed making their acquaintance.

Another Asian dinner seemed quite appropriate, since High Point has a large number of Asian restaurants, so we chose Taste of Asia, which I had visited once before, a few weeks back. The sushi was excellent, but I can't boast enough about the service; as before, they were very attentive and anxious to see that we left more than satisfied. We did.

The evening's last panel...with apologies to all involved...was the only low point of the weekend for me. The subject: "The Messiest Way to Kill a Zombie." And that's what it was...for an hour. The panelists and audience were certainly spirited, but I can't really see devoting a few minutes to the topic, much less an entire hour-long panel. To each his own, of course. I compensated with bourbon.

My final con activity was a booksigning this morning, which went quite well; I sold and signed enough books to more than make the entire weekend worthwhile—even the zombie panel. Brugger and I hit Ham's for lunch...my traditional bison burger...and then off we went, her to an open house and me on a couple of long hikes after some caches in Jamestown. My favorite of the bunch had me out on a tree half-submerged in the lake. Much to my relief, I managed to sign the log and return to the lake bank without falling in.

Brugger and I ended the evening by watching Angel Heart, which I hadn't seen in its entirety since its initial theatrical release in '87. It held up very well; I do quite like it, despite its almost excruciatingly slow pace. Trevor Jones's magnificent musical score really helps make that movie.

I sleep now.

I look like this . . . because this is where my feets are.

Caching Crew and the Blustery Day

Up with the sun on this frigid and windy morning to get over to Ringgold, VA, northeast of Danville, where a group of about 25 geocachers set to work cleaning up the Shawnee Road trailhead for the Danville & Richmond rail trail. I'd been out there hiking and biking lately (Pastorale, Triskaphobia, Where the Hell Are the Undead?) and found that the trailhead had become a regular garbage dump. I'd decided it needed a touch of CITO (cache in, trash out), and the idea caught on with the Southside VA Geocachers' group. So this morning, a good hours' work turned the rubbish heap into a new, pristine bit of woodland, so that finding even a scrap of trash now might be quite the daunting challenge. There was a ton of it out there, to be sure—mostly unremarkable, but I did find an interesting bit: a pink suitcase full of porn. No, I shit you not. It was so waterlogged and heavy, it took two of us to haul it to sponsor Keith McCoy's truck. Naturally, we're trusting Keith to do the right thing with it.

After the cleanup and a fine brunswick stew lunch at the McCoy's Corner Cafe in Ringgold, several of us set out to hunt a number of caches in the Danville area. A few highly creative hides out there, my favorite being one that involved some serious physical challenges (see pics and video below). Cold and windy out there, I gotta tell you. This, though, is what caching is all about. And all the folks who volunteered to spend a portion of their day improving a natural area are a credit to their respective communities.

Click on pics to enlarge.

Preparing to haul away the fruits of the morning's labor

Not for the faint of heart!

Also not for the faint of heart! Yep, there's a cache container up there.

After the cache has been replaced, it is determined that Damned Rodan must ascend
and make adjustments. Done and done.

The team of daredevils


Damned Rodan's ascent caught on video.

Geocaching in the Land Where Horror Dwells

A couple of weeks ago, author-journalist John Peters was kind enough to interview me for his blog, and the article went live today. It covers a little of everything—my adventures in horror writing, geocaching, Godzilla, Dark Shadows, sushi, you name it. Check it out here: Geocaching in the Land Where Horror Dwells. Then flee for your life.

Stellarcon 36

Friday, March 2 through Sunday, March 4, I'll be a guest at Stellarcon 36, in High Point, NC, at the downtown Best Western Hotel (135 South Main St., High Point, NC 27260) . You are most welcome to come and heckle the crap out of me (as long as you do it nicely, of course). Along with several panels, I have a book signing and a reading lined up. Schedule is as follows:

Friday, March 2
7:00 PM: Best Worst Movie Monsters
For every Jaws, there's an Orca. For every Bela Lugosi Dracula, there's a John Carradine Dracula. Come join the chorus of complaints about the worst monsters to grace the silver screen. With Tony Finkelstein, Dan Johnson, Les Rickard

10:00 PM: Horror Through The Ages
Even in more enlightened times, people remain scared of many of the same things that frightened us centuries ago. Our panelists discuss why. With Theresa Bane, Stella
Price

Saturday, March 3
1:30 PM–2:00 PM: Reading

5:00 PM: Writing As Therapy
To readers, books are entertainment, but what are books to writers? Listen as several authors
discuss how writing helps them. With Danny Birt, Stuart Jaffe, Andi Newton, Janine K.
Spendlove

10:00 PM: Messiest Way to Kill a Zombie
The title pretty much speaks for itself. With Dan Johnson, Brad Sappington, Chris Weed, Michael Z. Williamson

Sunday, March 4
11:00 AM–12:00 PM: Book signing

I'll have copies of Blue Devil Island, The Gaki, Other Gods, Legends of the Night, and CDs of all three of the Dark Shadows audio dramas I scripted (Path of Fate, Curse of the Pharaoh, and Blood Dance), all available at a special discount for the convention only. Come on down!

What's That Glow?

"Mushroom Cloud." "Nuclear Fun." "Rad (a.k.a. Glow in the Dark)." "What's That Glow?" These are just a few of the names of the geocaches in Harris Lake County Park in New Hill, NC. It's the biggest park in Wake County and quite beautiful, with numerous hiking and biking trails, disc golf, picnic areas, camping, and boating. Not to mention the Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant just across the lake.

I'm all for the responsible development of nuclear power (which means I have serious reservations about it). There's no mistaking its dangers, of which you're clearly reminded by the profusion of "Evacuation Route" signs in the area. It's particularly disconcerting when you think about the deadly events at the Fukushima plant in Japan—and the fact that, last August, we had a magnitude 5.8 quake, with the epicenter just up the road a piece in Virginia.

Yesterday, which was unseasonably warm, Bridget "Suntigres" Langley and I spent the better part of the day hiking and caching around Harris Park. The trails led us to a few interesting destinations, such as the remains of an ancient graveyard (home to numerous undead nuclear families, no doubt), and the remnants of the Womble family house, which dates back to 1803. We also found a pair of nice little snakes and some less-innocuous man-eating vines, which nearly spelled the end for Bridget. She came out all right in the end, but it required a valiant struggle.

After all that, Brugger and I hauled ourselves to Zen Sushi for a fabulous dinner, and then we gathered with several folks for a ghost tour of downtown Greensboro, run by Carolina History and Haunts, for which we had a Groupon. It was fun and all, though we didn't see any ghosts. Zombies, yes; ghosts, no. Finally, we decided to try out the bar at Bin 33 for a nightcap, which proved enjoyable.

Writing-wise, not a bad week. Two stories accepted for a couple of anthologies. Details later on.

Click on pics to enlarge.


If I were to say something like "Bridget needs to lose weight," you probably
wouldn't be hearing from me again.


Out on the Peninsula Trail.


Wombles wobble, but they don't fall down. Or do they?
The foundations date back to 1803.

[image error]
Old dude feeling a little dead, or a zombie-to-be.


These happy little folks were playing near one of the caches. They're out mighty early;
hope they don't freeze as the weather turns cold again.


The more I look at this, the more I think, "This is the wolf spider of trees."


O noze! The vines haz Bridget! Is OK, though, I vanquish them.


Or maybe not so OK. Alas.