Jonathan Henderson

Everything is wet and muddy, and the outside smells extremely swampy. Of course, living right on the edge of the Everglades, one could make the very sensible argument that that is what it should smell like around here. Regardless, it's still a unusual smell. The Everglades is actually a slow moving river, not a true "swamp", and it usually does not smell like this.

Mosquitoes, gnats, dragonflies and "no see ums" are out in force. Just walking my dog for a few minutes results in over a dozen itchy bites. The sidewalks are becoming slippery with moss and algae. I haven't been able to ride my scooter for a week now; the constant downpour just makes it too unpleasant (not to mention dangerous) to ride around on two wheels.

And yet... despite all that... I spent at least an hour today just gazing outside at the falling rain, and then lying down on the couch in the semi-darkness, just listening to the sound of the rain pounding outside. An occasional friendly rumble of thunder punctuated the sound. The almost spiritual sense of well being was all encompassing. I napped for a few minutes, the gentlest slumber I've had in weeks.

The sound of rain has always soothed me, and from conversations, I know I'm not the only one. Why is that? What is it about the sound of rain outside that seems to elicit an almost primeval sense of well being?

I have a theory.

We are, after all, savannah apes. Our ancestral cousins may have owned the forests, but our branch moved out into the open grasslands. Over thousands of generations, we evolved an upright gait, lost most of our body hair, developed legs and feet suited for running, a protruding nose, and many other subtle modifications that suited us for living out in the wide open plains.

This is why, I believe, that the sight and sounds of a meadow or an open field are instantly soothing. Such experiences reach deep into our subconscious, and trigger the part of our brain that reacts instinctively. We like open spaces, places we can run through, places we can see from horizon to horizon. And how does this relate to the sound of rain?

Think about it. Living out on the open savannah, rain would be miserable. No trees to shelter us from the rain. No coat of fur to keep the rain off our bare skin. We'd get soaking wet and chilled to the bone. Children and the elderly would become sick. So, of course, we found (or built) shelter. And inside that shelter, we felt safe. We had defeated the rain. And secure inside our shelters, we looked out onto the rainy savannah and felt a great satisfaction.

Millions of years later, that deep sense of satisfaction at having shelter from the rain is so ingrained that it is no longer conscious. We instinctively feel comforted by the sound of rain falling outside, without even knowing why. The savannah ape hid under a rock shelf and grinned his monkey grin at the thwarted elements. The 21st century concrete ape has long since forgotten why, but deep down inside, we still feel that sense of all-pervading satisfaction.

So the next time it rains, I'm going to curl up on my couch, listen to the wonderful sound of falling water, and embrace the ancient ape inside. I seek shelter from the storm, and I am comforted mightily by it.

Posted by Jonathan Henderson at 01:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The EC Archives: Tales from the Crypt, Volume 1 (2007). Gemstone Publishing, 212 pages.
The EC Archives: Tales from the Crypt, Volume 2 (2007). Gemstone Publishing, 212 pages.

By all rights, I should have been at Comic-Con 2008 during the last week of July. I bought a full pass more than six months in advance. I had a couple of old buddies from Los Angeles that I was going to team up with and "do the floor". I had a place to stay. I had arranged a heavily discounted airplane ticket. I had my sessions planned out, what lines I was going to stand in for autographs, what panels I was going to attend. I had everything but a costume.

Fate intervened.

Two days before I was to leave, I came down with The Mother Of All Colds, expanding into a strep-throat-like illness that made me sound like Harvey Fierstein, and so congested that I could only breath through my mouth. I couldn't work, much less fly. And so, very reluctantly, I stayed here in humid Fort Lauderdale, instead of breezy San Diego. Sadness and gnashing of teeth ensued.

For the record, my last San Diego Comic-Con was in 2000, the last year I lived in Los Angeles.

One of my Los Angeles friends whom I was hoping would go to San Diego with me this year is Jonathan Green (as I have said before on this site, Jonathans Rule). However, Jon, being a responsible father, decided not to go this year. He did not want to set a bad example for his eight-year-old son, especially at a time in the boy's life when Jon is trying to teach him thriftiness and the value of a hard-earned dollar.

Jon was, however, hoping to live vicariously through me. This was especially true since we are both huge EC Comics fans, and we had been exchanging emails over the past few weeks outlining some of our dream acquisitions.

When I emailed Jon that I would not be able to attend this year thanks to an Evil Virus Attack, he opined that the best revenge would be to stay in bed and read comics.

Which I did.

And that finally brings us to the subject of this review. If, a few paragraphs earlier when I wrote "huge EC Comics fans", you went, "What the hell is EC?", I'll give you a very brief summary. "EC" stands for "Entertaining Comics". Without going into all the detail (go here if you want that), when I say "EC", I'm referring to the comic books published by EC from about 1948 to 1956. This period, referred to as the "New Trend" by the EC editors at the time, introduced the greatest revolution in illustrated fiction yet seen. EC comics included The Haunt of Fear , The Vault of Horror , Weird Science , Weird Fantasy , Shock SuspenStories , and - the only title to survive the 1950's - Mad .

During the brief period they were published, EC Comics completely changed the whole concept of comic books. EC hired highly talented artists who brought a cinema-like touch to the 4-color pages. The stories were aimed at teenagers and young adults, not at children. Most, if not all, of the stories taught a lesson. Most were considered "racy" or "shocking" at the time. And almost all are considered classics today.

But the New Trend line of EC comics did not survive after the summer of 1955, when the U.S. Congress - spurred on by a pop psychology book called Seduction of the Innocent, which claimed comic books turned children in murderers and rapists - held hearings about standards and practices in the comic book industry. EC comics, with their lurid covers and cutting-edge stories, did not hold up well during a time when the country was looking to clamp down on any freedom of expression. And so, they were effectively banned. Mad was the only survivor, as it converted to black-and-white and resized itself into a magazine.

The New Trend EC comics are very rare nowadays, especially since as time went by, so many of them got adapted into lucrative television shows and hit films.

Naturally, there have been several reprints and collections over the years. I looked at many of these collections with longing, but most of them were reprinted in black-and-white, not in the full color of the originals. And many of the reprints excised some of the humorous elements like the prose stories and the Editor's Page. But in the last few years, they've finally gotten the deluxe treatment, and that's what I'm talking about today.

The EC Archives is a series of thick, glossy hardcover collections of the New Trend EC Comics. I read through both existing volumes of Tales From The Crypt during the week of Comic-Con, and was reminded of what glorious storytelling is contained within these pages. These reprints are made directly from the original art (with a few exceptions where the original artwork has been lost forever in time), and have been recolored using modern techniques by one of the original EC colorists. The artwork jumps off the page.

In these volumes of Tales From The Crypt - one of the very first of the revolutionary EC line - we can see how the basics of the 20th century horror story actually work. The spurned lovers, the revenge stories, the guy/girl who had it coming to them, they're all here. You got your zombies, your ghosts, vampires, werewolves, aliens, robots, immortals, you name it, they're here. And of course, there is The Crypt-Keeper to present them all to you - along with his fellow "Ghou-Lunatics", The Old Witch and The Vault-Keeper.

As a modern reader, it's baffling to see how anyone could have taken these stories so seriously that they would seek to ban them - just the presence of the hilarious "hosts" for each story should have been enough to clue in even the most humorless person skimming any issue. These are the best forms of what I call Delicious Horror - the type of ridiculous phony gore that is delectable to watch (or read) because it's so obviously not real.

Tales From The Crypt, like all EC Comics, specializes in the "Good Lord!" moment: the point in the story when some character realizes what is going on, or going to happen, or has been happening, etc. and then says "Good Lord!" followed by some sort of revelation. Here are some examples:

"Good Lord! Look! A dead man!"

"Locked! Good Lord! How will I get out of here?"

"Good Lord! It's A... heart! A human heart!"

"Good Lord! I... I must be insane. Wanting to... No! Don't let me do it!"

"Good Lord! How Horrible! He's been... scalped!"

"Good Lord! Her pulse has actually stopped!"

"Good Lord! It's locked! Chained... and locked from the inside!"

"Good Lord! My beard! It's stopped growing!"

"Good Lord! He's out of his mind! He's fighting with that doll!"

And my favorite, from the cover of Tales From The Crypt #25 (found in Volume 2 of this collection):

"Good Lord! This isn't wax! This is a human hand!"

These hardcover reprints are gorgeous to the eye, thrilling and entertaining to read. "Entertaining Comics" in the best of all senses of both words. I await the remaining volumes in this series, along with the other EC comic titles being reprinted in the same format. But beware, once you start reading them, you won't be able to put them down.

Good Lord!

Posted by Jonathan Henderson at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week, we severed our final physical tie to the phone company. In favor of an all wireless tie to the same phone company. So, for the first time in my life, I don't have a dial tone. It's all just 0's and 1's across the ether now.

I remember so clearly when I got my own personal phone number. It was September of 1980, and I had just moved into my dormitory for freshman year (Northwestern University, Foster House, just down the block from the Technological Institute). Through some lucky twist of fate, I had won the lottery for a single room - an incredibly rare and valuable thing, especially for a Freshman. A glorious 8 x 12 foot room was mine, all mine. My own door, my own window, my own radiator... and my own phone jack.

After I got my keys and threw down my luggage, the first thing I did was go stand in line for my phone. A few months before I had opened my own bank account, but that was nothing compared to this. A phone! AT&T offered me an extravagant choice of models to choose from... a princess phone (!), a hang on the wall type, and the nice plain kind with a handset. And they were all push-button phones! Every phone in my house growing up had been a rotary dial phone; the only time I had used a push-button phone was in a phone booth.

I selected a moss-green unit, put down my deposit (in those days you didn't buy a phone, you just borrowed it from the phone company), and half an hour later I plugged it in. I think my first phone call was to one of my aunts or uncles to let them know my new phone number... my parents and siblings were living in Korea at the time, and an international phone call was out of the question.

As the years went by, I went through many phones and many phone numbers. I continued to lease my phones from AT&T for several years after the court-ordered breakup, long after the time when you could buy a cheap telephone in any drug store. I just liked the nice solid feel. I had phones on the wall, phones shaped like pop culture objects, phones that made bizarre ringing noises. I got my first answering machine in 1983 - the first message left on it was: "Hi, Jon, this is Lenore. When the hell did you get this? Call me back."

I got my first cell phone in 1993, after a car accident left me stranded on a residential stretch of Sunset Boulevard (the part past Westwood where it goes into Pacific Palisades). It was a huge Blaupunkt, with a leather case to carry it in and a long coiled cord with a cigarette plug on the end. It weighed about 2 pounds, as I recall. Cell service then was very spotty, and the battery would only last for about 30 minutes of talking before you had to plug it back in to charge it.

Since then, I've had flip phones, smart phones, candy bar phones, Motorolas, Nokias, Samsungs, and the first iPhone. I've had headsets both wired and bluetoothed. But what finally made me decide to yank the wire and go completely cellular was the iPhone 3G that I bought a month ago.

No, not because the phone is So Great That I Can't Imagine Anything Else. Far from it. But the cost of cell phone service with high-speed data has now gotten so high that I can no longer justify duplicating my phone service over both a land line wire and over the air. With data, my cell phone plan is costing me almost $90.00 a month. My land-line phone with Super Duper Long Distance was costing me another $67 every month, and was used less and less.

The only thing standing in my way was the number itself. Our home phone number is (was) one of those great numbers that has a lot of the same numbers repeating, and is very easy to remember. We didn't want to lose it. Our solution was to simply transfer the great home number to Frank's cell phone. So, as of last Monday, our old home phone number is now Frank's cell phone number. And my cell phone number is my only number.

My younger friends, colleagues and relatives have expressed surprise that I still even had a land line. Many folks under thirty that I've talked to have never had a wired phone, only cellular. And now, with the iPhone and other smart phones like it, phones have become the repository for email and web surfing as well. Within five years, I'm sure the cell phone and computer will merge together completely. Hardware designers, I have some ideas. Give me a call on my cell phone.

Isn't it great living in the 21st century? At long last, I finally feel like I'm living in the future. Now when do I get my ticket to the wheel in space and my new spandex jacket?

Posted by Jonathan Henderson at 01:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

2008 Genuine Buddy 150 "International" (Series Italia).

I'm not a motorcycle guy. In fact, the only time in my life I've ever ridden a motorcycle was once when I was in high school - I rode my little brother's cross-country bike for a few hundred feet. It wasn't for me. In fact, for a very long time, I thought motorcycles of any type were foolish and dangerous instruments of death. My friends in the health care business call them "Donor Cycles" for a good reason.

But about 10 years ago, I started making friends with some people who regularly ride motorcycles. And since moving to South Florida, I've met even more. These acquaintances made me realize that motorcycles in and of themselves are no more dangerous than any other vehicle: it's how they are ridden and how they interact with the other vehicles on the road that makes them dangerous. However,while I like and respect the people who ride them, I could never be one of them.

Therefore, I have no justification for why or how I got obsessed with getting a motor scooter.

It started a few months ago. 2008 has been about trying to save on gasoline and energy in general. I bought a hybrid car just before the beginning of the year. Although the Civic Hybrid gets great mileage, I miss the style and pep of my old Mini Cooper greatly. And so the idea of riding a retro-style scooter began to grip me. I remembered that a former colleague of mine, Mike Brady, got a Vespa scooter that I thought was the coolest thing on wheels at the time. I started to see myself driving one of those...

About two months ago I decided to get serious about this. I started visiting local dealers. I went by Honda, since I'd bought one of their cars, but I was underwhelmed with their selection: They had 2 scooters at the very low end (the Metropolitan and the Elite 80), and 1 at the extreme far end (the Silver Wing). Nothing in the middle.

I went to the Vespa dealer in Fort Lauderdale. This was more like it, but the prices ($4500 for the lowest) seemed like an awful lot for something that I intended to be auxiliary transportation. However, the folks at Fort Lauderdale Vespa did help me to understand the ins and outs of a getting a motorcycle license, and gave me a pile of brochures for motorcycle safety training.

My googling for "motor scooters" had turned up a lot of references to the "Buddy" scooter, including a Scooter of the Year award for 2007. The Buddy 125 and Buddy 150, made by the Genuine Scooter Company, sure looked like what I was looking for. And topping out at $3200, the price seemed a lot more in line with what I was willing to pay. I found a dealer near me, the Scooter Superstore of Hollywood, and stopped by to take a look.

And that was it. I had to have one.

Three weeks later - after taking a weekend long motorcycle safety training course, passing both a written and a driving test, getting a new driver license with a Motorcycle Endorsement, AND getting a new credit card (the dealer wouldn't take Amex, the only card I had) - I drove out of the Scooter Superstore on my brand new, green two-toned "Series Italia" Genuine Buddy 150cc scooter.

My first ride was a 23 mile drive from the dealer to my house. In the pouring rain. Wearing a new helmet, gloves, and jacket for the first time.

I had a blast.

At the moment, I've got 285 miles on the Buddy, and I've filled it with gas 3 times. Each time, I've spent less than $5.00 for a tank of gas. My average mileage (well, of course I keep detailed records in a spreadsheet!) is 91 miles per gallon. My top speed has been just a hair over 65 miles an hour, when there was no one around and I just wanted to see how far the throttle would go. And no, I'm not planning on taking it on the freeway.

I've ridden the Buddy to work 3 times so far, and I've driven it to most of my regular places. This past Saturday, I sold my car (since I am getting a new one on order in a few weeks) and the Buddy is now my sole means of transportation - at least until my new Mini Cooper arrives.

This little scoot has put its hooks into me deep. I've been consulting the Modern Buddy forum daily, I've ordered a pair of specialty riding boots, and I'm waiting for my Kevlar shirt so I don't have to wear my mesh armored jacket in the current hot and humid weather here in Broward County. And I'll probably write up a review of my Bluetooth-enabled Nolan helmet, which lets me talk on my iPhone while keeping both hands on the "wheel".

I'm sure I'll have more to say, although I'll probably say most of it on the Modern Buddy forum, rather than on this blog. But if you're trying to think of a way to save on gas... and still have an enjoyable ride... you need to get yourself a new buddy. A Genuine Buddy.

And no, you can't have mine.

Posted by Jonathan Henderson at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)