NaBloPoMo Day 4

(In which our hero enjoys a duty-free finger of scotch while watching a scary movie, so SPOILER ALERT)

Okay, so maybe I forgot what I was writing about back in May. Been a long time. Oh wait, was that May of last year, or this year? Maybe it’s been longer than I thought.

I’m watching the beginning of Poltergeist right now, and I honestly don’t remember very much about this movie. I read the book first, (can’t remember who did the adaptation, nor can I recall which way the adaptation went: book to movie, or movie to book,) and I know I remember many things very clearly from the book, but there’s a lot of stuff I have no recollection about. I remember the remote control fight in the book, I remember the bathroom scene (though I think I remember that happening in the kitchen instead). Maybe I think it was in the kitchen because I was at my Oma’s house on 33rd when I read the book (or maybe I just remember it as that place).

Do you have that happen too? Certain books put you in certain houses when you’re reading about a house? Do you ever have more than one book staged in the same house?

(Hah, just saw a poster for Alien on the wall in the kids’ room, nice little hat tip).

Oh man, that’s right: the clown on the chair. I was never stupid enough to have a clown or just about any other doll in a chair in my room at night, but I would often see things in the room when it was dim. Thinking back now, 30-something years later, I think I was probably seeing things in the dim light because I was nearsighted, which was starting to get worse around the time I was ten. Of course, our brains love to make up things when there’s not quite enough information. See movement where there isn’t. Fill in details where they’re missing.

I wonder if other animals get freaked out by stuff that’s not there. Like, do adolescent chimps see things at night that aren’t there? Shadows?

Hey Shaw, are you trying to make TV ads that look like they were converted for playback on a Nintendo DS? Is that intentional, or did something go seriously awry with the encode?

I wonder if The Ring was in any way inspired by Poltergeist? Also, hello, quit falling asleep in front of the TV and leaving it on all night. What’s up with that?

Oh yeah, this is sorta neat – last night I was playing with an app for my phone that listens for tones (can’t think of the word at the moment – hello, scotch) and found out that the TV being on with no signal produced a 15-16Hz tone. It was pretty loud, too, like as loud as people talking in the room, but I couldn’t hear it. There’s all sorts of tones that we can’t hear as we grow up.

Maybe there’s things we can’t see any more once we grow up, too.