Happy belated birthday to wedes and happy birthday to llembas! I hope each of you are enjoying a fantastic weekend, and will have a most wonderful year.

Bits and bobs:
* Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab now has, among lots of other fantastic collections, scents inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos: A Picnic in Arkham: The Lovecraft Connection.

* Have you ever wanted to live in the Shire?

* Valancourt Books has a "must read" new publication for autumn, Terrific Tales (1804) by Isabella Lewis. This curious and extremely rare book is very likely one of the first such collections of historical ghost stories published in the English language.

* I'm a little late to this party, but I just discovered that Bubblehead Publishing recently released a graphic novel that contains both the previously published issues and the never-before published concluding installments of Bill Mumy's clever Voyage to the Bottom of the Soul story. This is a serious and ambitious continuation of the Lost in Space saga in the spirit of the original television pilot (as opposed to the later campy episodes). Great stuff.

* For those in the Tennessee area: lizzieausten and I recently celebrated the coming of Fall by taking the Franklin Ghost and Gore Tour, and I highly recommend it to everyone. Next month, our Lómelindi Smial of the Tolkien Society is observing Halloween by taking the Nashville Ghost Tour. Three cheers for all things creepy!


Speaking of which, my first-year seminar classes listened to the original 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast by the Mercury Theatre on the Air last week. I always hear something new when I listen to that brilliant dramatization. That production is the source for my quote of the day:

We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's, and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the Earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small, spinning fragment of solar driftwood which, by chance or design, man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space.

Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this Earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us....
- The War of the Worlds radio broadcast, 1938