{"id":383,"date":"2004-10-03T00:55:00","date_gmt":"2004-10-02T19:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/?p=383"},"modified":"2004-10-03T00:55:00","modified_gmt":"2004-10-02T19:55:00","slug":"aliens-and-dead-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/?p=383","title":{"rendered":"Aliens and dead birds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I wanted to burn a firelog, just for the happy crackly of the fire in the fireplace.  I find it soothing.<\/p>\n<p>I opened the flue (for the first time) and a dead bird wrapped up in a wad of leaves fell out, nearly on my head.  Not soothing. <\/p>\n<p>Halloween is clearly on the way.  There was a brief, blissful year (after the terrorist attacks of 2001) when people cut back substantially on celebrating with simulated drippy-flesh and the rubber intestines of horror.  I sort of liked it.  We are, however, back in full swing.  Ick.  I mean, I have a strong stomach and all that&#8230;but I get moody enough just with the change of seasons and the natural progression into winter.  I don&#8217;t really need simulated zombies coming out of simulated graves with little simulated cobwebs and strings of orange christmas lights over it all, topped off with a tape loop of eerie howls and screams (pictures of my neighbors house posted on request).  <\/p>\n<p>Dear Halloween:  I want no part of your death culture.  Leave me alone.<\/p>\n<p>So then I watched &#8220;Alien 3.&#8221;  &#8220;Oh no you don&#8217;t, brain.  You get back in there.&#8221;  Inferior.  One more to go, and if I remember right, Alien Resurrection is bad in a way that rescales the badness-o-meter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I wanted to burn a firelog, just for the happy crackly of the fire in the fireplace. I find it soothing. I opened the flue (for the first time) and a dead bird wrapped up in a wad of leaves fell out, nearly on my head. Not soothing. Halloween is clearly on the way. There [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}