The hap- happest season of all

Yes, it's that time of the year again!

And you know what that means...

If you've guessed that it's but just a few weeks till my birthday, you are on the right track.



Thank you for your consideration.

Man with a harmonica

Tempus fugit. Carpe diem. And all that.



I found him at my local curiosity shop.

Every town ought to have one.

What is he playing? I wonder.



The shop owner caught me snapping those shots and she invited me in... to hear him play—yes, it's an automaton!

The music the automaton plays, it turned out, is "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain." The song is derived from the Christian spiritual known as "When the Chariot Comes."

I don't know. I am a little disapointed. "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain" is an enthralling and fun song and all, I am sure, but I just thought "Man with a Harmonica" suited him better.

Sometimes certain things are best left to the imagination.

By Invitation Only

Pronounced eech-uh hown-uh, Oìdhche Shamhnathe ("Night of Samhain") is the last day of the Celtic lunar calendar, which is due to occur on the 4th of November, this year.

The celebration will take place at the usual place. At the usual time.



You know where. And you know when.

No official invitations will be sent, this year. Consider yourself invited if it just so happens that you are reading this and have attended any Oìdhche Shamhnathe celebration with us at any time in the past.

Also consider yourself invited if you stumbled by happenchance upon this post and have figured your way to where and when are. (Sometimes, things happen for a reason.) While here, you are bound by the same Obligations of Guest and Host as do apply to your fellow guests:



That sort of thing.

Don't make too much of it.



As usual there will be food.



No need to RSVP...



Your name is already on the approved list.

Why are you so afraid?

Do you still have no faith?



Welcome to Mansions of Madness, 2nd edition, our next Tabletop RPG!



It's a Lovecraftian universe inspired game.



☝🏼 Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American writer of weird and horror fiction, who is known for his creation of what became known as the Cthulhu Mythos.

If anyone wanna watch Dagon (the film directed by Stuart Gordon and written by Dennis Paoli, based on H. P. Lovecraft's novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth), we've got a copy in the Loge's library.

The Cthulu mythos is about outer-dimensional, incomprehensible to the human mind, madness-inducing entities, who once ruled the Earth. Some of them—the least of them—are still amongst us (like the mi-go in "The Whisperer in Darkness"). Others, the Great Old Ones, were once expelled in another dimension, but they will return when "the stars are right."

There are cultists (no, not Scientologists—though who is to say what "the truth revealed" to the faithful who ultimately reach OT level VIII really turns about to be?) who are trying to open the "door" to bring about the return of the Great Old Ones.

The hallmark of Lovecraft's work is cosmicism, the sense that ordinary life is a thin shell over a reality that is so alien and abstract in comparison that merely contemplating it would damage the sanity of the ordinary person.

Lovecraft's pantheon is made of "such stuff as dreams [or nightmares] are made on" and "dreams are older than brooding Tyre or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon," but not all of Lovecraft's entities are entirely the product of the author's tormented psyche, Bast, Nodens and Dagon are known antic deities respectively from Egyptian, Celtic and Mesopotamian mythologies.

Did you know that the Loge possesses a copy, in the library, of what has been described as "potentially the most dangerous Black Book known to the Western World"?

No, not The Project For The New American Century...

The Necronomicon!



How careless of the librarian.

I think of some unsuspecting guest stumbling onto that book and shuffling unknowingly thought the pages ...



And I shudder.

Lost in Translation

Friends do not let friends carry a katana on their back.

Besides, everybody knows that the sharpest blade is the mind!

Go Figure

For some strange reason...



I've been feeling the curious urge of carrying a katana strapped to my back, of late.

But Nausicaa just said no.

Penny For Your Thoughts

1991, D and I have just begun dating. And we are in Claremont, California, with a couple of friends that I have convinced , along with D, to drive there with me from LA in my old Buick LeSabre to watch a Kabuki production.





It's a Kabuki-in-English performance.



The month is March.



Leonard Pronko is an acquaintance of mine. I took a class with him back in the days I was a student at the Claremont colleges.

As I am writing these lines I just found out that he's passed away, the old coot!



I remember him fondly.

I do not know that the production of Kabuki plays in English is still a thing like it was in those days—including at the University of Hawaii:



Nowadays, Kabuki has become a synonym for thetrical. It is often used to describe politicians suspected of acting insincerely to please their supporters and/or get maximum media attention.

Case in point:

Happy Lockdown Birthday

So... Err... Does it mean?