The Year of the Ninja and the Orchid Ballerina

Happy Halloween! And YES, I promised what today's title would be yesterday because I know these are our kids' Jeffrey and Sarah's costumes. They look great in them; Martha was out with us Sunday and we bought the costumes and they've already been “field tested” at Tuesday night's party for Jeffrey's Cub Scout troop. Tonight the plan is for Martha who gets off work before I do to pick up the kids at her parents' house and drive around trick-or-treating – they'll get to wear their costumes at school too for about an hour. Before going to work myself today, I stopped at Main Street Books and was reminded by what I saw that preschool kids get to go trick or treating up and down Main Street, and there were some really cool costumes! One kid as an octopus brought a big smile to my face, and I saw at least two Ariels (from The Little Mermaid, and her Once Upon A Time counterpart appears on this Sunday's episode, but I digress).

Now as to the people I meet and the books I read – the only things that will be different about you in five years (my Halloween 2018) from now, according to Charlie T. Jones writer of Life Is Tremendous!, but again I digress – I have done quite a few of both. And so I don't lose track of where I'm coming from on this one, I'll start with one that could be extraterrestrial. I say “could be” because the setting of the Paul Cornell/Ryan Kelly graphic novel Saucer Country: The Reticulan Candidate (ISBN 9781401240479) is exclusively Earth but it's intermingled with UFO folklore – essentially, New Mexico governor and Presidential candidate Arcadia Alvarado believes she and her ex-husband were abducted by aliens, the Greys who are often cited as coming from Zeta Reticuli thirty-nine light years from Earth – enough that the reader can't quite tell whether this fictional run for the Oval Office is being manipulated by E.T.s or not, or are the people in-story just meant to believe that.

No, my brain did not quite freeze finishing that; but moving on, I read L. Frank Baum's eighth Oz book, Tik-Tok of Oz, in two days this week. I read the Oz books again and again and again when I was growing up – Baum himself wrote fourteen of them – and this 1914 volume with the rotund mechanical man who “thinks, speaks, acts, and does everything but live” being retrieved from a well, falling with his companions through a Hollow Tube to the other side of the world, marching as the Army of Oogaboo, helping the Shaggy Man retrieve his brother who's held prisoner by the Nome King, and guarding a Dorothy-surrogate in the story named Betsy Bobbin with a mule named Hank. Don't get me wrong, they develop really well through the book and subsequent Oz adventures as characters, but NOW that I'm reading when I'm forty-one as opposed to a few decades ago, I am catching some points that I didn't before.

And I hate being analytical about Oz, so I'm stopping now. David