Throughout the world, people who make Internet inquiries about Kuwa6226 meet violent deaths.
In online forums and chatrooms, people are warned not to mention the mysterious entity.
But who, or what, is Kuwa6226? A supernatural force? A cult? A global conspiracy?
Most people say that it’s better not to ask…and Kuwa6226’s reign of terror goes unchallenged.
***
Then two unlikely sleuths, from opposite sides of the world, unite.
Minoru Watase is a corporate IT employee in Japan. Julie Lawrence is a college student in the American Pacific Northwest.
Julie and Minoru have each lost a friend to Kuwa6226. Together, they are determined to discover Kuwa6226’s true identity and eliminate the menace.
Their search will take them from the streets of Tokyo to an American college town in Washington State. When they finally come face-to-face with Kuwa6226, Julie and Minoru will be unprepared for the revelation…and the ruthlessness of their adversary!
Kuwa 6226 is a horror-mystery with endless twists and turns!
To say that network television is in decline has become almost a cliché in recent years. The mainstream news media has been in decline, too.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was not quite a serious news show (like 60 Minutes), and not quite pure entertainment with the occasional political jab thrown in (like Saturday Night Live). The Late Show was a show dedicated to a single man and his opinions.
This week CBS announced that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert would be cancelled. According to the network, this is purely a financial decision. Some Democrats, including Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren, allege otherwise.
Who knows? On one hand, the current occupant of the White House has demonstrated a willingness to involve himself in private-sector matters that former commanders-in-chief would have considered off-limits. This week, the president pressured the Coca-Cola Company to use cane sugar instead of corn syrup in its beverages.
Reasonable people can disagree on the importance of that one; but I can’t remember any former president involving himself in a debate about soft drinks. And Stephen Colbert, while on air, was one of Trump’s most trenchant critics. So who knows?
On the other hand, the partisan political orientation of Colbert’s program automatically cut the show’s viewership in half. Network TV isn’t talk radio or the Internet. Network TV has always faced a pressure to play to the middle, to the least common denominator.
What is the market, in the Internet-dominated year of 2025, for a network show consisting of a 61-year-old white guy delivering political monologues, and interviewing some predictable guests? (Colbert recently invited Zohran Mamdani, NYC’s Democratic Socialist mayoral candidate, to appear on his show.)
I’m a 57-year-old white guy in Ohio, and I never watched Colbert (except for clips posted on the Internet). How many members of Gen Z, a more liberal, more diverse generation, were tuning in? How many members of Gen Z watch network television at all?
In the current environment, it isn’t hard to believe that CBS factored political considerations into its decision to cancel The Late Show. It’s also not hard to believe that The Late Show, originally launched in the pre-Internet era of 1993 (with David Letterman as host) was simply a relic whose time had passed.
Book Riot reports that the newest Kindle Unlimited (KU) scam involves rapidly produced, AI-generated novels:
“AI-generated books can be easily created and uploaded, and they’re flooding search engines—making it so that real-life authors, particularly self-published ones, are difficult to find, drowned out by books that aren’t written by humans. And now, some users are using AI to clone real-life books, and even generating and publishing books falsely attributed to trusted authors’ names.”
This doesn’t surprise me. Almost as soon as the Kindle Unlimited program was launched, back in 2014 (eleven years ago, now). There were individuals and criminal networks looking for ways to scam the system. Amazon has had to make various changes over the years in order to counter the bad guys.
Nor am I surprised that an unholy alliance between AI and scammers is the latest permutation of the problem. AI is the manure-generating cow of the Internet, after all. And its barriers to entry are relatively low. AI is an irresistible temptation for people who are already trying to make money without doing anything productive.
Book Riot further reports that the romance genre is where most of the scamming is taking place. Once again, no surprise. Since the beginning, KU scams have been concentrated in the romance field.
The reason here is the sheer numbers involved. Just as a certain kind of man will always be drawn to Pornhub, a certain kind of woman will always be drawn to romance novels, especially the “spicy” (i.e., sexually explicit) ones.
Some of the most voracious romance readers consume a book per day. These are the ultimate “whale readers”, and targets for Kindle Unlimited writers and scammers alike.
In the title of the above-quoted article,Book Riot asks the question: “Can Kindle Unlimited Survive AI?”
My guess is: yes. AI-everything, like various fatuous trends of the past (consider the “pet rock” craze of the mid-1970s) will find its way into the dustbin of history. But in the meantime, there will be some disruptions.
I am an American by birth, but I have long been an enthusiastic Anglophile.
My grandfather spent part of World War II in Plymouth, England. He was inspired by the British people’s forbearance and fighting spirit during the Second World War. I am a fan of most all things British—with the notable exceptions of mashed peas and Benny Hill.
This past week in Rugby, England, a 12-year-old girl named Courtney Wright was sent home from class when she wore a British flag dress to school to celebrate “Culture Day”. Her teacher considered the Union Jack to be hate speech, apparently.
Sadly, this kind of thing happens a lot in the United Kingdom. In recent decades, Churchill’s England has become the England of Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer. Jeremy Corbyn, who aspired to be Prime Minister, pointedly refused to sing “God Save the Queen/King”, the British national anthem. Imagine an American presidential candidate refusing to participate in such a basic ritual of civic pride. And yet, Corbyn, now 76, was once the leader of the Labour Party.
As an American, I don’t really have a dog in this fight over Culture Day attire at a school in Rugby, England. But I nevertheless admire this brave young lady, Courtney Wright. She set an example for many British adults, by standing up for healthy patriotism. In her own way, she is a modern-day Boudicca.
The Union Jack is the symbol of a great civilization. The British Empire was not perfect. (Americans certainly expressed that view in 1776.) But the British Empire spread the rule of law, free-market economics, and British culture/language throughout the globe. Show me an empire that was more benevolent, that brought more net benefits to more people. This is why the citizens of so many former British colonies seek to emigrate to the UK.
Kudos to Courtney Wright, and perdition to the teacher who sent her home from school on Culture Day. God save the King!
And now, for something trivial: is Jennifer Love Hewitt still “hot”?
This was the question that I saw fervently debated in both my Twitter and Facebook feeds in recent days. The actress appeared at the Hollywood premier of the I Know What You Did Last Summer remake.
Hewitt, now 46 years old, starred in the 1997 original version at the age of 18. (She has a cameo role in the remake, apparently.)
Hewitt, who was lithe and slender in her youth, has put on some weight. (That’s not a judgment, just an observation.) The social media debate therefore followed the usual pattern: There was a faction who fat-shamed, and another faction who asserted that the noticeably heavier, now middle-aged Hewitt was “hotter than ever”.
Allow me to propose a middle ground. Forty-six is within grasping distance of 50. When I was a kid, 50-year-old women were typically grandmothers. Even today, many 50-year-old women are grandmothers. Grandmothers are not 18-year-olds in the bloom of youth. (Nor are grandfathers, for that matter.)
I will soon turn 57. I’m a runner and a weightlifter, and my weight is pretty close to what it was when I was 18. But I’m also bald as a cue ball, and my beard now comes in white. And hey—I was never exactly Tom Cruise or Ryan Reynolds in the looks department.
Is a 46-year-old woman supposed to be the siren that she was at 18? And is it necessary to either a.) loudly observe that she’s not the slender beauty she once was, or b.) declare, in a virtue-signaling manner, that she’s “hotter than ever”? Both stances, in my opinion, are missing the point.
Jennifer Love Hewitt has starred in some movies I’ve enjoyed over the years, including I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). Her weight, at the age of 46, is her own business.
I’ve seen most of Mel Gibson’s movies, but I somehow missed Payback (1999). I watched the movie tonight and was distinctly underwhelmed.
Payback, as the title suggests, follows a boilerplate revenge plot. Mel Gibson plays Porter, an unlikable underworld figure who has been shot, left for dead, and cheated out of $70,000. Most of the movie concerns his violent quest for retribution.
Payback seems to be influenced by the nihilistic violence of [the much overrated] Pulp Fiction (1994), which was then recent in the public memory. There is much bloodshed in Payback, but none of it is very believable. Characters sustain fatal gunshot wounds, but recover long enough to deliver a coherent wisecrack or two, before falling off to sleep.
Payback proceeds with a smirking, tongue-in-cheek tone and vibe. The result is a movie that is not enough of one thing or another. Payback is too grim to succeed as a comedy, it’s too ridiculous to succeed as an action film.
Mel Gibson has starred in some great movies over the years. Payback isn’t one of them.
-ET
VENETIAN SPRINGS
Read it in Kindle Unlimited or paperback!
Mark Baxter thought a trip to the casino would mean easy money. Instead he faces a desperate fight to save his wife from a ruthless narcotics kingpin.
Sex work is not a topic that we discuss here much. I’d much rather talk about books, Gen X pop culture, and such.
But I recently learned that three states—Texas, Oklahoma, and North Carolina—have made the exchange of money for sex between two consenting adults a felony.
I’m having difficulty even processing this. I’m a Gen Xer who grew up watching Night Shift and Risky Business—two Reagan-era comedies that involve the world’s oldest profession.
Live and let live, is my motto. My rights stop at the end of your nose, and vice versa. I may not approve of what you do in your personal life…but hey, that’s your thing.
Also, get your priorities straight, if you’re an elected official. Here in Ohio, my Republican governor, Mike DeWine, recently vetoed a bill that would have provided property tax relief to middle- and working-class homeowners. Meanwhile, DeWine’s attorney general, Dave Yost, is obsessed with rooting out any form of transactional nooky. Dave Yost practically lives for prostitution busts, and he spends millions of taxpayer dollars on his personal crusade.
Let’s begin with the obvious. In an ideal world, no one would choose to patronize sex workers or to become one. In an ideal world, everyone would have a meaningful, committed sexual relationship, and everyone would earn their living as a veterinarian, a CEO, or a web designer.
It’s also true that in an ideal world, no one would smoke cigarettes, eat too many refined carbs, or make political rants on social media. No one would get divorced. No one would be rude, promiscuous, or sarcastic toward others.
But the ideal isn’t the issue here, nor even the question of whether or not two adults exchanging sex for money is a “good” thing. (It probably isn’t a “good” thing.)
The question is whether or not the government has the right to use state violence in order to make and enforce this decision for consenting adults.
I would say no to this one.
The premise that doesn’t work
Most of the arguments calling for a scorched-earth legal approach to commercial sex rely on a single premise: that no woman could possibly, under any set of circumstances, engage in sex work voluntarily.
Ergo, any woman who engages in such commerce must be the victim of violent compulsion. There is no other possibility. There are no exceptions.
And yet—we have empirical evidence to the contrary.
Consider Mia Lee, the New York-based forensic accountant-turned-escort, who charges $1,500 per hour. Lee has an advanced degree. She’s given interviews to the media. We can be reasonably certain that she isn’t the victim of modern-day slavers. Ditto for Alice Little, the (legal) Nevada escort who made $1.2 million in 2019.
$1,500 per hour? $1.2 million per year?
We should all be so exploited.
Yes, I’m probably a little jealous, if anything, at how much money Lee and Little are making for an act that most people find pleasurable. I’m also wondering about the psychology of the men who plunk down that kind of coin for sex.
But is anyone involved in such a transaction a felon? Public enemy number one? I don’t see the case for that.
What about those female Marines Corps officers?
The assumed victimization of all sex workers also contradicts the tenets of feminism and equal rights. We now ask men to follow the orders of female Marine Corps officers in combat situations. At the same time, laws felonizing commercial sex assume that every woman is a hapless, impotent victim. Otherwise, none of them would charge $1,500 for sex. They’ve all been forced into it at gunpoint.
If you want to make the case that women should be Marine Corps officers, you can do that. If you want to make the case that women are fragile, pliant creatures who must be protected from consensual sexual encounters where money is exchanged, you can make that case.
But you can’t make both of those cases at the same time. You have to choose. The strong woman or the born victim. Those two narratives contradict each other.
***
None of the above implies or asserts that the government should attempt to normalize transactional, commercialized sex, in the same way that some state governments have foolishly normalized (and thereby encouraged) the use of recreational marijuana in recent years.
I actually think that recreational marijuana is much worse than commercial sex. (I’m not a fan of commercial sex, but I actively loathe anything related to recreational drug use.) I wouldn’t want my son to be a pothead, and no, I probably wouldn’t want a daughter of mine to be a sex worker, either. But I’d be far more disappointed in the pothead. A sex worker can at least make $1.2 million per year.
You might disagree—especially about the marijuana thing. Maybe you relax by smoking a bowl now and then, and you can’t understand why I’m so uptight about it.
That’s fine. We can agree to disagree. Adults should be able to do whatever they want with other consenting adults, in the privacy of their own homes. This might include smoking weed (though I think that’s really stupid), or it might include charging (or paying) big bucks for something so mundane as sex.
So long as you aren’t violating anyone’s rights in the process, or imposing a clear and present danger to others (i.e., don’t smoke weed and drive), what you do as a consenting adult is none of my business. Nor is this rightfully the business of anyone in government.
Gerald R. Ford, the 38th President of the United States, was born on July 14, 1913. Were he still alive, today would be his 112th birthday.
Gerald Ford was the first POTUS of whom I have any direct memory at all. Lyndon Baines Johnson was president when I was born, and I lived through all the Nixon years; but I was unaware of both Johnson and Nixon while they were in office.
I distinctly remember my 2nd grade teacher telling us that the current commander-in-chief was President Ford. This would have been in 1975. Fifty years ago now.
There was some confusion on my part, however. I knew that my grandfather worked for the Ford Motor Company. Was there a connection? There had to be, given the identical surnames.
Hey, I was seven years old.
The future President Gerald R. Ford in his youth
Politically, Gerald Ford probably came closer to representing my own political sentiments than any other president in my lifetime—with the possible exception of the first President Bush.
Ford—like the first Bush–embodied a brand of Republicanism that was socially moderate, fiscally conservative, and restrained in the use of American power abroad.
I was too young to vote for Ford in 1976, of course. But I would have.
Calm down. I’m not talking here about literal, physical doom. I’m talking about self-inflicted, electoral doom.
New York City seems poised to elect Zohran Mamdani as its mayor later this year.
I won’t call Mamdani a socialist. Socialism represents a serious—but flawed—attempt to explain human economic activity.
Mamdani’s agenda is a grab-bag of far-left hobbyhorses, from Defund the Police to Open Borders, with a hodgepodge of discredited economic policies thrown in. (He’s for state-run grocery stores and rent controls.)
This isn’t doctrinaire socialism. The leaders of most truly socialist economies in history have understood the need for effective border control and relatively strict policing. If you control the economy, you also need to control who comes in for a share of the economic pie. And all authentic socialists have been control freaks where their citizens’ personal conduct is concerned.
Zohran Mamdani’s sales pitch, rather, is best described as TikTok leftism. It’s a kitchen sink of ideas that are designed to appeal to the gullible.
There is also an element of youth appeal. Zohran Mamdani, at 33, is only four years older than was fellow New Yorker Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, when she was elected to the US House of Representatives back in 2018.
The image presented here is that a hip new generation of progressive youngsters is going to take over and fix things. The problem is, most of the youngsters’ “new ideas” are actually old ideas. Rent controls go back to the 1930s, at least. The USSR tried state-run grocery stores and they yielded nothing but empty shelves. Defund the Police has its roots in the crime-ridden 1970s.
None of Zohran Mamdani’s ideas is truly new. But his ideas seem new to people whose understanding of abstract issues is largely limited to social media. We need not wonder why Zohran Mamdani fares so well with young voters.
And he may win the NYC mayoral election in November.
Wealthy private and corporate interests, who would presumably have to fund Mamdani’s state-run grocery stores, are already pledging to flee the Big Apple. Stocks linked to NYC’s commercial and residential real estate sectors plunged after Mamdani’s recent primary win. Texas and Florida are about to get a lot more crowded.
New York City’s population fell by about 4 percent between 2020 and 2024, and it continues to fall, especially if you exclude undocumented migrants from the calculations. At the state level, New York (along with California) now leads the nation in outward migration. And New York City is the epicenter of the mass flight. It’s like that 1981 John Carpenter film, Escape from New York.
Theatrical release poster for Escape from New York (1981)
But New York City is still America’s financial hub. This is a legacy position, going back all the way to the nineteenth century. If our national stock exchange were being founded from scratch today, no business-minded person would choose to locate it in New York City.
Zohran Mamdani may make things so bad in New York, that the financial industry will finally leave the city in a big way. I can easily think of a dozen American cities that would be better suited for the role of national finance center: Charlotte, North Carolina; Dallas, Texas; maybe even Nashville, Tennessee.
At some point, New York just gets so bad, thatthe pain of being there outweighs whatever benefits the city can provide. History may record the 2025 election of Mayor Zohran Mamdani as the tipping point.
I was partly inspired to learn Japanese, many years ago, after watching Empire of the Sun in a movie theater. In the movie, a very young Christian Bale speaks a little of the language. I figured: if he could do it, so could I. And I did. I spent much of the 1990s working as a Japanese language interpreter-translator.
Nowadays, some westerners are drawn to the study of Japanese because they like Pokemon and manga. Not me. I was always drawn to the medieval, militaristic Japan of James Clavell’s Shogun. And, of course, the Empire of Japan (大日本帝国) that gave my grandfather’s generation so much trouble.
I am forever fascinated with both World War II and with the Japanese language. World War II ended a mere 23 years before I was born. Throughout my formative years, there were many people alive who remembered it—including many veterans.
During the war, there were attempts to teach the bare bones of the Japanese language to American soldiers, marines, and sailors who served in the Pacific theater. This vintage video from the US Marine Corps provides one example of those efforts.
The instruction in the video completely skips the Japanese writing system. No one thought that US Marines bound for Okinawa were going to become Japanese linguists. This was about teaching marines how to pronounce simple instructions.
As one commenter on YouTube quipped, “Imagine if the Japanese soldiers had responded with 日本語お上手ですね。”
The direct translation of that phrase is: “You speak good Japanese.” But this compliment is sometimes delivered with a trace of sarcasm, implying that the recipient is really not so good at Japanese.
Also in the YouTube comments: a list of the phrases taught in the video, with some notes from a native speaker of Japanese. (The Japanese writing is given alongside the romanized pronunciation.)
2:12 降参せよ。(KOSAN-SE-YO)
2:58 撃ち方を止め。 (UCHIKATA WO YAME)
3:36 武器を捨てろ。 (BUKI WO SUTERO)
4:05 手を上げろ。 (TE WO AGERO）
4:27 殺さないよ。(KOROSANAI YO)←This sentence is a little unnatural
6:25 裸になれ。(HADAKA NI NARE)
6:48 出て来い。(DETE KOI)
6:53 こっち来い。 (KOTCHI KOI)←This sentence is a unnatural
7:45 進め。(SUSUME)
8:02 止まれ。(TOMARE)
8:23 黙れ。(DAMARE)
8:37 駄目だよ、駄目だよ。(DAME DAYO, DAME DAYO)(English:It’s no good, it’s no good.)
I understand the intention behind such training, but I have to wonder how useful this was, to the marines who actually engaged the enemy in combat. Japanese is difficult enough for a beginner under ideal conditions, much less in the heat of battle.
(Note: Yes, I realize that the title of the video contains an epithet. This was wartime, and everyone—on all sides—was suffering from a marked lack of political correctness. We don’t use such language today. But we need not clutch our pearls over insensitive language employed when the entire world was at war.)
In 1990 I was nearing the end of my college days. An older adult (in his late 30s), told me that I would never be taken seriously until I had gotten an MBA.
I was like: “Isn’t four years of college enough to work in the marketing or the accounting department?” But apparently not, according to the thinking of that era.
Back in my college days—about 35 years ago—young people were encouraged to get as much higher education as possible.
***
Should we blame the Baby Boomers? Why not? My parents, neither of whom had a college degree, ended up doing well. My dad started his own business. My mom started a second business with my dad. They prospered, but they both had to take roundabout paths to success, without college degrees.
Both of my parents reported that their fellow Baby Boomers with college degrees had a much easier time of it. As a result, “thou shalt go to college” was drilled into my head from an early age.
I did go to college. I got a four-year degree in economics. It helped me land my first job.
In the decades after my graduation, however, the landscape started to change. The college degree lost the scarcity value it had had in my parents’ early adulthood, or even mine.
At the same time, colleges and universities began concocting more low-value and worthless degree programs, in everything from communications and visual arts to various ethnic and gender-related fields. (Who in their right mind would pay for a degree in “queer studies”?)
The tide shifted dramatically about a decade ago, in the wake of the 2007-9 financial crisis. I was then meeting a lot of Millennials with liberal arts degrees who were working at restaurant jobs while paying back their student loans. (Not that there’s anything wrong with working at a restaurant, mind you. But you don’t need a college degree to do that. You shouldn’t get a college degree to do that.)
For a while the situation turned around. New college grads experienced a mini-boom in employment from 2021-4, as businesses were hoarding staff, and paying a lot of young grads unusually high starting salaries. In 2023, my friend told me that his daughter landed a corporate position at a salary of $90K, with a very ordinary 4-year degree from the University of Cincinnati, and no practical experience.
That was in 2023. Now, as you’ve likely heard, the job market for new college grads has imploded. The overall unemployment rate is 4.2 percent, which is not that high. But the unemployment rate for recent college gradsstands at 5.8 percent, with an even higher rate for young people overall.
Should they all become plumbers and HVAC technicians? Some people seem to think so. “Learn to code” was the cliché of a few years ago, leveled at anyone with a hifalutin degree who couldn’t find a job. Now “learn a trade” has become stock advice for college graduates who majored in anything but nursing, or a similar healthcare-related field. Even computer science and business school grads are having a tough time right now. It isn’t only the kids who majored in queer studies.
I get it. And yes, most major population centers could use some more HVAC technicians.
But at the end of the day, it makes no more sense for everyone to become a blue-collar tradesperson, than it does for everyone to get an MBA. Sooner or later, the law of supply and demand will kick in. There can be too many HVAC techs, if the field becomes too popular. (There can be too many nurses, too.)
What is true is this: our decades-long fascination with the 4-year college degree has finally hit the undeniable saturation point. This really happened around 2010, but many students—and their parents—were in denial. In 2025, denial is no longer possible, even for students and parents who dream of a sheepskin from aparticular university.
College enrollment is declining, and has been declining for more than a decade. At some point, the law of supply and demand will shift the other way. Young people with college degrees will become comparatively rare again. Demand for graduates in most mainstream college majors should recover.
In the meantime, the value of a college degree (for anything other than a degree in a healthcare field) will be less than it was when I graduated in the early 1990s.
In recent years, I have met many intelligent young people who are skipping college altogether. This would have been unthinkable in my youthful days. But young people today certainly have their reasons.
Milli Vanilli was a popular rock duo of the late 1980s. Two athletic frontmen, Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, executed brilliant onstage dance routines as they performed then-popular songs like “Girl You Know It’s True”.
In 1989 and 1990, Milli Vanilli was huge.
The problem: Milli Vanilli was also a fake. The photogenic Morvan and Pilatus didn’t sing a note on the group’s bestselling album. They didn’t sing a note in concert, either.
Milli Vanilli was a musical Potemkin village. All the music—including the singing—was performed by unseen session musicians. This fact was revealed to the world in late 1990, and it caused quite a stir.
But Milli Vanilli weren’t the first “fake” rock band. In 1968, music publisher Don Kirshner created the animated, make-believe rock group, the Archies. The Archies were cartoon characters, but they nevertheless topped the Billboard 100 in 1969 with their song, “Sugar, Sugar”.
Neither the Archies nor Milli Vanilli would be the last fake band, however. Just recently, it was learned that the Velvet Sundown, a 1960s-inspired group with a wide following on Spotify, is AI-generated.
AI-generated images of the band, which have the now-familiar slick, fakey look and feel of AI art, contain the usual telltale signs of AI fraud. The lead guitarist has blended fingers, and his six-string guitar contains only five tuning keys.
From the Velvet Sundown’s Facebook page
The Velvet Sundown’s music leaves much to be desired, too. I listened to the band’s “Dust on the Wind”, which can be found on YouTube. Never mind that the title is a blatant ripoff of a 1977 Kansas song, “Dust in the Wind”. The style and lyrics show more than a trace of Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, whose music was no doubt used to train the AI. (Borrowings from Neil Young’s extensive solo work can also be detected.)
The Velvet Sundown is an interesting parlor trick of quasi-plagiarism. But like AI visual art, this semi-musical output only serves to illustrate the limits of AI: AI can plagiarize, warp, and remix artistic content. It can’t “create”.
I’ll leave the Velvet Sundown to the rest of you. I’d rather listen to Milli Vanilli or the Archies.
I discovered pop/rock music in 1981-2, when I was still in junior high. Because of the longevity of contemporary rock bands, I sometimes come across new material from bands that I first discovered 40 years ago.
This is always a treat, and it always makes me feel younger. (If the rock bands of your youth are still making new music, you can’t be that old, right? That notion works for the Boomers, so why not for Gen X?)
38 Special is one such still-active band from my junior high years. I became a fan of 38 Special back when their 1982 album Special Forces was new, and reached the number 10 spot on the Billboard 200. This album includes several of the group’s classic songs, including, “Caught Up in You” and “You Keep Runnin’ Away”.
The band has just released a new song on YouTube, “All I Haven’t Said”.
There have been some personnel changes since 1982, of course. (I believe 38 Special has a new lead vocalist.) So the sound is a little different, but the same spirit is there.
I like the new song, and I am glad to see that 38 Special is still around and making music.
I have been an avid runner since 1984. In more than 40 years of running, I have had relatively few injuries. But all of the injuries that I have had have involved my feet.
As a result, my quest for the perfect running shoe has lasted for 40 years, too. I’ve tried all the major brands at one time or another: Nike, Adidas, New Balance, etc.
I recently acquired this pair of Cloudsurfers, and they are like no running shoes I have ever owned. They are light for speed, but also provide extensive support.
My new Cloudsurfer running shoes
Regular readers will know that I often wax nostalgic about the 1980s. I’m a curmudgeon when it comes to most social media—and don’t even get me started about AI.
But sometimes, the more modern, high-tech solution represents an improvement. Cloudsurfers weren’t available for me to run in back in 1984. I wish such shoes had been on the market in my salad days.
The following excerpt is from Chapter 1 of Kuwa6226!
Go to bed already, an internal voice told him. Be sensible. Be responsible.
Hajime Takagawa rubbed his eyes as he stared at his computer screen. He knew that he should have been asleep an hour ago. The time was already 11:47 p.m.
The main room of his studio apartment was completely dark, except for the glow of his laptop screen. The remnants of Takagawa’s late dinner—ramen and salted pork—still hung in the semi-fetid air.
He would have to clean up the kitchen before he went to bed, too.
More than that, though,Takagawa would have to report to work tomorrow. No different from any other Tuesday. Another grueling morning commute through Japan’s Kantō region, which encompassed Greater Tokyo.
The commute was even more grueling when you were sleep-deprived. (This Takagawa knew from experience.)
But Takagawa, seated in the dark at his kitchen table, was too transfixed by what was on his computer screen.
It wasn’t pornography, nor online gambling. Not even social media—not really.
It was an online forum.
The forum was called: the International Legend Hunters (ILH) forum.
The forum consisted of a series of conversations with complete strangers, about supernatural phenomena and urban legends.
Takagawa leaned forward in his chair, the time and tomorrow’s troubles forgotten again.
Someone in Scotland had just posted a field report about an investigation of a supposedly haunted castle outside Edinburgh.
The poster’s handle was IanK12. Takagawa read IanK12’s report with great interest. He struggled over a few typos, awkward sentences, and unfamiliar words. The language of the International Legend Hunter’s forum was English, which Takagawa understood, though imperfectly.
If nothing else, Takagawa told himself, his new obsession might be improving his English skills. That could come in handy at work.
“I didn’t see any ghosts,” IanK12 typed at the end of his report. “But I didn’t debunk the legend, either.”
Takagawa pondered this. The whole point of the International Legend Hunters forum was to debunk urban legends and ghost stories. IanK12 had therefore failed. (Takagawa, though, would never be so ill-mannered as to point this out.)
But he was determined to do better. When Takagawa carried out the investigation he was planning, he would not fail. He would find the truth, and he would not lose his nerve.
And he already had a doozy of an urban legend in mind.
Takagawa read two more field reports. The first of these concerned a haunted village in the Philippines. The second was about a site in Ireland where UFOs were commonly seen—if you believed the stories.
These field reports, too, were inconclusive. They were little more than descriptions of the locations, with some random speculations thrown in.
The forum has no real purpose if no one ever comes to any conclusions, Takagawa thought. These investigations should be more thorough, more systematic.
Takagawa considered for a moment, and then typed:
“Interesting reports, to be sure. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to make several more trips over the coming days, to see if any phenomena present themselves? Then we may have some concrete data to analyze.”
He paused. Was his English correct, or at least comprehensible? He believed that it was. He typed another paragraph:
“On the other hand: while no one can prove the nonexistence of a negative, a lack of a phenomenon, repeated over multiple days, weighs in favor of disproving an urban legend.”
Then he added:
“Please excuse my poor English.”
Finally he pushed the POST button, and his remarks appeared in the forum.
His handle in the forum was TokyoTaka. Everyone in the forum posted under a pseudonym, often one that suggested nationality or location.
Takagawa’s comments of constructive criticism received several upvotes, but the enthusiasm was muted. Not everyone in the forum was serious about making systematic inquiries, let alone approximating the scientific method. Many of the forum’s contributors seemed content to exchange ghost stories in cyberspace.
Finally, Takagawa went to bed.
The time was 12:21 a.m., Tuesday morning.
His sleep was tortured. He dreamt of being chased through a forest by a giant skeletal creature, one with bulging green eyes and clattering teeth.
How I wrote a horror novel called Revolutionary Ghosts
Or…
Can an ordinary teenager defeat the Headless Horseman, and a host of other vengeful spirits from America’s revolutionary past?
The big idea
I love history, and I love supernatural horror tales.“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was therefore always one of my favorite short stories. This classic tale by Washington Irving describes how a Hessian artillery officer terrorized the young American republic several decades after his death.
The Hessian was decapitated by a Continental Army cannonball at the Battle of White Plains, New York, on October 28, 1776. According to some historical accounts, a Hessian artillery officer really did meet such an end at the Battle of White Plains. I’ve read several books about warfare in the 1700s and through the Age of Napoleon. Armies in those days obviously did not have access to machine guns, flamethrowers, and the like. But those 18th-century cannons could inflict some horrific forms of death, decapitation among them.
I was first exposed to the “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” via the 1949 Disney film of the same name. The Disney adaptation was already close to 30 years old, but still popular, when I saw it as a kid sometime during the 1970s.
Headless Horsemen from around the world
While doing a bit of research for Revolutionary Ghosts, I discovered that the Headless Horseman is a folklore motif that reappears in various cultures throughout the world.
In Irish folklore, the dullahan or dulachán (“dark man”) is a headless, demonic fairy that rides a horse through the countryside at night. The dullahan carries his head under his arm. When the dullahan stops riding, someone dies.
Scottish folklore includes a tale about a headless horseman named Ewen. Ewen wasbeheaded when he lost a clan battle at Glen Cainnir on the Isle of Mull. His death prevented him from becoming a chieftain. He roams the hills at night, seeking to reclaim his right to rule.
Finally, in English folklore, there is the 14th century epic poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. After Gawain kills the green knight in living form (by beheading him) the knight lifts his head, rides off, and challenges Gawain to a rematch the following year.
But Revolutionary Ghosts is focused on the Headless Horseman of American lore: the headless horseman who chased Ichabod Crane through the New York countryside in the mid-1790s.
The Headless Horseman isn’t the only historical spirit to stir up trouble in the novel. John André, the executed British spy, makes an appearance, too. (John André was a real historical figure.)
I also created the character of Marie Trumbull, a Loyalist whom the Continental Army sentenced to death for betraying her country’s secrets to the British. But Marie managed to slit her own throat while still in her cell, thereby cheating the hangman. Marie Trumbull was a dark-haired beauty in life. In death, she appears as a desiccated, reanimated corpse. She carries the blade that she used to take her own life, all those years ago.
Oh, and Revolutionary Ghosts also has an army of spectral Hessian soldiers. I had a lot of fun with them!
The Spirit of ’76
Most of the novel is set in the summer of 1976. An Ohio teenager, Steve Wagner, begins to sense that something strange is going on near his home. There are slime-covered hoofprints in the grass. There are unusual sounds on the road at night. People are disappearing.
Steve gradually comes to an awareness of what is going on….But can he convince anyone else, and stop the Headless Horseman, before it’s too late?
I decided to set the novel in 1976 for a number of reasons. First of all, this was the year of the American Bicentennial. The “Spirit of ’76 was everywhere in 1976. That created an obvious tie-in with the American Revolution.
Nineteen seventy-six was also a year in which Vietnam, Watergate, and the turmoil of the 1960s were all recent memories. The mid-1970s were a time of national anxiety and pessimism (kind of like now). The economy was not good. This was the era of energy crises and stagflation.
Reading the reader reviews of Revolutionary Ghosts, I am flattered to get appreciative remarks from people who were themselves about the same age as the main character in 1976:
“…I am 62 years old now and 1976 being the year I graduated high school, I remember it pretty well. Everything the main character mentions (except the ghostly stuff), I lived through and remember. So that was an added bonus for me.”
“I’m 2 years younger than the main character so I could really relate to almost every thing about him.”
I’m actually a bit younger than the main character. In 1976 I was eight years old. But as regular readers of this blog will know, I’m nostalgic by nature. I haven’t forgotten the 1970s or the 1980s, because I still spend a lot of time in those decades.
If you like the 1970s, you’ll find plenty of nostalgic nuggets in Revolutionary Ghosts, like Bicentennial Quarters, and the McDonald’s Arctic Orange Shakes of 1976.
***
Also, there’s something spooky about the past, just because it is the past. As L.P. Hartley said, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
For me, 1976 is a year I can clearly remember. And yet—it is shrouded in a certain haziness. There wasn’t nearly as much technology. Many aspects of daily life were more “primitive” then.
It isn’t at all difficult to believe that during that long-ago summer, the Headless Horseman might have come back from the dead to terrorize the American heartland…
