Welcome to the website of author Edward Trimnell!
New trailer for: THE CONSULTANT
A lone American, kidnapped and taken to North Korea. He has one objective: escape!
A story ripped from the headlines, and immersed in the deadly politics of North Korea.
A thriller for fans of Tom Clancy, James Clavell, and Dale Brown. A riveting story about an ordinary man who is forced to take on the most evil regime on earth!
The book haul video is a thing on the Japanese corners of YouTube, just as it is among English-language booktubers.
As in English, the Japanese book haul video (and the entire booktuber sector) is dominated by young women. No complaints here, except to point out that men of all ages, in all countries, should read more.
I have not been to Japan for more than a decade now. One thing I really miss about being in Japan is browsing bookstores, and looking for new books to read.
Even with the Internet, the acquisition of Japanese-language reading materials remains something of an ordeal in the United States. The US division of Amazon stocks relatively few Japanese-language titles. The demand simply isn’t there.
At the same time, US-based, independently owned mail-order Japanese bookstores have mostly gone out of business. This is yet another case of the Internet ruining a business model without providing an acceptable substitute.
I recall Sasuga Bookstore of Cambridge, Massachusetts with particular fondness. I purchased many books from them throughout the 1990s and early 00s. (Sasuga closed its doors for good in 2010. 残念でした.)
-ET
I’m a lifelong foreign language learner. Russian is my newest focus.
Eli from Russia is one of my favorite Russian YouTubers. She recently made a video about the similarities of the Russian and Serbian languages.
There are similarities between Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, and Polish. (I don’t know much about Bulgarian, so I’ll refrain from commenting on that one.)
As the above video demonstrates, Russian and Serbian are substantially similar, but still mutually unintelligible, even though a speaker of one of these languages can understand large chunks of the other one.
The Serbian language is not on my list—at least for now. No offense to Serbian speakers intended.
All languages interest me somewhat. But I’m now in my 50s. I’ve been studying languages since my early 20s. Thirty years of language study has taught me that I’ll never have time to learn them all. In a limited human lifespan, one must set priorities in all matters, including language study.
-ET
**Save on Amazon: Learn to Read Serbian in 5 Days by Lena Dragovic
If you have done any reading in the business/self-help genre, you have no doubt come across the following sentence:
“You are the CEO of your own life.”
On the surface, this sounds empowering. There is, moreover, a large measure of truth to it. If you are an unincarcerated adult living somewhere in the free (or semi-free) world, you are, indeed, the CEO of your own life.
***
But there’s a problem here.
Imagine, if you will, a CEO sitting alone at the head of a large table in a boardroom. The boardroom is located on the sixth floor of the company’s headquarters.
The headquarters building is empty, Except for the CEO.
How much could such a CEO get done?
Who would do the hiring? Who would plan production? Who would ensure that the company’s products were of the highest possible quality?
By himself, a CEO doesn’t get much done at all.
Let’s bring this back to the personal metaphor. Yes, by all means, you are the CEO of your own life. But you are also the sales manager, the quality control chief, the head of purchasing. You’re responsible for personnel matters, and for economic forecasting.
You’re much more than the CEO of your own life. Being the CEO of your own life is just the starting point, really.
-ET
In the summer of 1987, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers released the song “Jammin’ Me”, with an accompanying MTV video, embedded below.
The theme of the song is: mass media overload. Some of the specific references in the song are now dated (El Salvador, Vanessa Redgrave, Joe Piscopo, Eddie Murphy, etc.). But with a few updates, this song would be perfectly relevant in 2024.
It’s worth noting that 1987 was a year before social media, the Internet, and mass-market cell phones. There were no podcasters. Talk radio had yet to take off in a big way.
And even in 1987, it was possible to feel news and media overload.
While 1987 was not without its political controversies, that was a calmer, saner era than the one in which we find ourselves today. There was a general sense that in the halls of power, adults were in charge.
The video therefore focuses on the excesses of 1980s consumer culture, but you can see and hear multiple nods to the political issues of that bygone time, too.
-ET
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was one of the 1980s teen movies that I never got around to seeing. This was not a conscious decision on my part. (No one thought of “boycotting” movies back then.) Rather, it was more like an oversight.
For one thing, the movie was released on June 11, 1986. This was the week after I graduated from high school. Perhaps I had a sense that having graduated myself, watching movies about high school kids was no longer an entirely appropriate thing for me to do. I had, after all, eagerly watched early teen films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and The Breakfast Club (1985). But I had no time for Ferris and his adolescent adventures. For me, the most memorable film experience of the summer of 1986 was the original Top Gun.
I’ve rewatched Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Breakfast Club as an adult. I’ve toyed with the idea of watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But I fear that moment has simply passed. I’m now 56 years old. I have even less interest in watching a teen movie in 2024 than I did in the summer of 1986.
One factoid for you, though: that movie I never saw was a box office success. So much so, that the dust had barely settled on the movie, before Hollywood got to work on a spin-off TV series, entitled Ferris Bueller.
The TV series was short-lived. It ran for only a single season, from 1990 to 1991. Youth culture has always been fickle and fast-changing. What was cool for high school kids in 1986 was uninteresting for high schoolers a mere four or five years later.
I only recently learned of the television series’ existence. 1990 and 1991 were busy years for me; I wasn’t watching much television.
Among the members of the Ferris Bueller cast was Jennifer Aniston, who was then unknown, and probably less annoying than she is now. But even Aniston could not make a success of Ferris Bueller the television show.
-ET
A late-summer heat wave has come to Southern Ohio this week. That means temperatures in the mid-90s, and high levels of humidity.
I am reminded of another heat wave, in another late summer, 42 years ago.
In 1982, I was a freshman at a Catholic high school in Cincinnati. This was a working-class parochial school of the twentieth-century kind, not one of the posh private institutions that is so popular today.
The school building was old. (My mother had attended the same school, in the same building, in the 1960s.) There was no air conditioning.
Also, in those days Catholic school kids wore hot, uncomfortable uniforms year-round: dress slacks and a button-up white or blue dress shirt for the boys, a button-up blouse and a skirt for the girls. No wearing shorts and golf shirts to school, as is so common nowadays.
The early September of 1982 was an exceptionally hot one. Mr. Fairbanks’s freshman English class was held on the second floor, during the fifth period. Around one o’clock in the afternoon.
One day it was perhaps ninety degrees outside. Mr. Fairbanks had opened the windows, but the classroom was still a sweatbox.
We students were miserable, but Mr. Fairbanks was just as miserable. (As a male teacher at the school, he had to wear a tie, in addition to a dress shirt and slacks.)
As class was about to begin, it was clear that no one was in the mood for the lesson. Yes, this was 1982. But even in 1982, 14-year-olds from the suburbs had certain expectations where creature comforts were concerned.
Struck by a sudden burst of inspiration, Mr. Fairbanks stepped over to the blackboard and wrote, in large letters, all caps:
“THINK JANUARY”
Everyone laughed. Then Mr. Fairbanks proceeded with the day’s lesson, which—if memory serves—had something to do with diagramming sentences.
Did those two words on the blackboard do anything to lessen the heat? No. Nor did this turn into a life-changing, mind-over-matter exercise for me. I may have tried to “think January” for a minute or two, but there was no thinking away the heat that day.
What I learned in that fifth-period English class, 42 years ago, was that sometimes you just have to put up with unpleasant circumstances and situations. Some of these circumstances are simply beyond your capacity to change—like a second-floor classroom in an unairconditioned school building on a hot September afternoon.
When that happens, you have two choices: wallow in your discomfort, or set it aside and get through the minor ordeal.
Sooner or later, every heatwave passes. Think January for long enough, and one day it will be January.
And then it will be too cold.
-ET
A modern office building hides a portal to a dangerous parallel universe…and a struggle for freedom!
Amanda Kearns assumes that her work-related visit to the Lakeview Towers office complex in Ohio will mean just another sales call.
But she’s very wrong!
Amanda and her two colleagues, Hugh and Evan, step through the wrong door in the vast building’s interior.
On the other side, they find themselves trapped inside the Maze.
The Maze is a labyrinthine parallel universe filled with both supernatural and human menaces.
Killer robots await. Giant, carnivorous birds patrol the skies. Wraithlike beings called “watchers” hunt the unwary.
Also inside the Maze is a ragtag group of ordinary people…who are struggling to free themselves from a demigod tyrant, the Director.
Amanda, Hugh, and Evan must decide: should they join the fight for freedom, or risk all in a gamble to return to their own world?
THE MAZE is a riveting emotional tale wrapped within a fantasy adventure, THE MAZE is sure to appeal to adult readers who fondly recall childhood parallel universe stories like “Through the Looking Glass” and “The Chronicles of Narnia”.
A quick personal reading note: I’m on volume 6 of 課長島耕作 (Kachou Shima Kousaku). I’m rereading the whole series, which I read for the first time in the mid-1990s.
And yes, I’m reading it in the original Japanese. I was a Japanese language translator throughout much of the 1990s. I started studying Japanese back in 1988.
But if you don’t read Japanese, you can probably find the long-running Shima Kousaku series in English. (I’ve definitely seen it out there.)
People who know about my Japanese-language background often ask me about manga. Do I like it?
Well…yes and no. In general, I don’t care for the (often) sexualized fantasy tropes that comprise so much of the manga sphere. I much prefer the more realistic Japanese manga; and Shima Kousaku is my favorite.
The Shima Kousaku series begins in the 1980s. It follows the journey of a Japanese corporate employee, or salaryman, as he moves up the ladder of his employer, Hatsushiba Electric.
Not much happens in these stories, in terms of high-concept plot. These are basically soap operas, but they’re exceptionally well-done soap operas, with plenty of microtension.
A story doesn’t need zombies and car chases to be enthralling. (Though a story certainly can be enthralling with zombies and car chases; don’t get me wrong.)
-ET
Twitter (or “X”, if you prefer) informs me that Shout, the highly successful album from the British new wave/synth-pop group Tears for Fears, was released this week in 1985. Thirty-nine years ago.
A teen of that era, I liked lots of music from the 1980s. One of the wonderful things about that decade was the sheer diversity of the music scene.
And I mean “diversity” in the best sense of that word. There were plenty of nonwhite and female artists. That was the decade of Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Pat Benatar, and Billy Ocean. But there was also a lot of stylistic diversity.
(This is one of the many aspects in which I pity the youth of today, who must face a nonstop barrage of coverage surrounding that overrated mediocrity, Taylor Swift.)
Everyone could find something that they liked in the 1980s. I liked Def Leppard, Triumph, AC/DC, Journey, and Rush.
British new wave/synth-pop? Not so much. I remember groaning when the eponymous single of Tears for Fears’s 1985 album came on the radio for what seemed like the zillionth time. (And “Shout” got a ton of FM radio airplay in the late summer of 1985, let me tell you.)
But time changes our perspectives in myriad ways. I’m still not a fan of 1980s British new wave/synth-pop. But it was so much a part of an era for which I am now hopelessly nostalgic. I find—somewhat to my chagrin—that this formerly groan-inducing music is now a trigger for scores of happy memories.
Ditto for a hit song from another ‘80s British new wave/synth-pop group called Soft Cell.
In 1981 and 1982, Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” was on FM radio nonstop. I literally cannot hear it today without being transported 40-odd years into the past. But there is one memory in particular that stands out.
For me, the summer of 1982 was the summer between the eighth grade and the first year of high school. That summer, I accompanied my parents on a trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
I was thirteen years old, not quite fourteen. I was bursting with the hormonal energy that made me constantly preoccupied with all female humans falling between my age and about thirty.
But all of this was very new. Alas, I often found myself tongue-tied when it came time to talk to one of those female humans. And so it was on that trip to Myrtle Beach.
One afternoon, I walked out of the condo my parents had rented and headed for the beach. Little did I know, when I set out, that I would remember that walk for 40 years, though not for any reasons worth bragging about.
Directly in my path was a girl in a dark blue one-piece swimsuit. She was lying on a towel in the sand, facing my direction. I remember that she had shoulder-length brunette hair, and she was deeply tanned. She was wearing sunglasses.
She had an FM radio on her beach towel. What song was playing? Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love”. I distinctly remember that.
As I drew closer, I saw that she was probably a year or two older than me. Maybe an incoming high school sophomore. A junior? Possibly.
And then, the impossible happened. She smiled and said, “Hi”. But not in a dismissive way. She removed her sunglasses.
That was my cue to talk, to strike up a conversation.
What did I do, though? I uttered some guttural response that roughly approximated American English. “Haa-augh!” would be a close transliteration, I think.
Then I kept walking. And walking. When I returned an hour later, she was gone. I looked for her later in the week (having prepared a dozen cool conversation openers), but I didn’t see her.
***
What would have come of it, if I’d had a bit more game in the summer of ’82?
Probably nothing. We were both very young, and we were both on vacation. Our homes were likely hundreds of miles apart. And that was long before email, texting, or FaceTime.
But hey, you never know.
That’s an embarrassing memory, but also a good one. As anticlimactic as that incident was, the summer of 1982 was the portal to many happy times. I had a pleasant teenage experience, as teenage experiences go.
I’m still not a fan of British new wave/synth-pop. But I no longer groan when I happen to hear it.
-ET
The Walking Dead debuted on AMC in 2010. As most readers will know, The Walking Dead was a series about…the zombie apocalypse, of all things.
People die, come back to life, and prey on the living!
The Walking Dead was immensely popular from the get-go, among both critics and viewers.
But that didn’t last, as we’ll see shortly.
In one sense, the creators of The Walking Dead did not create anything new. The Walking Dead was not the first zombie tale available to viewers.
Since 1968, the filmmaker George A. Romero (1940-2017) had churned out movies in his “dead” series. These included Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Diary of the Dead (2017).
While Romero’s movies enjoyed a strong cult following, they never really achieved mass appeal. Many horror movie fans liked them, but not much of anyone else did.
The appeal of The Walking Dead, on the other hand, extended far beyond the relatively small audiences that are usually drawn to extreme horror.
The Walking Dead was similar to Romero’s movies. But also very different.
The Walking Dead had plenty of flesh-eating zombies, just like the George A. Romero’s films. The Walking Dead was violent and intense, just like the films of Romero.
But unlike Romero’s films, The Walking Dead was also focused on quality scripts and character development. The Walking Dead was as much a drama series as a horror series.
And the drama was top-notch. Many viewers cared more about the characters and their struggles than they did about the zombies.
Herein lay the difference.
As a result of this difference, The Walking Dead attracted millions of viewers who had never had any interest in the horror genre—and certainly not in the gruesome zombie sub-genre of horror.
I was amazed at how many of my female friends, in particular, became diehard fans of the show. Women who, in high school, would have scoffed at the idea of reading a Stephen King novel.
Even my mother enjoyed the first few seasons of The Walking Dead. And my mom had never had any interest in horror movies. (She’d always hated them, in fact.)
***
The “secret sauce” of The Walking Dead was the well-written drama and character development mentioned above, interwoven with the expected tropes of the zombie genre. The combination of the drama and the horror made The Walking Dead a favorite of anyone who loved a good story.
But then things deteriorated. During the fifth and sixth seasons, the taut storytelling and character development of the first few seasons were replaced with repetitive violence and gore—an insidious temptation in anything zombie-related.
This trend hit a nadir in the first episode of the seventh season. The seventh season’s initial installment began with an act of sadistic human-on-human violence that was well…over the top.
This was the now famous—or infamous—“bat episode”. The villain Negan brutally killed two of the show’s main characters with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire.
I watched it, and hated it.
I wasn’t alone. Millions of other viewers hated it, too.
As more than one critic pointed out, The Walking Dead had degenerated into “torture porn”.
George A. Romero’s zombie films had also wallowed in the excesses of human depravity and cruelty.
This, too, is a common trope in zombie stories. It’s a natural outcome of the genre’s premise. As the world descends into post-apocalyptic chaos, the surviving humans give in to all the evil impulses that society ordinarily keeps in check.
That theme has its place, but it can easily be overdone—even in a zombie apocalypse story.
George A. Romero’s movies overdid it.
And now The Walking Dead had overdone it, too. In a big way.
***
But why?
Here’s my theory: The Walking Dead’s producers, writers, and showrunners had lost sight of what made the show so darned great in its first few seasons.
Or maybe they never identified it to begin with….
***
Over the years, I’ve followed numerous rock bands, novelists, and movie producers whose creative careers rise and fall with the following trajectory:
***
Such a creator may continue to ride the coattails of their previous work in the marketplace, but the glory days never return. After the debacle of Season Seven, AMC continued to milk the cash cow of The Walking Dead for four more seasons (plus a slew of spinoffs).
But for most of us, the magic of those first few seasons was gone.
What is the cause of this observable and so often repeating phenomenon? A rock band, novelist, or filmmaker shouldn’t be subject to the age-related declines that are so inescapable for athletes.
Nor is this phenomenon limited to artists. It can happen to restauranteurs, self-employed tradespersons, and corporate employees.
***
This is the other side of quality control.
Just as you need to understand what you are doing wrong when things go badly, you also need to understand what you have done right when you hit one out of the park.
Or hit a bunch of them out of the park.
***
How do you know that?
You analyze your process. You identify your secret sauce, and keep on doing what works.
It wouldn’t have been difficult for the writers, producers, and showrunners of The Walking Dead to get together and say: “What makes our show so successful is strong dramatic storytelling, combined with the horror elements of the zombie genre. So let’s keep doing that!”
But that isn’t what they did.
-ET
The Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979 is one of the first major global events that I remember.
I was 11 years old on November 4, 1979, when Iran’s revolution came to a head, and a mob of student militants overran the US Embassy in Tehran. The student militants took 66 American hostages. 52 of these hostages would remain in Iran until January, 1981.
I followed the 444-day crisis on the news. But being 11 years old, I was sketchy on most of the historical background.
I’ve read a lot more about the crisis since then. I’m presently finishing up the above book, Guests of the Ayatollah: the First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam, by Mark Bowden.
Bowden’s book includes not only the overarching historical details, but also many individual stories: of the hostages, and others whose lives were impacted.
Definitely worth a read if this is a subject that interests you!
-ET
**View Guests of the Ayatollah: the First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam, by Mark Bowden on Amazon***
I recently read Geddy Lee’s memoir, My Effin’ Life.
Geddy Lee was the bassist and lead singer of Rush, my all-time favorite band.
(I discovered Rush in the fall of 1982, when I heard “New World Man” playing on FM radio. I was instantly hooked. At some point, I’ll probably write a longer piece about my passion for Rush. For now: suffice it to say that I’ve been a rabid fan for 40-plus years.)
Geddy Lee begins his memoir with a discussion of his childhood. He was born Gary Lee Weinrib in Canada in 1953. Lee was the son of Jewish emigres and Holocaust survivors.
Lee discusses his Jewish identity and his youthful experiences with antisemitism. (Canadians, it seems, aren’t all nice…at least they weren’t in the 1950s.)
He includes a chapter about his parents’ ordeals in the concentration camps, in both Poland and Germany. This was not something that I had bargained for when I bought the book. But it’s one of the most interesting chapters, despite the dark subject matter.
He then takes the reader on a journey through the long history of Rush, album by album.
I devoured the book in about three days.
My only complaint was the repetitious—and inevitably tiresome—references to marijuana smoking. After a while, I was like: Okay, you guys toked up a lot; I get it. Enough already! But that’s a minor quibble about an otherwise engaging story.
Speaking of story: Geddy Lee is a talented and relatable storyteller. My Effin’ Life is obviously a book that will only be of interest to Rush fans. But if you do like Rush (and if you don’t, what’s wrong with you?), it is a read that you shouldn’t miss.
-ET
In 1938, the planners in Nazi Germany know that war is coming. They are eager to acquire the atom bomb.
They are working against Allied governments, operating both in Germany and abroad. (And not all of the Reich’s accomplices are German nationals.)
A group of ordinary Americans and Germans are forced to choose sides. Their choices will lead them into a web of betrayal, murder, and espionage.
Their paths meet in Cairo, Egypt, where the Reich is hunting a fugitive atomic physicist.
Betty Lehman is a 19-year-old girl from Dutch Falls, Pennsylvania. Her family is active in the German-American Bund. Betty has been recruited to betray her country in the service of the Reich.
Rudolf Schenk is an undercover agent of the German Gestapo. He wants to do his duty. But can he abandon his last shred of conscience?
Jack McCallum is an American treasure hunter in Cairo. He falls for two women: one who is working undercover for the Third Reich, one who is fleeing the Gestapo.
Heinrich Vogel is a physicist who fled Germany for Egypt. He and his young adult daughter, Ingrid, face a daily game of cat-and-mouse with the Gestapo. His goal: to reach Britain or America before the Gestapo reaches him and his daughter!
Note: The individual books will still be available on the series page!
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.
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 was beheaded 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!
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…
