Category Archives: Photography

Widow’s Bay

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Fantasmino, Tony Oursler, 2017

Summer vacation season is just around the corner and Anne, but her sisters have been planning their annual pilgrimage to the cabin for some while now. Situated on the shores of Lake Superior, it is our go-to summer destination. Which brings me to my latest guilty pleasure, Apple TV+ new horror-comedy series Widow’s Bay, starring Matthew Rhys. Rhys plays the mayor of this cursed fictional New England town. His hope for his island burg is to transform it into the next Nantucket, the next tourist Mecca. Only the first two episodes have dropped, but this is what I know. 

The first episode revolves around the visit of a New York Times travel writer. Seeing any favorable publicity as crucial to the life of his town, Rhys is desperate to leave this reporter with a good impression. However, the malevolent forces who really govern things have other ideas. The supporting cast of townsfolks are no help, except for comic relief. In what looks like a recurring theme, this episode is modeled after another horror classic, John Carpenter’s The Fog. Not being a big horror aficionado myself, I must take this comparison on faith. Frankly, I am afraid of the dark, but if Reddit says so, then it must be. As I said, I am a scarcity cat, but so far, the horror has been sufficiently leavened by the comedy to be quite tolerable, but there are no guaranties going forward.  

Killer AI Trump Clown

The second episode sees our mayor locked into the captain’s suite at Widow’s Bay one and only haunted hotel. Even the manager refuses to stay the night there, but on a dare Rhys acquiesces. Queue this episode’s theme Stephen King’s It. As is the way of these things, the killer clown first appears as an innocuous traveling businessman. Abet an unannounced one. Rhys had been exploring his room and came upon a shelf of old parlor games. Titles include:  

  • Daddy’s Home: A creepy board game about an abusive father.
  • Teeth: A cursed party game containing nothing but a pair of pliers.
  • Run: A card game that mostly read “not yet” before finally saying “run”.

After a mild fright the two sit down over drinks to play Daddy’s Home. That’s enough of that, why spoil the story. Next week’s episode features the annual beach opening. I’m thinking Jaws here. Dun-dun… dundun… dun-dun-dundun.

Mad Dogs & Englishmen

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“Crappy bikes make Baby Jesus cry”

Mad Dogs & Englishmen is a Monterey area bicycle store chain. The pictured location is in Carmel. As bike shops go, it is one of the best that I have seen. We have rented bikes from them many times in the past. Once, they rented us really nice ones, instead of their usual crappy rental fare, in the hope that we would then buy them, but it was not to be. We had used their Monterey location for this. Taking off from downtown Monterey, we would ride along the coast, around the peninsula, through Pacific Grove, to Pebble Beach and back. Pictured are two bicycles. The pink one has a sidecar, which are usually employed to cart small dogs. The other bike sports a surfboard rack. I later saw a bike with this kind of rack being employed down the hill, by Carmel beach.

New Neighbors

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Robins Nest Outside Our Bedroom

According to T. S. Elliot, April is supposed to be the cruelest month, but not around here. Instead of baby birds being plucked too soon, we seem to have a bumper crop. It started with the Mouning doves. They traditionally roost on our southside neighbor’s house and as is their like, mournfully call to us from there. This has been the situation for years. This year though, they seemed to have jumped the driveway and our now roosting on our house. This morning, I spied two doves on our dining room windowsill and while lying on the living room couch, I could hear them calling. I suspected that they are nesting either on the real chimney or the fake chimney, both of which are at the front of the house. Both masonry structures are too tall to see what is happening on top of them, but such lofty perches also seem too exposed to hawks. According to Wiki, Mourning doves are known for building very flimsy, minimalist nests made of twigs and grass, typically completed in few days. They often nest in trees, shrubs, or on human structures like gutters, with both parents sharing incubation (male by day, female by night) and raising multiple broods per season. I still have not located their nest, but while looking for it, I easily found the pictured Robin’s nest, at the back of the house, where breakfast is served all day long.