tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23719759262096303132012-02-16T10:41:28.740-08:00J.W. Ockerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14978777187682498561noreply@blogger.comBlogger104125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2371975926209630313.post-40332387849588167062011-12-02T10:50:00.001-08:002011-12-02T10:52:37.678-08:00

J.W. Ocker is an award-winning writer currently living in Nashua, NH. He has a B.A. in English from Clearwater Christian College in Clearwater, FL, and a Master’s in Liberal Arts from the Great Books Program of St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD. He is the author of The New England Grimpendium and the creator and curator of the website O.T.I.S.: Odd Things I’ve Seen (OddThingsIveSeen.com),

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June 3, 2011 – The Rolling Stones sing, “Go ahead, bite the Big Apple…don’t mind the maggots.” They’re referring to the city named New York, of course, but the notion can be generalized to the entire state, as well. After all, like most places, New York has a dark side. And I’m under contract to go stumble around in it. I’m currently researching, traveling, and writing another Grimpendium,

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Happy Halloween Itself 10.31.2011 For a lot of people, today is the only day they celebrate Halloween. Here, we’ve been doing it for more than a month and a half. But one day or 50, the season still flies by so…freaking…fast. And ellipses don’t slow it down one…freaking…bit. But I don’t want to spend the last post of the Halloween 2011 Blog summarizing what wend on here on the blog since

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October 31, 2011 — For a lot of people, today is the only day they celebrate Halloween. Here, we’ve been doing it for more than a month and a half. But one day or 50, the season still flies by so…freaking…fast. And ellipses don’t slow it down one…freaking…bit. We squeezed a lot in this season, though. Graves of werewolves and vampires, Ouija boards and mediums, movies and candy, corn mazes

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October 30, 2011 — Haunted house attractions are among my pet proofs that actual haunted houses don’t exist. You see, if someone came out and said, “This house is definitely haunted. If you enter, you are guaranteed to see harrowing stuff and things from another world will jump out at you. I would suggest hitting a Dairy Queen, instead,” there would be long lines of excited, cider chugging

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October 29, 2011 — I owe Mark Beard an apology, wherever he is. Mark was a friend from my college days who kept trying to get me to watch some series called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I refused, citing various legal precedents, but mostly because I couldn’t believe that somebody decided it was a good idea to stretch what was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek, one-off movie gag into a serialized

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October 28, 2011 — Sorry to post about this again, but I just can’t shake the October snow from the shoulders of my vampire cape. At this point, it’s all melted, but they’re predicting an actual snowstorm this weekend for my neck of the woods, which is really going to hurt the skimpy costume quotient of our local Halloween parties and make all the ghosts extremely hard to pick out. All my

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October 27, 2011 — This evening I spent about an hour making screencaps of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Halloween episodes for tonight’s post, but that’s all been preempted. It’s snowing. Right now. Four days before Halloween. We were all settled in to watch It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. My wife had made a batch of mulled port. All our spooky decorations were lit. It was going to be a

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October 26, 2011 — I think the one thing that’ll get humanity into the Universe Hall of Fame is that we can take shameful and inhuman acts of depravity and turn them into light comedy farce for the enjoyment of all. That takes talent. And some other things, probably. Take for example the horrid Archer-Gilligan murders, in which a nursing care provider in the early 1900s went on a decade-long

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Noses and teeth are so last Halloween. October 25, 2011 — Throughout their young lives, we tell our children to keep away from knives and fire. But then, once a year, we give them both and tell them to go at it. With “it” being a cranium-sized orange fruit that most of us are more comfortable thinking of as a vegetable. I’ve never seen a bad jack-o-lantern. Stick a flame inside them, and

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October 24, 2011 — Washington Irving used actual Sleepy Hollow/Tarrytown, NY, landmarks in his story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. On my most recent visit to the area, I retraced and video’d the route of Ichabod Crane from the moment he meets the Headless Horseman to the point where he ends up as a smashed jack-o-lantern and a legend worth the acting talents of Johnny Depp, Jeff Goldblum, and Ed

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October 23, 2011 — I just left my heart in Sleepy Hollow. Better than leaving my head, I guess. A few years ago, I wrote a 3,500-word piece on Sleepy Hollow, NY, and its neighbor village of Tarrytown for O.T.I.S. In it, I explained that the town was the place where Washington Irving lived and was buried. That it was here he set his famous story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow using the actual

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October 21, 2011 This is the short, sad life of Rotbert the Pumpkin,  Fated to molder, created to decay,  And, if we were honest with ourselves,  Kind of like you and I in that way. Day 1 No one is quite sure when he was born,  But his first spark of consciousness  Is indelibly carved into his gourd.  Are pumpkins no more than this? Day 2 Rotbert did have one night of glory

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October 20, 2011 — Every Halloween, many sacrifice themselves so that you and I can enjoy a better holiday. This season isn't over yet, but, today, I'd like to take a moment to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice for Halloween 2011. They may no longer be with us, but in a way, they will always be with us.

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October 19, 2011 — In the suburbs of Boston, MA, in the town of Southborough, to be exact, they have the grave of a werewolf. Well, actually, it's the grave of an actor who played a werewolf in a movie. But, in the defense of the utter coolness of this grave, the actor was the first to ever play the monster in a major motion picture. "First to play a werewolf" goes on your resume, your tombstone,

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October 17, 2011 — So let me get this straight. This thing lets you talk to the dead and/or summon demons from dark dimensions…and you buy it at Toys R Us? The world’s a truly awe-inspiring place, after all. And that's how I found myself inside of a dirt pentagram asking questions of those long dead. I have quasi-nostalgia for Ouija boards. Until a few days ago, I’d never used one in my

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October 16, 2011 — I live less than an hour from Salem, MA, that wonderland of witches that is reanimated every year by the chill breath of Autumn, so I visit the small city a couple of times a year…but always at least in October. I wrote about one visit here. Another here. Another here. Yet another here. And I visited Salem again today. Looking back on those writings, my opinion of the

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October 15, 2011 —This story starts out with furniture. Sorry. Hopefully there’ll be a payoff. A couple of weeks ago, my parents sent us, as a gift, a five-foot-long leather storage ottoman. It was an extremely nice gesture and an extremely nice piece of furniture. However, just like all the others in my peer group, all I could think about was the large cardboard box that it came in. If the

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October 13, 2011 — The lessons that you’re supposed to take away from Boston’s historic cemeteries like the Old Granary Burying Ground are ones involving history, democracy, liberty, mortality. The only one I ever come away with, though, is that you can never have too many skulls and skeletons. Sure, every cemetery is brimming with bones, but the Old Granary is packed aboveground with these

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October 12, 2011— I’ve become a big proponent of exploring the state where one lives. Mainly because I’ve failed to do it quite a few times in my earlier life in the various states where I’ve filed my taxes, and I completely regret it. Whether you’ve lived your whole life in a single state or jaunt from state to state every few years, either path is a huge opportunity to see some pretty cool

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October 10, 2011 — We had grand Fall plans for yesterday, the Day of Columbus. The kind of plans you build an entire season around. The kind you look back on as being representative of why you love this time of year. We were going to the pumpkin patch to pick pumpkins for carving. We were going to our local farmstead to buy apples in various states of existences (candied, cidered, pied,

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October 9, 2011— If you’re into Autumn, Halloween, or early American Literature then you have to make your way to the town of Sleepy Hollow, NY, at some point in your life. If you’re into all three, you should pretty much move and buy a burial plot there. You see, in that five-square-mile town right in the middle of the picturesque Hudson Valley, they celebrate Washington Irving and his short

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October 7, 2011 — I’m going to have to ask your indulgence on this particular oddity. I have the suspicion that I’m writing about it almost solely because it’s found in the small southern Maryland town where I was born, so I have a soft spot for it. Probably in my brain. That said, the good news is that the oddity involves a witch. The bad news is, well, all the rest of it. Today, in the

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October 6, 2011 — Even if I hadn’t recently attended the Tim Burton Exhibit and seen firsthand the puppets from The Nightmare Before Christmas, I’d still be impelled to watch the stop-motion masterpiece this month. After all, October without The Nightmare Before Christmas is, well, every October before 1993. Still, it’s now so much a part of the holiday that going through one without seeing

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October 5, 2011 — New York might have a shiny name, but underneath it's as dark and wormy as any other state. I know because I've been exploring that side of it for the past six months as part of my next book project, The New York Grimpendium, a sequel to last year's The New England Grimpendium. I still have a few months of exploring to do, but I thought I'd give everybody a sneak peek at just

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