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Consolata and I were talking about meanness. “I was much meaner when I was younger,” said Consolata.

“You mean before Frodo threw the Ring into the fire??” I asked.

How do you know Sauron is a bitch? Because he looks like a flaming vagina.

Consolata mentioned the time that he (Yes he is a he) had an assistant who was a college graduate but had no idea what percentages were. “One-fourth is what percent?” he asked, and the assistant wrote “14%”. “I want you to go to each of your teachers in elementary school, high school and college and apologize,” Consolata declared. “Tell them you wasted their time.”

But Consolata’s meanness—more crankiness really—was provoked. We recalled The Meanest Person We’ve Ever Heard Of. This man noticed that in his garden a bird had built a nest in a tree. The bird had laid three eggs in the nest and was incubating them. One day when the bird flew off in search of food, the man took the three eggs and hard-boiled them. Not to eat, which might have made sense. No, he put the hard-boiled eggs back in the nest. To see if the bird would continue incubating them.
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Movable concrete walls seal everything in.

Read The First Zombie-Proof House.

Here is one of M.C. Escher’s symmetry drawings. Look at the white spaces and you see angels. Look at the dark spaces and you see devils.

It’s like humans. ‘Normal’ people turn into monsters. The person you least expect to do something courageous becomes a hero. How does this happen? The American psychologist Philip Zimbardo proposes an explanation in his TED talk from 2008.

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There’s a lovely piece on Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, Cronos) and his horror iconography in the New Yorker. Read it here.

Does this article put you in the mood for a little H.P. Lovecraft? Check out the H.P. Lovecraft Archive. Everything online, don’t you love the internets?

1. The still photo setting on my pocket video recorder is a little tricky. Please email me your photos of the Meet & Greet with Jon.
2. Jon is way cuter in person than in photos.
3. I am a midget.

Thanks to listbonne, Elle, ifrico, Jeffrey, Ruth, jules, Watermalong, the chronicler of boredom, brewhuh23, atomic_bum, and Jon for coming to the Meet & Greet at La Cuisine.

Jon has just been named captain of the Manila Nomads rugby team.

Momelia, you were sorely missed. (I didn’t read your message until I got home so we figured you’d stood us up because you were horrible haha.) Apologies to the two who didn’t join the group (I tried to murder their books), but the point of the meet & greet was for the readers to mingle, not have the waiter summon me for a private signing. It takes effort to plan these things you know.

Cacs, bomberman and winespirits, you can pick up your orders at La Cuisine.

Random matters discussed at the meet: Favorite death scenes in movies.

listbonne: John Travolta’s in Phenomenon
brewhuh23: Obi Wan-Kenobi in Star Wars
Me: Boromir in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Jon: Satine in Moulin Rouge

Meet & Greet with Jon, photo from chronicler’s camera.

Favorite Jon stories:

The Hard-Boiled Egg
The 3 Jerks Theory of Rugby, feat. “I thought _____ was a dick.”
Advice from a parent who went to UP to a son going off to college
Kazakhstan rugby
Beijing jejemon accent
Getting tackled by 2 Saunders brothers
Vision problems

Thanks to brewhuh23 for the 3 pairs of camera stud earrings! Here’s one on my giant head.

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tehanu, dibee, jeffwar314, Neogorbash, jouvs, jake, roseanna: We just got the shipping costs; the delivery charge will be about P150. Please check your email early tomorrow morning for the bank details. Thanks.

While writing a column about Italian brunch I remembered that I had an unread copy of The Monster of Florence, so I opened it and promptly ruined a good night’s sleep. Bad idea to start reading a true story about a serial killer who kills couples making out in parked cars—and then cuts out the woman’s vagina—at 11 pm.

The Monster of Florence murdered 16 people between 1968 and 1985, and according to authors Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi, he’s still out there. Three people were arrested and convicted as the Monster, but their convictions were based on testimony that was probably manufactured, given by witnesses who were mostly unreliable, to support wacko conspiracy theories pushed by prosecutors and judges who leveraged the very high-profile case into plum official positions for themselves. Evidence that did not support the conspiracy theory (A Satanic cult hired the killers to murder couples and steal the vaginas for their black masses!) was thrown out, and a profile requested from FBI’s famous Behavioral Science Unit completely ignored.

At one point journalist Mario Spezi, who had covered the Monster from the beginning and knows more about the case than anyone besides the serial killer himself, was arrested for obstruction of justice. So the book is actually two horror stories: the bloody crimes of a serial killer, and the Stygian labyrinth of the criminal justice system.

The man whom Preston and Spezi believe is the real Monster was never tried. He continues to maintain his innocence. He is now in his early 50s (The authors say he did not commit the 1968 murders but he started while he was still in his teens). In interviews he seemed less bothered by the suspicion that he was the Monster than by the implication that he was sexually impotent.

According to Preston (who also writes a bestselling series of crime novels with Lincoln Child featuring FBI Agent Pendergrast), the Monster investigation provided Thomas Harris with a lot of material for Hannibal, his sequel to The Silence of the Lambs. (Apparently there is a whole Monster subplot in the book that was not included in the film.) For instance, Sardinians were among the initial suspects, and Sardinian clans were known to engage in kidnapping for ransom. In one case the ransom wasn’t paid, so the victim was fed to man-eating pigs. Like the Gary Oldman character in Ridley Scott’s film adaptation. (There are also man-eating pigs in Deadwood.)

Ridley Scott himself has a cameo in the Monster story—a tape of the Blade Runner soundtrack by Vangelis was playing in a van where two of the victims were killed. (Which Filipino classic movie features music by Vangelis? Temptation Island! Walang tubig, walang pagkain, magsayaw na lang tayo.)

Thomas Harris also borrows from Florentine history—the policeman played by Giancarlo Giannini in the film is a descendant of the Pazzi who tried to assassinate Lorenzo de Medici. The historical Pazzi’s gory end was similar to his fictional descendant’s. Harris had asked the noble Capponi family if it would be all right to make Dr. Hannibal Lecter the curator of the Capponi archive. The Capponi family agreed, as long as the family would not be the main course.