Jellyn’s Collection of Curiosities

More Voyager later. I still have some on the Tivo to watch. But Spike has been messing with the schedule, so who knows when or if I’ll be able to resume after I finish the.. 8, I think, that I have left on the Tivo. Stupid Spike. In other news, I have Torchwood and all of the Highlander TV series on DVD. Which I may need, since the new Fall season has been a big disappointment.

Anyway, onward! To my review of two Halloween books that didn’t have “Halloween” in the title, so I couldn’t review them over on Triple Take.

Oh, wow, lie! This does have Halloween in the title. Whoopsy.

Old Witch Rescues Halloween by Wende and Harry Devlin (1972)

I grabbed this because it looked familiar. But after having read it, it didn’t really ring any bells. Maybe I read other books in the series?

Rich white guy declares there won’t be Halloween, and people listen to him, because he’s rich. And a white guy. But Old Witch is having none of that. So he kidnaps her and locks her up. But a crow helps her get a broom. And then she shows up at his rally, or whatever. And he dumps his pitcher of water on her!!

But, fortunately, she doesn’t melt. Fyew.

She turns him into a frog. She rallies the townsfolk to fight for Halloween. Then turns him back. And he’s all ‘yay halloween’. And then they have a party.

And it’s really kind of a weird narrative (ack, I just used the word narrative in a sentence) because there’s this sort of detachment from Old Witch, who seems to be the protagonist. She doesn’t say a whole lot. She sings a little song, she talks to herself and the crow (9 words total there), she chants a spell. Then she’s got 2 lines to psyche up the crowd. And then like 4 words at the end of the book. None of what she says is part of an actual conversation.

It does add to the picture of her as the eccentric old woman who nobody in the town talks to and then hangs as a witch. Except.. she seems to have friends, and the townsfolk aren’t against her.

In the end, a better book than some of the other ones I read.

The Candy Witch by Steven Kroll (1979)

I saw this on the booksale rack at the library and I was all ‘I remember that book!’ I flipped through it briefly and decided ‘I liked this book!’ I didn’t buy it quickly enough before it vanished. (I had had a brief thought that I should save it for some other kid to find and love.)

But then later I saw it in the children’s room, sans dust jacket, but in recognizable orange with the candy witch embossed in a corner of the cover. Hurray for books that don’t require a dust jacket to be recognizable.

Maggie is a witch, in a family of witches (and warlocks). She likes sticking candy in people’s pockets and filling fridges with food, but her family doesn’t notice the good deeds she does. So she gets fed up and sets out to get noticed. She starts playing tricks on people. Lizards out of bathroom faucets, frogs in pockets, milk turning into flowers. Nothing too malicious or dangerous, but not very nice either.

But her family still doesn’t notice! So she waits until all the kids have gone trick or treating and then steals their candy bags. They get sad. She feels remorse. She talks to her family. Then she throws a candy festival to make it all better.

I couldn’t tell you exactly what appealed to me about this as a kid, but I’ll try.

The colors of the book are shades of orange, black, and purple. It’s really inspired, I think. Perfect for a Halloween book. Maggie is drawn so simply I think even I could reproduce her. So definitely accessible and appealling artwork all around.

She sticks candy in people’s pockets! And there’s one scene where she has all the trick or treat bags piled up on a rooftop with her. What’s not to love about that? Candy!!

Unfortunately, with my 2010 old-fogey eyes, I did notice a flaw. There’s two questionable costumes the kids are wearing. One’s dressed as the typical ‘Indian chief’ and another looks to be a gypsy fortune-teller. If this book were to be republished today, I hope they would skillfully modify or excise those two, but leave the rest of the book untouched.

I find it a little odd that the costumes are all generic. That is, there’s no Spiderman or C3PO. But the candy specifically references Hershey’s kisses and M&M’s. Also, who has peppermints and jelly beans on Halloween? Weirdos! And she’s got fountains of lemonade at her party. Lemonade and candy? Gross. Why wasn’t it apple cider?

Anyway, I still love this book. And that’s why I had to review it somewhere. And that’s why I’m kind of sad I didn’t buy it from the booksale after all.

Summary: Let’s fight some giant viruses.

‘chromolinguistics’. Took me a minute to work out what that probably meant.

And shout out to ASL! Which is.. kind of odd. Considering they speak Federation Standard. They should have a standard sign language. Since most Federation races are humanoid, it shouldn’t be too difficult to develop a standard.

Voyager is ‘over a light year away’. Janeway put the shuttle in maximum warp. Someone with a calculator want to tell me how many seconds it’d take them to get there? Okay, let me give it a shot. If maximum warp of the shuttle is warp 6 (which I’m only going on memory for that, so I could be completely wrong) and the formula is v = w^3c then if I did my math right, it should take them about 32 hours to get there.

It doesn’t seem like it took them that long to get there, but her coffee mug did disappear from on top of the console.

Well, Wildman replicated something 11 hours ago. But clearly something was wrong with the ship before they started for the ship. So they must’ve been going higher than warp 8.

Or the whole formula and/or my math is suspect.

Tsk. Neelix, she told you not to go anywhere. What’re you doing getting carried off by the slimy insect?

Okay. I totally stopped paying attention to do something on Facebook, but when I looked back, I was reasonably certain I hadn’t missed anything at all. Lara Janeway is roaming around the ship with her phaser rifle. I looked back in time to see her find the crew in…. the mess hall? Weren’t they outside the mess hall before? Something about a bad gelpack but otherwise it was fine? And they totally didn’t sense the lifesigns in there?

And what the frell? The Doctor? I was wondering 15 minutes ago why they didn’t head for sickbay, but then she was talking about getting the main computer back online. So I assumed. I assumed that the doctor’s program couldn’t run and that’s why she didn’t bother heading there for a report from him.

Not to mention that after Neelix got hit, sickbay should’ve been their first stop.

Why does Tak Tak sound familiar? Is that from Star Wars? Or um.. I dunno. Taktak…

Okay, um.. how are the biofilters working? They trap a virus, for example, and don’t let it rematerialize. But.. they even trap it outside the transporter buffer? I mean, wouldn’t that technically be, then, a different buffer?

Now, wait, what? I assumed the buffer was computer memory. Now he’s saying it moved from the buffer ‘into an adjacent system’. And at this point I still think it would be just code. Bits of code that, if allowed to finally rematerialize, would turn into a virus. But it’s just code! If it’s in the buffer!

The gelpack slimed me!

Okay, okay, ignoring the fact that the virus should not exist as a virus… trying very hard to ignore that bit of illogic.. we come to.. why would it only infect one gelpack? Just because Janeway can’t deal with a sick crew and a sick ship at the same time?

You returned to sickbay? Sickbay had better be on deck 2 or you’re breaking your own quarantine!

Except you said everyone on deck 2 was infected, and yet here’s Kes, seemingly uninfected.

Well, it’s over.

Sticking this in my bottom 10 eps, I think. It was just so silly and made no sense. And was rather boring apart from that.

Though I did figure out that the mobile emitter means the doctor didn’t need the ship’s computer working. So the captain should’ve assumed he was there and sought him out as soon as she got on board. Or even before she got on board if communications were working at all. Which apparently they were later because the two of them had split up and were talking to each other.

So 2 minutes into the episode we begin with our illogical moves! She should’ve been able to talk to the doctor before her and Neelix left the shuttle and learned everything they needed to know, and if the shuttle had a transporter, solved the whole problem without even leaving the shuttle.