Who Ya Gonna Call? My Time as a Ghost Hunter

I mentioned way back in my early biographical posts that I've done quite a few interesting things over the years, but one of the experiences I've had that I still get the most questions about is the years I spent as a Ghost Hunter (1999-2002.) The success of overproduced cable shows that wildly distort the processes used and experiences of a paranormal investigator were years away when I got my start, but I suspect my story is an unusual one.

I've read books about real life ghost stories since I was a very young man. I can remember that one of the first books I checked out of a public library was on the subject, and the very first book ordered in school from the Scholastic catalog was about ghosts. (Incidentally, I believe the second was a book on Greco-Roman mythology, I was an odd child.) I'd read about haunted sites, seen photographs of mists and orbs and the rare (and almost always fake) photos of an actual apparition, and I wanted to take one of those myself. One of the gaming groups I was in had someone in it with a similar interest, and we knew of a supposedly haunted site not far from where we gamed.

First book on hauntings I ever read.

After various sessions of D&D, my friend Mark and I would load up our cameras and get into either his car or mine and head to Robinson Woods in Norridge, IL. The site is an Indian Burial Ground, literally, with a headstone marking the grave of Pottowatami Chief Alexander Robinson not too far in. Now and again, we'd look around, take a few rolls of film... we didn't really know what we were doing. One night, we arrived at the site and saw two suspicious looking individuals already there, my friend and I acknowledged the pair, but not knowing if they were drug dealers or not, we moved deeper into the woods. From behind us, we saw a camera flash, and realized the pair was there for the same reason we were. We moved back to speak with them, camera in hand, and the taller of the two, dressed in a trenchcoat laughed, saying “We thought you guys might be drug dealers!”

To be fair, I was likely dressed like this.

That night the four of us went out to eat at a late night Denny's (an American restaurant that serves breakfast 24 hours per day in many places) and talked about our experiences. This is how my friend and I got started with Haunted Chicago Paranormal Research and Investigation. The pair we'd met were the last two of a group of investigators who'd had a personal falling out, and were about to “give up the ghost” (pun most definitely intended.) We agreed to go with them to a few other sites that the two of us had planned to visit someday anyway, and after a few months of weekly trips, we were officially inducted into the group.

At the time, we structured our group to be different from most other ghost hunters in the Midwest, and particularly in Chicago. Most other groups used ghost hunting as a way to sell books, or run October bus tours, or otherwise make a living. We didn't want to sell anything. We wanted to have strict controls on the data we'd gather, and come at the subject in a manner that would please people like us, interested skeptics. We did photography experiments to have examples of equipment malfunction, water on the lens, lens flare and a host of other entirely normal phenomena usually cited to debunk haunted photography. For every photo that made it to the website, we'd discard 10 with results that weren't good enough to satisfy all of us.

One of the shots I took that was most often linked-to and discussed, as drops of water
and lens flare don't move, and specks of dust don't move that fast.

We created forms, tracked down and used night vision goggles, electromagnetic field meters, ambient temperature gauges and lots of cameras. We visited virtually every site in the Chicagoland area, graveyards at night, forest preserves, the site of the Eastland disaster, Resurrection Cemetery (Of Resurrection Mary fame) and the alley where a man who may or may not have been John Dillinger was shot to death. We spent a lot of time in Bachelor's Grove Cemetery and we met our share of drunken teens, other investigators and angry policemen ready to chase us out. We took data. Lots and lots of data. We may not have been proper scientists, but we were going to take our research many steps closer in that direction than anyone else had.

The process of being a paranormal investigator is a lot like I've heard being in law enforcement is... hours of boring routine punctuated by moments of excitement. We heard and saw unusual things on rare occasion, but they were difficult to test in a scientific manner. We recorded abnormal EMF readings, sudden drops in air temperature and took photographs with anomalous results. However, for every experience like this, there were a hundred that were either entirely normal (and kind of dull) or suspect, in that they might have an alternate rational explanation. In the end, we had a lot we couldn't explain, but our findings were inconclusive.

A photo I shot in the infamous Bachelor's Grove Cemetery.

We did have several television appearances, I gave a few interviews before cameras and our group was profiled on a cable show or two, before they realized that the groups not using rigid standards of data collection and a healthy dose of skepticism made for better TV. We even did a few home investigations and had conversations with many of the other well-known personalities of “the scene.” Our largest project to fall through came after we had drinks with a paranormal investigator in New Orleans, who gave us a tour of a graveyard she had the keys to. An arrangement for a Haunting-themed train trip on the City of New Orleans run from Chicago with presentations at either end from members of our respective groups fell apart due to poor communication.

Over the years, group members drifted apart, we went on fewer and fewer trips out as other things in our lives took priority, and now I rarely see or hear from any of them besides Mark, who I knew well before becoming involved. It was an interesting experience, and I came away with it with a hypothesis that didn't quite get enough testing to call a theory. I believe based on what we saw and recorded that certain powerful emotions can leave an imprint on a place. Not talking about psychic energies or any other New Age kind of stuff, I mean an actual measurable change on the environment, in particular in naturally occurring levels of Electromagnetic Fields. EMF has unusual interactions with people, making them feel things, see/hear things and can even move objects or distort photography. Unfortunately, that doesn't sell as many books or blocks of television time as spirits of the restless dead.

The Unemployed Geek Cooks – The Basics: Sauces.

I've had this idea for a second blog for quite some time, but I don't have a decent digital camera and the style of blogging demands that you do. The food blog. Besides writing, gaming and other geeky pursuits, the only thing I do that isn't sleeping or looking for work is making food. Now, most of the time, I eat like a bachelor despite being happily married, i.e. eating canned spaghetti straight out of the tin, ramen noodles and microwave treats or frozen entrees. However, either my wife or I cook on occasion, and I've had the time to refine my craft a bit in these last few months, so rather than hold out for a future spinoff blog, I'll take advantage of the Memorial Day holiday to talk about my style of cooking and do some brief discussion about it, while my collard greens for tonight's meal simmer.

Too many men decide from the outset that the only cooking they'll take pride in the noble art of grilling. I have nothing against a well-grilled steak, burger or kabob, but a grill isn't always practical, and I've found there are plenty of masculine styles of cooking that can be done indoors. My personal cooking styles take cues from the American Southern blues musicians/Soul Food, New Orleans-style Cajun food and Mexican-American or Tex-Mex cuisine. These styles have a few things in common. They were first made popular with simple, inexpensive ingredients by poorer people, they use more spice for flavoring than many other styles of cooking, and they are very “manly.”

I know some think he's a huge D-bag, but his cooking and mine are pretty similar. (Guy Fieri, of the Food Network)

In traditional cooking schools, the French method is the most commonly accepted structure and form followed when training to become a chef. This method of cooking involves a brigade system of different cooks with different responsibilities, and under the Head Chef and Sous Chef, the highest stratified position is the saucier, responsible for sauteéd items... and their sauces. Sauces are the thing that you can do right and cover a multitude of other sins in the kitchen, and if you do them wrong, the flavor of the dish is unsalvageable.

I'm not a trained chef, and many of my sauces come out of a bottle, but gathering the basics for my style of cooking and understanding when to use each and how to combine them was key to becoming a good cook. Getting this stuff down is like the difference between memorizing lines and acting, or practicing scales on an instrument and really playing. I could write pages and pages about the history of various sauce types, but I want to focus on a few kitchen essentials: oils, vinegars, savory sauces and hot sauces.

Oil and vinegar are combined to use as a dressing or condiment, and form bases for many, many different sauces. I keep no fewer than three different cooking oils around at all times, as in addition to being ingredients in various sauces, cooking meat is easier with a bit of oil in the pan. I stock at all times olive oil, peanut oil (roasted, in my case) and canola oil. Vinegar gives a distinctive tangy flavor, and is an important component in cooking many meat and fish dishes, as well as an ingredient in virtually every other bottled sauce. I keep bottles of white vinegar, malt vinegar, apple cider vinegar and balsamic vinegar in the kitchen at all times.

One of my secret ingredients, the base oil for cooking chicken and sausage for my Jambalaya.

Many savory sauces are used as ingredient and/or condiment, from the simple tomato ketchup to a wide variety of barbecue sauces and European seafood sauces, most notably Worcestershire Sauce. I prefer to cook and bottle my own barbecue sauce (a process that deserves an article all its own), but I also keep around at least 1 bottle of Sweet Baby Ray's Barbecue, and when I can get it (which isn't often enough) Dreamland Barbecue sauce from Alabama. In addition to the staples listed above, I've recently begun to experiment with a seasoning sauce called Maggi, popular in certain European countries and down in Mexico, but virtually unknown here in the States. It tastes like a cross between a high-quality chinese soy sauce and a well-cooked steak.

If you must use a grocery-store BBQ sauce, you could do a whole lot worse.

Hot sauces. Pages and pages have been written about pepper sauces and their role in cooking, but I'm not interested in heat for heat's sake, so I typically don't bother with the spicer varieties. Anything made out of a habanero pepper is likely too hot to not overwhelm most of what I cook, so the sauces I keep in the house are on the wimpy side of the Scoville heat scale. (All Scoville units below approximate.)

• Frank's Red Hot (870sc) : A Cayenne Pepper sauce most well known for being an essential ingredient in the original Buffalo Style chicken wings (along with butter). One of my go-to sauces in cooking and as a condiment directly on food.
• Tabasco - Traditional Red Pepper (2500sc), Green (800sc), and Chipotle (1500sc) : The basic Tabasco sauce is little more than vinegar and red pepper, which makes it a better “add heat” ingredient than anything, Green is a much milder jalapeno pepper sauce, and Chipotle is one of the most useful sauces in my whole collection. Very low heat, incredible smoky flavor. I highly recommend replacing any use of “liquid smoke” with this sauce, as the smoked peppers are perfectly balanced in this, and I use it in all three of my cooking styles.
• Sriacha “Rooster Sauce” (2200sc): A Vietnamese sauce designed to be a condiment on restaurant tables, this combination of red pepper and garlic flavors in a thicker sauce has gotten much love from the internet lately, and the flavor explains why. Since I bought a bottle of this, it is replacing Frank's as the sauce I'm most likely to put directly onto food as a condiment, and my wife (who isn't a “spicy food” person, uses quite a bit of this as well.
  
  

  

  I only really discovered this one this year, since I've been out of work.

  
  

I know that there's a whole lot of other sauces out there, even some that fit into my styles of cooking like a molé or creole tomato, even a New Orleans béchamel or other roux based sauces, but I'm more talking about  "stock the kitchen" basics here.  Since this isn't really a proper "geeky" topic, and it is a bit of a stretch to link this to being unemployed, this may be an anomaly as I don't want to regularly go too far outside my niche. Let me know what you think. Want to see more of this as an occasional backup feature when I'm struggling for an idea, or should I say "damn the torpedoes" and try to do a spinoff "Geeky Guy Cooking" blog even without a decent camera?  

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Fallout – Mutants and Radscorpions and Ghouls, Oh my!

War. War never changes. From those four words, fans of the franchise who hadn't read the title of today's post would still know what I'm writing about. I've had a long and complex relationship with Fallout, most of it good, soured near the end, but with hope for a happy reconciliation someday. I already talked about the only blemish on the franchise in my experience here, (basically, the ending to Fallout 3 practically ruined the game for me) so I can devote the rest of this article to the good times.

I still reinstall and play this and Fallout 2 every few years.

Black Isle Studios was a development house, frequently confused with BioWare as they both produced RPGs for Interplay in the late 1990s – early 2000s. They are best known for PlaneScape: Torment and Fallout 1 & 2. Due to differences of opinion in how the team should be run between team members and Interplay, key members of the dev team left to form Troika Games in 1998, leading to the rest of the division being laid off and Black Isle was officially defunct as of 2005. The inspiration for the first Fallout game, released in 1997, was an earlier Interplay RPG called Wasteland, released nearly a decade before.

The pen and paper RPG roots of Fallout are apparent in the character creation and improvement screens, and feeling like a tabletop roleplaying game was by design. Initially, the developers planned to use Steve Jackson's GURPS for character creation, combat and skill resolution, but the amount of violence in Fallout was a primary factor in the licensing agreement falling apart. Instead, the developers came up with their own in-house system, named SPECIAL (an acronym for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck, the primary attributes of any character.) In addition to purchasing points in these attributes, a character had to spend initial character resources to buy ranks in skills, and one or more “perks” which gave a character abilities not covered by his/her skills and attributes (not unlike feats in D&D or talents in WoW.)

PiP-Boy, the Fallout series mascot (and whipping boy for some of the more gory perks.)

The post-apocalyptic wasteland in the Fallout titles gave the character an overall goal with a time limit, but beyond that, a great deal of freedom in choosing how to complete that goal, as well as other side quests and subgoals encountered during play. Many challenges could be completed with stealth, violence or smooth talking, and consequences for attacking or allying with any of the various power groups out in the wastes would have an effect both later in the game, and on the ending (at least in Fallout 1&2). In the first game, the player takes the role of a dweller of a vault, a self-contained “bomb shelter” of sorts that insulated itself from the apocalypse, but exploration becomes necessary when the water purification chip in the vault becomes defective. The 2^nd game features a descendent of the original Vault Dweller, now living in an imperiled village out in the wastes.

Many elements of style, from the Iconic Pip-Boy to Nuka-Cola (a bottled soda whose caps become the default standard of currency) and iconic creatures like genetic mutants and the radioactive Ghouls persist throughout all Fallout titles. Bethesda Softworks (of The Elder Scrolls games) acquired the rights to develop new Fallout titles, starting with Fallout 3, which dropped the top-down isometric perspective in favor of a first-person view more in keeping with their other games. Though the thematic elements were in keeping with the original games (your character in Fallout 3 is, once again, a Vault Dweller on a quest), series purists derided the newer games as “Oblivion (Elder Scrolls IV) with Guns.”

These games actually got me into listening to Louis Armstrong.

The combat systems in the original Black Isle titles and the Bethesda games were significantly different from each other. Fallout 1&2 featured turn-based RPG “action points” style combat, controlling multiple party members from a tactical perspective. Fallout 3 and later Bethesda titles did away with this system, preferring instead combat more like a first-person shooter, with the ability to zoom in and use “action points” to target specific creature body parts to allow a weapons skill roll to handle to hit and damage calculations, with a lot of extra damage assigned for hitting a vital spot. Both combat systems had their own advantages and disadvantages, the degree of precise control and tactical perspective in earlier games appealing to RPG gamer not fond of first person shooters, and the faster pace and improved graphics appealing to gamers who don't mind action elements in an RPG so much.

I really hope that this game is as good as I've been hearing, it'd be nice to look forward to Fallout titles again.

Overall, I prefer the older titles to the newer offerings by a wide margin, even though I don't mind RPG-action hybrids in the slightest. I appreciate how much work went into the newer titles to do a classic setting justice, but I fear that in the rush to modernize the franchise that some essential depth was lost. I've heard very good things about Fallout: New Vegas, in particular that it addresses some of the specific concerns of fans of earlier games with regard to deeper storytelling with more choices and potential consequences. I'll be sure to give the newer games a look once I can manage it. Bethesda obviously has a lot of respect for getting the Fallout “feel” right, and now that they don't have to completely reinvent the wheel, maybe they can recapture some of that Black Isle magic.

The Return of an Old Friend. Mountain Dew Pitch Black is Back! (Now what to do with my other two wishes...)

I spent quite a bit of my day running those types of errands that absolutely require one to leave the house for a few hours, and my time spent outside was far from wasted.  I don't refer to social interaction with the public at large, or indeed anyone beyond my wife and the few folks who make it over to the house.  Eh, I've been to a friendly barbeque recently enough that my in person social skills haven't suffered too dramatic a degradation.  What saved a day spent in otherwise frustrating traffic and waiting in lines full of strangers was the return of something once thought lost.  I am, of course, talking about Mountain Dew Pitch Black.

I almost put an image of Vin Diesel here, but it seemed a silly joke.

I'm not much of a soda drinker, but like most gamers here in the US, I've had a special relationship over the years with Mountain Dew.  The caffeine and sugar rush from this particular soda has gotten me through more than a few marathon gaming sessions, and I've endeavored to at least taste their annual limited-edition flavor experiments with the stuff.  These have ranged from the quite good (Game Fuel red) to the positively putrid (Game Fuel blue,)  but none have ever held the crown besides Pitch Black.  Honestly, it kind of ruined me for soda, and it was discontinued over five years ago, and I'd held little hope of ever seeing it again.

I think the length of time it was completely unavailable added to the mystique surrounding this stuff, but tasting it again reminded me of why so many of us were desperate to have it back on the market.  There's a "bite" on the end of the flavor that makes it a little more than a caffeinated grape soda, and that factor was lost when they briefly brought it back as "Pitch Black II" in 2005, messing with the formula to attempt to make it more... sour.  The five bottles I purchased today are, thankfully, the original variety, and two are already gone.  Drinking this bottled nostalgia made me think about some of the other discontinued soda flavors.

Now that Pitch Black was re-released, Surge probably holds the crown for "most wanted discontinued beverage" in the soda world.  This neon green soda was released to compete with Mountain Dew, but rather than being a knock-off, I remember it having a distinct flavor all its own. It was a citrus flavored drink not completely unlike Mountain Dew, but also had a flavor similar to Green River (which is not gone, we just only see it around St. Patrick's Day in most places) in there somewhere, almost a  taste like lime Jell-O. It is apparently still available in Norway, and the closest approximation now is the Energy Drink named Vault, also  bottled by Coca-Cola.

Cans of this stuff still sell like mad on eBay, unless you live in Norway.

My personal favorite no longer available soda is the "berryclear" variety of Sprite remix.  As a "mixed berry" infusion of the popular lemon-lime brand, it was one of the few sodas to not really have anything else quite like it, without being just plain weird, like many of Pepsi's now-discontinued brands.  Anyone who's has mixed berry Skittles has a pretty good idea of the flavor behind this one, and I think the only reason why I didn't obsess over this flavor  the way I did about Pitch Black is that I didn't actually drink very much of it when it was available. I mentioned that I don't drink much of the sugary carbonated stuff as it is, but I drink virtually none of it if there's no caffeine involved.  Still, I have fond memories of having made an exception for this one.

And I never did get to mix this with anything stronger, which is now my only use for no-caffeine soda.

Plenty of articles have been written by many bloggers about Pepsi's own missteps in the goofy soda world, and their subsequent disappearances from store shelves.  Crystal Pepsi, Pepsi Fire and Ice, and many other unusual flavors available only seasonally or in countries outside the US have been part of the failed experiments, but only one that I recall  was so foul that I literally spit it out.  Pepsi Blue.  All of the color of spray window-cleaner, but somehow managing to taste worse than the average sugar-infuse cleaning product, without the accompanying sweet release of death.  Yeah, you could say I didn't care for it. For what it is worth, Pepsi Blue delivered on its promise, to combine cola with the "blue raspberry" fad so popular in children's drinks at the time.  This however, was a case of no one asking "Just because we *can* do this, *should* we?"

Not fit for human consumption.

I'm sure there are missing soft drinks worldwide that my readers outside the United States have their own fond memories of, and there's certainly a few here in the US that I didn't profile.  Did I not write about your favorite? Let me know, as I think a third bottle of Pitch Black is calling. Maybe I'll try it with Jaegermeister before it vanishes back into the mists once more.

Would You Like a Jelly Baby? - Doctor Who Throughout the Years.

Of all characters in modern science fiction, there is not a single one that compares to the longevity of The Doctor, of the British Sci-fi program Doctor Who. Through television programs, movies, radio shows, spin-off novels and comic books, Doctor Who has existed in one form or another since it first aired in 1963. The show's continuity as a single entity distinguishes it from other classic science fiction movies and television programs that experience a “reboot” or other retelling. Series elements such as The TARDIS (The Doctor's time traveling device), villainous aliens including the Daleks, and the character of The Doctor himself have persisted throughout the decades of the show.

The TARDIS, bigger on the inside than on the outside.

From the beginning, The Doctor was a mysterious figure, a time-traveling alien with a human appearance who adventured throughout time and space. He was first played by William Hartnell from 1963-1966 until the actor's failing health required his departure from the series, but he provided one of the key concepts behind The Doctor before he stopped playing the character. As an alien, Hartnell reasoned, why could The Doctor not “regenerate” himself into another body when near death? The Second Doctor first appeared in the fourth episode of the Tenth Planet serial, and several important aspects of the character were immediately established, most notably that in each incarnation, The Doctor not only looks, but behaves slightly differently.

As the show continued to release additional series on television over the years, The Doctor's face changed many more times and Doctor Who became more popular worldwide, in spite of parent criticism that it was too violent and frightening for children. The Doctor continued to adventure with one or more companions throughout time and space in the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space) device, which unlike the doctor retained its external appearance as a 1950's era British Police Box. Throughout the series' middle age, the actor who played The Doctor the longest was Tom Baker, portraying the Fourth Doctor, whose trademark long scarf and unusual demeanor made him one of the most immediately distinct characters in the show's long history. For many people, the Fourth Doctor was the definitive incarnation of the character, a status he would hold for over 25 years.

For many, he is the only Doctor that mattered.

The backstory of The Doctor and his alien enemies the Cybermen and the Daleks, was fleshed out and filled in a bit at a time over the years. The metal Cybermen are a race that replaced organic material bit by bit with cybernetic parts, and frequently come into conflict with The Doctor. The Daleks are an alien race of mutants bent on conquest who house themselves in a tank-like shell and have eliminated all emotions save those useful for conquest and the extermination of all other races. The insane metallic cry of “EXTERMINATE!” has persisted throughout the history of appearances by the Daleks. The Doctor himself was revealed to be a member of a race known as Time Lords, from the planet Gallifrey, though The Doctor himself seemed to be something of an outsider even to his own kind. This relationship with his people set the stage for another series recurring villain, a renegade Time Lord called The Master.

A classic joke was that the easiest way to defeat Daleks was stairs. This was later resolved, as they can fly.

The program went off of the BBC in 1989 as the network attempted to organize funding for future series featuring the characters, unsuccessfully attempting a revival with the lone appearance of the Eighth Doctor in a Television Movie in 1996. Throughout this period it was also discovered that in the 1970s over 100 episodes of early Doctor Who programs were forever lost as the original archives from the first six years of broadcast were destroyed to save space. Nearly 17 years of bad news for Doctor Who fans came to an end in 2005, when a revival starring Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor came to television screens.

The 2005 revival was tremendously popular, despite Eccleston only playing The Doctor for thirteen episodes, in no small part due to the overwhelming popularity of the Tenth Doctor. David Tennant was cast as the Tenth Doctor before the first episode of the 2005 series aired when it was made clear that Eccleston would play the character for only a single series. His regeneration was a major part of the first series' finale, and his portrayal of the character for the next five years proved so popular that he was the only actor to beat Tom Baker more than once in fan polls of “Greatest Doctor of All Time.” Aside from an episode here and there in the 1980s, it was Tennant's role as The Doctor that hooked me into the show personally and got me to track down the episodes I'd missed from 2005 on. Tennant continued to plat the character until 2008 when Matt Smith, the youngest actor to ever portray the character took over as the Eleventh, and current incarnation of the character.

My personal favorite Doctor, just barely edging out Tom Baker.

Personally, the episodes revisiting classic who villains are some of my favorites, but my all time favorite episode was “Blink” from 2007, featuring the Weeping Angels and barely featuring The Doctor at all. Throughout the years, historical adventure, sci-fi action and horror scenarios have made the show unique and consistently interesting, and several successful spin-offs have had runs of their own. Most notable among these is Torchwood, a show about an organization in Britain made aware of time travel and alien threats to Earth by the appearance of The Doctor, and their determination to defend against these threats at all costs. I'm still a few seasons behind, so I don't have much of an opinion about Matt Smith yet. I'm going to try to catch up this summer however, as I want to watch all of Torchwood in preparation for the Torchwood series “Miracle Day.” I'm sure when that premieres, I'll be right here to review it.

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