Last month I spent a weekend in my hometown, Bloomington, Indiana, and I finally got my hands on a video I’ve been wanting to find for years: Haunted Indiana, a classic low-budget horror compilation that ran on Bloomington public access starting in the early ’80s. Created by a couple of local filmmakers, it was an 18-minute-long collection of Indiana-themed paranormal tales, each one accompanied by music lifted from Psycho or another archetypal horror film. One story was about three young campers who pitch a tent in an empty clearing and wake up to find themselves in the middle of a graveyard; another was about a stretch of rural road that is haunted by the spirit of a man who was killed in an accident.

Like the Sleestaks, Haunted Indiana seems very silly to me today, but I found it pretty frightening when it was first broadcast, partly because a few of the stories played into my own childhood fears, as good horror stories often do. Seeing it now, I’m impressed by how effective most of the tales are, and I’m also struck by the flat Indiana accent of the narrator, whose calm delivery is funny and a little bit chilling.

Here’s the story I remember most:

My old pal Rob Harrell—whom I wrote about in this post and this post and this post—is scheduled to be featured in a CBS Evening News segment tomorrow or Thursday, and it’s not just because he’s talented.

Rob and I have been friends since we met in the sixth grade at Binford Middle School in Bloomington, Indiana, our hometown. Even in the sixth grade, he was a precocious illustrator and artist, and he went on to get two or three art degrees. These days he is, among other things, the creator, writer, and illustrator of Big Top, a daily comic strip from Universal Press Syndicate—the company that distributes Doonesbury, The Boondocks, and many other nationally prominent strips. Big Top appears in about 40 papers around the country, including the Boston Herald and the Detroit Free Press. In 2004, The Onion’s culture section had this to say about Big Top: “Rob Harrell possesses a classicist’s sense of comic timing … using panel space as well as any comics-page humorist since, yes, Berkeley Breathed.”

Rob moved with his wife, Amber, to Austin last year, after having lived in Indianapolis since college. A few months ago, he was experiencing constant headaches and some unusual pain behind his right eye, so he went with Amber to have some tests done. Eventually the doctors determined that he had a malignant tumor behind his right eye. Did I mention he’s only 37?

[Continue reading "Something Cool Comes From Cancer"...]

Apropos of pretty much nothing: I was 10 or 11 years old during the 1979-1980 Iranian hostage crisis. I distinctly remember some kids at my elementary school doing an anti-Ayatollah singalong a few times at recess and on the bus. It was set to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands”:

If you hate the Ayatollah clap your hands
If you hate the Ayatollah clap your hands
If you hate the Ayatollah and you think he’s assa-hole-ah
If you hate the Ayatollah clap your hands

Does anyone else remember this? Was it just a Southern Indiana thing? A Google search pulls up nothing.

The Indianapolis-based artist Rob Harrell and I have been pals since about 1983, when we started the sixth grade together at Binford Middle School in Bloomington, Indiana. Rob is the guy behind the excellent syndicated comic strip Big Top, which runs in several dozen newspapers around the country. Big Top will remind you of Calvin & Hobbes and Bloom County. If there’s a funnier mainstream comic strip being published today, I’m not aware of it. Rob also paints and does commercial illustration; he’s got a brilliant conceptual mind and intimidating technique. The illustration below is from a few years back when he was experimenting a lot with scratchboard techniques. I’m posting it here because I think it’s perfect and hilarious.