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Category Archives: young dan kelly

Childhood Movie Trauma Mystery Solved

Some time back I asked for help from the Kindertrauma folks in remembering the name of a creepy live action movie where a St. Bernard dreams of being chased by a man dressed as a terrifying skiing cat. Here’s my original blog write-up. Just today a fellow named Dan Salmon, who had a similar childhood memory of […]

Ann Rule Died

For a long time I was quite the aficionado of true crime books. I had a fascination with serial murder for a good part of my young life. I published a zine about it, in fact. I probably read most of the books Rule published before the early 1990s. She, John Waters (who also collected […]

Help Me Identify the Skiing Cat-Human Dog Murder Film I Saw at Age Five(?)

The Internet has helped me solve numerous mysteries over the years, mostly in the vein of “What was that film/song/book/TV show where the ______ did _____?” Here’s a new one that I’d sure like to solve before I die. Long ago, probably in the first half of the 1970s, I went to see a movie […]

Creepy Things That Have Happened to Me That I’ve Never Told Anyone

Once, when I was a kid, I was “camping out” in the living room. This consisted of spreading out my bear-shaped sleeping bag on the shag carpeting, crawling in, and falling asleep. At some point in the night I snapped awake, thinking I heard someone call my name, “Danny…Danny…” I looked up, and there was […]

How Can Shadows Be Slimy?

Horror fiction is the only genre I follow with any consistency. I’ve had brief flirtations and extended courtships with genres like fantasy (I favored sword and sorcery during high school, but happily never after), mysteries (mostly the old pulp/hard-boiled stuff, though I’ve followed a few modern series), and sci-fi (briefly raiding my dad’s 40s to […]

It Never Would Have Worked Out Between Me and Dave

Letter from summer camp to my parents (postmarked July 1979), rediscovered in an old photo album at my parents. I loved Boy Scouts, but I always hated camping as a kid. No idea what Mom and Dad’s reaction was to the Dave Litt part. Interestingly, Dave introduced me to the movie Alien (via the Marvel […]

Harvey Pekar Made Me the Man I Am Today (Sort of)

Harvey Pekar died yesterday. If the name doesn’t ring a bell you probably weren’t a comic collector in the 80s and 90s, or you missed the film version of Pekar’s comic American Splendor where Pekar was played by Paul Giamatti (accompanied by James “Doc Venture” Urbaniak and Judah “30 Rock” Friedlander as Pekar friends R. […]

My First National Exposure: An Auspicious Start

Sent to me by my friend Kathy, who is plundering her personal archives. From The Nose… July 1994. Edited down from a longer piece (I was told that it was “too literary” and needed to be tacked back a bit, which is fine, because The Nose wasn’t Harper’s). Oh, so much has changed since then. […]

I Can’t Understand Why I Didn’t Get Dates in High School

And I didn’t even do most of the programming. I just tagged along with an even bigger dork and provided the text.