Earlier this year I put up a show called Tales of Adventure.  (Don't worry, I'm just explaining the context.  It ended in May so you don't have to go anymore.)  Moderately skilled improvisers read short stories based on a different theme each week. The first week's theme was horror, so in honor of Halloween and self-promotion, I am reposting this DennisOToole.com classic: the extremely scary playbill that I handed out to the audience that week. 

TALES OF ADVENTURE!

VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1:
HORROR WEEK

For your diversion, we have compiled some of the most popular jokes about ghosts, ghouls, goblins, and other deadly monsters that have been passed down through the generations.  Perhaps these laughs will take the sting out of what you hear tonight and the chuckles herein will help you to sleep.  Perhaps…



GHOULISH JOKES AND 
GHOSTLY RIDDLES

What do you get when you cross a swamp thing and an ogre?

Awesome post.  John Cassidy is the best, most consistently-excellent blogger that I've come across.

From an essay in the American Scholar by Christian Wiman, about cancer, suffering, and faith:

"Experience seems to stream clearly through some lives, rather than getting slowed and clogged up in the drift-waste of ego, or stagnating in little inlets of despair, envy, rage. It has to do with seizing and releasing as a single gesture. It has to do with standing in relation to life and death like those late Bontecou mobiles, owning an emptiness that, because you have claimed it, has become a source of light, wearing your wound that, like a ramshackle house on some high exposed hill, sings with the hard wind that is steadily destroying it."

Opening paragraphs of Dexter Filkins's review of "No Easy Day":

"Earlier this year, under a half-moon in eastern Afghanistan, I found myself on a C-130 transport plane with a group of American Special Operations commandos — maybe Navy SEALs, maybe Army Rangers. The operators, as they like to call themselves, had come for a mission, carried it out and were hitching a ride back to their base. They had long hair and long beards, and their eyes were very hard. They didn’t smile and they didn’t talk, not even to one another. When the plane landed, they disappeared.

In the 11 years since 9/11, Special Operations commandos like SEALs and Rangers have done the dirty work of America’s wars. By day, ordinary soldiers may be trying to win over the locals with water projects and new schools, but at night the SEALs and Rangers are swooping into villages and killing and dragging away guerrilla leaders. In Afghanistan, Special Operations teams carry out dozens of these missions every night: Kill and capture, kill and capture, kill and capture. It makes the eyes very hard."