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California’s earthquakes have nothing to do with the curse, of course, earthquakes are just plate tectonics reminding us there are far weirder things lying beneath than what looms above. We’re al...

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The Curse of the Thirty Mile Zone existed long before Cinema, is centuries older than motion pictures, and will exist for eons hence. Perhaps less obviously than it does now, but it suffused the ...

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According to The Amazing Mitzi, while many of Hollywood’s ironies are indeed side-effects of The Thirty-Mile-Zone’s obfuscating enchantment, it’s far from all. Some are geographical, some climato...

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Pain is not art, of course, and is not where art comes from. It’s understandably confused, though, don’t beat yourself up about it. They manifest in similar places, at similar times. It is easy t...

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“What left you so cynical, anyway? What broke your heart so terribly that The Curse collapsed, revealing the floorboards underneath the glamour?” Frank considered. “You’re alive, you aren’t starv...

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The vast majority of history’s greatest monsters were born into fortune and fame, but we mustn’t draw too many conclusions from that, lest we fall into a survivorship bias fallacy. Concentrating ...

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It was a helluva thing, of course, for Frank to wake from his coma and find his entire species had disappeared off the face of the Earth. The loneliness and existential dread of discovering himse...

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“If you’re the last of your kind,” I asked tentatively, gently as I could, “and it’s been that way for ages?” “Both of which I’m,” Frank interposed, “reasonably certain.” “So why do so many rando...

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FRANK THE SASQUATCH: But you have to admit, though, if you overlook the Curse of the Thirty Mile Zone, if you didn’t come here to get famous, Southern California’s gut-wrenching beautiful. Possib...

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“So,” Frank asked the Amazing Mitzi, sitting in a Starbucks between a Hooters and Disney’s El Capitan Theatre, across from Mann’s Chinese, “what makes you so certain that your god exists?” “The G...

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“I’ve never seen anyone do that before,” he said. “Do what?” I asked, squirting ketchup onto my mozzarella sticks. “Put ketchup on mozzarella sticks. That’s a new one on me.” “Well, I’m part-Ital...

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Movie-theater butter, of course, isn’t actually butter at all. It’s “topping”. That stuff they put on popped corn at your local multiplex (if you still have one, if yours wasn’t put out of busine...

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Fighting entropy, with this universe’s grim deterministic physics, is a lot like playing skeeball in a beachside arcade. You can practice and practice, but no matter how skilled you’ve become, th...

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Plot, to my tastes, is a necessary evil as best. Structure required to hold the damn thing together, bones to hang the meat from, but I can’t say I ever enjoyed a story solely for the plot. I’ve ...

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The scientist’s healthy-but-radically-altered form as a female sasquatch turned out seven-feet four-inches tall. Taller than Frank but not so much it underlined his own relative shortness too muc...

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After the burst of magic the scientist had been trained through a decade of college to disregard, the first thing he felt was all the things he didn’t feel. He didn’t feel weak, didn’t feel tremb...

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The peril of a city with endless shine, sunrise to sunset three-sixty-five, is the way the brightest lights also cast the darkest shadows. The deep azures of sky and sea, that white-hot beating y...

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There was a bright flash of light, well, light and not-light, really. The realm of the lower angels is seen partially in the ultra-violet, according to Mitzi via Frank’s second-hand recollections...

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The golem, the sasquatch, Frankenstein’s doctor, all these impossible monsters that should not exist, the washed-up jock and the rock stars past twenty-seven, the self-pitying failure, the holy w...

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But you must also understand why the scientist was doing what he was doing. Taking a creature that wasn’t supposed to exist and yet existed, a creature that believed himself the last of his kind,...

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Once upon a time, Bubbe Sara told Mitzi, as that’s how stories are done, there was a city called Prague. There’s still a Prague, not so different from how it is now but so long ago, nonetheless. ...

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The Amazing Mitzi’s hesitancy to use kabbalistic practice in flashy ways, in obvious fashions, in manners that might hold her to covenants she hadn’t the capacity to keep, was not a new thing in ...

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Using a bus inside Los Angeles as a means of transportation is about as efficacious as putting a note inside a bottle then hurling it into the Pacific Ocean is in terms of means of communication....

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“I healed,” Frank turned his right arm out toward me, parting through thick fur to show the marks that remained from the scientist’s rushed intravenous-port installation, pink skin underneath, kn...

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If you give all the secrets away, there’s no trick. No one shows for the next engagement, no one pays to see it. Even if they can’t work it themselves, they know how it was done and convince them...

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