Rainy Dog Monsters

We get rain showers here in Panama that make regular downpours seem like a sunny day. This is why if you feel the top of any Panamanian's head you will feel small indentations like hail bumps on a car hood. Really. If you don't believe me, go feel a Panamanian.

In the why us category, I have finally figured out why our dog Raffi, after months of being "house broken" has regressed and now finds going indoors worth the anger and screaming he gets from his adopted parents. He doesn't like to walk on wet grass. This morning I decided to start retraining the mutt. I put him on a leash and walked him outdoors every hour on the hour. Each of the three times so far that I've done this, I've had to drag him off the sidewalk and onto the grass. Once there he acts like we would if we two legged breeds had to walk barefooted across broken glass. He treads very lightly. As this is the "rainy" season, the grass in our fenced-in area is seldom dry. I'm hoping by next week my strength will have returned from where ever strength goes when one is sick (or even two) and I will be able to take the critters walking in the morning. A good hike always induces dog poop piles along the way.

But enough of the mundane recounting of less than earth shattering news. Although yesterday's rains did shatter a bit of earth, the earth didn't seem to mind so I'll not waste time with that and tell you instead about the return of horror movies to the big screens near you and the little screens - by comparison - in my house leading up to Halloween my favorite, as a kid, holiday.

The ads for new flicks are all in the horror genre with lots of remakes of old classics like "Prom Night" which has as its theme what to do with teenagers who get a little sexually naughty. Dismemberment is the answer to that as teens will tell you themselves, which accounts for why they line up impatiently outside theaters to watch assorted hackers and choppers do their thing. As far as I can tell, though, none of these movies has served as a deterrent to teenage, ah, shenanigans. I tune in and watch for the thrill of being safely frightened and to admire the cleverness of modern directors who continually find novel ways to do in adolescent boys and girls. I also admit to a touch of envy because I never got the chance to rile up a monster back in the Fifties when I was a kid. Petting and "dry humping", I suppose, were just not enough to inspire murderous rage. Movie monsters in those days mostly did in grown-ups and truthfully, at the time, I didn't know what they (the grown-ups) were up to. Probably dancing too closely. I know at my Prom Night close dancing could get you in real trouble with the Monitors.

Anyway, I'm in Hog Heaven if that means a good place and not where hogs go after death, with a choice of a good Scary almost every time I turn on the tube. I still prefer horror flicks with a plausible premise, a good director, and a decent budget but any old monster mayhem will do in a pinch.

(Now that I think of it, plausible is the the key isn't it? Maybe that's why I enjoyed "Alien Versus Predator, Requiem" last night. I mean that's plausible, right?)