Goth Chick News: Video Killed the Radio Star
I’ve always been most terrified by the stuff I’ve never even seen. I’ve screamed my way through ghost hunting expeditions having never once actually laid eyes on an apparition of any kind. Jaws is one of my favorite movies, mainly for the scenes when you know the shark is somewhere just outside your line of sight, and I have read books that have made me afraid to have any part of me not under the covers once I’m in bed, for days on end.
It is universally true that what you imagine is exponentially more horrible than the reality, which is why hack-and-slash movies copiously strewn with limbs and drenched in bodily fluids have never done it for me.
It’s no surprise then, that I’ve recently become addicted to the “theater of the mind” known as classic radio.
Having repeatedly watched the movie A Christmas Story, where little Ralphie makes a bee-line to the enormous living room radio to listen to “Little Orphan Annie,” I was aware that radio serials predated television. But it wasn’t until channel surfing on my satellite radio one day that I stopped on a station, and hearing Peter Lorre’s voice, fell hopelessly in love.
No, not with Peter Lorre. I’ve been in love with him since reruns of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “Tales of Terror.” What I fell in love with was an old time radio drama called The Inner Sanctum, and I had to know more.
Back in May I told you all about 
I have a friend who collects Star Wars paraphernalia. He travels around the country a few times a year attending mammoth SciFi conventions and comic trade shows, in the frenzied remainder of the hunting and gathering instinct that evolution allowed us to keep. The dedicated room in his house where this amazing assortment of merchandise is displayed has its own security system, in place at the request of the insurance company that covers it with a policy of biblical proportion. His Facebook page is a plethora of friends and fans who admire his every acquisition, seeking to purchase or swap rare treasures with their original packaging intact.
Ah summertime! With Memorial Day behind us we can finally relish the signs that warm weather is here to stay and the frigid months are at least temporarily a thing of the past. Though I am already counting down the less than five months until Halloween, even I am somewhat giddy in the abundant sunlight streaming in the office window, making it clear I haven’t dusted since the last full moon. Which reminds me…
Back in 2005 I had the pleasure of lunching with Charlaine Harris, who was on a book tour celebrating the release of her fourth Sookie Stackhouse novel Dead to the World.
To call me a “gamer” would do a serious injustice to those hardcore cyber-warriors who are universally recognized for their pale complexion and calloused thumbs. But as someone who has spent many a windfall dollar at the local GameStop, foregone more than one sunny summer day hunched over a keyboard in a darkened room, and lives at least partially in a world where an 
Imagine the family vacation from hell.
This is the second of two installments which I pre-wrote for the Goth Chick Intern to gratefully post on my behalf.
For the next two weeks Mr. Goth Chick and I are out of town, for what will sound to everyone else like a really normal vacation. But you lot know better.