greg willis

Enough of all this destruction! This weekend Matt and Dawn -- from H's side of the family -- came over and Matt spent most of the time constructing our new deck. I have to say, it was nice to have someone who actually knows what they are doing work on the house.

And have no doubts, I didn't help in the least. Matt does this for a living, and the last thing that he needed was someone like me --

So I worked on removing more of the deck today. It is now three-quarters dismantled, with six contractor bags full of decking and a fair bit of cut-up lumber to be set out Wednesday for the trash. I'll finish the last bit later this week, just in time for the new deck to be constructed next weekend.

And there's a little video. I've hacked my little Canon PowerShot SD870 IS (details here) and one of the new things that it can do is time-lapse photos. I then use Quicktime to turn the photos into a movie. This is one of my first attempts, so I screwed it up a bit -- I still had the photo size set to 'huge' so the memory card filled up far before I finished. But you still get the general feel of me slicing up the deck, and you are spared the sweaty, slow, and old Greg that I turned into later in the process.

Now who would represent that freshman English word dichotomy more than Dr Jeckle and Mr Hyde (ex-wives excepted)? A good Victorian subtitle might be "Wherein the Doctor Made Himself the Monster, Thus Reducing the Cast By One."

And for all the monster richness expressed by Mr Hyde (no advanced degree for him, nosiree), this story is often boiled down to psychology. But I will point out the fact that

Sometimes the biggest improvement can come from destruction.

So we're replacing the deck in our backyard. It's not much of a deck -- a whopping two feet off of the ground, not high enough to need a railing. And structurally there's really not much wrong with it. But it's painted, not stained. And painted gray, at that. Add that to the heaps of biomass (pollen strands, bark, leaves, acorns, and the occasional branch or two) that the huge nearby oak tree dumps onto it throughout the year and you get a dirty deck.

"Clean it!" You say. "Powerwash the mother!" You insist. (You're getting a bit pushy, to tell the truth, but I'm not gonna say anything.) But if we powerwash it,

Oh scientists, why must you be an essential part of almost every classic monster tale. The crypto-zoologists of King Kong and Creature from the Black lagoon, the crypto-biologist in The Werewolf of London, the the nuclear engineers in Godzilla, the Egyptologists in The Mummy, and the home-brewing physician in Dr Jeckle and Mr Hyde.

I wasn't a very sharp kid. I didn't get the sexual overtones in the Dracula story until much later. Like all the other monsters, Dracula had to get the girl. But for Dracula the girl was not just a snappy accessory to carry around while being chased by angry villagers, by angry city folks, by concerned scientists, or by a well-equipped military. For him it was about getting the girl to follow him. And did I suspect anything else was up

Godzilla is the one of the only traditional film monsters who does not go after the girl. He directs his anger, rightly so, at the society in general. He's helped in this, of course, by being super-sized for a monster. If the Wolfman went at society, he would need at least a crowbar. Godzilla dispatches a train or a building just by now looking where he's going. So as far as any relationship with a woman, he might have serious difficulty in just picking one out of the fleeing crowd.

In a deeper reading of Godzilla,

Poor Hunchback. Of all my monster models, he was the one I cared about least. Much like The Phantom of the Opera, neither my friends nor I had ever actually seen the movie.

And the similarities with Phantom keep going:

• More melodrama than horror
• set in Paris (not universally known to be creepy)
• featuring a disfigured human with a very narrow skill set
• who is persecuted for his abnormality
• whose revenge includes stealing the girl

But unlike Phantom, the hunchback