The subject of How to turn people to stone was brought once more to mind by a recent infestation of gorgons here at Heaven On Earth, which wouldn’t nearly be as annoying if it weren’t for how hard it is to convince an exterminator to come in and take care of things, no matter how much you tell them you are willing to spend or give them, plus they expect the homeowner to do all the hard work beforehand of setting up the system of mirrors and sign insurance riders and I don’t know exactly what all else, so they could just traipse on in and put in their ten minutes of work and get paid for doing the whole job. I was thinking that it was such a waste with evil villains who would pay good money to get access to a real honest-to-goodness stone gazing gorgon to help out in whatever caper they were up to, but since the things are so nasty (and it’s a lie if anyone tells you that they’re actually easy to tame, trust me) that to try to make this work would be such an incredible hassle of its own that it seems totally to not be worth the effort. That’s why people who have actual lives to live go in for petrifaction beams and potions instead for their turning to stone needs, which we talk a little bit more about in the revised article, check it out.

Capella

From ancient times, the human virgin has played an important role as sacrificial payment to a god or some other potentate and as magical energy source for both mortal and immortal villains. In addition to their sacrificial role for supplicating various evil deities, it turns out that there are certain other areas of demand, including unicorn hunting and olive oil production. Neglected, for the most part, by “legitimate” commerce, the virgin trade is a lucrative line of business for a a great many unscrupulous evildoer operations ranging in size from local to multinational. High in value but also highly perishable, virgins need to be processed with special considerations in order to maintain product quality all the way to the enduser. The latest article here is devoted to the maximization of profit through astute management of the virgin supply chain according to the most modern techniques.

Veeper

Recently we were reminded of the difficulty of making the screams cease when an acquaintance of ours, a ghoul with numerous successful misdeeds on his ledger, began to complain of a certain listlessness especially after meals. He was checked for organic problems and given a clean bill of health (as he was the sort who mainly kept his vices to the execution of his trade) and so his torpor was unexpected for a person of his relative youth. Some investigation including recording of his nighttime habits revealed that he was tossing and turning all night long, accounting for the disarray of the bedchamber every morning, evidently in some measure of distress all on an unconscious level. What might have caused this to come out now, after a healthy career of torture, execution, and mayhem? It so happened it had something to do with a curious artifact that found its way into the fellow’s possession, an innocent-looking item which on closer inspection proved to be of alien origin and proved to be somewhat troublesome to rid the sufferer of in a safe manner. I have it on good authority that the individual is now free of sleep troubles caused by imagined voices, and has traded that whole episode of his life for one in which he finds himself under some compulsion to travel around this region of the galaxy, far from the site of his original deeds.

Grinning Skull (friendfeed)

At the lair we have all our favorite stories about housing random transients, loathsome guests, bedbugs, freaks, degenerates, and lying sacks of trash over the years, now and then with a vivid detail that sort of sums up what if anything was memorable about the time they took up space here. Which makes us perfect authorities obviously on How to run a hotel, no matter what anyone says to the contrary, seeing as how we even went and talked to some actual shady innkeepers of our acquaintance about their complaints (which they were more than willing to describe at some length) and about the things they are having problems with (which required a little more persuasion on our part, for sure) and incorporated these completely seamlessly with our own observations on how to set your guest rooms up, on what kinds of monsters to use as staff, and what kind of liquor to stock behind the front desk, which are the kind of things that you just cannot come up with all on your own without some kind of real experience, right? But still we wanted to make it not too specific on what kind of rotten dealings were supposed to be going on behind the facade and all, we wanted to do it up in a way that the skull guy kept calling “generic” and so “generic” is what was put down all right, with just those little touches that you need to have to keep your reader from passing out out of boredom (that’s what I kept saying) or flipping to some other article here maybe or even going to some other website on the subject, not that I know of any. Okay so make of it what you will make of it, I did all I could, whatever.

Capella

Here is a list of things we have learned about apes in the past year or so since we have visited the subject of How to get apes to accept you as their leader

1. Primates can be darn fast when they care to be.
2. They are easily distracted with a favorite food treat, but only for a few minutes.
3. Gorillas are not the best when it comes to piloting a vessel.
4. It is worse than useless giving a chimp full access to the Internet.
5. You can lead an orangutan to water, but what happens after that is anyone’s guess.
6. Argh, gibbons! Gibbons, gibbons, gibbons!

None of which really enter into that article’s rewrite, but it may be that this is just as well. Hope you guys get something out of this.

Veeper