Girl By The Orange Sculpture & The 11:11 Bus

...also two shots of the Dan Ryan as I waited for the 87th Street bus. I saw the girl as I was getting the train at Fullerton, and the bus home was much later than usual. Usually, I come so so so close, the bus pulls in by Long John Silver's/A&W right on time, 11:07, every Monday night. This time, I was able to catch the dreaded 11:11 and we were only at the Damen/Beverly stop. Yay me. Turned out the bus was delayed because there was a shooting on Cottage Grove and squads had backed up traffic. The city after dark.

More McCallum

And shouldn't there always be more McCallum? Rich The Guy Who Won The Nebula Award commented previously about the OUTER LIMITS episode in which David McCallum was obsessed with clocks. I knew it was either OL or TWILIGHT ZONE. I do agree that his talents were much under-appreciated. Also, to show how far a writer will go to make a few cents, I'm posting the evidence of my writing articles for the David McCallum Observer, which was similar in content to the John Agar Newsletter, and it was a time when I thought getting contributor copies in addition to five or ten dollars was really out of this world. Oh, Robert Mitch Newsletter, where were you then? And why isn't there one even now? Well, thing is, I looked back at the photo of McCallum and the clocks. Maybe you can see where I'm going with this already. Look at the lower right hand side of the photo. See that one clock that reads...11:11? Son of a bitch.

Leading Up To My Nemesis

This was the first shot on the Cloud Gate role. The Transportation Building, where Eliot Ness and the Untouchables did their thing. In a way, Ness was/is a hero to me, though this feeling has faded with time. But, damn. Everything is lined up and the shadow is exactly what I was going for. Usually I am like Jerry Lewis with the camera. This is the best photo I've taken this year.

But there lies a story here, going back to 1987. Max Allen Collins' first novel, about Chicago P.I. Nate Heller. TRUE DETECTIVE. Initially a trilogy set around Capone and Frank Nitti, later Heller is involved with Amelia Earhart, The Black Dahlia, and even James Forrester and Roswell. All brilliant books. But here it is 1987, barely a year after I was cursed, and in that book, there are photos of the main characters. The photo of Eliot Ness is from 1932. Look at his watch. Yep. It is 11:11. Son of a--

SN 1572 & The Friday Night Four Sticks

Its that time again. Starts this way, I'm looking at Astronomy Photo Of the Day (APOD), and there's that top photo, the remnant of the Supernova of 1572 (which at one point had the luminosity of 200 full moons), and then it mentioned Tycho Brahe and his diary, I linked to that, and damn it all, first freaking sentence he writes mentions that he first saw the bright star on November 11th 1572. I mention that to Astronomer Louis and he pops back the the galaxy M 108 has a right ascenion of 11 hours and a declination of 11 minutes as of today, the spring equinox. It is a never ending hell. I googled more images, like last year when I found out that Black Label used to put out a malt called 11-11. This time out I typed in Eleven Eleven and then Four Sticks, the latter giving me the cycle license plate meant to drive Charles crazy, some crazy art exhibit in Calgary, and (though I have not posted an image), a California magazine called Eleven Eleven and I fully intend to mail (yes, you heard me, they accept only stories sent USPS so they must be Puritans!!!)I'll let you know how that goes. If I'm accepted, certainly that is my death knell. Well, by causing the Four Sticks curse on Louis he at least can find crazy astronomy lingo that shows 1111. I am think that perhaps what is needed is a Four Sticks constellation, but I suppose anybody can do that by looking at Gemini and shaking their head back and forth.

Howard Menger RIP on Venus

First off, let me tell you about my friend Louis, an astronomer in Albany. He overheard (kinda what you end up doing on Twitter) me and Sid discussing Four Sticks. Poor Louis, he wanted to know more, and sadly, he is now part of this horrible mess. He has sent me several 1111 photos in the last month. I feel for him, I do, because the Four Sticks will follow him around FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE. Anyhow. Howard Menger. I have way too much crazy shit in my head, and a lot of it involves UFOs and the books about them. Whenever the subject comes up--you know, like when I'm wearing my blood-spattered clown suit in the Skydeck of the Sears Tower--I'll point out that, whereas all the books in the 80s and 90s wanted to one up the last, the "contactees" of the 1950s were content to tell their stories without bashing the next guy. George Adamski, goofy polak that he was, started the whole "tall, blonde Fabio-looking dudes from Venus" thing, always meeting in the desert, I guess to keep that Fabio-bronze working. Then there was Howard Betherum, a guy whose last name screams "Make me an element!" There were others, even one guy I never heard of until today, Calvin Girvin, who met a guy from Venus named Cryxtan. Thanks, Internet, another name I'm stuck with now. Howard Menger died over a week ago, he didn't see his saucers in the desert, he saw them in central New Jersey, so yay for him. (Then again, the aliens from Saturn might have been street tough). I have an old pb of his book somewheres; sadly, I don't have the LP of the space music. Any chance I see one of these books from the 50s, I grab them up. The story's may seem far-fetched, but you get a glimpse of the lives people had two generations back, before airplanes filled the night skies and it seemed logical enough that you could walk down a street and see a glowing light in a field, my point there being that I can't walk ANYWHERE without seeing strip malls and four lane main streets. And, like I said, Menger would not have written of his story by making it more fantastical to make it sell because the space girl he met (space girls always accompanied the Fabios) had bigger boobies than the ones in the desert, and I always thought that was a cool thing. And now he has gone on to our sister planet and maybe, just maybe, if I tilt my head near the constellation of Leo, I might hear his music bopping out from the rings of Saturn. And if there was any single reason for me to riff on this dude tonight, it was because of his obituary from the NJ paper. I could only cut & paste, but here is the opening paragraph. Going back to Louis, man, I'm on that ride with you, let's keep those four sticks coming...

Howard Menger, 87, beloved husband, father, retired Army veteran of World War Two, business owner, inventor, author, speaker, and long time resident of Vero Beach, transitioned peacefully at 11:11 PM on Wednesday, February 25, 2009.

The Dread Four Sticks Curse Leads Me Down The Insanity Road

OF COURSE I'M INSANE. THE NUMBERS KEEP COMING UP AND NOW THEY ARE GROWING. If I start getting emails from "The Lincolnshire Poacher" (one of the few identified numbers station receivers), I'm getting out of town, brother.


Subject: Re: Numbers Stations
Date: 6/30/2008 11:11:11 P.M. Central Daylight Time
From: milesbennell@yahoo.com
Reply To:
To: Jonalgiers@aol.com
Sent from the Internet (Details)

Curse Of The Four Sticks, Redux

I've posted the shot of my royalty check before. I had scanned the time card from my old job a few months back, waiting for the eventual Four Sticks Curse to rear up again. At this point, though, not being at that particular job, I thought it might be a cool idea to include a bottle of 11-11 Malt Liquor. Yin and yang, good karma and bad. The reason I finally found a reason to post on the curse, the origin of which can be found by clicking my previous links below, is because, yes, the numbers have shown up again. This isn't a Hurley on LOST/numbers station listening post kinda thing going. In short, once someone is told about the Four Sticks, they will appear in your life when least expected. For no reason. Case in point, the following excerpt from an article I was using for research:



Grand jury lifting veil on unsolved mob hits
By Rick Jervis and Liam Ford, Tribune staff reporters. Tribune staff reporters Ray Gibson and Art Barnum contributed to this report

January 23, 2005

Joseph "the Clown" Lombardo was at a workbench in his small Near West Side shop, where masonry saws and tools are sharpened, when 10 federal agents swarmed in.

One agent waved a grand jury warrant, another carried a cotton swab. The agents dabbed the inside of Lombardo's mouth with the swab--gathering DNA--and were gone in less than two minutes.

Lombardo, a longtime Chicago Outfit leader who publicly swore off his mob ties after being released from prison in 1992, is one of more than a dozen mob bosses and associates who are subjects of a new federal probe into long-dormant mob murders, some dating as far back as three decades.

A federal grand jury is investigating at least 16 unsolved killings, making it one of the biggest law-enforcement strikes against organized crime in Chicago history. Sources close to the investigation--dubbed Operation Family Secrets--and attorneys for some of the alleged mob members say they expect the grand jury to hand up indictments as early as next month.

Convictions on this scale would be unprecedented. The Chicago Crime Commission counts 1,111 Chicago-area gangland slayings since 1919, but only 14 have ended in murder convictions and three cases were cleared when the suspected killers were murdered before being arrested, according to the commission.

Why not just say over a thousand? Why not round it off to Eleven hundred? ts because complete strangers are trying to drive me mad in the past, present, and very likely in the future, coming up with ways for the damnable sequence of ones to show up again and again...Wayne

Halcyon Days in Rogers Park, 1985

I received two pieces of mail today, both reminiscent of my days living in Rogers Park before moving back home after my father had brain surgery. I had three roommates, Douglas Klauba, Gary Krejca, and Rich Stergulz, all artists. I keep meaning to post a painting Rich--now living in California--had auctioned off for wildfire relief, but you can see his website on the blog links. Doug always found time from his immensely busy schedule to illustrate ANYTHING of mine for free. For the fun of it. Not because I had Kodak Land Camera photos from the Bukkake ClownFest of 1982. Peggy Nadramia of GRUE magazine wanted this little chapbook of my poems to send out to subscribers and I picked up a copy from Daniel Breen, who owns a bookstore in Chapel Hill, NC, for six bucks. I might grab a few more if Santa is good to me. The other thing, well...Gary Krejca caused me to become a victim of The Four Sticks. He called my attention to the VCR at 11:11 PM and from that point on, more often than not, any digital clock would be flashing the four sticks instead of, say 11:14. We still exchange Happy Four Sticks emails on Veterans Day. I get several royalty checks every that are for stories that go back almost fifteen years, so it doesn't matter how small they are, its for something I've done nothing for. Well, take a look at the amount on the check that came the same day as Suburbs. I have been waiting years for a check like that. Check your clocks, everybody. What time is it? (Nope, its NOT Bukkake Clown Time, that's the first Sunday of every week...) Wayne