Erin Bee @erinbee@gorgon.city

The reason I learned this, is that I had bought a few sticks because I wanted a tall, thin plant to fill in some space beside the sink on the bathroom counter. Now every time I go in there, I'm amused at (technically) asparagus in a room where people pee. The plant lady version of a Blink 182 song.

What in the Chuck Tingle's Avatar is going on with this week's episode of Lower Decks?

Even though the Winchester Mystery House wasn't a thing yet when Dracula was written, I immediately thought it'd be a great setting for a vampire hunt when Quincey suggested bringing brand name rifles.

Google "Velma" and wait a second. Trust me.

Dracaena: a more sustainable, plant-based Dracula. (Unfortunately hetero.)

TIL that "lucky bamboo" isn't true bamboo at all — it's in the same family as asparagus, Asparagaceae. (Bamboo is in the family Poaceae with grasses.)

The drugstore has the Wet n' Wild Halloween display stand out and there isn't even a spot for the glow in the dark nail polish, which feels like an insult.

The Aerated Bread Company's hygienic method of making bread (with the claim it contains more gluten than yeast bread!) and their chain of bakeries/teahouses definitely fits in with what I expect to hear about Victorian food, ideas of hygiene/health, and public spaces. It's just that the characters of my youth were so constrained, they would never be near such a place.

Since girls' fiction set in the 19th century is either focused on the home or frontier/rural self reliance, that was my early experience with thinking about the 1800s. Even though I know much better now, reading about cities gives me a reflexive reaction at my core: Wait a sec, Jonathan Harker is taking tea at a chain restaurant?

Two things about Bram Stoker:

- his wife was known as the most beautiful woman in Ireland

- he packed up his family to go to London to be a business manager for an actor he admired

Two relationship themes in Dracula:

- if you don't pay attention to your girl, someone else will

- you can have a healthy relationship with a woman or you can have homoerotic Scooby Doo adventures with your boys that you keep hidden from her, you can't have both

If nobody yells "Blow spiders!" in next year's Renfield movie, I'll be very disappointed.

All the scantily costumed babes thinking they might get the hot Halloween they always wanted, but at what cost?

It's October 1st and I'm wearing sandals; this is unnatural.

🎵 Maya Angelou is a party dude

There's a park in Meleb, Manitoba (that Google maps wisely abbreviates at M.P.C. Reunion Park), named after the first three schools in the area, Meleb, Park, and Cumming. There's a statue of mushrooms in the park and even though there isn't much they can do, the tourism board really needs to work on their phrasing

I wonder how often people from Gimli, Manitoba have to hear "Like the dwarf?" and not want to say "No, like the mythical place foretold as the reward for the righteous survivors of Ragnarok."

(Which is also how the dwarf got his name because both have roots in the old Norse for "fire. Side note: I bet there are probably more named characters in Tolkien's works than there are people in Gimli, Manitoba.)