“We counted 964 stab wounds.”

John bent over and examined the corpse. He asked, “Did you find a cell phone on him?”

The detective nodded.

“Okay. Way I figure it, the first thing you do in a case like this is figure out whether the guy deserved it. For instance, I was at a movie last weekend and an hour into the film, the asshole in front of me pulls out his cell phone and makes a call. You understand what I’m sayin’? It’s not like he forgot about his phone and it rang. He actually pulled it out and dialed the number. ‘Franky? It’s me. Yeah, I’m watchin’ that Superman movie…’ I mean, I can see stabbin’ that guy a thousand times, no problem. This guy’s phone, was it crammed up his anus? Because if it was I’m thinking this may be the same guy.”

I closed my eyes and ran my hand through my hair.

“Look,” I said, through a sigh, “they called us here for a reason.”

“That’s right,” said the man in the lab coat, speaking for the first time. “Dr. Boren, we are convinced, was killed because of his experiments. He was shunned by the scientific community as a madman. But we believe the work he was doing, though grotesque, was… evolutionary.”

“That’s more like it,” I said. “Who else was in the building this morning?”

“Just his daughter, Rachel. She also was his lab assistant. Oh, here she comes now.”

I pictured a small, studious type with short cropped hair and glasses riding the bridge of her nose. I could not have expected the vision of sensual womanhood that appeared in the doorway.

Titties. Titties, round and bouncy like the fruit of a titty bush. Rachel strode tittily through the door, shrugging her mane of chestnut hair in a cascade of curls that fell gently over her titties, like a cool flow of water over titties.

“Titties,” said the detective. Or at least, that’s what I heard. “Titties, titties titties. Titties, titties titties titties.”

John leaned over, whispering into my ear. “Titties. Titties titties titties titties titties titties titties. Titties?”

I grabbed a clipboard off the counter and held it in front of my crotch to hide my bulging erection.

“I’m John,” said John, making no effort to hide the engorged manhood that stood upright like the stiff branch of an erection tree.

“And I’m David.”

“Whoops,” said John, from behind me, a smarmy lilt in his voice. “My pants seem to have fallen off.”

I gritted my teeth.

Bastard.

I love crap like this. By “this” I mean this short video about the “Amen Break,” a six-second bit of drums that can be heard in half the damned rap songs ever made, even today, stolen from an obscure 1969 B-side that otherwise nobody had heard of. This one band, long-forgotten, in a song even they have likely forgotten, laid down what turned out to be one of the most-heard snatches of music in human history. This is the story.

So I don’t have the $500 to spend on Microsoft’s Office suite, and compose everything on Open Office. This is the free open-source word processor and it works as well as can be expected (yes, I wrote and formatted the book version of JDatE on it). One feature of Open Office is its “auto-complete” system that detects when you’re about to type certain words and goes ahead and fills in the rest to save you some keystrokes. So when you start to type the word “motivate” in Open Office, autocomplete gives you:

How do I put myself into horror-writing mode after a long day of doodling cartoon penises on my desk pad at work? By thinking about things like the Thunderbird photo.

The deal is, way back in the western days the press used to print even more bullshit than they do now. One example was the story of a bunch of gunslingers who claimed to have shot down a gigantic 100 foot-long reptillian bird monster. The story ran in a local newspaper, then other newspapers nationwide and then was reprinted dozens of times in “Amazing Stories” type magazines in the 60’s, when that stuff was popular. You can find lots of people who remember seeing the articles and everyone remembers seeing the photo along with it. It showed the carcass of the huge monster pinned to a wall, with several guys standing in front of it, arms outstretched, fingertip to fingertip, to demonstrate how huge the thing is. The photo is famous.

Also, it doesn’t exist. You pull up the archives of those magazines, and even the original newspaper, and it just isn’t there. Or anywhere else. The articles are there, minus the photo. And yet, thousands of people say they saw it, and all remember it the same way.

In the daytime, I think it’s a pretty cool example of peer influence on experience and the fallibility of collective memory. At night, when it’s quiet and I’m alone, I have different ideas.

If you’re easily creeped out and want something to clear that from your memory, try this. You’ll need sound.