<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=2X0Kgd_0wJUoXf100" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=2X0Kgd_0wJUoXf100" width="1024" height="768" ></figure><h2>Christmas arches come early this year</h2>What a time to be alive! Dodgers dispatched the Mets, destroying Gotham’s dream of a subway series but greatly pleasing the fat cats at FOX and Major League Baseball. FOX will be airing the epic meeting of the Dodgers and the Yankees starting Friday at 5:08 p.m.Happily, the games are free to watch, unlike the series with the Mets, which my wife and I watched on a Spanish-language channel, finding it in many ways more enjoyable than listening to the usual nonstop prattle on domestic channels.Speaking of prattling, want me to tell you the story about when my dad took me to game four of the 1963 World Series when the Dodgers swept the Yanks? I’ll spare you. Look it up.At the deciding game’s conclusion Tuesday night, the neighborhood fairly exploded with fireworks and other noisemakers.It was like a war zone, of course.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=0DA7li_0wJUoXf100" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=0DA7li_0wJUoXf100" width="2000" height="1000" ></figure><h2>Giant skeletons, now with eyes!</h2>Not only do we have the Series coming up, we’re deep into Halloween season, sometimes known as the Gateway to Christmas. Many folks in my neighborhood, which is the birthplace of the now-ubiquitous Christmas arches, have set up their arches early for Halloween and festooned them with orange and purple lights, which is fine (I guess), but they’re likely to be transformed back into Christmas arches way too early in November.Also closing in on meriting the term ubiquitous are the 12-foot skeletons that debuted at Home Depot just four years ago. An updated version with spooky illuminated eyes and a jack-o-lantern head is available this year for $379. That’s too much for something that doesn’t scare me anymore.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=1KR8iH_0wJUoXf100" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=1KR8iH_0wJUoXf100" width="1024" height="683" ></figure><h2>House haunt</h2>Want to skip all the Halloween decorations and instead just go ahead and buy what certainly looks like a haunted house to me?A somewhat Gothic home at 3702 E. First St. in Belmont Heights has been on the market for a couple of months, listed at $2.2 million.The three-bedroom, two-bath, 2,670-square-foot house is a work of art, arguably excessively so. It’s certainly ornate and opulent, wth an interior making ample use of marble, onyx, crystal, Gothic dragons and stained glass as well as custom carvings.A couple of other assets are frighteningly haunted curb appeal and, for relaxation and meditation, a 400-square-foot koi pond with a fountain and 18 mature koi.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=010Ti3_0wJUoXf100" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=010Ti3_0wJUoXf100" width="540" height="338" ></figure>I gave “The Plot,” a novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz a try in anticipation of reading its follow-up, “The Sequel.” I’ve never felt the obligation to finish a book if I can’t bring myself to struggle through to the end. I dropped “The Plot” 80 percent into it when I no longer cared at all about the “protagonist” (if you can call him that) author or his wife or the “antagonist” who is accusing the writer of plagiarism. The author’s stolen story is interspersed throughout, and I didn’t care about that, either.So I swung over to a jewel of a book, “Small Things Like These,” a brisk (at just 116 pages) and frightening story about Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, a group of homes for “fallen women,” which included prostitutes as well as orphans and abandoned girls who were treated with brutal inhumanity by their Catholic nun overseers while tacitly accepted and ignored by their surrounding communities throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.“Small Things Like These” tells the story of one man, Bill Furlong, a coal and lumber merchant, who stumbles upon the treatment of the girls and, despite the protests of his wife and the surrounding Catholic community to keep his mouth shut and mind his own business, nevertheless intervenes.It’s an ultimately uplifting story of bravery and redemption interwoven with sadness and revulsion. A movie by the same name, starring Cillian Murphy, who won an Academy Award for his starring role in “Oppenheimer,” has recently been released.I also embarked on a reading of Jonathan Harr’s 1995 book “A Civil Action,” about a water contamination case in Woburn, Massachusetts in the 1980s. I didn’t get far into it before I jumped over to the play-at-home version by watching the excellent 1998 film based on the book (with the same title) with an amazing cast that includes John Travolta in the lead, with RobertDuvall, John Lithgow, William H. Macy and James Gandolfini. Book or film, either way, you can’t lose.</div></body>

Mountain View, CA

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What a time to be alive! Dodgers dispatched the Mets, destroying Gotham’s dream of a subway series but greatly pleasing the fat cats at FOX and Major League Baseball. FOX will be airing the epic meeting of the Dodgers and the Yankees starting Friday at 5:08 p.m. Happily, the...

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