Michael Henrik Wynns skrivedagbok

[Michaelhe]

A light-hearted segment I made for my radio station

 

[Michaelhe]

 

[Michaelhe]

 

We all remember Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the movie version of Edward Albee's classic 1962 play Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf.

This short drama from a public information movie produced by a little known director called Alexander Hammid in 1954 achieves a little of the same effect, and does it so effectively, and with such a well delivered punchline at the end that I stripped the audio, and made it into an audio drama, so that it would become more clear.

I upload it under a creative commons license for everyone to use without attribution to Historyradio.org but you must attribute the original source. Also, I cut two didactic sentences at the end, which I took to be public information movie jargon.

[Michaelhe]

 

[Michaelhe]

“A Ghost Story”, by Michael Henrik Wynn
Flames flickered and spat in the night. You could see them from the road, and you also heard the laughter of the old men seated on stools around the fire. Above them the great starry sky stretched out, and the evening was chill and their breaths visible as they spoke. It was a comfort then that two of them had beer, and the third – the most hardened and eldest of the lot – had a small flask with stronger drink, which he cordially, on occasion, offered to the others.
“Have you heard that dear Jenny saw the ghost of John?” said old Peter, his animated wrinkles appeared deeper in the shifting light, as he placed a log in the fire.
“You’re kidding!” said Frank. “She has finally gone nuts?”
“I am not sure about that.”
“How did John die, I thought it was nothing, natural causes”
“Well, it may appear normal to you, and perhaps it was. But I can tell you that even what is normal is, in reality, not.” He looked at Edward and Frank, and furrowed his brows.
“What are you jabbing about? He was on his way to do something in the city, there was nothing unusual. You are full of crap”
Old Peter sighed, rubbed his hands and began:
“I talked to John that day, he was making Christmas dinner, but had forgotten to buy stuffing. And he was very worried.”
“So what” said Edward.
“And his sons were coming, and he had forgotten to ask them to bring his fishing rod. That rod was the dearest thing that John had. It was given to him by his own father, who never got time to teach him how to fish properly. But John kept on to that rod thinking it was all he had left when his father died, and that one day he was going to take his own sons fishing with it and teach them how to use it properly. But they had just placed it in the attic. And now, John had finally decided that this Christmas he would teach them all the things that his own father never had time to teach him. And he was going to ask them to bring it. Yet he forgot”.
“We all knew he was in poor health, what does this have to do with anything?”
“I am getting to that. These things put a strain on your mind, you see. Jenny had just got back from her sister's the week he died, and she said he was going through the drawer looking for something, but she never found out what it was. But he searched and searched, and opened an emptied several closets, and placed the clothing on the table before checking in every pocket. Then he discovered an old book, and realized that it had not been returned to the library, and that there might be charges unless he returned it by Friday.
“I think you need to get to the point very soon,” said Edward and offered Peter a beer, which he accepted without hesitation.
“John had just hired a workman when he died, and this expense he had planned to deduct in his tax return, as it was linked to his small business. But in order to do that he needed to ask for receipts, which he hadn’t done. So he ran over to their office that evening in the rain. Of course, he was so agitated that he didn’t bring either a plastic bag, an umbrella or a rain coat, and when he was back his receipts had been drenched and the water had made all the numbers illegible, and since it was a weekend he was planning to get it done next week. But of course, he was dead by then.
He had also begun on a new project in the garden. There was a wall he wanted to remove, as the brickwork was crumbling, and there was moss growing, which he said attracted insects and needed to be removed. This he was going to start the following month, after he and Jenny had returned from their cruise”
“They were going on a cruise? Jenny never mentioned this?”
“Yes, they had invested a fortune in those tickets. But Jenny has been so devastated by John’s funeral that she never cared about the financial loss from those non-refundable tickets. She was in no mood to go anywhere on her own. None of the children could go. And I don’t think Jenny thought much about this.”
“I thought you were going to tell us some ghost story?”
“Yes, the week-end John died there was a strange and mysterious fog. It had drifted down from the mountains, and then just settled. Jenny said she had never seen him as agitated as he was that Saturday, and he was going over taxes and books, and was muttering numbers. Then suddenly, he looked up from his desk as if he had remembered something, put on his coat and left. Jenny saw him melting into the fog from the upstairs window. He was extremely distraught”.
“He didn’t kill himself? Are you saying he died of a heart attack?
“Not really, he returned an hour later, and then they went to bed as usual.
“So he died in his sleep, peacefully?”
“No, he woke next morning, brushed his teeth and began pouring water into the tub. Jenny said she was going to join him, and when he turned to pick up a coin that he had dropped on the floor, he stepped on a bar of soap, and somehow he then hit his head on the marble sink, and Jenny found him unconscious when she arrived.”
“So he died from an accident?”
“Accident yes, but it was not the fall that killed him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jenny called the ambulance and he was rushed to the hospital, they concluded that while he had bad concussion, he was OK to leave after they had checked him out.”
“Why are you telling us all this?”
“I am getting to that. As they were leaving the hospital, they crossed the road to the parking lot and then Jenny looks at him and says she has forgotten her purse. John then he says he would get it, turns and steps into the road..and that is when the bus hit him. He died instantly.”
“Where does this ghost enter into to this drivel?” said Frank.
“It was last Friday, just after the funeral. The moon was clear and full that evening and the air was absolutely still. Jenny had seated herself in a rocking chair by the window, and cried. She had looked at old photos, and her mind was overwhelmed by memories of those years that they had spent together. And she remembered what a kind man he had been, and how he had never yelled at her or even raised his voice. And the great compassion with which he had treated everyone in his life. Then she had climbed the stairs to their bedroom, walked over to the bed. Then she heard a noise, which distracted her for a moment. Suddenly, she felt someone nearby, a hand on her shoulder and she turned. She said he looked just as he had always looked. She was so happy she teared up.
“But what did he want? Did he say anything?”
“He had returned, he said, to remind her to pay the gas bill.”
“The gas bill!” Edward laughed. He glanced at Frank, who was smiling. “You mean to tell us that he returned from the grave because he forgot to pay his bills?”
“Edward,” old Peter said and sipped from his flask, “that is why all ghosts return to the land of the living.”

[Michaelhe]

 

Many of the early westerners who traveled in Asia were both great story tellers as well as folklorists. One of these was Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904). In this segment, I use an AI voice and some sound effects to bring you his absolutely fantastic retelling of an ancient Chinese legend: “The Soul of the Great Bell”. The story is a little over the top, and I had great fun building on this.  
Historyradio.org is a free educational net radio stream available 24/7 online and in phone apps.

 

 

[Michaelhe]

About the - hopefully temporary - trade war with the US

Since I am so incredibly attractive and virile, most people do not realize that I am not a young man. That means that I had some experience in life, for good or bad, which may have taught me lessons that may be beneficial or rubbish.
In the early days of the internet, while i was unemployed, I began a small search engine project indexing various educational audio and video by means of a rebuilt phpdig script. Of course, back then the files were not at youtube, but in real media format etc in the websites.
That meant that I had to provide the CPU power to run the indexing script and the storage for data huge MYSQL database, which i couldn't afford. I hired an indian programmer online for basically nothing, and in the end it looked OK, but was both slow, required a lot of time consuming manual editing and tiresome. So I dropped it to become a movie blogger.
Fast forward to our present day. I saw the farewell adress by Biden, and I thought what he is saying is actually very true. All the It companies are centralized in California. Now, while California is a mythical and probably a nice place, there are some of us who think that there should be more than one brand of corn flakes in the world. This is a matter of principle. So in my mind I sketched out a small search interface, which today can be built in JavaScript and html, and rely on third party services. This is my project now. It is a search interface in which i combine the European alternatives to the large American companies. You can see that both in terms of functionality and content there isn't much that Europe does not have. The reason is that the content is not owned by google, it is owned by the consumer and the large museums and libraries. Google is a content organizer in a sense.

https://search-europe.org

When you click this you will be redirected to a temporary site, where I have the interface, while some name server issues are sorted out. I think people might be comforted to know this now that there some sort of trade war with the US. Note: this is made for a desktop, it is not mobile ready yet, even if you can access it on a phone. I haven't tested it on phones. So, it may look worse. I will fix that when the functionality is set. 

Endret fredag kl 11:04 av Michaelhe