Of course, by the time collective humidity-madness had finally driven all of us at the Home Office around the bend, it turned out that the Great Shvitz was about to finally let up and some distinctly autumnal breezes have been wafting -- that's right, we said wafting -- through our neck of the woods.

We regret the foray into horrible ranting about, of all things, the weather. As recompense, links to two other horrors. One is about "horror." The other is, unfortunately, absolutely horrible.

• News of a new, gay-themed adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's story The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Regular readers may recall the Wombat P.O.V. on Lovecraft from earlier this year. Retrofitting the story -- which at bottom has a considerable foundation in Lovecraft's phobias about race mixing -- with the idea that the town represents a gay-hostile heritage the protagonist must face down is interesting, but so vaguely outlined in the linked article that I sincerely hope the filmmakers have a clearer idea of what they're about than is expressed here.
• First of all, I should mention that the link to this East Bay Express article contains some disturbing images and very graphic language. Click at your own risk. But the story is worth knowing about: Apparently there are soldiers in Iraq trading digital photos of war dead (Iraqi dead, that is), for access to amateur pr0n from a site with a charming URL that is more or less NowThatsF*dUp.com. The site posts the gore and shares the porn. It's like some kind of filthy-minded version of Iran-Contra.

  The author of the article gets significantly overheated about this, and the editor has appended a subtitle that claims, weirdly, that this "makes Abu Ghraib look like kid stuff." I don't quite get that, but the whole shebang is pretty nasty nevertheless; there's a gloating quality in the combination of pictures and soldier-supplied captions that's fundamentally nauseating here, and goes beyond gallows humor. It'll be interesting to see if this goes anywhere in the press besides truly lefty advocacy papers.