Hiya Skeleton Crew,

I was gonna start this email by sayin, “Wow, it’s already the last week of October! Time really does fly, don’t it?” But then I noticed that actually it’s only the SECOND-to-last week of October.

So I guess the lesson here’s that time ... goes at about the appropriate rate that ya’d normally expect?

Trivia 1

What do last week’s themie answers hafta do with each other? They’re the titles of works of fiction—the movie Underworld & the Twilight series—what’ve got vampires & werewolves fighting each other!

Another supernatural series that features vampires & werewolves (or “Weres”) is the Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris. The series actually goes by a coupla different names, though: sometimes they’re called the Sookie Stackhouse Novels’cause that’s the name of the title character it follows; probably most common nowadays is what name that’s I guess ya’d call it a retronym that comes from the teevee series the books were the basis for?

Trivia 2

Wikipedia says how some folks think Underwold is Don DeLillo’s magnum opus. I ain’t qualified to disagree on that, but maybe I’d venture that his BEST KNOWN work is White Noise, which follows a year in the life of a professor at a li’l liberal arts college.

The second part of White Noise features a rail car accident that leaks a buncha nasty stuff called Nyodene Derivative into the environment. This accident gets referred to by what three-word term that names this section of the novel—& also an indie rock band that’s fronted by Mikel Jollett with the single “Sometime Around Midnight”?