Obviously, I’m not the only person with a vendetta against New York City. The Rotten Apple has been destroyed so many damn times in film, it’s not even funny - but here, courtesy of Gawker.com, are 15 different ways New York City’s been destroyed.

Personally, I’ve always liked the destruction in Cloverfield and The Day After Tomorrow the best. The “American Godzilla” was just embarrassing. New York City deserves a much higher class of giant monster than that ludicrous oversized Tyrannosaur.

I am positively obsessed with the movie Ghostbusters. So, naturally, when the movie eventually became the cartoon The Real Ghostbusters, I was glued to the television every damn Saturday when it came on.

And then one day…out of nowhere…what the hell is THIS? I had just turned on the cartoon and…did that guy named “Clark Ashton” just say “Necronomicon”? He sure as hell did! And thus begins “The Collect Call of Cathulhu,” truly the best episode of The Real Ghostbusters EVER for its metric tonne of Lovecraftian references.

Below you’ll find the entire episode split into three separate YouTube videos. Keep your eyes and ears peeled for shoggoths, spawn of Cthulhu, Weird Tales, the Book of Dzyan (mispronounced as “The Book of DYzan”), the Pnakotic Manuscripts, and many other HPL/”Cthulhu Mythos” references. The episode was written by Michael Reaves, who may be familiar to Lovecraft afficionados for his work co-editing the HPL-meets-Sherlock-Holmes anthology Shadows Over Baker Street, a generally sub-par collection which every cephalophile must nonetheless have in his/her/its library for Neil Gaiman’s amazing story “A Study in Emerald” (available as a downloadable PDF at the preceding link).

Anyway, on with the Ghostbusters VS. Cthulhu action!

Needless to say, this episode of The Real Ghostbusters has been lurking in the back of my mind as I’ve been writing “City of Pillars.” Particularly perceptive readers may spot quite a few references to this cartoon in the story…especially the next two chapters, which I’ll have online this Friday. In the meantime, I hope this bit of eldritch humour has whetted your appetite for Lovecraftian monsters destroying New York (or, well, attempting to) while I’m still beating these goddamned words together!

You may wonder why I’m posting a link to a video of Henry Miller, author Tropic of Cancer, The Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy, et. al. on a site dedicated to science fiction and horror. Though they were practically contemporaries (Miller was a year younger than HPL), H. P. Lovecraft would’ve utterly hated Henry Miller—he would’ve loathed Miller’s writing, and would’ve thought him nothing more than a louche, unlettered lout.

But Henry Miller’s writing has, oddly enough, had a big impact on mine. The unrepentant bitterness of his words, as well as their venomous humor, suits my pallet just fine. In fact, I don’t think I could ever match Henry Miller’s above description of that seething hell that is New York City. I’m sure were Mr. Miller alive today, he’d be rooting for the Other Gods as he’s reading “City of Pillars.”

Okay. We’re back! Weird Server Problems are gone and everything’s working again, or so it seems.

Much like R’lyeh itself, or Joan Crawford, Footnotes to the Human Species is slowly, painfully, rising from the grave.

What happened to the site? Well…I’m not sure. Immediately after I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1, I started running into problems editing posted content and, even worse, posting new content. A number of chapters from “City of Pillars” were posted truncated, with half the damn text missing! I contacted my web hosting company, 1and1.com, and they couldn’t find anything wrong with their MySQL databases or with my hosting platform.

So, I simply decided to wipe the site and rebuild it. After all, I’ve kept voluminous backups of the site’s database. All I’d need to do is reinstall wordpress, do some tweaking here and there, and everything would be hunky-dory again, right?

Nope. Nyet. Nein.

Let’s just say that this is the fifth time I’ve created a new MySQL database and reinstalled WP 2.5.1 in the past two/three days. I’ll spare you the exceedingly strange details, but…suffice to say, I believe we are now back on track, and I promise each and every one of you loyal readers that this won’t happen again. Unless, of course, a shoggoth gets loose in 1and1.com’s server farm again. *Shrug*

At any rate, please be patient: it’s going to take a little while to get everything back to where it was…so as new versions of “City of Pillars” chapters reappear, please take the time to read them again, as many of them have been HEAVILY edited to add much needed characterization, a little more eldritch detail, and more obscure allusions to elements in American history, Lovecraft’s fiction, and even John Carpenter’s The Thing! I’m thinking of launching a Footnotes to the Human Species Guess That Allusion contest: the person who correctly identifies the most obscure textual allusions in each chapter of “City of Pillars” will win an autographed doodle of one of the giant transdimensional monsters that destroy Manhattan! (No, really, I’m serious here.)

Furthermore, in times to come, look for Footnotes to begin hosting “gallery exhibits” of contemporary Lovecraftian art in conjunction with DeviantArt and various other online portfolios. I figure hey, after reading a giant chunk of my text, what’s better to massage away the eyestrain than some awesome pictures of tentacles and ruined cities and surreal alien landscapes?

I want to personally thank each and every one of y’all who emailed me asking about the site—I think I’ve replied to yinz, but if I didn’t, it’s just because I’ve really been juggling a lot of stuff this week. Damned futile jobsearch. If it weren’t for writing this Lovecraftian claptrap, I’d be going absolutely mad with boredom and defeatism….

So, that’s enough for now. It’s 0420 EST, so even my nocturnal ass needs to get to bed. I’ll keep you posted on how the site rebuild is going, and should probably have everything back up and running by tomorrow evening!

Take care and, as always, Iä!

NOTE: 6-8-2008: Still having posting problems.