December 2010 One-Off and a Review from Sandra

Welcome to the December  2010 Issue of 10Flash Quarterly.

More good stuff this month.  First, a new One-Off story by Charles Thiesen.  Charles is author of the very funny Artie “The Angel” DeAngelo crime caper stories that have appeared  in the 2010 issues of 10Flash.  Joke Shop isn’t an Artie story, but it offers more of Charles’ wonderfully off-kilter humor, as he takes a look at how jokes get spread around.

And Sandra Odell explores the goodness of geekdom and reality television, as she reviews  Hollywood Treasures from the Sy’Fy Channel.

K.C. and Jude Marie

Joke Shop

crime caper by Charles Thiesen

My office is in Boston, on the corner of Boylston and Berkley. The building is home to a lot of private dicks — gigolos and detectives both. The halls smell of gun oil, shoe leather, and used latex. I never breathe between the elevator and my desk.

The answering machine was blinking like it had  come out of a tunnel. It was a job, thank god. Since I read about hungry arctic explorers who ate their boots, I’d been eying my shoulder holster.

The message summoned me to the home of Llewellyn Lowell Lawrence XI in Brookline. A butler led me to the solarium. It was hot and green enough to be a jungle, but too pretty.

A voice came from behind a clump of pink and orange flowers — if you saw them on a shirt, you’d ralph. “You fancy orchids, sir?”

[click the title for the whole story]

Geekish Treasures

a review by Sandra Odell, Feature Editor

Midweek, late night.  What’s on TV?

*click*  No . . . *click*  No . . . *click*  No . . . *click*, *click*, *click* . . . 7,000 channels and nothing good . . . *click* . . . hmmm . . . HOLLYWOOD TREASURES on the SyFy Channel.  Looks promising.

I am a self-professed geek, hard to believe, I know.  I married a geek who prides himself on a certain level of geek cred, that elusive combination of OCD, and pipe dreams that fuels the fire of behind the scenes genre aficionados around the world.  HOLLYWOOD TREASURES is the SyFy Channel’s bid to capture the market share of such geekish attention with a look at the high-end collector scene.

[click the title for the whole story]