I thought it would be fun to start a thread that people attending the festival could report on. After some stressful moments in travel preparations (a misplaced VISA card, getting lost in finding my airport due to roads closed from recent flooding), I finally made it first to Chicago and then on to Tarrytown. I had barely checked into my room when a letter was hand-delivered warning of impending strong storms, tornadoes, and possible flooding. The hotel lobby is very comfortable and feels a little like the hall of an old castle. Visited already with Teresa who was in the lobby sipping wine with her friend. Because of the threatening storm, I didn't go out to eat but had a wonderful penne pasta (with jumbo shrimp and fresh artichoke cooked in a wine broth) here at the hotel. Tomorrow I hope to spend some solitary time at Lyndhurst, providing all goes well; and would also like to investigate Tarrytown, though that is in the opposite direction. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Professor Stokes will be here and am looking forward to seeing her, Jimbo, and others. I've also just learned that there won't be any DS events here at the hotel other than the luncheon on Sunday. One thing I enjoyed at the other festivals I've attended was how you could watch DS episodes playing in one of the banquet rooms practically all night if you wanted, but that won't be the case this time.

"Häxan," a Swedish/Danish 1922 silent film, sometimes considered infamous, is airing now on TCM. The film tells the story of typical witchcraft cases in the Middle Ages.

Trivia about the film from imdb.com:

"The Swedish film censors required numerous cuts in the film, before authorizing its release. Among the censored scenes were the closeup of the finger being removed from the hanged man's hand, the trampling of the cross in the witch's sabbath scene, the shot of the oozing infant held over a cooking pot, a closeup of a woman's face while she is on a torture rack, closeups of several instruments of torture being employed, and a shot of a demon embracing a nude woman (all these shots have since been restored to the film)."

Speaking of photos, I came across this website recently about various restorations of the movie "Suspiria." There are some very close, closeups of Joan Bennett if you click on the small photos halfway down the main page:

http://whiggles.landofwhimsy.com/archives/dario_argento/

With this one, where she's holding the phone, you almost feel like you're in the same room with her - especially if you click a second time on the enlarged photo, which then expands even larger. It's like High-Definition:

http://whiggles.landofwhimsy.com/hdcaptures/suspiria15.jpg

This news may be in keeping with the spirit, though not the letter, of the guidelines for posting celebrity obituaries. Ingrid Pitt died two days before Thanksgiving, in London. I believe she has been mentioned in passing on this forum, both regarding her brief appearance in the classic "The Wicker Man," and in two vampire movies, "Vampire Lovers" and "Countess Dracula." "Vampire Lovers," directed by Roy Ward Baker, released in 1970, is loosely adapted from the vampire novella "Carmilla" by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/26/local/la-me-ingrid-pitt-20101125

I haven't been able to find the average running time for individual episodes (without commercials). Was it 21 minutes? 23 minutes?

I thought of trying to figure it out by the Running Time listed on the DVD packages, but that's confusing because there are bonus interviews, varying number of episodes on different sets, etc.

If I could find this out, I will do some math to figure out how long it would take to watch the entire series, from start to finish. It's been a dream of mine to be able to do this - if only I had unlimited time and funds! Just think, having 8 hours a day with no interruptions, obligations, work ... I wonder how long it would take to watch the entire series ...

Update to the above:
If my calculations are right, and if the average episode is 23 minutes, you could watch the entire series in only 58.7 days, if you watched for 8 hours per day!

I'm posting this personal experience to warn about the risk of keeping your important documents solely as electronic files. Even having a backup, like an external drive, is not fail-safe.

In my case, my important files included a lot of DS material, especially copies of discussions on this forum, and also various typed notes, photos, and other documents related to DS. All of these were saved on my computer hard drive and also on a Seagate external drive. My DS files were not the only documents involved, but a small part of all the things I had worked on over the past several years, including five years of genealogy research and writing projects.

A few days after Christmas, the hard drive on my 5-year-old Dell laptop gave out without warning. Having to buy a new computer was not something I would have wished to do, but that seemed almost a small price to pay in comparison with the thought of losing five years worth of files. (I brought in my hard drive to a tech squad and was told it wasn't readable and even caused their equipment to freeze up.) Fortunately, I had backed everything up on the Seagate device (considered one of the best manufacturers in the business), except for the past month. My greatest concern in the next few weeks, in addition to buying a new computer, was to reconstruct the work I had done and now permanently lost in the past month.

I thought I could breathe easily about all my old files, and didn't even take time to try accessing them for a few weeks. When I finally did, I found that my Seagate drive was not recognized by my new computer. I spent several days in near panic phoning tech people at computer stores and searching online forums for people having similar problems. The tech squad at one large retailer had no clue as to why this should be. At another store, a sales person told me that the problem was the difference between XP - which was the operating system on my old computer - and Windows 7, the new operating system, and the only one available on any new computer now sold (except for Apples). He suggested I might try to install Windows XP on my new computer as well, which he said allowed a dual-boot, and that I would then be able to access my storage device. I searched online and found instructions on how to install XP as a dual boot, but found that I would need the original disk from my old computer having the XP operating system on it. Then I remembered that I had thrown out the disks and things from my old computer, having seen no reason to save anything from a system now considered obsolete.

I tried many suggested fixes I read about on forums, but none worked.

Luckily, I remembered that my local library has some old computers and was able to obtain permission to bring in my external drive. Unbelievably, my storage device was not recognized on the old computers running Windows XP either.

In the meantime I had been e-mailed with Seagate's support for several days, answering dozens of questions and asking many of my own, which always seemed to be only partially answered.

Eventually Seagate gave me a code to download software from their website which would allow my device to be recognized on the XP computer. I was then to make some configuration changes to the device and would be able to access my files on my Windows 7 computer although without full functionality. Now it sounded like the problem was not only an XP - Windows 7 incompatibility, but the fact that my new laptop is 64-bit, where the storage devices are made only for 32-bit computers (whatever that means).

To draw this long story to a close, I was eventually able to access my storage on my new computer and transfer all my old files to the new computer.

My question remains now: how should I backup up all my important files this time? The external drives seem a good bet, but obviously technology can fail or not work, as I had experienced. Jump drives are pretty risky; I've had more than one turn out to be defective, and if they're not used regularly, they can lose their electrical charge and everything stored on them (funny they don't tell you that on the package). There's also a risk of making a mistake with these devices (such as re-partioning them), which instantaneously deletes everything stored on the device. Last year I had looked into a company that backs up your system, but I read of countless problems and complaints from people who paid for this service, including problems with their computers slowing down and freezing from the software that is installed remotely. There is Google docs, which apparently has some glitches, and it appears you have to save one document at a time - not very practical when you have hundreds of documents. Plus they wouldn't be organized in the folders the way you have them on your computer. It's also impractical (for me, at least) to print everything out - that would be thousands of pages, and many of these documents are continually being added to or revised.

So at the moment I have a new Seagate device that I had bought last fall but never used. (The old one cannot be used to store documents on a 64-bit computer.) Low and behold, wouldn't you know, but when I plugged it in, a message popped up saying that this $70 device purchased late last fall is only for a 32-bit computer. Now Seagate has sent me a code to download software for this device, which will allow me to use it (hopefully) with limited functionality.

I don't know of a foolproof answer, and there may not be one.

I just hope no one else has to go through what I have gone through these past few weeks.

Backup your DS files and everything else that's important - but remember that technology has its limits, and there is usually no warning when failure happens.

Zahir's mention in another thread about the early English vampire novel "Varney the Vampire" got me thinking ...

I have always taken it as a given that Barnabas Collins was the first vampire to be presented sympathetically. This innovative approach to the vampire has been credited to Jonathan Frid himself for the interpretation he gave the role -- to Art Wallace who said he "created" Barnabas Collins -- and to other DS writers and producers (if I'm not mistaken).

I don't wish to take away anything from those whose contributions made Barnabas such a unique character. It's apparent that the sympathetic and also romanticized approach to later vampires (for example, in "Forever Knight" and in Francis Ford Coppola's "Dracula") was inspired by Barnabas.

But there may have been a very early sympathetic vampire near the beginning of the vampire tradition in English literature. In 1819, John Polidori published "The Vampyr," inspired by a fragmentary tale sketched by Byron (during the time the Shelleys were also visiting Byron in Switzerland). According to an article by British professor Juliette Wood ("Vampires in English Fiction"), Polidori humanizes his anti-hero vampire, Ruthven, arousing both the reader's horror and "sympathy." She says that one can recognize the "romantic figure of the Byronic hero" in Polidori's tale.

It would be interesting to know whether any subsequent depictions of vampires were in this mold of the bordering-on-evil yet sympathetic, romantic anti-hero ... until Barnabas Collins. Anyone?