I didn’t think we could do it, but Perverse Osmosis posted 30 straight days of Sabbath. Of course, I conveniently skipped Halloween, the reason for the season, but that was because Edgar Allan Poe paid a visit, and I could not deny her/his presence.

This weekend is Suck Fest in NYC. I am heading to the Friday show, headlined by the magnificent Municipal Waste. I can only image how much the venue will smell when the day is done, how many great T-shirts I will see, and how many circle pits will circle. Plus, it is New York City, which means Rockit Science, the best record store going.

If all goes as planned, and I don’t lose my phone some time between then and now, there should be an in-depth report of the goings on posted at Saturday or Sunday, depending on if the iron horse has wi-fi like Amtrak claims.

Image source

“Cornucopia” is one of those pieces that is many songs in one, which I guess is the point of the title. There are some incredible riffs [as usual] in here, and one incredible breakdown.

Stone giants exist in the liminal space around the Underdark. They don’t directly live underground–preferring caves and caverns–although they probably could, and their neighbors would be happy to see them, but they like to live in the places around entrances to the cave systems where drow, deep gnomes, and the rest have their fun.

I don’t blame them for not living completely underground; after all, these are giants averaging 12′ tall. I can easily see an entire stone giant sit com based around the pratfalls of a clumsy teen who consistently smashes his head into the cave’s ceiling when he stands up too quickly [stone giants are not known for their well-developed sense of humor]. The show would follow him and his pet cave bear, Snooklepuss, on a series of misadventures, usually involving rock throwing, the previously mentioned head-smashing, and Snooklepuss’s searching for the perfect jar of honey to eat.

Despite my career choice, I have never been particularly astute at deciphering songs. For a long time, I assumed Eddie Money’s “Two Tickets to Paradise” was actually about air travel. “Snowblind” falls under the same category; until not so long ago, I thought this song was about literal snowblindness. The kind of lost a party might suffer from after being caught in a blizzard when adventuring in the Kron Hills. No one remembered that they needed to cut some slits in a fabric or piece of fur to protect the old peepers from both wind-driven snow and the reflection of the sun after the snow is over. That is where the real snow blind starts to kick in; nowhere to look but into the glaring white snow. Looking up is not an option because the sky is also bright, and it is important to know where to go when stomping around in the snow.

But it turns out that “Snowblind” is actually about cocaine use, not being lost in the snow. If we are to believe the internet, some of the original takes have Ozzy yelling “Cocaine” at the end of every chorus, which he does on a couple live recordings. Once again, I completely missed the point.

Another song that launched a thousand bands. Got to give Sabbath this: they can write a mean riff.

We all want to reach out and touch the sky occasionally when living in the Underdark. The occasional glints of sun or moonbeams that trickle through the cracks and chasms in the ground let us know that there is another world out there; a world that isn’t sealed in perma-dark. It might be nice to be able to walk from point A to point B without always having a light, torch, flambeaux, lantern, hooded lantern, or glowing fungi. Just once I would like to get off guard duty and not have to rely on infra or ultravision to get me home.

I am certainly not advocating for a permanent move back to the surface. That place has more than its fair share of problems, like rain and that crap they call snow. But still, maybe every year or two, a week-long vacation to the surface is called for, a chance to unwind and see how the other, dumber half lives.

Much like “Orchid,” I don’t see “FX” being many people’s favorite Sabbath song.

The love of the average gnome for illusions and visual trickery is well known. A gnome illusionist  player character has the opportunity to be a 7th-level illusionist; mix that with the ability to multiclass as a thief, and that character would probably live through the assault on the slave lords. Every gnome clan that ekes out an existence in the mountains around entrances to the Underdark is going to have a couple illusionists ready to cast hallucinatory terrain or misdirection to trick the band of marauding orcs or bandits that threaten the gnomes’ precious stonework or cache of gems.

Maybe it is a cultural impulse to differentiate gnome from dwarf. The dwarves are generally anti-trickery, except when it comes to making traps to slaughter invading goblin armies. I also don’t usually think of dwarves as being particularly jovial; dour as a dwarf is an Underdark cliche’ for a reason. But not the gnome. They are the bon vivants of the  mountains and dales, always ready to cast ventriloquism to get a few laughs or hypnotic pattern to get the party started.

Image source