Yarr.

As I sees it, few there be with better claims to piracy than me. I knows my way around a sword; I've worked upon an antique sailing vessel, I've studied up on me history. I can do the funny talk with authority.

And I has me a pirate name, now:

What kind of pirate am I? You decide!
You can also view a breakdown of results or put one of these on your own page!
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey

!!!

I love pirates.

I love Weebl.

I love topical news references made into satire.

I love THIS:

Dear The (Twilight) World:

Concerned as I am over The Curse of the Cullen Hair* -- it's moved into poor Kristen Stewart's real life, and it seems the film version of poor Jasper has been hit upside the head with the clown-hair stick -- I have to take more drastic measures.

Today I saw pictures of Jackson Rathbone in real life. Let it be known: to hell with Team Edward. I'm defecting to Team Jasper. Actually, make that Team Jay** to ensure Beautiful Green Eye Continuity.

*A Horror Movie in its Own Right.

**So says IMDb.com: who am I to judge if fate has destined this?

Sic Probo, or Q.E.D.

This is a Fraggle (Wembley, to be precise). Note the resemblance to the picture below, specifically in the hair area. This should end all disagreement with my pronouncement.

In Which Our Author Is Pointlessly Catty

I guess I shouldn't be too surprised (given the contents of the novel) that a Twilight personality quiz would be almost painfully sexist, and certainly not gender neutral. So I played along and took the "Which Male Character Are You?" to this result:


Take the Quiz and Share Your Results!

Reasonable, I suppose, although the picture reminded me of a jovial bisexual Bavarian tourist in 1930s Berlin the morning after one too many absinthes.

Out of curiosity, I also took the female version and got this:


Take the Quiz and Share Your Results!

Which I objected to. Not because she apparently warrants an exclamation point and Carlisle doesn't(!). Not because of the result. But because of Alice's hair. As I've said before, just because she received electro-shock therapy in the '20s is no reason to feather her short hair to give the impression her toe's permanently wedged into a light socket. I mean, she looks like a Fraggle.

(I've also pointed out that, judging by how Edward's pompadour cut gets bigger in each new ad, he'll be able to go Pom to Pom with Liberace in a 'Who's the Gayest Corpse in Hollywood" by the time the film's released...)

Love Without Hope

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.

--Robert Graves

No reason for posting this other than it's quite lovely. It's exactly what lyrical poetry is supposed to be.

(Okay, I've been reading the Patrick Troughton Doctor Who Annuals, which insist on showing him with that hat from his first few stories and it always makes me think of this poem... And bugger all if you can find a picture of the dratted thing)

Edit: oops! No weird agenda with the wrong colour scheme. Just an amusing mistake!

Another quick thought...

A passing reference a friend made in conversation the other day made me remember some thing. Something that that pricked my conscience.

I never slept with any of teachers*. I was never even tempted (although lots of people thought I had**). One of my stage-managers in college, whilst attempting to get me drunk***, told me she'd slept with her PE TA.

At the time, I thought this was a low mark in sluttiness -- this was before Carolina made you do things like write down your daily calorie intake for a week in your PE classes, so all you really had to do was show up once a week for class and not be dead. I even got credit for an advanced fencing class without ever having been in it. That's how easy they were.

So, at the time, sleeping with the TA just seemed like ultimate in pointlessness and wanton promiscuity.

This is, of course, stupid and very naive. Of all the TAs you'd have, the PE one is the one you'd most want to sleep with: the grade thing is only tangentially related, if at all.

So dear Sarah, I apologise for several years of falsely ascribed low morals. You were clearly more sexually aware than I was.

*Which isn't to say I didn't sleep with people who were TAs, just not my TAs.

**Story of my life. Always the blame for the thing I didn't do, and never any credit for what I did. Except possibly in the stalls of the Greenlaw Hall.

***Talk about causes for St Jude. We found a bottle of white wine in the prop closet. She had one glass, I had three and I practically had to her carry up the stairs of Graham Memorial. Whatever it was she wanted, she didn't get it.

Sundry Observations on Doctor Who

David Tennant announced he's leaving Doctor Who after the run of 2009 specials. I am surprisingly okay with this. (Not that it would matter if I wasn't...)

It'll be four seasons of him as the Doctor, which makes him one of the longer-lasting incarnations (only Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker lasted longer*) and he's had a good innings with stories like "Blink" and "Human Nature". And he's doing the lovely thing of quitting while he's ahead. He's certainly one of the best Doctors ever, and he -- or the new production team -- won't bugger that up in his time left (*fingers crossed).

Soon, I'll be able to go back to fancying him, which is impossible to do with someone playing the Doctor.

And I'm excited to see who the new Doctor is. If I were as famous as Brian Blessed is, I'd just /say/ it was me and the papers would publish it. But I'm not.

I'm not quite as excited as everyone else seems to be about Steven Moffat taking over as executive producer. I haven't mentioned it because I'm still pondering it over. Lawrence Miles posted his thoughts on the subject, and I was inclined to agree. He may be mad, but he is a very good critic**, and he pointed out that this season's "Silence in the Library"/"The Dead Forest" two-parter is a fairly weak retreading of Moffat's previous stories. However, all the rest of his stories are top-notch, so I'm keeping a sort of guarded optimism. His casting of the new Doctor will be very telling...

By a weird coincidence, I managed to get a hold of the Trial of a Time Lord box set and The Brain of Morbius release both this week, and have been drowning in a sea of stories I haven't seen since... well, since the VHS of Trial came out and... a long, long time for Morbius. The older story is a bit better than I remember; Trial is... well, Trial.

Some observations:

1) Joseph Lidster (Who writer and audio playwright for Big Finish and screenwriter for Torchwood) is way cuter than I expected. He appears on an extra for "Terror of the Vervoids", a special that talks about cliffhangers. Could maybe somebody stick him in front of the cameras for the roughly 800,000 spots BBC America needs for ads shilling their up-coming broadcast of Series 4 instead of Moffat?

2) Apparently, the production team of "Vervoids" asked Bonnie Langford to scream in the same key Dominic Glynn's Season 23 arrangement of the theme tune stings in on. This is, unintentionally, hysterically funny once you know. It gives visions of the Mouse Organ from Monty Python.

3) I have all three novels of the extant "Missing Season" published by Target. Now I want to read them again, although they seem pretty fishy.

4) Brian Blessed is god.

*There's an argument to be made that both McCoy's and McGann's tenure was longer (both at 9 years apiece, 1987-1996 and 1996-2005, respectively, since work featuring their Doctor came out, but it's non-TV work.

**I'd link to it, but like most of his more... contentious posts, it's been taken down.

You know, I was never a big fan of The X-Files. Largely because the acting was (well, is) pretty awful: the only really good episodes were the jokey ones that sort of went with that. Even Duchovy is under no illusions about his talent. And I can go with that.

But for a good four or five seasons, the character of Dana Scully was one of the stupidest characters in TV (up there with Lois Lane). And Gillian Anderson's performance was about 180 degrees where it should have been, which called more attention to that fact than was strictly necessary:

Dalek Th... Scully: No, Mulder. You are wrong. Even though you have been correct in every mystery every week now for four years now, the Yeti/teh Saucer Pplz/intelligent viruses cannot exist.

I mean, old school Doctor Who girls never believed, either, but then no one mistook them for the brains of the operation. (Except poor Liz Shaw, who got booted out after 25 episodes...)

So imagine my joy in finding Anderson in a bitchy little article for MSN:

It's possible that Anderson doesn't have any dramatic ability. However, it's more likely that she tried for nonchalance, but overshot and achieved nonliving.... more.. She and David Duchovny went together like peanut butter and cheese (or is that macaroni and jelly?).

Au plaisir d'un gentlhomme

Sounds like a Bond title, doesn't it?

But I'm thinking "Property of a Lady", one of the sources for the film Octopussy.

Anyway, I've be positioned into... No.

Set up to... Grrr.

Put up to... Jeez, isn't there any way into this that isn't vaguely slutty sounding? Apparently not.

So, I've been asked to either a) put up a Sinister post here that I wrote not long ago so a non-Sinisterine can read it or b) relate a story of how I was compared to a certain race of little, blue cartoon... I'm not sure what a Smurf is really, but whatever it is a Smurf is, and how the name stuck.

I'm choosing a), since as sole prop. of this site, I have forbidden all reference to me/Smurf comparison.

"My First Time"!

Sounds racy, doesn't it? Of course, unlike other Sinisterines (looks in askance
at Ken Chu and pines -- pines! -- at the memory of Markelby) I'm
not actually tarty. I just like to pretend I am, sometimes. And I've no idea
why, but in my head just now, I sounded just like Tevye the Milkman
saying that. Anyway.

I want a go at telling my "First time I heard Belle and Sebastian" story!

It's a bit of a long story, so you'll have to indulge me. And it's long
because it's part of a much longer story about a boy (one of /those/ kinds
of boys) and I have to tell at least a little of it for the B&S story to
make much sense.

The boy's name was Daniel. I met him my first year of college, back in the
mid 90s. When I think of him now, I think of him all in corduroys and
Argyle sweaters, but I think most of that is sort of layered on, memories
filtered back through TV and movies. Or maybe this time of year just lends
itself to thinking of people in browns and greys.

He was a year older than me, and I since I was still so fresh out of high
school, I still thought that was a very big deal: in addition to being
very pretty -- all dark curls over bright green eyes and snowy skin -- he
was that much more older and sophisticated. Or so I thought.

I'll spare you all the tedious details of how I actually met him (shoved into
him by the proprietress of a charity shop on Franklin Street that liked to
bill itself as a "vintage" store) and how we got to know one another, and
skip to the part where he decided to go to a Study Abroad semester in London
the next Spring. He was away all that semester, and when it ended he
decided to stay in London through the summer, too, loafing, in my
opinion, in a sort of louche hipster grandeur.

I, on the other hand, spent the summer dressed as an Elizabethan soldier
for tourists at the seaside and tried not to pass out from heat exhaustion


We met up again, of course, that Fall. We were lying together on my twin
n bed in my dorm room, comparing stories about our summers and listening
to the musical treasures he had brought back with him. We were talking about
t something trivial when he remembered something. "Oh man," he said,
"You have to listen to this. You'll love it."

He dug around in his bag and fished out another cassette. It was a copy of
a record he'd heard. He took out the tape we were listening to and put another
one in the little boombox we were listening to, and then cued up the
song he wanted to play. It started, and he looked at me, his eyes shining
with expectation. (Or was it Expectations?)

I listened.

I thought it was crap. I said so. He sort of visibly sank and looked
disappointed. "I'm no big fan of techno," I said. "but that isn't even very
/good/ techno."

To this day, I have no idea why, out of all the songs on Tigermilk, he
picked "Electronic Renaissance", or why he didn't give me some prep for
it, like "Wait, listen to the lyrics!" or "The next song is better!"

I felt really awful, because he had been so excited to share this. I mean,
I know: I've felt exactly that sort of evangelistic glee, too, before
and since, and for the exact same music. But I didn't get it that night.
Not at all. And I really liked him, too, but I was too dumb then to
even try to give it another listen, just for him.

In the end it was all right. He had brought back a ton of music, and we
listened to most of it that night. We ordered awful pizza and stayed up late,
annoying my roommate, laughing and trying to correct the faults in each
ch other's musical tastes, till we found other ways to occupy ourselves.

And clearly I managed to hear some other Belle and Sebastian not much later
and liked it. A lot. But that's another story.

So there you go. I'd've done this for no other reason than ce certain gentilhomme inspired me to break out my old Go-Betweens albums. I had almost forgotten "Love Goes On!" is one of my favourite songs. (Am... Em... Bm... C... G... Em... D... C...)

If all goes to the good, I may not post again this week.

;)

You know, nothing will make you think twice about stupid, off-the cuff tweets like the sentence:

"Stephen Fry is now following you on Twitter!"

I did something quite sad this evening. It's finally gotten cold in these parts -- well, cool. For a long time, it's always been my tradition to mull some wine the first really cold night of the year.

I started doing it in college. I remember the first year I did it, I was in a dorm -- Stacy Hall -- doing it for a load of friends crammed into my room. We had chased The Idiot Steve out by telling him we were having an orgy. It almost backfired because he apparently fancied one of the girls, but then Daniel smiled and put his hand on The Idiot Steve's shoulder and he was off. I was greatly complimented when my English(/Greekish/Frenchish) friend Lucie said it was 'just like Fireworks Night!"

I think that may have been one of the nights we went chasing after the Gimghouls. If it was, then it would have been the midnight on 31 October, so a few days later than now.

After I graduated, I remember doing it a couple of times with my friends Christina and Jamie, at Christina's little duplex. And at least one of those was a party (very possibly her birthday party) with at least a dozen DJs from 'XDU jockeying to spin.

It was always a trip in New York, too. It was one of the first things people I started with did en masse. There was -- is -- a liquor store just across the street from Hunter, so w, dropped in and bought several bottle of cheap red, then went back to somebody's Manhattan place. There were five or six of us crammed on somebody's fire escape, smoking and drinking and actually talking for the first time.

Well, anyway, I did alone by myself tonight for the first time. I couldn't go out and get any, but there was a bottle of something alarmingly labelled "Indiana Grape Wine". I used it without trying any. I added the spices (ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and a dusting of allspice) and the rest (lemon juice, a touch of vanilla, and more sugar than is seemly) and heated it accordingly.

It was just as bad as something labelled "Grape" Wine should be. For tradition's sake, I forced a few gulps down my throat, but it was so bad I wound up pouring most of it out. I poured it down the sink lest it kill the grass in the yard.

I think I'm glad of that, actually. Had it been good enough to drink, I'd have drunk all of it and gotten pointlessly maudlin. As it is, I can (just) manage to sort of cheerfully reminisce without falling prey to nostalgia. Although if I brood, I may just fall prey anyway. So I'll stop.

Fate. I temtptz it.

I don't believe in much, but I do believe in not tempting fate. You don't go around just asking for trouble, for trouble will be sent unto to you.

Looking back on it now, I started to tempt fate just by deciding to go to a Barnes and Noble's. But it's the only -- literally the only -- bookstore in 30 or 40 miles. And I really wanted to get Sarah Vowell's new book, The Wordy Shipmates, which came out this week. For I love her work with a passion roughly equal to Sarah Caudwell, William Faulkner and Uncle Terry*.

Fate can't be blamed for not announcing itself, either. When (of course) I couldn't find it, or even the essays section of the store (for lo, nothing so fancy is to be found in that branch), I walked up to the customer service desk. The girl who helped me was named Laura.

I did not take the hint. When I said what I was looking for, she squinted and harumphed, and asked me to spell the author's last name.

This was clearly a bookstore girl who was not familiar with Sarah Vowell. Another hint wasted.

She took me to where she /thought/ the essays were. There were no essays. Just Westerns. We returned to the CS desk.

"Oh," she said. "It's a new release. It'll be in the front."

I had looked there, you know. First thing. I ignored this hint, too. We went to the front table, where the book was conspicuous by its absence.

"I'll look in the back," she said. She did. No luck.

"You'll have to order it special," she said.

"But it's a new book. Out this week. Major publisher..." By the end, it was more a series of hopeful suggestions than statements of fact.

I ordered the book. It might be here in two weeks. :(

The whole situation was a bit mitigated when the other girl from the Customer Service booth, who was a more typical bookstore girl of about 21, followed me away from the desk and offered to buy me a coffee. It was sweet, but also sad, since it was exactly the right trick from exactly the wrong person. I'm chalking this up as karma for featuring someone I hardly ever talk about -- or even really let myself think too much about -- in a Sinister post I wrote this week, since there's nobody who'd get that more than him...

*Terrence Dicks, who taught at least two generations of Doctor Who fans how to read and unlocked the Doctor's past adventures to legions of his fans before the days of VCRs by turning the episodes into books. Granted, usually by adding "he said" and a few odd epithets to camera scripts: "said the Doctor, with his young-old face and shock of white hair" or "said the Doctor with his pleasant, open face."

Come /on/, Big Finish:

Let me start out with a compliment: Big Finish does a lot, and it does a lot well. The stories you think are going to be quite cracking ("Time of the Daleks" and "Bloodtide" spring to my mind) almost inevitably are, but -- more impressively -- the ones that sound awfully dull and quite possibly a waste of time ("Assassin in the Limelight" and "The Boy That Time Forgot") almost invariably aren't.

And no, I don't know why the former examples above are so old and the latter so new. And there are some that counts as both in the middle.

Anyway.

I just finished listening to "The Haunting of Thomas Brewster". It counts more as the latter than the former (although me just happening to read "The Cloud Exiles" in the Doctor Who Annual 1967 removes a little of its originality).

The ending of part three. Victorian ragamuffin Pickens dies saving the boy he loves, choked off by the baddies whilst crying out "I lov--".

Please.

It might have been edgy 15 years ago, but now it just seems gratuitously melodramatic. Their (pointedly one-sided) relationship wasn't worth overtly developing in the preceding episode(s), apparently, and subsequently throwing that element to the death scene is an emotionally false way to raise the stakes.

In fact, it sort of falls back old images of the poor gay getting what's coming to him for daring to be out of the social norm. Giving him a little dignity is just a way to appease the straight audience's potential reservations before they can let situation effectively carry out their judgment.

It's why AIDS tragedies are such a popular thing for teh straight people. They can pity the poor fag before he gets exactly what he has coming to him for having all that gay sex. It flatters their egos /and/ their prejudice.

And it's why Tony Kushner and his awful Angels in America, 8-hour-foray into his own ego that it is*, should occupy roughly the same place in the gay noosphere that Vidkun Quisling does for the Norwegians.

[Nor does it help that his pointless complexities are gleefully confused for meaningfulness by audiences too lazy to do the sort of thinking that would recognise it for what it is. But this isn't a slam-Kushner post. It's just hard to get around how much he sucks.]

Anyway, you can't blame just the writer, Jonathan Morris, who generally does wonderful stuff, and in toto "Haunting" counts as that; this, I think, is just a freak of collective something (Laziness? I'm not sure... ) Somewhere, there was an editor or a dramaturg or a director who should have caught this and seen it for what it was.

Of course, I could just be full of myself. ;)

*Angels in America is in exactly the same category as Almost Famous. It's fine if people want to masturbate, and it's fine to watch someone masturbate, if that's what you and them want to do. But it's not okay to /make/ people watch you masturbate by calling that jacking-off a film or a play.

And you deserve a special place in hell if you con people into thinking it's art while you do it.

Dear Teh World:

So what's her name, you know, Claire Kincaid, her off Law and Order. And Crossing Jordan. Jill Hennessey*. That's it. She was also in RoboCop 3.

I can't help but think /that/ is a wasted cross-over opportunity. But what would it be about?

It hit me.

Robo-Lenny.



Back from the dead and ready to kick ass like he never could. For justice.

Best. Idea. Ever.

Admit it, you want to see this series.

I mean, it couldn't possibly be worse than the new Knight Rider or The Sarah Connors Chronicles.

Why am I not working for Network TV?!

Please return to your regular lives.

If you can!

*Did you know she is a) from Canada and b) half of a set of twins?

I haven't been sleeping very well lately. The pay-off for this -- if you can call it a pay-off -- is that during the 15 or 20 minutes a night I sleep, I have incredibly vivid dreams. I must have dropped off while thinking of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia last night, because that's what I dreamt about.

I don't remember it all, or particularly coherently (if indeed the dream was coherent to begin with). But it started off with me in Paddy's pub getting hit on by Sweet Dee, who was across the bar. I remember thinking that was odd for several reasons, but I was pretty pleased with myself for hitting it off with that attractive a female, even if I had no romantic intentions at all. It ended with her writing her number on the back of my hand with a mascara wand and rubbing my thigh.

The next part (and only I would have dreams with A and B plotlines) had something to do with me throwing coconuts at Mac and Charlie to get them into a swimming pool. Whatever it was, it didn't work, because I ended up in the pool. But so did they. And we decided we needed to pick up Dennis from school.

Then we were all in a second floor classroom, paneled in wood (maybe an old-fashioned chem lab), at night. I was trying to shove an infeasible number of old Dr Who Annuals in a back-pack and trying to clear out before the next lecture started. Mac and Charlie were using gas taps to blow up condoms. Students started coming in, and a female lecturer started a lesson. I managed to pack all the books away with some pencils and crayons, and all the four of us left. As we exited we passed the pool again.

And then I woke up.

I'm feeling particularly sad and lonely at the moment, so I'm going to console myself by writing a virtually useless review.

1) The Doctor Who Annual 1966. The text is written by David Whitaker, Doctor Who's first script editor (credited as story editor) and a writer of the series from the beginning up until Jon Pertwee's first season. Whitaker really is the one of the founding fathers of Doctor Who and probably was the first to give it any sort of coherent vision. He was also very, very far out there in some of his writing: the best path to putting it in any sort of context is the virtually ingenious article about him in About Time 2.

The artist was Walter Howarth. I'm not a comics person, but even I understand he's something of a legend in British comics. Certainly his work in this book deserves the highest praise, if for nothing else the colour effect he manages with four colour ink.

This counts as one of the first print versions of the Doctor's adventures. One of the few earlier ones was also written by Whitaker: his version of the events of The Daleks. If you haven't read then... well, you've missed out on one hell of a trip.

At this point, continuity isn't even a consideration. If anything, it's a hindrance. As it probably should be. This volume has (what might be) the Doctor's first encounter with the folk of Vortis and the Sensorites and return brushes with the folk on Vortis and with the Voord from The Keys of Marinus.

But the Doctor here keeps a great deal of his secrets. He might be from Earth (sometimes it's his home, sometimes it's not). Sometimes the TARDIS (err, the Tardis) works perfectly; sometimes it's quite untrustable after a run-in with the Daleks (ho ho -- I'm not even touching the dating od that!).

What we have then is a collection that reflects some of the earliest ideas of the Doctor: always a scientist and traveller. And -- just as Syndney Newman always wanted -- the Doctor survives on a dependence on basic scientific ideas. Although knowledge of more advanced ideas might just be a hindrance...

All in all, the stories are simple (though longer than they ever will be again in the Annuals) but not simply written. They're engaging, and clearly written by someone who not only cares about how the Doctor is presented and developed but by someone who cares that his readers develop something themselves.

But he's not quite the same Doctor we recognize -- or is he? He's happy to drop people off deep in their own past ("Peril in Mechanistria") and to hell with the web of time, and he's happy to maim one of the Voord and let them die at the hands of an angry mob ("Fishmen of Kandalinga"). Be it come to that, he' s happy to let the Menopt(e)ra kill off the last of the Atlanteans ("The Lost Ones").

In the end, as someone viewing these stories from 42 years later, it's hard to say these stories are of /the/ Doctor as much as they are stories of /a/ Doctor. And that makes it all the more fascinating. I love the sort of fluidity it implies, and as long as it's based on a sort of respect for the character, I can go with it. I mean, I didn't throw fits over Richard E. Grant's 9th Doctor, either, even though I loved Chris Ecclestone.

Too bad the next annual wasn't a Whitaker creation!

One Fish, Two Fish; Red Fish, Blue Fish

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

So I was reading this article about Michael Cera, and agreeing, thinking, "Yeah, I'd go down on that," when it occurred to me this article is actually about my friend Ross. (Well, except the bit about baby fat. Ross is such that I can't imagine even an ounce of that on him.)

Ross Bryant is everything that they say about Cera, but funnier. More acidly wittier funnier, to be precise. /And/ he was doing it first. So there.

Two Things...

...which are, so far as I can tell, unrelated.

1) I've been listening to Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66 a lot recently. He's fab. I grew up listening to him, you know. When other people were poisoning themselves with New Kids on the Block, Paula Abdul or Snow (ahh, the early '90s, when pop music rolled over and died), I was listening to LPs swiped from my mother's music collection. Sergio featured heavily: she had (and now I have) Ye-Me-Li, Crystal Illusions, and Fool on a Hill. It's bedrock cool: original yet influenced, hot but cool, mellow but intense. Of its time, as it were, but for all ages. Go get you some. I hear he cut a track not long ago, a re-mix of Mas Que Nada with the Black Eyed Peas.

[It's odd, but my mother's music collection for a period is pretty damn cool: Sergio, Fifth Dimension, Jim Croce. It soon sort of fades into mid 70s Streisand and Neil Diamond, and from there into really awful early 80s country and from there into Jesus music. I cannot imagine my mother as someone Into Music, like an Indie kid, for whom music is important, talking about music to other people and really being affected by it, and loyal to a sound, but I had to get it from somewhere. And there was always music in out house. Good music, be it Bach or Bacharach, so maybe she was.]

2) So did you know Tennessee Williams' first published work was in Weird Tales? Yeah, it was: "The Vengeance of Nitocris", (1928). Very clearly of the sub-Lovecraft genre, it's exactly as bad as you'd think. But it's also the lodestone of everything he ever wrote: brother/sister weirdness, revenge, canny women, pretty boys, untrustworthy narrators, death...