Blessed by the Potato

There were some power outages in London today, accompanied by strange noises (Wayfare said it sounded like dinosaurs attacking). Traffic lights were out at a number of intersections across the north and west ends of the city, which caused some pretty big traffic slowdowns. I’ve got to say I wasn’t very impressed with the situation: it took hours and hours before the London police sent someone to direct traffic at the major intersections, and there were a lot of people gunning it through the unregulated intersections and generally driving like dicks.

All this time with a blog, and I haven’t really touched on personal finances.

My dad’s an accountant by education, and then became a financial consultant as he got more experience in the work force (though the subtle differences between a CA and a financial consultant escape me), opening his own business and then closing said business down and “retiring” early. Now, retiring here goes in quotation marks because my dad still works at least a little bit every day of the week. His nearly full-time job now is managing his retirement savings to make sure that the returns keep coming in sufficient quantities to make ends meet without having to dip into the principal, if that can be helped.

He got my brother and I interested in investing at a very young age; he shopped around for banks that were willing to do business with kids with respect, and sell them very low-minimum GICs. We set up my first savings/chequing account when I was 10, and he explained the value of tucking the money I had saved up from my allowance and gifts into a GIC to not be touched for a whole year to get even more interest around age 13. I think I had my first set of Canada Savings Bonds at 15, and he was helping us play the market before I went to university.

Unfortunately for me, while I had the head for everything he was trying to teach us about picking stocks, I just didn’t really have the interest or more importantly, the talent for the non-tangibles. As much as my dad will scour a balance sheet for earnings, market capitalization, cash on hand, and yield, he also pays attention to the overall market and psychology of a company. Even if a company looks good on paper, if it just has a bad reputation and isn’t going anywhere with its sales, the stock isn’t going to do well in the long term. Vice-versa, even companies with a mediocre balance sheet can really turn it around if the market is going in their direction. One example is those funny sandals known as “crocs.” They’re actually made by a Canadian firm, and that company flew more-or-less under the radar for a while. My brother and my dad saw how popular these ridiculous shoes were becoming, and decided to invest a little bit, something that’s come out well for them. I couldn’t get over the fact that they were ugly and had holes in them, and thought it would never go anywhere. In case you haven’t noticed, my brother does seem to have the head for this sort of thing, and certainly the interest, so he’s now on the career path to becoming a stock broker himself.

You can’t really avoid the stock market if you want to save and invest your money. I mean, you can but then you’ll be barely beating inflation with a 4% GIC (OK, 5.5% if you run out to Canadian Tire right now). My dad has never been much of a believer in mutual funds, partly because he’s better than many fund managers at picking stocks (and even the good fund managers are sometimes hampered by the momentum of a mutual fund or other rules), and partly because many mutual funds will sap your potential returns with various fees (though investing out in the wilderness on your own also has commissions). Somehow, that dislike of mutual funds got passed on to me, and so I’ve been investing pretty much soley in individual equities either on my own or with my dad’s help.

In the last few days I’ve started to really reconsider the value of mutual funds. I’ve been largely invested into income trusts, which with the lying Conservatives have become a bit of a minefield. So I’ve been trying to do this “diversification” thing. And it’s really, really hard to spread your investment around when you don’t have a lot to invest. Not being diversified has hurt a bit. There are the nice winners, such as Q9 Networks, which has grown by over 50% in about two years for me. But there are also real dogs, such as Surebeam, which looked promising at first, and then tanked all the way to nothing once it was revealed that the people managing the company lied and they didn’t have the lucrative contracts they said they did.

Another advantage of mutual funds is that you don’t have to keep a constant eye on the market, which is something that my dad does but I, until very recently, haven’t. For one thing, it was always a bit of a pain to try to keep track of things, and while looking up stock prices is pretty easy to do each night, I always had trouble remembering where I bought, so it was hard to keep things in perspective. Plus, it was stressful. It’s much easier to be a buy & hold investor when you’re not worrying your portfolio daily. The use of easy tools has helped me with that recently, things such as Google Finance. To also keep on top of things I’ve started reading various analysts, bloggers, and writers in the business section of the paper and online. One, themoneygardener, is linked over on the right.

I’ve also become more interested in my “investment portfolio” lately as buying a house and a car have become nearer and nearer goals. Lots of friends have been getting all grown up, with houses, jobs, and kids. I am, of course, still in grad school, but that doesn’t mean that Wayfare wants to wait another decade for that sort of thing, so we’ve got to be planning and saving now, and keeping one eye on the real estate market.

To put it briefly, the housing market is scary.

If I thought diversification was a problem with a stock portfolio, buying a house blows that completely out of the water. For many people, once you get a house, that’s pretty much your only investment for at least a few years. Of course, at the same time you don’t worry as much about a market downturn because real estate is pretty stable in the first place, and even if there was a housing crash, well, you still have a place to live which was the main point (unless you’re flipping houses, which no one I know is), and as long as you don’t have to move, you can usually ride it out. Sure, we “lose” money by paying “rent” instead of “building equity”, but it’s a lot less risky that way, and there are lots of good articles that point out that if you can live frugally and save the difference between what rent is and what a mortgage would cost, that you can come out ahead of the game. Especially if it means you then save enough to put a decent down payment on a house…

But the thing that’s really scary is how fast the housing prices are shooting up. Wayfare tells me it’s 9% a year in London, and it looks to be about the same around Toronto (of course, a house in London costs about 50-75% of what an equivalent one in Toronto would). A friend just recently bought a house after saving and saving and saving for years to try to get a respectable 20% down payment. He tells me though that he couldn’t do it, and had to buy because he couldn’t even keep pace with his savings, let alone build on them, and had to get one of those 5 or 10% down insured mortgages. The housing market was simply growing faster than any other investment he could make. That renting and “saving the difference” argument really only applies to a relatively stable market, not one that’s shooting off like crazy like this.

For a long time now, I’ve looked at the real estate boom and consoled myself that it’s really a much better decision to stay out of it: I simply don’t have enough certainty about what I’ll do after I graduate to be buying real estate anywhere, and surely that kind of growth can’t be sustainable. I looked at the US, and read the market analysts, many of whom have long been predicting the “subprime meltdown” we’re seeing now. I looked at the demographics, and saw a lot of baby boomers coming up on retirement: to me, that looked like a lot of excellent family homes that might soon come up for sale as they decide to winterize their cottages and retire outside the city. From all of that I concluded that housing prices must stabilize soon, and maybe even correct downwards a bit.

It’s been over 2 years of saying that to myself now, and won’t we be damned, but the subprime crisis is hitting the States, but the Canadian market seems completely immune to it (well, except for our banks), much as it may bedevil me. My own parents (baby boomers), despite spending upwards of 50% of their time at the cottage have no intentions of selling their Toronto home, even with one son gone, the second on the way out, and the final kid applying to university next year, with out-of-town schools ranking high in her preferences. So much for my theory about a flood of baby-boomer homes coming up for sale.

I’ve had some rough luck in the market in recent years, and the markets in general aren’t doing too well lately, either. There have been some nasty capital losses for me, but thanks to the high payout of some of my income trusts my average return is still around 6%. While that is better than sitting on a savings account, that’s not a lot of return for the risk I’m exposed to. It also seems to be a low rate of return. I don’t really have any mutual fund literature that says they can do better or anything like that, but I have read a lot of investing articles that say things like “compounded at 8% over…” which seem to imply getting an 8% return is common and easy (in fact, I think that’s closer to what my dad averages). Heck, my landlord has to pay me 6% on my last month’s rent down payment. Of course, once you compare my 6% figure to the 9% the housing market has gone up, and I start thinking bad things about my ability to ever buy a house in the future.

But hey, the slight downturn the stock market is facing now may present some “buying opportunities” so that I can at least aim to be a rich renter (as much as it may irk Wayfare to “waste” money that way).

Almost every year I’ve watched the Toronto Santa Claus Parade on TV, and gone down in person a few times (twice as a kid, and at least once as an adult with my parade-loving other half). It’s always a top-notch affair, and I think it’s inspired a lot of other cities and towns to do the same (or maybe it has something to do with Christmas). Anyhow, this is the first year that we’ve bothered to go downtown to watch the London Santa Claus Parade in person. It was a pretty good show, with some high-quality well-integrated floats (notably the entry by Kellogg’s), as well as a number of sadder-looking “let’s throw a tree and some lights on a trailer” floats. I’m not trying to disparage the London parade for that: the Toronto one has a lot more advertising and money, etc., that goes into it, and the London one was still a good show even if it was more low-key. Of course, the Toronto one also gets entrants from all over the place, to get the best marching bands and the best float entries, etc. In London, it’s all local.

Which made some of the sights pretty surprising. For instance, London has all kinds of weirdo dance and band groups, a unicycle club, and more shriners than you can shake a stick at! (I think there were 3 separate groups of shriners that went through, and each group was pretty substantial!) Some things really weren’t very wintery or Christmasy, such as the group of Jedi and stormtroopers that walked by. Wayfare mentioned before they got to us how cool it would have been to be in the marching band — she briefly considered joining the Western one when she was in grad school. I sort of shrugged my shoulders, not thinking that would be all that cool, but then the Jedi came by and I was all like “wow, how cool would it be to be a Jedi in the parade?!” “That would be pretty cool, of course, when I was thinking of joining the marching band, I didn’t realize that was an option. I still don’t quite get how it relates to Santa…”

The parade didn’t quite go off without a hitch: the route was different this year because of the giant sinkhole, so apparently it’s more picturesque as it rolls by decorated shop fronts, rather than the more barren facade of Queens. Beyond that, it was quite a bit later rolling by than we expected, and there were two or three very large gaps where there was nobody coming for almost as far as we could see (at least 5 or 6 blocks) and we started to wonder if the parade had ended without Santa (we knew from the paper that there was some minor controversy with Santa). London, unlike many other cities’ Santa Claus Parades, holds its at night. That makes the lights (and lightsabers!) all the more impressive as they go by, but it also makes it colder, so those big waiting periods weren’t really appreciated.

This is just about the time of the year when my family puts up the tree (sometimes we might even wait until December), but Wayfare’s traditionally does theirs while the Santa Claus Parade is on TV. A nice little tradition, so we’re going to watch our tape of it tomorrow and put the tree up then…

There were two articles in the Free Press today that I found kind of interesting, especially put together. The first was on those payday loan services, and the ridiculous annual rate that their fees work out to (over 700%).

“If we’re not there, what’s going to happen? The power is going to be cut off. The kids are not going to eat,” he told the board.

Critics scoffed at the idea, saying payday loans can often trap low income-earners in a cycle of poverty.

“They’re trading off essential things, like buying medication or paying their rent, for trying to eventually pay off their loans,” said Gloria Desorcy, head of the Manitoba branch of the Consumers Association of Canada.

“How do you ever catch up?”

The second was related to the massive sinkhole that hit downtown London on Halloween. It knocked out power for the whole day, and many people weren’t able to work in the downtown core. As a result, two guys who work in a call centre are trying to recover their lost wages for the day. I don’t really know whether these guys have a case or not, and I don’t really care (though I think it’s pretty damned ballsy to try to recover lost wages for the day spent navigating the red tape at city hall). What caught my eye was this quote:

The loss of the wages hurts, said Underhill, a father of four.

“It doesn’t seem a lot to the city,” Pinnell said. “But this bill gets cut and this bill gets cut. Everybody lives paycheque to paycheque.”

[emphasis mine]

Now, maybe this was just innocent hyperbole on the part of Pinnell, but I find that kind of disturbing nonetheless, that not only are there so many people out there living paycheque-to-paycheque, but that some people perceive that to be the norm, to be an acceptable way to carry on your life. I just couldn’t imagine not having some kind of buffer in savings or overtime options or something to make up for potential lost wages or surprise expenses. And the thought that everyone lives paycheque to paycheque makes getting ahead of the payday loan places even more difficult: how can you make sacrifices to save if you don’t even believe that saving is a virtue (or at least normal)?

We went to the Fanshawe Pioneer Village’s Haunted Hayride last night, which featured “Polidori’s Vampyre”, a short play put on as the hayride made its rounds. The setup and execution was kind of neat: to get a bunch of people run through simultaneously, the play was broken up into four different stations. The four trailers would all rotate between the station and park while the actors carried out each scene, then the trailers would move on. Each time we changed stations, a new group of actors played the same characters, which I found confusing at the 2nd station (right after our first change!) when a new character was introduced (they warned us about the setup at the beginning, and introduced us to the 4 main characters in the “prologue”, but this character wasn’t included in that group). The performances varied a fair bit from actor to actor, as one might expect in these situations, and the cast was rather female-heavy (only two male characters, and they still had a female cross-dress one at half the stations), but I suppose that’s to be expected in a student drama group. A lot of the kids had good screams, growls, and undead-rising abilities. There were some issues with the split, simultaneous station method: at one point, our station was a few seconds behind the others, and we could clearly hear the other actors screaming out the lines from down the way…

The plot, however, sucked.

To outline it in full (with spoilers, though no one should really care since tonight was the last performance so it’s not like you can go and see it yourself):

Our 19th century hero, John, has returned from England and brought along a strange travelling companion: Lord Ruthven (note: I can’t for the life of me remember what it actually was). John’s sister and mother are glad he’s back, and are hoping he can help because strange, evil things have been happening in the new world while he’s been abroad. Then, John’s sister somehow has a baby who’s going blind and needs help. She hears that Lord Ruthven is wealthy and gives out money to druggies and miscreants, and asks him to help pay for a doctor who might be able to restore her son’s sight. He refuses, saying her cause is too noble, and that he prefers a story with a fall from grace. Lord Ruthven leaves, and John enters to talk with his sister, who tells him that she thinks Lord Ruthven might have a dark side to him. John defends his travelling companion.

Later, we see John and his new girlfriend talking. He is haughty and condescending to her rural upbringing as she tries to warn him of an evil in the woods, and not to ride through there after twilight. He says that he has a fast horse and a sharp dagger, and will not indulge her superstitions. As John heads off for the woods, we see Lord Ruthven chasing after the girl with a mad, hungry look on his face. The next scene, of course, takes us to said woods, where it’s night time, John’s horse has run off, and he’s lost his dagger due to theft or negligence. All he has left is the cross his girlfriend gave him to help keep him safe. He meets up with Lord Ruthven, as they come upon the body of his dead girlfriend. Lord Ruthven tries to tell him to be a man, to not be afraid of the woods, and to stop being so sad over the loss of the farmgirl, when they run into two bandits. While John tries to hand over what he has left, Lord Ruthven starts a fight, and manages to run them off… but not before taking a dagger in the back. John’s struggle with the other bandit focuses around the theft of his cross, and from the acting it’s not clear whether that bandit was trying to take the cross as something valuable (as protection from the vampires?) or is reeling in pain from touching it and trying to throw it away. The bandit runs off quickly, either way, and John has it again in the next scene.

As Lord Ruthven he dies (“as a melancholy lad, I prepared words for just this occasion, but find that when the moment is finally upon me, I have nothing to say”) he makes one very strange request of John: not to tell anyone of his death for a year and a day. Then, presumably a year later, John has gone mad over the death of his girlfriend and travelling companion, and his sister and mother are making preparations for the former’s wedding, wondering if John will be fit to attend. John seems to be a little frazzled, but well enough to talk to his sister about the affair — and realizes that he’s never even met the groom (no mention is made of what happened to the baby and the baby’s father). Then his sister shows him a picture of her fiance: the very dead Lord Ruthven. John screams that her wedding will lead only to ruination, that he’s a monster, etc., but his family thinks he’s mad and troops off to the wedding.

Finally, in the only remotely creepy scene (right before this, a kid on our wagon asked “can we go on the haunted hayride after this?”) John finds that he’s the only human left in the village. Everyone gathers around him in the wake of the wedding, and they all close in on him until it turns into a vampire death pile. After which, Lord Ruthven addresses the audience, and the vampires get up from their feast on John and chase the wagons with snarls and growls and evil cackling laughs as the hayride makes a hasty getaway.

All-in-all, a pretty lame show without much in the way of suspense.

Right off the bat, the play got onto the wrong foot by trying to follow two pretty much mutually exclusive story lines. The first involved the evil happening out in the woods, the demonic rituals. These had apparently been happening for some time before John and Lord Ruthven arrived from England. In that case, it could have turned into a neat story about being trapped in the village, the fear of the woods and the dark, and been kind of spooky and scary that way. It’s a storyline that would have lent itself well to having people jump out of the woods and scream as we drove by. The second and beginning of the third scenes really seemed to be playing to this type of story.

The other storyline surrounded the mysterious Lord Ruthven, who was to the audience obviously “the” vampire. He was pale, dressed creepy, of the aristocracy, and had strange, evil, tastes. The end of the third scene and the “twist” in the fourth were definitely playing to this storyline, which would have been more thrilling and creepy than scary and nightmarish. However, this storyline was severely weakened by having evil things in the woods predate the pair’s arrival from Europe (it could have perhaps been fixed by having Lord Ruthven get lost in the woods first and “miraculously return” or somesuch).

It is a little tough to pull something like this off, since there’s only about 25 minutes or so of “stage” time to tell the tale. A narrator might have helped, to introduce new characters or to help mark the passing of time (there seemed to be a fair bit of time between the prologue and scene 1, scene 1 and scene 2, and a lot from 3 to 4. However, 3 seemed to take place on the same night as 2…).

So, I decided to write my own little story that might work with a similar set up (several stations for a hayride, with a short ~5 minute scene at each one).

Polidori’s Werewolf

Intro:

John Polidori has just returned to his rural home town after his first year of university in the city. His high school sweetheart, Isabelle, is glad to see he has made it back safe. Quipping that the journey is not all that dangerous, and barely four days by horseback, he is informed that the woods have become treacherous lately, particularly at night. John says that there was nothing to worry about, his new friend Sam has some family money, and paid for a night in a proper inn for the both of them all the way in, so they never had to camp at night, but chastises his sweetheart for her simple ways. After all, he’s seen the maps and civilization is growing every decade, and now the woods are not so deep and not so distant as when they were children, surely they must be much safer now.

Isabelle continues though, insisting that the woods are dangerous of late. Dogs have been barking and run off into the woods, never to return. Just the other day, one was found dead by his owner, looking like it was half-eaten. This catches the attention of Sam, who is now properly introduced as a student of zoology. He would be most interested in seeing this, as he is not aware of any Canadian predators in the area that have a taste for dog. John’s sister Mary arrives just then to greet him with a warm hug, and is very interested to meet his friend Sam. When she learns of his interest in the goings-on in the woods, she immediately offers to take the pair out to investigate.

The woods:

Here we see the gory remains of a dog’s head and torso. Mary is both disgusted, and delighting in disgusting John. John is concerned with what could have done this to such a large dog. “Wolves, from the looks of it,” says Sam “the tracks in the mud look like two sets of dog prints, one much larger than the other, that could be our wolf and this poor thing here.” Mary starts to wander off then screams, and the other two run to her and move a bush, revealing the other half of the dog. “Interesting,” muses Sam “the best meat, here on the thighs, has been untouched, and the other half, aside from being torn apart, did not look like it served as a meal…” The others question what that could possibly mean. “It might mean that whatever animal did this was interrupted in its kill… or wasn’t killing for food at all.”

“Well,” suggests John “wolves can become territorial, can’t they?” Mary says, flatly, that the wolf must have been possessed by the devil to do that over a patch of forest. Dogs usually nip or fight until the other runs away… Sam suggests that they can be fiercely territorial, especially when mating, but that the violence of what happened to this dog suggests that the wolf may be sick or mad.

“We must get a hunting party together to stop this, before the madness spreads to all the animals of the farms. We’ve got to kill the wolf.”

Howling is then heard, quite loudly and far too close. They all suddenly notice that it’s getting dark out, and that this would be an excellent time to head back in. They run off, terrified, and behind them the bushes shake.

The honeymoon, cut short:

It has been several months, and despite sending out regular hunting parties, the village still hasn’t found the mad wolf. Sam believes that they will have a much better chance of finding it in the fall, when the leaves start to drop and the wolf has fewer places to hide.

John, meanwhile, has married Isabelle, and they are having a last conversation with Sam and Mary before heading off to their honeymoon. Those plans are cut short, however, when a horrible howling and growling sound is heard, followed by the piercing scream of a man. Thundering steps are heard crashing through the foliage, and then the dull thump of someone hitting the ground, and another agonizing scream. The foursome rushes to investigate, and finds one of the village’s hunters panicked and bleeding on the ground. He raves about the beast, the devil itself that is out there. It killed his friend, and it had him in his jaws until the four of them came running. He tries to get up and falls on his face, and asks for their help, and is amazed to find that he is missing an arm. He passes out from the shock, as another round of howling begins. John picks up the gun and herds the women behind him as they all try to make it back to the safety of the village.

A werewolf comes crashing out of the woods at them, snarling and growling. The girls scream and John raises the rifle, but he is attacked first, and it goes flying as the werewolf bites firmly down on his arm, then knocks him to the ground and attacks his leg. Sam grabs the rifle and quickly bashes the beast with the stock, then takes aim as it runs off into the woods. A shot cries out in the night, and a crash is heard in the woods. John calls out in pain, and the two girls start to drag him away to safety.

Months later:

John’s injuries never properly heal, and he cannot return to school. Sam, partly out of loyalty to his friend, and partly out of a desire for Mary, decides to stay in the town and help him out.

They are all shaken by their experience that night, months ago. The body of the wolf was never found, only three hunters. The wife of the one who died from bloodloss after losing his arm knows that one man set out with him, so it becomes unclear whether the third, found dead by a bullet through the heart, was out on his own and got caught in the crossfire, or whether he was the creature. Possessed, perhaps, or cursed, or even something worse. Rumours abound, and while Sam cannot possibly agree with Mary’s superstitious belief in demonic possession turning a man into a wolf creature, he admires the tenacity of her belief, and steals a kiss. Plus, the evidence suggests that the beast is still at large, as animals continue to go missing.

Meanwhile, we find out that Isabelle is pregnant. The pregnancy causes her to wake in the middle of the night though, and then she finds that most disturbingly, John is not there some times. She worries where he might be going, and what he might be doing, particularly since he’s not well enough to be out of bed.

News comes then, as a villager drops by to ask if anyone has seen her husband. He left to use the outhouse near the woods the night before, and never returned…

Months later still:

John is too sick to be out at night, his wounds will not fully close and they burn with the heat of brimstone. Mary and Sam are setting out to join a search party, as now the tenth person has disappeared into the woods. Howling can be heard in the distance almost every night lately, particularly when the full moon is up.

They discuss Isabelle’s recent birth to a baby boy, and how exciting it is and how much love there is between her and John, despite his injuries. “The boy is strange, though” remarks Sam.

“My perfect nephew?! Best watch what you say” retorts Mary.

“Well, he is a good looking boy, I’ll grant you that, but to be born with a full head of hair and teeth is strange. Most strange.”

“Yes, peculiar, but maybe it’s just every other infant in the world who has it wrong. Just think of all the nights Isabelle will get to sleep through since he won’t have to teethe!” Mary exclaims. They walk for a bit in silence. “I would like one of my own one day,” she sighs “it would be so beautiful.”

They stop and Sam touches her cheek “You look so pale and beautiful in the moonlight. And it is such a beautiful moon.” He deliberately points her chin to the sky.

“Yes,” she says “it’s so bright on nights like this, and the air is so crisp, and the sky so clear…”

He pulls a ring out of his pocket while she’s watching the sky, then gets down on one knee. “Mary, I love you with all my heart. Will you marry me?” Before she can respond there is another howl, much closer this time, and a werewolf leaps over the kneeling Sam and flattens Mary. Sam tries to grab the werewolf, but is kicked back to the ground. Mary’s throat is slashed by the beast’s fangs, and then it runs off into the woods, howling.

Sam screams at the moon himself.

Soon after:

Sam pounds on the door to the Polidori home. Isabelle answers, starts to chastise him for the lateness of the hour, and for waking the child, when she sees the redness in his eyes and the madness in his hair. He grabs her and starts to cry, saying that Mary is dead. “Where is John? I must tell him.”

“He should be in bed,” Isabelle begins, but then turns to see that he is not. “Oh no, he’s gone off on another of his sleepwalking adventures. Oh, I’m so sorry Sam, oh Mary! What happened?”

“The beast, Isabelle. The beast got her.” He sobs. “We were going to be married, and she was snatched away from me by its evil jaws…”

John returns, as in a trance, half changed into a werewolf, his clothes covered with blood. “No, no it can’t be…” Sam gasps in horror as John walks by him without seeing, going straight for the door to the bedroom.

Isabelle screams “No, John no, not you!”

“Mary said it was a man, a cursed man, and I didn’t believe her. I’ll make you pay for what you did, you murderer! You killer!” He grabs a rifle, and shoots John through the heart at point blank range. John falls to the ground, and never seems to notice, lost as he is in the transformation.

Isabelle starts to growl at Sam. “John! You killed him!” As Sam turns in surprise to her, the child howls and jumps out of his bed, and the two of them begin to tear Sam limb from limb.