customers served (give or take a few hundred thousand) since September 2004!
Comments and opinions expressed on THE KNIGHT SHIFT are those of Christopher Knight and not necessarily those of subjects discussed in this blog, of advertisers appearing on it or of any reasonable human being. Any correspondence/irate letters/lawsuit threats/Nigerian e-mail scams can be sent to theknightshift@gmail.com.
One week from tonight, the story of the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 will draw to a close as the final episode of Lost airs on ABC.
I do not know if there will ever be another television series that has so captivated me. That has compelled me to tune in as Lost has. I am not much of a television viewer at all: a show has to sincerely earn my attention and respect, for me to devote my time toward it. And that, Lost has done.
"What They Died For", the last regular episode, airs two nights from now. There'll be a two-hour recap next Sunday followed by the two and a half hour "The End".
And some dude/dudette in London has spliced together this spellbinding trailer for Lost's series finale. It's so entrancing that none other than Lost executive producer Damon Lindelof Twitter-ed about it earlier this morning! This bit o' video cuts right to the heart and soul of what has made Lost so good.
In case you're wondering, the music is "Shooting Star" from the Stardust soundtrack.
And there'll no doubt be plenty more Lost posts between now and next Sunday night (and probably beyond...)
Having now rehearsed the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" scene for the first time, my mind is far more at rest about being a "ballet ninja" in that part of the show.
(I could also say something about how it turns out that Phra Alack - the character that I'm playing - was in real life a eunuch. Seems that was a common requirement for employment in a royal household in the Far East up 'til the early twentieth century. The things some people will do for a paycheck...)
The disparate parts of the show are coming together into a cohesive unit. It's really something: one group will be practicing dance while another is going over singing, and still another at the same time could be the principles going over lines. And they're not necessarily at the same location either: our rehearsals have been at Rockingham County Senior High School (where the performances will be held next month) and in two buildings at Rockingham Community College, and there'll be rehearsals at an area church later this week. Not to mention all the work that's going on at the Theatre Guild's warehouse on set construction, plus props and costumes.
It's certainly turning into a more massive production than Children of Eden two years ago, and some have said that it's becoming even bigger than Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat last year. Which is exciting, 'cuz Joseph was far and away the glitziest show that I've seen anywhere around here, ever. If people come away from this show telling us that we should take it on the road, then I'll consider that one of the highest praises imaginable.
Not only that, but DreamWorks execs are reportedly trying to get Tim Burton attached to the project. Monsterpocalypse creator Matt Wilson is already on board as co-producer for the movie.
Hmmmm... this could be pretty good. Provided that the correct tone and atmosphere is there. Monsterpocalypse has some terrific background fluff behind it and building on that, DreamWorks could turn in a heck of a good movie. In my mind a Monsterpocalypse film should be like the original RoboCop: intense on action and drama but also with tons of tongue-in-cheek humor and satire. Make it a CGI animated spectacle and DreamWorks potentially has a very strong movie franchise in it stable.
'Course, I can't let a post like this go by without showing off my very own Monsterpocalypse filmmaking: HyperMind's entry in last year's Monsterpocapalooza contest (and we even made the top ten!)...
If you wanna find out more about this great game, smash on through to Monsterpocalypse.com. You'll also wanna check out Team Covenant: a website devoted to great games like Monsterpocalypse (and sponsors of this week's inaugural MonCon in Tulsa, Oklahoma). And I can't say enough good about Team Covenant's The Definitive Monsterpocalypse Tutorial DVD: by far one of the most passionate and clever how-to videos that I've ever seen :-)
It's hard to believe now, but Theodore Maiman's discovery was turned down from scholarly publication when he first submitted it! At the time there was a lot of work being conducted on maser (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) and the journal Physical Review Letters thought that Maiman's article was a retread of too many others. But before long researchers - and soon afterward the rest of the world - agreed that the laser which Maiman created on May 16th 1960 using a ruby rod was an entirely different gimmick. Fifty years later and lasers are everywhere around us: in CD and DVD players, in your doctor's office, maybe even in your shirt pocket.
The journey lasted more than 23,000 miles, including some time across the equator. During her trip Jessica consumed "32 cans of Spam, 64 cans of tuna, 32 cans of pineapple, 576 chocolate bars, and 290 freeze dried ready meals all alone in her small yacht." She was kept company by a crew of stuffed animals, and an assortment of timed care packages from her family that she opened per a set schedule. And when not navigating her ship "Ella's Pink Lady" Jessica kept busy keeping a blog that allowed everyone to follow the course of her journey.
It must be noted that for all that she has accomplished, Miss Watson is incredibly humble. Sharing the podium with Australian prime minster Kevin Rudd yesterday, Jessica shrugged off notions of being something more. "I don't consider myself a hero, I'm an ordinary girl. You don't have to be someone special to achieve something amazing, you've just got to have a dream, believe in it and work hard. I'd like to think I've proved that anything really is possible if you set your mind to it."
That's one lady who's got rare wisdom in addition to having notched up such a journey. And if ya ask me, they do make her a hero.
Congrats Jessica! Looking forward to reading the inevitable book about your adventure :-)
I'd better get back to blogging in earnest. Stuff might be about to happen.
I am returning with some new features, which will be getting unrolled on The Knight Shift in the near future. Looking forward to seeing what kind of response they evoke :-)
This is probably the most mythos-packed episode of Lost, ever. And I've no doubt that many might not care much for that aspect...
...but I thought that "Across The Sea" was a very strong entry that answered bunches of questions while simultaneously not answering some that I was expecting and in fact added at least one big new question (with three and a half hours left to wrap up the tale of Lost and its myriad of mysteries).
"Across The Sea" was also the longest flashback episode in Lost history: the entire chapter takes place an indeterminate amount of time in the past, and that's bugging me. Is this meant to be pre-ancient Egypt? The hieroglyphics we've seen at the Temple and that this is apparently before the Statue of Tawaret was built would suggest it. That potentially places "Across The Sea" more than four thousand years before the present time. To quote Tommy Lee Jones from what has become one of my favorite movies: "Who are these people?"
I suppose that one of the reasons I'm wondering about how far back "Across The Sea" takes place, is that a bigtime mystery from Season 1 got answered tonight and it doesn't quite jibe with Jack's expert opinion on the matter. And speaking of that: I'll wager an RC Cola and a Moon Pie that just as many people will be outraged by tonight's episode as they were by "The Candidate" last week, accusing the showrunners of "cheating" with "Across The Sea" and all those theories that had abounded.
And what's the Man in Black's real name? Producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof have said he's got one and that it's important to the story. Well... considering how we now know what he wants and why he is the way he is (even though I don't understand why that happened, the "birth of the Smoke Monster" sequence was awesome) seems like his name would have been the cherry on top.
I'll give "Across The Sea" a 7 out of 10, and I'd love to give it an 8 but something... seemed lacking. Maybe I'll reconsider after watching it again (and again and again). And who knows: perhaps in retrospect this will prove to be a much-appreciated breather before "The End" a week and a half from tonight.
Only one more regular episode. Next Tuesday night: "What They Died For".
(And the teaser for next week's Lost was one of the best ever! Using "The End" by The Doors like that was a stroke of genius :-)
Not a new word from The Knight Shift's eclectic proprietor since Friday evening. Well, other than a comment or two on existing posts.
Let's just say that I had a great past few days and that God wound up teaching me a lot of new things and I was led to let His guidance continue to linger and instruct me past the usual end of the weekend. Or something like that.
That, and it was a great Mother's Day.
Looks like the stuff piled up in my absence. Where do I start?
It's the Lost Season 5 Soundtrack CD! It won't hit retail until this coming Tuesday, but a copy arrived here a few hours ago from somewhere among my nebuluous network of insiders and associates (or perhaps it was the strange time-shifting qualities of the Island that made it possible)...
I'm now on my second time of playing through it and once again Michael Giacchino has turned in a mesmerizing score (but those of us who watch Lost know that already :-) There are 23 tracks on this thing. The ones I've most been looking forward to having are "The Swinging Bendulum": the theme that was first introduced when we saw the Lamp Post in the episode "The Lie". That, and "The Tangled Web", better known as Jacob's theme. Unfortunately "The Tangled Web" does not trail off into the score that we heard when we got our first real view of the Statue of Tawaret in the prologue of "The Incident", which I thought was really majestic and mysterious. But hey: we do get the main vibe of Jacob's theme, so that's still fine. And there is plenty of reprising of "Dharmacide" (from the Season 3 soundtrack, which most people know as Ben's theme), which has also been one of my most favorite bits of music from the show.
Per my usual practice, I'm going to purchase a copy at retail this coming week (something that I did with Transformers: The Scoretwice when it came out a few years ago :-) to make up for having this one sent. And if you love Lost and the work of Michael Giacchino, I'm gonna heartily recommend that you buy it too. 'Tis well worth plunking down hard-earned coin for.
"Code Name Rodent" textified from the courthouse in Danville that Micah Robertson - son of local cult leader Johnny Robertson - has been found guilty of trespassing at Westover Baptist Church. Robertson won't get jail time (he could have gotten up to a year in the slammer) but he's been hit with a $100 fine.
More importantly, Micah Noel Robertson now has a criminal record. One directly stemming from his activities of harassment and intimidation as a member of the cult calling itself "Church of Christ" headed by his father, Johnny Robertson.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the first such legal mark against the cult. Will Johnny Robertson and his followers pay heed to it? Probably not.
More soon...
EDIT 4:48 p.m. EST: To all the members of the press who are finding this blog this afternoon.
Please be advised that Johnny Robertson, the father of guilty defendant Micah Robertson, is a convicted felon himself who has served time in prison for armed robbery. Johnny Robertson has also accused numerous churches in the area of child pornography (without any evidence), has stalked many people in their private residences and at their places of worship, and is the de facto owner of WGSR Star 47 in the sense that its general manager Charles Roark does anything that Robertson tells him to do. Among many other things that will no doubt be of interest to you.
For more please follow this link and feel free to search The Knight Shift for much more about this cult and its activities in this area.
EDIT 5:45 p.m. EST: Look! Criminal record!
Click to drastically embiggenize.
Micah Robertson can have this taken off his record after one year's probation. He also can't go to Westover Baptist Church again.
I'm going to make this commentary: that what Micah Robertson and the rest of his cult do, has nothing in common whatsoever with what Jesus and His followers are recorded as doing in the New Testament. Micah Robertson is fond of claiming that he and his fellow goons are "arguing" and "debating" just as the apostle Paul did.
Micah Robertson doesn't seem to realize that Christ, Peter, Paul and the rest were motivated out of love for others, not motivated out of debate for sake of debate. Without the requisite love, the words of Johnny Robertson and his followers are as clanging cymbals, meaning nothing.
I will also note, since I'm apparently getting quite an audience at the moment, that Johnny Robertson, his son Micah and the rest of their cult do not worship Jesus Christ. Rather they worship the water in the baptistery of their building with the "Church of Christ" sign hanging outside.
EDIT 11:16 p.m. EST: Pssst... hey, all of you members of the "Church of Christ" cult in Texas who are visiting this blog tonight:
Is it biblical or typical practice among your number for one of you to knowingly and consistently give huge amounts of God's money to an avowed atheist, bisexual habitual thief?
I know the Lord works in mysterious ways, but in my mind that's got to be pushing things.
...so to make up for it, here's a shiny new photo of The Knight Shift's unofficial Page 3 girl: my beautiful cousin Lauryn!
And look: she's got another gorgeous friend, whose name I do not currently have on file. But who are you to complain? After all, you're getting two lovely ladies in one great shot!
By the way, the rumors are true: I am currently giving this blog a severe and long-awaited overhaul. However contrary to reports there will not be a pay-only section of Lauryn photos on The Knight Shift (although I would no doubt make a tidy sum from such a practice... but I am an ethical and upstanding publisher after all :-)
Ya see, it's crap like this that makes me despise the Seventeenth Amendment and everything about it.
The United States Senate is supposed to represent the states. Up 'til 1913, it was the individual state legislatures that elected their respective senators. Then the Seventeenth Amendment was passed and made the Senate a popularly-elected office.
And that was the beginning of the real modern era of dirty politics and corruption, in my book.
We had our primary elections here in North Carolina today. Incumbent U.S. Senator Richard Burr won the Republican nomination. He'll be going against whoever comes out of the runoff set for June 22nd against Elaine Marshall and Cal Cunningham from the Democrat party.
Elaine Marshall ain't happy. And she wants Cal Cunningham to drop out already... for the good of the Democrats. From WRAL's website...
"I think not having a runoff is in the Democratic Party's long-range best interests," Marshall said. "(We should be) focusing on the target, which is getting this (Senate) seat for the Democratic Party. So, continuing to fight among ourselves does not get us to the point where we need to be."
Ummmm... excuse me, Mrs. Marshall: the seat of United States Senator from North Carolina doesn't belong to the Democrat party, the Republican party or ANY party! It belongs to the people. It is meant to represent them as a state in the Senate.
Not this office, or any other, was ever meant by the Founding Fathers to be considered spoils of political war.
And I would be just as honked-off angry if any Republican had said likewise.
There is a disconnect between the people and the politicians in this country, friends and neighbors. You know it. I know it. And it's a damn shame that apparently so few will openly and brazenly admit that the vast majority of those involved in politics large and small do NOT deserve our vote!
But it's a fleeting, precious and scarce commodity when one of this sort does us the favor of opening his or her mouth and stating the obvious.
I have not chosen whether or not I will cast a vote for Richard Burr this November. But I can most definitely assure everyone that I will not be casting any vote for Elaine Marshall.
(Thanks for the heads-up and link to lifelong friend and brother in much Chad Austin, who is alleging that he will begin blogging again in the near future...)
The producers of ABC's hit drama have shot so much crucial material for the show's hugely anticipated series finale that the network has agreed to extend the last episode by an extra half-hour.
When the "Lost" finale airs Sunday, May 23, the episode will run from 9 to 11:30 p.m. The overrun will air instead of the local news, with the "Jimmy Kimmel Live: Aloha to Lost" post-finale special remaining at 11:30 p.m. ABC is expected to announce the plan on Tuesday night's episode of Kimmel.
The night before "The End" airs, ABC will also broadcast the pilot episode that first aired on September 22nd, 2004, as one of those "enhanced" editions that pops up factoids about the story on the bottom of the screen.
I don't know if there's going to be anything like Lost that I'll be watching again anytime soon, seeing as how I'm so extremely finicky about how I choose to devote my precious time on television. The last time a show captivated me this much, it was Babylon 5 more than ten years ago. If there's nothing else on the horizon, this might be the most zeroed-in on the boob tube that I'll be for a long time to come...
...so at least for the weekend of May 22-23, I'll get to go out with a bang :-)
I'm going to be as un-spoilerish as I possibly can be after seeing this episode...
Goin' be LOTS of people all kinds of angry and crying tonight after watching "The Candidate". The Intertubes might just burst from the wrath being poured into keyboards between now and the next several hours.
At least with Blake's 7, Terry Nation waited until the absolutely final episode of that show to force viewers to watch the main characters gets killed off one by one. Lost still has four hours left before its final moments: what the $&@# could showrunners Cuse and Lindelof possibly have left to hurt us with?
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Whether alive or dead or undead, John Locke just can't stop playing with C-4. Jack has finally and firmly emerged as the man of faith: exactly the mirror opposite of what he started out as. And it was great to see Anthony Cooper again...
...but it was Hurley's breakdown in the final moments which is still resonating mightily in my gray matter. That... and one very particular tragic moment that we saw before the final commercial break... said it all.
Has any other show done so magnificent a performance at building up characters that we've come to care for, only to force us to... to watch as that happened to them?
Well played, Cuse and Lindelof. Well played.
But it's not "The End" yet.
And we shall see what lies "Across the Sea" next week.
Until then, "The Candidate" would get a 10 out of 10 from this viewer... except that it broke clean off after pegging the needle so hard.
Nashville, Tennessee is currently the biggest disaster area in the entire country: never mind the oil spill in the Gulf and the attempted car bombing in Times Square. But somehow, most people in America other than those in the immediate area seem completely oblivious about it.
If you live outside of Nashville, you may not be aware, but our city was hit by a 500-year flood over the last few days. The national news coverage gave us 15 minutes, but went back to focusing on a failed car bomb and an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. While both are clearly important stories, was that any reason to ignore our story? It may not be as terror-sexy as a failed car bomb or as eco-sexy as an oil spill, but that’s no reason to be ignored.
The Cumberland River crested at its highest level in over 80 years. Nashville had its highest rainfall totals since records began. People drowned. Billions of dollars in damage occurred. It is the single largest disaster to hit Middle Tennessee since the Civil War. And yet…no one knows about it.
Does it really matter? Eventually, it will…as I mentioned, there are billions of dollars in damage. It seems bizarre that no one seems to be aware that we just experienced what is quite probably the costliest non-hurricane disaster in American history. The funds to rebuild will have to come from somewhere, which is why people need to know. It’s hard to believe that we will receive much relief if there isn’t a perception that we need it.
But let’s look at the other side of the coin for a moment. A large part of the reason that we are being ignored is because of who we are. Think about that for just a second. Did you hear about looting? Did you hear about crime sprees? No…you didn’t. You heard about people pulling their neighbors off of rooftops. You saw a group of people trying to move two horses to higher ground. No…we didn’t loot. Our biggest warning was, “Don’t play in the floodwater.” When you think about it…that speaks a lot for our city. A large portion of why we were being ignored was that we weren’t doing anything to draw attention to ourselves. We were handling it on our own.
(snip)
Parts of Nashville that could never even conceivably be underwater were underwater. Some of them still are. Opry Mills and the Opryland Hotel are, for all intents and purposes, destroyed. People died sitting in standstill traffic on the Interstate. We saw boats going down West End. And, of course, we all saw the surreal image of the portable building from Lighthouse Christian floating into traffic and being destroyed when cars were knocked into it. I’m still having trouble comprehending all of it.
And yet…life will go on. We’ll go back to work, to school, to our lives…and we’ll carry on. In a little over a month, I’ll be on this website talking about the draft. In October, we’ll be discussing the new Predators’ season with nary a thought of these past few days. But in a way, they changed everyone in this town. We now know that that it can happen to us…but also know that we can handle it.
Because we are Nashville.
I was in Nashville a few years ago with Dad. We had a great time there (I went to try out for Jeopardy!, and so help me I like to think I'm knowledgeable about many things but fourteenth-century French opera is not one of them :-). A lot of the places that Fuqua mentions in this article, we visited. Opry Mills is where Opryland used to be. It's now a mall that pays homage to Nashville's legacy of country music.
I'm having a very hard time picturing the place flooded and destroyed.
To the people of Nashville: you've a lot more friends out here than y'all can imagine. And you are definitely being held up in our thoughts and prayers as you have to go through this.
And I for one have no doubt that you will bounce back from this. Because, like the article says: you are Nashville.
SPIDERMAN foiled a would-be thief as Jedi Knights blocked his escape route.
No, it's not a comic book plot but the scene which unravelled in a Australian book store on Saturday.
Store owner Michael Baulderstone, dressed as Spiderman, spotted the man trying to steal an X-Men book worth $160 (£97).
The 45-year-old called for back-up and the hapless thief was surrounded by superheroes within seconds.
Mr Baulderstone said: "We had about 40 people dressed up as their favourite superheroes to celebrate International Free Comic Day, so he didn't have much of a choice but to hand the comic back after a little bit of a scuffle.
"Everyone in the store thought it was a play, that it was street theatre of some sort. It wasn't until I said 'call the police' that people started to realise.
"One of the funniest things about the incident was that I called for people to stand near the door and it just so happened we had people dressed as Jedi knights there blocking the exit, the Flash was there at some point too.
"It was a bit serious at the time, but now we're looking back laughing at what greeted police."
Perhaps this chap will argue in court "But yer lordship I was told it was Free Comic Book Day..."
Here's what McWeeny has found out: the teaser trailer for it is going to run with Iron Man 2, which comes out this Friday.
The title of it (if this is indeed the name of the film) is Super 8.
And it might... emphasis on "might" y'all... be the follow-up to 2008's Cloverfield.
I was already planning on seeing Iron Man 2 on Friday. Guess this will be even more reason to look forward to it (even if this doesn't turn out to be a Cloverfield sequel :-)
It's been two weeks since the last fresh installment. Last Tuesday night was a repeat of "Ab Aeterno", the long-awaited and wildly acclaimed Richard Alpert backstory episode that aired a few weeks ago.
Tonight's episode, "The Candidate", is being said by those who have seen it already to be exceptionally good. And I'm hearing even better things about next week's "Across the Sea", which is said to answer a wazoo of questions (including the origin of the frozen donkey wheel, and how Jacob and his "friend" came to the Island). No, I don't know what those are: I'm discovering 'em along with everyone else. And don't e-mail me with answers either: I know when real Evil Incarnate is reading my blog, so it would be too easy to track you down too if I had to :-P
"The Candidate" airs at 9 p.m. EST, and is gonna be one of those episodes of Lost that is extra-long by two minutes. Plan your DVRs accordingly!
It's the biggest financial bailout of a single country in history. I'm already hearing that the International Monetary Fund won't have enough coin to put Greece back on firm footing again (if it even had that). No doubt the IMF will soon afterward be coming to the United States government for Americans to pay "our fair share" of Europe's debt crisis.
But that's not what compels me to write about Greece's woes at the moment, friends and neighbors...
This has not gone over well with many of the natives, who have responded with angry protests throughout that nation.
And I find it very easy to envision the United States following much the same track toward economic disaster.
Our own government is too big, too unwieldy, and "employs" way too many people. It's not as bad as 1/3rd of the workforce, but it's getting there. Hell, 1/7th of the economy is going to practically be federalized en masse when "healthcare reform" gets implemented.
We're spending money we no longer have, and we keep giving it away as "entitlements" (including to many people who aren't legally in this country to begin with).
I'm beginning to see the cracks. Pay attention and you can't miss 'em either. States and municipalities large and small are struggling to pay the bills. And yet we keep throwing money away to maintain a semblance of might and power.
The tree looks like it's yet standing tall and firm. But it's become rotted inside. And it's getting worse.
If you want a picture of what future awaits us here in America, you might wanna take a look at Greece. This could will be us sooner than later, if we don't rein in our fiscal policies.
Future solid state disks may finally be able to catch up with the large capacities of mechanical hard drives, thanks to an ingenious project by a scientist at the North Carolina State University.
Dr Jay Narayan has developed a silicon storage chip that stores data in magnetic nanodots, or quantum dots; tiny structures that can measure just 6nm in diameter. Each nanoscale dot stores a single bit of data, but you can squeeze so many dots onto a small area of silicon that the university says that a single chip can “store an unprecedented amount of data.”
Dr Narayan says that the technology could enable you to “store over one billion pages of information in a chip that is one square inch.” That’s pages in terms of books, by the way, so how much is this in terms of bits and bytes?
Speaking to Thinq, Dr Narayan explained that "one terabit can store 250 million pages." According to Dr Narayan, "at 10nm per bit, 1cm square stores one terabit." As such, the billion pages would be made up of four square centimetres of silicon, providing four terabits of storage. That's basically 512GB in just one small chip, and you could squeeze in much more data than that if the dots had a diameter of just 6nm.
If this new method overcomes the problems with limited reading/writing that current solid state storage has, in addition to that gads of space... well, that would pretty much be the last hard drive or iPod or whatever that you would ever need (and maybe even want :-)
Smurf on the smurfy link above for more shots of Azaria as Gargamel, who in the film chases the Smurfs into modern-day Manhattan. This looks like it's gonna be a fun movie! I shall have to smurf it when it comes out :-)
A hunter named Charles Olsen has been hit with a $7000 fine after being found guilty of violating game and wildlife laws, after illegally shooting and killing a bear.
It's how Olsen led the unwitting bear to its doom that particularly raises eyebrows: with a trail of donuts.
Charles Olsen, 39, who has been nicknamed the 'Pastry Poacher', was found guilty of violating game laws after he lured the creature with the sweet treats and illegally shot it.
He first attracted the attention of a Game Commission Wildlife Conservation Officer when he was spotted driving his truck, which was loaded with pastries, on a highway just one week before the start of bear season.
Charles Olsen was fined after luring the bear with doughnuts and then shooting it.
The wildlife officer then reported Mr Olsen's truck license number to bear check stations.
Officer Cory Bentzoni is quoted as saying: 'Being that we were so close to bear season, seeing that person drive by with an unusual amount of pastries was like watching an individual go down a row of parked vehicles testing each handle to see if it would open.
'Something just didn't seem right.'
In addition to the fine, Olsen is also looking at losing his hunting privileges for the next three years.
I can't figure out why the cops at the donut shop weren't already suspicious of him to begin with...
"We know who you are." That's the message from the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue in this spot - paid for with the tax dollars of Pennsylvania citizens - that obviously has but one purpose: to SCARE us.
Who exactly is "we" here? And who is "you" intended to represent?
Has our government really become so divorced from the people it's supposed to be comprised of and represent, that it has now resorted to active measures of intimidation?
Here. See for yourself...
This is not freedom, people. This is blatant tyranny. This is everything that the Founders and too many others since their time have fought against and far more than that. And if I were a resident of Pennsylvania, I would be mad as #&@$ at the state government there for this. It indicates way too much else gone screwy, not just in Pennsylvania but across this country.
As V said in V for Vendetta: "People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people."
Rose Cutuli Wray, our abundantly effervescent director for Theatre Guild of Rockingham County's production of The King and I, has just informed me that in addition to playing Phra Alack (the King's secretary), that I have been given another role as well.
From her e-mail...
Also you have been chosen to be one of our 5 ballet ninja's for Small House of Uncle Thomas. No dancing is necessary, but you will be doing numerous things in the ballet.
A "ballet ninja".
A "ballet ninja"?!
What the...?!?!?
I have no idea what this means exactly, and with a name like "ballet ninja" I'm rather scared to contemplate upon it.
But hey, this is art. The potential silliness is temporary but the show is forever!
I couldn't resist posting a lil' vintage Vanessa Redgrave (one of the most talented actresses in the history of anything) from the film version of Camelot to celebrate the occasion!
It's almost a half-century later... and we still don't have that personal one-man sub! Or domed cities on Mars. Or cars with interchangeable bodies. Or robots to decorate our Christmas trees.
Relief pitcher Charlie Kerfeld asked for and received 37 boxes of orange Jell-O as a bonus when he signed a new contract with the Astros in 1987. Roy Oswalt got a shiny new bulldozer for helping his team get to the World Series. A.J. Burnett required the Blue Jays to give his wife eight round-trip limo rides per season from their home in Maryland to Toronto when he signed as a free agent five years ago.
Those are just a few of the wacky stipulations that professional baseball players have demanded or agreed to in their signing contracts, according to this entertaining lil' article at CNN.com. One thing that I didn't know until reading this: Michael Jordan was still getting paid by the owner of the NBA's Chicago Bulls when Jordan tried his luck at baseball in the early Nineties. Why? 'Cuz Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf was also the owner of Jordan's baseball team :-)
Well done guys! All the more praiseworthy given your present location. I just hope that this won't become an issue when it gets to be time for your next evaluation :-P
As much as I have come to loathe remakes in general - for reasons which I will get to shortly - and even knowing that my opinion is probably going to be in a solid minority, I must confess that I was pleasantly surprised by and rather quite enjoyed the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street.
What's my beef with remakes? It's like this: I can always tell when a movie project rehashing of an earlier successful film is being overly-driven by the pursuit of excess lucre. Look at Clash of the Titans: no I haven't seen its remake yet but I've heard nothing but unbelievably bad things about it (and even worse about it, ahem, "3-D" version, but that's a rant for another time). And then there are films like Peter Jackson's adaptation of King Kong: the movies that don't put the potential for dollars in front of the product's quality on the list of priorities.
What's the difference between the two? What qualifies a remake as being "great" as opposed to being "irredeemably baaaad? It's whether the director, the writers, the entire production choose to remain faithful to the spirit of the original.
And that, I believe Samuel Bayer and his crew have done with Platinum Dunes' retelling of A Nightmare on Elm Street.
This movie hails back to the tone and vibe that Wes Craven evoked in the original movie all the way back in 1983, before Freddy Krueger developed from a demonically-empowered dream-stalkin' homicidal child molester into a character plagued with self-parody. Freddy Krueger 1983 was scary. By the time Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare came out eight years later, Freddy was even being aped on the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And as much as I loved the concept of the Elm Street universe and its central character, it was enough to make me cringe...
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 isn't like that. Its Freddy Krueger (played by Jackie Earle Haley, inheriting the hat and sweater from the original series' Robert Englund) is not the Freddy who cracks too many corny jokes before killing you with cockroaches or comic books or a Nintendo Power Glove. Haley's Freddy Krueger is about revenge and murder... and then he'll go for the laugh. In the same way that Heath Ledger's Joker had that "it's funny but it's also not funny" aspect of his character in The Dark Knight.
I guess that's what I appreciated most about A Nightmare on Elm Street 2.0. This movie marked the return of Freddy Krueger as a primal avatar of the natural forces of fear. Which in my mind is the best way to handle Freddy as a character.
Overall, this movie is a smart update of the original's concept. All of the classic elements are still here: Freddy's claw rising out of the bathwater, the rhyming girls playing jump-rope, the parents hiding a terrible secret... But it's also a movie that isn't afraid to change things up some. Freddy's backstory is changed significantly: in the 2010 version he's not a child murderer in his mortal life. But I still have to nod in approval to what scribes Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer have come up with. And I have to say something about the score (composed by Steve Jablonsky, which y'all who've been following this blog already for a few years know how much I love his work :-) as well. If 2010's A Nightmare on Elm Street had the familiar "Elm Street theme", I can't recall it. Jablonsky has delivered a fresh and terrific score that is totally in keeping with the atmosphere of Springwood, USA while at the same time not retreading the music of the original series. I'll probably be buying the soundtrack if it's available (and if it's not, no I won't be doing an online petition again, sorry. It's just have too much else going on at the moment :-)
I saw this movie in a packed theater last night at midnight along with friend and fellow blogger Steven Glaspie. And it's been awhile since I've seen an audience react with that much genuine terror and serious screaming at what's happening up on the screen. And we happened to overhear a number of other people saying that they enjoyed it. I doubt it'll ever hold the same place as the original series and its mythology, but I for one wouldn't mind seeing two or three more of the "new universe" of Elm Street movies. But not more than that: this movie was infinitely better than the remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween... but I don't want it to become another Saw series either.
So if you want a fun springtime popcorn flick and wanna feel good 'n scared, leave your preconceptions in the parking lot and give A Nightmare on Elm Street a shot. I think you just might be quite surprised by it as well.
E-mails have flooded (pun shamefully intended) into my box since early Tuesday morning asking "Have you heard about Noah's ark being discovered on Mount Ararat?!"
I've been following this story from the time it first broke. And I've been pondering it a lot, wondering what exactly to make of it, before adding my own two cents into the discussion at large...
In case you've missed it, a group of Chinese and Turkish researchers are claiming to have found a massive artificial wooden structure on the slopes of Mount Ararat in Turkey: the place which depending on how you translate the original texts, was the place where the ark of Noah landed after the worldwide deluge recorded in the Book of Genesis (some argue that it should translate into the "mountains of Ararat", making the possible location of the Ark anywhere between Turkey and Iran).
Now, people have been looking for Noah's Ark for literally hundreds of years. Reports of sightings have been documented throughout antiquity. Even during the twentieth century there have been stories about it being spotted from afar (and not a few who said they walked on its top decks), including some admittedly very curious aerial photographs. But so far, nobody has come up with solid physical evidence of the ark being there.
I've heard 'em all over the years. So when I first read about Noah's Ark Ministries International out of Hong Kong, you could have immediately colored me skeptical.
Except that these guys arrived with something that to the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever produced before. Namely, photographs, wood samples, and full-color video.
Here's the problem I have with it however: as well-meaning as Noah's Ark Ministries International likely is, they should not have full-bore declared with little uncertainty that they have found the biblical boat. It would have been much more professional and scholarly if they had announced to the international community that they had discovered strong evidence of a man-made wooden structure on Mount Ararat, and then proceeded to allow their findings to withstand rigorous academic scrutiny.
Which leads to my next point: we don't know where exactly these photographs and video footage were made. However, I definitely could understand if the group wants to keep it under wraps for the time being, lest the site become contaminated (or worse, vandalized). But at some point they must be prepared to come forward with the location, and open it up to further study: both organized and independent. That isn't being mistrustful of the explorers' claim at all. I like to think that it's trying to validate it.
So that said, I'll make this commentary for the time being: assuming that Noah's Ark Ministries International has (a) located something that is indeed on Mount Ararat, (b) it can be determined that the site and its evidence has not been planted, (c) operating without the pre-conceived notion that this must be Noah's Ark...
...what then is it that they have found?
Because if the group is being absolutely honest with us, they have discovered something on Mount Ararat. Whether or not it is Noah's Ark or not, it will still be an amazing archaeological find!
And even if it isn't the ark of Noah, it won't alter the matter of my own beliefs one way or another. The historical witness and far more than that has already in my estimation more than confirmed the greatest and most central tenet of my faith: that God so loved the world, that He sent His only Son to free us from the burdens of sin and legalism. Our faith is founded on things yet unseen, not those things which we can behold with our eyes.
But that said: I'm still gonna be keeping my eye on this story :-)
I hope these kids understand that emergency first aid in the real world is kinda hard to do while running around the landscape looking for medpacks.
The Boy Scouts of America is now offering a Video Games merit award for its younger members: those who are part of the Tiger Cubs, Cub Scouts and Webelos Scouts. There are actually two awards: the Video Games belt loop (one of those metal belt ornaments, which I always thought were pretty innovative) and an academics pin, which is earned after getting the belt loop. Among the requirements for the decoration: "Teach an adult or a friend how to play a video game", "Play a video game that will help you practice your math, spelling, or another skill that helps you in your schoolwork", and "With an adult’s supervision, install a gaming system" (click here for the full list of requirements).
Now, I love a good video game as much as the next person. But being an Eagle Scout and having been a Cub Scout before that, I have to say that this is about the silliest thing that the Boy Scouts of America has done in a great many moon. And lest y'all think that I'm being old-fashioned or a "stick in the mud", consider this: there are already awards in Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts for things like computer skills. So one for video gaming is plenty redundant. What's next: a merit badge for Facebook and Twitter skillz?
In addition to Video Games, the Boy Scouts are also rolling out awards for Disability Awareness, Family Travel, Good Manners, Hiking, Hockey, Horseback Riding, Kickball, Nutrition, Pet Care, Photography, Reading and Writing, and Skateboarding. I can see at least two on that list that are not only fun to do, but very strong skills that can follow a young lad (or young lass, no male chauvinists we!) into a life of productive success. Seems like the Cub Scouts could be doing more to encourage early forays into things like that.
(But then, who knows? One of those Cub Scouts might grow up to be the next Ken Levine or Cliff Bleszinski...)
This is part of the PowerPoint presentation that was shown to General Stanley McChrystal and other United States military officers leading operations in Afghanistan. It's supposed to clearly and concisely diagram why the situation there is so dire.
No wonder...
McChrystal, commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, quipped that "When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war."
Few words when spoken by a politician or associated sycophant should raise the red flag of alarm more than the word "comprehensive".
(I heard it used a few minutes ago on the Fox News Channel. Per my longtime observation of such matters, whenever anyone in elected office or the "mainstream" press uses the word "comprehensive", 99.999% of the time what it really means is "there's more bullsh-t going on behind the scenes than you seriously want to know about...")
I'm still not entirely persuaded that this wasn't a planned stunt. Like last week's to-do about the 4G-equipped iPhone that some Apple engineer, ahem, "drunkenly" left in a bar. Sure got the Intertubes abuzz about it, aye? So yeah, mark me down as being in the "planned marketing conspiracy" column on that one.
Nearly a full quarter-century earlier, something similar happened to another American mega corporation. That time it was The Coca-Cola Company. On April 23rd 1985, executives announced that the original, world-famous Coca-Cola formula was being retired. Seems that the "old Coke" wasn't cutting it anymore in the "cola wars" between Coca-Cola and Pepsi. So the time-honored Coca Cola was to be put to pasture. In its place we would be getting something called "New Coke".
Witness anew what is arguably the lowest point of the illustrious career of Bill Cosby...
"Better than ever"?? I still remember the one time that I tried to drink New Coke. It tasted like crap! What were you thinking, Bill?! We trusted you! And Coca-Cola betrayed us! No Jell-O Pudding for you.
With a wrathful vehemence not seen since the Cabbage Patch Kid riots of '83, Coca-Cola found itself besieged with angry phone calls, letters and organized protests. Three months later then-CEO Roberto Goizueta announced - via a televised spot with all the gravitas of an Oval Office address - that the crisis was ending: the old Coca-Cola was coming back as "Coca-Cola Classic".
And within days of hitting shelves again for the first time, sales of original Coca-Cola soared. Coca-Cola Classic fast eclipsed sales of Pepsi. To this day, Coca-Cola remains the best-selling soft drink in the world.
How could it not have? By that point in the summer of 1985 Coca-Cola dominated much of the pop cultural discussion, both here and abroad. People were talking about Coke like they had never talked about it before.
New Coke by itself was a business failure... but New Coke did make people want the original Coke like never before. New Coke pulled off what had never been done on this large a scale before: it created genuine demand for something that was already so successful it didn't need demand.
I don't care what the "official" documents say: I'm fairly convinced that the New Coke fiasco in my book was brilliant and quite intentional psychological marketing. Not completely convinced though. Wanna know why? Because it does bother me, that the mass of people can be manipulated by something so simple. And so part of my mind doesn't want to acknowledge a great fear that history and human nature have perhaps confirmed too many times already. But anyhoo...
If you want to know more about New Coke, which we got ambushed with twenty-five years ago this week, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a good write-up about it, including how Coca-Cola is now chronicling the New Coke episode at the World of Coca-Cola.
(If nothing else, it has to be said that New Coke was a product so bad that it made Billy Beer taste good.)
Because you asked for it (well, a lot of the masculine gender among you anyway) here is once again my too-lovely-for-words and incredibly sweet second cousin Lauryn... and her equally gorgeous mother Robin!
No wonder they've often been mistaken for sisters :-)
I would like to also show you a photo of Bob, Lauryn's dad and Robin's husband, but that would prolly ruin the effect...
When friend and fellow filmmaker Marco van Bergen sent me the teaser poster for his upcoming film Shadowlands, I immediately e-mailed him back something to the effect of "Marco, get some therapy dude!"
But seriously: it is a rather neat image, although rather bloody. But I like how it compels the eye to dart around it, picking out grisly detail and the film's tagline...
Guess what? You're immortal! You aren't going to die. Your life is a quantum wave function that from your point of view is infinite. You may see others die and it's altogether possible that they may see you die but that is merely relational to the observer. The fact of the matter is, as an observer of your own wave function you can see neither its beginning or its end.
Don't let anyone else tell you otherwise, either. They're only seeing their respective wave functions. What the heck do they know?
Mind ya, immortality can be a bit boring after awhile. I can't help you there. But no doubt you'll find something to keep you occupied.
Me? I'm going off to become a shrimp boat captain.
Just finished watching this week's episode of Star Wars: Clone Wars on Cartoon Network. This is one show that has gradually and without ceasing, surpassed my expectations. But I had especially high hopes for tonight's installment, "Death Trap". Wouldn't surprise me if this episode had a series' record number of people watching it.
And why? Because it's been known for awhile that "Death Trap" hails the return of Boba Fett: the most infamous - and most popular - bounty hunter of the entire Star Wars pantheon.
It will be thirty years next month since Boba Fett was first seen in The Empire Strikes Back, and fully eight since a young Boba fought alongside his father Jango in Attack of the Clones...
So he's not yet the Mandalorian-armored mercenary that will eventually stalk the galaxy. But "Death Trap" definitely gave us plenty of the up-and-coming Boba Fett in high-gear action! Heck, by my rough count this one half-hour of Clone Wars showed us Boba wrecking more havoc than everything he did in the live-action movies combined! And yet at this stage in his career (voiced by Daniel Logan, who played the ten-year old Boba in Attack of the Clones) he's still a bit uncertain of himself, still blessed with a child's conscience... albeit a child obsessed with killing Mace Windu. He's not what we know he'll be, but he's well on that path.
And then there were the last few moments of the episode: practically porno for everyone who's ever loved the Star Wars bounty hunters too much than is probably healthy. Yeah I'm speaking of Bossk and Aurra Sing but if you watched this episode then you know what I'm thinking of most of all: the return of Boba Fett's hyper-deadly space vessel, Slave I.
(I wonder if we'll ever get to see Bossk's ship, the Hound's Tooth. 'Specially that wicked automated skinning table tailor-made for Wookiee prey. Prolly not: as daring as Star Wars: Clone Wars has been this season, it's not that daring... yet anyway.)
All in all, I thought "Death Trap" was a superb episode: well-scripted, beautifully animated, and finely orchestrated as a story of both action and character. I'll likely watch it a few more times from the DVR over the next several days.
"Death Trap" will air a few more times this week, and then Boba returns for the Clone Wars season finale next Friday night. No doubt Fett-heads across the planet will be waiting out the week with baited breath :-)
Here is Jonathan McWhite (accompanied by David McWhite on guitar) perfectly aping a classic Kenny Rogers tune with this hilarious song parody about Barack Obama...
Very great thanks to good friend Bethany Myers for finding this! :-)
How something like this has escaped my knowledge until now, I've no idea.
Did you know that two widely-used childhood vaccines were manufactured with cells taken from aborted fetuses?
I didn't either, until I read this article from LifeNews.com. It's about a just-published research study that has found a connection between the MMRII and chickenpox vaccines, and the dramatic rise in the rate of diagnosed autism.
From the article...
A new study conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency shows a correlation between the use of cells from babies in abortions in vaccines to an increase in autism rates. The study provides another problem from pro-life advocates who are already concerned about the abortion-vaccine tie.
The study, published in February in the publication Environmental Science & Technology, confirms 1988 as a “change point” in the rise of Autism Disorder rate.
"Although the debate about the nature of increasing autism continues, the potential for this increase to be real and involve exogenous environmental stressors exists," the study says.
The 1988 date is significant because, as pro-life blogger Jill Stanek notes, the Sound Choice Pharmaceutical Institute indicates that's when the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices added a second dose of the MMR vaccine, containing fetal cells from aborted babies, to its recommendations.
The study found two other change point dates: 1981, two years after MMRII was approved in the United States with fetal cells, and 1995, when SCPI says the chickenpox vaccine using aborted cells was approved.
Jim Sedlak, vice president of American Life League, said today that his group is joining SCPI in calling for a Fair Labeling and Informed Consent Act to let people know of this link and the use of cells from babies victimized by abortion.
“For years the evidence has pointed toward the link between vaccines using DNA from aborted babies and the rise of Autism Disorder rates,” he said. “Parents need and deserve to know the risks associated with vaccinations made from lines derived from the bodies of aborted children.”
After all these years and several court cases focusing on the mercury in vaccines as being the accused source of cases of autism, now it turns out that it was possibly something far, far worse that might have been behind the climb.
How does it feel, knowing that we have had our children "inoculated" with the dead remains of innocent babies?
I doubt that even Edgar Allan Poe, in his most feverish nightmare, could have come up with so horrific a thing.
Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien is on my very short list of all-time greatest and most favorite movies. I first got to watch it in 1984 and even today, after countless numbers of times of watching it, it has never failed to thrill and enthrall. Alien is the perfect science-fiction and horror film. Its 1986 sequel Aliens is one of the darn few movies widely regarded as being just as good, if not better even, than the original. But that was mostly an action movie: Scott's Alien was nearly pure unbridled terror of the classic form.
Unfortunately what happened to the Alien franchise after that hasn't been anywhere as up to par with what Ridley Scott and James Cameron did. Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection well, let's put it this way: they both had their moments, but I don't regard them as being true "Alien"-ish canon. Maybe they're just bad dreams that Ripley is having and she's still aboard the Sulaco along with Hicks, Newt and Bishop on the way back from LV-426. Even Alien vs. Predator was better than those entries (and I haven't seen that movie's sequel so I can't comment on how good or bad it might be).
Anyway, when word came that Ridley Scott was planning on returning to the series that he helped to create, I was ecstatic. I had been hoping that he could get things back on track. Maybe even do something drastic to make us forget that Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection never happened to begin with.
Unfortunately, it looks as if that is not to be. We've known for some time already that Scott was going to do a "prequel" to the original Alien... which I already thought was a way wrong approach. Now it's worse. Confirming some rumors that have been making the rounds for awhile, Scott spoke to MTV Movies and revealed some details about the Alien prequel. Including what it's going to mostly be about.
And much of it will be about this thing...
Yup, the Space Jockey. That fossilized ancient extraterrestrial pilot that Dallas, Kaine and Lambert found in the derelict spaceship on LV-426. Scott told MTV that "It's fundamentally about going out to find out 'Who the hell was that Space Jockey?' The guy who was sitting in the chair in the alien vehicle — there was a giant fellow sitting in a seat on what looked to be either a piece of technology or an astronomer's chair. Remember that?"
How could we forget a thing like that? But I for one am compelled to ask: Do we want to know everything about what the Space Jockey is? That was one of the things that most made Alien succeed as a horror story: the Lovecraftian atmosphere of the film. Here are seven blue-collar working stiffs aboard a glorified tugboat. You know: people that on some level we can all relate to. And they're earning their paycheck in the depths of interstellar space: the most unknown and inhospitable setting known to man. And they come across something that they not only don't understand, but the crazy geometry of it practically screams out "you can't understand this".
Honestly, I don't want to understand that. And I've no doubt many others feel the same way. The Space Jockey - whatever the heck he/she/it is - is part of a mystique that would forever be gone if we knew any more about its back story. It is simply... what it is. Nothing more and nothing less. But this is definitely a case of "less is more".
There is plenty of potential in the Alien franchise that hasn't been touched upon at all. 'Twould be something that fans would much more appreciate if Ridley Scott took the road less traveled than that of a prequel. Seriously, I want him to return to the series... but not like this.
It says much about a television station and its management when it apparently has nothing to fill up six and a half hours of airtime per week other than a man demonstrating that he has symptoms of syphilis.
I have been explicitly commanded by the director and head costumer that I shall not get that haircut that I had planned for next week. And that I am not to get it until perhaps after the show is finished in mid June.
Other than that (which I can live with, I suppose) it was a great first meeting for the full cast and crew of Theatre Guild of Rockingham County's production of The King and I. There's something like nearly sixty people in this cast, a huge technical crew, over 400 costumes (or costume pieces, one or the other, either way it's pretty darned big for a community theatre production), few more stats about this show that blew some minds. It's gonna be positivalutely gigantic! Maybe one of the biggest productions ever in these parts.
And oh yeah, this is one neat cast and crew. Lots of familiar faces from past productions, along with some new ones that it's gonna be fun to work with for the first time. I forged some very good friendships during Children of Eden two years ago, and have during every show that I've been involved with since. Looking forward to making even more during The King and I.
As always, watch this space every now and then for reports as we prepare to bring y'all the timeless tale of Anna Leonowens and the King of Siam :-)
Penguin Group Australia had to reprint 7,000 copies of Pasta Bible last week, the Sydney Morning Herald has reported.
The reprint cost A$20,000 ($18,000; £12,000), but stock in bookshops will not be recalled as it is "extremely hard" to do so, Penguin said.
The recipe was for tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto.
"We're mortified that this has become an issue of any kind, and why anyone would be offended, we don't know," head of publishing Bob Sessions is quoted as saying by the Sydney newspaper.
Penguin said almost every one of the more than 150 recipes in the book listed salt and freshly ground black pepper, but a misprint occurred on just one page.
"When it comes to the proof-reader, of course they should have picked it up, but proof-reading a cookbook is an extremely difficult task. I find that quite forgivable," Mr Sessions said.
I wonder if Penguin is printing any cookbooks for Mexican or Chinese cuisine...
