Ten-thirty on a warm July evening...
Wednesday, July 26, 2023
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
Haven't done a "Tammy Tuesday" in awhile
For some time I was posting new pics of my miniature dachshund Tammy every Tuesday. It's been a fair bit since I've done that. But it just so happened that I caught a really good snapshot of her this afternoon while I was working at the desk in my living room. I was eating some crackers and she insisted that I pay her the "cracker tax" (there's also the "chicken tax", the "cheese tax", the "barbecue ribs tax", etc.)...
I know: Tammy is not as red as she used to be. Well, she is over eleven years old. There's no not facing that. But she's still in excellent health, and if you saw how playful she is you would think she's much younger than her age. She always accompanies me when I turn in for the night and she makes sure that she takes a toy to bed, just like a human child would bring a stuffed doll. I've been told by the vet that if Tammy maintains good health and is kept at an ideal weight, that we'll be in each other's company for many years to come. Which, would make me very happy.
Tuesday, July 18, 2023
Had an interview tonight...
...and I hadn't gotten a haircut since January. What can I say? I've been busy on multiple fronts. But I needed some fine coiffing before this evening.
Here's how it came out, along with what my "office space" looks like most of the time:
Among the items in the background: my Eagle Scout medal. Poster of Vault Boy from the Fallout game series. A MAD Magazine Hot Wheels car. Waterjet-cut metal "Crimson Omen" from the Gears of War video games (made by a good friend). One of my school board campaign yard signs. Various CDs that have special meaning (including the Transformers score album signed by Steve Jablonsky). The LEGO Doctor Who set (bought at a LEGO Store in San Diego, and I wound up giving a presentation about Doctor Who and explaining stuff, this one teenage girl said "you should be a teacher!"). A Funko Pop! doll, also from Fallout. A Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man doll. What you can't see: a LOT of books covering everything from Christian theology to local history to Harry Potter to plasma welding. A few Warhammer 40,000 minis that I'm especially proud of my work on. And a framed portrait of Dad.
For the interview I got dressed up, including the lucky Millennium Falcon neck tie that's a gift from a good friend:
Tuesday, July 11, 2023
I've waited 32 years for this day
I should probably preface what you're about to see with something. For the past few months, well...
There's really no other way to put it: I've lost my interest in Star Wars.
I can't finger any one particular reason why. But what Disney has done with the franchise, what Disney has done period, is a major factor in that. I find myself no longer able to support a company that apparently no longer desires me or my hard-earned cash. It's much worse than that even: Disney is now trying to rewrite and redefine history so as to advance an extreme leftist agenda.
How do I in good conscience, as a citizen and as a Christian, find myself able to support that? I can't.
Which makes what I'm about to post seem direly hypocritical. But I think that this once, the good memories can take priority. I mean, I have spent almost two-thirds of my life waiting to see this.
Disney's upcoming Star Wars series Ahsoka dropped a new trailer today, and for a few fleeting seconds in it we get our first look at how Grand Admiral Thrawn appears in live-action. Thrawn first appeared in Timothy Zahn's 1991 novel Heir to the Empire. Thrawn became such a respected character that he was one of the few elements to be adapted from the "Expanded Universe" and into the current Star Wars canon. He has probably become even more popular as a result.
So how does Thrawn come across in our first live-action glimpse of him?
Pretty darn close to what I've always imagined he would look:
That's Lars Mikkelsen in the role. Mikkelsen previously voiced Thrawn in the animated Rebels series. I'd say he seems to be projecting the gravitas and dignity (for a major villain) that the Thrawn of the books has always presented. I could accept this as being Grand Admiral Thrawn, if I ever find that I'm getting my love for the saga back.
Well, like I said, I've waited a very long time for this day to come. And to be honest I had come to believe it would never happen. But it has. It's enough to pique my curiosity, at least.
Wednesday, July 05, 2023
Found my first op-ed article for my college's newspaper
The other night I was trying to locate something regarding my alma mater Elon University (though it was still "Elon College" when I was there). During the search I came upon something truly wonderful: an archive of just about every issue of Elon's weekly student newspaper The Pendulum.
I got involved in the The Pendulum early in my first semester at the school. At first I was a reporter, writing articles about the new food court and elections in the town of Elon. But increasingly I realized that I could be a journalist... but what I really wanted was to write opinion pieces. I had already been writing letters to the region's largest newspaper and more often than not they got published. Carrying that passion to my college's newspaper would be seriously putting myself out there, with immediate feedback when the issue hit the stands. This was my true calling as a writer: to encourage people to think just a little extra.
My first essay for the paper was published in March of 1996. And it was about the true cost of abortion. It was a quote from Mother Teresa that had me pondering some things. It was as good as anything to write about. I definitely was going in guns blazing. It certainly did precipitate a response. By the time the next issue hit I had received five death threats. And then there was the female student who got in my face and said "You stupid pro-life f-cking piece of sh-t."
Anyhoo, the other night I went looking for some of my pieces. And I found the one about abortion. I took a screenshot of it. Which included the worst photo of me that's ever been taken. Seriously, what happened?!? I look terrible. Thankfully a better photo was taken for future articles. But this one... wow.
So here is my first op-ed essay for The Pendulum. Click on the image to enlarge it big enough to read comfortably:
The other pieces, I'll try to post those too in the near future. But this gives you an idea of what I was up to in college. Which, was one of the few aspects about my life as a student that made sense. But that's something for another time.
Yes, feel free to make snarky remarks about my photo here. I certainly do :-)
Tuesday, July 04, 2023
Happy Independence Day America
The scene from the excellent HBO miniseries John Adams where Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the delegates vote to declare American secession from Britain:
I have to believe that the mood of the room following the vote for the Declaration of Independence in real life was no less solemn. The look on their faces must have said it all: "Dear God, we just did that. That just happened! What have we done?!"
May we come to again honor those men who pledged their fortunes, their integrity, and their very lives so as to give us the blessings of liberty.
Monday, July 03, 2023
Dear Elon Musk: Make Twitter usable again
This line from the 1983 movie WarGames has come to mind in the past couple of days:
Except right now it's Elon Musk instead of Dabney Coleman. And instead of the WOPR computer the problem is that Twitter is, at the moment, complete junk.
A few years ago I embedded the timeline of my most recent tweets on this blog, in the right-hand column toward the top of the page. It gradually came to be a great complement to the blog proper. Instead of making a post about anything that I found interesting enough to share, I simply tweeted it and it would also come up on the blog. It had become a "secondary spinal cord" of my humble website.
Well, as you can see, the timeline is gone. There is just a link to my individual Twitter page and you can see some of my tweets there. I say "some" because Twitter owner Elon Musk has limited how many tweets you can see per day. And oh yeah, you MUST have a Twitter account and be signed into it if you want to read tweets at all.
Mr. Musk, WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO US?!?
Musk claims that he's doing this to keep Google and ChatGPT and whatever other systems are out there from automatically sucking up information from Twitter.
What Musk has done instead is make Twitter absolutely FUBAR and completely useless so far as any meaningful work goes.
It's the proverbial "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". Speaking of babies, why do I now think that had he been in Solomon's place, Musk would have gone ahead and cut the little infant in two?
"Mr. Musk, after very serious consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your microblogging service sucks."
Well, there's only one thing that I can think about doing, in light of these circumstances. That being: I'm going to stop using Twitter at all, for the foreseeable future. If Elon Musk reverses course and rolls back all of these limits, I will gladly come back to Twitter and forgive its owner and anyone else responsible for doing this to us. But I need my embedded Twitter feed back to normal.
Nobody of sound mind does this to his or her customers. It's like the phone company limiting your calls to two hundred seconds per day. That's how insane these new policies at Twitter are.
Maybe Musk will get the point if enough people complain. Because right now it looks like he's sabotaging his own company. If there's a financial angle to that, I've no idea what it could be. But he needs to fix this, immediately.
