[easyazon_link identifier=”B007B7GOYQ” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Dracula[/easyazon_link] by Bram Stoker. Performed by Alan Cumming, Tim Curry, Simon Vance, Katherine Kellgren, Susan Duerden, John Lee, Graeme Malcolm, and Steven Crossley. I read Dracula many years ago, about the same time I read Frankenstein,The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. A bit of overload on the Victorian novels. So I found this audiobook with Alan Cumming doing most of the heavy lifting and thought I would give it a listen. I have to say the cast here did an amazing job. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Dracula, whereas…
Author: Jon Herrera
Writer, Photographer, Blogger.
Wilhem Walengrave Vampire
Writing is an amazing experience. Editing is hell on earth. Selling is next to impossible. For all creatives, these are the best of times and the worst of times. Anyone can be published. Anyone can make a movie. Anyone can release their own album. And pretty much everyone has. New content is constantly being created and added to Amazon, YouTube, Twitter, Vine, Facebook, etc, etc, etc. There is a wonderful little rush that comes from hitting the button that allows something you created to be available to the world. And a wonderful little bump of depression when no notices. I’ve…
The Path
What if a cult was a gated community you might actually want to join? Hulu’s The Path tells the story of a group of people living out the Vision of their founder. They don’t like being called a cult, they prefer the term movement. We open up with what looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland. People are scattered amid the ruins and then a few cars roll into view. The rescuers are members of the Meiyerism movement. But this isn’t some distant future, it’s just the site of a tornado. It seems the Meiyerists get new members by rescuing people. The Path is…
Cell
I resisted getting a cell for a long time. I always thought of them as the Mark of The Beast. But it never occurred to me to write a story where they really were the mark of the beast. Cell the movie stars Samuel L. Jackson and John Cusack and lots of random people turned into zombies/pod people while they were using their mobile phones. Our hero, John Cusack, is using his cell when his battery dies and he is forced to use a land line. This means his wife is on her cell phone when the attack comes. But…
10 Cloverfield Lane
Spoilers The big mystery in 10 Cloverfield Lane isn’t much of a mystery. The name Cloverfield refers to a rather horrible monster movie that J.J. Abrams made a few years back. That was a lost footage film about New York being destroyed by a number of odd critters from space. So it follows that this film will be set in the same universe as that one. But we have left New York City for a farm in Louisiana. The bulk of 10 Cloverfield Lane sees a woman who finds herself hostage in a crazy man’s fallout shelter. John Goodman does…
The Counselor
Spoilers This movie sucks. Cormac McCarthy writes shit stories that are somehow viewed as High Art and Great Literature. The Road and No Country For Old Men are pretty much downers. So I should have hit the STOP button as soon as I saw McCarthy’s name in the opening credits of The Counselor. Sadly, I didn’t. There are a lot of shows where people suffer and die. Game of Thrones is pretty much nothing but people suffering and dying. All cop shows deal with death as a matter of course. Doctor shows also involve a lot of suffering. But these…
Barista
Barista is a documentary that follow a handful of baristas around as they talk about coffee, make coffee, practice making coffee, drink coffee, make more coffee, talk more about coffee and then compete in a contest to see who can best baffle a panel of judges in 15 minutes by making the most bizarre coffee they can think of. Then they talk some more about coffee. Every profession has its devotees who cross over the line of fan to frantic, from dabbler to Master, from someone who presses a button to someone who takes control of every step of the…
Eat Street
The ManBQue Guide to Making Street Food at Home Any fan of Anthony Bourdain or Andrew Zimmern knows that the best food to be had is street food. The good folks at Manbque know this as well. I had never heard of Manbque, but that didn’t stop me from reading their cookbook. I’m a bit of a cookbook junkie. I pick up just about every one I run across and flip through the pages. As a photographer I look at the photos, as a foodie I check out the recipes. Both are pretty good. I like the writing style used in Eat…
The Truth
I read The Game not long after it came out. It’s a fun, crazy, bizarre story about the world of pick-up artists. It’s not really about how to pick up women, but about the loose collection of losers who charge other losers a high price to share their secrets. Neil doesn’t really fit in with these guys, but he does end up getting pretty good at getting women’s phone numbers. He doesn’t seem too interested in calling most of them though. In The Truth, we find Neil a few years later. He’s a sadder and wiser fellow now. He realizes that it’s wrong to want to have sex with…
Talk Like TED
Carmine Gallo has found nine things successful TED Talks have in common and he shares his insights on how to use these nine secrets in your own presentations. TED, for those who have been living under a rock, is a conference where famous and not so famous people give short presentations. One of TED’s rules is that a talk can’t be longer than 18 minutes. This is one of the Nine Secrets Carmine shares, keep it short. He also says to have a Tweetable Headline. Keep your title under 140 characters. He goes on to mention several titles that are…