Earth Day is a day designed to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth’s environment. It was founded by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in held on April 22, 1970. Earth Day is celebrated in spring in the Northern Hemisphere and autumn in the Southern Hemisphere. Earth Day Network, a group that wishes to become the coordinator of Earth Day globally, asserts that Earth Day is now observed on April 22 on virtually every country on Earth. -Wikipedia Going to the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens has pretty much been my own random Earth Day observance, we tend to…
Category: random thoughts
Leonard Nimoy Plans to Stop Working
At 79 years of age, the actor most famous for playing half human-half Vulcan Mr Spock, says he plans to stop acting and stop making appearances at Sci Fi Conventions. I’m guessing he wants to spend more time taking photos of naked fat women. I remember seeing an interview with Tom and Ray Magliozzi of NPR’s Car Talk and they were asked when they would retire. Retire? they said in mock horror. We only work one hour a week now! I kind of feel the same way about Leonard Nimoy, what, exactly, is he retiring from? Of course, he would…
People Distrust The Government
I’ve never like Police Forces-part of the Big Brother arm of Government. I’m not too crazy about Soldiers or the Military either. But I do like the Interstate Highway system, safe air travel, and the occasional bit of junk mail. I like the whole idea of paper money, which has absolutely zero intrinsic value, being able to pay for all the stuff that makes up the American Way of life. I am a bit concerned that so much of this funny money goes to pay the 17 million or so people who work for the Government. Do we really need…
Spanking
There was another study today that says spanking is bad for kids as it tends to make them more aggressive. So I had to wonder, does anyone still spank their kids? I’ve been a portrait photographer for close to fourteen years now and I have seen a few parents that spank their kids for not smiling, but most of them resort to bribery instead. I was never spanked myself, and I tend to remember being a pretty aggressive child as well. But not as aggressive as I could have been-I never went out for sports or went to college. I…
Ying and Yang or Is that Bipolar?
Highs and lows have always been my norm. I’ve always been an all or nothing kind of guy. I’m either in the best shape I’ve ever been, ready to scale mountains and race in triathlons-or I’m gonna be dead by the end of the week so why bother? I happen to be in a manic phase at the moment-those are the good ones where you feel like you can do anything-though really, your just as inept as you are the rest of the time. It just doesn’t really bother you any more. When your in the Abyss, that’s when it…
Reading Like a Writer-Improving Your Own Writing
My favorite short story writers are Issac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick. These authors took the impossible and made them seem mundane, then pushed the world off it’s axis at the story’s end. These are fun stories to read, you never know what’s going to happen next, but you always know something is going happen. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose is about her favorite stories and writers. Like many college educated writers, she is a huge fan of Long Dead…
Choke-From The Author of Fight Club
Chokewas written by Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, and the film made from that book has that same kind of slightly alternate world view. Choke is the story of Victor Mancini and his multi-faceted life as a sex addict, an Historical Reenactor, a son, a friend, and a con artist. When we meet Victor he is at a Sex Addicts meeting and instantly hooks up with one of the women in the support group. Our hero, such as he is, works at a place that looks like Williamsburg, Virginia-one those spots where everyone dresses up like it’s 1750…
Running With Scissors
You know, memoir is not court stenography. Memoir is not a video on YouTube. Memoir has a narrative. Memoirs, a good memoir, is a person’s experience, their memory, and how that experience mattered to them, emotionally and psychologically. Augusten Burroughs I’ve always liked memoirs, though I didn’t always know that I was watching a memoir. A Christmas Story is a fairy tale memoir. Little Big Man was a fake memoir. Most of the brilliant writing of David Sedaris is in the form of memoirs. Oprah yelled at James Frey for making stuff up in his memoir A Million Little Pieces.…
Shatner’s Raw Nerve
William Shatner likes to keep busy. When he’s not trying to get people to use Priceline.com – no one deals like we do! Or preforming as Denny Crane in the long running Boston Legal. Or writing one of a zillion books. Or appearing at a Star Trek Convention. William Shatner does a pretty job as an interviewer on the Biography Channel. The list of people that have agreed to go on Shatner’s Raw Nerve includes such people as Valerie Bertinelli, Tim Allen, Jenna Jamison, Jimmy Kimmel, and Leonard Nimoy. To be honest I have only seen the Leonard Nimoy episode,…
The Beatles The Candle Burns
I’ve been a Beatles fan since I first discovered the Fab Four in High School-about ten years after the band broke up. I bought reissues of all their albums and once in a while in a thrift store I would find an album I had never seen before. These unknown albums would often have the usual tracks of an LP I was familiar with, but with new cover art. Once in a while they had songs I had never heard of either. These, of course, were bootleg albums-records cranked out by companies that didn’t have the rights to release them…