I can see Laurell K Hamilton sitting at her desk. She arches her back and cracks her knuckles like Lurch getting ready to play the harpsicord. She smiles as she thinks to herself, what could I do that would be more boring than watching Anita Blake have sex for the umptempth time? Aha! Inspiration strikes. I could have Anita talk about having sex! The Anita Blake books used to be nice and predictable. She would go to work and raise a zombie or two. Word would come down about a Monster on the loose. She would track the Monster down…
Category: random thoughts
Game of Thrones Season 5
There is a certain morbid pleasure that comes from watching a show where you know that any of the characters could, at any moment, die a horrible death. Death is the defining aspect of Game of Thrones. Violent death, well, what other kind is there? There is a soft kind of logic in Game of Thrones, nothing is ever what it appears to be and you really can’t trust anyone. But there are plenty of times when the show makes no damned sense at all. There was one death scene in the first few episodes that kind of bothered me.…
T-Shirts, Yeah Why Not?
A famous novelist meets a famous surgeon. The Surgeon says ‘Oh, you’re a writer? I’ve always thought about writing a book once I retire.’ ‘Funny that.’ The Writer says. ‘I’ve always thought about doing a bit of brain surgery when I retire.’ I ran across a couple of videos on YouTube and, as so often happens, found a whole world I didn’t know existed. There are about 50,000 videos that talk about t-shirt marketing and about 2,000 that talk about Teespring. My own experience with t-shirts is limited to owning a couple of dozen and having heated debates at fan…
Cops As Cold Blooded Killers
When I first heard about Rodney King, I assumed he was a lowlife that was asking for it. When I heard about Micheal Brown last year, I have to admit that I thought pretty much the same thing. Now I’m not so sure. The last few Cop shooting to hit the news have been flat out murders. In the case of Walter Scott, a black man shot in the back eight times by a white cop, the authorities actually decided to charge the bastard with murder. They should also charge all the cops in Cleveland that treated Timothy Russell and…
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.
When I was in High School I started a self-help phase in my reading that lasted a couple of decades. I started off with a lot of the Classics. How To Make Friends, The Power of Positive Thinking, Acres of Diamonds, and so on. Along the way I ran across a sub branch of self help books that proclaimed they were more than just ideas, they were real. The Teachings of Don Juan, Way of the Peaceful Warrior, The Silva Method of Mind Control, and yes, Dianetics. Books about Rolfing, the Feldenkrais Method, and assorted people who channeled minor gods…
Finding Vivian Maier
Finding Vivian Maier opens with a number of older people staring off into space. One by one they give a one word description of Vivian. Words like Private and Enigmatic finally came to most of them. Then we see this rather nerdy fellow with an unfortunate haircut and horn rim glasses. He says he was at an auction and he bought a bunch of negatives. He found that he liked what he saw in the images. He bought more negatives and then found even more in a storage unit. He found around a hundred thousand images in undeveloped film and…
Two Stuffed Pizzas in Chicago
My favorite pizza is usually Neapolitan Style. Very thin crust and a cracker like crispness. But that’s not what Chicago Pizza is famous for. The big item is Stuffed Pizza with thick crust and a two inch tall wall of crust around the edge. Lots of gooey cheese and lots of options, each costing a couple of dollars, that can be added. I like sausage. While in Chicago recently, I tried two pizza restaurants. Allegretti’s Pizzeria & Ristorante and Giordano’s Pizza. Stuffed Pizza is one of those foods that doesn’t translate well with a photo. The aroma, the mouth feel, and the amazing…
Which Film Will Be The Top Grossing of 2015?
Every year we see a lot of anticipation about upcoming films and a lot of predictions about which ones will ultimately win at the box office. Will it be a sequel in 2015? The Magic 8 Ball says Signs Point To Yes. 2015 has already seen an interesting mix of films people are willing to pay to see. According to Wikipedia, the early out of the gate winners are 5o Shades of Grey and Cinderella. That would be a fun double feature. But 50 Shades current number of $563,862,000 wouldn’t land it the Top Ten Grossing films from 2014. The summer…
The Graduate —A Comedy???
A defining scene in The Graduate is where Mrs Robinson is putting on her hose as Benjamin watches. She has very thin legs and the hose glide over them quickly and easily. She fastens them to a garter belt. It’s a lovely shot. Benjamin looks entranced and he loses track of what he was saying. It’s a great little scene. I’m reading this fun book about famous film personalities and the films they love called Watching Movies. Ron Howard’s pick was The Graduate. He prattles on about cuts and transitions and how this tool or that was used in the…
From Typewriter to Technorati: My Journey as an Old-School Blogger in a Modern World
I used to write these long rambling letters to everyone I knew. Pages and pages of random thoughts and poems and photos and whatnot. I banged them out on an old typewriter and I still refer to the ‘Enter’ key as the ‘Return’ key. I was blogging before there were blogs. A pretty lesbian I liked to write to told me I should write a blog. So I did. It was a more personal blog than the ones I write now. Filled with intimate details, rants about the unfairness of it all, and the usual mundane daily business of a…