THIS is how to remake HAWAII FIVE-O!

I ain't seen the new Hawaii Five-O series on CBS yet, but I bet it's got nothing on what my lifelong best friend Chad Austin did when he visited the Aloha State a few months ago! Turns out that he's been holding back on me and has been doing some filmmaking of his own: witness this AWESOME spoof of the opening credits from the original Hawaii Five-O series!

Speaking of Chad, I've heard that people who've seen The People vs. George Lucas have really enjoyed his portrayal of George Lucas from our film Forcery (clips of which appear in the award-winning documentary). And Chad swears that he's going to start blogging again soon. Maybe we are witnessing a new cinematographer in the making? :-)

Did I deep-fry some turkey for Christmas?

Ohhhh yeah, I deep-fried the turkey! Three of them, in fact! All on Christmas Eve. Two 12-pound full-sized birds for friends and a turkey breast for my own family gathering.

Here's the first bird that I did...

The second turkey...

And the turkey breast: smaller but no less succulent!

And hey, look who showed up! None other than Tebow Wasmund, the popular pup (who was recently seen as Sandy the dog in a production of Annie) and his mistress Peggy! Tebow is well known around here as he is often courting admirers at iCoffee in nearby Summerfield. It's a great lil' coffee house and well worth visiting!

I guess you just can't keep a good dog away from the scent of fried turkey :-P

And 'twas a good thing that I got all that frying done on Christmas Eve 'cuz the next day, we got our first real White Christmas in almost fifty years...

In case anyone is wondering, I used Lost: The Final Season as the soundtrack to which I fried this batch of turkeys to.

Incidentally, I have come up with a pretty... shall we say, "interesting?"... idea for a new turkey fryer. And there is already someone that I am conspiring with to make it into a reality. Guess that'll be a project to work on for 2011. Expect pictures and YouTube video if/when we pull it off.

And, that wraps up turkey frying for the 2010 holiday season! So help me, my hands will be smelling like garlic butter for a whole 'nother month.

Merry Christmas 2010

Fox 8 story about my living with bipolar disorder

Chris Knight showed his creativity in one of the first Youtube videos to go viral. But there was another, darker side that he struggled to contain.

Last week Bob Buckley from WGHP Fox 8 came to my house along with photojournalist Chris Weaver to interview me about my recent public disclosure on this blog about my having bipolar disorder. We filmed about an hour's worth of material (and Chris got some terrific outdoor shots with his cinematography skillz :-).

The story aired last night during the Fox 8 News at 10 as a Buckley Report feature. A lot of people have told me since its broadcast that it turned out great and that hopefully it will bring encouragement to others suffering from bipolar (which, is one of the reasons why I felt led to write about it on my blog).

Here's the story, in case you missed it last night (or if you happen to live in London or Tasmania or Chula Vista or somewhere else outside of Fox 8's broadcasting area)...

 

Here's the link to the story's page on the Fox 8 website.

In the past few weeks, God has placed it on my heart that... this can be a kind of ministry opportunity. Last month a friend of mine who is associate pastor of a nearby church shared 2nd Corinthians with me: how Paul wrote about God putting afflictions in our lives so that we might be a help to others going through the same thing.

If so, then I certainly must thank God for not only letting me go through this, but also His bringing me through to this place in my life. To a place where I can have the life that I have always longed for.

There was so much said during the interview last week and not all of it could have made the final cut. I remember telling Bob and Chris at one point that I was better than I was a few months ago... and I'm not as good as I will be a few months from now.

And if God has given me this experience, for whatever reason He had in allowing it, well... I'm going to play it to the hilt for everything that it can.

Thanks to Bob Buckley and Chris Weaver for a job well done! :-)

20 crazy things the U.S. government spends OUR money on: Grateful Dead memorabilia, WORLD OF WARCRAFT and more

It's fiscal criminal insanity: more than $440,000 to study Vietnamese male prostitutes. How about roughly a million dollars spent to compose poetry for zoos? Then there is more than a hundred grand used to construct a "critter crossing" for salamanders in Vermont. The University of California at Irvine received a grant of $3 million to study the online video game World of Warcraft. And over $600,000 was given to another California university to digitize Grateful Dead concert tickets and T-shirts.

Those are just some of the examples of horrid waste - funded by our tax dollars - by the federal government documented by The Economic Collapse blog. Also on the list of 20 craziest things that the United States government directs expenditure from the public treasury for: studying flatulence from dairy cows and the renovation of a pizzeria's store front to give it a "more inviting" feel.

Ya see, this is part of the reason why I have no faith at all in temporal politics, regardless of who or what party winds up "in charge" in Washington. This kind of irresponsible spending has been going on for as long as I can remember and darned FEW seem to be serious at all about slashing it.

Meanwhile, our Republic dies a death by a thousand cuts...

Grow your own Bhut jolokia!

"Weird Ed" Woody, my filmmaking partner, is quietly attempting to murder me.

That's the only reason why I can conceive of his sending me this link to ThinkGeek's product page for the Grow Your Own World's Hottest DIY Pepper kit... because Weird Ed is well aware of my fascination with spicy hot food and he knows that I'm not going to pass up on the chance to grow my own Bhut jolokia!

This pepper, native to northeastern India, was written about more than three years ago on this blog and at the time some enterprising folks were looking at how to market it to the wider world. Well for a few bucks and some scratch you can get this pop-top can, open it up and give it water and sunlight, and in a few weeks you'll get your first sprouts. The pepper comes in at more than a million scorching Scoville units of heat. By comparison, your typical bottle of Tabasco sauce is 2,500 Scoville units. A few weeks ago the Bhut jolokia was dethroned as the hottest pepper on official record by a hybrid (which is based on the Bhut jolokia), but it's still the hottest-known naturally occurring pepper that's on the market.

Here's that link again if you dare. If nothing else, maybe you'll get lucky and get your Grow Your Own World's Hottest DIY Pepper kits by Christmas: 'twould be something different to give than those Chia Pets you always wind up buying when all other gift ideas fail...

A small meditation upon Christ and Christmas

Why do some people express such bitter disagreement about when exactly Jesus was born?

Seems the important thing is that Jesus was born at all.

But, that could just be me...

Word Lens: Visual universal translator thingy for iPhone

Holy crap! This is amazing! A new app for the iPhone called Word Lens from an outfit called Quest Visual uses the phone's camera to translate visual words on-screen in real time.

Check out this video of Word Lens in action...

"No matter where you go, there you are."

Awright, first person who can tell me what obscure mondo-bizarro film that is from, can buy themselves a candy bar and pretend I got it for them.

I'm... not quite ready to return to this blog at the usual frenetic frequency that all two of my loyal readers have come to appreciate. According to my figures there had been an average of five new posts a day for quite some time now. But if you look at the front page that I'm seeing right now, there've only been twenty-five posts since mid-August!

Clearly, something has been amiss with Your Friend and Humble Narrator.

I'm not retiring The Knight Shift (well, not planning to anyway: some claim that this blog has caused more mischief than WikiLeaks... and look at where that site has gone lately!). But there is certainly - and there has already been - some significant "shifting around" of sorts behind the scenes as I have had to wrestle with quite a bit in my personal life. And I may or may not have divulged more than enough of that already.

What can I say? I believe in being honest and sincere. And most especially to and about myself. As the Bard wrote in Hamlet, "To thine own self be true".

I believe that. Even when my own self is wracked with common human foibles and frailties and a few more common than we often care to admit.

This blog has always been about things that interest me, that I believe others might find interesting as well, and as a place where I can share my thoughts and reflections on various matters. This site in its seven years of operation has done quite a lot: from movie reviews, to chronicling my running for public office, to premiering movies that I have made with friends, to documenting the exploits of the last great American moonshiner, to taking on a multimedia giant in a copyright dispute (and prevailing in the end), to recipes, and well... just about anything and everything in between.

And now, there is something else that I'll be writing about and reflecting upon. Not a new thing, but something that I'm inclined to believe is important enough to share some perspective about. And maybe others will come away from this blog even a bit wiser and more enlightened for the time spend reading from it. In the end, that is all any writer is really hoping to accomplish.

So that is what I'll be doing. Along with everything else that readers have come to expect from this blog. And Lord willing, I'll be doing more of that sooner than later.

In the meantime, to The Knight Shift's regular and faithful readership: Hello again! And to those who will be coming across this blog during the next few days: Welcome! Hope you like what you find here :-)

By the way, in case any of the regular readership is wondering if I deep-fried any turkey this past Thanksgiving...

Ahhh c'mon: y'all didn't think that I wouldn't properly document something like that, didja?!