I
am writing about the night that I stormed out the door of our apartment
without telling my wife where I was going, because not even I knew
where I was going. And how I wound up in Raleigh at my best friend's
door at 10 at night. God only knows how I made it to the highway
without crashing the car at the high speed I was going at.
This
is the part of bipolar disorder that I hate the most. Asking God why He
let me have something like...
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Son of ex-slave and Union soldier passes away (you read that right)
It's stuff like this that never ceases to fascinate me. These things impress upon us that so much of our history... isn't that long ago after all.
Luke Martin, Jr. passed away a few days ago in Raleigh (that's the capital of North Carolina for those who might not know that). Mr. Martin was 97.
He died 179 years after his father was born. His father, by the way, was a former slave who escaped to freedom and then fought in the Civil...
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Newly-discovered planet has rings TWO HUNDRED TIMES BIGGER than those of Saturn
I won't apologize for the all-caps there. I mean, we are talking about something of monstrous proportions here...
Four hundred-some light years away is the recently-discovered exoplanet J1407b. Its parent star kept blinking in and out of view. Astro-boffins went to work on the case, doing analysis of light patterns and spectroscopy and all kinds of stuff...
Monday, January 19, 2015
I finally beat Zaxxon!
You might have heard about the Internet Arcade that Internet Archive fired up a few months ago. All of those arcade games that we (or at least some of us) used to feed quarters into? Well, almost 700 of them - as in the originals, not home console ports - are available to play for free in your web browser! Which is a great thing because these games are a...
Book update for mid-January
I think I'm getting back into the full swing of writing my book, at last.
I've completely re-written Chapter 1. And I seriously hope that I'm not just seeing things but the more I read over it and how it flows into the rest of the manuscript, the better and better it's looking. It sets up a much better tone for the book that follows. It's more gripping. It's more "me" than the original version was. And that is what...
Tuesday, January 06, 2015
Reidsville's $30,000 monument to madness
So my hometown of Reidsville, North Carolina has decided to ultimately remove a nationally-recognized statue with more than a hundred years of history, and let it instead be replaced with a horror straight out of H.P. Lovecraft...
"We'll tear your soul apart!"
Brief recap: almost four years ago the Confederate monument in downtown Reidsville was toppled and smashed...
Monday, January 05, 2015
Watch it now: the legendary CNN "end of the world" video
One of the things I've always wanted to do with this blog is post interesting stuff. Or at least those things that are intriguing to me. Admittedly, that has slacked off a lot in the past several months. Between writing my book (a project that devoured most of 2014) and then Dad's passing a month and a half ago, this hasn't been the best of times to...
