Well, this is turning out to be an interesting morning. Right after posting that Mel Brooks is making “Spaceballs 2”, this comes along…

My old stomping grounds at TheForce.net is today reporting that there will be a live-action Star Wars TV series beginning in the fall of 2006. You can bet the farm that this is gonna happen. For one thing, that had to be Josh Griffin posting the story (no one else can type “Awesome!” quite like he 😉 and being his colleague for two and a half years and friend for even longer, I can vouch that he’s way more thorough on his sources than a CBS editor. Also, this has been coming out piecemeal for the past several months anyway: the “Clone Wars” microseries on Cartoon Network was a smash hit and George Lucas has been pretty adamant lately about not only not making any more ...

Oh Lord please no…

Ain’t It Cool News is reporting this morning that Mel Brooks is currently writing “Spaceballs 2”!

The original “Spaceballs” was already as perfect a sci-fi spoof as a comic genius of Brooks’ stature could make. It’s BRILLIANT and it’s FUNNY! It riffed on just about every major sci-fi classic up to its time. HOW da heck is a sequel going to not only live up to all that but raise the bar?

I love Mel Brooks’ movies – heck, “Blazing Saddles” was the very first DVD I ever bought – but he should reconsider making this. Although, since his last movie was the largely forgotten “Dracula: Dead and Loving It” and that was almost ten years ago, he really should try something to show that he still possesses the edge he had when he did “Young Frankenstein” and “Silent Movie” back in the day....

My wife and I talked a bit about the elections on our way back from working-out this afternoon, and I shared with her a story about Teddy Roosevelt: how one night when he was President he was giving a bill the “hairy eyeball” before signing it. Roosevelt found an item in the bill that he couldn’t understand the rationale for… and he wasn’t about to sign it until he did. So Roosevelt put on his coat and hat, stomped out of the White House and took a carriage to the house of the congressman who wrote the bill, and at about 1 in the morning started banging on the door. The bleary-eyed, disheaveled representative found the President of the United States on his front doorstep demanding to know what was constitutional about that part of the bill. The congressman couldn’t give Ol’ Teddy an adequate answer, which led to an ...

No blogging since Friday ‘cuz the bulk of this past weekend (maybe 5 hours sleep total since waking up Friday morning) was spent wrapping up principle photography on “Forcery”. Once our cast assembled here at the apartment we arrived at the set about 10 PM Friday night to film a scene that demanded a strong moonlight shining down through the window. We set up one of the incandescent lamps with a blue gel outside the window and angled it to cast its light down on the bed, then moved the lamp so that we could get another angle.

After picking up another cast member we had everyone at Short Sugar’s Barbecue in Reidsville NC at 8 AM the following morning to film the final scene of the movie: George Lucas and Rick McCallum in a red convertible at Mel’s Drive-In from “American Graffiti”. After getting that done we had ...

I’m going to be “tweaking” the look of this blog this week and at times some posts that will be nothing but pictures will be getting posted, then promptly yanked. That’ll just be me getting some things uploaded for The Knight Shift’s new appearance (it’s too dark and I’m not into the whole “Goth” thing)....

…although in my own defense I’d like to suggest that I’m not a political junky! REAL political junkies spend their waking hours playing imaginary games of Risk between the Democrats and Republicans in their heads. They also usually have two television sets to watch Fox News and CNN at the same time. Some of them would betray the family’s priest to the Cossacks if dinner with Ann Coulter or Susan Estrich was part of the deal. The worst of the lot get an erotic turn-on by covering the bed with printouts of Zogby projections. I spent four years with some of the most psychotic political science majors in the cosmos: I know political junkies, man.

Consider me a mere historian who is watching events unfold, shaking his head in disbelief as this country becomes divided along a false dichotomy, and unable to believe that anything short of extreme circumstances will ...

“He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” — Matthew 5:45, NIV

Ya gotta admit though: it WAS pretty eerie. Still is if you’re only counting the mainland.

In my last entry I posted a map showing the route of this season’s hurricanes through Florida, which one guy noted have only gone through counties that voted for Bush in the 2000 election. Counties that voted for Gore weren’t hit. Almost as if the Almighty was sending Florida a message about something…

…’cept it turns out that the map isn’t quite entirely accurate.

Charley’s path took it through the Florida keys, which are part of Monroe County. And Monroe did vote for Gore in 2000! Also, as someone noted in the last post’s comments, Ivan’s eye actually made landfall in Alabama, not the Florida panhandle itself… although ...

A little while ago one of my friends sent me the picture hosted at this link. You gotta admit, that’s a pretty bizarre correlation between the paths of recent hurricanes to which counties in Florida voted for George W. Bush in 2000…

Not one county that voted against Bush was hit. Furthermore it looks like hurricanes lately have gone out of their way to AVOID hitting those that didn’t.

I don’t believe for a second that this is God’s way of saying that Al Gore should have won Florida: God doesn’t choose our Presidents for us, and He doesn’t anoint them to be in authority over us. Most people don’t understand – they’ve actually been deluded against realizing this – that God gave the authority over America to we the people, as the citizens of this nation, and it is we who are anointed to govern ourselves. We ...

“Hi my name is Chris and I’m a Starwarsaholic.”

“Hi Chris!!”

I called up my friend Brian (the coolest cat who ever played cello) and he came by here last night about 11:20. He was wearing his “Revenge Of The Sith” t-shirt (the black one with the “Return Of The Jedi”-style lettering) and at the last minute I opted to wear my full Jedi costume with robes, cloak, lightsaber etc. We took my car to the Wal-Mart on Wendover Avenue in Greensboro and waited with about 30 other happy campers for magic hour to hit.

People loved Brian’s shirt (it looks very cool) and my costume. Some kids wanted to touch the lightsaber… uh-uh, no doing: only people I trust in a big way tough this lightsaber. This is the most special lightsaber ever made, at least to me: it was my own design. I made it in my Dad’s ...

“THX 1138: Reality Takes a Turn Toward Fiction” is up and I’m thankful again that the good folks at that site are letting me contribute my thoughts to them. My only problem with this (though I do understand their decision) is the ending of the article: it was edited from what it originally said because there was… well, let’s just say it’s something I need to be more mindful of in the future, as this was the very first time I’ve ever had to deal with some things that a writer traditionally didn’t have to bear in mind. It’s still not fixed quite the way I would have liked, but I submitted an alternate that (I think) takes care of the problem and gives it the clean ending I was aiming for. Hoping it’ll merit approval and can be tacked on soon: I hate it when three incomplete thoughts vie ...