Lent 2024: A respite from blogging

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday: the beginning of the Lenten season.

There have been some years when I have observed Lent on this blog.  The first time, in 2006, I refrained from posting at all.  This blog was two years old then and it was a commitment to keep the content fresh and poppin'.  So no blogging for seven weeks presented a dire temptation to write something, to write anything.  But I believe that I came through it a better person, and a better writer at that.

Then two years ago I felt the need to participate in Lent again.  But this time I went in the dire opposite direction.  After leaving Reidsville in 2016 I let this site lapse a bit (for over a year and a half!) while I was getting things in my personal life taken care of.  I like to think that I came back to this blog a different and better individual.  But the damage was done and this site still hasn't regained the audience it once enjoyed.  Still, I write.  And I was writing with passion for Lent 2022: endeavoring to make one post each day during the season.  In the end there were 47 posts made from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday... and it was TOUGH!  But it was something that I needed to do.  God showed me that He hasn't let the gift He has given me lapse because of lack of use.  That was something I needed to see, and I am thankful that He bore me through it.

Now we are on the doorstep of Lent 2024.  And once again I am going to give up blogging for the next seven or so weeks.  It's going to take something dire to bring me back to this site until then (Joe Biden resigning or being removed from the presidency will probably not cut it).  I won't be actively looking for anything to post about.  But this is time when I will be writing.  I'm committing myself to finishing at least one new chapter for my book each week.  Hopefully more than that if the Muse is feeling kind.  In the past month I've written three major chapters.  I've let confidants read some of the work so far and without exception they wildly approved and said that they want to know more about my life story.  I'll give you this teaser: "When you're driving a few hundred miles to banish demons, you can find most of what you need at Walmart."

So I'm more or less going into "radio silence" on this blog.  Probably not so much on Twitter however: that will remain an occasional chronicle of my musings and observations.  I'm also trying to see if I can achieve having a thousand followers.  I want to think that it's possible by doing it the old fashioned way: "we uuuuurn it" (as John Houseman articulated the line).

Lent ends on Easter Sunday.  This year that falls on March 31st.  Which is an important date for me.  It will be my birthday and not only that but my fiftieth!  I'm facing it with pure abandon.  Too many people, especially men, treat fifty as something they must make a deal with God to avoid the ramifications of.  Me?  I'm thankful... DARN thankful... that I will have made it that far.  I should not be here writing these words.  By many accounts I should have been dead dozens of times over by now, especially by my own hand.  I have survived too much than to not be grateful to God and the people He has put into my life for helping to bring me this far along.  I don't know what the heck I'm going to blog about come Easter Sunday but I'm going to write the heck out of it.

So, that's what's going to be up for the next few weeks.  I won't have died (you'll know if if I do though, that is going to be posted on this site) or otherwise abandoned The Knight Shift.  I'm just focusing on spiritual matters more for the next month and a half or so.  And maybe as before, I'll come out of it a better person.

See y'all in forty days.

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The Knight Shift turns TWENTY!

 Twenty years ago today, on January 2nd 2004:

"Here we go, fast and furious..."

I'll be honest: I really never thought this blog would make it past the first year or so,  It would be something for me to play around with and then I'd get bored and abandon it.

This has not happened yet.

I think The Knight Shift fulfilled a need in my life.  To actively chronicle the human condition of this one very peculiar individual.  That has been a thing of evolution, that I can't but be impressed by as I look at many of the thousands of posts I've made over the years.  Especially those early ones.  I was much more writing about politics then, for one thing.  Today, not so much.  I can put it no plainer than this: politics is one thing that I have grown bored with.  I'm more of an ideas man, not an ideologies man.  Although lately the desire to be more proactive about that has been growing in my mind.

Well here this blog is, twenty years old today.  When it began I was 29 years old, married, about to be diagnosed with a mental condition, trying to make my first movie, still full of "piss and vinegar".  Today I'm about to turn fifty, writing a book about life with that same condition, am unfortunately divorced (but still hopeful for that kind of happiness), have made a number of movies and recently started writing the story for a new one, and I think I've inadvertently become more seasoned.  The Knight Shift has touched upon all of that and more.  Including but not limited to: movie reviews, recipes, documenting a run for public office, taking on a major corporation, shared the thoughts and turmoils of being a manic depressive, took an extended respite and came back to write about being on the road across America for over a year, posted lots of pics of my miniature dachshund Tammy, shared the loss of loved ones, celebrated the gaining of new ones, and... well, you get the idea.

I'm hoping and praying that this blog will continue for another 37 years at least.  I want to write about seeing Halley's Comet for the second time in my life.  The first was a disappointment.  Would love to make up for that.  A much better appearance of Halley would make a fine place to retire this blog on.

But in the meantime I'm counting on God to continue to provide new ideas, new experiences, new people from which to draw writing inspiration from.  I'll be honest, this site took a blow after Dad passed.  I lost a lot of drive about many things.  But I like to think the old mojo is coming back.  So long as there's even just one reader, I'm going to do my best to make this a site worth visiting.  You have my promise on that.

So Happy Twentieth Anniversary to The Knight Shift!  I'm looking forward to seeing what the next twenty years will bring :-)

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Dear Elon Musk: Make Twitter usable again

This line from the 1983 movie WarGames has come to mind in the past couple of days:

Except right now it's Elon Musk instead of Dabney Coleman.  And instead of the WOPR computer the problem is that Twitter is, at the moment, complete junk.

A few years ago I embedded the timeline of my most recent tweets on this blog, in the right-hand column toward the top of the page.  It gradually came to be a great complement to the blog proper.  Instead of making a post about anything that I found interesting enough to share, I simply tweeted it and it would also come up on the blog.  It had become a "secondary spinal cord" of my humble website.

Well, as you can see, the timeline is gone.  There is just a link to my individual Twitter page and you can see some of my tweets there. I say "some" because Twitter owner Elon Musk has limited how many tweets you can see per day.  And oh yeah, you MUST have a Twitter account and be signed into it if you want to read tweets at all.

Mr. Musk, WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO US?!?

 

Musk claims that he's doing this to keep Google and ChatGPT and whatever other systems are out there from automatically sucking up information from Twitter.

What Musk has done instead is make Twitter absolutely FUBAR and completely useless so far as any meaningful work goes.

It's the proverbial "throwing the baby out with the bathwater".  Speaking of babies, why do I now think that had he been in Solomon's place, Musk would have gone ahead and cut the little infant in two?

"Mr. Musk, after very serious consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your microblogging service sucks."

Well, there's only one thing that I can think about doing, in light of these circumstances.  That being: I'm going to stop using Twitter at all, for the foreseeable future.  If Elon Musk reverses course and rolls back all of these limits, I will gladly come back to Twitter and forgive its owner and anyone else responsible for doing this to us.  But I need my embedded Twitter feed back to normal.

Nobody of sound mind does this to his or her customers.  It's like the phone company limiting your calls to two hundred seconds per day.  That's how insane these new policies at Twitter are.

Maybe Musk will get the point if enough people complain.  Because right now it looks like he's sabotaging his own company.  If there's a financial angle to that, I've no idea what it could be.  But he needs to fix this, immediately.

 

 

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Preview: The Knight Shift's very last blog post

Am looking at making a few edits and additions to this blog.  Nothing too drastic though.  I used to change up The Knight Shift's appearance about once a year or so.  But it's had this template for five years now and it really does seem to be the best it's looked.

And I'm going to make sure it stays looking good, up until the very end.

A long time ago I heard about something that, it was kind of a legend.  That somewhere in the bowels of the CNN headquarters in Atlanta, there was a videotape.  And it was explicitly noted that it would not be used until the end of the world had been confirmed.  CNN founder Ted Turner had declared when the channel first started up that it would be on the air until the absolutely final moments of Planet Earth.  There would be no signing-off of CNN until then.

It turned out that this was not a myth.  Turner did make a "hold until end of the world" video.  Here it is on YouTube.  Depicting a military band playing "Nearer My God To Thee".  To be followed by CNN going out into darkness eternal.

When the tale turned out to be real, an idea hit me.  That I should also have a final post to be made on this blog.  There are actually two posts for the occasion: one to be made when my own passing away happens (hopefully a LONG time from now), and one to also hold for publishing until the apocalypse truly is upon us.

So if you are wondering what the very final words will be on The Knight Shift, after all this time and more, here's what is "in the vault" ready to be used at the closing of human history.  Please ignore the January 2050 timestamp.  That's just a placeholder for the actual date of Armageddon.

Anyhoo, here it is:

---

---

 

I want to be well into my eighties before I leave this earth, however it happens.  I was a kid when Halley's Comet visited in 1986 and it really was a letdown unless you lived in more southerly latitudes.  Hoping I'll get to see it during its next appearance and praying it will be much better.

Well, there it is.  When you all see that post, you will know to step away from the computer or put down your smart phone and embrace your loved ones as destruction rains down upon us.

I just like being prepared, is all :-)

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I'm now on Substack

In trying to return to writing on a regular basis, I'm looking to broaden my reach.  So it is that I've just joined Substack, at christopherknight.substack.com.  Expect more serious commentary than what I usually have on this blog.  Like, the first post is about an ethical issue that has been on my mind the past several days.  Substack has the feature of letting authors charge a monthly subscription for their work.  I'm not going to  go that far.  I doubt my own humble page will get more than a hundred views a month.  But the idea is there, at least.  Anyhoo, see y'all on Substack!

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AAAAAANNNDDD... We're back!!

So... the blog has a new look.

Not all thanks to me, no doubt.  I had help.  Thanks/blame Brian Fesperman, "Weird" Ed Woody, Stephen Shumate and maybe a few others for encouraging me to keep my sanity during this process, especially just today as some serious kinks were worked out of the new template.

Please note that the redesign doesn't have the post's full text on the front page.  You have to click the "Read More" button on the right of each entry.  If I had known it would look this pretty, I would have done it like that a long time ago.

There's a responsive menu at the top of the page.  Play around with it, see what you find!

The sidebar is tabbed.  Which if you remember the previous sidebar, this one is also much easier to navigate around.

And certainly most obvious is the photo slideshow.  I'm going to do what I can to keep that updated in a timely fashion.  Looks beautiful, aye?

A little fine-tuning still to go, but otherwise The Knight Shift is officially re-skinned.  Hope you all enjoy it :-)

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Reconsidered

Like Michael Corleone said: "Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in."

Last week I posted that it might be goodbye for good for my blogging.  Lots of things went into that.  I have wound up extremely busy with work-related stuff lately (speaking of which, I'm soon going to be advertising freelance writing services on this blog, and if you want to go ahead and solicit my services e-mail me at theknightshift@gmail.com and I'll be happy to discuss it with you!).

And then, from my perspective, some... very lousy things happened on this end.  My spirit wound up darn nearly broken.  Friends counseled me to not be discouraged, to keep going.  That this blog has given them hope when they needed it, even if at times I myself feel little or no hope at all.

Huh.  Imagine that.  Getting hope from the hopeless.  I suppose anything is possible...

Maybe just as writing about the bipolar disorder has been, I should keep writing to... stay grounded, stay focused, on things.  Keep grounded in reality.  Be able to see beyond my own problems.  Maybe even offer something worth visiting this blog for people who are needing something to smile or laugh at.  Who knows: maybe even provide something new to think about.

So for the time being, I'm going to stick with it.  I'm going to try even to have a new photo of Tammy up tomorrow.  The frequency of posting may not be very often, at least not for the time being.  But it will be something, anyway.

Just one thing that I'd like to ask: this is a very difficult time for me right now.  However it is that you can or are led to, some prayer for Yours Truly would be seriously, seriously appreciated.  I don't know how I've been brought through the past week, except for God bringing me to where I am now.  I have to thank Him and I have to thank those who have kept me in their prayers.

I suppose, if there is any hope at all in this world, that is where it is going to begin...

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The Highlight Reel: Aaron Goins Jr. lays it down about pro wrestling and culture (especially pro wrestling)

Last week I brought two blogs to your attention: Once Upon A Time In My Head by Doug Smith and Life Lessons in Hope, Faith, & Love by Vanessa Tachenko. Well, it's been brought to my attention that another friend also has a blog and I think y'all will be mighty entertained by it!

From the twisted mind of Aaron Goins, Jr. (I mean that in a good way) comes The Highlight Reel, and as it turns out Aaron has been working on this one for going on three years now! But it's never too late to discover a good blog. On his, you'll find Aaron's musings, rants and ravings about everything from the state of professional wrestling and other sports, to his thoughts on movies and television and other happenings in our culture. Aaron and Doug are good friends and reading their blogs, I can't help but imagine the two of them having a no-holds barred talk show on premium cable. Maybe someday that will happen. If it does, it'll be in part because they were showing us their good commentary and mad skillz already.

Anyhoo, mash on over to The Highlight Reel for more from Aaron!

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A couple o' blogs to watch

In the last few days two blogs have come to my attention that I'm no doubt going to be visiting a lot from now on, and all two of The Knight Shift's readers might want to check them out too!

First, having its world premiere this week is Once Upon A Time In My Thoughts, presented by good friend Doug Smith! It's brand-spankin' new but already shows heaps of promise. For its initial set of posts Doug is focusing on movies he likes that many others hate, and conversely movies he hates but that other people think are classic! I agree with him: The Godfather, Part III and Gods and Generals are much better than a lot of folks give them credit for... but I can't figure out how anyone can not like It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World! I mean, just Jerry Lewis' very fleeting cameo alone qualifies that film as comedy gold. But anyhoo, I like Doug's style and no doubt others will too!

And then there is this delightful blog that I only discovered late Wednesday night but has already won me over with its writer's beautiful gift of writing, encouragement and inspiration: Life Lessons in Hope, Faith, & Love. I can't put it any better than this: Vanessa Tachenko's site is very much the kind that I would like my own to be but have sadly missed the mark. Vanessa is someone who has embraced the grace of God with abandon and is letting His love be reflected in everything that she commits to writing. If you want to know what I mean, her thoughts on the Chick-fil-A situation is by far the finest essay that I have come across anywhere about that particular connontroversy. A good blog is one that you visit and when you finish reading it, you feel like you're a little better for the the time spent on it. Well, Vanessa's site is time is time well spent indeed...

So if y'all are fed-up with the seeming dearth of posts on The Knight Shift lately (there have been good reasons for that, honest!) then I think you'll be more than satiated with what Doug and Vanessa have to offer :-)

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"What hath God wrought"

Because I have such a love of history, Samuel Morse's first message by telegraph seemed more than a fitting first post to make from my new iPad :-)

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Michelle Bradsher enters the blogosphere!

In case anyone's wondering where the list of links went to: I haven't forgotten about it. In fact it'll probably reappear sometime this week if I can find time to put it together anew. It's just something that I made a secondary priority during this blog's recent redesign. And I'm looking forward to spinning some traffic toward friends and accomplices who also maintain blogsome presence on the Intertubes :-)

As it turns out, tonight I discovered another to add to the roll. I have known Michelle Bradsher for a long time (like, going back to seventh grade). And I am delighted that she has chosen to share her unique voice and her talent for conveying the stories of others on her new site, Bradsher's Blog.

Welcome to blogging, Michelle! I'm looking forward to reading your site and I am glad to spread the word about it with others :-)

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Overhaul in progress

Pay no attention to... whatever!

EDIT 10:53 p.m. EST: This is the first major-scale monkeying-around that I've done to this blog since 2007. Been tinkering with it most of the day and so far... looks great! Should be easier to navigate from now on (and there's even an "Earlier Posts" link at the bottom, finally!).

I've also been told that it's coming in great on BlackBerry devices. Hopefully other mobile gadgets will display it just as well.

Awright well, comments as always are welcome :-)

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"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?!

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What do they know that I don't?

For the past week or so, I have noticed that The Knight Shift is receiving an inordinately high number of visits from law firms.

All of them are coming in through the "front door" (the blog's main URL at theknightshift.blogspot.com), not at any one particular post. And it's not just been legal firms in North Carolina. If anything visits from law firms in my own home state are being vastly outnumbered by visits from across the country: places like Oklahoma, New Hampshire, Washington state, Texas, Alaska...

I am totally clueless as to what is going on that is leading so many lawyers to visit this site.

Dunno if this means that my activities as a blogger will be propelling me to a lawyer's office but at this point, after going through that twice already, I'm starting to get used to it :-P

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Awright, break's over...

I'd better get back to blogging in earnest. Stuff might be about to happen.

I am returning with some new features, which will be getting unrolled on The Knight Shift in the near future. Looking forward to seeing what kind of response they evoke :-)

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Wow, what happened to my blogging?

Not a new word from The Knight Shift's eclectic proprietor since Friday evening. Well, other than a comment or two on existing posts.

Let's just say that I had a great past few days and that God wound up teaching me a lot of new things and I was led to let His guidance continue to linger and instruct me past the usual end of the weekend. Or something like that.

That, and it was a great Mother's Day.

Looks like the stuff piled up in my absence. Where do I start?

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What's wrong with you people?!?

I'm talking about those of you who are good friends who have blogs too. Too many of y'all have gotten more than a bit slack of late. What, you think I like reading my own all the time?! I go to you guys' blogs too... and it's absolutely heartbreaking that too many of you have seemingly abandoned your poor blogs!

At least Jenna St. Hilaire is still busy with hers. Not only that but she also just finished writing an entire novel. What do the rest of you have to say for yourselves?!?

Chad, what gives man? Two years we've been looking at that post about the Krispy Kreme Challenge that you ran in Raleigh. Time to re-brand yourself or something bro. And Brian... where are you?! Not an update in more than a year!

Don't even get me started on the two Erics.

C'mon back to the blogosphere y'all. This place is so much more entertaining with your company :-)

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Meet the Liberian Analog Blogger

Think the blogosphere needs the Internet? Bah! A dude in Liberia on the west coast of Africa is running a blog devoted to gathering that country's news and in spite of his old-fashioned technique, he's got hordes of readers!

In Monrovia, Liberia, there's a guy taking the matter of a lopsided, state-run media and reshaping it into a free-of-charge, independent news-aggregator—all accomplished with dry-erase board and couple markers. (Sorry, internet!) Each morning, at 10:45 AM, Alfred Sirleaf wakes up and heads down to his bulletin board to post the day's news, culling together a slate of stories his countrymen might otherwise never see. Grateful readers line up in droves, on foot and in cars, to read these updates, in what has been described as the country’s—and probably the world's—only analog blog.

Hit the above link for video of Mr. Sirleaf and his unique "website"!

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A blogger is born!

Hey everyone, say hey to the newest blogger on the planet (along with the probably 500 or so in the past few minutes who also took that first leap into the blogosphere): Steven Glaspie and his Gentle Giant Express. Steven is a longtime friend and fellow Eagle Scout, and yes he's yet another brilliant mind to come out of Rockingham County, North Carolina! This is a thinkin' dude, who writes some great poetry among other things. The blog is brand spankin' new, so check it out at stevenglaspie.blogspot.com and watch Steven flex his skillz!

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Back from the weekend

A lot of zaniness piled up on my desk. I'd better get to work.

I heared you people behaved yourselves pretty well while I was gone. For that you can buy a candy bar and pretend I got it for you :-P

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