5 days left to enter GEARS OF WAR 2: THE SOUNDTRACK signed CD contest

Just a friendly reminder that there are now five days remaining to enter the contest to win one of three copies of Gears of War 2: The Soundtrack, signed by composer Steve Jablonsky (who has also composed the scores for Transformers, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and ABC's Desperate Housewives in addition to a ton of other good stuff).

By the way, these copies will be personally signed by Steve Jablonsky to the winners! So if you're name is "Barney Spepple" and you win one of 'em, your copy will be signed something like "To Barney..." etc.

How do you enter again? Well, here are the rules once more...

1. E-mail your entry to theknightshift@gmail.com with GEARS OF WAR 2 SOUNDTRACK CONTEST in the subject line. GEARS OF WAR 2 SOUNDTRACK CONTEST has to be in the subject line.

2. Include the following information in your entry:

- First and last name

- Mailing address

- Phone number

- The name of the Gears of War character you are impersonating

3. And then, attach a photo of yourself doing your best impersonation of a Gears of War character. It can be anyone from established Gears of War canon (the games, the comic book, the novel Gears of War: Aspho Fields but you'll have to be especially imaginative, anything that's been authorized by Epic Games as being legit part of the Gears of War mythology). Keep in mind that this is not a costume contest! If you're the kind of person who likes to parade around Comic-Con and Dragon-Con wearing a full set of COG Gear armor, you're more than welcome to pose wearing that. But this is all about character. This is a contest focusing on raw persona. In short: do you "get" what Gears of War is all about? Can you make that come across with nothing more than your own countenance? If so, pick a Gears of War character and show us what you got! Doesn't matter if you're male or female: plop on a do-rag and show us your best Marcus Fenix mug. Or give us Dom or Anya or Baird or Cole or Dizzy or Tai (ooh-boy I'm eager to see if anyone attempts Tai) or heck, even a Locust grub or the Locust Queen herself! Extra points will be given toward creativity and originality, but as I said this is about channeling character more than it is about costume ingenuity. Also, please try to keep your image size to 1 megabyte or less.

4. No age limit but this contest will enforce a "one entry per person" limit. So like shootin' a gun in a Gears of War game, make it count!

5. You'll have between now and until 12:01 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on December 18th, 2008 to e-mail in your entry, so that gives you a bit more than two weeks to come up with something.

6. Judging for the contest will be conducted by a three-member panel that has already been pre-selected. Their decisions are final.

7. By entering you are giving consent to have your photo published on The Knight Shift blog (the one you're looking at right now). So make sure your photos are "family-friendly", folks :-)

8. In addition to the three final winners, this blog reserves the right to also publish "honorable mentions" if there are any.

9. Insofar as real life will cooperate, the winners will be announced sometime on December 19th 2008 and the signed CDs will be rushed to each of the winners as soon as possible.

Remember: this is not a costume contest! Don't let your lack of real Coalition of Ordered Governments armor deter you from entering! If you have a face (let's hope you do :-) and you think you can channel and project the spirit of Marcus, Dom, Anya, or any other Gears of War character with it, then get your entry sent in today!

Read More

Butt-Numb-A-Thon 10 starts today

For those who don't know what that is, it's an annual 24-hour long film festival hosted by Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News, at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas. Some consider it to be the most sought-after cinematic event in the country. I got to attend Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 last year and twelve months later there's not a day that goes by that I don't think about the whole crazy experience.

Well, for those of us who won't be able to go to this year's Butt-Numb-A-Thon, here's something to assuage our pain. It's the trailer for Stunt Rock, which is shown every year at Butt-Numb-A-Thon to get the party started...

Is that not the most outrageously cool trailer ever made? :-)

Read More

So last night was Performance #4 of OLIVER TWIST

I think having all this past week off from rehearsals might have been a good thing, 'cuz everything seemed to have really clicked well during last night's show. We all got into it totally refreshed and ready to knock it out of the ballpark. Also, there was a substantially good audience, despite what apparently was pro wrestling at the National Guard Armory next door which had also drawn a large crowd.

Theatre Guild of Rockingham County's production of Oliver Twist plays again tonight at 7:30 and then the final show tomorrow afternoon at 2:30, in the Advanced Technologies Building Auditorium at Rockingham Community College. Click here for more information.

Read More

Study: Older people are VERY active video game players! But...

...they tend to hide that fact from their contemporaries, according to the story at Financial Post.

Personally, I don't see anything wrong, at all, with anyone enjoying a good video game. The story cites Nicholas Muehlen, a fifty-year old dude - and a chef, by the way - who likes to indulge in the Gears of War, Halo and Call of Duty series of games. He and his wife get into the play as much as their grown children.

This can't possibly be a bad thing. Or an activity to be embarrassed about.

Video games are a form of entertainment, just like television and movies. But they have the advantage of being an interactive experience that involves not just hand-eye coordination but more often than not some serious thinking, too. And consider immersive-style games like Gears of War 2 and BioShock: why just watch the story when you can be in the story?

Heck, the way the economy is right now, video games are a downright sound investment for your entertainment budget. Certainly they deliver more per dollar than DVDs or movie tickets.

So, Nicholas Muehlen and every other "seasoned" video game player out there: rock on! You are at the forefront of a trend that only looks to continue. Hey, if my own father can do pretty well at Gears of War 2, then this is something that anybody should stand up and feel proud about enjoying! :-)

Read More

Federal Reserve won't say who's getting TWO TRILLION DOLLARS of taxpayer money

Either way you cut this, it screams out "biggest heist of all time".

The Federal Reserve is refusing to disclose the recipients of $2 TRILLION of emergency loans financed by American taxpayers.

On a related note, President Bush is considering tapping into the same funds since the "bailout" failed in the Senate last night.

Time to revisit "Hell Époque" post that I made all the way back in January. That was the term that future historians, I'm sure of it, would give our current era.

The era of United States history that stretched from the early 1990s until the end of the first decade of the 21st century, that has come to be regarded as the final years of America's long-time domination of the world's culture and economy.

Although noted for considerable achievements in computers and telecommunications that led to apparent empowerment of the individual, the Hell Époque was also a time of cultural and political stagnation in America that coincided with tremendous loss of individual liberty as the American government began to seize unprecedented power. Most authorities agree that although this had already been a long-time trend in America, the election of Bill Clinton as U.S. President in 1992 saw the start of the final phase of escalation toward an all-powerful American state. This would climax during the presidency of George W. Bush, whose disastrous domestic and foreign policies catapulted the country toward utter ruin.

Most historians agree that it became widely accepted among the American people during the Hell Époque that their government had finally become too corrupt and that the life they had come to believe in had drawn to a close, and that the "rule of law" under the Constitution no longer existed. This was especially apparent following the collapse of the traditional "two party system" and the failure of the American economy in...

Seems more and more like that's all happening these days.

Read More

Two essays for those of us who are paying attention

The first one is by Matt Towery at Townhall.com, who ruminates on "Why More and More Politicians are Rotten to the Core". Towery echoes a lot of things that have been on my mind during the past year, which have led me to tell many people more times than I care to remember that "There is no faith to be had in politics".

And on the somewhat more ornery side of things, Fred Reed - the Internet's greatest curmudgeon - waxes eloquent in his piece "What Have the Bastards Done to My Country?".

Read More

Ron Paul tells it like it is about auto bailout (twice!)

You would think that common sense might be prevailing enough. I mean, c'mon... would you buy a car from a company owned by the same federal government that has so brilliantly managed Social Security and Amtrak?

So yesterday before the House of Representatives came the Honorable (so rarely do I get to use that term and the person I'm speaking of actually merit it) Ron Paul, and he laid down the smack bigtime on how positively wrong the notion of this "bailout" is. Paul has the brass ones to call this what it really is: socialism, and nationalizing an entire domestic industry. Dr. Paul references not just the Constitution, but a lot of good history.

Here it is: a lone voice of sanity in Washington D.C.

Listening to this, I have no doubt: if the Republican Party leadership (a bunch that I have absolutely no respect for at all) had given this man the support that they gave McCain and the other phonies this past election season, Barack Obama would not tonight be a "President-Elect".

(By the way, I made the embedded video a bit bigger, courtesy of YouTube's new options. How's it look? :-)

Read More

For good old games, GOG.com delivers

About a month ago I heard about GOG.com. The site - its URL is an acronym for "Good Old Games" - is dedicated to promoting classic computer games from years gone by. So with a lot of folks raving about how good Fallout 3 is since it came out last month and because I never played the original, I purchased Fallout (shown at left) from GOG.com for $5.99 earlier this week. For that amount came not only the game as a 500 megabyte download, but also the manual and a lot of other Fallout-related goodies (like the soundtrack).

And after the last few days of traipsing around the blasted wasteland of Fallout, I now forsee giving GOG.com plenty more of my coin in the future. In addition to Fallout and Fallout 2 (also for six bucks) the site's catalogue features Descent and its sequel, MDK, Earthworm Jim 3D, Unreal Gold, and many others. All of the games sold through GOG.com are free of digital rights management (for which a lot of people will be happy) and they are guaranteed to work on Windows XP and Vista (I've been playing Fallout on a Vista machine and trust me: it plays perfectly!). The site is still in beta, but if GOG.com is as consistent with its word as it has been so far, I will certainly recommend checking them out on a regular basis.

Read More

Bible probably not true, Bush says

So, all of you who have held up George W. Bush as a paragon of Christian virtue: how do you 'splain this?

George W. Bush, outgoing President of the United States, now says that the Bible is "probably not" literally true.

Bush also says that evolution is not incompatible with the Bible.

Adding to his statement that he is "not a literalist", Bush also hedged immensely when he said that the most important lesson in the Bible is that "God sent a son". Ummmm... Georgie baby, if you studied the Bible at all, you would know that God sent His only Son.

I saw firsthand eight years ago that the Cult of Bush was anything but Christ-like. Bush and his faithful do not worship God: they worship raw, naked power. Bush just happened to say the right words and the "evangelical conservatives" - who are by far the dumbest bunch of fools that I have ever seen in my life and yeah I called 'em "fools" - fell right in line and sung his praises.

And now, just a few weeks before leaving the White House, he finally shows them, in no uncertain terms, that he is not like them at all.

I would say that I hope the "evangelicals" would learn their lesson from this, that they would finally engage the minds that God gave 'em... but I'm expecting them to just find another smooth-talking politician to latch onto.

Read More

NOT AGAIN! Scantily-clad girls bathe in KFC restaurant sink

What the hell is it with employees bathing in restaurant sinks lately? A few months ago it was "Mr. Unstable" who boneheadedly decided to post a video of himself cleansing in the sink at Burger King in Xenia, Ohio: a stunt that got not only himself but a bunch of others fired.

Now it's the KFC in Anderson, California, where three female employees also took a bath in the sink normally used to clean utensils.

Two of the girls have been fired, and the other has already left on her own. They took several photos of themselves wearing swimsuits while carousing in the steaming-hot water (click here for more 'cuz many of y'all will no doubt be interested anyway) and then posted them on Myspace in a gallery called "KFC Moments".

I don't know which is the more dumb: that they did this to begin with, or that they opted to publicize it.

Hey kids, listen: I've been known to do some outrageous stunts too (heck I still do, even). But don't do it if it could possibly lead to drastic consequences like losing your employment. If you wanna take some pics and stash them away for years later, when you're safe and you want to show off how much of an idiot you were back in the day, fine... but to show off how much of an idiot you are today is only asking for trouble.

Read More

Carrie Fisher now sez: STAR WARS wasn't worth it

Carrie Fisher (depicted at right in the "Slave Leia Metal Bikini" from Return of the Jedi) was on The Today Show this morning shilling her new book Wishful Drinking. And she let loose what will no doubt be a shocking revelation to millions of fanboys: that she now regrets having anything to do with the Star Wars movies. That if she had known it would become so popular, Fisher would have "never" signed up to be Princess Leia at all. Fisher now blames the instant celebrity that Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope and the ensuing sequels brought her for her bipolar disorder, her drug addiction (Cary Grant was brought in by her parents to counsel her to "don't eat acid"), and the failure of her relationships such as her onetime marriage to Paul Simon.

I'm inclined to suggest that adolescent celebrities read what Carrie Fisher is saying here, and that they would do well to heed the wisdom she's offering.

It's safe to say that childhood stars do not go through the most well-adjusted periods compared to "common" kids. And it makes sense that there's a hideous cost to the spotlight at that stage in life. Kids at that age are just then figuring out their own sense of identity. They're going through confusion enough as it is, without being called upon to be a public icon all the time. No wonder so many of them turn to substance abuse: they practically need that to feel numb to themselves.

Thanks to my good friend Eric Wilson for passing the story along :-)

Read More

Bush Doctrine = Epic Fail

Is there anything more pathetic than a person scrambling against time in a vain effort to ensure that history will be kind to him or her?

Perhaps only if that person happens to be a current President of the United States.

George W. Bush was at West Point yesterday, trying to spin his eight years in office as a blazing success. The most foolish man to ever occupy the Oval Office actually defended his policy of pre-emptive war (something that had never been done before in American history) and declared to the assembled cadets that "With all the actions we've taken these past eight years, we've laid a solid foundation on which future presidents and future military leaders can build."

The Decider also boasted that the present condition of the United States military is ""stronger, more agile and better prepared" than how he found it when he first took office. I am somewhat reminded of how Adolf Hitler furiously insisted that entire divisions of the German army were still awaiting his orders in the waning days of World War II. If Bush seriously believes that the American armed forces are better today than they were in 2000, then either somebody should have been fired a long time ago for giving him faulty information, or there is a severe disconnect in his gray matter from reality. I suspect the latter.

So what is the result of the Bush Doctrine? The Middle East is today more destabilized than it has been since perhaps before World War I... and there is no "order from chaos" that is apparently arising. It is the legitimate opinion of many that Al Quaeda is getting stronger because Bush let its members have a safe haven in Pakistan, which as the past few weeks have witnessed has become a far greater base for terrorism than most were ready to acknowledge. Iraq is still a much worse mess than it would have been had we just left it alone, and it will be yet decades before the final cost of that fiasco is known.

I could go into his horrible domestic policies, but I've said enough of those lately already. But I will dare say that more than any other elected official, it will have been George W. Bush who most destroyed the America that we had come to know.

(And now I'm wondering how long before the loons from "that church" in Winston-Salem arrive to proclaim Bush as the "greatest President ever" like they have done recently...)

Read More

DOOM: Fifteen years of Hell on Earth

Fifteen years ago this morning, on December 10th, 1993, id Software uploaded a zipped-up file to a bulletin board system and an FTP archive on the Internet. The file contained the setup, executable and WAD for the shareware version of the first official release of a new computer game called Doom.

And video games haven't been the same since.

Yeah, Wolfenstein 3D (also an id Software product) is generally considered to have been the original first-person shooter. But Doom was the one that really made everybody stand up and take notice. Being thrown into the part of a Space Marine on a Martian moonbase who must fend off hordes of demons from Hell itself was wildly addictive fun. Some estimate that the original free shareware episode of Doom, "Knee Deep in the Dead", is the most installed piece of entertainment software in history. That the game was so easily modifiable (I still laugh whenever I think of the "Barney the Dinosaur" mod) is no doubt the biggest reason why Doom, a decade and a half later, is still being vigorously played. Doom became its own industry, just as at the same time it changed the video game industry forever.

I'll never forget the first time I played it. My good friend Johnny Yow came over one evening so we could carpool to an evening history class. He told me to "give this a try" and handed me a box containing the disks for the Doom shareware game. When I got back that evening I installed it, started playing... and it was like 2 in the morning before I quit for the night. The next evening I showed Dad how I had found the chainsaw and was using it to slice up the bad guys. Hee-hee-hee... I won't forget how he shook his head at seeing that, either :-)

Think I'll celebrate the occasion in style this morning by playing a few rounds of Doom on my Xbox 360.

Read More

Redundancy is... (Blagojevich did business as usual, the wrong way)

Today's edition of the News & Record (the big newspaper in Greensboro) has a front-page story - like most other papers across the country this morning - about Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich getting arrested for corruption regarding the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama.

The headline in the News & Record reads: "Senate seat alleged for sale"

So when was the last time a Senate seat wasn't for sale in this country?

If he did this, then Blagojevich should be thrown in, no... under the jailhouse and left to rot. But let's get real folks: politics in the United States has become a high-stakes poker game with a buy-in that drastically exceeds the means of the average citizen. Unless you are filthy rich or otherwise have socially astute connections, you have no chance of running for high office.

Hell, it takes a fortune just to hire enough lawyers who will be able to go through all the legalities that are now on the books for a candidate to adhere to.

And it is precisely the mechanisms of modern American politics that not only allow, but even encourage the sort of corruption that we are seeing (again) happen around Chicago.

When the common man and his virtues are shut out of the process, then where will those virtues be found at all?

Read More

Baldwin: Conservatives are practicing "Selective Constitutionalism"

I figured this was going to happen if Barack Obama won the presidential election: self-professed "conservatives" would be quick to blast Obama and the Democrats for violating the Constitution... when in fact those same conservatives have turned a blind eye at every opportunity during the past eight years when "their guy" George W. Bush did the same.

That's the kind of hypocrisy that I cannot forgive. And so far as the "Christian" ones go, it tells me that they are not interested in the truth at all.

Chuck Baldwin agrees, writing in his latest essay. The "Constitutional crisis" that many conservatives claim is there because of the dubious nature of Obama's birthplace is diminished, because these conservatives refused to condemn their own just as equally...

Many conservatives seem to be obsessed with this controversy, calling it a "constitutional crisis." The fact is, however, we have been in a "constitutional crisis" for years! The problem is, most conservatives only get worked up over a potential abridgement of constitutional government when it serves their partisan political purposes. In other words, when a Democrat appears guilty of constitutional conflict, conservatives "go ballistic," but when Republicans are equally culpable of constitutional conflict, they yawn with utter indifference.

(snip)

But, again, most conservatives care little about the Constitution's requirement that a President be a "natural born Citizen." Like liberals, most conservatives are afflicted with a very debilitating disease that I call Selective Constitutionalism. They only want to apply constitutional government when it helps Republicans or hurts Democrats. Most of them really could not care less about adherence to the Constitution. If they did, they would have been up in arms for the last eight years as President George W. Bush repeatedly ignored--and even trampled--the U.S. Constitution.

Where were these "constitutional" conservatives when George W. Bush was assuming dictatorial-style powers and contravening Fourth Amendment prohibitions against warrantless searches and seizures? Where were they when Bush was ordering our emails, letters, and phone calls to be intercepted by federal police agencies without court oversight? Where were they when Bush was obliterating the Fifth and Eighth Amendments? Where were they when Bush overturned Posse Comitatus by Executive Order? Where were they when Bush dismantled the constitutional right of Habeas Corpus? Where were they when Bush lied to the American people about the invasion of Iraq and took the United States to war without a Declaration of War from Congress? Where were conservatives when Bush turned nine U.S. military installations over to the United Arab Emirates? Where were they when Bush ordered his Department of Transportation to open up America's airlines to foreign ownership? Where were they when President Bush nullified (using "signing statements") over 1,100 statutes he did not like? Where were they as President Bush and his fellow Republicans reauthorized one of the most egregiously unconstitutional pieces of legislation in modern memory: the USA Patriot Act? Where were they when Bush signed the blatantly unconstitutional McCain/Feingold Act? I could go on and on...

Baldwin is correct, again. But to those who are looking more for rationale supporting their ideology than daring to question whether that ideology is even right, it won't matter.

Read More

Another classic GARFIELD AND FRIENDS: "Invasion of the Big Robots"

Garfield and Friends rates with The Tick as having some of the most twisted humor done for a Saturday morning cartoon. Like this episode, where Garfield wakes up one morning and finds that he's in the wrong cartoon! I love how the regular kind of Garfield and Friends animation gets mixed up with the futuristic Eighties-style for the Starwolf sequences. And then the Disney-ish look toward the end.

First airing on December 2nd 1989, here is "Invasion of the Big Robots"...

Read More

"With sport-utility vehicles at the altar..."

You know, Jesus beat and chased the money changers out of the temple because they had turned His father's house into a den of robbers.

So what would His reaction be if he saw His father's house turned into an automobile showroom?

A single photo demonstrates how screwed-up America has become...

Three vehicles - one from each of the major domestic auto makers - were brought to the altar of Greater Grace Temple, one of Detroit's largest churches. They were there to help with an appeal to Heaven: that God might do a work in the souls of the President and members of Congress and move them to give Ford, General Motors and Chrysler a fat juicy bailout package.

Sayeth the Reverend Charles Ellis...

At one point, Ellis summoned up hundreds of auto workers and retirees in the congregation to come forward toward the vehicles on the altar to be anointed with oil.

"It's all about hope. You can't dictate how people will think, how they will respond, how they will vote," Ellis said after the service. "But you can look to God. We believe he can change the minds and hearts of men and women in power, and that's what we tried to do today."

I barely know where to begin.

Okay, first of all, using the cars in this way reeks of idolatry.

But so too does this attempt to get God to "change the hearts and minds of men and women in power". These people do not understand - as well as too many other Americans - that God did not grant power and authority over America to the government. He let "We the People" be the authority. It's up to us to make do with the free will that He graced us with. This church is in effect making this a prayer to man and the institutions of man, rather than to God for wisdom and guidance.

And so far as the Big Three auto makers go: they don't deserve a bailout. And neither do the members of the auto unions deserve any more sympathy than is absolutely necessary. Both of them are at fault for what is happening right now to the auto industry. They had decades to clean up their act. Why the Hell should the American taxpayers be called upon to "help" them when they refused to help themselves?

Let economic Darwinism runs its course for once. And if the government dares give them a "bailout", then I'm gonna petition Congress for a ten million dollar "stimulus" package for KWerky Productions to help with the economy here in North Carolina.

Read More