Tammy's decoy

Last night Tammy, my miniature dachshund, got on the sofa.  And she brought along one of her Christmas toys: a plush dachshund toy, which came courtesy of my cousin Lauryn and her husband.So she got up under her blanket, on my lap, and I noticed that she and her toy each had their tale protruding out:Which one is Tammy??  In real life it really does look like there...

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Twelve Years Later: Forgiving Mom

The realization hit me this morning that today is the twelfth anniversary of Mom's passing. I've written about her before, here.  Maybe too much.   Sometimes all the hurt and anguish builds up and demands, even needs a vent.  Some people do that with art.  Or going out for a drive.  I learned a long time ago that I can't paint and I'm a threat...

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Christmas 2023: Return of a Tradition

To be honest, I don't know if I should do this.  It seems like it would be more ideal to bring this back during a better Christmas.But when would that be?  We aren't guaranteed a tomorrow, much less a holiday that could be years from now.It's like this: for a very long time, every year in the days before Christmas, I would post an article that I wrote for my college's...

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Tammy and me at Kitty Hawk

Today is the 120th anniversary of the first powered air flight, by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk on the  Outer Banks of North Carolina.In May of 2017, not long after coming back east after nearly a year of traveling across America, I took my dog Tammy on a day trip to the Outer Banks.  I wanted her to be able to say (to other dogs anyway) that she has seen the...

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Got to see Godzilla Minus One last night

Many years ago an idea hit for a Godzilla movie.  There are strong doubts that I'll ever get to make it but the notion still occupies my mind whenever a film about kaiju is released.  My idea for a Godzilla film is to set it in Japan in 1954, the year the original film came out.  To treat Godzilla as a force of nature like an earthquake or tsunami.  Shoot...

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DOOM is thirty years old today!

Doom, arguably the most installed piece of software in the history of anything, today celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of its release. It was at 12:01 AM on the morning of December 10th, 1993 that the team at id Software uploaded the first one-third of the game - the shareware version - to an FTP server at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.  Within minutes wanna-be...

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Testing for un-named weekly series

It was my friend Matt Smith who first encouraged me to start a weekly video series like his own Sunday school videos.  He suggested some equipment and I've been playing around with shooting footage with my iPad Pro.  Today I tried it again, this time with a wireless lavalier microphone.This is still VERY rough, but I thought it could be shared with y'all.  Few things from making this: the mic should be further up my shirt (crossing...

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The Knight "Many Santas" Hypothesis

Work with me here.  This is something that popped into being inside my gray matter a few weeks ago.  Personally, I can't find any argument about how this is not a viable theory.  Although I confess that I did ummm... "borrow" some things from current pop culture.   But as Santa Claus is a character who has borrowed much else across the centuries I...

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Sharing something very special tonight

So, this past week a memory just popped into mind.  About something I had written a long time ago as a student at Elon.  Awhile back I discovered an online archive of every issue of The Pendulum, which was the college's newspaper.  I've shared a few of the op-ed pieces I wrote for the paper already.I don't know why I found myself thinking of it but I went looking...

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I'm feeling as if Kipling is in order...

 The Godsof theCopybook HeadingsRudyard Kipling1919~As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place. Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all. We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in...

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Chris sees Doctor Who's "The Star Beast" so you don't have to

"Doctor... I let you go."~ final words of the Twelfth Doctor  Oh dear Lord.  It was so much worse than I was ready for.I keep hearing Peter Capaldi's last words as The Doctor, now several minutes after watching "The Star Beast": the first of the three hour-long specials "celebrating" the sixtieth anniversary of Doctor Who.  Because that is what I'm...

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God and me: How I found my faith again

I wish that I could tell you, faithful readers (all two of you) that my spiritual life is one that has been a beautiful one.  A life that has somehow escaped all trouble and heartbreak.  This month is the twenty-seventh anniversary of my first coming to having faith in Christ.  And you would think that all of that time would have resulted in... well, something...

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Changing Doctor Who's Davros is officially the STUPIDEST thing I've seen all year

The Doctor - the titular hero of the long-running BBC series Doctor Who - has had many, many enemies in his sixty years of saving the universe.  Everyone from Cybermen to The Master to the Weeping Angels to... well just about anything you can come up with has been a potential threat.But there is one foe who is above and beyond the rest: Davros.  The insane creator...

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This is the kind of people that Americans used to be

It was 1983, forty whole years ago.  At the White House.  "Santa Claus" came that year in the form of Mr. T.  Here he is with beloved First Lady Nancy Reagan sitting on his lap:Damn it.  What the hell has become of us, since then?We aren't like that anymore.  Our culture and society has become so degenerated that something so playful like that...

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An offer to Russell T. Davies, about Doctor Who

Dear Mr. Davies,Greetings good sir!  I know this is a very exciting time for you, so I thank you for taking the time (I hope) to read this proposal.  Please know that I have been a fan of your helming of Doctor Who since that very first episode with Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor.  I am looking forward to where you are taking the series next,...

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I have watched the teaser trailer for GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE at least ten times so far...

 ...and, well, I'm stoked about this movie.  It looks like it could be even better than Ghostbuster: Afterlife.  And I loved that movie a lot.Here's the teaser for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire that dropped yesterday:I will definitely be wearing my Ghostbusters uniform to the theater to see this.  All the more reason to upgrade my boots for it ...

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The legend of Popcorn Sutton lives on! Family is (legally) brewing famed 'shiner's likker

Yowza!!  And I've thought that many times over the past several years or so, in regard to the memory of Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton.  Longtime readers will remember when I was posting about Popcorn with machine gun-regularity.  I'd always wanted to meet the man.  Unfortunately that never happened.  In March of 2009, a few days before he was supposed to...

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