Lesson learned

After all these months since the school board race, tonight something very important about running for office was impressed upon me... the hard way. Let's just say that I've learned that it's not enough to adhere to the letter of the law so far as record-keeping goes. You have to go further than that, and document everything.

Why? Because this afternoon I was given the opportunity to do something relatively cool, and this was all set to happen. Except that I was missing one crucial bit of information that was absolutely needed on these guys' end before they could proceed. If I had made a note of this info at the time, this could probably have happened. But I didn't, and in spite of my best efforts I couldn't locate this information to relay to them. So, it didn't happen.

But all the same, I'm feeling rather honored and delighted that I was approached with this. It was my fault that it couldn't get any further. Next time, I'll know better. And if you ever run for office, remember: document document document EVERYTHING!

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Filmmaker Bob Clark and son killed by a drunk driver

Bob Clark and son Ariel were killed by a drunk driver in California on Tuesday.

Among many other things (yes I'll mention that he did Porky's), Bob Clark directed a certain little 1983 movie called A Christmas Story.

There's possibly more to this story that I'm waiting to hear confirmation on before posting it here.

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I haven't seen tonight's LOST yet

Through a series of circumstances that were completely unforseen and totally unexpected to happen at all, for the first time ever my lovely wife Lisa has seen a new episode of Lost... and I haven't!

I'm about to go watch it from the DVR. She said it was really good.

EDIT 12:50 AM 4-5-2007: Just wrapped up watching it. Another great ep. Maybe it didn't have all the "wham!" of the past several episodes but this was a fun one that brought closure to some things while opening up a whole bunch of others.

Personally, the most enjoyable part of this episode was what Hurley did with Sawyer. And I've realized something tonight: for all the talk of leadership that Hurley spoke about, it's Hurley who is the real leader of the castaways. From the very beginning, Hurley has gone out of his way to be a servant to his fellow survivors, whether it be making the golf course or creating the diversion of getting the minibus to work again. And tonight we saw Hurley's real wisdom shine: instead of taking the obvious leadership role for himself, he helped Sawyer become that leader instead, in a way that Sawyer probably would never do on his own.

So... what the heck is up with Locke now?

Very good show, this one was.

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DARPA working on liquid-metal robots

Here's the story at New Scientist Technology Blog.

This may not be the best of technological pursuits, going by what we saw in Terminator 2: Judgment Day...

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My latest letter to the editor is published today

Click here to read my latest letter to the editor at the News & Record website.

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Keith Richards snorted father's cremated ashes mixed with cocaine

Read here, if you must.

Richards has a pretty big role in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End coming out next month (he's playing Captain Jack Sparrow's father). This is potentially a worse PR fiasco for Disney than was Ewan McGregor's "lightsaber" in the months leading up to The Phantom Menace.

EDIT 2:01 AM 04-04-2007: The story going around now is that Richards was "only kidding", and that he didn't really snort his father's ashes like cocaine.

The real Greek tragedy of the thing is, there's no telling what substances Keith Richards has snorted during his long career. One's cremated remains would probably be the least of them.

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My April Fools gag worked way better than expected

I've heard from about 4 or 5 people today who told me that they visited my blog during Sunday and were completely convinced that I had joined the Amish, as was posted here during April Fools Day. That's about ten or so people close to me that I know of who were taken in by the gag.

To say that I'm not giggling about this stunt's success would be an understatement :-) Now I just have to figure how to top this for next year...

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Glutton for punishment

A year ago I reviewed the novel The Da Vinci Code. It took me days to recover after reading that... thing.

Well, today is the day that the very last (we hope) novel of the Left Behind series comes out. Against my better judgment, I will commence to reading this shortly and likewise post a review.

Never let it be said that I don't go out of my way to provide new content on this blog...

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Soldiers returning to Iraq after more brief breaks

Story at MSNBC about soldiers returning to Iraq after considerably shorter respites than is sought by military policy. Some brigades are being sent back into the combat zone after being home only 7 months, when there's supposed to be one year's rest after each year deployed.

Why are the soldiers being sent back so quickly? Because there's not enough military personnel to fully accommodate our presence in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. If this administration decides it wants to go to war with Iran, it will get even worse for our men and women in the armed forces.

Just one more indication that our armed forces have become spread too thin through the worst mismanagement of military resources in American history.

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SERENITY tops STAR WARS for best sci-fi movie honor

Serenity, the big-screen follow-up to Joss Whedon's TV show Firefly, has been named best sci-fi movie by readers of SFX. Number two on the list is the original Star Wars. Finishing out the top ten in order are: Blade Runner, Planet of the Apes (presumably the original), The Matrix, Alien, Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, and Back to the Future.

I'm glad to see this, because the Firefly universe is a franchise that really deserves to be continued one way or another. I never got to see the show but I thought that Serenity was both entertaining and thoughtful. Maybe I'll put the Firefly series on Netflix and catch it sometime.

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Polar Rose: The "Duke Nukem Forever" of Web 2.0

A few months ago I heard about an intriguing new website called Polar Rose. It's creators have billed it as a search engine for images... and images of people in particular. Polar Rose is built around facial recognition software that, theoretically, you'll be able to input the picture of a person you know and it will scan for every occurrence of that person's face in photos throughout the Internet.

So I've been keeping an eye out for Polar Rose to debut its service, which was supposed to have been sometime in the first quarter of 2007. We're now headed into the second quarter. There also hasn't been anything new added to the Polar Rose website since about mid-January. I've heard that they were originally going for a December 2006 roll-out. According to one source it might happen this month or in May.

I hope they get on the ball soon and release this, because there's a lot of good potential to be found in an innovation like this. But to have announced it with so much fanfare about what it promises, only to not deliver on time and then not offer something in the way of official feedback, Polar Rose is on track to become the Duke Nukem Forever of Web 2.0... and nobody wants to see that happen.

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SCHRODINGER'S BEDROOM link isn't working right now

The film - and several others at the On The Lot site - has vanished. I understand that it's a technical problem being worked on, so hopefully mine and everyone else's movies will be back up soon :-)

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My birthday, and an R2-D2 mailbox in Greensboro!

So two days ago it was my birthday. Which in recent times that's been a pretty rough thing for me to go through. I guess it's because a few years ago I spent my birthday as a pallbearer for my grandmother's funeral and the last thing approximating physical contact with her was carrying her casket to the graveside. Since then I've never been able to fully dis-associate birthdays from funerals, life from death. And my grandmother and I had been close, too.

There have been times that it hasn't been so bad though. The following year after her funeral, during the first year of our relationship, Lisa went far in giving me a fun, upbeat, positive birthday. That included going to Olympic Park in Atlanta, then meeting up with my life-long best friend Chad where he worked at the CNN Building and he showed us around to a lot of places that you'd never see on a guided tour of the place, and then Lisa took me to see the annual Atlanta Passion Play put on by First Baptist Church there (the one that Charles Stanley pastors).

That was a good birthday. This year... not so much. Guess it's because of a lot of things that have come crashing down all at once lately. It was enough to jerk me back into that "birthdays = death" thing that I've tried so hard to shake off. But I was able to manage to have a little bit of fun all the same...

One good thing that I'll remember this birthday for, was that it was the day I finally got to see one of those cute new R2-D2 mailboxes for myself (click on the link to see if there's one in your town). Until this weekend I was ready to go to Raleigh, Charlotte, Asheville or maybe Roanoke to find one, but my friend Darth Larry told me the day before that there was definitely one in Greensboro. He told me where to find it (and here's his report and photos of the thing). So yesterday afternoon Lisa and I went to the corner of West Market Street and College Place (this is the front entrance to Greensboro College, if it helps any) and found our little Artoo unit...

Here's a shot of the intersection that Artoo is next too (along with Lisa)...

Here's what the back of our faithful astro-droid looks like...

Here's Lisa re-creating a famous scene from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (maybe we should have found her a white Leia outfit and done her hair up in buns for this pic?)...

And finally, to prove that I was really there (note my custom-built lightsaber hanging from my belt)...

When the new Star Wars stamps from the U.S. Postal Service go on sale on May 25th, I'm thinking of wearing my full Jedi costume to the post office when I buy some. Maybe I'll have photos to post of that too, if I can find someone willing to go with me who won't be afraid to associate with a guy in a Jedi getup :-)

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"Be careful out there among them English"

In case you didn't get to see it, all during April Fools Day this site became "Plain Blog written by Brother Christopher Knight". In true Amish style, it was a black page with white Times New Roman font (to be as "plain" as possible, and I also didn't use italics because that would be akin to the whole thing about buttons on clothes that Amish have) and it announced that Lisa and I had chosen to join the local Amish community.

As you've no doubt surmised by this post, Lisa and I have not decided to "be plain" after all. I couldn't resist doing this.The idea came last year to do an April Fools prank with my blog, and from the getgo the plan was to write about how Lisa and I had decided to join the Amish and give up the Internet forever. But it was like late evening on April Fools last year when I remembered that I'd wanted to do that... so I've been saving this gag up for the whole past year.

Anyway, April Fools for this year is over and this blog can get back to "normal", whatever the heck that is supposed to be around here. But for sake of posterity, here is the complete text of the post that was up for the past 24 hours...

Plain Blog written by Christopher KnightSunday, April 1 2007 12:01 a.m.

Dear friends and faithful readers of The Knight Shift blog:
As of today, I am surrendering my presence on the Internet. I will also no longer be involved in film production. Or anything else involving computers.

Why?

Lisa and I are joining a community of Old Order Mennonites... more commonly known as the Amish. As you probably know, the Amish have very limited use of "modern conveniences" like cars and electricity. Which is going to take a lot of getting used to being without those things. But the Amish also practice a concept called Gelassenheit. It means "letting the will of God be". I've come to realize that the emptiness in my life is because I have tried to control it according to my own will, instead of surrendering it completely to God. I've let the things of this world come in between me and God, and that relationship is something much more important than petty materialism.

I've spoken with the elders of the local Amish community and they have no problem with our joining their congregation. One of them joked that my entire life leading up to this has been one long period of Rumspringa. Maybe so. I've seen and sampled a lot of this world's pleasures and they are not for me. I'm tired of them. I can turn my back on them now and fully toward what God would have me to be.

Your thoughts and prayers would be appreciated. We are so new at this. I'm going to have to learn to speak old High German in order to understand the worship services. I have also found employment as an assistant to a farrier, where I'll help in making horseshoes for my Amish brethren. Speaking of which, I'm going to have to learn to steer a horse for the first time in my life. It has also been agreed that I can teach school... which since Amish only go to school up to eighth grade, I'm more than qualified to be an educator. We'll be living with a young Amish couple for these next few weeks, until the brothers can get together for a house-raising, which is where we will spend the rest of our lives in peace and contentment.

Do you know that this means that I'm going to have to grow a full beard now? Yeah, I can hardly see myself with one either.

You have to understand: we are not only doing this for ourselves, but for our children too. We've seen what this world is becoming, and we don't wish for our offspring to be brought to despair because of it.

So to everyone who I have come to know and love - and will still love in all the years to come - during this past decade and more, I want to wish you farewell, and please be careful out there among them English.

Gott segnen,
Brother Christopher Knight

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Happy 80th Birthday to Aunt Glendora!

My aunt Glendora is 80 years seasoned this weekend... but just try believing that after seeing how good she looks:

Lots of people can't believe she's really 80 now ("but you don't look it!" they all say). You wouldn't know it either if you knew how fast she gets around. Definitely an inspiration to live and let nothing stop you. This picture was from the lil' breakfast we had in her honor at Golden Corral this morning. So here's wishing Aunt Glendora a Happy 80th Birthday!

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One of the most bizarre things I've ever seen

The Snake Plissken Memorial Playground Project.

Now go back and re-read that again, and hit the link.

Apparently this is for real. The plan: build a playground for children in Kosovo, and name it after Kurt Russell's character from Escape from New York.

What's next... the Ash Williams Memorial Wildlife Preserve?

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The North Carolina Lottery is one year old today

Yes, today marks the one-year anniversary since state-sponsored gambling finally came to the Tarheel State. We have indeed come a long way from the days when you could go to jail here for buying a copy of Penthouse Magazine.

In all seriousness though, I don't know if the lottery has had much of an impact... at least yet... on state education. If North Carolina was smart we would manage the lottery proceeds like how Georgia does theres, what with their Hope Scholarship and all. That, and bolster our teachers' pay a lot more than they're getting now (and they more than deserve it).

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