Just watched UNITED 93

Tonight was the night that United 93 premiered on HBO. If you have HBO-W it'll be coming on again in another hour or so. We watched it in full glorious high-definition.

This one is going to be haunting me for the next few days, I just know it.

United 93 was the plane that was hijacked on 9-11, that the passengers fought back before it could hit its intended target (presumably this was going to be the Capitol building). Instead it spiralled into the ground in a field in rural Pennsylvania.

This was the first movie about 9-11 that I've ever seen. I'll almost certainly be picking up the DVD for this soon. United 93 is one of the finest historical movies that I've seen, and it captures the intensity of that horrible day... I don't want to say beautifully, but it does resonate strong if you were watching it happen, wherever you were that day. The reactions from the characters are made all the more authentic when you realize, during the credits, that most of the real-life air traffic control and military staff on duty that day played themselves in this film.

This was just... wow.

I don't know if I've seen any other films by Paul Greengrass before, but I'm definitely going to find out about what else he's done. I'll strongly recommend United 93, but be mindful that this is one of the more intense movies to come out lately.

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How Bill Clinton helped ruin childhood innocence

This morning reminded me once again why Bill Clinton was one of the worst Presidents in American history: because he single-handedly destroyed Saturday morning cartoons.

It was back around the mid-1990s that he did the deed. Clinton decided that children's television programming wasn't "educational" enough: kids were enjoying Scooby-Doo and Papa Smurf way too much for their own good. So Clinton handed down a decree through the FCC: a high percentage of children's programming had to be "educational" in nature. Which was just the Clintons' way of saying that they were going to expose children to more of their screwball propaganda. So we got a helluva lot less of The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show and a lot more @&$%-ing crap like Captain Planet and the Planeteers. Lord how I hated that show. Whoever's responsible for putting it on the air should have been dragged out into the street and shot. And there was a lot of other #&$@ that wound up on the air because of Clinton too.

Do you understand what I'm saying here? That Saturday morning, which for so many decades was understood to be "the children's time" of the week, and something even considered sacred, was destroyed by Bill Clinton because he wanted to put his own greasy stamp on that and everything else. This is what he wanted his "legacy" to include. He didn't give a damn about the children. Clinton only thought of himself, just as he did with everything else. He destroyed Saturday morning for children.

He destroyed it for everyone else too. I'll never forget the first time I fully understood what he had done. It was one morning in September 1997 and "Weird" Ed and I were waiting for the premiere episode of The Weird Al Show on the local CBS affiliate. Instead we got this s*** called Wheel of Fortune 2000. I called up the CBS station and they said that because of Clinton's mandate for more children's "educational" programming, that they had to include Wheel of Fortune 2000 and because they had their local morning news show, there wasn't time to put The Weird Al Show into their Saturday morning schedule.

All it took was one man to destroy something pure, innocent, wonderful and fun. And what's more, Saturday morning television has never recovered. What Clinton did, he did to the next few generations of young Americans, and quite possibly it'll be more than that. I don't see Saturday morning programming returning to the way it once was anytime soon.

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Was Chris Knight the world's very first blogger?

This isn't something to be making a post about unless there was serious documentation backing it up. And I wouldn't be claiming to be this for "bragging rights" either. Rather, it's purely for the sake of history that I would want to come forward with this and add it for consideration in our dialogue about such things.

But I will admit: when it dawned on me yesterday about what I was doing over 12 years ago, and how that has now become such a routine part of life today when at the time it was pretty unusual, I did feel a little bit of pride at the prospect. A guy can be afforded that much, can't he? :-)

So here's the tale about how your friend Chris Knight may have started the world's very first blog... ever.

How do we define "blog"?Something needs to be addressed first though: how exactly do we define what a "blog" is? CNET News.com published a story last month about blogging turning 10 years old, and the story traces the history of online personal publishing. It began with .plan files that you read using the "finger" command with the Unix user prompt (something that I had on my account at Elon when I was a student there). Those weren't usually accessible through the World Wide Web, unless the .plan was made visible on a webpage via a CGI script or somesuch. When it comes to web-based publishing, the story cites Justin Hall and his Links.net page which Hall started in January 1994, and Carolyn Burke's online "Caroline's Diary" which began in January 1995 as the first online diary. The earliest true "blog" as mentioned in the story that is still active today is Dave Winer's Scripting News, which dates back to April 1st, 1997.

But in the modern sense, what exactly constitutes a "blog"?

In my mind, a "true blog" is an exercise in individual creativity and commentary, as expressed through the enabling of publication in an electronic medium for a wide audience. That's what makes a blog different from a diary: a blog is intended for publication. But as opposed to most publishing done in the modern era, there is no "gatekeeper" in place to control or edit the information that the blogger is sharing, where trying to share the contents of a written diary would have to pass muster with a number of editors.

A blog could be considered only truly a blog if it is not only an online log of information, but information in the form of thoughts and ideas coming unfettered from the mind of the blogger. At least, that is what "blogging" as we have come to understand it is considered to be. As such, it should be expected out of the blogger that he or she is actively producing new content from his or her unique perspective.

And in early October in 1994, that is exactly what I began doing...

Meddling with a modemI got my first real computer for Christmas in 1993. It was an AST brand, 25 mhz 486 processor with 4 megabytes of RAM and a 170 megabyte hard drive... which back in those days was plenty, until Wing Commander III came out a year later and I found myself salivating for an upgrade. But for its time, it was a really nice thing to tinker with and learn from and actually doing stuff with like writing papers for college classes (at least, until the night that Johnny Yow brought over Doom and there's no telling how many hundreds of hours I've wasted on that game since).

It had a 4800 baud fax modem in it too. And I got to use it to send faxes to a number of places and it came in quite handy whenever I had a letter to the editor to submit to the News & Record in Greensboro. We'll come back to that in a bit, 'cuz my op-ed letters to that newspaper helped to germinate quite a bit the idea that I eventually had.

Well, I wasn't content to just send faxes with it. I wanted to use my computer as a real communication tool: something that I could actively engage in ideas with. At the time there were online services like CompuServe and America Online (which wasn't strictly an Internet provider per se at the time) and Prodigy and a few others. But those cost monthly fees to use, not to mention that to dial out from Reidsville, North Carolina to the nearest access number would have incurred long-distance charges. And yet, the desire to "go online and do something" wouldn't leave me alone.

Enter the NEXUSI'd heard tell that there were smaller, privately-run versions of the bigger online services. These were the "bulletin board systems" or BBSes you've probably heard mentioned over the years. Just out of curiosity, I started asking around to see if any of those were in this area. One night I called my friend Mark Comer, who owned a computer store in town, and asked him if he knew of any. It turned out that Mark actually had his own BBS. He called it The NEXUS. He gave me the phone number and I dialed in from the computer. The modems did their "handshake" and for the first time in my life, I watched ASCII characters rain down from the top of the screen to form the welcome page for The NEXUS BBS.

From that moment on, I was captivated by the online world.

Mark had a few message boards and some files available for download, including Doom. Not long after I first found The NEXUS he added FidoNet connection to the board, including the Star Wars Echo, which for a lot of "old timers" was the very first time we could connect electronically with fellow fans of the saga.

I found The NEXUS right at the time when a lot of other people were either looking for BBSes to dial in to with their new computers, or were starting their own systems up. For rural Rockingham County, this was the most 'netting that we could have for awhile. Looking back, I think it's safe to say that there was an active and happy online presence, in spite of lacking a real Internet connection. It seemed like every week a new BBS was going up based in the county, usually from Reidsville or Eden and there was at least one good one in Stoneville. Every time word of one got around, I fired up my modem (and usually had to wait until I didn't get a busy signal 'cuz somebody else was using the BBS... which more often than not used only one phone line) and dialed in. Which sometimes let to some pretty funny stuff: one night I tried dialing in to what was supposed to be a new BBS in Eden. It was a non-existent number. So I changed one digit in the number to make it another Eden-based number, thinking that maybe I'd been given a mis-printed number. Well, imagine my shock when it turned out that I had dialed straight into the Eden branch of NationsBank (now Bank of America).

I was having loads of fun with the local BBSes, especially The NEXUS, which sort of became "home base" for me. And it wasn't long before an idea came to me...

Knight's CornerI was 20 years old when all of this was happening, and "full of vinegar" as they say. I started writing letters to the editor of the area's big newspaper when I was 17, but it was when I was 19 or 20 that I really started to hit my stride. The thing is, the News & Record had (and still has) a policy: each person could have only one letter printed every 30 days. Any more than that wasn't allowed. Every time I saw one of my letters printed in the paper, it was like I felt a rush: knowing that people were reading my stuff and talking and more importantly thinking about it... that was a really good feeling! I would have submitted a lot more to the News & Record if I could. I was bursting at the seams with stuff that I wanted to write and talk about. But there was that pesky 30-day rule...

It was like a junkie going through withdrawal. I had to publish a lot, and I had to publish bad.

That's when a really crazy notion hit me.

I wanted to ask Mark if he would assign to me a special section of The NEXUS, that anyone in the public could read but only I would have the access to write to it. With that section, I would have free reign to write and post about whatever it was that was on my mind. Since I strongly considered myself to be a political conservative at the time, that would be a viewpoint that I would be bringing up for discussion and since this being 1994 and the big "topic" apart from O.J. was Hillary Clinton’s "health care reform", I could use this section to talk about how wrong I thought her ideas were (does this mean that I am the world's very first conservative blogger? Eat your heart out Powerline and Little Green Footballs!).

Or, I would use it to talk about anything else that was on my mind. It would be wide-open for me to use.

Mark loved the idea. And even though it was his BBS, Mark trusted me enough to not abuse the privileges he was giving me with it.

And it wouldn't be just about posting stuff with that being the final word about it either. Mark set it up so that whenever I posted something, other registered users of The NEXUS could leave comments about it.

We called it Knight's Corner.

For all intents and purposes, it was exactly what today could be called a blog. With new, original content that I wrote and posted at least 2 or 3 times a week and sometimes much more than that. And we started it up early in the month of October in 1994.

Those first few weeks, I wrote a lot about the upcoming November elections: the ones that wound up seeing the Republican party gaining control of the House and Senate for the first time in four decades. I don't think looking back that I was trying to be exactly "the online version of Rush Limbaugh", but using Knight's Corner to talk about ideas and issues was something that I did feel a great deal of satisfaction in doing. Some of the posts that I did sparked riotous debate. I remember one in particular that spiraled into how a Republican-held Congress would be disastrous for the country, because of the gridlock that would come between it and President Clinton. 'Course with me being a rock-ribbed Republican at the time, I thought that anything that would stifle the Clintons would be good for America.

I wrote a lot of other things to it, too. One night not long after the elections, for whatever reason, I shared my "secret recipe" for turning frozen pizza into a true gourmet delicacy: pour Paul Newman's Olive Oil and Vinegar Salad Dressing on top of it before putting it in the oven. Then there was my rant against airing hemorrhoid relief commercials during dinner hours, which apparently made a lot of people who read it laugh, gauging by the comments that were posted on that one. A few times I wrote reviews of movies that I had rented from Action Video, like Gettysburg and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (I was 20 years old before I saw that movie... pretty sad huh?).

Knight's Corner even had its own opening page and logo. It was something I whipped-up one night with this ASCII-art program that Mark had me download. It was a crudely-drawn stylized "Knight's Corner" in dark red font against a black background (the text of the rest of Knight's Corner was bright white). A few months later when Mark added RIP-scripted graphics, we made a new version of the logo with a RIP-drawing program too, for people who used dial-up programs that could handle RIP.

Would you like to know what the guy behind Knight's Corner looked like? Not long after we started Knight's Corner up, I got a handheld black and white scanner. I scanned a photo of myself and uploaded it to Mark's system and we told people where they could download it from (with either "x modem" or "y modem"... gotta wonder how many people reading this will remember those). So if Knight's Corner was the world's very first real blog, then that might have been the very first blog "profile picture" too.

The more I think about it, the more I feel confident in calling Knight's Corner, if not THE very first real blog, then certainly one of the very first. 'Course, the word "blog" didn't exist at the time. Neither Mark or myself knew what exactly to call Knight's Corner. We mostly referred to it as my "thingy".

What else can I say about Knight's Corner? It was a hoot to do. I had so much fun doing it, that my writing letters to the News & Record started to slack off big-time. And then the News & Record itself got wind of what was going on up in Rockingham County...

"Welcome to the Virtual Neighborhood"The NEXUS BBS was becoming such a success, that I told Mark that maybe it was time to tell others outside of the county's "computer clique" about it and the other systems that were around. He agreed. I guess I did have an ulterior motive in suggesting this: the more people who used the BBS (which Mark had added quite a few number of phone lines to it), the more who could potentially read Knight's Corner. Which would make running Knight's Corner all the more fun :-)

So I used my handy-dandy fax modem and sent the News & Record a letter about The NEXUS and what we were doing with it and about how there were all these other systems around that were offering a taste of the online world to those who didn't have full-fledged Internet yet. Staff writer Susan Ladd got in touch with me and Mark and a few other people who were active on the BBSes. Her story ran on page D1 – the front page of the Life section – on January 21st, 1995. Her article, "Welcome to the Virtual Neighborhood", had a graphic of a cork bulletin board with Post-It notes and papers pertaining to BBS activity tacked to it. One of them said "Barney's Bulletins", which was a humorous reference to Knight's Corner. It was a great story with a lot of personality injected into it.

Here's part of Ladd's article that talks about Knight's Corner...

Knight maintains an area on the NEXUS board called Knight's Corner, with recipes, a humor column, even a photo. He also enjoys the debate forums.

"The topics change all the time, and since most people use an alias, you can say whatever you want," says Knight, who lives in Reidsville. "The topics are everything from health care reform to hemorrhoid commercials airing at dinner time - I started that one myself."

That weekend and the next few days, I noted that quite a few new users started using The NEXUS, and I heard from some of the other BBS operators that they saw a jump in new users, too. I made a post to Knight's Corner that welcomed the new arrivals, then commenced to writing even more about stuff that was on my mind. Some people liked what I had to say, others took issue with me. One article I wrote that particularly comes to mind had to do with abortion and why I thought it was wrong. Over a year later, I used many of the same arguments in that Knight's Corner article for my first op-ed piece in Elon's student newspaper, The Pendulum (which aroused quite a lot of reaction too, but that's a story for another time).

So there it is: documentation from a major newspaper that I was actively engaged in what can only be called "blogging" as early as late 1994. Pretty cool, huh? :-)

Behold... the InternetI kept at Knight's Corner for the next several months. And then when a company called Interpath brought the very first Internet connection to Rockingham County in spring of 1995 and I discovered the Netscape browser, my interest in keeping Knight's Corner going started to slide considerably. I'll always have a lot of fond memories about the time when BBSes were king and my role in actively creating content for it... but when the Internet came, it really was like going from a bicycle to a Ferrari. Suddenly there was so much more wide-open possibility to explore and use.

But I didn't abandon Knight's Corner entirely. Not long after I started classes at Elon I took part in a 2-hour session about writing HTML and uploading them so that we could have our own homepages on Elon's server. The night after that lil' class, I was working on my homepage in the computer lab in the Alamance building. That’s when Ed Woody came in and asked what was I doing and I told him. I'll never forget the look of astonishment in his eyes as he saw that I was creating a real, honest-to-goodness webpage: "I thought you had to have special software to do that!" he exclaimed. I immediately began sharing with him all the tricks that I had learned the night before. We spent the rest of the evening merrily working on our homepages. And that was the start of the partnership between "Weird" Ed Woody and Christopher Knight :-)

But like I said, I didn't totally forget about Knight's Corner. Whenever I wrote a new piece to post on The NEXUS, I first did it in Microsoft Works (which came with the computer), then looked it over and then I had to laboriously type it in again into the BBS through my account. What this meant was, I still had the text of the Knight's Corner postings. I created a separate page off from my main homepage that I copied and pasted the text of a lot of those into, and linked to it from "Chris Knight's Eclectic Emporium" (yes that was the title of my VERY FIRST web page). I didn't bother with transcribing all the comments that my stuff on The NEXUS had received though.

So now Knight's Corner had a real live presence on the World Wide Web. I wrote a few new things to it every now and then, but by that point my creative energies were devoted mostly to unlocking the secrets of the Internet and learning how to use them productively. The last thing I really posted to the Knight's Corner "blog" was my column about abortion from that issue of The Pendulum from March of 1996. I received quite a bit of e-mail about it, and added those to the article just under the main piece, complete with dates received.

What happened after that? Well, in July 1996 came the movie Independence Day and I went nuts for that movie and created the "Chris Knight's Unofficial ID4 Homepage" to express my love for it, and it soon turned into the biggest webpage on Elon's servers. I even got a nice e-mail from Dean Devlin about it. It wasn't a question of disk space per se, but by that time I realized that keeping the Independence Day page up was really what my momentary passion was. I quit posting to Knight's Corner entirely.

When I re-designed my homepage a few months later (this time calling it "Chris Knight's Carnival of Coolness") Knight's Corner was gone completely. I'd become a regular op-ed writer for The Pendulum by then, and that's where I then focused my mind on serious matters. But I've still got floppies containing the original Knight's Corner articles floating around somewhere. Maybe someday I'll find them again and post them here.

Knight's Corner 2.0When blogging started becoming big a few years ago, I couldn't help but remember doing Knight's Corner. In fact, I would definitely say that The Knight Shift blog is the spiritual descendant of Knight's Corner, if not actually being Knight's Corner 2.0. There aren't many times that I make a post here that I don't think back to how this was done in "the old days": using a terminal program dialed into a BBS to methodically type in text that was often slow – sometimes by several minutes – to show up in your window. It's so much easier now. In fact, right now I'm typing this up in Microsoft Word and will soon be copy and pasting it into the text window on my Blogger dashboard, just like millions of other active bloggers do on a daily basis.

Anyway, yesterday when the article about me and Schrodinger's Bedroom came out in goTriad, it made me think back over the years to all the other... stuff... that landed me in the newspapers. It's not that I've tried to draw attention to myself all this time. It's just that whether it's BBSes or desktop filmmaking, I've always wanted to point out the neat stuff to people so that they can take it and run with it and do something really cool with it, too. Everything I've done most of my life has been with trying to encourage people to do something good, or making them think a little more, or entertaining them in mind (and sometimes all at once, like what I did with my school board commercials). I remembered back to this article from 1995 that Susan Ladd did. And it was only then that it hit me like a hammer upside the head: that I was actively keeping a blog, with a lot of personally-created content, long before anyone else is on record as having done that. With documented evidence proving this, to boot.

So, there you have it: I may have been the world's very first real blogger (which would make Reidsville, North Carolina the birthplace of blogging). Or maybe not. I'm guessing probably not and that there might be someone else out there who was doing this already before the fall of 1994.

But regardless of that, it is a nice feeling to be able to say that you were definitely one of the pioneers in an uncharted territory that is today enjoyed by countless others worldwide. And more than looking back on what I might have done, I enjoy seeing what everyone else is writing and making with what is still our nascent sense of empowerment... and thinking about the things that are yet waiting to be accomplished with it.

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This Don Imus thing is a joke

And I'm not talking about what he did either. I'm talking about the reaction to it and how this seems to have become this country's biggest priority, if you're going by either the "mainstream" press or the "alternative" media including the blogosphere.

It wasn't until late yesterday afternoon that I heard what Imus said exactly. Have I been that out of touch with reality for this past week? More like: there were other things... and more important things... for me to worry about. There should be a lot more important things for all of us to concern ourselves with instead of what words a talk radio host chooses to use. If Imus had said "let's round up all the (your choice of minority here)s and (your choice of harsh fate here)" then that might be something to take note of. But on the scale measuring calamities awaiting modern civilization, Don Imus doesn't rate anywhere.

I've started to wonder in the past few years, and this thing proves it: are we as Americans no longer capable of facing boldly the things that do truly matter? I have to wonder about that, because the only things that we seem to be zealous about anymore are "non-news" stories like what Imus said, or Anna-Nicole Smith or whenever Mel Gibson and Michael Richards go on a mad rant about Jews or black Americans. Years before that it was O.J. and some of the tabloid pablum about the JonBenet Ramsey case. Those things are banal at best, inappropriate at worst... but in no way worth so much waste of resources to harp on incessantly.

We are losing our rights, are over-taxed, are losing our manufacturing infrastructure, have a thousand more things that we should be focused on... and instead we willingly buy into the farce that Don Imus saying "nappy-headed hos" on live radio is a threat to all that we know and love. That's what Al Sharpton would have you believe anyway... and who the hell actually takes that guy seriously? Shouldn't the Tawana Brawley thing have wrecked his reputation for good?

If this is what we now fixate ourselves on instead of the things that will determine whether we have a country worth passing down to our children, well... it makes me wonder if America really is as good as we want to believe it is anymore. If it's still worth defending, even. Why should somebody enlist in the armed forces to uphold and defend a Constitution that is no longer adhered to by a people more interested in what Don Imus has to say on the radio? Would you be willing to die for such a people?

I sure wouldn't.

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Delayed reaction to last night's LOST

I watched last night's Lost episode "One of Us" when it broadcast and again off the DVR. This show has been on an incredible hot streak for the past several weeks and last night's may have been the best so far from it. Lots of "mythology" questions were answered (I guess we finally now know how it is that the Others know so much about the passengers of Flight 815) but there's still plenty of others left and in true Lost form, plenty more were opened up. Once again, I'm most wondering about who "Jacob" is supposed to be. Obviously someone with a lot of authority. When will we finally get to see him? Hopefully by the end of this season.

Is it just me, or is Sawyer really becoming a nice guy after all? What Hurley did to him last week seems to have affected him for the better.

Something really, really bad must be going down next time, 'cuz for the preview of next week's show they used "Requiem for a Dream" for the background music. Anytime THAT instrumental piece gets used as a promo thing, brace yourself for bigtime wham.

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goTriad has a story about me and SCHRODINGER'S BEDROOM!

I had no idea this was in today's edition of goTriad (which will be available throughout the area for all this coming week) until Kate from the Murphy in the Morning Show on 107.5 FM called a few minutes ago to ask if I would be up for an interview tomorrow morning, so I'll be on the air at 7:20 or so tomorrow morning talking about Schrodinger's Bedroom.

Here's the link to the story on goTriad.com. Sue Edelberg did a really great job with this write-up. And my friend Johnny Yow will no doubt enjoy how many times he's mentioned in this story :-P

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20 years ago tonight came the ESCAPE FROM SOBIBOR

For one person to escape from a Nazi concentration camp was daring.

For three to escape was incredible.

For three hundred to escape was impossible.

Nothing is impossible.

So read the tagline of the full-page ad in the April 12th, 1987 issue of Parade that promoted that night's broadcast on CBS of Escape from Sobibor, starring Alan Arkin and Rutger Hauer.

Twenty years ago tonight came the premiere of what is perhaps the greatest movie about the Holocaust ever made. Escape from Sobibor is about the only thing of its kind that ever occurred during World War II: a mass escape by Jewish prisoners from a Nazi concentration camp. Sobibor was one of the primary extermination facilities in eastern Poland, with estimates ranging from as low as 250,000 to as high (according to one Sobibor survivor) as one million who were gassed to death there. On October 14 in 1943 several of the Jewish inmates, who had been making clandestine plans for months, secretly murdered most of the camp's S.S. officers without raising any alarm. What happened after that during the evening roll call could best be summed up by what Leon Feldhendler (Arkin's character) screamed to his fellow captives: "God is with you! Now let nothing stop you!" Over three hundred Jewish prisoners stormed the gates, killing many of the German and Ukrainian guards in the process, and escaped into the forests surrounding Sobibor.

It's a very good movie. Made all the more enthralling if you know, based on what the actual survivors who are depicted in this movie have said, that practically everything you see in this movie actually took place. Arkin's Feldhendler is the de-facto leader of the Jewish inmates, trying to encourage his people to keep their spirits up in spite of their surroundings. Several Jews make escape attempts early in the movie. After one such attempt, the Nazi commandant makes a declaration: for every Jew who escapes Sobibor, more will be killed in his place. Thus, if Feldhendler and his associates want to plan an escape, it must be one for every Jew in Sobibor. Everyone has to be given a chance. They are about to abandon any hope of escape, because to pull that off is, without question, impossible. After all, these are but simple people - with no training or experience - that would be setting themselves up against the most elite of the Nazi ranks. If they are to do this, then they are going to need someone with a brilliant military mind to make it happen.

Then one day, as if an answer to their prayers, a contingent of captured Soviet soldiers - all Jews - is brought to the camp. Their leader is Alexander "Sasha" Pechersky (played by Rutger Hauer), a man who wrote music before the war. Feldhendler tells Pechersky of the challenge facing them.

From that point on, Escape from Sobibor is not only an inspiring story about hope and defiance, but a classic tale about leadership in the most trying of circumstances. It is sheer pleasure to watch Pechersky delegate tasks to his fellow inmates ("Can you make knives?" "How many?" "As many as you can make.") in preparation for their day of liberation. When it's found out that the camp commander will be gone for several days, Feldhendler and Perchersky realize that if they are to act, then the time is now.

This is a brutal movie. Definitely a lot more so than most anything else made for TV at that time. Watching these Jews systematically butcher their Nazi captors one by one in various locations throughout the camp is to this day one of the most endearing things I've ever seen produced for television. There's plenty of investment into the story and when the point of no return comes, there's payoff in spades. Indeed, the escape scene may be one of the most thrilling ever put to film. Rutger Hauer went on to win a Golden Globe for Supporting Actor (Television) for his portrayal of Pechersky.

There are two versions of Escape from Sobibor: one is the "standard" edition but there is also one that adds substantially several more minutes to the story. I've seen both, and prefer the longer one more. But to date you can only find the shorter version on DVD. I'm hoping that someday, whoever owns the rights to it will release the longer cut on DVD. Of all the movies about the Holocaust that I know of, this is the one that I would recommend as must-see viewing in a college classroom... and many high school ones for that matter.

You can still find the "standard" edition on Amazon.com and a few other places though. And you can even watch the full movie online in a few places on the Web. Click here to watch Escape from Sobibor on CinemaNow. You must be using Internet Explorer for it to work, and hit "Yes" then "Play" when prompted. It doesn't cost anything to watch it by the way.

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Kurt Vonnegut is now unstuck in time

This is not something that I wanted to read upon first waking up...

Kurt Vonnegut has passed away at the age of 84.

Sadly, to date I've read only one of his novels. That being Slaughterhouse Five, about Billy Pilgrim: a man who becomes "unstuck in time" and can go to any moment of his life whenever he wants. In high school I also read his short story "Harrison Bergeron": I thought it was one of the most brilliant things that I'd ever read. Looking back on it now, I think Vonnegut was sadly pretty prescient with "Harrison Bergeron". It's the perfect short story about equality enforced by law and deviation from society being a punishable offense. Someday, I'm going to read Breakfast of Champions and the rest of his classics.

Vonnegut had what might have been the all-time greatest cameo appearance in a movie. It came in 1986's Back to School starring Rodney Dangerfield. I won't spoil it for you if you haven't seen it, but seeing him pop up in the context of that scene was, and still is, quite a hilarious shock.

Even if he had never been a literary giant, he would have had a live worthy of serious consideration. Among other things he was a soldier during the Battle of the Bulge. And he was an eyewitness to the firebombing of Dresden: something that I think no doubt still haunted him years later when he wrote Slaughterhouse Five.

Well, I don't know what else to say in a post like this. He was a great writer and an interesting fellow in his own right.

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When did Left Behind jump the shark?

My friend Chad had a great idea as a follow-up to my review last week of Kingdom Come, the final Left Behind book:

When did Left Behind "jump the shark"?

Inspired by the Jump the Shark website, I'm going to invite everyone to post their comments about when did the Left Behind series, which started out so awesome, start to rapidly deteriorate.

Here's the thing that came to my mind as I thought about the books and perused back through them...

When Did Left Behind Jump The Shark?

- Never Jumped

- First Chapter of First Book

- The Movie

- Chloe wants to murder her baby

- Guns, guns, guns

- Jesus shows up looking like a professional wrestler

- The "Tribulation Force"

- Carpathia kills the pig and bathes in its blood

- Birth (Kenny Bruce)

- They Did It (Carpathia and Hattie)

- The "Loyalty Enforcement Facilitator"

- Chang gets the Mark of the Beast against his will

- Too much "copy and pasting" straight from the Bible

- Tsion's life is saved because he has to go "do number-one"

- Viv Ivins

- "World War III"

- The hokey "radiation/electromagnetism" theory about the Rapture

- Chaim's whining

- Hattie's whining

- Too many "6"s

- Leon Fortunato

- The "frogs"

- A website without any traceable IP address gets over a billion hits a day

- Too many flat pronouns (Tsion Ben-Judah, Annie Christopher, "The Place", "The Truth" etc.)

- The Remnant... 'nuff said

- Pontifex Maximus Peter Matthews and his ridiculous costume

- The Prequels

- Buck and Chloe's "cookie" thing

- Too much discussing the geography of Chicago and Colorado Springs

- The Video Game

There's probably more: after all, this was sixteen books, not counting the kids series and the two "political" and "military" series (meaning that Left Behind has something like fifty books total). I'm sure there's some other good ones there somewhere. Feel free to discuss and add to the list!

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Happy (belated) Easter

This is what I got from Dad for Easter...
Now that Easter is over, Jenna Olwin can resume posting about Harry Potter again, which she gave up for Lent (though she seemingly fell off the wagon with this post about the new book's cover, since she did it on a Sunday it doesn't count).

Did you know that although Easter is very much a Christian holiday, that the word "Easter" is taken from an old pagan goddess of dawn who was also named "Easter"?

I've never seen much use to the holiday, personally. I mean, the resurrection of Jesus is something that Christians are supposed to draw hope from every day of the year... so why focus that hope on just one?

Okay, 'nuff thoughts about Easter for this year. I mostly just did this post to show off the cool Spider-Man candy egg that Dad found and got for me :-)

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Johnny Hart has passed away

Johnny Hart, the cartoon genius behind the B.C. and The Wizard of Id strips, has died at the age of 76.

Not much more needs to be said. The man was a giant in his art, and a giant for his faith. Even in the years when I wasn't a Christian, I was amazed at the passion Hart had in sharing his belief in God through his strips, especially B.C..

Here's one of the news stories about Hart passing. One think I can't help but think about in this: Hart devoted every Easter's B.C. strip to remembering the resurrection of Christ. And he died right at Easter... which for a person like Hart, is probably the most wonderful time to leave this world, if it can be said that there is one.

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Finally saw 300

Dad and I went to see 300 at the Carousel Grande in Greensboro this afternoon. I've been wanting to catch this ever since it came out a few weeks ago. It's adapted from Frank Miller's graphic novel 300, which is about the Battle of Thermopylae that took place in 480 B.C. between the Spartans and the invading Persians. Gerard Butler plays King Leonidas of the Spartans and that's Rodrigo Santoro - who has been playing Paulo on Lost and I had no idea that it was him in this role - as Xerxes.

300 is brutal! It may be the most vicious movie that I've ever seen. It's definitely the most violent historical-based film that I've watched... and I've seen plenty. The thing that keeps standing out in my mind is Xerxes' army: if all you know about the Greco-Persian Wars is from watching 300, then you would believe that the Persians were the biggest collection of freaks in the history of anything. I'm not kidding: if the Orcs in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings made you sick to your stomach, you will have weeks of nightmares after seeing the... things... that Xerxes sends out against the Spartans. I mean... holy crow this one guy has knives for both of his forearms!

As for Xerxes himself: he may be one of the most evil and despicable and plain-out ugly villains in movie history. I'm gonna have a very hard time forgetting this guy.

Some people are claiming that there's some kind of subtle commentary about current politics in 300. I really didn't see that, or even know how that's possible: 300 the graphic novel came out in 1998, almost ten years ago now. And 300 the film, from what I hear, is literally a scene-for-scene adaptation of the book and it's dialogue. I think there are a lot of timeless themes in this movie though, for all the violence throughout it.

Anyway, I thought 300 was really good. Better than I was expecting, even. And Dad said that he liked it. I'll definitely be getting this one when it comes out on DVD.

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We've had snow this morning

It actually started last night about 8 o'clock, with a few flakes falling. There was a light cover of the white stuff on our vehicles and in a lot of places on the ground when we woke up this morning. The past few days have been unseasonably cold for early April.

We didn't have any really hard snowstorms this winter. Maybe we'll make up for it next year. In the meantime, the snow this morning has been a pretty thing to behold.

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iPolitics: Michigan kids may get free MP3 players

State reps in Michigan want to give each child in that state a free iPod, courtesy of the taxpayers of that state.

That has to be one of the worst and most stupid proposed abuses of government power that I've ever heard of. The Detroit News expresses blunt outrage in an editorial about the proposal, that says it better than I can here.

You know, if this goes through, these Michigan politicians are going to be encouraging crime. Think about this for a minute: free iPods for people who might ordinarily not be able to afford an iPod. Well, is the government of Michigan going to be getting iTunes for all of those people to go along with their new iPods? Probably not. These kids will have an MP3 player but no MP3s. And the music for those iPods has to come from somewhere...

So if this goes through, the state of Michigan will in effect be encouraging illegal music downloading among its people. It would be like handing out free bongs but not supplying the marijuana: of course people would be looking for weed to use it with!

I'll bet the RIAA is already salivating at the legal prospects that would be coming with this, if this proposal passes (which hopefully it won't).

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Review of KINGDOM COME (the final Left Behind novel)

I can't begin to describe how much I loathe this book.

Let me state something before I go too far: I believe, quite earnestly, that the Left Behind series began with nothing but the best and noblest of intentions. I will always believe that.

But I also stand by something that I wrote a few weeks ago: "Left Behind has become a bloated whore."

Let's face it: when the final chapter of a sixteen-novel series is a less enthralling read than Hannibal Rising, something has gone very, very wrong.

(Yes, I'm one of the five people who'll admit to reading Hannibal Rising. My choice of literature lately could be described as "off-kilter" and that would be a compliment.)

I bought Kingdom Come - the final book of the runaway best-selling Left Behind series - Tuesday night (the day it was published) at the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Reidsville. There was a time when I counted down the hours to the release of a new Left Behind book. Those days are now a happy but fleeting memory. So embarrassed was I to be seen with the book the other night that after I picked up a copy, I grabbed the latest issue of Astronomy magazine to hide the front cover and the fact that I had it in my hands. Yes, once upon a time I would buy a Left Behind book with pride. By Tuesday night, the final time purchasing one of these books, it felt more like buying cheap porno from the friendly neighborhood Piggly Wiggly and trying to hide your face at the cash register.

Which is something that's very regrettable. I don't necessarily agree with some things they hold to, but I believe Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins are two good people. Few will argue that Jenkins is not a standout writer and just as few will not acknowledge that LaHaye knows his Christian theology. I got to meet both of them several years ago and however brief it was, I thought they were two nice fellas who were absolutely sincere about what it was they were trying to do with this series. That was when Book 8 in the series, The Mark, had come out. And what a rollickin' good read it was! But that was eight books ago...

Years later, and LaHaye and Jenkins are tired of this. It's painfully obvious. The same way that Patrick Stewart was visibly tired of playing Picard by the time Star Trek: Nemesis came out. Part of me wonders if LaHaye and Jenkins ever intended for Left Behind to get stretched this far and spread so thin. Did the suits at Tyndale House keep begging them to keep doing this against all sound judgment? Good lord, there have been sixteen full-length novels to tell this story, where Harry Potter only needs seven. Eight books would have been more than enough: one for each year of the Tribulation and a final one covering the millennium following.

I just had a scary thought: Left Behind now dwarfs L. Ron Hubbard's "Mission Earth" ten-volume series. Consider that for a moment: however nutty he was, L. Ron Hubbard... the founder of Scientology mind you... at least knew when to stop.

I can't help but think that Left Behind is the Christian counter-culture version of the infamous "Clone Saga" from the Spider-Man comics: a story that started out simple but as it started to earn more money, it spun out of the control of the writers. Left Behind was supposed to be a ministry thing. But when it became popular it became an entirely different animal altogether. Left Behind ended up a whole franchise, complete with comic books and video games and a movie adaptation that was to Kirk Cameron what Gigli was to Ben Affleck.

And now, here at the end, after the milking is finally done, Left Behind is a more depleted cow than Star Trek ever was (I'm going to stop right there before I go too far and start talking about Rick Berman and Brannon Braga... but that's what keeps coming to mind when I think of what ultimately happened with LaHaye and Jenkins and their Left Behind books).

Who's to blame for this mess? It started out so well, with such great promise. By the time book 12 came out, Left Behind was a series crying for vengeance. Somebody should have long ago been held accountable for what became of it.

But here we have Kingdom Come: the last novel of the entire thing. Is it possible that in spite of how fouled-up this thing has become, that Left Behind could yet be redeemed at the very end?

Sadly, no.

Kingdom Come starts off with a quick recap of the end from Glorious Appearing. After a brief look at the days and weeks immediately following the Second Coming, the story jumps to a point ninety-three years later... and stays there for all but a little more than the final chapter. You'd think that with an entire millennium to play with that we would see some grand sweeping epic unfold across the centuries. Instead we get Sunday School presentations and a story about loyalty and betrayal that has all the plot intrigue of the movie Office Space. I'd never been so bored at reading a Left Behind book as I did trudging through the 300 or so pages between the extreme ends of the thousand years.

Anyway, it's now almost a century into the millennial kingdom, and the world's population is split into two groups: the "naturals" and the "glorifieds". The glorifieds are the ones who got raptured or died and went to Heaven for all those years, then came back to Earth when Jesus returned. They don't age and they don't marry or otherwise have romantic emotions, so they don't have children. The naturals are the ones who either survived the Tribulation at the end of Glorious Appearing or are the children of those survivors, who can still marry and reproduce. "Arrested development" takes on a whole new meaning at this point in history, where anyone under the age of one hundred is not only considered to be still a juvenile, but acts like one too. So there are people in their eighties and nineties that are getting drunk, smoking weed and all other kinds of lewd behavior. The catch is that if they don't wise up and believe in Jesus (who is physically ruling the Earth at this point) they die right on their one hundredth birthday. Everyone else is immune to death (although by 800 years into the millennium the original naturals ain't in the best of health). The only other people who are dying prematurely are the ones who are seriously doing blasphemous things, like when a pervert natural spontaneously combusts while trying to rape a glorified.

(How this book deals with sex was one of the more ridiculous things that I've ever read. If, say on a scale of 1 to 10 for sexuality in literature that some of the stuff in Frank Herbert's last two Dune novels was a 10, then "glorified" Buck's wonderment at being delighted that he'll never have sex with his wife again is a negative-12. How in the world did this get written with a straight face, much less published?)

The main conflict in the book comes from The Other Light movement: those who willingly refuse to submit to Christ's rule, even though they know they'll die at one hundred years old. Compared to the machinations of Nicolae Carpathia throughout the previous books, The Other Light seems like a tacked-on afterthought: not much depth to these guys at all. And the biggest real damage they do in this story is forging an e-mail. Oh, for the good old days of dramatic horror when believers were getting dragged to the guillotine...

How can anyone take this book seriously, either as a gripping story or as a Christian ministry tool? This late in the game, nobody new is being witnessed to in Kingdom Come. If you're here reading this you were already either a rabid fan of the series or (like me) you felt some horrible obligation to finish it, in hopes that all that time and money invested in the prior novels is going to somehow pay off. LaHaye and Jenkins had some real "running room" to do something new and refreshing here at the end. Instead we get more of the "same old same old".

The spiritual exposition is rampant. But it adds nothing to what you've already read if you've gone through any one of the previous novels. Like I said, the only reason you would probably be reading Kingdom Come is if you'd already read the other books. There is nothing new that you'll find to think about in this book, in spite of how thick Kingdom Come is padded with pre-trib theology. At least Francisco's "money speech" in Atlas Shrugged challenged your brain to ponder deeply, even though in real life Francisco would have still been talking long after everyone had left and the guys had come to mop the floor for the night. Think of that kind of narrative, but much more monotonous. That these unwieldy treatises of pre-trib philosophy keep interrupting the few times when the action starts to really get going doesn't help matters much.

Oh yeah: how much actual "writing" was done on this book? Because there are practically entire chapters that plagiarize verbatim the Holy Bible. It was like somebody just did a wholesale "cut and paste" from Bible software and into the text of the story. I wish it could be that easy for me to write a bestselling book!

Kingdom Come is vapid. It is banal. It is cheap. Too much of the story seems like a cop-out...

I am seriously stunned at how much I have come to hate this book.

And I tried... honestly, I tried my darndest... these past few days to find something good to say about it. But it's just not coming, folks. Kingdom Come ranks as one of the WORST things that I ever spent time and money on.

This book, and what Left Behind as a whole became in the end, should be a dire warning for any of us who profess belief in Christ and try to use our creative talents to serve God. If God gave us these things, then we should use them to the utmost of our ability and strength. We should have nothing less than the most absolute greatest passion, whether its writing or filmmaking or athletics or painting or whatever else that we have an aptitude for, in making these gifts reflect well on the One who bestowed them upon us to begin with.

Because Kingdom Come seems even less than a half-hearted attempt. It would have been better to have not written or published this to begin with. But it was. Which makes me wonder what was the biggest motivation in doing Left Behind at all: God, or money?

I don't know anymore. All I do know is that for years the Left Behind novels have taken up considerable space on my bookshelves, and I can't in good conscience leave them there without being embarrassed for their presence. Filling it with Michael Stackpole's "Battletech" novels seems like a much wiser use of the space at this point. What's going to happen to my Left Behind collection? Probably taken down and put in a plastic storage tote, out of sight and out of mind.

And maybe someday my children will find it and ask "Daddy what's this?" and I'll tell them the sad sordid account of how a story that started out so terrific with Left Behind became so wasted by the time Kingdom Come happened. Then the books will wind up in the basement where the second-rate paper will become nourishment for the rats and cockroaches and slowly but surely fading away.

Let it fade.

(I still think that Mark Waid and Alex Ross would do a lot better job at telling this story. If you want a really good book to read, check out their Kingdom Come from DC Comics!)

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Good Friday 2007

Today is the observance of Good Friday in most Christian traditions.

Ever since first hearing about this in 1992, I've been fascinated with this ritual that is done every year by some Christians in the Philippines:

Wilson Bondoc, 19, a bicycle cab driver, is nailed to a wooden cross during a Good Friday crucifixion re-enactment in Lourdes Northwest Village in Pampanga province, north of Manila, April 6, 2007. REUTERS/Romeo Ranoco (PHILIPPINES) Original link

Men are nailed to a cross during a re-enactment of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in the village of Cutud, about 80 km (50 miles) north of Manila, April 6, 2007. More than a dozen Filipinos were nailed to crosses and scores more whipped their backs into a bloody pulp on Friday in a gory ritual to mark the death of Jesus Christ. REUTERS/Darren Whiteside (PHILIPPINES) Original link

Men flagellate themselves before a re-enactment of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in the village of Cutud, about 80 km (50 miles) north of Manila, April 6, 2007. More than a dozen Filipinos were nailed to crosses and scores more whipped their backs into a bloody pulp on Friday in a gory ritual to mark the death of Jesus Christ. (PHILIPPINES) Original link

In case you're wondering: those choosing to be crucified aren't left up on the crosses for very long. They're nailed down, hoisted up and left there for a few minutes before being taken back down. The nails are also specially treated to minimize trauma and infection. Some Christians in the Philippines have put themselves through this ritual every Good Friday for several years in a row. In recent years some women have also allowed themselves to be crucified.

As I said: fascinating.

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Confirmed: Bob Clark and son were killed by an illegal alien

Earlier this morning I wrote about film director Bob Clark and his son being killed by a drunken driver a few nights ago. I had some suspicions about what happened but didn't "air them" at the time. I said that I was waiting to hear some solid word before saying anything else.

Well, it hasn't appeared on any news websites yet but I am getting confirmation this hour that Hector Velazquez-Nava - the man who killed Bob Clark and his son Ariel - not only had three times the legal blood alcohol limit... but he was also an illegal alien.

A talented artist and his son are no longer with us, because our elected officials refuse to do a damned thing about our porous border with Mexico.

These are the same people that George W. Bush is fighting tooth and nail to grant amnesty for, by the way.

How many more Americans are going to have to die at the hands of people who aren't supposed to be here, before our politicians do something about it?

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