Pictures from Texas, Part 3

I'm gonna go ahead and knock the rest of this thing out of the ballpark, 'cuz the next few days are going to be crazy busy and I've put off doing this long enough. So here's the rest of the photos from Texas (here's Part 1 and here's Part 2).

One of the things that I'd wanted to do while I was in Texas was visit my brother-in-law Jonathan, who's a seminary student at Baylor University in Waco. On Friday, the day after I went to the Alamo, Deborah and I hopped in my rented Jeep and took off for Austin, where we'd catch I-35 north.

Here's Austin as we were entering town...

Here's Deborah. The last time we'd seen each other, it was at Star Wars Celebration III in Indianapolis two and a half years earlier.

This was taken while we were on Congressional Avenue, with the Texas State Capitol in front of us...

This is me, in front of the University of Texas Tower. This is the very building from which Charles Whitman shot and killed all those people in 1966. I heard that there are still places around the building down on the street that you can see where the bullets hit concrete walls and such. Macabre history aside, the Tower is one of the things that dominate the Austin landscape, and is often lit up for holidays and whenever University of Texas wins a ballgame.

After that, Deborah and I got onto I-35 and headed north. It was about two hours later when we hit the outskirts of Waco. A short while later, and we were at Jonathan's apartment! 'Twas a really great thing to hook up with my bro-in-law so far from home.

By the time we got there, we were starving. Jonathan said that he knew of a good place to eat, and it must have been 'cuz he's mentioned this a few times already: Rosati's Pizza. That's where he took us. Here's Jonathan after we got seated...

Rosati's serves up Chicago-style deep-dish pizza. That was the first time that I'd ever had any and it was delicious! Here's the soft drink cup that I got, which I took a pic of mostly so I could point out the phone number of the place...

After lunch, Jonathan took us to the Dr. Pepper Museum. Waco is the town where Dr. Pepper was first invented, and it's practically the official drink of the state of Texas...

Here's Deborah with a spooky animatronic talking Charles Alderton, the guy who invented Dr. Pepper...

We were at the Dr. Pepper Museum for a while and then Jonathan took us on a tour of Baylor, which is one of the biggest campuses that I've ever seen: the science building itself is bigger than the entire campus of Elon University south of Haggard Avenue! Here's Baylor as we were entering the place...

Here's a side-shot of the seminary building. Note the Bible verse that says "The night cometh". That's the seminary's ummm... official verse, or something, according to Jonathan...

A shot of inside the stained-glass windows inside the seminary's chapel...

This is Deborah and I at the sign outside the seminary. The building behind us is a parking deck, that Jonathan said the Baylor students refer to as the "Garage-Mahal". Something else about Baylor: every building on campus seems to have at least one steeple. Strange, that...

And here's me and Jonathan at the sign for the George W. Truett Theological Seminary...

After we went around Baylor, we headed back to Jonathan's place, said our goodbyes for now ('cuz it would just be a few more weeks before Jonathan and I saw each other again) and Deboran and I headed back to her house near Austin. On the return trip, we got to see a beautiful sunset, and Deborah was able to get some pics...

We made it back to her house, and then I was headed back toward downtown Austin, for this "meet and greet" for the Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 attendees at a local chili honky-tonk. That's where, after all of these years (I was one of Ain't It Cool News's first readers, even remember the day Harry posted those pictures from Star Wars Episode IV Special Edition which kinda launched the site) I got to finally meet Harry Knowles. Here's the pic of us together...

Then I went back to Deborah's place and wound up having to call FedEx to fuss at them for not having delivered a package on time (I'd sent it on Monday for 2-day delivery to Deborah's house, and it was now Friday night). The FedEx rep - who I'm fairly sure wasn't even talking to me from anywhere in the United States - told me that it would get there "tomorrow". When tomorrow morning came, it still hadn't got there... and the next FedEx person that I talked to on the phone said that particular station wasn't even open on weekends! "I don't care how you do it," I told her, "you had better get that package here today. I don't care if they are closed are not, FedEx failed to live up to its end of a contract. You'd better make up for it immediately." Well those weren't my exact words: they actual dialogue was, shall we say, far more colorful. But this comes into play before long in our story, that's why I wanted to mention it.

Saturday was the day of Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9. That morning before I left for the event in Austin (which I wouldn't return from until the following day, it being a 24-hour long film festival), I spotted this dear outside of Deborah's kitchen window...

Not long after that, I left for Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9. There aren't any pictures from that, because cameras, cellphones and similar electronic devices weren't allowed. Here's the report on Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 that I made a few days after I got back home, in case you're wondering what went on there (I'm still laughing at how they ran a documentary about a urethroplasty during breakfast).

Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 ended a little after noon on Sunday. I went back to where I'd parked the Jeep, at the Hilton Hotel a few blocks away, and then very tiredly headed back "home". On the main road to Deborah's house a storm front was roaring across the landscape, and I got to get a neat pic of that...

The front brought significantly lower temperates to that part of Texas: most of the time that I was there, it was around 70-72. The high the next day was 50.

When I got back, I found out that a FedEx person had come from the shipping facility not long after I'd left the previous day, driving his own car and very apologetic about how my package had been sitting at his office for three days without any attempt to deliver. I'll give FedEx credit for trying to make up for their bungling (in addition to their offering to refund my money). Now, what was so important about that package? I'd put some presents in it for Deborah and her family, out of gratitude for their providing me with a place to stay while I was there for the film festival. Some of this stuff that I was giving them weren't the kind of things that you want to bring on a commercial airliner. Namely, this very cool railroad spike knife (the entire knife, blade and handle, is forged from a single railroad spike) that my Dad made for me to give to Deborah's father...

I also gave Deborah some Star Wars figures from my personal collection that I knew she had been looking for, and gift cards for her and her sisters.

And that's pretty much it for the Texas trip. The next morning I finished packing, bid farewell to Deborah and her family (Lord willing, Lisa and I will be going to Austin in the spring and we'll get to see Deborah again) and then I headed to the airport, stopping at a shipping place on the way to get the HD-DVD player (the one that Harry gave everyone who attended Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9) and posters from the event sent home 'cuz there wasn't room to put them in my luggage. I turned in the Jeep, checked in my luggage, hopped on the plane, and started the journey home.

Very heartfelt thanks to Deborah Wilson, her dad, her sisters, and their dogs for hosting me while I was visiting Texas!

All in all, it was a terrific trip. And after everything else that's happened over this past year, the whole thing was a wonderful way to help cap off 2007. I hope and pray that maybe, just maybe, it'll be a sign that things might bode well for 2008 :-)

Read More

Pictures from Texas, Part 2

Here are more photos from my Texas adventure. When we left off at Part 1, I'd arrived at my friend Deborah's house in Texas. The next morning, before anyone else had woken up, I went out for a walk around her house.

Here's Deborah's backyard. As I told her when I got there, "You could throw a dead body back there and nobody would ever find it." Also fun to keep in mind that this is Travis County, which was the setting of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Just think: somewhere in those hills, Leatherface could yet be lurking with his trusty Stihl...

Some road I found, that goes... Lord knows where.

Here's a shot of Deborah's house from the backyard. That's Deborah's sister's dog Sophie who's bouncing across the grass...

Here's the scene from Deborah's front porch...

And some of her front yard (the pics can't do any justice to how vast this place really is)...

The first cactus that I've ever seen growing in the wild...

And here's a yucca plant...

And here's a... actually I forget what kind of plant that Deborah told me this is.

A close-up of Sophie as I was going back inside...

Around 1:30 that afternoon (Thursday), I left Deborah's house and soon was on Highway 281, tearing across the Texas landscape, headed south...

And two hours or so later, I was in San Antonio, en route to the Alamo...

Finally, after wanting to visit the place for over a quarter-century, here I was, at the Alamo!

Here's some more stuff around the Alamo: barracks, Spanish cannon, etc...

Being into knifemaking (along with Dad), the Alamo has a special place in my heart because this is where Jim Bowie died. Althoug these are not Bowie's personal knives (or maybe they are, who knows?), the Alamo has a number of Bowie knives on display...

I was at the Alamo for about an hour or so, and then left. On the way out I spotted Bowie Street, which I thought was a cool name for a road...

I got a sandwich at a Quizno's on the way back, and about an hour later or so I drove through the town of Blanco. I tried getting some pics of the Christmas lights that the town was decorated with...

I think that's probably enough photos for this installment. I'm going to try to get the rest up later this evening in Part 3, which'll cover the following day's trip to Waco and some other stuff.

Read More

The Passion of the Claus

A guy near Seattle has crucified Santa Claus and put him on display in his front yard. The whole thing is meant to protest the over-commercializing of Christmas.

Obviously, this has upset quite a few folks around there.

This whole "crucified Santa" thing has been around for at least a dozen years now. Supposedly, the manager of a department store in Tokyo put Santa on a cross for a store display around 1994, because he was told to do something for Christmas and he didn't know what the holiday was about or what people usually did for it. And then last year some dude in Canada did the "Santa nailed to a cross" shtick too.

I hate to say this, but I kinda see where these guys are coming from. I didn't start my Christmas shopping until this past week. In years past, I used to enjoy going out and watching all of the people doing their shopping. These days, it makes me sad to see how the pursuit of materialism has supplanted whatever good has been inherently part of Christmas. Hell, I'm just happy to be here, alive and marginally sane, and able to celebrate Christmas at all, after what has been an extremely hard and trying year. I don't need "things" to be happy for this holiday season. Just give me my wife to hug and my loved ones to cherish, and I'll be happy. I am happy, in that respect.

Am I alone in my belief, that Christmas sincerely has become a religious festival: one in celebration of consumption?

Let me suggest something else along those lines: that a lot of Christians have made Christmas into something it's not supposed to be, also. For the past few months I've read about a lot of Christians who are upset that it can't be called "Christmas" in schools, by stores like Wal-Mart and other places anymore. That instead "Merry Christmas" is being replaced by "Happy Holidays" too much.

As if that's supposed to even matter to us at all.

You see, once again some people are using Christ as something for power, instead of yielding to Him out of humility. In this case they're using Christ's birth as something to lord over others.

I don't give a flying rat's butt about whether or not it's called "Christmas" or not. It wouldn't even bother me if we didn't celebrate Christmas at all. The important thing is, God came to us at all. Shouldn't that be enough to thoroughly overwhelm us?

Read More

The Lost Colony, Cheesecake Factory, and "Perry Como's TRIUMPH OF THE WILL" aka THE POLAR EXPRESS in IMAX 3-D!

So the past 72 hours here have been... interesting. I'll be able to talk about it more in the next couple of days. Just wanna say for the record though, that I've been a busy dude toward the end of this past week. And I'm about to head out to create some more mischief.

But before I do, I wanna do a bit of a write-up about what happened yesterday, 'cuz it was full of some cool stuff that you've probably still got time to check out if you like.

Yesterday morning, my sister Anita arrived around 9:30. Lisa got in Anita's RAV4 and I followed in my new Camry and we headed out to Raleigh, to see The Polar Express in 3-D on the IMAX screen there (or as I call it, "The Big-Ass Screen").

This was something that Lisa had been wanting to see especially, so I got tickets for her (and then for Anita when it turned out she wanted to see it too). Me? I first saw it when it was released three years ago and since that time The Polar Express has become more... disturbing... in my mind. Everything is great and fun for most of the movie (and that this was Michael Jeter's last movie before he died makes it particularly poignant). But all the same: when they finally get to the North Pole, the movie becomes "Perry Como's Triumph of the Will": the Santa worship, the Stasi-ish way how it turns out Santa watches all the world's children, the Nazi-like field rally with the elves... Lisa and Anita keep telling me that I'm "over-analyzing things" but I can't help it: if you ever have seen Triumph of the Will then you'll probably see these things too. And really, isn't The Polar Express supposed to be a propaganda movie for Santa Claus?

Strangely enough, I had a blast watching The Polar Express in IMAX 3-D. The flaws in the movie as a story are still there (and I wrote about those in my initial review) but those are easily overshadowed by how much of a technical achievement The Polar Express is. And in 3-D, on a five-story movie screen... the most fun thing for me wasn't the movie itself, but how all those children who were there to watch it were blown away by the overwhelming spectacle of this movie.

So I gotta report: it was a great experience. And if you want to see it too, it's playing on a lot of IMAX screens right now but we saw it at the Wachovia IMAX Theatre at the Marbles Kid Museum (formerly named Exploris) in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. Right now it looks like it's playing on through at least January 10th, 2008.

After we got back to our cars, Anita went on and then Lisa and I drove a few blocks to the North Carolina Museum of History to check out something that I've been wanting to see since it started in October...

For more than 400 years, one of the greatest enigmas of American history has been that of the Roanoke Colony, more commonly known as "the Lost Colony". 116 English colonists had simply vanished when Governor John White returned to Roanoke Island with fresh supplies in 1590. The only thing left behind amid the ruins of their fort was a cryptic word "Croatoan" carved in a tree.

What happened to them? Were they killed off or did they move elsewhere or did they (as some believe) inter-marry with neighboring tribes of Native Americans... which raises the possibility that descendants of the Lost Colony are living among us today?

"Mysteries of the Lost Colony" is an exhibit of the British Museum currently on display at the North Carolina Museum of History. There's lots of good stuff about the Lost Colony itself, but the real centerpiece of the show is the large number of original watercolors by John White (whose daughter Eleanor would be the one to give birth to Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World). A talented artist by trade before he was appointed to be governor of the colony, White did many depictions of the natives and wildlife of present-day coastal North Carolina. A lot of them have been reproduced in history books over the years, and it was quite a thrill to be able to see the originals, made by White himself. Toward the end of the tour, there's an interactive video with one of the actresses of CBS's CSI shows that lets you vote on what you think was the fate of the colony. When we left, "Killed" had a slim lead over "Absorbed", which is what I've come to believe is what happened to them. Maybe in the next few years the Lost Colony DNA Project will be able to come up with some indication about whether the colonists did indeed become the ancestors of the modern-day Lumbee and other Native American tribes in the state. If you want to see "Mysteries of the Lost Colony", it's on display until January 13th, 2008.

After we left the museum, Lisa guided me to The Cheesecake Factory at Crabtree Valley Mall. I'd never heard of the place before and don't really care for cheesecake... but lo and behold it's also a fancy restaurant with a humongous menu to choose from. We ordered the buffalo wings for an appetizer and then the pepperoni pizza for the main dish. The wings were wonderfully spicy and the pizza looked and tasted like real Italian-style pizza. The place also had great atmosphere and decor. If you're ever in the area of Crabtree Valley Mall and if you like good food and great cheesecake (which Lisa says they do but like I said, I've never had a taste for the stuff), give The Cheesecake Factory a try.

And that was our day yesterday, other than a bit o' Christmas shopping that I was able to get in. Good movie, good history, good food: not too bad eh? :-)

Read More

Pictures from Texas, Part 1

Here they are finally: photos from the trip to Texas that I made earlier this month. Took awhile to get around to posting these 'cuz there were so many (over 380) across a six-day period, and I've been extremely busy since getting back. Obviously this isn't all of the pics, but they'll give you a gist of what went down there (except for during Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 itself because cameras weren't allowed in there). And because there are so many (and also 'cuz it's a bit late) I'm going to break these down into two parts. The second installment of pics, I'm gonna try to have up later on Saturday night. Anyhoo, here's the first batch of photos from my odyssey to Texas!

I flew out of Raleigh-Durham on the morning of December 5th, en route to Orlando and then the plane would go on to Houston. On the south-bound flight I got to see Charleston, South Carolina from the air...

And after leaving Orlando, it wasn't long before I got my first-ever look at the Gulf of Mexico...

Here's something I didn't expect to see: New Orleans. The pilot didn't announce it, but I immediately recognized the causeway across Lake Pontchartrain. Even from the air, I couldn't help but think that New Orleans looked... a bit messy. Is that still damage from Katrina? I'd never seen New Orleans before, so I don't know. But compared to other cities that I've seen from the air, New Orleans seemed dingy...

Here's an un-resized (read as: very very big) image of New Orleans, if you want to see some more detail...

And here's a pic I took of what I call "Voodoo Country"...

Around the time that New Orleans came into view, I saw something else that I'd never seen before in my life: offshore oil rigs. And there were a lot more than I ever thought were out there. Not only that but they were also fairly close to shore and spaced relatively close by to each other: I saw one cluster of them that I'm pretty sure I could swim from one to the other, they were in such a small area. Here's one of the better pics that I was able to get...

As we were approaching Houston, I spotted this fighter jet off the starboard side of the plane. It was flying at a speed and trajectory that put it almost synchronous with our airliner, so I was able to snap this cool pic...

Here's the Johnson Space Center as we were approaching the airport...

And here's downtown Houston, along with the Astrodome...

As we were landing in Houston, the dude sitting behind me told me "Welcome to Texas!" His name was Terry, and I thought that was worth mentioning here too 'cuz that was the first time ever that someone welcomed me to Texas...

I got to Houston, waited at the airport for an hour and a half and then took off for Austin (I flew Southwest Airlines by the way, an outfit that really impressed me with a lot of things, including their innovative way of how they board the planes). When I got to Austin and retrieved my luggage, I went to rent a vehicle. The nice girl at the desk recognized me from my appearance on The Soup on E! several weeks ago. The car rental folks said they didn't have too much at the moment. "Give me the most Texas-ish thing you got," I told them. "The Jeep," one girl said: "You want the big white Jeep." Here's what I wound up tearing across the Texas landscape in for my trip: a 2008 Jeep...

I took off and got to Deborah's house about a half-hour later. It wasn't long afterward that Deborah's dad got home from work, and we went to a real honest-to-goodness Tex-Mex restaurant for dinner (a place that had the spiciest salsa that I've ever had in a restaurant). Then we went back home and I turned in for the night.

And that's a great stopping-point for this edition of "Pictures from Texas". Will have the next bunch up real soon :-)

Read More