BBC releases first look at Matt Smith in full DOCTOR WHO garb

Production has now begun on next year's season of Doctor Who (following the hiatus it took during 2009) and the BBC has published the first photo of Matt Smith in full costume. Smith will be the next actor to take on the iconic role of the Doctor (taking over from David Tennant).

So what does the Eleventh Doctor look like? Here he is (along with new companion Amy Pond, played by Karen Gillan)...

Heck, that's darn near how I dress on a regular basis! I mean, nice shirt along with rugged pants and sturdy boots... except I don't usually wear a bow tie :-P

Next season's Doctor Who will be the first with new showrunner Steven Moffat at the helm. If that name doesn't ring a bell, I probably only have to mention that he wrote the previous episodes "The Girl in the Fireplace" and the "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead" two-parter and that should be enough to make you swoon with eager anticipation.

Can't wait to see the Doctor's newest adventures in time and space when they begin again next spring!

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"That's one small step for a man..."

"...one giant leap for mankind."

(And before anybody gives me grief over it, in the past few years audio analysis has determined that Armstrong did indeed say "step for a man" :-)

Forty years ago today, on July 20th, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Eugene "Buzz" Aldrin, with the assistance of a few hundred thousand of their good friends back on Earth, fulfilled an ages-old dream when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. Armstrong was the first man to stretch his legs on the lunar surface, while Aldrin has the distinction of being the first person to "drain the main vein" on another world.

I didn't know until this past year that before they began their "extra-vehicular activity" (in layman's terms: they went outside the spaceship), that Aldrin also took communion on the Moon. At the time he was an elder of Webster Presbyterian Church and asked that a communion kit be prepared for his mission. The chalice he used on the lunar surface is now kept by the church.

Now, wanna see something really cool? Just in time for the fortieth anniversary, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken this image of the Apollo 11 landing site! You can clearly see the Eagle lunar module's descent stage, just as Armstrong and Aldrin left it forty years ago. The LRO has found four more Apollo landing sites thus far. Future photos will be even more detailed.

Forty years ago today came the greatest technological triumph of human history. It did not come cheap, and it was not without sacrifice. And it seems that somewhere along the way, we've lost that same spirit which once upon a time, did put a man on the moon.

But I like to believe that it's there still... and can be found again.

Here's a toast to the people of Apollo 11. May what they accomplished ever serve to inspire us all.

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Cultist Johnny Robertson reacts to this blog (Plus: Facebook is laughing!)

It started several months ago, when I began cryptically referring to what I called "Evil Incarnate(tm)" on my Facebook updates. It wasn't long before many friends started asking "Hey Chris, what are you talking about?!" (or words to that effect).

So that's how it came to be that quite a few people on Facebook are now watching - and laughing at - local cult leader Johnny Robertson. I'd dare say that quite a considerable amount of WGSR's bandwidth is now being used by people from Florida to New Hampshire to Oregon who are tuning in via streaming video just to giggle at this loon and his cronies. And now we've started doing a live "running commentary" over Facebook where we poke holes and point out the lies in Robertson's mad rantings, along with generally making fun of him and his followers.

So one friend further west pointed out something a few minutes ago: that Robertson is crowing this evening about how supposedly he got some ministry in this area to change their website... but Robertson "ain't said nothin'" about how this very blog has caused him to shut up about something!

And... it's true.

Since The Knight Shift first revealed a number of weeks ago that the "Church of Christ" cult has been run out of the town of Reidsville, Robertson has not once on his broadcasts mentioned any "Reidsville meeting"! And neither has Robertson spoken any further about any meeting of the group taking place in Ruffin... which Robertson claimed on the July 5th broadcast had been going on for "more than a year". All that the cult currently has going on is the "Martinsville Church of Christ" and the "Eden Church of Christ".

Some are beginning to wonder if it has that much left, but I'm gonna withhold comment on that for now.

(Actually, I'm on top of a bunch of stuff that I'm withholding for the time being...)

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ROCK BAND will allow indie artists to add own songs (and make $$$ from it!)

Are you an independent musician looking to promote your work? Might wanna check this out: you'll soon be able to add your own original music to the popular music game Rock Band! Indie artists and bands will use Microsoft's XNA Creator's Club to mesh the song's MIDI file to the format used by the game. The work will then be submitted to other Creator's Club programmers for critique and then must meet final approval by Harmonix and MTV Games. After they go live the songs will sell between 50 cents and 3 dollars, with the artists getting 30% of the cut! Not a bad business model at all, and there's the potential for some great publicity for indie musicians.

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Today's FOXTROT takes on Comic-Con

One of these days, Lord willing, I will go to Comic-Con. Just to say that I attended at least once. In the meantime, today's Foxtrot strip suggests what might be a way to simulate the experience...

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Walter Cronkite has passed away

As I got older I came to see how in some ways, he obviously did let the sense of power get the better of him. I'm not going to not acknowledge that.

But I'm choosing not to dwell on that tonight. None of us are perfect. And there were fewer people that more defined television news coverage or came to be an icon of modern America than did Walter Cronkite.

"The most trusted man in America" passed away at age 92 this evening. Ironically on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, which even more solidified his reputation as both a calm newsman and a giddy spectator alongside history in the making... something that happened many times over his long career.

Thoughts and prayers going out to his family.

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Is God trying to tell me something?

"God doesn't give you the people you want, He gives you the people you NEED. To help you, to hurt you, to leave you, to love you and to make you into the person you were meant to be."

Twice in as many days, I have heard a friend or relative say those exact words.

Curious, that...

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Fridays always need a good (bad?) joke

What did Helen Keller say when she found the cheese grater?

"That was the most violent book I've ever read!"

(Never heard that one before. Thanks to Bob Ceres for telling it!)

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Vice-President Biden sez: We have to KEEP SPENDING to keep from going bankrupt

Read about it here.

I would say that this country is in the hands of madmen... but then I cannot but think that we have been that way for quite some time.

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Jessica Wanstall and the one that DIDN'T get away!

The big fish in the photo is a nearly 9-foot long catfish weighing 193 pounds.

And that grinning lil' girl holding it is Jessica Wanstall, 11 years old, 4-feet 10-inches tall and weighing 83 pounds. She's the young lady who caught the fish on the River Ebro in Spain.

Bet ya it won't be no ordinary fish tale Jessica tells her mates when she comes back from holiday...

Click here to reel-in the story of Jessica and her record catch!

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Canadian toddler in toy truck survives 13 kilometer river ride

Demetrius Jones, just turned all of three years old, was on a camping trip with his family in the British Columbian wilderness when he went out for a lil' spin on his battery-powered miniature Chevrolet Silverado.

And then young master Demetrius chose to attempt to turn his Chevy into an amphibious vehicle.

Demetrius drove his toy truck into the nearby river and was swept away by the current. His frantic family and Royal Canadian Mounted Police launched an intensive search for the tyke, expecting the worse...

...but three hours later Demetrius Jones was found alive and laughing and 13 kilometers (a little over 8 miles) away by a group of fishermen. Demetrius had clung to the truck - what he called his "boat" - for the entire crazy ride. After being treated for mild hypothermia at the hospital, he was soon released.

Incidentally the toy truck was pulled from the river and still works fine.

(Bet I'm not the only one who thinks Chevy should work out a huge endorsement deal with Demetrius and his family: "Like a rock!" :-)

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The Rondina Family: Brother and sister Christian filmmakers racking up awards with LEGO animation!

They work with a medium found at any typical Toys R Us... but their vision is as grand as Cecil B. DeMille's.

Anthony and Jessica Rondina are a talented brother/sister pair out of Huntersville, North Carolina that got into animation with a high school project. A few more films under their belt and now their feature Jericho: The Promise Fulfilled is sweeping up film festival prizes and earning the duo widespread acclaim! Christian-Movie.com interviews the Rondinas about their Gideon Production Group, how they animate with LEGO minifigures, their future projects and how they dedicate it all to God. And if you wanna see more of the Rondina pair's awesome work, mash down here for their official website!

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When Star Wars meets classic art...

...it's quite often an entrancing spectacle. And sometimes even a pretty disgusting one: witness this rendition of Darth Sidious (left) as if it has been done by the great master Beougereau.

Worth1000.com is currently hosting Round 3 of their Star Wars/Classic Art mashup series, and it will have you both in stunned awe and sidesplitting laughter! And yet, Renaissance art ever seems to be the perfect motif for that saga of a galaxy far, far away.

And if you want to see some earlier Star Wars/classic renderings, here's Worth1000.com's first batch and here's the results of their second call for the same theme. And Something Awful has a similar thing going on too.

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Man charged $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 for pack of cigarettes

Josh Muszynski of Manchester, New Hampshire went to the local convenience store and bought a pack of Camel cigarettes. He put the purchase on his debit card. And then when he got home found out that he had been charged more than TWENTY THREE QUADRILLION DOLLARS for his smokes.

Turns out to have been a programming error on the part of Visa, and apparently it's hit a number of its cardholders. Visa and his bank quickly resolved the issue for Muszynski, and he was no longer stuck with a tab that was more than 2007 times the current national debt.

But hey, as bad as inflation is getting, it's just a matter of time before all our purchases are this astronomical! :-P

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I don't post "Beautiful" nearly enough on this blog...

...so here is a photo of my second cousin Lauryn, who is celebrating her 22nd birthday:

And here is a photo of Lauryn and her mother (and my cousin) Robin. They could be - and have been - mistaken for sisters!

And in case any of y'all are wondering: Yes, ALL the women in my family are this beautiful! :-) Not to mention very sweet and among the most Christian ladies I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.

Anyways... Happy Birthday Lauryn!

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Photos of those Belgians!

All two regular readers of this blog know that last week I hosted four friends from Belgium in my home. We had quite a number of interesting adventures while they were here... and things got so wild we even had to dial 911! So to memorialize the fun times I thought I'd post a few pics from the past few days.

This is Bennie. She and I have been friends since 1992, when we first met while she was tagging along with family that was visiting from out of state (she used to be an exchange student with them). We hit it off so well that the following summer I visited her in Belgium... and that was my first time ever outside of America! We've hooked up quite a few times over the years. Here she is in the kitchen, making a special Belgian dinner...

What was Bennie and her family cooking up? Well, first there were these stuffed peppers and tomatoes...

And then for dessert, there was this chocolate mousse (made with real Belgian chocolate!)...

I'd thought that I'd gotten a photo of Bennie's stepson Gaetan, but apparently not. He does show up quite often in the camcorder footage though (so there is evidence that he actually exists :-). This photo is of his sister Fleur. And as you can see like any typical fourteen-year old girl, Fleur enjoys using Facebook to keep in touch with her friends (that's what she's doing on one of my computers, and incidentally this is one of the VERY rare occasions that you will EVER see my video editing room... and yeah it's a spare bedroom too :-P). The only thing really different is that when Fleur is on Facebook, she's doing it in French! How kewl is that?!

And finally, here is a picture of Bennie and her husband Eric. Yes, THAT Eric! The same Eric who told us last Thursday around 3:30 in the afternoon that he was going for a walk... and didn't come back. At 7 p.m. I had to call 911 because we had no idea where he was, Eric speaks no English, he was in unknown territory and this was the first time he had ever been overseas (or even on a plane trip for that matter). Around 7:30 a Rockingham County Sheriff's Department car pulled into my driveway and a deputy that I've known for years told me "he's walking up the road!" James didn't speak French and Eric didn't speak English but James told him "Chris Knight?" and Eric smiled and nodded. Turned out Eric walked to the end of the road I'm on toward thick woods, kept walking and ended up going more than six miles, then turned down a road he recognized from earlier that day and walked back along U.S. 158, stopping to get a Coca-Cola from a nearby store. When Bennie and I found him he was sans shirt and grinning like nobody's business. All told that was around FIFTEEN MILES that Eric walked through Terra Incognita without getting shot for trespassing, sunk in quicksand or held hostage by drug dealers. Someday I'm going to bring Eric (and Bennie to translate for him) to talk to our Boy Scout troop, 'cuz this guy definitely set a new standard for hiking in Rockingham County!

Anyway, here he is along with Bennie, sitting on the front steps of Speedwell Presbyterian Church near Reidsville...

'Twas quite a good time, with an old friend and some new ones. Lord willing I'll get to reciprocate and get back to Belgium sooner than later. It really is a sweet lil' country, and as you can see it breeds some rather hardy folks (not to mention being the home of Belgian chocolate, the Smurfs and Tintin, and the saxaphone).

Bennie, Eric, Gaetan and Fleur, thanks for stopping by. Y'all come back now, y'hear?!? :-)

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Video of Michael Jackson's hair fire made public 25 years later

It's probably going to get yanked as soon as you try to view it, but rest assured: this will be showing up on YouTube for many years to come...

Well, there it is: Michael Jackson's hair catching fire during filming of a Pepsi commercial in 1984, in footage published for the first time by US Magazine. This is something that had grown to legendary proportions long before Jackson's death a few weeks ago. And at the time this was a huge story.

Seeing this at last, the only thought that really comes to mind is "My God..." This was a far more gruesome mishap than I can recall ever hearing it described. Amazingly, Jackson was still dancing for several seconds, completely unaware that his head was ablaze.

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