Here they are!
The "Jingle Bells" cover is attributed most to Pearl (center of top row) although Caesar, King, Dolly and Pussy also turned in solid renditions of "Pat-A-Cake", "O Susanna" and "Three Blind Mice".
Want to know the real history of "Dogs Singing 'Jingle Bells'"? Click here for the story of the Caroling Dogs of Copenhagen.
I was at HyperMind in Burlington a few nights ago, my now-familiar haunt on many Thursday evenings (and a few other times during the week) and I got my butt handed to me twice during a coupl'a rousing games of Monsterpocalypse and... ahhh THAT'S BESIDE THE POINT!! :-P
Anyway, this very fine friendly local game store that I have written about much in the past year is doing some groovy charity events this month for the Marine Corps Toys for Tots and Loaves & Fishes Christian Food Ministry! This weekend there's a YuGiOh Tournament and next weekend it's a Magic: The Gathering tourney. The buy-in is to bring items of non-perishable food and while you're there you can donate to the Toys for Tots box.
HyperMind is at 3396 S. Church Street in Burlington, North Carolina. Their phone number is 336-584-1760 and you can find plenty more information on the store's website at hypermindonline.com. Bring some food and toys and yer playin' cards and get ready to have fun for a good cause!
I wish they would make this into a real Christmas special!
Maybe more to post this weekend but in the meantime I got nothin' and for once I like it! :-P
Early yesterday morning the above... whatever... appeared in the sky over Norway (Click here for plenty more photos). It's been captured on video and still photography all over that country. Speculation has run the gamut from an off-kilter display of the Northern Lights, to little green men. Bad Astronomy might be onto the real culprit: a Russian rocket that was test-launched Wednesday and went awry, spewing its fuel into the atmosphere. A more mundane explanation, but still makes for a pretty awe-inspiring show.
It could prolly also be said that Darth Bane is the galactic poster child for anyone who ever chose to read a book instead of going outside and playing football with the rest of the kids. 'Course, Bane still worked out like crazy later on so that he'd have the physique and prowess to match, but anyhoo...
Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil by Drew Karpyshyn came out yesterday. This newest Star Wars novel is the final chapter of an impromptu trilogy that began three years ago with Darth Bane: Path of Destruction. The unexpected success of that novel led to Karpyshyn getting tapped to write Darth Bane: Rule of Two, released a year later.
It's good to keep these things in mind while talking about Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil because for a trilogy of books that may not have even been planned to begin with, this wound up being one of the most satisfying and thrilling arcs of storytelling that I've ever read from that great saga of a galaxy far, far away. And I'll reiterate something that I suggested in my review of Darth Bane: Path of Destruction three years ago: that the story of Darth Bane is one that I would absolutely love to see realized in a visual medium someday (and I'm still hearing Clancy Brown's voice coming out of Bane's mouth). For someone who started out as pretty much nothing more than a throwaway reference in the background story of the Star Wars saga, Darth Bane has certainly become one of the most intriguing and popular characters from the mythology.
If this was all planned out, Drew Karpyshyn deserves to be recognized as among the top tier of Star Wars authors today. If it wasn't, then all the more reason why Karpyshyn should be so ensconced. His Darth Bane trilogy should be required study for any future author that might have the chance to write Star Wars.
Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil begins ten years after the events of Darth Bane: Rule of Two. Darth Bane and his apprentice Darth Zannah are still continuing the Sith order through the Rule of Two instituted by Bane: that there must always be only two Sith at a time. Master and apprentice. One to have the power and the other to covet it. Bane has been training Zannah since the day he found her on the battlefield of Ruusan.
And Bane has been doing so knowing fully well... accepting it as inevitable even... that the day must come when Zannah must face him and destroy him. Such is the only way that Zannah can earn the title of Sith Master. But as the years slip by, Zannah has not taken the step of challenging her master. And Bane is beginning to feel the ravages of time and age. That he is still recovering from the orbalisks that once covered his body isn't helping him either...
Fearing that Zannah might not be strong enough to carry on the Sith lineage and knowing that he won't live long enough to adequately train another apprentice, Darth Bane begins seeking out hidden and forgotten Sith lore. His search brings him to the story of Darth Andeddu: an ancient Sith who legends speak of discovering the means of immortality. Bane begins seeking out Andeddu's lair, believing that if he can find the means of staving off death for long enough, he can do away with Zannah and replace her with a more fitting apprentice.
Meanwhile, a labor dispute on the world of Doan has spiraled into something darker when a Jedi sent to mediate between miners and the ruling families ends in the death of the envoy. Serra, the newly-widowed wife of the king's son, leaves for Coruscant on a diplomatic mission of reconciliation with the Jedi Order. It is at the Jedi Temple that Serra discovers a very terrible thing: that for all the boasting of the Jedi, the Sith are not extinct. There is still one out there: the Sith Lord that killed Serra's father many years earlier.
Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil is a little less than 300 pages in length. The second half flies past with the blur of a lightsaber, and Karpyshyn deftly ties up all of the loose ends that we had known were there, as well as tidying up things that we perhaps didn't realize were still there to begin with. In short: it felt every bit like a classic Star Wars tale.
And when Darth Bane and Darth Zannah meet for their final confrontation, Karpyshyn does not disappoint. We've known for the longest time how the Sith of the Rule of Two (the same Sith order that will a thousand years later produce Darth Sidious and Darth Vader) propagates: with the master intentionally training the apprentice to one day rise up to destroy him. This is the first time that we get to see how that happens. I think that Karpyshyn might have inadvertently created a whole new sub-genre of Star Wars storytelling with how masterfully he pulled off his Darth Bane trilogy and its final installment. We've got Jedi stories up to our armpits. With the arrival of Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil, the Sith have satisfied us yet fittingly tantalize us with the promise of more.
If you've read the first two Darth Bane novels, then plunking down coin for Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil is a foregone conclusion. If you haven't already, then start with Darth Bane: Path of Destruction and prepare for a Dark Side treat from the days of the Old Republic. This is Star Wars tale-tellin' at its finest, and I hope that Lucasfilm will give Drew Karpyshyn plenty more opportunity to play with the saga in years to come!
Well, the TSA has somehow goofed and posted its "top secret" manual for screening airline passengers online. And the TSA apparently believed that covering sensitive up with black rectangles in an Adobe Acrobat file would be enough to hide confidential information... without realizing how easy it is to just remove the layers with the rectangles!
Want to read it for yourself? Here's the zipped-up archive containing the TSA screening manual!
Between this and the leaked e-mails from University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, it is a great time to be a believer in limited government :-)
Tron Legacy takes us back the game grid on December 17th, 2010.
"The hard part is how to make it into something that doesn't feel like a world torn asunder and people just in battle," he described. "I think we really want to focus on the idea of a world that's running well, and then it's Emergence Day and kind of make it impactful and immediate and the survival of those 48 hours as people survive Emergence Day. It's more like Cloverfield or something like that."Not just a "let's make a movie of an insanely popular video game 'cuz we can dammit!" then, but apparently this is going to be a thoughtful and well-considered chapter of the Gears of War canon as much as any of the games or books. Hey, with two-some hours of running time, we're potentially looking at the tail end of the Pendulum Wars, a really good look at Sera (maybe even how the humans came to be there in the first place) and then the horror of Emergence Day and its aftermath.
Sounds like full of win to me. Maybe Gears of War will be the movie that finally bucks the trend of video games-to-lackluster movies.
Here it is, featuring Willie Nelson's rendition of "Amazing Grace"...
The final season of Lost begins on February 2nd, 2010.
Yeah you read that right: the Pentagon is working on zombie pigs now.
Before you reach for the nearest shotgun or chainsaw though, you should know that there's some practical applications being sought from this. The problem is severe injuries of military personnel in combat situations: massive blood loss from wounds that without immediate (and often nearly impossible) treatment leads to death or debilitating lifelong trauma that may stand a chance of being averted. So the eggheads at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) are experimenting to see if a state of hibernation can be achieved in pigs, similar to squirrels and other mammals. If it can be made to work in pigs, humans could be the next step. Artificially slowing down brain and heart functions long enough to get an injured soldier to proper treatment could save many more lives from the battlefield.
'Course, another idea to drastically lower the number of combat deaths and injuries is to stop waging wars with no damn purpose or definite goal! But, that's just me...
This next item though is sufficiently wacky enough that it screams to be talked about.
Some people have been writing to let me know that Johnny Robertson and all of his followers (those being James Oldfield, Micah Robertson "The Lesser" and Mark McMinnis) have been conspicuously absent from the airwaves of local television station WGSR in recent weeks. Instead What Does the Bible Say? and A Word from the Lord (AKA "The Martinsville Taliban Show" and "A Word from James Oldfield") have been in reruns, one of which was Oldfield's two-hour spiel about why it's a sin to place money in the Salvation Army kettles. That particular screed prompted one person known to this writer to make a fifty dollar contribution to the Salvation Army on behalf of James Oldfield, but I digress...
So, wanna know where Johnny Robertson and his crew are?
Siddown. Y'all ain't gonna buh-leeeeve this one.
Robertson and his cronies are currently on a madcap dash around the country visiting the few other gatherings of their "Church of Christ" cult (which again, has nothing at all to do with the mainstream Churches of Christ) in a bid to raise money for more airtime on WGSR.
But wait: it gets better...
Currently, the "Church of Christ" cult broadcasts for four and a half hours each week on WGSR out of Martinsville, Virginia and Reidsville, North Carolina.
Johnny Robertson has decided that this isn't enough "information" (which approximately consists of 50% bragging about himself, 40% harassing other people and churches and 10% sloppy PowerPoint presentations and 0% about Jesus Christ).
So now he is attempting to raise funds to purchase TWENTY-FOUR HOURS OF AIRTIME PER WEEK!
That is about 3 and a half hours per day that Robertson and his co-villains will be attempting to fill with god-knows-what (not God that is, but the god of this world that Robertson and his cronies serve and commit evil for).
Wouldn't surprise me if Robertson ordered what few followers he still has to ramp up their attacks and intimidation tactics of innocent people and church congregations around here. Maybe even going as far as harassing Greensboro, Burlington and Winston-Salem since Robertson is apparently goading WGSR general manager/personal stooge Charles Roark toward expanding into those markets...
...But that also means that this blog will be expecting a lot more traffic in the near future as people start Goggle-ing about Johnny Robertson, "Martinsville Church of Christ" and the like as more begin to discover the brazenly unethical behavior coming out of WGSR and its current management.
Twenty-four hours per week? I don't know of any politician who's that conceited...
But what of the fifth Japanese mini-sub?
There's been evidence for decades - particularly an intercepted radio transmission from the day after the ambush reporting on the success of the mini-sub - but no hard proof of the role it might have played. Historians have debated it for years.
But today history has one less mystery. The scuttled remains of the fifth Japanese mini-sub have been found three miles south of Pearl Harbor, its 800-pound torpedoes emptied and likely fired at the battleships West Virginia and Oklahoma and perhaps causing enough damage for the latter to capsize in in one of the most iconic destructive acts of the raid.
Amazing, isn't it? That even today, there are still things we don't know about World War II that every so often finally come to light.
Even as we remember those who fought and served and even perished in this most terrible of conflicts, let us pray that there may never again be such an occasion for enigma.
