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Comments and opinions expressed on THE KNIGHT SHIFT are those of Christopher Knight and not necessarily those of subjects discussed in this blog, of advertisers appearing on it or of any reasonable human being. Any correspondence/irate letters/lawsuit threats/Nigerian e-mail scams can be sent to theknightshift@gmail.com.
I ain't seen the new Hawaii Five-O series on CBS yet, but I bet it's got nothing on what my lifelong best friend Chad Austin did when he visited the Aloha State a few months ago! Turns out that he's been holding back on me and has been doing some filmmaking of his own: witness this AWESOME spoof of the opening credits from the original Hawaii Five-O series!
Speaking of Chad, I've heard that people who've seen The People vs. George Lucas have really enjoyed his portrayal of George Lucas from our film Forcery (clips of which appear in the award-winning documentary). And Chad swears that he's going to start blogging again soon. Maybe we are witnessing a new cinematographer in the making? :-)
Ohhhh yeah, I deep-fried the turkey! Three of them, in fact! All on Christmas Eve. Two 12-pound full-sized birds for friends and a turkey breast for my own family gathering.
Here's the first bird that I did...
The second turkey...
And the turkey breast: smaller but no less succulent!
And hey, look who showed up! None other than Tebow Wasmund, the popular pup (who was recently seen as Sandy the dog in a production of Annie) and his mistress Peggy! Tebow is well known around here as he is often courting admirers at iCoffee in nearby Summerfield. It's a great lil' coffee house and well worth visiting!
I guess you just can't keep a good dog away from the scent of fried turkey :-P
And 'twas a good thing that I got all that frying done on Christmas Eve 'cuz the next day, we got our first real White Christmas in almost fifty years...
In case anyone is wondering, I used Lost: The Final Season as the soundtrack to which I fried this batch of turkeys to.
Incidentally, I have come up with a pretty... shall we say, "interesting?"... idea for a new turkey fryer. And there is already someone that I am conspiring with to make it into a reality. Guess that'll be a project to work on for 2011. Expect pictures and YouTube video if/when we pull it off.
And, that wraps up turkey frying for the 2010 holiday season! So help me, my hands will be smelling like garlic butter for a whole 'nother month.
The story aired last night during the Fox 8 News at 10 as a Buckley Report feature. A lot of people have told me since its broadcast that it turned out great and that hopefully it will bring encouragement to others suffering from bipolar (which, is one of the reasons why I felt led to write about it on my blog).
Here's the story, in case you missed it last night (or if you happen to live in London or Tasmania or Chula Vista or somewhere else outside of Fox 8's broadcasting area)...
In the past few weeks, God has placed it on my heart that... this can be a kind of ministry opportunity. Last month a friend of mine who is associate pastor of a nearby church shared 2nd Corinthians with me: how Paul wrote about God putting afflictions in our lives so that we might be a help to others going through the same thing.
If so, then I certainly must thank God for not only letting me go through this, but also His bringing me through to this place in my life. To a place where I can have the life that I have always longed for.
There was so much said during the interview last week and not all of it could have made the final cut. I remember telling Bob and Chris at one point that I was better than I was a few months ago... and I'm not as good as I will be a few months from now.
And if God has given me this experience, for whatever reason He had in allowing it, well... I'm going to play it to the hilt for everything that it can.
Thanks to Bob Buckley and Chris Weaver for a job well done! :-)
It's fiscal criminal insanity: more than $440,000 to study Vietnamese male prostitutes. How about roughly a million dollars spent to compose poetry for zoos? Then there is more than a hundred grand used to construct a "critter crossing" for salamanders in Vermont. The University of California at Irvine received a grant of $3 million to study the online video game World of Warcraft. And over $600,000 was given to another California university to digitize Grateful Dead concert tickets and T-shirts.
Those are just some of the examples of horrid waste - funded by our tax dollars - by the federal government documented by The Economic Collapse blog. Also on the list of 20 craziest things that the United States government directs expenditure from the public treasury for: studying flatulence from dairy cows and the renovation of a pizzeria's store front to give it a "more inviting" feel.
Ya see, this is part of the reason why I have no faith at all in temporal politics, regardless of who or what party winds up "in charge" in Washington. This kind of irresponsible spending has been going on for as long as I can remember and darned FEW seem to be serious at all about slashing it.
Meanwhile, our Republic dies a death by a thousand cuts...
"Weird Ed" Woody, my filmmaking partner, is quietly attempting to murder me.
That's the only reason why I can conceive of his sending me this link to ThinkGeek's product page for the Grow Your Own World's Hottest DIY Pepper kit... because Weird Ed is well aware of my fascination with spicy hot food and he knows that I'm not going to pass up on the chance to grow my own Bhut jolokia!
This pepper, native to northeastern India, was written about more than three years ago on this blog and at the time some enterprising folks were looking at how to market it to the wider world. Well for a few bucks and some scratch you can get this pop-top can, open it up and give it water and sunlight, and in a few weeks you'll get your first sprouts. The pepper comes in at more than a million scorching Scoville units of heat. By comparison, your typical bottle of Tabasco sauce is 2,500 Scoville units. A few weeks ago the Bhut jolokia was dethroned as the hottest pepper on official record by a hybrid (which is based on the Bhut jolokia), but it's still the hottest-known naturally occurring pepper that's on the market.
Here's that link again if you dare. If nothing else, maybe you'll get lucky and get your Grow Your Own World's Hottest DIY Pepper kits by Christmas: 'twould be something different to give than those Chia Pets you always wind up buying when all other gift ideas fail...
Holy crap! This is amazing! A new app for the iPhone called Word Lens from an outfit called Quest Visual uses the phone's camera to translate visual words on-screen in real time.
Awright, first person who can tell me what obscure mondo-bizarro film that is from, can buy themselves a candy bar and pretend I got it for them.
I'm... not quite ready to return to this blog at the usual frenetic frequency that all two of my loyal readers have come to appreciate. According to my figures there had been an average of five new posts a day for quite some time now. But if you look at the front page that I'm seeing right now, there've only been twenty-five posts since mid-August!
Clearly, something has been amiss with Your Friend and Humble Narrator.
I'm not retiring The Knight Shift (well, not planning to anyway: some claim that this blog has caused more mischief than WikiLeaks... and look at where that site has gone lately!). But there is certainly - and there has already been - some significant "shifting around" of sorts behind the scenes as I have had to wrestle with quite a bit in my personal life. And I may or may not have divulged more than enough of that already.
What can I say? I believe in being honest and sincere. And most especially to and about myself. As the Bard wrote in Hamlet, "To thine own self be true".
I believe that. Even when my own self is wracked with common human foibles and frailties and a few more common than we often care to admit.
This blog has always been about things that interest me, that I believe others might find interesting as well, and as a place where I can share my thoughts and reflections on various matters. This site in its seven years of operation has done quite a lot: from movie reviews, to chronicling my running for public office, to premiering movies that I have made with friends, to documenting the exploits of the last great American moonshiner, to taking on a multimedia giant in a copyright dispute (and prevailing in the end), to recipes, and well... just about anything and everything in between.
And now, there is something else that I'll be writing about and reflecting upon. Not a new thing, but something that I'm inclined to believe is important enough to share some perspective about. And maybe others will come away from this blog even a bit wiser and more enlightened for the time spend reading from it. In the end, that is all any writer is really hoping to accomplish.
So that is what I'll be doing. Along with everything else that readers have come to expect from this blog. And Lord willing, I'll be doing more of that sooner than later.
In the meantime, to The Knight Shift's regular and faithful readership: Hello again! And to those who will be coming across this blog during the next few days: Welcome! Hope you like what you find here :-)
By the way, in case any of the regular readership is wondering if I deep-fried any turkey this past Thanksgiving...
Ahhh c'mon: y'all didn't think that I wouldn't properly document something like that, didja?!
Edit 5:12 p.m. EST: I have been asked to remove this post. And, I will honor this request. EDIT 5:22 p.m. EST 11/18/2010: I am not going to repost the original text that was here. But increasingly, I am being led to post something about what I have gone through. Maybe - just maybe - God might use it to spare others the grief that I have gone through and that I have put too many other people through.In my last post (which really was meant to be farewell for now) I publicly disclosed that I have suffered from depression for many years. I also have had to struggle with bipolar. And I do understand that I am likely giving up a lot of great potential in coming forward with that.Well, whether I want it or not, it is a part of me. It is part of my identity, which I will have to deal with for the rest of my life on this earth. And don't think that I haven't cried out to God about it. Indeed, especially in the past two months as I have begun to regain my understanding of things, I have cried out to Him harder than ever before.I have especially asked God why He gave me this, when it led to certain things happening which are, as best I can understand them, things He is against. Like divorce.For whatever reason He has, God allowed me to be stricken full-bore with bipolar, which on top of the depression and very many medications that I have been given in the past several years to fight this, turned me into a very different person than what I really was. A different person than who I like to think God intended for me to be. I became someone who put the ones closest to me through hell. And I was completely powerless to do anything about it.Bipolar, depression and all other kinds of mental illness are not a sin. Not at all. They are a kind of disease: one as real and destructive as cancer, hemophilia and diabetes. In some ways having a mental illness is far, far worse. If God had to stricken me with something, I wish He had given me cancer instead. That is something, at least, that pretty much everybody can understand.So I would like to say some things to two groups of people. First of all, I want to address those who, like me, have been afflicted with bipolar.Please know: this is NOT your fault! You could not possibly have wanted this or asked for this condition. And if you are like me, you probably weren't even aware of your own mind turning against you until it was too late. You know where I'm coming from, and I know where you are coming from too. The feeling of being alone in a dark, deep prison cell from which there is no light, no hope, no escape. Being trapped in your own mind, having to watch helplessly as you do things beyond your control. Things that you know you would have never done otherwise.I know what it's like to feel rejected by God and rejected by those closest to you. They don't understand this. They can't understand it, not without experiencing it themselves. And like me, that is something that you - since you know what this is like - would never wish on anyone. Not even your worst enemies.I know what it's like to tell God that it's just not fair. That if He was going to allow your health to be destroyed, to let it inflict harm on your flesh. To suffer something that takes away your judgment and your common sense and your spirit for living... how can that be fair? And yet, God let it happen to us.Don't give up hope. Please, don't give up hope. And as for why God would allow this to us, the only answer that comes to mind is from the story of Jesus healing the blind man, as is recorded in the Gospel of John, chapter 9:
As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?""Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world."
After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man's eyes. "Go," he told him, "wash in the Pool of Siloam" (this word means "Sent"). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.
That is the best that I have been able to locate in scripture during these many weeks. And perhaps I should be rejoicing that God let me go through this: that if it means He will be glorified in the end, that He chose me because He knew that I could take it.
That doesn't mean that I necessarily like it one bit. After all, depression and bipolar have cost me friendships, opportunities and even my marriage. I wish that I could see how this is going to end, so that my burden might be lessened from knowing that God is going to use this.All I have to go on is faith and hope and trusting in Him. I don't know how the story ends. For now I'm a struggling character in a story that He is still writing. There are moments when I wish He did use someone else. But then, that would have been someone else suffering. And how much faith would any of us have if God didn't put us in places where we were in pain and misery and crying out to Him for deliverance?In the end, God is good. Even though things are so very dark. I will be thankful that as silent as He is now, He is listening.Now, for the second group that I want to address: the people who have to live and deal with a loved one suffering bipolar...Your mother, your father, your brother or sister, your husband or your wife who has bipolar: you have no idea what kind of a hell they are having to endure. They didn't ask for this.And neither do they deserve being abandoned and left alone.Would somebody abandon a loved one because that person became sick with cancer, or hemophilia, or leukemia? Of course not! At least they should not do such a thing. Conditions such as depression, bipolar, schizophrenia and everything else under the umbrella of mental illness are just as much a disease as cancer or muscular dystrophy. With much the same cause: something going wrong physically, deep inside the brain. It could be brought on by trauma or it could be neurochemical in nature.These people who have bipolar, they are good people, who have been hit with something beyond their control. And it is a cruel thing to leave them because of their illness.Wanna know something though? I don't hold anything against those who have left me because of my own condition. Because as I've said, you have to go through it yourself in order to understand. And this is something that I never want those I care about to have to suffer.Folks, please: your loved ones who may have bipolar, they don't deserve to be left behind. They need to be loved and cherished. You need to love and cherish them harder than you ever have before, and I do know how hard a thing that is to ask! Just know that however much hell they are putting you through, they are being put through hell far, far worse. They don't mean to hurt you or humiliate you or otherwise bring embarrassment to you. If they are anything like what I am now going through, the eventual recovery from bipolar is going to leave them cursing the day that they were born. That is the magnitude of grief and shame that people feel when they realize for the first time how much hurt they have done to those they love most, when they couldn't have helped it.Trust me: a person with bipolar is going through more than any person should ever go through in this earthly life. To not be forgiven for what they are by the people closest to them, is a far worse thing than the condition itself.I am not forgiven. By God, yes. But not by those who I have hurt. And I would do anything to be able to take it all back, if I possibly could.And those who suffer bipolar that you, dear reader, might personally know: I've no doubt that they feel the same way.Please, don't abandon those whose own minds have turned against them. Pray for them. Be patient with them. Most of all, dare to love them in spite of their illness.More certain am I than of how my own story is becoming, do I believe that Christ will be lifted up and glorified by those who do love and cherish and forgive those who cannot help the situation of mental illness.All things work for the will of God. Even mental illness. The question is: how willing are we to choose to glorify Him in spite of ourselves and our pride?
"Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."
-- Chief Joseph, 1877
I have suffered from severe depression for more than ten years. I have fought it as hard as I possibly can and it hasn't been enough. It has cost me dear friends, potentially wonderful opportunities, and worst of all it has cost me the wife who I loved and held precious more than anyone else that has ever come into my life.
The sufferings I have been through, I would not wish on anyone. Not even wish them on those who have wanted to hurt me.
I am saying this because there is only so much that the enemy, the lord of this world, can do to me. He can take away everything that I hold dear. He can destroy the relationships I have with others. He can even take away my health and end my life.
I am saying this because I will not curse God. Even though in the past several days I have cried out to Him about my hurt and my guilt and my anguish and in spite of it He has been distant and silent.
I am not going to curse God. To follow Christ does not mean an easy life. I have followed Him for almost fourteen years and I have failed and fallen more times than not. There have been times before when I have cursed God in anger.
But I will not curse God this time or ever again.
God is good.
"Whatever they plot against the Lord he will bring to an end; trouble will not come a second time."
-- Nahum 1:9
I will not curse God. There is little left that can be done to hurt me. I am not even afraid to die anymore, if it comes to that.
Here's what really raised my eyebrows: this is apparently a STATEWIDE suspension, and not merely along the North Carolina coast. In other words, folks around Sylva, Waynesville and other fine places waaay out in the North Carolina mountains are also affected by the gun rights suspension... even though it's extremely doubtful that they will be affected by Earl in the least bit.
What the hell is Governor Perdue thinking?!
I would like for someone to show me where this is just a matter for the coastal areas. But even if that were the case, it does not make me feel the least bit comfortable that Perdue has taken it upon herself to say that the Second Amendment no longer applies, regardless of how big or small an area is affected by Earl.
And then the woman has the gall to say that those who decide to ride it out are "on your own". So what are they supposed to use to defend themselves against potential looters? Like the guy in Aliens suggested: "harsh language"?
This woman hasn't a clue. Like too damn many other elected officials in this country.
Hey y'all, been a few days since an update. All that can be said at the moment is that I've got a lot of irons in the fire, so to speak :-)
Here, maybe this'll make up for it. My good friend and brother in Christ (not to mention fellow Star Wars ubergeek) Joshua Ausley shot, edited and produced this head-slammingly rockalicious music video for a band called Death Proof out of our very own Greensboro, North Carolina!
