Popcorn Sutton: The Airplane!

That is the most awesome aircraft in history, and infinitely cooler than the Stealth Bomber.

(Okay, the SR-71 Blackbird will always be the greatest aircraft ever, but this is at least a very close second.)

I'm not sure if this is one person's private aircraft or something official with Popcorn Sutton's Tennessee White Whiskey, but it's got "93 Proof" printed on the fuselage and flies high and fast! 'Course it's been said that Popcorn's likker would make you fly high and fast without a plane, but anyhoo...

I wonder if we'll ever see a NASCAR driver sponsored by Popcorn Sutton's moonshine. Now that would be a beast of a hot-looking car!

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My girlfriend's performances at Spring Showcase 2012!

This is Kristen Bradford, the girl who I am more blessed than I possibly deserve to have in my life, along with her instructor Jay Henderson at this past weekend's Spring Showcase in Roanoke, Virginia...

(Photo credit goes to Ryan Kegel, who along with his wife Sarah were two of the many who came to cheer Kristen on :-)

Showcase is a twice-annual event hosted by the Arthur Murray Dance Studio in Roanoke, Virginia. It's a formal/gala event at the Hotel Roanoke where the students perform before a large audience. This was the third one that I have been at since we've been dating and it was easily the most electrifying one yet!

Okay, 'nuff from me. Y'all want to see Kristen dance. And I'm gonna happily oblige ya!

First up was a "graduation ceremony" of sorts. Ballroom dancing has different levels of skill and competition. At this Showcase, Kristen is moving up from Bronze III to IV. Here are the routines that she performed...

Then followed a series of "mini-matches": four couples on the floor at the same time, with the crowd calling out the numbers pinned to the male partner's backs when that couple does something especially good. Here are the first three mini-matches Kristen did...

Kristen Bradford Mini-Match #1

Kristen Bradford Mini-Match #2

Kristen Bradford Mini-Match #3

Following the first half of Showcase there was a thirty-minute break. And during this time I had a little fun with the trusty iPad. Here is Kristen and Jay starring in "The Dancing Damsel!"

Following the break, Kristen returned to solo with a Samba...

Kristen had two more mini-matches for the evening...

Kristen Bradford Mini-Match #4

Kristen Bradford Mini-Match #5

And then, later on during Showcase, came a performance that I heard many say was perhaps the finest of the event. I certainly loved it!

Accompanying the song "Lady in Red", here is Kristen and Jay dancing Bolero...

Someday, I pray that I might be able to dance even half as good as Jay... because I would seriously love to be a serious enough a partner for Kristen :-)

After Showcase finished up, there was the fine dinner and night of dancing ahead of us. And yes, Yours Truly did hit the floor with mostly some Waltz and Rumba. I even did a fancy turn somewhere in there.

But I definitely gotta show y'all these guys. Nick Manzo and Laura Cotton came to Showcase all the way from the Arthur Murray studio in Arrowhead, Arizona! They are two of the top-ranked dance instructors anywhere in the world... and here you'll see why:

By this point the evening was getting long, and after all that dancing Kristen was feeling a bit exhausted.

And then Nick asked her for a dance! Here they are, having fun with a Hustle along with Sister Sledge's "We Are Family":

That was more than enough to put a few more times on the dance floor into her :-)

Everyone from the Arthur Murray Dance Studio in Roanoke did a remarkable job! I'm looking at taking classes there sometime in the near future. Hey, maybe there's hope yet for a guy with two left feet :-)

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"The Angels Take Manhattan": Chris is increasingly conflicted about Amy and Rory's departure from DOCTOR WHO

"Spoilers"? I doubt it. By the night it aired everyone and their tin dog knew all too well that "The Angels Take Manhattan" would be the episode that saw wife-and-husband companions Amy and Rory (Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill) taking their bows from Doctor Who.

So what did this blogger think of the second Doctor Who story that the BBC has filmed in the United States?

I think that writer and showrunner Steven Moffat gave Amy and Rory a fine and fitting close to their part in the Doctor's epic mythology, with as much happiness as two people in love with each other could possibly have. At the same time, with more and more time passing since watching it I can't help but think that this story felt too fast-paced and blurring, especially toward an event which by every measure should be forever burned into the gestalt consciousness of the Whoniverse.

And then there is the point which will probably have people jumping flunky on me from all quarters: I honestly think that of the stories to date featuring the Weeping Angels, this was certainly the weakest.

Look folks, I am madly in love with the Weeping Angels so far as Doctor Who enemies are concerned! In a television show that has become as famous for its monsters as it has for its hero, the Weeping Angels stand as the most original and absolutely the most horrifying of the lot. Far more so than the Daleks and the Cybermen, even. In fact, I'd dare say that the Weeping Angels are the most frightening creatures in any modern fiction, period. They're such a terrifying and unique concept that I'm even attempting to write a fan-fiction story about them, so don't anybody say that I don't appreciate them!

But in "The Angels Take Manhattan", well... the Weeping Angels also came across as rushed, to the point of being - dare I say it - underwhelming.

Maybe it's a consequence of how this season is being structured. Moffat has stated a few times that Season 7 (or 33 depending on what you're incrementing from) would be a solid slate of one-episode stories. Based on the season so far, I'm beginning to suspect that wasn't a wise decision. "Asylum of the Daleks" and "A Town Called Mercy" definitely worked without having to span multiple chapters. But then there have been "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" and last week's "The Power of Three": stories that perhaps had potential but were shoehorned into less space than they deserved (okay, I don't know if anything could have helped "The Power of Three"). "The Angels Take Manhattan" is now the most glaring example of this problem, especially when one considers how last year's amazing "The Impossible Astronaut"/"The Day of the Moon" worked as the first Doctor Who story made on American soil. In retrospect it seems that selling-point was the biggest thing "The Angels Take Manhattan" had going for it... and gimmicks like that, however well intended, should never trump plot or pacing.

I'm not even going to begin to touch upon this episode's inordinately considerable amount of plotholes and inconsistencies. And just how does the Statue of Liberty go missing without anyone noticing it? Did illusionist David Copperfield have an uncredited cameo where his swimsuit-clad assistants hoisted a black curtain to hide the Statue from observation so it could go stomping off to Winter Quay? And how does a copper and steel colossus with hollow innards become a Weeping Angel, anyway?

River Song, with the ever-enjoyable Alex Kingston in the role, seems like a tacked-on addition to the episode. For someone who is the Doctor's wife and with such a major change-up at hand, River Song deserved better.

I'm gonna have to say that "The Angels Take Manhattan" fulfilled its mission of giving Amy and Rory a proper send-off. But the lead-up to that moment could have been immensely more memorable... and far less confusing.

"The Angels Take Manhattan" gets Three Sonic Screwdrivers from this blogger: not a bad episode, but not overwhelmingly "great" either.

And with that, Doctor Who returns with the now-traditional Christmas special airing December 25th!

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Bad Moon Rising: British cop's call for backup leads to luna-tickling mistake

A police officer in Great Britain is weathering international ribbing after calling in for reinforcements to help with a potentially dangerous situation... that turned out to be nothing more than the light of the silvery moon!

From the story at The Inquisitr:

According to Independent Online News, the story was originally picked up by Police magazine, which brought the cop’s startling encounter with the moon to the masses. In the article, the officer in question didn’t realize his mistake until after he’d told his co-workers that he might require backup.

“While single-crewed on night duty in Worcestershire a PC called up his sergeant letting him know that he was going up into the Clent Hills to investigate a ‘suspicious bright light’ that he could see shining from the other side of the hills,” the magazine revealed. “The call was for safety reasons as he might need back-up once he found the source. Twenty minutes later the PC called his sergeant back to reassure him that everything was ok and that he had found the source of the light.”

Fortunately, the mysterious light was nothing more than the moon hanging out in the heavens. All kidding aside, at least the cop was doing his job. Had the light turned out to be some sort of threat to the fine residents of Worcestershire, the poor guy would have been a hero. Sadly, he’s just the butt of a joke.

Personally, I don't think this guy should be ridiculed at all. Astral phenomenon has a long, long history of playing tricks with light on human visual acuity. I mean, the planet Venus has been mistaken for everything from distant volcanic eruptions to flying saucers. It's not the first time that somebody has been fooled by natural lights in the sky, and it won't be the last.

This policeman wasn't wrong to call for help if he thought there was legitimate reason for it. But still, all in all... it is a rather funny story :-)

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Just watched the first episode of LAST RESORT

This blog's regular readers know that I do not keep up with television very well. The number of series that I've watched on a routine basis can be counted on one hand. And until last year there were never two that I watched concurrently during a season: those being Doctor Who and The Walking Dead.

But I might have to make a lot more room on my DVR, if last night's premiere of Last Resort was any indication.

ABC's new series follows the crew of a (fictional) United States Navy intercontinental ballistic missile submarine, the U.S.S. Colorado. Minutes into the pilot episode and amidst a ship-wide celebratory tradition for crossing the Equator, the Colorado receives orders to fire its nuclear warheads at Pakistan. The thing is, the orders did not come through official channels, but through a secondary channel. When Captain Chaplin (Andre Braugher) demands hardcore confirmation of the launch order, all hell breaks loose: the Colorado is fired upon by another U.S. Navy vessel and believed destroyed. The United States government blames Pakistan for attacking the Colorado and promptly launches its nukes. With World War III dawning, Captain Chaplin surfaces his ship off the beaches of Sainte Marina in the Indian Ocean and promptly takes over the island (which includes a handy-dandy NATO communications station). Chaplin then puts out an ultimatum to the world: Sainte Marina is an independent state under his command and anyone coming within 200 miles of the place will get fired upon.

He isn't bluffing. And to prove it he launches one of the sub's missiles at the United States.

There are moments which stretched credulity: I mean, could a submarine surface with such surgical precision beneath a rubber raft? To say nothing of a sub sitting on ocean rock bottom. But even so, I found myself surprisingly immersed and captivated by the premise and execution of Last Resort's first episode. With the crew of the Colorado on their own and trying to prove their innocence while figuring out who sent the launch order, it's like The Fugitive as envisioned by Tom Clancy. The ensemble casting also reminds me somewhat of Lost (look for Robert Patrick as one of the Colorado's officers), along with the narrative split between the outside world and an island locality which threatens to bring out the worst (and best) of its inhabitants.

All in all, I found it a satisfying episode. One that will warrant me keeping an eye on Last Resort for at least the next few weeks to see if it merits regular watching.

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The statue of Buddha made from a meteorite and acquired by Nazis

That's not the most weird headline I've ever made for a blog post, but I must say: that it's certainly among the most interesting! It's not often that the worlds of archaeology, astronomy, chemistry and history come together so boldly.

The statue on the left, dubbed "the Iron Man", was found in Tibet sometime around 1938, by Nazi scientist Ernst Schäfer. It's thought that it represents the Buddhist god Vaisravana. The statue isn't terribly large but given its all-metal composition it is rather heavy. Schäfer thought it would be of particular interest to his superiors because of the swastika symbol carved upon its chest (Schäfer's expedition was to research the origins of the Aryan race). So the statue was packed up and sent to Germany and eventually found its way into the possession of a private collector.

The statue was likely carved in the tenth century, at most. But it's what it was carved from that makes it really neat: an iron-nickel meteorite that probably crashed to Earth sometime around 10,000 years ago along the border of present-day Siberia and Mongolia!

Furthermore, this is the only known statue carved in human likeness to have been made from a meteorite.

And incidentally, the swastika symbol found on the statue is - or was anyway - a very common symbol in many Asian cultures, as it was thought to represent good fortune. The swastika can be found on statues, in embroidery and many other works of art. It was only when the Nazis arose that Hitler and his followers twisted it into the symbol now sadly synonymous with evil.

LiveScience has a more in-depth article about the Nazi-found meteorite Buddha statue.

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What good is the United Nations, anyway?

I always thought that the purpose of the United Nations was for countries which recognize each other to come together for the furtherance of peace. That it was meant to be a platform for raw hate and threats of violence seemed anathema to that purpose.

But this week Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - head of a government which has done more to sponsor terrorism than any other during the past thirty years and which has consistently threatened the safety of the United States - has addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations. And once again Ahmadinnerjacket or whatever the heck his name is, has vowed to wipe the country of Israel off the map.

There are two questions that I can neither find suitable answer to or rid my gray matter of. First: Why the hell are we letting Ahmadinejad/Ahmadinnerjacket into the United States? I don't buy into the notion that the United Nations is "neutral international ground". Ahmadinejad is not only the head of a government which has sworn itself as an enemy of the United States, but there has been substantial evidence in recent years that he was involved in the taking of hostages from the American embassy in 1979.

Imadinnerjacket should have been arrested the moment he landed. He certainly should not have been given free parking for his Air Iran jet at Andrews Air Force Base: the same place where Air Force One is kept and maintained.

Second: Why does the United Nations tolerate and even invite the presence of such a man and the government he represents, when neither have demonstrated that they have any intent of civilized and peaceful co-existence with their neighbors?

I understand that in the history of mankind, and no doubt for all the millenea to come, nation will disagree with nation. Sometimes those disagreements come to martial clash of arms. I've never been so foolish as to believe the United Nations could ever bring about total peace on Earth: that would be a miracle left to God Himself, so fallen and inept is the nature of man.

Even so, that whole "swords into plowshares" thing, I thought the United Nations took that seriously. And cheering the mad ravings of a genocidal lunatic is the furthest thing from diplomatic civility in the pursuit of peace!

It's like this: either the United Nations demands that its member states acknowledge and respect the right of each other to exist and to utterly strive to avoid war, or the United Nations stands for nothing more than being a colossal joke sitting on the East River in Manhattan.

One of the bigger criticisms of the League of Nations was that it was too weak to have prevented World War II. Might future history books record that the United Nations was incapable of reigning-in one of its members from igniting World War III?

If not, and if the United Nations is tolerating such behavior even now... then what good is the United Nations at all?

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Ostrich Pillow power-nap accessory

This project was asking for $70,000 on Kickstarter in order to become a reality. As of this writing it has raised $76,272.

So coming soon from design firm Kawamura-Ganjavian, it is the Ostrich Pillow!

Here's the product's description...

OSTRICH PILLOW is a revolutionary new product to enable easy power naps anytime, everywhere, OSTRICH PILLOW ‘s unique design offers a micro environment in which to take a cosy and comfortable power nap at ease. OSTRICH PILLOW has been designed to allow you to create a little private space within a public one, to relax and unwind. Its soothing soft interior shelters and isolates your head and hands (mind and body) for a short break, without needing to leave your desk, chair, bench or wherever you may be.

And if you put it on backwards it makes an excellent snore-suppressor!

Thanks to Kristen for finding this :-)

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Ma Chalmers lives, and she's destroying school lunch

Please tell me that isn't a soybean that Michelle Obama is extolling the virtues of in that photo.

The current First Lady has somehow become the nation's Food Czar, with a capacity of recommending, implementing and apparently enforcing her own policies on the country. No other First Lady has enjoyed such power. Not even the much-beloved Nancy Reagan, who channeled the massive respect given her toward no more a gesture than encouraging America's children to steer clear of drug abuse, was granted such authority to wield.

Michelle Obama, however, is hellbent on imposing her own whacked nutritional vision upon the children of those who "just said no".

Michelle Obama has directed the United States Department of Agriculture to mandate school lunches that can best be described as "skimpy" and "lacking". Not to mention downright unpalatable. The government is determined to limit elementary kids to 650 calories and high schoolers to 850 calories.

Hasn't Michelle ever paid attention to her own children? I mean, elementary kids are supposed to run around and be energetic and that burns up calories. To say nothing of high school students engaged in sports like football and basketball. I was on our high school's swim team and I ate a lot to have fuel for practice and meets: I don't think I could have gotten fat if if I tried during a season.

The students are starving, they know it and they also know who's responsible for it. Some enterprising youngsters have even begun operating black markets for such federally-verboten items as chocolate syrup and potato chips. The kids just don't want to be commanded by the government about what they can and cannot eat when their parents are supposed to be in charge of their nutritional needs. One of the obvious consequences? Vast amounts of food getting wasted and thrown away.

And yet in spite of it, the government is blaming the children for apparently lacking enough wisdom to enjoy federal oversight of their lives! From Kyle Olson's article at TownHall.com...

Nancy Carvalho, director of food services for New Bedford Public Schools, was quoted as saying that hummus and black bean salads have been tough sells in elementary cafeterias. That means even smaller children are going through the day fighting hunger pains, which can never be considered a good thing.

One government official tried to put the blame on the students.

"One thing I think we need to keep in mind as kids say they're still hungry is that many children aren't used to eating fruits and vegetables at home, much less at school. So it's a change in what they are eating. If they are still hungry, it's that they are not eating all the food that's being offered," USDA Deputy Undersecretary Janey Thornton was quoted as saying.

I know of no other way to put it than this: Michelle Obama has become Emma "Ma" Chalmers.

If you've never read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Ma Chalmers (mother of Kip Chalmers: he who instigated the chain of events that led to the horrific Winston Tunnel disaster) comes in fairly late in the novel. With the national economy imploding under the weight of looters and moochers and as the transportation infrastructure is collapsing, Ma Chalmers comes on the scene with her national mandate for soybeans...

But thirty million dollars of subsidy money from Washington had been plowed into Project Soybean -- an enormous acreage in Louisiana, where a harvest of soybeans was ripening, as advocated and organized by Emma Chalmers, for the purpose of reconditioning the dietary habits of the nation. Emma Chalmers, better known as Kip's Ma, was an old sociologist who had hung about Washington for years, as other women of her age and type hang about barrooms. For some reason which nobody could define, the death of her son in the tunnel catastrophe had given her in Washington an aura of martyrdom, heightened by her recent conversion to Buddhism. "The soybean is a much more sturdy, nutritious and economical plant than all the extravagant foods which our wasteful, self-indulgent diet has conditioned us to expect," Kip's Ma had said over the radio; her voice always sounded as if it were falling in drops, not of water, but of mayonnaise. "Soybeans make an excellent substitute for bread, meat, cereals and coffee--and if all of us were compelled to adopt soybeans as our staple diet, it would solve the national food crisis and make it possible to feed more people. The greatest food for the greatest number--that's my slogan. At a time of desperate public need, it's our duty to sacrifice our luxurious tastes and eat our way back to prosperity by adapting ourselves to the simple, wholesome foodstuff on which the peoples of the Orient have so nobly subsisted for centuries. There's a great deal that we could learn from the peoples of the Orient."

Ma Chalmers exploits her "friendships" and political pull to bring the bulk of the country's available railroad cars to her soybean collective in Louisiana, while at the same time a record harvest of corn and wheat - more than enough to feed the country - is bulging at the seams in Minnesota... and the farmers have no way of moving it.

It does not end well.

In Minnesota, farmers were setting fire to their own farms, they were demolishing grain elevators and the homes of county officials, they were fighting along the track of the railroad, some to tear it up, some to defend it with their lives--and, with no goal to reach save violence, they were dying in the streets of gutted towns and in the silent gullies of a roadless night.

Then there was only the acrid stench of grain rotting in half-smouldering piles -- a few columns of smoke rising from the plains, standing still in the air over blackened ruins -- and, in an office in Pennsylvania, Hank Rearden sitting at his desk, looking at a list of men who had gone bankrupt: they were the manufacturers of farm equipment, who could not be paid and would not be able to pay him.

As for the government-mandated soybeans...

The harvest of soybeans did not reach the markets of the country: it had been reaped prematurely, it was moldy and unfit for consumption.

"Unfit for consumption." That's a good a description as any for darn near everything coming from our "brilliant" leaders in Washington D.C.

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I don't even keep up with football...

...and even I can't believe what happened during last night's Seattle/Green Bay game.

I was wondering late last night why my Facebook and Twitter pages were going crazy. Now I know.

Can't say it any better than how one friend put it: "The NFL has become the WWE."

If you're still trying to figure out this mess, Mash here for ESPN's report.

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Secret to male longevity: CASTRATION!

Hey guys: wanna live longer? Lose the family jewels.

(I tried to find an accompanying image for this, but the only ones readily available pertained to barnyard procedures, "shock" websites and full-color medical techniques...)

Discovery.com is reporting a new study about castrated men which finds that eunuchs live quite a bit longer than, errrr... "normally equipped" males. The researchers delved into records of Chinese dynasties, including the last of the court eunuchs from a century ago. From the article...

The researchers found that the eunuchs lived 14 to 19 years longer than other men did. Three even lived to 100 or more, a feat of longevity that remains relatively rare among men even today.

The effect wasn't just due to fine palace living either, since kings and other male members of the court had the shortest lifespans of all. The eunuchs also spent time both inside the palace and out.

"Since castration extends lifespan by reducing male sex hormones, we still believe that the effect would be the same today," Min told Discovery News. "In fact, castration was also performed in the early 1900s in a Kansas mental hospital. Castrated patients lived 13 years longer than intact patients, which is similar to (the results) of our study."

However...

The possible negative consequences of castration include "decreased libido, depression and loss of physical strength," according to coauthor Kyung-Jin Min of Inha University.

No doubt.

I bet asking for grant money to fund this research took balls!

(I'll stop while I'm still ahead. Oops...)

Tip of the hat to Erik Yaple for coming across this article.

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Guilty as charged

What had been a terrific and fun-filled Saturday night with my girlfriend and two close friends ended up crashing hard with an e-mail I received shortly after returning home...

Chris, just wanted to let you know that I am de-friending you because basically you are not a friend. Like most other "christians" I know, you seem to be two-faced and unreliable... my "christian" friends seem to be about the most worthless and unreliable of any that I have. I have atheist and agnostic friends who I trust implicitly. At least you've shown me that "christians" truly are a lying, two-face bunch of hypocrits.

That was written by someone who I have known for over thirty years. I cannot be responsible for the choice that this person has made in severing our relationship.

But it is true: I am a hypocrite.

So is every other Christian. Every Christian who sincerely lives and strives to put God first and foremost in his or her life will admit to it, at least. And I would dare say that every Christian who ever lived has been a hypocrite in one way or another. Sometimes in plenty of ways... and I'll admit to being more guilty than most on that charge, too.

Yes, Christians are hypocrites. We are sometimes two-faced and we can be especially unreliable! We even lie sometimes. In short: we are every bit as stupid, scurillous and scoundrelous as any other human being. That we dare to be so ridden with faults while yet claiming to follow One who lived perfectly makes us out in the eyes of many as being the worst of low-life scum.

I know that I am a hypocrite. In more ways than I want to share here.

But neither am I afraid to admit that I am a hypocrite. And so long as I find myself convicted of hypocrisy... which will be until the final breath leaves my lungs in this fallen world... I will continue to confess that flaw in my character.

I am a hypocrite. But it is not what I want to be. And the only hope I have of being sanctified is to continually surrender that frailty to God.

Yes, those who seek mercy from God will be granted mercy. I have no reason to doubt that those who are secured in Him will remain secure forevermore. But rather than being reason to rest from our nature, to orient one's heart toward Christ entails the life-long process of sanctification... and as I have discovered during my own faith journey, that becomes the most difficult and painful part of all in this path we have chosen.

Why must it be so? I have thought about that much over the years. And nothing else makes as much sense as this:

That knowing how frail and fallen we are, we as Christians are not to persuade others to become Christians. We are however meant to persuade others of Christ. And there is no greater way than to show His work - that which is finished and that which He is still accomplishing - in our lives.

If evidence is demanded for conviction, then I will gladly plead guilty every time.

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Last night we watched HUGO

I cannot remember the last time that a movie has so captivated me, that the next day I am still overwhelmingly enchanted by its beauty, its grandeur, and its sense of humanity.

 Hugo came out late last year, but until last night I knew precious little about it save for some of its cast and that it was directed by Martin Scorsese. And that it was based on a book. And that it was in 3-D. Maybe that was one reason why I didn't see it in theaters earlier, because truth be told I have become exhausted with the 3-D fad. Too much use of it in places where it shouldn't be used at all.

After watching Hugo for the first time however, I am kicking myself for not catching it during its theatrical run. I would pay good money just to watch that very first shot of the train station in 3-D, because even on a 2-D high-def television screen it was jaw-droppingly gorgeous!

So neither Kristen or I had ever seen this movie before. A friend of ours let her borrow it, so yesterday evening we settled in for a Sunday evening's enjoyment of some cinema. By the time the film's title is shown to us, several minutes had gone by but so entranced were we by the story and the visuals that we hadn't even noticed it was missing until it finally turned up. And it just kept getting better from there...

Good readers, I'm gonna choose to not go into a terrible amount of detail about Hugo. This really is a movie that you owe it to yourself to go into as unaware as possible. I mean, there are so darned few surprises in this world these days. Especially, it sadly seems, in the movies. And if you genuinely want to experience the movie the way they once were and could still be again, then you can not possibly go wrong with Hugo. Boasting the finest-assembled cast in recent memory - with Ben Kingsley, Chloë Grace Moretz, Sacha Baron Cohen, Christopher Lee, and Asa Butterfield turning in a wondrous performance as Hugo - this movie is an epic triumph in every sense.

Hugo gets this blogger's absolutely highest possible recommendation! I'll be getting the Blu-ray of this for my library for sure... and Lord willing I ever have children, this is one movie that I'm exceedingly looking forward to watching with them.

Now if that ain't praise for a movie, I don't know what is :-)

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Musing on mere religion

I will not make being a Christian more important than being in Christ.

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Burger King hassles customers at McDonald's in Rome, Georgia

Police in Rome, Georgia (a town that I have some firsthand knowledge of) are on the lookout for none other than the Burger King himself, who allegedly stood outside the McDonald's restaurant there and commenced to handing out free hamburgers.

From the CBS News story...

Police were called to a local McDonald’s in relation to a disturbance caused by a man dressed as the Burger King.

In a police report provided to the Rome News-Tribune, officers indicated that they were summoned to the fast-food restaurant around 1 p.m. on Monday, in response to a call about a suspicious person on the premises.

The person was allegedly resplendent in full Burger King regalia.

Police stated that, upon his arrival, the Burger King mascot reportedly began to hand out free hamburgers to customers, and stopped to take pictures with several children.

Officers were additionally told that one child ran away from the man in fear, the paper learned.

Only ONE child ran away?! I'm a grown dude and the King wigs even me out.

Might as well have some fun with these pics that I collected last year when Burger King retired their creepy mascot, but haven't used yet...

And even though it's not about King Creepy, this is still too good not to share...

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Trailer for THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY

And high-def Quicktime versions of the trailer are up at trailers.apple.com. We wants it my Precious, yesssss...

I made Kristen promise me something late last year: that we will see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey together at its midnight premiere, Lord willing, no matter what. Seeing this trailer has stoked my longing for this movie that much more. December 14th cannot get here fast enough! Okay yeah it can, but you know what I mean...

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Obama Administration brings back Bush-era "free speech zones"

Students at Wright State University who were protesting against Joseph Biden when he visited the campus last week were quarantined a quarter-mile away from the Vice President by the Secret Service. This happened not once, but twice. The rationale given by the Secret Service: they "didn't want the protesters to be too close to the motorcade."

Before any Republicans or Romney supporters cry "foul" about this, it would be well to remember that this exact same thing was routine policy during the presidency of George W. Bush! But that fact hasn't deterred a number of people on "conservative" websites from claiming that the Secret Service is violating the First Amendment, that Obama is violating the Constitution ad nauseum... when Obama's predecessor, a Republican president, was also insulating himself from public dissent with the very same methods, and on a much more chronic basis. Very many of Bush's following at the time had no problem whatsoever with the First Amendment rights of protestors being quashed. But now that the shoe's on the other foot...

"Free speech for me, but not for thee." I guess depending on who has the power, more animals really are more equal than others.

I don't want to hear any whining about Obama or Biden's use of "free speech zones" from past or present supporters of George W. Bush. As far as I'm concerned, come January we'll have had at least twelve years of regime by successive egomaniacs with narcissistic disorder. And I don't give a flying rat's butt which party either one belongs to.

So people: what's it going to take for us to quit supporting this sham?

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