eric h smith

Chris Knight's avatar

The other week my very good friend Eric Smith (yes, the same one who also made a campaign commercial during that VERY wacky school board race years ago) approached me with a project.  Could I help him pull off an April Fools stunt this year?  I said absolutely, that it would be an honor and a pleasure to work with him.

Along with being an expert welder, Eric is also a professional Santa Claus (the reason his beard is so big and bushy).  And he’s a certified beer expert (no really, you can get certifications for that) who regularly posts videos on YouTube as “Beer Santa”.  So he came up with the idea for Duke’s Mayonnaise Beer.

Here’s the video he published two days ago.  Looks and sounds pretty convincing aye? 🙂

Maybe next year I’ll come up with another prank.  It’s been too long since I’ve pulled off ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Please note: I am not a beer drinker.  In fact, it’s very rare that I’ll drink alcohol at all.  There’s nothing I hold against those who enjoy it (in moderation ‘course).  And I know next to nothing about what makes a good beer.  The first time I tried drinking any, it was in Belgium in 1993.  To this day I still cannot adequately describe how dark that stuff was…

North Carolina Beers, blog, Eric Smith

Even so, lacking knowledge and experience hasn’t been an impediment toward enjoying Eric Smith‘s new blog North Carolina Beers!  A home-brewer for well over a decade, Eric’s new site is “dedicated to North Carolina Beers and Breweries. Over
the next year or two I plan on visiting every brewery in NC and writing
a review on each of them. I will write about as many beers as I can
and there may be some beer specific post as well.”  ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Check this bad boy out!

This was a Christmas present from my friend Eric Smith: welder and metal worker extraordinare. It’s the Crimson Omen from the Gears of War video game series done in steel! Eric designed it on computer and then precision-cut it out of a sheet of metal with a water jet. The picture does it no justice: this thing looks positivalutely gnarly up close and in person. Eric knew that I’m a big fan of the Gears of War franchise, and I am both thankful and humbled that he went to the effort to make this.

Now I just need to figure out how to fittingly display it. Any ideas? 🙂...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Good friend and colleague in fighting the good fight Eric Smith, hot off his portrayal of Reverend Hopkins in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever a few months ago, wants y’all to know that he’ll be appearing in “An Evening of Short Plays #22” this weekend, presented by the Greensboro Playwrights Forum as part of the Greensboro Fringe Festival. The show runs tonight through Sunday in the City Arts Studio Theatre at the Greensboro Cultural Center. Admission is free but a $5 donation is encouraged (and no doubt more would be appreciated if you enjoy it… as you no doubt will 🙂

Wanna know what to expect? Here’s the rundown of one of the plays…

“Viewer’s Like You by Tommy Trull”

In a highly meta-theatrical play, a snowman actor struggles to find his motivation in a film about snowman porn.

Heck, I’d pay full admission just to see that one ...

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Here are some photos that I took in Dad’s knife shop from this past weekend.

This first one is of a roller bearing welded to a piece of rebar, heating up in Dad’s propane-powered forge. At around 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, you can understand why I dubbed this the “Marshmallow from Hell”…

Another shot of the forge. Dad is on the left and Eric Smith is on the right…

The next couple of pics are of a wood splitter that Dad built years ago, which was later converted into a machine used to press and bend the red-hot steel. It’s particularly useful when working with Damascus (multi-layered) steel…

In this photo Dad is using a pneumatic-powered hammer (which he also designed and constructed) to “draw out” the steel into the more general shape of a blade…

Eric Smith holds the “finished” blade blank, after it had cooled-off enough to touch. In ...

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Lisa and I had an unusual perspective from which to watch the returns of yesterday’s North Carolina primary election: since I’ve been treasurer for Eric H. Smith’s campaign for statewide Superintendent of Public Instruction, we spent the evening at “campaign headquarters”. That being Eric’s house.

We had a very fun time! In addition to getting to play with Eric’s eighteen-month old son there was also good food courtesy of Eric’s wonderful wife Kelly. We had their high-def television tuned to one of the regional stations while Eric’s computer fed us constant returns from the North Carolina Board of Elections website.

When all was said and done, Eric came in 2nd in the Republican primary for Superintendent of Public Instruction, with 25% of the votes cast. Richard Morgan will go on to the general election in November with 51% of the votes.

So are we disappointed? If we were, I didn’t ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

My precinct is at Reidsville Middle School. I just returned from there. Here is a photograph that I took of my ballot in today’s North Carolina primary election. As you can see I cast my vote for Ron Paul for President… and it’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed having so clean a conscience in voting for a presidential candidate! None of that “hold my nose and pull the lever” here.

How many other people will be able to say that? Not nearly enough, probably.

I also voted for Eric H. Smith for statewide Superintendent of Public Instruction. But since I’m his campaign treasurer, y’all probably knew that was a given, too.

There may or may not have been other candidates and/or measures that I gave consideration toward. Parse that however you will.

On an ironic note, someone has told me that over at Free Republic there are many ...

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Ron Paul, Republican candidate for President, spoke at Carmichael Auditorium at UNC Chapel Hill yesterday afternoon at 3 o’clock. Also speaking on the program – having received Dr. Paul’s endorsements – were Eric Smith, who is running for North Carolina’s Superintendent of Public Instruction and B.J. Lawson, candidate for North Carolina’s 4th Congressional District. Since I am the treasurer for Eric’s campaign, and also ‘cuz I’ve always wanted to meet Ron Paul, I absolutely had to attend! 🙂

It was just as noon hit that I was leaving Reidsville, and on the way I stopped at the Barnes & Noble in Burlington to buy a copy of Dr. Paul’s new book The Revolution: A Manifesto, currently ranked #1 on Amazon. It was the only copy on the shelves and one of the associates told me that it had been “selling hard”. When I got to Chapel Hill ...

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I’m the treasurer for his campaign, but this is the first time that I’m getting to see this. In this video of his appearance at the Wake County Republican Convention a few weeks ago, Eric discusses why North Carolina parents should be fully liberated to send their children to the schools of their own choice – including private school and homeschooling – and he hits on one of the biggest problems facing this country and the one that politicians seem the least determined to address: illegal immigration.

Thanks to Katy’s Conservative Corner for providing this!

The North Carolina statewide primaries will be next week on May 6th. Eric is running on the Republican ballot....

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Longtime readers know already that I’m very hesitant to hand out endorsements of candidates. Someone running for office has to sincerely persuade me that he or she is the right man for the job.

In this case, that wasn’t a hard thing at all…

As of today, I’m announcing that The Knight Shift blog is officially endorsing Eric H. Smith in the race for Superintendent of Public Instruction for the state of North Carolina.

Smith is running as a Republican candidate in the North Carolina primary on May 6.

For disclosure’s sake, I am compelled to notify my readers that in addition to my support of Eric in this way, I am also the treasurer of the Smith For NC Kids campaign committee. That’s already been public record ever since Eric filed the paperwork to run. Eric offered me the position when he first considered “throwing his hat into the ...

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