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This past Friday evening saw musical parody genius, pop culture icon and now bestselling author “Weird Al” Yankovic come to Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh, North Carolina as part of his seven-city book-signing tour promoting his just-released children’s tome My New Teacher and Me!…

"Weird Al" Yankovic, Al Yankovic, My New Teacher and Me!, Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh, North Carolina, signing

My New Teacher and Me! is the follow-up to Weird Al’s acclaimed 2011 children’s book When I Grow Up (available as a standard book and as a newfangled iOS app for your iPad!).

I arrived at the store about three hours before the signing (incidentally, Quail Ridge Books is a really nice independent bookstore: I’m gonna make it a habit of swinging by there any time I’m in the Raleigh area) and bought a few copies to get signed.  I wound up reading My New Teacher and Me! in the interim and found it to be a delightful and well-crafted (and funny...

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I’m writing this on Friday afternoon.  It was on Wednesday night that Kristen, Chad, Marissa and I saw “Weird Al” Yankovic and his band in concert as part of his Alpocalypse 2013 tour!  I’m still coming down from the high and I think everyone else is too (especially Marissa who was bouncing off the walls so hard during class at school yesterday that she reportedly had to be sedated with Valium).  And after seeing Al live for the seventh time I have to say: this was easily the best show I’ve seen him perform yet!  Weird Al and his band were positivalutely ablaze with energy and sheer fun.  They were electrified and enthused as I’ve never seen any performers in a live concert!  This is a man who obviously loves his work and that comes across very well.  I’ve also never seen an audience so “into it” as they ...

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Just a friendly reminder that if you want to meet the blogger/proprietor of The Knight Shift in person and you’re going to be in the Raleigh/Durham today, that you’re in luck!

I will be at Artspace, located at 201 East Davie St in Raleigh at 5:45 p.m. this afternoon during the filmSPARK track of SPARKcon: a grassroots-organized four-day festival celebrating individual creativity around the Triangle area and throughout North Carolina. This will be the fourth annual event and this year SPARKcon will be held September 17-20. I’ll be speaking about the bizarre “copyright infringement” situation that happened between Yours Truly and Viacom on YouTube two years ago.

Look! Event announcement!

The Dude Who Took Down Viacom: One Filmmaker’s Story
EVENT LOCATION
Artspace

EVENT DESCRIPTION
Meet North Carolina filmmaker Chris Knight, a.k.a. “The Dude Who Took Down Viacom”. In 2006, Knight made a campaign advertisement to help promote his running

...
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That commercial is going to haunt me for the rest of my life, isn’t it? 😛

SPARKcon is a grassroots-organized four-day festival in Raleigh celebrating individual creativity around the Triangle area and throughout North Carolina. This will be the fourth annual event and this year SPARKcon will be held September 17-20. And I’ve been invited to speak that Friday night about the very crazy situation that happened between Yours Truly and Viacom two years ago.

Look! Event announcement!

The Dude Who Took Down Viacom: One Filmmaker’s Story
EVENT LOCATION
Artspace

EVENT DESCRIPTION
Meet North Carolina filmmaker Chris Knight, a.k.a. “The Dude Who Took Down Viacom”. In 2006, Knight made a campaign advertisement to help promote his running for a seat on Rockingham County’s Board of Education. Knight did not win a seat on the board, but he did win some internet and media fame as his commercial was featured in

...
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What? An orchestra playing a concert of music from a wide variety of video games? That’s exactly what PLAY! A Video Game Symphony is.

And it’s coming to the Raleigh/Durham/Cary area this Saturday, July 11th, courtesy of the North Carolina Symphony and the Concert Singers of Cary. The performance will be at the Koka Booth Amphitheater.

Here’s the e-mail that I received this afternoon from Lauren Trojan:

Hi Chris,

I read your recent post about the “Unknown Lifeform in North Carolina Sewer,” and thought you might be interested in another never-before-seen event in Raleigh. For the first time, Play! A Video Game Symphony will be presented by the North Carolina Symphony at Koka Booth Amphitheatre on Saturday, July 11, 2009. Since this is a non-traditional Symphony concert and would be of interest to your blog following, I hope you will consider mentioning the event on your blog.

PLAY! is a

...
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Sounds like a bad Fifties B-movie, doesn’t it?

But in reality, something slimy and ominous is lurking in the sluiceways of the capital of North Carolina.

Behold the horror that was recently discovered by a maintenance “snake camera”…

This video has gone viral bigtime in the past day or so, with some speculating that there might be an alien organism breeding beneath the streets of Raleigh. Personally, I thought it looked a lot like something out of the video game Dead Space, or maybe the insides of that giant worm from Gears of War 2.

But as it turns out, it’s actually a colony of tubifex worms, which are said to be common in sewers but rarely documented in such up-close detail.

Still looks pretty dang deees-gusting though 🙂

(Thanks to Lex Alexander for the fascinating find!)...

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A trusted source in the Raleigh/Durham area here in North Carolina called to let me know that the price of regular gasoline there is now $4.89, with premium at more than five bucks and a lot of stations limiting purchases to ten gallons. It’s also been reported that at many stations the cars are lined up to the streets.

Also, I’m now hearing that this now how gas is going for this afternoon in Greensboro (about a half-hour south of where we are) and that some stations have already run out of the precious juice.

(If you’re one of this blog’s many foreign readers, this is more or less related to Hurricane Ike in the Gulf of Mexico, although how much of this is serious distribution shortage and how much of this comes from speculators going nutzoid on the oil markets, is anyone’s guess.)

I hope this doesn’t turn into ...

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“Trees will tap dance, elephants will ride in the Indianapolis 500, and Orson Wells will skip breakfast, lunch, and dinner before State finds a way to beat Houston.”

— Dave Kindred
writer for The Washington Post
April 4th, 1983

It became, and remains to this day, the defining sports moment of the modern era.

It was twenty-five years ago tonight, on April 4th, 1983, that North Carolina State won the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship, in what has become regarded by many as the single greatest basketball game ever played and one of the biggest upsets in the history of athletics.

It also produced some of the most memorable sports images to be ever televised or photographed.

What can be said about that game that hasn’t already over a quarter-century? Nobody was expecting the Wolfpack of NC State to take down Houston. Guy Lewis’s Cougars – dubbed “Phi Slamma ...

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So the past 72 hours here have been… interesting. I’ll be able to talk about it more in the next couple of days. Just wanna say for the record though, that I’ve been a busy dude toward the end of this past week. And I’m about to head out to create some more mischief.

But before I do, I wanna do a bit of a write-up about what happened yesterday, ‘cuz it was full of some cool stuff that you’ve probably still got time to check out if you like.

Yesterday morning, my sister Anita arrived around 9:30. Lisa got in Anita’s RAV4 and I followed in my new Camry and we headed out to Raleigh, to see The Polar Express in 3-D on the IMAX screen there (or as I call it, “The Big-Ass Screen”).

This was something that Lisa had been wanting to see especially, so I got ...

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Two stories – both from here in North Carolina – that caught my attention this morning, that illustrate the frustration that I have so often with some who profess to share my faith in Christ…

The first has to do with Good News Independent Baptist Church in Raleigh: its pastor has placed this sign out in front of the church. I could say something about the horrible grammar and spelling (“Christain”?) but that’s not the point. What is troubling is that Rev. Gary Murrell is being a very poor witness for Christ in doing this. Does he seriously believe that this sign is going to convince any Muslim to give up his or her religion and embrace Christianity? Because he’s gravely mistaken if he does. We are supposed to be convincing people of Christ with our love toward them, and not militant hostility. When Murrell does this, he’s really ...

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