About six months ago I joined the rest of the world and got a Smartphone. In December a hit and run driver slammed into my 2006 Grand Caravan. It was a minor wreck. I called the police and when I was done, I drove home. But that was it for the van. A car that had taken me all over the country. Totalled…as the insurance company that wrote me a check for six hundred dollars called it. Now my world is altered. I have things to think about. Choices to make. I decide that I need a newer car and…
Author: Jon Herrera
Writer, Photographer, Blogger.
Before I Fall
Image Groundhog Day, only you hate everyone. spoilers Before I Fall is the story of five total and complete losers, four psycho bitch mean girls and one pathetic emo girl. This is a time loop story, that like Groundhog Day, resets as each day begins again. Our ‘hero’ is one of the mean girls, a total bitch to everyone she knows. Her big plan for the day is to have sex with her boyfriend and end her time as a virgin. We follow her as she is mean to her sister, her mother, her father, and everyone else who happens…
Norse Mythology – Neil Gaiman
Thor is a bit dim. Neil Gaiman is a great writer and a great reader. I love listening to his audio-books. Norse Mythology is a collection of tales from the legends of Odin, Thor, Loki, and countless lessor gods, giants, monsters, and whatnots. These are odd stories. Our Heroes are, for the most part, not nice people, not good people, and shocking very much like normal people. They are often hungry, they worry about growing old and dying, they are petty and jealous, and they are not to be trusted. But Neil doesn’t give them the bloody and gory treatment.…
Alien Covenant
For people who thought Prometheus made too much damned sense. spoilers Alien was a great horror movie. Aliens was a great action movie. The next three movies just sucked. Alien Covenant follows proudly in the tradition of Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, and Prometheus. It’s not so much that Alien Covenant sucked, as it just tells the same boring story as Prometheus. A group of Red Shirts land on a planet and die stupid and meaningless deaths. Oh yeah, and David is back and he’s still a bad guy. The setup is a colony ship, the Covenant, meets with an unfortunate…
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
“We’re all one head injury away from being someone else.” -quote from a book about the brain I have forget all of but this line. I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about thirty years ago. At about the same time I read If You Meet The Buddha On the Road Kill Him. Another very interesting book. I remember enjoying Zen and it’s tale of a madman traveling around the Northwest with his son riding along behind him on his trusty motorcycle. I mainly remembered a scene near the start of the book about a clumsy mechanic…
The Collapsing Empire
The Collapsing Empire tells the story of a handful of people living in the far flung future. Humans are scattered around the galaxy or the universe or something. Lots of random settlements, two of which we see, are connected by a McGuffin bit of sci-fi called The Flow. This is much like a Stargate system or a series of Portkeys or Jump Gates or a Warp Field or any other made up means of transport over vast distances you have ever seen. Like these other constructs, the tech doesn’t really matter. So it’s kind of odd when John puts a…
The Chemist
Stephanie Meyer writes long books. The Chemist is a nice cosy 530 pages long. Plenty of time to get attached to three main characters and a handful of supporting players. We open up with our hero talking about how much she loves the Bourne novels…except they aren’t very realistic. And thus we enbark on a Jason Bourne novel starring a woman instead of a man. I liked The Chemist except for one thing. Our hero tortures and occasionally murders people. Nothing wrong with that…she maintains she’s a good person and like Arnold in True Lies…she only tortured bad people. It’s…
The Founder
Michael Keaton plays Ray Kroc, a failure in his fifties who still has dreams of hitting it big. We open up with Ray giving a sales pitch for a shake machine. We then watch as everyone he pitches slams the door in his face. Then he hears about a small hamburger stand that ordered six of the shake machines. This leads him to McDonald’s, a small, but very well run restaurant in California. Ray is amazed by the crowds and the speed of food delivery. The McDonald brothers take Ray on a tour and show him exactly how they run…
Back of the House
Scott Haas hangs around chef Tony Maws restuarant Craigie on Main and watches the great chef and his team work. Tony is a chef and an asshole-of course, that’s a bit redundant. Anyone who has watched Hell’s Kitchen is familiar with the foul mouthed antics of Gordon Rasmey and one of my personal heroes for lo these many years has been Anthony Bourdian. Neither man seems to suffer fools easily. So Tony is the self centered, I’m Right, You’re Wrong demi-god of his tiny little world. There are times when Scott shows one of the revolving cast of line cooks…
Colony
In 1992 there was a silly little movie called The Gun in Betty Lou’s Handbag. It was a bit of fluff about a librarian that gets into trouble. Somewhere near the end there is a scene of the bad guy having dinner with a man and his wife. He offers the wife a bit of food on the end of a knife. She take the food into her mouth nervously-and then the bad guy scrapes the blade across her teeth and slices through her cheek. This was one of the most shocking bits of violence I have ever seen in…