I was in Fort Leavenworth, near Kansas City. I’d been there three or four times before, shooting the yearbook portraits for the Command and General Staff College. It was a good account. We all made money, the people at the Fort were all nice, and it’s beautiful in the area at this time of year. The Wife and I would often take a weekend and go to the KC Ren Faire, or eat at one of the many great barbecue joints the city is famed for. Our favorite spot was KC Masterpieces, which sadly is no more. This was a…
Deadnaming
Deadnaming is the practice of calling someone by a name they no longer go by. A common trivia question might be who is Marion Morrison or who is Reginald Dwight? Stage names like John Wayne and Elton John are common in the entertainment world. And yet, when Prince died and several people in the media announced that ‘Prince Nelson’ had died, I found this totally offensive. Prince is Prince, full stop. If Price couldn’t keep from being deadnamed, what do you really think your chances are? The media likes to deadname people, because using aliases is usually the practice of…
BlackKklansman
Set in the early 1970s, but very much about right now, BlacKkKlansman tells the story of a black man who becomes a cop in a time when black men were not cops. This is not a docudrama. This is a film inspired by real events, but not based on them. Spike Lee is plainly preaching to the choir. Klansmen are vile and evil mouth breathers who are clearly incapable of rational thought. Black people, the only group shown to suffer from the klan’s attentions, are uniformly beautiful. The men are well spoken and well dressed. The women have perfectly spherical…
The Outcasts of Time By Ian Mortimer
The Outcasts of Time starts off in the The Reign of King Edward III. Our heroes speak of events by the year of the King’s rule, since the way we count years had not yet been invented. We follow two brothers as they wander around a Plague infected world. Death is all around them. Bodies lay where they have fallen in the street, people hang themselves in despair, great pits are filled with dead bodies. In short order, the brothers have the Plague themselves and death is nigh. Then our hero hears a voice. It tells him to go to…
A Quiet Place
We start off with a black screen that says Day 89. A family of five is quietly sorting through the contents of an abandoned pharmacy in standard post apocalyptic fashion. We see that one girl has a cochlear implant. There is a small boy who walks quickly through the store, searching for toys. An older sister followers him and stops him from making noise. The boy finds an electronic toy, the kind with flashing lights and beeping noises. His father panics and his eyes go wide. He gets the toy from the child before it can make any noise and…
The Outsider by Stephen King
The Outsider tells the story of a small town Sheriff trying to solve an impossible murder. The problem is that he knows who the killer is, only the killer has an airtight alibi. The first part of the book spends a lot of time with the man arrested and the man who arrested him. Things are not as clear cut as they at first appear. The monster the Sheriff has to deal with is not the normal human variety, but something different. There is death and violence and things that go bump in the night. Like all Stephen King books,…
Toxic Fans
Or as they used to be known, ‘fans.’ I was a bit shocked a few years back when the creators of Breaking Bad said that fans such as myself, ones that wanted Walter White to ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after, were toxic people who didn’t get what they were saying. No, we got it all too much. Walter was the hero of the show and we were willing to follow that hero wherever he went and cheer him on in whatever he did. Yeah, he was a bad guy, but so was Spike in Buffy…
Calypso by David Sedaris
Listening to David Sedaris’s Calypso a few days after Anthony Bourdain’s suicide is a bit jarring. David talks about his sister’s suicide with the same cold disinterest that he talks about everything else in this small collection of personal essays. His sister’s problems are on a par with bickering with his husband, wasting money on odd clothes in Japan, and picking up trash as he walks around the English countryside. This is nothing new, David has always been a narcissistic sociopath. His lack of empathy just seemed to stand out a little clearer for me this time around. I had…
Solo A Star Wars Story
Solo, a movie no one wanted made, telling a story no one wanted to hear. It could have been worse. It could have started with Han Solo being born in a dingy back room or in a dark alleyway. Instead, we start with a heist gone wrong. Han and his never before mentioned One True Love are stealing fuel, or something like fuel. This led to encounters with a lot of CGI. In fact, there is so much CGI in this film that I’m not entirely sure that there were any real people involved in the production at all. Lots…
Noir by Christoper Moore
I’m a fan of audiobooks, since I tend to do a lot of driving for work of one kind or another. So I got the audiobook version of Christopher Moore’s Noir. The reader, Johnny Heller, takes to the idea of a Noir novel with some gusto. He swings wildly from Edward G Robinson to JFK to FDR and once or twice meanders into Droopy the Dog and other cartoonish voices. For me, at least, a little of this goes a long way. I found myself lost more than once amid the voices that sounded a little too much alike a…