Beaten, Seared, and Sauced

Jonathan Dixon is an old man of 38 when he decides that he is tired of wandering aimlessly through life.  The path before him has become clear.  He wants to be a Chef and the best way to get there runs through the Culinary Institute of America. For the most part, the CIA is a place for the honing of skills and the refining of talents. Those that sign up without any practical experience in a working kitchen find it all a bit overwhelming.  Being a Professional Chef is not for everyone. Beaten, Seared, and Sauced: On Becoming a Chef…

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Exit Through The Gift Shop

Imagine that you are a struggling artist-or worse yet, a struggling street artist.  Not only is your art generally not worth much, but it is a crime to make it and someone doing Community Service will be along shorty to cover it up.  But all is not that bad, a handful of street artists are being taken seriously, chief among them a man known as Banksy. Exit Through The Gift Shop is the story of a handful of graffiti artists who have taken the art of defacing private and public property to a new level.  Not content with plain old…

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Double Fantasy by John Lennon and Yoko Ono

While doing a bit of ritual cleaning I came across a stack of old LPs.  Double Fantasy was among them.  This is one of a handful of albums I bought new when it came out.  I was never as big a music fan as I could have been.  Oh, I love music, but I tend to love it after it’s been around for a while.  For example, I was really into the Beatles when John Lennon was murdered. Like most Beatles fans, I was never very fond of Yoko Ono.  As far as his Asian women went, I always thought…

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How To Write a Post Apocalyptic Story

Apocalyptic fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction that is concerned with the end of civilization either through nuclear war, plague, or some other general disaster. Post-apocalyptic fiction is set in a world or civilization after such a disaster. The time frame may be immediately after the catastrophe, focusing on the travails or psychology of survivors, or considerably later, often including the theme that the existence of pre-catastrophe civilization has been forgotten (or mythologized). –Wikipedia You start with one Main Character who has either lost everyone and everything they care about, or who soon will lose everyone and everything they…

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Eureka-The Statue is Made of Bronze!

The Syfy Channel has a handful of first run series, the best of which at the moment is Eureka.  This is the story of a small town of super geniuses who didn’t want to live in Area 51 and the poor sap who ends up being the town’s Sheriff.   The punchline of almost every episode of Eureka is that the idiot Sheriff is the only one to see the obvious solution to whatever earth ending problem the super geniuses have created that week. The new season opens up with a collection of Previously on Eureka clips, the most interesting…

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