Notes from a bibliophile

My dad was a huge sci-fi fan. Isaac Asimov was his favorite author. We saw every iteration of Star Wars that hit the theatre. I can't describe how amazing it was to see A New Hope on the big screen for the first time. Even the times Lucas fiddled with it don't bother me. Nothing will ever dampen your first love. We also loved Star Trek . I honestly never thought of them as belonging to two separate camps. They were just two stories I loved, two sides of the same geeky coin. I know the arguments that one is science based and the other is more faith based, for lack of a better term. People have put these two works of entertainment up as icons in the ever-going battle between science and religion. If that's so, perhaps I am of a third group, a group that doesn't find science and religion so incompatible. Maybe I'm a minority. My dad and I would gather around the TV set to watch the re-runs every week. It was one of the few fond memories I have with my dad. A lull...

A new month is just around the corner. Soon leaves will be falling along with the temperatures. Pumpkin spice everything is already on the menus. And Halloween candy is already on the shelves. With the fall comes a whole slew of films that I'm itching to see. Here's what's coming out in September that I'll try to catch eventually. On September 15th, Netflix has a series called American Vandal . It's a parody of the investigative/true crime television drama. It takes place in a high school where someone goes through the parking lot drawing dicks on everyone's car. It's sort of Making A Murderer but with penises. It looks juvenile and hilarious as hell. Also on Netflix September 15th is the Angelina Jolie directed First They Killed My Father . This feature length film is based on a memoir about a young girl living in Cambodia in 1975 during the rise of the Khmer Rouge. It might be difficult to watch, since these are children, but it's also something t...

In the continuing quest to break myself out of my reading funk, I found this graphic novel on the shelves at my local library. Being a small branch it doesn't have a lot to offer. Mostly I have to know what I'm looking for and then request it from another branch. I know libraries need to purge occasionally, but it would be nice if they wouldn't purge the first volumes of series. However, maybe it makes it possible to have these standalone novels, so like with everything in life, compromise is the key. This is the story of a young boy. When he was born he was sickly, but his dad was a doctor. Apparently at the time, the medical community thought that x-rays were some sort of cure-all for many diseases, so dad treated his son in what was, at the time, the proscribed treatment. No one knew the consequences. Years later he suddenly develops a growth on his neck. They leave it for years, thinking it's just a cyst and that it would go away. Eventually he underwent two surge...

I have been a Netflix subscriber for many years, and honestly I'm really impressed with the quality of their originals. I've become a fan of Grace and Frankie, House of Cards, The Ranch, Travelers, The OA, Stranger Things, and probably some others I've forgotten. So when I get an alert that they're releasing a new original, my ears perk up a bit. It could still be crap, but I'll at least give it the benefit of the doubt. They just released a feature-length original called What Happened to Monday. It begins by preying on a lot of fears. Overpopulation produces a worldwide food shortage. Switching to GMOs helps alleviate that shortage, but has the unexpected side effect of boosting fertility, which again, puts a stress on the food supply. To counterbalance this, the government enacts a strict one child policy. Any family with more than one child has to give up the extra so that they can be put into cryosleep, suspended animation until the time comes when they are ab...

This one you may not have heard of. Sports Night was a dramedy set in a Sports Center-like setting. The anchormen were played by Josh Charles and Peter Krause. The ensemble also starred Felicity Huffman, Robert Guillaume, Joshua Malina, and later, William H. Macy. It was written by Aaron Sorkin. How could it possibly go wrong? The show was about the relationships between the on-air talent and the production crew. There was the old will-they-or-won't-they trope between Casey McCall (Krause) and Dana Whitaker (Huffman). Casey and Dan Rydell (Charles) had been partners for a long time, and the two actors played off each other brilliantly. In typical Sorkin style, the dialogue was rapid-fire and sometimes overlapping, and incredibly smart and witty. The conferences that included some of the supporting cast generally gave everyone a chance to shine, not just the leads. But as delightful as it was, it was a little odd. The feel of the show is more sitcom than drama, which struck a st...

I'd like to tell you a little about this graphic novel. I'd like to, but I can't, because I have no freaking idea what I just read. It starts with a butterfly and a bunny. The bunny gets shot, and it's skeleton continues on through the comic telling a story to its friend the butterfly. And that's not the weird part. There are multiple things going on and I'm not sure how they all fit together. Death has a daughter with a man named Mason's wife. The daughter, Deathface Ginny, becomes the embodiment of vengeance. For some reason Death wants his daughter to come home so he keeps sending someone named Alice to get her. I'm not totally sure who Alice is. Alice is constantly defeated and returns to Death as a swarm of butterflies. There's a bunch of people protecting a girl who was apparently pulled out of a river of blood in hell. I think she's supposed to be the new embodiment of Death. I don't know. It's all very artsy. I'm ok with a...

I am such a pushover for mythology. Just mention it in relation to a book and you immediately have my interest. So when I read about the comic series The Wicked + the Divine, I was instantly curious. Luckily my local library had the first four volumes.  The premise of this comic is that the gods return to earth every 90 years as teens. They are the pop stars of the era in which they are incarnate, but within two years of their revealing, they are dead. I'm not entirely sure why they incarnate in this cyclical fashion; I think it's explained in there somewhere, but I've slept since then, so I can't remember. It's hardly the point of the story. In the beginning, we meet Lucifer, Amaterasu, Inanna, and Sekhmet. There's also Laura Wilson, a teen obsessed with the gods, and Cassandra, a reporter who's out to prove the gods are fakes, that they've always simply been a marketing ploy. While doing an interview, the group are attacked by some snipers and Lucif...

While I was writing for the website, I ran an idea past them that I had been thinking about doing here. It was a series of articles about some of my favorite TV shows - why I liked them, what they meant to me, why I thought others would like them. I had hoped that some of the other writers might join in and write about some of their favorite shows, but it didn't work out that way. I ended up writing four articles. One, unfortunately, has been lost to the ether, but hey, I can fix that. So I'm going to eventually repost those articles here, where I had originally intended them to be. After all, this blog is me on a tablet (or PC or laptop) and these shows tell more about me, so they belong here. But first, I'm going to talk about probably my all-time favorite TV show, The Twilight Zone . Yeah, it's *super* old. Sometimes it looks a little cheesy. Some of the stories are dated, although with our current climate, all the ones about nuclear war might not seem so far off t...

I've been on more of a movie kick than a book kick lately. There's a lot of stuff coming out in the next  five months that I'm really looking forward to, so I want to share those with you. First, I'd love to see The Hitman's Bodyguard   (this link is to the red band trailer so don't watch with the kiddos or the boss around). Ryan Reynolds has gotten to be such a big name in Hollywood, and I'm so happy for him. I remember watching him in Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place. I would have never expected him to get this big. Not that he wasn't good, you just never know what to expect, you know; who's going to get the breaks. This looks like it'll be pretty funny with enough action to keep it exciting. I'm also really interested in seeing the film Detroit . I don't know anything about the subject matter that the film is based on. It's slightly ahead of my time, so it's nothing I would have been aware of. It looks like an era of our...

I work two jobs - a 9-5 Monday through Friday and a part-time on the weekend. They have unfortunately cut a lot of hours at my weekend job, so much so that I got this past weekend off. Instead, I caught a matinee of The Dark Tower . I am not a fan of Stephen King books. For one, I'm not a big fan of horror, either in books or on film. Thrillers I can handle - Hitchcock is one of my favorite directors. But horror films these days seem more about jumping out and scaring the bejesus out of you. And anything with a doll or ventriloquist dummy is a solid "Oh, HELL NO!" I don't know what it is about King's books but they just don't do it for me. I read The Green Mile (not bad) and one of his short stories - I think it was from Night Shift - during a psychology class in high school (there was a lot of not paying attention those last two years). In small doses, I can handle him, but his larger works are just too gargantuan. I could read a lot in the same time it ...