Giving young actors a budget of a couple of million dollars and telling them to go make a movie is a lot like giving a four-year-old a pair of scissors and telling them to practice those naiscent running skills…the results are not gonna be pretty. Allowing some actors a budget to make the political equivalent of potty jokes (in one case, quite litterally) is just completely irresponsible.
David “I married Courtney Cox so you don’t have to” Arquette and his ex-Friends wife have created a little opus they call “The Tripper.” It’s a fun-loving story about some Really Earnest Hippies who encounter a derranged psychopath who likes to dress up like President Ronald Reagan, mimic his voice, use his one-liners…and chop people to death with an axe. Um…yeah.
Watching some bad movies, you think, “Wow…this musta seemed funny on paper…I wonder what happened.” Not this turkey. What I wonder is what movie exec lost his job for greenlighting this abomination. [Read more…] about Children with Toys.
I’ve always loved to read. It’s relaxing. I read a lot – mostly tech books, but I try to read some recreationally, both to relax and to expand my horizons. I was watching Glenn Beck on Headline News a couple of weeks ago, and he had author Andrew Klavan on, pitching his latest, Empire of Lies. Sounded interesting, so I filed it away to a slot on my list of “books I want to read.” This past week, I thought about the book, but had a hard time remembering the name or the author. It finally dawned on me that I could use Amazon’s “if you like this book you might also like” feature to find it. Sure enough, I was able to remember the general look of the cover. I’m not always into instant gratification, but for some reason, I really wanted to read this, and I had some time on my hands, so… 
I am sorry to report that 
Just got back from my annual sojourn to the upper portion of the Texas Panhandle, for a dove hunt. Now, I’m not a big hunter, mind you. It’s something that I like, but I’ve never really had the opportunity, I guess, to do a lot of it. I think I’ve been hunting, oh, maybe four or five times in my life. But this time was special. I had the opportunity to go hunting with a bunch of guys from my church, including the Vicar of our church and one of our Bishops. (If you’re curious, I bagged four doves…well…really 3 1/2, as with one I shared with one of the other hunters, as we shot it at the same time.) The experience left me tired, but also relaxed and happy. While (most of) the men of the church went a-hunting, the women of the church stayed home, and had a pool party. On the way home I pondered why men like hunting, and (most) women do not. 
In the world in which we live, it’s actually pretty easy to forget that nature trumps technology. For all our computers, machines, and other man-made paraphernalia, we still can’t control Mother Nature to any great extent. (Which, of course, is one of the things that makes me a hard-core skeptic over the man-made global warming thing – but that’s a topic for another time.)