Journey, Day Three

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story?

The release of Rogue One has caused a sharp rift through the Star Wars fans, certainly through the small community of Star Wars fans with whom I am most directly connected. For some, this is one of the best Star Wars films ever, in the ranks with the original trilogy (or at least very close to it), and for others it was sort of a boring mess. Thus, to an even greater extent than The Force Awakens about a year ago, this film has provoked reactions from various fans that are stark and clashing. I find this fascinating. Star Wars is such a cultural touchstone for my generation that it has become a sort of universal connection -- you can always count on meeting people who like Star Wars, who are even enthusiastic about it, and being able to bond over that shared love. It’s a passion that has linked me to countless other men and women, and helped me form friendships with strangers by providing common ground. For all these decades we fans were in such agreement that Star Wars i...

The Only Thing We Have to Fear...

It's October, which means not only do I get to start dipping into my nifty fall wardrobe but also that Halloween is upon us. I think its great that we devote specific holidays to various basic emotions of the human psyche. Halloween = fear, Valentine's day = love, Thanksgiving = gratitude, St. Patrick's Day = envy, and Christmas = greed. We're just missing wrath, lust, pride, sloth, gluttony, and inadequecy. Clearly, more holidays are necessary. But that's a subject for another day. We don't want to give Halloween less than its due. Because seriously, how cool is Halloween? Its way off the scale on the cool-o-meter. When else can you see even the most pious and sensible people indulging in a little of the supernatural and occult by dressing up their children as vampires, witches, or ghosts? Well, that's how it was back in my day anyway (which was soooooo long ago), but today kids dress up as Jedi, princesses, Harry Potter, or Spiderman. They are totally miss...

God Bless Us, Every One

Call me a Scrooge, but I've found that the last couple of years Christmas just hasn't carried the same sense of wonder and excitement it once did. When I was a kid, I was ready to pee my pants every day in December just thinking about the twenty-fifth, which crept closer so slowly that the month was always filled with blissfully tortuous anticipation. The sense of suspense, the agony of not knowing what the fantastically wrapped boxes contained, was only heightened by the lights, the music, the snow, and everything you knew meant it was Christmas time. Back then, my heart's desires cost about twenty bucks and, tragically, seemed both completely unobtainable and the key to my whole life's happiness. This was the season, then, when miracles of a very practical kind could happen; objects only admired on the shelf, or at a friend's, or in some abstract sense of obsession could literally become my own and wind up, eventually, in pieces somewhere in my closet. I like to c...

Deranged Ramblings

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