I am not allowed to be biased in my opinions about Middle-earth. That doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions. Of course I do. It means that every time I say something about J.R.R. Tolkien or Middle-earth, someone comes out of the woodwork and challenges me. During the Ages of the Great Debates everyone challenged me. You have to defend everything you say in an environment like that. …
Everyone knows that nothing in movies happens the way things do in real life. Life is boring and mundane and movies are magical. The whole point of movies is to help us escape from the everyday doldrums. Yada yada yada.
The other side of that coin is that movies often fail to represent what real life is like. For example, suppose you make a movie about a 30-hour hike through enemy-held territory when the actors’ platoon or company engages in three short firefights. …
If you have ever lived in Miami Beach you probably have heard of the Byron Carlyle twin cinemas. The theatre I remember officially closed in 2002 according to some sources, or sometime in the 1990s according to others. And I am not sure I remember just one theater or two theaters. The good news for the people of the Beach is that the building is a cinema once again, showing a mix of independent, art, and first run pop films.…
As a Web marketer you eventually find yourself talking about “evergreen content” with people. Maybe you are giving a presentation, writing a tutorial, in a meeting with a business decision-maker, or perhaps just passing time in a bar with your Web marketing friends. You cannot exist in Web marketing today without someone mentioning these words to you. In fact, evergreen content is one of those objectionable goals that marketers dangle in front of prospects, clients, and business leaders.…
For reasons that will never be clear to me I found myself browsing a thread on Quora where people offered advice on how to spot “assholes” when interviewing job candidates. I only ever hired one person I would have described with that word and we not only made an offer, that was the only person who fit the criteria I had been handed by my boss for finding “the right candidate”. …
The legendary prize money for solving Fermat’s Last Theorem has already been handed over to Andrew Wiles, who used esoteric mathematics that had not been developed in Pierre de Fermat’s time to prove that the old French man really was on to something when he made a little margin note in his copy of a book on Diophantine Equations.
A Diophantine Equation is anything in the format of Xn + Yn = Zn. …
I grew up on the road. My family moved a lot when I was a kid so there is no town that I can really call my “home town”. But there is one town where I lived more than once. I was not always happy to live there. In fact, I was probably never happy when I lived there. I had friends and I had friends in other cities, other states.…
We live in strange times. As I casually follow the latest economic news I cannot help but think about the 1970s. When OAPEC imposed the Arab oil embargo upon the United States and Western Europe to punish us for helping Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War a series of near-catastrophic economic events ensued. The US economy was weakened by the incredible rise in the price of oil, which shocked the economy into a period of high inflation and recession. …
I wish I could say I had lots of pictures to share but I managed to accidentally delete about half the pictures I took at HallowCon. Two attempts to root my Galaxy S6 failed (different software each time) so I think those pictures are gone forever. Meanwhile, Google, Android did not delete the pictures we wanted to delete. You still have some awful bugs in your mobile operating system.…
When Microsoft announced free upgrades to Windows 10 I was kind of glad the day of paying for upgrades to faulty operating systems was over. I have never had much faith in Microsoft’s ability to improve anything and they have so far fulfilled my expectations since DOS 2.0. But I will grant them some leeway because it’s not easy to write an operating system that allows hundreds of millions of very differently configured machines to work, and Microsoft managed to make them mostly work for the past few decades.…
So he likes you and you know he likes you and yet when you walk over to say “hi” to him or are introduced, he won’t shake your hand. Why is that? I guess because I have written articles on body language someone (or several someones) have been searching this site for an answer to the question “why do men attracted to a woman refuse to share hands with her?”…
UPDATE: Miss Nancy passed away on July 28, 2015. Her obituary is here. My thoughts and best wishes go out to her friends and loved ones, who will surely miss her. Thank you for contacting me with the sad news.
I fell in love four or five times in the 1960s. My first, most passionate love was with an older woman, Leslie Boullion, who was in the second grade.…
