David Dubrow

Author

  • About Dave
    • Interviews
  • Dave’s Blog
  • Dave’s Fiction
    • The Armageddon Trilogy
      • The Blessed Man and the Witch
      • The Nephilim and the False Prophet
      • The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel
    • Dreadedin Chronicles: The Nameless City
    • Get the Greek: A Chrismukkah Tale
    • Beneath the Ziggurat
    • The Ultimate Guide to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse
  • Free Stories
    • Hold On
    • How to Fix a Broken World
    • The Armageddon Trilogy Character List and Glossary
  • Social
    • Twitter
    • Facebook
    • Google +
    • Amazon
    • Goodreads

Two Minute Movie Review: Wyrmwood

August 10, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

How many more zombie apocalypse movies do we need?

At least one more.  Wyrmwood is it.

Spoilers abound. Read at your own peril.

It’s fun, it’s loud, it’s gory, it’s funny, it’s violent.  The budget might be low, but you wouldn’t know it to watch the film.  The cast does a great job with what they’ve been given, and even the more mediocre performances were leavened by great lines.

The movie is not without its flaws, but they’re easily overlooked.  A big example is the roving experiment truck: if the zombie apocalypse just occurred, how did they get up and running so quickly?

Brooke was a frightening character from beginning to end: physically strong, mentally tough, clever.  The filmmakers were smart, however, by not making her a woman who acts like a man to survive.

Barry did fine; if you’re looking for a lot of character depth in a zombie apocalypse film, you’re likely going to be disappointed.  Still, he pulled off his role without flaw.

As is usually the case in films like this, the best, most interesting characters never survive; it’s how we are made to feel bad about their exit from the film.  Benny was a worthy comedic character, though his delivery at times seemed a little flat.  Frank elicited pathos just before his end, which worked.

The two most interesting concepts: zombies as petrol and Brooke’s ability to control zombies, were weird but somehow fit, probably because it’s Australia and we automatically assume that an Aussie film is going to have its own brand of strangeness.

Compare this movie to The Walking Dead, with its endless, heavy, humorless drumbeat of loss and despair and interpersonal conflict.  I’d rather watch a zombie apocalypse show like Wyrmwood that doesn’t take itself quite as seriously and includes some fantastical elements.

Four out of five stars.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Filed Under: australia, horror, horror movies, movie review, wyrmwood, zombie apocalypse, zombies

Movie Review: The Babadook

April 29, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

I’d read nothing but good things about The Babadook, so when it became available for Netflix streaming, I couldn’t wait to see it.  It had been hyped as a terrifying, low-budget horror story that apparently scared the hell out of William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist, so it had to be awesome.

It wasn’t awesome.  But it was really good.

This review will contain spoilers, so if you haven’t seen it yet, go see it before reading.

  • slasreveR eloR: A great strength of the film is that you weren’t ever sure who the true antagonist was until the end.  Samuel started out as the obvious antagonist, and everything Amelia did made her the victim of his mood swings until she wasn’t anymore.  Over the course of the film, her anguish made her the actor instead of the acted-upon.  It was only at the climax, when the Babadook manifested itself as an external expression of Amelia’s grief, that the antagonist could be defeated.
  • Samuel: Some of the earlier scares surrounding Samuel were blunted somewhat by his general unlikability.  The actor did an extraordinary job of portraying a disturbed child, a performance made even stronger by the film’s ending, when you finally begin to sympathize with him.  At the beginning of the film’s final act, when you weren’t sure if there actually was a Babadook or not, Samuel transformed effortlessly into the hero.
  • Amelia: One of the film’s more effective subtleties was that Amelia didn’t have an obvious mental condition to blame for the Babadook’s presence.  She was grieving and at loose ends with a difficult child, but who could blame her?  There was no one triggering event that manifested the Babadook; it just sat within her until it was time to come out.  Don’t forget, though, that she wrote The Babadook book, and even added pages to it until she cooked it on the grill.  Despite everything, she was (and probably still is) mentally ill.
  • F/X: The Babadook has been labeled a low-budget movie, but it didn’t look that way.  There was no CGI and very few actual sightings of the eponymous monster, which worked very well.  The filmmakers did a great job with the budget they had, and there was little reason for the audience to walk away from the film unsatisfied.
  • Whither the Babadook?: Samuel’s gadgets at the end seemed a little reminiscent of Home Alone, but they worked well enough to exorcise the Babadook from Amelia.  Allegorically speaking, I think that the film is telling us to try to make peace with our demons, but it’s a bit muddled.  If you can’t keep the Babadook down, how long will it stay in the basement, eating worms?  Can Amelia write a new ending for it, finally banishing the monster forever?

A bit long, a bit thematically muddled, but definitely worth watching.  Four out of five stars.

(I’m also looking forward to the sequels: The Baba Ghanoush, about an Arab family dealing with a childhood monster, The Gabagool, about possessed Italian cold cuts, and Baba Black Sheep Squadron, about WWII U.S. Marine pilots fighting off a clawed black monster.)

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Filed Under: babadook, depression, grief, horror, horror movies, movie review

Movie Review: Truth or Die

March 30, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Truth or Die is a movie that is extremely English insofar as the characters all have very stiff upper lips and, like an afternoon tea, there’s nothing in it to particularly discomfit or terrify you.

Which is unfortunate, because it’s supposed to be a horror film.

There are some interesting bits in it, including a fairly horrible death scene, but for the most part it’s pedestrian, boring, and not worth your time.  It suffers from the problem plaguing many horror films: bad things happening to unlikable people, so it’s hard to care about any of it.

  • The Bad Guy: I’m one of those people who almost always roots for the bad guy in movies.  Pleasantly, the best thing about Truth or Die was David Oakes’s portrayal of antagonist Justin, a psychopathic military veteran.  Creepy, physically strong without being infallible, he managed to bring both menace and a tiny bit of humanity into the role.  You want him to see his work done, you want him to win, but unfortunately, that didn’t happen, which was disappointing.  Someone like him shouldn’t have been vanquished the way he was, but the movie had to have a happy ending, of sorts. A shame, really.
  • Whodunit: That was a bit of a surprise, which made it enjoyable.  The problem was that the rationale for sending the postcard, while plausible, seemed very last minute.  The character gave no indication of feeling that way earlier in the film, which made it too sudden, too sloppy.
  • Stiff Upper Lips: Paul, Chris, Gemma, and Eleanor were all quite tough.  Paul’s gunshot wound didn’t seem to pain him as much as being kneecapped might a normal person, and the defiance all four seemed willing to give to Justin would have been admirable if it wasn’t so unbelievable.  None of them panicked.  They all found incredible steel inside of them when it was needed.  I didn’t buy it.
  • Femme Fatale: Eleanor proved to be at least as psychotic as Justin and twice as tough, which didn’t make sense outside of a writer or producer’s requirement to have a super-strong female character.  Didn’t like her, didn’t find her sexy, didn’t find her interesting, didn’t find her believable.
  • The End: The rationale behind Felix hanging himself was way too complicated.  Did they really need that much backstory, with corporate intrigue, blackmail, gay sex, and a bizarre family code of honor to uphold?  Especially when it’s all just spat out at the last five minutes?

Truth or Die gets two stars out of five.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Filed Under: david oakes, english, horror, horror movies, movie reviews, truth or die

Analysis: Event Horizon

March 9, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

On the heels of my analysis of Omen III: The Final Conflict, I have decided to write a little bit about another Sam Neill film: Event Horizon.

Despite it being 18 years old, the movie holds up well.  It uses gore, shocks, and a genuinely disturbing idea to produce a combination of good science fiction and great horror.  The defining theme of the film is perception, specifically sight, and uses a gothic palette to paint a gloomy, almost steampunk aesthetic.

What Philip Eisner the screenwriter didn’t count on was the direction modern culture took between 1997 and 2015, focusing inward rather than outward.  After the credits, the first words we see on the screen are: “2015 – First permanent colony established on Moon.”  We are nowhere near that now, and not likely to be there within the next several decades.  The drive toward risk and exploration is gone, unfortunately, and can only be found among a few wealthy entrepreneurs.  While this takes us out of the film a bit, it’s a temporary departure: we’re immediately thrown into Dr. Weir’s nightmare of the Event Horizon afterward.  Grim, derelict, with a floating, eyeless corpse.  The camera takes us through the corpse’s screaming mouth and into Weir’s eye.  In fact, it’s the first we see of Weir: an extreme close-up of his eye.

The Event Horizon itself has become possessed by Hell, literally, and everything we see of it shows how it’s been poisoned.  The viscera splattered about the interior from the bizarre orgy captured in bits and pieces by the ship’s log is disturbing, more so because nobody from the Lewis and Clark  bothers to clean it up or even mentions it.  From the ship’s cruciform shape to its head-shaped bridge, we’re meant to know that the Event Horizon’s possession represents the fall of both God and Man.

Spiked, opening and closing like a massive, fearsome eye, the heart of the Event Horizon is the gravity drive, a device that folds space.  It’s only accessible through a long hallway rigged with explosives and a shorter corridor that spins in a disorienting fashion.  Hell, literal Hell is in that gravity drive, waiting to be released.  From the spikes inside the chamber to the bizarre engraving on the drive itself, there’s no mistaking that this thing is evil incarnate, which is one of the film’s weaknesses: didn’t anyone take a look at this thing during the architecture phase of the FTL project and go, “Yeah, that’s messed up.”?  Are the humans of the future that blase?  The crew of the Lewis and Clark was appropriately disquieted, at least.

Most effectively, the film’s theme, sight, puts the viewer in the role of an honorary crewmember of the Lewis and Clark.  After all, what do you do with a movie except watch it?  The villains all had their eyes ripped out, from the doomed captain of the Event Horizon to Weir, who blinded himself.   Weir’s wife Claire, when we see her outside of flashbacks, is also missing her eyes.  Justin, who had been briefly swallowed up by the Hell beyond the gate, made an unsuccessful suicide attempt by jettisoning out into space without a suit and lost his eyes as a result (the blood squirting from his face in zero-gravity).  Peters falls to her death as a result of following a ghost that only she could see; her own vision killed her.  When Miller asks Weir, “What happened to your eyes, doctor?” Weir responds, “Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see.”  And at the end, when the possessed Weir has Miller at his mercy, he shows Miller horrible visions of grotesque brutality, all the while asking him, “Do you see?  Do you see?”  Perception, in Event Horizon, is reality.  The possessed ship can make you see what it wants you to, and when it’s finished with you, it takes away your eyes so that you’ll see nothing else except the appalling torment it has in store.

Obviously, the film isn’t perfect.  The Lewis and Clark suffers from the unimaginatively grungy look that many seem to think future spacecraft will invariably possess, and the characters play to type without developing in any way, shape, or form.  Nevertheless, it’s a great way to spend 96 minutes, and it’s currently available on Netflix.  Watch it (again).

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Filed Under: demons, event horizon, hell, horror, horror movies, possession, sam neill, science fiction, seeing, sight, vision

Reminiscence and Analysis: Omen III

March 4, 2015 by David Dubrow 4 Comments

I must’ve been twelve or thirteen when I first saw Omen III: The Final Conflict.  I watched it with my older brother (the same brother with whom I’d watched Kolchak: The Night Stalker when I was too young staying up too late on Friday nights) on a Sunday evening.  We’d recently gotten cable TV, and my dad had sprung for subscriptions to both HBO and a local cable channel called Prism.  I think it must have been a package deal to get both, because Dad wasn’t into movies very much.  He liked baseball, and Prism broadcast all the Philadelphia Phillies games that the local TV stations didn’t or couldn’t due to blackouts.

We loved Prism, not least because, unlike HBO, it showed rated R movies during the day.

I can’t remember if I’d seen The Omen before watching Omen III.  Probably not, but it didn’t matter at the time.  The synopsis in the cable guide told us everything we needed to know: Adult Situations, Adult Language, Violence.  (Horror, 108 mins.)  I also can’t recall if my younger brother watched it with us or not.  I hope not, because it had some pretty disturbing stuff for an adult, let alone a kid.  Now that I’m the parent of a little boy, media management has become a concern.

The beginning of the film was brilliant: they wrote and filmed a commercial for Thorn Enterprises that Damien didn’t even like.  He poked holes in it.  It was a great way to show Damien’s intelligence, power, and amorality.  The previous ambassador’s bizarre suicide was another great piece of moviemaking: how many people shoot themselves under the nose?  I assume the effects guys measured the angle of the bullet to determine where it would go from the gun under the desk and said, “Well, it should go here.”  Truly disgusting brain splatter.  Very shocking.

Harvey Dean’s character had some depth.  Rather than have him just ignorant of his boss’s true nature, he knows that Damien Thorn is the Antichrist.  Consider the kind of person who knowingly works for the personification of evil.  He’s conflicted about ordering the deaths of the potential Christ-child babies, but does it anyway.  And when it comes time for him to pay the piper and have his own son killed, he refuses.  It’s all too much for him.  He wasn’t a sniggering caricature of an evil henchman, but a man who’d chosen the wrong side and paid for it with his life.  And soul.  There’s an unexpectedly poignant moment late in the film when his wife learns what he’s been doing and who his boss truly is.  She confronts him, holding his own baby son, with a monstrous series of crimes.  She’s broken and horrified and scared for her baby, and we feel for her.

There is still a part of the film that I can’t watch: the burned face of Dean’s baby when Damien uses the hell hound to implant horrible suggestions into Dean’s wife’s mind.  It showed the true, unadulterated evil of Damien Thorn in a way the other scenes did not.  His foiling of the monks’ plan to kill him was self-defense, but the baby-killing went way too far.  The method of the baby’s death was no accident; Damien had quoted Genesis 22:2 when telling the shocked Harvey to kill his own son, saying, “Then God said, ‘Take your son, your only son, whom you love–Isaac–and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you'[emphasis mine].”

The screaming monk swinging from the cable, swathed in burning plastic, was also disturbing.  As a youngster, the sex scene seemed more brutal than in later viewings of the film.  What was worse was that they killed the kid.  They wrote that the monk, a good guy, should accidentally stab a child to death.  Very brutal.  The kid was doomed, an apostate of Hell, but still, how often do boys get murdered in movies?

Damien praying to his own father Lucifer and cursing Jesus Christ was an extraordinary soliloquy.  It combined fury and loathing and even self-pity as he, the son of the Devil himself, describes the glory of suffering.  This insight into true evil was riveting and imaginative, making you understand Damien, if not sympathize.  Later, the juxtaposition of the monks’ exaltation at the star alignment heralding the rebirth of Christ with scenes of Damien in agony over the same event show us that in the end, Damien isn’t a man.  He is a figure, a supernatural creature.  A thing born of a jackal.

Note also that Damien only once or twice refers to Jesus Christ by His title: Christ.  He speaks to and of Him often, but uses the term “Nazarene,” denying Him His kingship as the Messiah.  In Damien’s mouth, Nazarene is a pejorative.  It works.

As Jews, we knew that demonic and vampiric bad guys in the movies could be turned by crosses (Richard Benjamin showed how useless the Magen David was against vampires in Love at First Bite), but we didn’t feel left out.  Judaism doesn’t have demons like Christianity, so things like the Antichrist and hell hounds were part of their mythology.  We could be frightened by it in fictional representations, but at no point did any of us say, “Hey!  That’s exclusionary!  You’re not being inclusive!”  It was a strength of the film that we were as caught up as much as any Gentile: after all, we’re talking about Armageddon here, and Jews will die at the end of the world, too.  The weird crucifix in Damien’s secret chamber was disquieting because we knew it was meant to be profane, especially when we saw what he was doing with it. Thorn’s Herod-style killings of the babies born during the star alignment lacked any deeper meaning for us when we first saw it (I didn’t learn about Herod until later in life when I read the New Testament), but the end was cathartic.  The good guys won, despite the terrible price.  We could rejoice in the death of the Antichrist and the horrible Armageddon he represented with clear hearts.

Looking back, it’s easy to see how different the film is from today’s efforts.  Even though the monks were bumbling and even foolish at times, they were the good guys.  And they represented the return of Jesus Christ.  No bones about it.  No pedophile priests, no new chapters of the Bible revealed to show how evil the Catholic church is.  Damien was the son of the Devil, and the priests, as incompetent as they were, fought to save the Christ child.  The religious iconography was relevant and poignant, including the vision of Christ at the end.  Even Jews could be moved.

The end was rushed, especially the last confrontation.  It didn’t make sense.  I’m not sure if some elements had been edited out for time constraints or if it was written that way in the beginning, but getting Damien to the place where he’d be killed should have been a lot more difficult than it was.

Despite its flaws, the 80’s hairstyles and terrible grating American accent Neill was obliged to adopt, The Final Conflict still holds up today.  If you haven’t seen it in a while, give it a look.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Filed Under: antichrist, christ child, demons, horror, horror movies, judaism, movies, omen 3, prism, religion, sam neill, the final conflict

Movie Review: Devil’s Pass

March 2, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Devil’s Pass is a movie that fictionalizes the infamous Dyatlov Pass incident, where nine Russian skiers died under mysterious circumstances in the Ural Mountains.  The premise is that five college students retrace the skiers’ steps decades later, armed with GPS devices and cameras, to determine exactly what happened in Dyatlov Pass.

In general, the movie was very silly, with a twist ending that was insufficiently teased and an utterly charmless cast that did nothing to elevate a tedious, pedestrian story.

  • Characters: All of the typical horror tropes were represented: the Good Girl, the Bad Girl, the Geek, the Player, the Hippie.  All were adequate.  At no point did any of them break character to be anything other than archetypes or get the viewer to care about what happened to them.
  • Scares: None.  It wasn’t even the least bit disturbing.  The teleporting zombie creatures were too shaky-cammed to see what they were doing, so it was hard to be afraid of them.  The bigfoot footprints in the snow were silly, not frightening.  An abortive trip to a mental hospital failed to provide the ominous foreboding that was intended.  
  • Found Footage-Style: I suppose we’ll just have to ride out the found footage-style of horror/sci-fi movies until it’s over and we can return to movie production that doesn’t involve gimmicks to get us to feel as though the action’s really happening.  There was no good reason to do this movie in found footage-style, as it added nothing to the immediacy of the story; in fact, it made the film less believable.  I couldn’t believe they filmed some of the things they did the way they did, especially during dangerous moments.  
  • The Twist: In an effort to solve the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass incident in the most bizarre way possible, they included a time-traveling wormhole that turns idiots into zombies.  Do you really need to know any more?  

Across the board, this film is a must-miss.  One star out of five.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Filed Under: bad movie, devil's pass, horror movies, movie reviews, renny harlin, russia, wormhole

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • Next Page »

"It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church." --Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

"Squop chicken? I never get enough to eat when I eat squop chicken. I told you that when we sat down. You gotta give me that. I told you when we sat down, I said frankly I said this is not my idea of a meal, squop chicken. I'm a big eater." --John O'Hara, BUtterfield 8

I saw the 1977 cartoon The Hobbit as a little boy, and it kindled a love of heroic fantasy that has never left me. Orson Bean's passing is terrible news. Rest in peace.

Obviously, these young people have been poorly served by their parents, but the honest search for practical information should be lauded, not contemned.

You shouldn't look at or use Twitter, and this story is another perfect example. There's so much that's wrong here that it would take a battalion of clergy, philosophers, and psychologists to fully map it out, let alone treat the issue.

This is the advertising copy for Ilana Glazer's stand-up comedy special The Planet Is Burning: "Ilana Glazer‘s debut standup special is trés lol, and turns out - she one funny b. Check out Ilana’s thoughts on partnership, being a successful stoner adult, Nazis, Diva Cups, and more. Hold on to your nuts cuz this hour proves how useless the patriarchy is. For Christ’s sake, The Planet Is Burning, and it’s time a short, queer, hairy New York Jew screams it in your face!" This is written to make you want to watch it.

In the midst of reading books about modern farming, the 6,000 year history of bread, and ancient grains, I found this just-published piece by farmer and scholar Victor Davis Hanson: Remembering the Farming Way.

"I then confront the decreasing power of the movement in order to demonstrate the need for increased theorizations of the reflexive capacities of institutionalized power structures to sustain oppositional education social movements." Yes. Of course.

You should definitely check out Atomickristin's sci-fi story Women in Fridges.

As it turns out, there may yet be some kind of personal cost for attempting to incite a social media mob into violence against a teenage boy you don't know, but decided to hate anyway because reasons.

One of the biggest problems with internet content is that the vast majority of sites don't pay their writers, and it shows in the lack of quality writing. It's hard to find decent writers, and harder to scrape up the cash to pay them. This piece is a shining example of the problem of free content: it's worth what you pay for.

If you're interested in understanding our current cultural insanity, the best primer available is Douglas Murray's The Madness of Crowds. Thoughtful, entertaining, and incisive.

More laws are dumb. More law enforcement is dumb. The only proper response to violence is overwhelming violence. End the assault. There's a rising anti-semitism problem in New York because Jews who act like victims are being victimized by predators. None of these attacks are random. Carry a weapon and practice deploying it under duress. Be alert and aware. I don't understand why the women Tiffany Harris attacked didn't flatten her face into the pavement, but once word gets around that the consequences of violence are grave, the violence will lessen.

When are you assholes going to understand that this stupidity doesn't work any longer? Nobody gives much of a damn if you think we're sexist because we don't want to see a movie you think we should see. It only makes us dislike you that much more, and you started out being an unlikable asshole. Find a new way to shame normal people.

The movie Terms of Endearment still holds up more than 35 years later, and if you're looking for a tearjerker, this is your jam. One element that didn't get a lot of mention is, at the end, when Flap, with a shrug, decides that his mother-in-law will become the mother of his children once Emma dies. He abandons them, and nothing is made of it. This always troubled me.

You need to read this story the next time you feel the urge to complain. And if you need a shot of admiration for another family's courage, check this out.

Progressive political activist and children's author J.K. Rowling finds herself on the wrong side of a mob she helped to create. The Woke Sandwich she's been trying to force-feed others since she earned enough f-you money doesn't taste as good as it looks when she's obliged to take a bite.

I need you to check out The Kohen Chronicles and pray for this family. Their 5-year-old son has cancer.

Currently, the movie Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker stands at 55% at Rotten Tomatoes. Don't forget that these are the same reviewers who not only adored the absolutely execrable The Last Jedi, but insisted that you were a MAGA hat-wearing incel white supremacist manbaby for not loving The Last Jedi. So either The Rise of Skywalker is an objectively bad film, or it simply wasn't woke enough to earn plaudits from our movie-reviewing moral and intellectual betters.

It's easy to hate the older pop bands like Genesis for their popularity, but they were capable of genius, and it shows in No Son of Mine.

If you want to know which identity group has more clout, read this story of the Zola ads on the Hallmark Channel.

Rest in peace, René Auberjonois. I remember you from Benson as a kid. As an adult, I remember you as Janos Audron in the Legacy of Kain video game series. You made every role you were in a classic.

Elf on a Shelf Follies, Part 2:
8-year-old: I wrote the elf a note! I hope he writes back.
Me: What did you write?
8yo: I asked if he has any friends.
Me: What if he says it's none of your business?
8yo: *eyes grow dark and glittering* Then I'll...touch him.
Me: Ah. Mutually assured destruction, then.

Elf on a Shelf Follies, Part 1: My 8-year-old got an Elf on the Shelf the other day. The book it came with tells a story in doggerel about this elf's purpose, which is to spy on the kid and report his doings to Santa Claus, who would then determine if the kid is worthy for Christmas presents this year. The book also said for the kid not to touch him, or the magic would fade, and for the family to give the elf a name. I wanted to name him Stasi. I was outvoted.

Actor Billy Dee Williams calls himself a man or a woman, depending on whim; his character Lando Calrissian is "pansexual," and his writer implies that he'd become intimate with anyone or anything, including, one presumes, a dog, a toaster, or a baby. J.J. Abrams is very concerned about LGBTQ representation in the Star Wars universe. This is Hollywood. This is Star Wars. This is what's important to the people in charge of your cinematic entertainment. Are you not entertained?

The funniest thing on the internet today is the number of people angry over an exercise bike commercial. Public outrage is always funny. Always.

One of the biggest mistakes the United States has ever made since WWII was recruiting for clandestine and federal law enforcement organizations at Ivy League schools. The best talent pools were/are available from local law enforcement and military veterans, with their maturity and, most importantly, field experience. We've been reaping the costs of these terrible decisions for decades, culminating in a hopelessly politicized, sub-competent FBI and CIA.

Watching Fauda seasons 1 and 2 again in preparation for season 3 to be broadcast, one hopes, in early 2020. Here's my back-of-the-matchbook review of season 2.

Every day I try to be grateful for what I have, even in the face of the petty frustrations and troubles that pockmark a day spent outside of one's living room, binge-watching Netflix. We live lives of ease in 21st century America, making it enormously difficult to do anything but take one's countless blessings for granted. Holidays like the just-passed Thanksgiving are helpful reminders. There's a reason why people call the attitude of a thankful heart practicing gratitude, not just feeling grateful. You have to practice it. You have to remind yourself of what you have. It's the work of a lifetime.

Held Back: A Recent Conversation.
8-year-old: Oh, and Jamie was there, too. He was in my first grade class two years ago.
Me: Wasn't he held back a year?
8yo: Yeah. It's because he kept going to the bathroom with the door open.
Me: No way!
8yo: And girls saw.
Me: That's not right. They're not going to hold a kid back a whole year over that.
8yo: Well, that's what he told me.
Me: Sounds fishy.
8yo: I believe him.
~fin~

It's right and good to push a raft of politically correct social justice policies on everything else under the sun, but when social justice invades Hollywood, that's just a bridge too far, says Terry Gilliam. Sorry, Terry: you helped make this sandwich. EAT IT.

Rob Henderson's piece on luxury beliefs will have you nodding your head over and over again...unless you subscribe to these luxury beliefs, in which case you'll get mad.

I've made the Saturday bread from Flour Water Salt Yeast so often that I've memorized the recipe. It never disappoints. Never. The same recipe works well for pizza, too.

Liberty doesn't mean the freedom to do anything you want. The true definition of liberty is the ability to choose the good. Anything less is libertinism.

Archives

My Social Media Links

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Google +

Author Links

  • Amazon Author Page
  • Goodreads

Copyright © 2025 · Author Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in