Listing to Starboard

Ten Advantages to Becoming an Old Coot

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Sun, 13 Jun 2021 16:41:00 +0000

I have attained my grandfatherly years honestly. I will admit I had hoped for a few more grandchildren than I wound up with, but my children have stubbornly refused to reproduce in the quantities I had in mind. I gave up my armada of boats, my ton of fishing gear, my sporting goods bag (in case a ball game broke out among my 18 grandchildren that, sadly, never materialized), my scuba diving equipment, my train sets, most of my game collection and all but a few of my young people oriented book collection (even "Mike Mulligan & His Steam Shovel" was passed along to the one grandkid we've determined to spoil rotten). I have two grandsons, one of whom is 2300 miles away is adopted and whom I love like one of my own children and visit weekly by Skype. My other grandson currently lives in Tennessee and moves around a lot, I've never met him and have only made tentative contact with him through Facebook recently so we don't know how that will go yet.

So my dream gig as the fun grandpa has been abridged significantly. I had a fleet of canoes and equipment all ready to lead family floats down the mighty (and fairly safe) rivers of Texas. I even trained as a Red Cross swimming and canoeing instructor. Man I was ready. Oh well. "The best laid plans o' mice and men oft times gang agly" as Scottish poet Bobby Burns once opined.

Still there are some definite advantages to becoming an old geezer and a few disadvantages like arthritis to make you appreciate the good bits. So let me list the good stuff that comes with being an old coot.

People don't expect you to dig ditches. It surprises them if you do pick up a shovel and they are appreciative since they didn't think you were going to help. AND they keep offering you drinks and asking you if you need to sit down for a minute.
Your children and their spouses ask you if you want to take a nap and think it's funny when you snore. You actually win points with your offspring, your spouse and your various descendants when you pile up in the recliner for an afternoon snooze.
You finally have accumulated an assortment of favorite things that don't get thrown out by your significant other because either they are ugly or you don't need them. By the time you are eligible for social security you own some things like mugs, recliners, fishing gear, Hawaiian shirts, and books that your wife tolerates and won't slip into the Goodwill donation box when you aren't looking. Figuring out what you can keep is a process of elimination.
Arthritis is a great excuse for avoiding unpleasant tasks. Conversely, when you actually get around to doing one of those honey-do projects, you get a brief respite from the admonishment to get-er-done!
You have a collection of favorite TV shows you really like. Better still, because you've previewed and selected the good stuff you enjoy, you don't have to wade through the depressing post-modernist crap your kids and grandkids think is relevant.
You have a favorite music collection that is wonderfully eclectic. I've got more than 500 songs in my phone's mp3 list and a pile of CDs, cassettes and vinyl that I'm gradually converting to digital mp3s. I defy anyone to look at my digital collection and find a bad song or at least one I don't like. I've got every thing from Pearly Shells (Don Ho) to Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road, from Doris Day to The First Highlanders Pipe Band playing Amazing Grace, from I'm My Own Grandpa to Brown-Eyed Girl, from Monkees, Beach Boys and Beatles to Placido Domingo, John Denver, Earl Scruggs, Burl Ives and Audio Adrenalin. My personal radio station never plays a song I don't want to hear or interrupt the music with a commercial for Honest Bob Vanderhoort's Used Cars.
You can sit on the back porch in the sun for 4 hours and it feels like you had a productive afternoon. It is no longer necessary to tick off a list of things you need to meet your life goals. Sitting on the back porch playing your guitar and feeding the squirrels in the sunshine WAS one of your life goals.
You know how to do stuff that makes you happy. You play the guitar, banjo, dulcimer or Irish bodhrain, You build model ships. You can make your own bookshelves. You have time to write that novel you always wanted to write. You can cook things you want to eat and you're pretty good at it because you have lots of practice.
People no longer ask you to help them move. You can go over if you want, but you are participating in more of a supervisory role because you have a lot of experience in how to move and pack having done so many many times in your life.
Little things give you immense satisfaction. A favorite restaurant, a walk down a country lane, a grandkid coming to visit, birds coming to your bird feeder outside your window and you can watch them from your easy chair. You, in fact, have an easy chair and people save it for you.

There are other things I'm sure, but I just can't remember them now. In fact, people don't expect you to get ten things pulled from memory in the first place, so when you do, you get credit for being kind of old, but still sharp as a tack.

Time for my obligatory Sabbath afternoon nap.

© 2021 by Tom King

A Baker's Dozen Series I Have Binge Watched More Than Once

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 10:25:00 +0000

Early Edition (Marissa, Gary & Chuck)

Thanks to being just out of range of Seattle's network stations and me having the Internet and streaming services and downloadable movies (think Nord VPN - 'nuff said), I keep stumbling over TV series that I used to love or new ones that draw me in and suck up my weekends. I'll put on the ones I've run through once or twice while I'm fixing things around the house or doing chores.

This is a very personal and not an exhaustive list. I left out some of the more intense series like NCIS, NCIS New Orleans, Criminal Minds and such to keep it to a "Baker's Dozen" (13) shows. It's an arbitrary number, but the shows all have a similar tone. Not all are easily available. I found Early Edition on YouTube, and the others in various streaming services that I'm not boycotting like Netflix.

Each of these series have a lighter tone for the most part. I left off the very well written Criminal Minds because it's too intense to binge. I have to take a break, in much the same way the actors had to given the subject matter. NCIS can be fun but when they lost Abbie, they kind of lost me.

So here are my 13 of my favorites in no particular order, although the last few are special favorites of mine. All of them are ones I've gone through a couple of times. Every year or so I'll line 'em up and run them again. I look forward to forgetting what episode comes next and as I age, I have become more adept at forgetting how each episode ends.

AMERICAN BAKER'S DOZEN BINGEABLE SHOWS:

Falling Skies - Noah Wylie leads a ragtag group of human survivors of an alien invasion. This is one that I like mostly because of Wylie, but also because it introduces some really nice music that appeals to my eclectic tastes.

Numbers - Crime procedural with David Krumholz (Mr. Universe from Firefly/Serenity and The Santa Claus), Rob Morrow (from Northern Exposure) and Taxi's Judd Hirsch. Krumholz plays a math whiz who helps his FBI agent brother (Morrow) solve tricky cases with math. Fascinating premise.

Leverage - Timothy Hutton plays an insurance investigator who gathers up an assortment of con artists, grifters, hackers and thieves he's pursued and or busted over his career and goes about like Robin Hood getting justice for people who have been abused by the rich and powerful. Even though they canceled the series, it wouldn't die and is coming back this summer with Noah Wylie taking Hutton's place with the old team in Leverage: Redemption. Can't wait.

Early Edition - Quirky series about a guy (Kyle Chandler from Friday Night Lights) who gets tomorrow's Chicago Sun-Times today. Poor guy winds up running around town trying to prevent murders, accidents and injustice. Fun series gone too soon.

The Librarian/Librarians - The Librarians is an extension of the TV movies with Noah Wylie. This series followed with a colorful cast that includes muscular and multi-talented Christian Kane from Leverage in which a group of people are drafted to be librarians and protect the world from troublesome problems with magic artifacts and persons up to no good. Fun romp through history with occasional help from Noah Wylie as the loner head librarian.

Warehouse 13
Claudia, Artie, Myka, Lena and Pete

Warehouse 13 - Sci-Fi Channel's series with a similar premise to the Librarians. Here Secret Service Agents working for Saul Rubinek and CC Pounder and a mysterious board of regents, collect artifacts that have been accidentally or deliberately imbued with dangerous magical powers and neutralize them. The stories are interesting, the characters likeable and fun to watch.

Castle - Firefly's inimitable Nathan Fillion (Captain Reynolds) stars as Rick Castle, a successful novelist who thanks to his friendship with the mayor gets to tag along on murder investigations with Stana Katic as leggy police detective Kate Becket. My favorite part of the series, however, is Castle's amazing relationship with his daughter, Alexis (Molly Quinn) and his prickly relationship with his diva actress Mom.

Monk - Tony Shaloub heads a great cast of characters as widowed OCD police detective Adrian Monk whose incredible obsessive pursuit of villains and microscopic attention to detail makes him San Francisco's go-to consulting detective despite his being removed from the police force due to his obsessive behaviors. It's kind of a comedy, but my obsessive neat-freak wife (whom I adore) views it as more of a tragedy and often corrects the writers for allowing things like Natalie (his nurse/girl Friday) placing her germy purse on the counter and Monk not noticing. A P.I. with a full time nurse sets up a lot of unique situations for San Francisco's defective detective.

Stargate SG1 - MacGuiver's Richard Dean Anderson takes on the Kurt Russel role from the movie - Colonel Jack O'Neil. Benjamin Browder from Farscape took his place during the last seasons. Amanda Tapping plays Samantha Carter the team scientist and Michael Shanks takes the James Spader role as egghead historian/archaeologist Daniel Jackson. The team with an alien named Teal'c (Christopher Judge) travel through mysterious stargates connecting many different planets and fight interstellar parasites and assorted evil aliens in an effort to save the galaxy. A rare sci-fi series that doesn't take itself too seriously. Someone asks Col O'Neil in one episode why people on every planet seem to speak English. "Just go with it," advises Jack. It's that kind of fun. Dom Deluise's sons direct and take supporting roles over the years and even Dom shows up for a couple of episodes as an alien caretaker with a split personality. There were two spinoff series and a couple of movie sequels, the show was that popular - and it ran for more than a decade so there is lots to binge on.

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The Last Ship - Grey's Anatomy's Dr. Dreamy (Eric Dane) and Adam Baldwin (Firefly and Chuck) star as Captain and First Officer of US destroyer Nathan James, the last surviving American ship after a virus takes out the crews of the US Navy. Cruising out of the way of the disaster in the arctic, the James's crew survives when the world is stricken by a devastating pandemic that destroys food and kills billions of people. Scientists on board attempt to create a vaccine while rogue militaries and warlords attempt to loot, pillage and conquer everyone who is left. The series really shows off the capabilities of a US destroyer.

Chuck - Morgan, Ellie, Casey, Chuck, and Sarah

Chuck - Based on a comic book series, Zachary Levi (Shazam) and Yvonne Strahovski (Handmaid's Tale) are a nerd recruited by national security agencies and his beautiful CIA handler, Sarah. Chuck's scientist dad has created a program called the Intersect, tailor made for Chuck's brain. Chuck receives an email which downloads the program to his brain and finds himself able to do kung fu, pull up all kinds of data in his brain and generally becomes a superspy. Adam Baldwin is Colonel Casey, a no-nonsense NSA agent who is highly uncomfortable in his cover as a stock boy at a Buy-More electronics store where Chuck works as part of the store's Nerd Herd, computer fix-it guys. The show is all kinds of fun with some really weird nerd action and quirky characters for comic relief.

Eureka - The cast's faces are familiar from other SF and TV series. It's a fish out of water story. A US Marshall blunders into a secret scientific community and gets himself drafted as the town sheriff whose job is to contain the constant stream of disasters caused by the collection of dangerously smart geniuses that work for Global Dynamics, the Defense Department funded employer and center of pretty much everything about the town. Sheriff Carter and his daughter move into a bossy smart house and learn to deal with the insane disasters that threaten the town and sometimes all life on Earth.

Firefly - Jane, Malcolm and Zoe

Firefly - Best for last! Nathan Fillion heads a wonderful cast as Captain of the smuggling spaceship Serenity. Captain Reynolds is a survivor of the losing side of a war with the despotic corporate government of a system of terraformed planets where humanity took refuge after Earth became uninhabitable. The series posits American and Chinese cultures as a blended dominant culture. Everyone curses in Chinese which makes censors jobs easier. These being largely pioneer worlds, the series is kind of a space Western - cowboys in space so to speak. The series was canceled early, but it earned a fanatical following and spun off a feature length movie "Serenity" which gave closure to the series' militant fan base.

BRITISH/CANADIAN/AUSTRALIAN BAKER'S DOZEN:

Foyle's War - DI Christopher Foyle and Samantha Stewart

Foyle's War - British detective inspector solves crimes in WWII southern England. Absorbing look at England's law enforcement during the war.

Sherlock - Benedict Cummerbach (Dr. Strange) and Martin Freeman (The Hobbit) are Holmes and Watson in one of the best versions of Conan-Doyle's ground-breaking detective.

All Creatures Great and Small - Wonderful series based on the James Herriot novels about his life as a country vet in the Yorkshire Dales. Stars Christopher Timothy and Robert Hardy.

Father Brown (both iterations) - There are two versions of GK Chesterton's priest/detective Father Brown. The earliest starred veteran British actor Kenneth More and the second with Mark Williams (Mr. Weasley in Harry Potter). Local detectives resent his meddling in their cases, especially because he always solves them.

Rosemary & Thyme - Felicity Kendall and Pam Ferris star as gardeners who every time they take a landscaping job, somebody gets murdered. Lots of fun.

Good Neighbors/The Good Life - Tom and Barbara Good (Richard Briers and Felicity Kendall) abandon corporate life to pursue self-sufficiency in their suburban home in Surbiton, London to the dismay of their high toned neighbors (Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington)

Miss Fischer's Murder Mysteries - Phryney Fischer, an independent, thoroughly modern lady sleuth cuts a swath across Melbourne's society in the late 1920s, fighting injustice, armed with a pearl-handled pistol, keen eye and razor-sharp wit.

Murdoch Mysteries - Yannick Bisson stars as the handsome Toronto detective William Murdoch in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Very Canadian as the series takes credit for having invented key American technologies and police procedures well ahead of their American cousins. Murdoch, a devout Catholic raised by nuns, brings his rigid sense of right and wrong to the messy business of law enforcement.

Horatio Hornblower

Horatio Hornblower - A series of A&E movies about CS Forester's British Sea Captain. They never finished the series although the 1950s Gregory Peck version does take up where A&E left off. Welch actor Ioan Gruffud stars and takes us from green seasick ensign to inventive captain who is based on famed British Captain Thomas Cochran, considered by many to be the most brilliant tactician in the British Navy during the age of sail. Hornblower notably never fights Americans directly which saves him for American audiences.

Fawlty Towers - John Cleese and Prunella Scales star as Torquay inn-keepers. Cleese delivers his frenetic style to the role as Basil Fawlty. Scales plays the perfect foil for the over-stuffed Basil as his wife, Sybil. The series didn't last nearly long enough but worth every second. "Basil the Rat" is my favorite episode.

Dr Who - The new series with new Dr. Who's rises above it's campy roots, although the Daleks do retain their toilet plunger appendages. I understand the new season trots out a female Dr. Who. Well why not? The series is hardly to be taken seriously. If you can't loosen up enough to enjoy it, the Dalek's will happily "EXTERMINATE!"

Anne of Green Gables

Anne of Green Gables (not Anne with an E) - This is the 1985 series, not the dismal "woke" Netflix version that I stopped watching when every other character turned out to be gay. The PBS Wonderworks mini-series about Lucy Maud Montgomery's heroine was faithful to the original and Megan Follows as Anne is the perfect Anne. Colleen Dewhurst as Marilla and Richard Farnsworth as Matthew were inspired casting. Montgomery was a preacher's wife and likely would have been horrified with what Netflix has done to her Anne. My kids and I used to binge watch Anne on weekends and get all misty and dampen some hankies. I listed it here because it was filmed on Prince Edward Island, Canada.

NOTE:

I started out with the first 13 American series, then added another dozen from our fellow English-speaking countries, because I like the often-lovely stuff they put out. There are a couple of shows that are an acquired taste on either list, but for the most part these on this list are easy to like. You may have to hunt them down online, but they're well worth a nice binge. I'd pack a lunch. Nachos would be perfect.

© 2021 by Tom King

A Dozen Songs for Fathers & Sons

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Sun, 07 Mar 2021 05:28:00 +0000

Me and My Boy

Disparagingly called songs about "Daddy Issues", as it turns out songs about fathers and sons are pretty common among singer-songwriters. Country, bluegrass, rap, gospel and rock musicians all do them. Father and son relationships are powerful in our lives, so it's not unsurprising that singers write about them. Songs cover everything from fathers who die to soon, wonderful dads, fathers who are missing in action, and fathers who are not understood by their sons and sons not understood by their fathers. Here is a very personal collection of songs about Dad, from several genres. Hope you enjoy them

1. Pearl Jam - The Man of the Hour: As one critic snarked, Eddie Vedder was still coming to terms with his "daddy issues" at the time this song was written. What this cold soul seems not to understand is that father-son relationships are confusing, deeply impact our lives, and are powerful themes for music, poetry, film and art. Eddie wrote this song for the movie "Big Fish" and it captures the theme perfectly.

2. Harry Chapin - The Cat's in the Cradle: Harry Chapin's poignant ballad about a Dad who inadvertently taught his son to be just like himself struck a chord with a lot of young fathers in the wake of the social upheavals of the 60s. Us hippie children were becoming fathers and Harry reminded us all not to repeat the mistakes of our own Dads. Apparently, not all of us listened too closely. I did, though.

3. Cat Stevens - Father & Son: Cat Stevens aka Jusef Islam, was another popular singe-songwriter who took a shot at guiding my generation of skulls full of mush as to the dangers of poor communication between Dads and sons. Here he sings both sides of a familiar argument between Dads and their male offspring. He also had a lot to say to children while he was at it. He did some very engaging music over his career.

4. Dan Fogelberg - Leader of the Band: Dan Fogelberg was one who loved and appreciated his father it appears. He also seems to realize that his father gave up his dreams to raise his family and that his Dad was responsible for his being able to achieve his own dreams. This one always makes me misty. Fogelberg talks about the song and what it meant for him and his father. This song never fails to make me get all misty.

5. Will Smith - Just the Two of Us: Not all Dad/son songs are gentle folksy ballads. Will Smith manages to make a sweet rap song about being a father. I love the words of this song. I know exactly how Will felt when they put that baby boy in his arms.

6. James Blunt - Monsters: This poignant song is about saying goodbye to a father and making peace at the end of a long life. If this song doesn't make you blubber, you have no heart. James couldn't even get through the song without weeping.

7. Peter Gabriel - Father, Son: Another song about wrapping it all up with your father and saying goodbye. The video with this one is particularly poignant.

8. Rodney Atkins - Watchin' You: This sweet song is a cautionary tale about being a good father by example. I love this song. It's a reminder that as a Dad, you gotta remember you are being watched 24/7 by that little guy of yours.

9. Cliff Eberhardt - My Father's Shoes: This song is more my experience of my father. My Dad was an alcoholic. He was by all accounts abusive, an ex-convict and something of a racist. He left my Mom with 3 kids when I was five years old to run off with a girl he met in a night club and made pregnant. Said he had to give the child his "name", as though that were a thing when he had 3 kids who already had his name. A lot of men think like that. His example determined me to not grow up to be him. This father in this song was kind of a more traditional father as seen by a restless hippie child, but much of the sentiment describes my own determination to not walk in my father's shoes.

10. Vince Gill - Key to Life: This song is about the sort of father you don't want to introduce your girlfriend to. He's a chain-smoking, hard talking, wears over-alls without a shirt teenage boy's nightmare, but even then, he's your Dad and you better come to terms with that if you don't want to be just like him, because some of him is lurking there inside you.

11. Vince Gill, Alison Krauss, Ricky Skaggs - Go Rest on High on That Mountain: This song is about losing a loved one and is frequently one sung by sons about their fathers when they pass on. Very nice trio.

12. Anthem Lights - You Will Always Be My Son: Anthem Lights Band sings another song about holding on and letting go of your sons. You want them to fly on their own, but you also want them to know the nest is there if they lose some feathers along the way.

If you have any more songs, drop the name of the song and the artist in the comments box below. I know there are some other ones out there that are as good as this bunch, I just can't remember them now. I'll add them to the post. Thanks.

© 2021 by Tom King
* Links are to songs posted on Youtube. I don't own any of this music.

My Top Thirty Two Christmas Movies

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Sun, 11 Oct 2020 06:37:00 +0000

Christmas movies are our annual anti-humbug holiday treat for my wife and I. We also have Halloween movies, 4th of July movies and St. Patrick's Day movies. Here's the list for Christmas. It started out as a top ten list but then it grew to 20 then 25 and now 32. I can't help it, they keep making new ones. So, in no particular order.

It's A Wonderful Life (Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed sleeper hit with Lionel Barrymore and the delightful Henry Travers)
White Christmas:(Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen. Perfect!)
Scrooge (Albert Finney)
Scrooged (Bill Murray)
The Christmas Lodge (With Daniel Jackson from Stargate SG1 and Erin Karpluk)
November Christmas (Hallmark I think - it's a shameless tear jerker but sweet)
Christmas Vacation (Chevy Chase classic)
Home Alone 1 and 2 (Kevin manages to have not one but 2 engaging Christmas Adventures)
Silent Night (Linda Hamilton as a German mom in WWII who entertains soldiers from both sides at Christmas)
Christmas With The Kranks (Tim Allen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dan Ackroyd, Cheech Marin) A Steven King story if you can believe it - very funny though.
The Santa Clause (Tim Allen - all three)
Joyeux Noel (The WWI Christmas miracle)
A Christmas Story (Ralphie angles for an official Red Ryder BB gun with a compass in the stock)
The Polar Express (Based on Chris Van Allsburg's ethereal picture book)
How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Jim Carey)
How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Boris Karloff)
A Charlie Brown Christmas (It's a TV cartoon but then so is the Grinch with Karloff)
Miracle on 34th Street (Natalie Woods is precious)
A Christmas Carol (Jim Carey - animated lunacy from Disney)
The Christmas Card (Great romantic Hallmark flick)
Fallen Angel (Gary Sinise - not what you'd expect)
Die Hard (Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Bonnie Bedelia, Alexander Gudenov) It's not Christmas until Hans Gruber falls off the Nakatomi Towers.
Mixed Nuts (Steve Martin, Madeleine Kahn, Robert Klein, Rob Reiner) Almost forgotten Steve Martin flick that's fun to watch
Holiday Inn (Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire compete for the girl)
The Holiday (Kate Winslet, Cameron Diaz, Jude Law and Jack Black)
The Christmas Ornament (Jewel Staits, Kellie Martin, Cameron Matheson)
The Christmas Train (Dermot Mulroney, Danny Glover, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, Joan Cusack)
Mrs. Miracle James Van der Beek, Erin Karpluk, Doris Roberts) and the lovely sequel Call Me Mrs. Miracle (Doris Roberts, Jewel Staite, Eric Johnson, Loren Holly)
Love Actually (Bill Nighy, Colin Firth, Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Martin Freeman, Keira Knightly and a host of others) Warning with this one. If you can find a version that tones down the language and brief nudity great, otherwise send the kids to bed.
12 Dates of Christmas (Amy Smart, Mark-Paul Gosselaar)
Christmas in the Smokies (Sarah Lancaster, Barry Corbin, Alan Powell)
Crazy for Christmas: ( Andrea Roth, Howard Hesseman, Jason Spevack, Yannick Bisson ) Shannon, a single mother, is forced to chauffeur a wealthy eccentric around town on Christmas Eve while he gives away cash to complete strangers. When a reporter pursues the story, a new romance blossoms.

There you go. There are some that are peripheral Christmas movies like Trading Places and Lethal Weapon that I left off the list, even though I included the first Die Hard which was by no means a strictly Christmas movie. I also hesitated to include Mel Gibson's deeply strange Fat Man which though the missus likes it (she has a thing about Mel) It might be a kind of disturbing approach to the Santa Claus myth. Any, you've been warned.

I would include links but these things move around so much and sometimes a selfish TV channel or streaming channel grabs one of them and hogs it up for themselves. So Google these and watch them where you can. Youtube has a bunch of them so you might go there first. Tubi and Crackle have some of them every year. In the subscription services, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Paramount+, Friendly TV and such will have various assortments. Sometimes you can find the rare ones on the Pirate Bay, just make sure you are careful and respect the copyrights involved before you download. ;-)

Merry comin' up on Christmas!

© 2020, 21, 22, 23 by Tom King

Sci-Fi Series Gone Too Soon

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Tue, 18 Jul 2017 21:42:00 +0000

Why doesn't more good sci-fi survive on TV?

TV networks suck at managing science fiction shows. There is a reason. They keep hiring "professional" television writers to write SF shows for one thing. They need to hire good sci-fi writers, otherwise the product winds up looking like "CSI Goes to Space" or "The Goldmans on the Moon". That said, there were some really good attempts at solid, magic free science fiction in the past 10 or 20 years. Some succeeded, but a surprising number of really good efforts failed miserably or succeeded right up until they were canceled by a surprisingly thick-headed gang of network execs.

1. Firefly - 'nuff said.
2. Journeyman - I liked the direction that "Journeyman" was going with a poor guy inadvertently traveling in time and trying to figure out what in the world was going on.
3. Crusoe with Sean Bean in the title role wasn't science fiction, but captured some of the "stranger in a strange land" flavor of really good SF.
4. Terra Nova - I was just getting into the dinosaurs and time travel series and boom! Canceled.
5. Flash Forward - by this time I should have smelled a rat, but nope. Turned on the TV one night and it was gone right in the middle of the story.
6. Invasion - Really should have seen the end coming with that one.
7. Defying Gravity was pretty interesting. So, of course - poof and gone!
8. New Amsterdam - about an immortal New Yorker was fascinating and the kinda sorta got to end it, but it ended way too soon.
9. Forever, which explored a similar theme of an immortal in New York was even more interesting and I've loved Ioan Gruffud ever since Hornblower. Either Forever or New Amsterdam was better than "Highlander" which got two movies and a series more than it deserved.
10. Jericho, the post-apocalyptic series set in a small Midwest town, died far too soon too despite a fan revolt. Part of the campaign was to deliver massive quantities of nuts to the CBS studios - an homage to the line Gerald McRaney delivered, borrowing from General Macauliffe at Bastogne. The fans made a mistake having nuts delivered to CBS in protest. They should have brought slingshots and pelted the execs when they tried to get to their cars in the evening.

Network television doesn't do great stories anymore - at least not with any consistency, though sometimes they do accidentally. Grimm was a good show in a bad time spot and now it's gone too soon. This year saw the end of more than one series I liked in favor of some "Twerking with the Stars" or "Let's Make You a Star", or "Lie, Cheat and Betray Your Way to Big Money" kind of unreality show. Cheap to produce and appeal heavily to the sub 100 IQ crowd.

The problem with intelligent sci-fi is that it only appeals to about 20% or less of the TV watching demographic - those who possess an IQ somewhat better than even money. They are expensive to produce and until the arrival of the cheap-but-great special effects George Lucas and Steven Spielberg promised us would come our way soon, they'll likely not rise much above the Star Trek level if that far. They even canceled the very interesting "Enterprise" after a relatively short run. There were complaints that it was too cerebral for Trekkies.

I don't expect any long run sci-fi to make it on TV, even on the Sci-fi channel, which used to do some really great shows. I was a Stargate-SG1 junkie for better than a decade, what with reruns and all. The later iterations took themselves far too seriously though, lost the irreverent tone that the Deluise brothers and Richard Dean Anderson brought to the original and each post SG-1 outing had a progressively shorter run.

If I were Bill Gates kind of rich, I'd create a network and buy up all those canceled shows and run new seasons of them along with the old. Firefly would be my first purchase, of course. There would be no wrestling or reality shows. Just great stories. The one new series I'd do right away would be the Poul Anderson stories of space robber baron Nicholas Van Rinj - trader to the stars. What a terrific character and what a dense pile of rich stories to work from.

In the meantime, I haven't read nearly enough books yet, which is where TV should be mining for stories. Every time a "professional" television writer tries to write science fiction, somewhere a puppy dies.

© 2017 by Tom King

A Baker's Dozen Famous Actresses You Didn't Know Were Republicans

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 06:17:00 +0000

1. Shirley Temple - Shirley Temple Black was more than just a pretty cute kid. She grew up to be a smart cookie. She was a lifelong Republican and was appointed to the ambassadorship of the United Nations and later served as ambassador to Czechoslovakia. While there she witnessed the Soviet invasion from the top of a roof where she took refuge. She saw soldiers shooting women and looting Prague from her perch on the roof. Later when Czechoslovakia overthrew it's communist government, it was Shirley that opened relations between the U.S. and the new government.

2. Doris Day - When I was a young man, I always had a little crush on Doris Day. She seemed like such a nice person and was the sort of gal I was attracted to. Turns out she's an active Republican, participating in several presidential elections over the years. A Roman Catholic and staunch conservative, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in 2004. She's really big on animal charities as well and is founder of the Doris Day Animal Foundation.

3. Joan Rivers - Joan was a longtime Republican. She was friends of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Steve Forbes, and even admired Margaret Thatcher. She was a rare bird -- a New York Jewish female comedienne. As the Washington Times noted, all of the Republican New York, Jewish, female comediennes in the world would "...fit into one phone booth, and still have ample room to make some calls."

4. Phyllis Diller - Phyllis was a standup comedienne when there weren't very many of them. Her comedy was self-effacing. She cracked jokes about her age and appearance, bad cooking and her husband “Fang.” She supported her five kids spending most of her working life on the road with people like Bob Hope and Johnny Carson. She did two TV series and was regular on “Laugh In” and Hollywood Squares. She was friends with Joan Rivers and both voted Republican in a career that did not reward conservatives.

5. Claudette Colbert - The Oscar winning actress was born Emilie Claudette Chauchoin in France. Her family moved to the US in 1906. She worked her way through acting school in a dress shop and upon her Broadway debut, she changed her name to Claudette Colbert. She also was friends with Ronald and Nancy Reagan and was a staunch Republican and what her IMDB bio called "a natural conservative."

6. Maureen O'Hara - My other youthful crush was Dublin born fiery redhead, Maureen O'Hara, She was a staunch conservative Republican like her flag-waving favorite co-star, John Wayne. Over time Maureen publicly supported the Presidencies of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush. She never was intimidated by the liberal Hollywood establishment and was completely comfortable with her conservatism.

7. Virginia Mayo - Vivacious blonde bombshell, Virginia Mayo graduated from chorus girl in MGM's Goldwyn Girls to leading lady best known for a series of films with comedian Danny Kaye. Over the years she played opposite Hollywood leading men including Kaye, Bob Hope, Burt Lancaster, James Cagney, Ronald Reagan, George Raft, Rex Harrison, Paul Newman and even the Marx Brothers. A lifelong Republican, Virginia endorsed Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972, and supported her longtime friend Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential race. An Arab Sultan once remarked that Virginia's beauty was "proof of the existence of God."

8. Barbara Stanwyck - As you can tell from the picture, Barbara Stanwyck was a second amendment kind of gal. She married fellow arch-conservative Robert Taylor and helped form the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1944. Their mission statement said, in part, "...in our special field of motion pictures, we resent the growing impression that this industry is made of, and dominated by, Communists, radicals, and crackpots.” Stanwyck was a fan of Ayn Rand and pushed Warner Bros. to buy the rights to The Fountainhead.

9. Jane Russell - No shrinking violet, Jane Russell hung with notorious Republicans like Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, Lou Costello, June Allyson, Dick Powell and Jimmy Stewart. She described herself in 2003 as, "...a teetotaling, mean-spirited, right-wing, narrow-minded conservative Christian bigot, but not a racist.” She also had no problem with gay members of her profession, maintaining close relationships with choreographers and gay actors alike. She got along famously with liberal colleagues in the film industry including Marilyn Monroe who was just an inch shy of being a communist. Tough gal, Russell, helped Marilyn get through on set hysterics and prevented the directors and other actors from bullying the troubled actress. Heavily involved in very conservative causes, something that appalled her liberal friends, Jane was a complete mystery to liberal Hollywood, most of whom counted pistol-packin' Jane as a good friend.

10. Irene Dunn One of the most active Hollywood stars in Republican causes during her career, Irene campaigned for Richard Nixon in 1960 and for Ronald Reagan both times he ran for Governor of California and then again for both of his presidential campaigns. President Dwight D. Eisenhower named her an alternate delegate to the U.N. General Assembly in 1959. She actively campaigned for him in the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections. Nominated for five Academy Awards, she starred opposite Hollywood dreamboats Clark Gable and Cary Grant, as well as Charles Boyer and Spencer Tracy. Irene was a hard-working gal, both in film and in politics.

11. Vera Ellen - Lithe elfin dancer, Vera Ellen was a better dancer than the industry gave her credit for. She danced with all the best male dancers including Fred Astaire, Donald O'Connor, Gene Kelly, and (my favorite), Danny Kaye. Her dance number with Kaye in White Christmas was breath-taking. She once was fired from a chorus line for showing too much individuality. She was a lifelong Republican and a solid supporter of Ronald Reagan especially. Her later life was tragic, but she left a legacy of film behind and a whole lot of spectacularly athletic dance numbers.

12. Margaret Hamilton - Well so long as Republicans are going to get a bad rap anyway, let's include our most infamous Republican actress, the Wicked Witch of the West her own self, Margaret Hamilton. Margaret Hamilton grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, attended Hathaway Brown School and practiced acting by doing children's theater. After several film roles in the 30s, Margaret was tapped for her breakout role in the Wizard of Oz as the witch that haunted children's dreams for more than half a century. Turns out she was a Sunday School teacher, a staunch Republican and conservative. It turns out Republicans do pitch a wide tent.

13. Glynis Johns - Let's make it a baker's dozen. I was watching Danny Kaye's The Court Jester and co-star was the lovely Glynis Johns. She shows up in a lot of my favorite movies and turns out she's a staunch Republican. She used to do a lot of light comedy, but the versatile Ms. Johns could also play serious roles as well. Another of my favorite performances was Glynis's delightful sufragette, Mrs. Banks, in Mary Poppins. Steven Sondheim's Send in the Clowns was written specifically for Glynis to perform. She had trouble with long held notes, so Sondheim kept the phrasing short for her. Her family came from Wales, but she is now a naturalized American citizen and staunch conservative Republicans.

There are a whole batch of lists on the Internet featuring current Republican actresses out there, but there aren't many from the golden era of film. I thought you might like to see that not all of the classic actresses from the heyday of film were shrieking Communists and liberals. That's why I used to watch the Oscars. There wasn't much danger of having to listen to some speech about how terrible America is for not helping the Palestinians drive the Jews into the sea. They just talked about what a privilege it was for them to do their job and to be in this great country. Note the number of immigrants up in that list.

Love those Republican gals!
© 2017 by Tom King

How Many of These Movie Quotes Can You Identify?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 09:52:00 +0000

We really don't have any idea how many movies we've stuffed away in our already over-crowded brains. It would probably astound you the number of hours you've spent in front of a screen watching films. Don't believe me? How many of these movies can you identify just from a quick quote from the movie. Caution: this quiz will be graded. You'll need paper and pencil or a blank word processor document to record your answers. This is not multiple choice (I am an English teacher).

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
Go ahead. Make my day.
My Mama always said, 'Life was like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're gonna get.'
Where we're going we don't need roads...
“But without my voice, how can I…”
“You’ll have your looks, your pretty face… and don’t underestimate the importance of body language.”
“I am a nice shark, not a mindless eating machine. If I am to change this image, I must first change myself. Fish are friends, not food."
Hey, I know a joke! A squirrel walks up to a tree and says, “I forgot to store acorns for the winter and now I am dead.” Ha! It is funny because the squirrel gets dead.
“Uh-uh! Don’t you think about running off doing no daring-do. We’ve been planning this dinner for two months!”
“The public is in danger!”
“My evening’s in danger!”
“You tell me where my suit is, woman! We are talking about the greater good!”
“‘Greater good’? I am your wife! I’m the greatest good you are ever gonna get!”
"Aw, you're an action figure! You are a child's plaything!"
"You are a sad little man and you have my pity."
"Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."
Attaboy, Clarence.!
It's not the years, honey. It's the mileage.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
"We ain't got no badges! We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinking badges!”
"I'll have what she's having."
"Are you crying? There's no crying! There's no crying in baseball!"
I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse.
Here's looking at you, kid.
After all, tomorrow is another day!
Houston, we have a problem.
Hasta la vista, baby.
"So, no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave."
I feel the need - the need for speed!
Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.
"Surely you can't be serious." - "I am serious. And don't call me Shirley.

Groundhog Day - Bill Murray

Did you get them all? Check your answers below and give yourself four points for every one you got correct.

1. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
2. Sudden Impact
3. Forrest Gump
4. Back to the Future
5. Little Mermaid
6. Finding Nemo

7. Up!
8. The Incredibles
9. Toy Story
10. The Wizard of Oz
11. It's a Wonderful Life
12. Raiders of the Lost Ark
13. Star Wars
14. Treasure of the Sierra Madres
15. When Harry Met Sally
16. A League of Their Own
17. The Godfather
18. Casablanca
19. Gone With the Wind
20. Apollo XIII
21. Terminator 2
22. Serenity
23. Top Gun
24. Dead Poet's Society
25. Airplane

Score: Multiply the number you got right by 4

0-59: F (You are a person who has an actual life)
60-60: D (You read books)
70-79: C (You watch a lot of sports)
80-89: B (You probably have kids and have some of the Disney flicks memorized)
90-100: A (You really need to get out in the fresh air and get some sun)

* I'm not saying how many of those I would have gotten. I'm supposed to have a degree in English and we English majors find movies beneath us. We're supposed to sit by fires, smoke pipes and read 3000 year-old heroic poetry for fun.

© 2017 by Tom King

John Williams Says His Tunes Aren't Memorable

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 07:00:00 +0000

There have been a spate of articles recently complaining that movie scores are not very memorable anymore. Even the mighty John Williams has called his own Star Wars Score "not very memorable". One wonders if these guys just have seen too many movies or at least aren't looking at the ones that John Williams wrote the score for. Here's a sampling of John's movie tunes. Most of these you'd likely recognize right off the bat. Others you'll swear you've heard it somewhere before and will only need slight prompting to remember.

Here are some links to samples from John Williams' movies. See if these tunes are memorable.

The Rare Breed - James Stewart, Maureen O'Hara

Jaws - Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss

Star Wars - Mark Hamel, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Alec Guinness

Close Encounters of the Third Kind - Richard Dreyfuss, Terri Garr

Superman - Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder

Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen

E.T. The Extraterrestrial: Henry Thomas, Drew Barrymore

Hook: Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman

Far and Away: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman

Home Alone: Macauley Culkin, Joe Pesci

Harry Potter: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson

Saving Private Ryan: Tom Hanks, Matt Damon

As you can see, John's tunes are, in fact, kind of memorable. And I left off several dozen other familiar movie themes and his Olympic Games Themes. When you hear the songs, you remember them. That's what I call memorable. So lighten up with the humility, John. You're good at what you do. I figure you're probably going to be right up there with Mozart and Bach given the depth of your work.

© 2017 by Tom King

Top Seven Sci-Fi TV Series for People Who Don't Take Sci-Fi So Seriously

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Mon, 05 Sep 2016 11:06:00 +0000

A lot of Sci-Fi TV series take themselves very very seriously. It's great if you just need to be serious all the time. Me, I like my science fiction with a touch of humor. So here's my list of the greatest TV science fiction series that didn't take themselves too seriously. If you have some others you'd like to add, let me know. So here's the list in no particular order:

Firefly - Okay, there is at least one series I put in order. Joss Whedon's epic sci-fi series was canceled far too soon. It was quirky, funny and the characters were wonderful. It puzzled some people who were expecting Star Trek's tidy socialist federation and fuzzy collectivist economy. Instead, Firefly creates an interplanetary Wild West frontier in conflict with a powerful collectivist government and follows a band of smugglers making a dubious living out among the frontier planets.
Star Trek the Original Series - What I liked about the original Star Trek vs the later versions

was Shatner's lighter touch as captain. He never took things as seriously as the other captains. And he was a little bit randy too, which made him more interesting.
Stargate SG1 - Colonel Jack O'Neill and his merry band didlots of serious stuff, but Jack had a cock-eyed view of everything and quick, dry sense of humor. The series was a favorite early effort by the SyFy channel back when it was still the Sci-Fi channel. Dom Deluise's boys were heavily involved and Dom himself made an appearance. One of my favorite episodes was the one where the alien was hired as a consultant for a TV show called "Wormhole Extreme" which was a parody of SG1. Really funny. It gave the show a human quality and gave us more than a few laughs.
Eureka - Another Sci-Fi channel original about a town full of geniuses doing work for the Department of Defense and the sheriff who tries to hold things together as the town's denizen's variously try to blow themselves up one day after another. The show is funny, poignant and smart and I was sorry to see it come to an end.
Warehouse 13 - An interesting Sci-Fi channel series about a secret warehouse where all the magical and cursed items of the world were kept. Again, the team that took care of the artifacts were funny and serious and grumpy and chirpy and got into the most bizarre situations you could imagine. The show was fun and fantasy and yet overlapped on occasion with the hard science fiction world of Eureka. I loved the strange world they inhabited.
Chuck - While not exactly science fiction, this spy out ofwater series had a lot of science fictional elements to it and also had that sense of light humor and likeable characters that earned it the same kind of fiercely devoted fans the rest of the series in this list earned.
Red Dwarf - A blatantly sarcastic sci-fi series as only theBrits can manages. They seem to have the market cornered on making open fun of science fiction. I didn't include any of the other sci-fi comedy TV series the British do as this list is only about light-heartedly serious science fiction. My daughter and I used to watch Red Dwarf on Saturday nights. It's kind of a sentimental favorite of mine.

What are your favorites? I know I left out a lot of people's favorite SF, but this was a very personal list and so I limited it to the ones that made me smile. Did I forget anything because I like to have lists of ten or twelve, so I have room to add more. Just make your case in the comment section below.

© 2016 by Tom King

Incoming and Outgoing - Top 25 Things Gone Bye Bye and What Is Replacing Them

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 00:16:00 +0000

In my lifetime a lot of things have disappeared from usage in America. Makes me feel old quite frankly, so I'll make this quick.

WHAT'S DISAPPEARED................WHAT'S REPLACED IT

1. 78 and 45 rpm records...................LPs..........Digital CDs..........Mp3s
2. Slide Rules.....................................Calculators..........computers
3. Massive Mainframe Computers.....Personal computers....laptops.......tablets........smart phones
4. The Rolodex...................................Data bases....e-mail....The Internet.....Smart phone address books
5. Car phones......................................Cell phones.......smart phones
6. Walkie-talkies.................................CB radios......smart phones/facetime
7. Refundable glass pop bottles..........Plastic and aluminum soda cans
8. Microfilm........................................Data bases......eBooks......web based databases
9. Ticker Tape Machines.....................Fax machines......Internet notifications
10. Full service gas stations.................Self-serve gas stations
11. Bruce Willis’ hair...........................Bruce Willis' bald head
12. Burma Shave Road Signs...............Pop up interactive web ads
13. Olympic softball.............................Olympic synchronized swimming
14. Kodachrome slide film...................Digital camera SD cards
15. Flash bulbs/flash cubes...................Electronic flash.....Digital auto adjust speed/aperture
16. Typewriters.....................................Word processor software.....voice to type software
17. Freight Train Cabooses...................End-of-train-device
18. The Single Screen Movie Theater...The Multiplex.....Streaming services renting first run films
19. Folding paper maps.........................GPS/computer map software....talking GPS directions
20. Cathode Ray Picture tube TVs.........Plasma TV........LED flat screen TVs
21. Analog NTSC television stations.....HD Digital television stations......Internet streaming services
22. Pagers...............................................Smartphones
23. Dot-matrix printers...........................Inkjet, laser and 3d Printers
24. Film movie cameras..........................Digital video cameras
25. Wire recorders/8-track tapes.............Cassette recorders...Digital audio recorders

If you read a lot of science fiction, you'll recognize a few things on the obsolete list that sci-fi authors of just a few decades ago missed the call on. The futurists could be forgiven for missing the rapid obsolescence of wire recorders, computer memory stored on tape and film cameras. Occasionally, they catch it. Star Trek got the look and feel of the cell phone right and even the bluetooth in the earbud. Portable data storage, although they went for cubes instead of SD cards and jump drives, was one of the things they got right. One wonders what will come and go in the next 50 years. You will probably be surprised.

Ten things I Miss About Texas

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Sun, 07 Feb 2016 07:25:00 +0000

...now that I'm stuck here in Washington State.

For some reason, God with his infinite sense of humor has placed me far from home under gray, cold and dripping skies. I miss the big old sprawling, boisterous and beautiful state of Texas where I was born and spent most of my life. Here are some of the things I miss about home.

Texas sunsets and fields of bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrushes
Canoeing Texas Rivers
Sailing Texas lakes (we have actual wind there)
Blue Northers (being that suddenly cold makes you know you are alive)
The Alamo (Texas's #1 sacred place)
Chuy's Mexican Restaurant (Austin, Dallas and Tyler)
Buffalo Creek Barbecue (Cleburne)
Dinosaur Valley State park (Glen Rose)
The San Jacinto Monument, Battlefield and the Battleship Texas (Texas's #2 sacred place)
Watching Tornadoes go past and miss me altogether (you know your angel is there beside you at times like these)

There are lots of other things about Texas I like. Big Bend Country, the wide open spaces of West Texas, the Big Thicket, historic Austin, Ft. Worth Children's Museum and Planetarium, The San Antonio Riverwalk. Shakespeare in the Park in Fort Worth, The Caddo Indian Mounds, The North Texas Irish Festival, Padre Island, Jefferson River Port, Joe T. Garcia's Mexican Restaurant in Fort Worth, and Longhorn Caverns just to name a few. I love my state.

© 2016 by Tom King

Top Ten Signs You're Getting Old

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 22:23:00 +0000

Age sneaks up on you and pretty soon you're doing stuff you SWORE you'd never ever do in your life. Here are some early warning signs that decrepitude is approaching:

1. You don't have to set your alarm clock anymore, unless you want to make sure you don't get up so early that your grandkids think you must have been a dairy farmer once.

2. You choose movies to watch that won't disturb your nap. British period movies are a special favorite, although you find anything with John Wayne or Maureen O'Hara in it to be soothing.

3. You have a favorite movie that you've never seen the end of. And that's part of the reason you like it so well.

4. You wear black knee socks with shorts - not because you think its fashionable, but because it hurts too much to bend over and take them off. I mean getting a pair of shorts on is tough enough. Who has the energy left to change your socks?

5. You drop things a lot less often, because it's too danged hard to get down on your knees to pick them back up again. Before picking anything up you look around for some kind of long-handled tool. If you haven't bought a grabber yet, you've had one in the shopping cart at least once but were too cheap to buy it.

6. You park out on the far side of the grocery store parking lot in order to (a) protect your car from dents caused by people parking next to you and (b) because the extra walk is part of your plan to get "back in shape".

7. Your memory is so far gone that you actually believe that you were once "in shape". Your stories about the days when you were in shape are the stuff of legend (or more accurately - mythology). Joseph Campbell once interviewed you for a book he was writing.

8. At least one day a month, you never get around to changing out of your pajamas. Either that or you slept in your clothes. Either that or you wear the same clothes all the time.

9. You realize that you are probably never going to get around to writing the Great American Novel and that not paying attention in high school English probably didn't hurt your career that much or if it did, you really don't care anymore.

10. You develop a sudden interest in the surgical arts - as practiced upon yourself and your friends. You find yourself discussing colonoscopies over meals at four-star restaurants.

The bad news is that it gets worse from here on. When someone suggests going to a monthly bingo game at 6:00 am down at the McDonald's in the Walmart Supercenter, and you think it "sounds like fun", you will have officially topped the hill and begun the long slide down into geezerdom.

The good news? You've lived long enough to become a problem for your children, which is sort of payback for all the misery they caused for you when they were kids. They'll be having that "meeting" down at the I-Hop one day soon to figure out what to do with you. You will not be invited and your suggestions will not be seriously considered.

Smile and go with it (but put in your dentures first; the gums are just not attractive, okay).

(c) 2004 by Tom King

Ten Ways Your Dog is Telling You You're A Compulsive Neat Freak

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 05:18:00 +0000

Sometimes you can tell a lot about a human by the behavior of his or her dog. My wife and I have been married 39 years. Ours is a mixed marriage. She's a compulsive clean freak. I am NOT. We've compromised on the deal. I'm now a compulsive hand-washer. I keep my street shoes in a rack by the front door and do NOT wear them in the house and I've developed an allergy to chlorine bleach. Once, I was sitting at my desk while she was cleaning the living room. She dusted me! I've also been vacuumed, polished and sent back to rewash my hands. I'm 59 years old.

I'm now noticing signs in our dog that may indicate there's more to the theoretical symbiotic relationship between woman and beast than I first thought. Here are 10 dog behaviors I have noticed in canines who live with people who I suspect might be clinical neat freaks, if there were such a diagnosis in the APA Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Here are the diagnostic criteria I've come up with. If your dog shows three or more of the following behaviors, YOU might be a neat freak.

YOU MIGHT BE A COMPULSIVE NEAT FREAK IF:

1. When the dog enters your house she throws herself over on her back and sticks her feet up to be washed.

2. When you turn on the vacuum cleaner, the dog comes and sits in front of it until you vacuum her down with the upholstery hose and likes it.

3. When you leave your shoes on the floor, the dog puts them on the shoe rack by the front door.

4. The dog enjoys taking a bath.

5. The dog wears more cologne than you do and has her own fragrance.

6. The dog has a dog bed in every room with washable slipcovers that are washed more often than weekly.

7. The dog's food costs more than yours and/or she's vegan, has her own toothbrush and a favorite brand of special doggie toothpaste.

8. The dog has at some time or other worn underpants around the house.

9. The dog doesn't like for its feet to touch grass or dirt.

10. The dog expects you to wipe her butt after she goes poop (after you pick the poop up with the special plastic gloves and properly dispose of it, of course - and she sits and watches you to make sure you do it).

My dog is beginning to develop a few of these traits, but fortunately, she has me to take her for a walk and show her how the other half lives occasionally. We both know, however, that the rules go back into effect at the front door where our shoes come off and our feet get washed!

© 2013 by Tom King

Daisy gets vacuumed!

Top Ten Lists Reveal the Top Ten Reasons American Culture is Dying

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Sun, 10 Nov 2013 18:44:00 +0000

If you want to take the temperature of American Culture, go spool through top ten lists - top ten worst movies, top ten funniest movies, top ten reasons you're stupid and I'm not. You'll get a taste of what passes for cutting edge cultural awareness and good taste in the world of 20 to 30 somethings, who are apparently the only human beings worthy of the attention of advertisers. Either that or you'll take an overdose of something handy and die.

Should you survive with your brain relatively intact, let me 'splain. Here are ten things that, according to our society's youthful critical class, that are the essential criteria for coolness, at least according to today's most "important" demographic.

1. Drugs - I waded through several "top ten funniest movies of all time" expecting to find stuff like "Some Like it Hot", "Philadelphia Story", "Bringing Up Baby" and "The Odd Couple". Instead it was usually ten movies about teenagers using drugs, having sex and committing mayhem. The criteria for funny these days is apparently directly proportional to the the quantity of drugs consumed while taking your pants off.

2. Meaninglessness - When looking at the best overlooked films, most under-rated films, best movies of all time, the lists lean strongly toward the dystopian, post-modernist, violent and obscure. The more depressing the ending, the more likely to win the Oscar. Apparently being militantly hopeless is the new cool.

3. Self-Centeredness - The kinds of things that make the top ten lists these days tend to be films, music and television about characters who are not just anti-heroes, but about characters that are anti-human almost. Slashers now have cult followings and any character who acts selflessly in these types of films is quickly revealed to be a self-centered fraud in disguise. Moral of the story? Everybody is a self-centered prat and no one is to be trusted, not even yourself. I blame Freud.

4. Immodest Dress - The most admirably decked out in our modern world are those who show lots of cleavage, thigh and nipple, roughly in that order and without regard to gender. Skin tight, liposuction chiseled abs are standard as are enhanced bosoms and buttocks, whether by surgery or steroid treatments. Black is still cool. While I'm growing tired of strategically placed rags, apparently the culture has decided to run with it. Fashion designers are still managing to sell tattered dishcloths as high fashion, however.

5. Attitude - Attitude is important in the modern urban dystopia. It seems that you cannot be cool unless you are totally self-interested, chronically negative and pretty danged arrogant about it. Giant egos and abusive manners are hereby all the rage. Women have, in this attitudinous culture, been freed from their shackles only to submit meekly to being called b%^#$ and wh#@%$. I fail to see how feminists have improved their lot at all, but hey, I admit to being uncool.

6. Disdainfulness - It is particularly important in your search for coolness in today's edgy culture, that you look down on the things your peers all look down upon. You must have nothing good to say about religion, mom, apple pie and country and speak dismissively to anyone who is not approved of by your fellow disdainfuls in the same manner that a superior speaks to a menial (and lets face it, anyone who is not you or part of the cool group is a menial).

7. Criticality - Thanks to the Internet, we can not only share our most private thoughts, talk back to celebrities and be spied on by our mothers, but because we in this free information cornucopia of opportunity, everybody's a bloody critic. You have to watch out though. If you criticize the wrong thing (as I am doing now) and anyone finds out, you may be swarmed by your fellow critics and worse, be dismissed as a cultural dinosaur by the arbiters of what's gangsta, whoever they are.

8. Thugitude - Something about being a thug that brings romance into our lives these days. The sort of music you listen to should support all the above personality traits in addition to helping you to project a vaguely (and, when necessary, not so vaguely) threatening aspect to any of wankers who attempt get in your face. Being a thug tends to limit your job choices to organized crime, but your plan was to die young in a hail of police bullets anyway.

9. Illiteracy - We are apparently sliding back to the medieval in terms of spelling and word usage. Evidently, those who are really a part of the special group of cutting edge intellects these days have forgone spelling and spell words or use grammar in any fashion that occurs to them. It's a combination of urban street slang, text message shortcuts and creative attempts to indicate to others that you are somehow superior to everyone else. Kind of like pig Latin for thugs. "Wad up, br? Fo Shizzle my dizzle, what a bizzo meet me up the gizzo when you get a clizzo, and yo bro wuz the problemo? ROTFLMAO"

10. Obama/Biden/Pelosi/Schumer Worshipfulness - Finally, you must believe that President Obama or his predestined successor, VP Joe Biden, represents the only hope for the future of mankind and you must be believe in him no matter what he says or in spite of any evidence that he's an egomaniacal Marxist tyrant to the contrary. Just repeat this mantra, "Obama good, Tea Party baaaad!" or "Biden good, Trump bad" over and over until your eyes glaze and you develop an overwhelming urge to eat human brains. Once you have achieved this state, the only thing to remember is to avoid people with shotguns and you are officially off the heezie fo' sheezie and a card-carrying member of the Zombie Apocalypse.

I'm just sayin'

Tom

My Top Ten Favorite Funny Songs

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 01:08:00 +0000

When you sing like I do, you go for funny. No one wants to hear a love song from a voice that sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard. I therefore borrowed the Richard Harris talk-singing technique, the only thing that worked for people with raggedy voices before we got those sound systems that automatically correct your pitch if you get lost along the way. I just love those things, but it does seem like cheating somehow. So I've always kept an assortment of funny songs in my song bag, though, just in case I was playing guitar and someone mistook me for a singer.

So, here, in no particular order, are my top ten favorite funny or novelty songs (with links to examples of redentions of same) designed to make you a wildly popular entertainer with children and drunks.

The Boa Constrictor Song - Shel Silverstein's masterful combination of horror, humor and general grossitude. Extremely popular at summer camps, day care centers and old folks homes. Shel also wrote two other popular novelty tunes - "A Boy Named Sue" and "Cover of the Rolling Stone" - as well as a string of popular childrens' poem books beginning with "Where the Sidewalk Ends" which won an award or two. The version here is by Shel Silverstein himself and includes several of his other kids songs as well.
Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road - Loudan Wainright III's paean to noxious road kill always gets a sing-along started. I'm not sure why, but children and drunks seem to like singing the world stinkin' very loudly for some reason. Here the inimitable Mr. Wainright sings his classic song live in concert.
That's How the Yodel was Born - Riders in the Sky's Ranger Doug demonstrates the high and lonesome sound made by an unfortunate cowboy who landed a bit far forward on the saddle of his bucking bronc on this painful song. In this instance, yodeling will really make you cringe once you hear how it came about.
Apeman - The Kinks did some really interesting and fun songs during their erratic career. This one was my favorite. It's not screamingly hilarious, but it is a lot of fun to sing. This version is an in-concert recording.
Boomer Johnson - I first heard this cowboy poem about a murderous range cook on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion radio show. I have a tape around here somewhere and got the words and music from that. I found mostly recitations. This version uses a slightly different tune than I do, but you get the idea. Stick around through all the verses for the most satisfying ending I ever heard for a song about a bad man.
When I Was a Dinosaur - This fun song is by the duo, Trout Fishing in America. Keith Grimwood the short and substantial standup bass player and Ezra Idlet, the tall lanky guitar player play eclectic folk/rock hits to audiences of all ages. They're one of the few night club acts that can get away with playing Teddy Bear's Picnic at 2am to a bunch of drunks and get a wild round of applause. This song is always a hit with 5 year olds.
Waltzing With Bears - My daughter and I used to sing this song together. It's a classic kids song and went immediately to folk status and collected several dozen new verses along the way and the beauty is that there is always room for new and ever more scurrilous verses if you care to add some.
Mad Dogs and Englishmen - This classic bit of parlor humor was written by the inimitable Noel Coward. The faster you sing it the more effective this tongue tangler is. The link shows Noel singing a lightning round version that takes the breath away.
All I Want is a Proper Cup of Coffee - This version is by my favorite duo, Eric and Keith of Trout Fishing in America. This is another one of those that gets faster and faster and challenges you to keep your tongue untangled.
I'm My Own Grandpa - This horrible old song is the chronicle of backwoods marriage run amuck. It's appropriate to end this list with a version of this song performed in riotous fashion by the Muppets. Keep in mind that circumstances laid out in this song could actually happen all quite legally and given the current run of May/December weddings out there, it could happen again.

There are a whole lot of other songs out there that could be added to this list. This is just my personal top ten - the ones I've learned how to play. If you have some favorites of your own, please add them to the comments section below.

© 2013 by Tom King

Ten Best Pies and Cobblers(IMHO)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 15:59:00 +0000

I can resist most desserts. Ice Cream, even homemade vanilla with peaches doesn't make my knees week. Chocolate, I can do without. I can skip all manner of puddings, parfaits and bon bons. What I cannot pass by however is a well-made pie.

By "well-made" I mean one that has a crisp, flaky crust and some manner of fruit inside it. I'm partial to fruit, although there is one non-fruit entry in my list and only one woman in the world who can make it. The list herewith is personal and by no means exhaustive. I've made no attempt to rank my favorite pies in order of goodness. Instead I have included only pies which would be the best in the world at the time I happen to be in the mood for just that one special pie.

The List:

Marie Callendar Razzleberry Pie - This is one of the few store bought pies I include on this list. I include it because it is so danged good. It's a combination of blackberry, raspberry and apples. I can't always find it down at the grocery store, but when I spot one, I grab it along with a tub of Bluebell Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream - the only proper ice cream for eating with pie (unless you hand crank up my grandmother's special recipe vanilla ice cream).

Sam's/Wal-Mart's giant bakery lattice apple pie - Wal-Mart makes a huge lattice top apple pie that rivals anybody's anywhere. You can get them at Sam's almost any time and for the price you can't beat it. It's not too sweet and the filling is more fruity than most store-bought pies. It can take days to eat one, they're so huge.

Mama's Homemade Peach Cobbler - Okay it's not exactly a pie. It's better. The recipe is superb, it's more peachy. She goes easy on the spices so that great flavor comes through and the pie filling isn't so juicy that you forget there's peaches in there. This is the way a proper cobbler is made in the south. Just follow that recipe and you'll be unhappy with any other peach pie or cobbler you ever eat again. I promise.

Aunt Sheila's Homemade Chocolate Meringue Pie - This pie can only be made from scratch. The recipe starts from cocoa and is all about timing. My Sweet Baboo doesn't like meringue most of the time, but for this pie, she makes an exception. It's also good with Cool Whip or Whip Cream on it, but it's absolutely magnificent with meringue. This thing is hard to resist and I don't even like chocolate pie!

Uncle Tom's Lemon Meringue Pie - This isn't one of those fancy lemon cream pies or icebox lemon pies. Those things are way too sweet. This lemon pie is a simple Jello Lemon Pudding and Pie filling pie. The secret is Mrs. King's pie crust which I cannot now duplicate and despair of ever being able to reproduce. I'm working on the recipe and will include a link later if you want to give it a try. I love this kind of pie. I get one of these for my birthday every year instead of a cake (another dessert I can easily resist).

Tart Cherry Pie - Most cherry pies are far too sweet and syrupy. I like mine fruity and with a lot less sugar than most folk use. I like a cherry pie that contrasts with the ice cream, not one that overpowers it. With this one, I like a little evaporated milk instead of ice cream so I can taste the cherries properly. I've never eaten a store-made cherry pie that quite makes the grade.

Wild Blackberry Cobbler - A proper wild blackberry cobbler is one where you went out and gathered the blackberries yourself. This recipe can also be made as a pie or a nice lattice cobbler. Either way it's tart, not too sweet and a perfect framework for a scoop of homemade vanilla ice cream. It's not nearly as good if you bought the berries. To fully enjoy this you have to be picking thorns out of your fingers as you eat it.

Quick Peach Cobbler - This unique little recipe is one of my guiltier pleasures and, in my opinion, the only thing cake mix is truly useful for. It's made by mixing up cake batter, pouring it into a casserole disk with a thick layer of melted butter in the bottom and then pouring in some peaches. The cake batter crisps on the bottom and side from the hot butter and wraps itself around the peaches to make a nice buttery/peachy cobbler that you can whip up in a few minutes. This recipe offers a from-scratch cake batter, but you can use the kind in the box quite as well. The trick is to make the outside of the crust crispy so you get the nice contrast between the butter and the peaches.

Pumpkin Pie - I love pumpkin pie because it is the only proper pie to serve for breakfast. It's much better after it's spent the night in the fridge and you take it out and eat it chilled with maybe a little whipped cream. It really needs nothing. The kind you make with canned pumpkin is just fine. The only thing is not to overdue the spices. The spices should set off the flavor of the pumpkin, not overwhelm it. This is a nice recipe. Just adjust the spice to suit your taste.

Southern Pecan Pie - Pecan pies are rather sweeter than any of the other pies I've included in this list, but, made properly, they absolutely make my favorite pie list. Pecan pie is all about the crust and the nuts. The crust has to be flaky and delicious to offset the sweet filling. I like my pecan pies long on the pecans and short on the filling. I find that 99% of store-bought pecan pie is only faux pecan pie. They put some pecans on top with some cracker filling around them so it looks like more pecans than there are. In the south, we just drive around till we find a pecan tree hanging over the grader ditch, knock enough off for a couple of pies and take 'em home to shell. There is no excuse for skimping on a pecan pie in the south except that you just don't have any self-respect. If you don't have enough for a proper top coat of pecans on your pie, make brownies instead. I mean really people.....

The secret to a good pie is the crust. Any decent cook will tell you that. Everybody has their own way of doing it. My wife's recipe is the best I've seen. I'll add the link as soon as I torture her to get the recipe.

Dang! Now I'm gonna have to go make a pie. And my diet was coming along so well.

Tom King

Top 12 Famous People with Bad Hair

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 16:35:00 +0000

Kim Jong Un, the modern dean of bad hair days. I didn't include
him in the list because I dislike him intensely.

For some reason, there are a lot of famous people who do not care what their hair looks like. Well, today is National Bad Hair Day and to celebrate we present this rogues of famous people with bad hair. These are in no particular order of badness. They all have bad hair in their own way. Some are loveable. Some dispicable. There's no accounting for who has bad hair.

Albert Einstein - Einstein wild and wooly mane of white hair set the trend for fashionable physicists for the rest of the 20th century. His singular hairstyle is now known to my barber as "Einstein hair" and apparently I've got it. Oh, well you could look like someone much worse.

Abraham Lincoln - Honest Abe honestly had a most unruly head of hair. It looked much of the time as though Mary Todd put a bowl on his head and went after the loose ends with a hatchet. Still under that ragged hair of his beat the heart of a wise and gentle man. Lincoln actually made bad hair look good.

Carrot Top - Carrot Top, with his arresting shock of wild red hair has been making people laugh for close to three decades with a sense of humor as wild and unruly as that head of hair. Bad hair can be funny and profitable as Mr. Top has proved.

Daniel Webster - Nineteenth century American politician Daniel Webster was known for his gift as a speech-maker. Legend has it that he could out negotiate the devil and given some of the characters in the US Senate with which he had to wrangle, he probably could have. The hair must have been a little intimidating. Later pictures of him show an increasingly angry head of hair framing his face. Knowing Daniel he fixed it that way on purpose to mess with people's heads.

Don King - The wrestling promoter that gave us so many fights of the century that he ran out of century. He had hair that looked like it was something alive sitting on top of his head. People didn't like to stand too close. There were rumors that his hair would bite off your fingers if you got too close. People always stood back when they were negotiating with Don. His hair struck fear into the hearts of sportscasters, boxers and arena owners.

Donald Trump - What can we say about the Trumpster? The man is the king of the ugly comb-over. For someone with enough money to buy the Hair Club for Men, a man who could have all the beautiful women he wanted even if he were absolutely bald, the man who is the financial wunderkind of New York City is somehow absolutely clueless about how bad his hair looks. Go figure!

Adolph Hitler - This guy was so scary that no one dared tell him he wasn't fooling anyone with the comb-over, nor that the moustache looked like overgrown nose hair.

Mark Twain - American humorist Mark Twain was the champion of the witty remark. His gifts as a writer and speech-maker very likely gave rise to the idea that people with weird hair were highly intelligent, something Albert Einstein would go on to reinforce.

John Adams - Our second president had the dual problem of massive frontal hair loss and massive crown of wild hair in the back. Adams really wanted the office of president to have more regal trappings but George Washington set the precedent for a less ostentatious presentation for later chief executives. Adams could have used a crown, though, to cover the bald forehead and mash down all that hair.

Colonel Muamar Ghaddafi (or however you spell it) was the very nasty dictator of Libya. Nobody could figure out how to really spell his name. We're not even sure he knew how it was spelled. The Colonel as he was known to his friends and everyone he terrorized during his heyday in the late 70s and early 80s was in danger of becoming as wild and crazy as his hair until Ronald Reagan blew up his house to get his attention. After that he was much calmer, though he did try to develop nukes until George Bush invaded Iraq and hung his buddy, Saddam Hussein. Took a little more of the fluff out of his hair, that did.

Henry David Thoreau - Nineteenth century essayist, poet, hermit and general intellectual guy was author of "On Walden Pond" (not the movie with Katherine Hepburn and Henry Fonda - the long dull essay they make you read in high school lit class). Apparently weird hair was deemed sexy, at least by the languid Mr. Thoreau.

Martin Van Buren - Last, but not least, the dull as a post US president with the flamboyant hairdo, Martin Van Buren made whiskers fashionable again. Not a wild success as president, but given the hairdo, one suspects he really didn't give a hoot.

Me - I figure if this collection of guys can get away with having hair that looks like they slept with their heads in a Cuisinart, why do I ever want to spend $15 on a barber? What's the use when you can do the Einstein hair and look smarter to boot.

I tease therefore I am....

© 2013 by Tom King

Top Ten Reason We Don’t Want to Be Great Britain

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 09:10:00 +0000

(Or any other European, Asian, African or South American Country for that matter)

British cop rushes to the rescue....

It matters not what topic a feeble-minded old conservative like me wants to bring up, it never fails but that some liberal jumps up to tell me how much better it’s done in England or France or anywhere not the United States. I’m beginning to think these folk don’t like it here in America. So in order to save myself time in looking up stuff for use in future arguments with leftists, I wish to respond categorically as to why I don’t even want to live in Great Britain, much less any of the less civilized countries of the world. Here goes:

Reason # 10: There’s too much bloody history in the place. I’d never get any work done. Something historical’s happened on just about every square foot of ground in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. I couldn’t drive ten feet in that place without there being some statue or memorial where Prince Humperdink fought the Saxon hordes or the Viking hordes or the French hordes or some horde or other and got his head chopped off for his troubles. I’m one of those people that need a break in my historical sites so I can stop reading for a bit and rest my eyes. In Texas you can drive for hundreds of miles over ground where nothing has ever happened of any significance. It’s kind of peaceful.

Reason # 9: You don’t have to carry a passport to get decent food. In America, we’ve brought fine cuisine from all over the world here where we can eat it without having to drive to Europe . It’s too far to fly across an ocean from here to get decent Italian food, so we have set up Italian restaurants just down the street. We also have French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, Thai, Indian, Ethiopian, Vietnamese and Tex-Mex lined up cheek by jowl along the boulevard. Notice, if you will how hard it is to find an English, Scots or Irish restaurant in an American city. There’s a good reason for that I suspect. I’ve seen pictures of bangers and mash and I wasn’t impressed.

Reason # 8: In England you have Magna Carta. In the United States we have the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. The difference between these documents is the difference between our countries. Magna Carta is a list of rights that are granted by the King, mostly to the other nobles with a few scraps they threw to the peasants that were standing around pointing swords and pitchforks at his highness at the time. In England, your rights devolve from the Crown. In the United States we start out with the people having certain inalienable rights to start with and we dribble out a very limited amount of power to the town, then the county, state and national governments in smaller and smaller bits. The direction from which power comes is the whole point of the thing.

Reason # 7: We don’t want to hear about how Great Britain is “Great” because it had an empire and we didn’t. How’s that empire thing working out for you by the way? The reason America never got itself an empire is because we didn’t want one. We didn’t colonize anything after we filled up the empty spaces in North America, though we picked up a couple of nice land deals along the way. We got some islands and stuff as dependents when we liberated them in wars and stuff, we let them move into our basement and couldn’t get them to leave. We were able to nudge Cuba and the Philippines out on their own, but some of the little ones wanted to join our gang for protection. We decided NOT to grab everything in sight and make ourselves an empire. Cuts way down on the number of insurrections we have to handle.

Reason # 6: Spanish is easier to learn than Welsh and Gaelic and even a Cajun is easier to understand than a Yorkshire farmer. Spanish will eventually become so intermeshed with American English that pretty soon we’ll all be speaking the same language anyway. In Great Britain, you’re never going to get the Welsh to use some vowels for crying out loud and the Scots and Irish are just making up weird ways to spell stuff that bears no relationship to the sound of the words and nobody will tell you how to say “No comprende’, senor,” in Welsh.

Reason # 5: British cops don’t carry guns. If you’re being robbed, you might get a Bobby with a truncheon to wander by after he finishes his tea and today’s episode of Emmerdale on the telly. If I’m being robbed, I want Chuck Norris with a bazooka coming to my rescue in a helicopter, not some stuffy prig in a Mini-Cooper who’s going to rap on the door and ask the bad guys, “What’s going on here, Sport?”

Reason # 4: You cannot have a gun. Since the 1996 school shooting at Dunblane, Scotland, Britain has pretty much eliminated personal gun ownership. The Crown believes only the government should have guns, therefore only the government, terrorists, drug lords and hardened criminals carry guns. The rate of gun deaths has dropped below that of the United States while the rate of violent assaults, robberies and murders by stabbing, strangulation, clubbing and explosions have soared far above the US rates for those sorts of arguably more painful deaths; this despite the fact that Britain has more cops per capita than the US.

Reason # 3: In Britain, criminals are protected from citizens. In the United States, criminals do not know which homeowners own guns and which will shoot them which discourages robbery. It is legal in many states to shoot anyone who tries to break into your house or attack you in any way. In Britain, the police believe it isn’t cricket for a homeowner or crime victim to respond with greater force than that being used by the criminal to commit his crime against you. In other words, you are expected to put down the butcher knife you picked up off the kitchen cabinet and ask the burglar if you might pop off to the garage to get your cricket bat so as not to have a more deadly weapon to defend yourself with than the tire iron he’s carrying.

Reason # 2: If you did have a gun, you could not use it to defend yourself in Britain. The government believes that law enforcement is their job even though it takes them forever to get there when you call. They expect you to ask the home invader to sit down for a spot of tea while you wait for the Bobbies. Don’t believe me? A Norfolk farmer is now serving a life sentence in England for shooting a knife-wielding youth who broke into his house intent on robbing him. In Texas he’d have been given a medal by the sheriff’s department and a box of replacement ammo.

Reason # 1: You cannot escape crime by moving away from it in Britain. In the United States, you can move out of “bad” neighborhoods or crime-ridden cities, go to a nice place out in the country where everyone pretty much owns a gun and pretty much have a reasonable expectation that nothing really bad will happen to you in the way of a crime. In Britain it doesn’t do any good to move. Criminals know you are all unarmed and that you aren’t allowed to shoot them if you were. Therefore, they can go anywhere to commit a crime. Rural areas and small towns make perfect targets because the police tend to be far away, not terribly motivated to hurry and don’t like their sleep disturbed. It’s safer, the likelihood of being caught is far less (remember citizens are not allowed to hurt them) and neighbors aren’t allowed to interfere. If you attack and rape a woman, and her neighbor comes to her rescue and beats the crap out of you, he’s the one who will go to jail. The police rationale is that the criminal wasn’t attacking the neighbor so he doesn’t have a legitimate horse in the race. He is therefore guilty of assault.

Not only that, but more violent burglaries happen when people are at home than when they are not. In Britain, insurance companies require security systems. The security system is most likely turned off when the homeowner is at home, so that’s the safest time for home invaders and burglars to strike. They aren’t afraid of the homeowners (remember – no guns allowed).

Summary: Most houses in Britain are older than most of our most ancient historical landmarks here in the States and I am allergic to mildew. Criminals are not afraid of me and if they come in MY house, I’m most likely going to jail for at least attempted murder not to mention having to pay for British Health to install their new kneecaps. I also didn’t mention British universal healthcare which is really more like British Universal Health Neglect since most Britishers die waiting in a que. Mostly I like it that in America we have rights. In England, they grant you rights at the whim of the Crown. That's why we left England in the first place. We didn't trust the government there and we don't much trust it here. Excuse me now while I go clean my shotgun, in case we get very late company out here in the woods.

My Top Ten Purveyors of Middle Class Haute Cuisine

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 18:46:00 +0000

My favorite food critic - Antone from Ratatouille

The hoity-toity make jokes about them. Food critics regularly look down their lengthy noses at them. Sitcoms occasionally remind us that they are not as good as "real" Italian or Mexican or Ethiopian or Thai restaurants where they drizzle some unidentifiable sauce over a bit of meat, two asparagus spears and a slice of some kind of squash. But restaurants like these so-called "casual dining" restaurants are essential to the mental health of the middle class. They help us keep our tuxedos and evening gowns clean for weddings and funerals and deer hunting. There are several good reasons why these places are popular with the less snooty crowd:

We know where they are. They have big lighted signs and they put them in places we can find them like next to a mall or Wal-Mart. Middle class people don't have the time or energy left after a hard day of real work to run all over town looking for snobby restaurants. We want something good, something nice and something we can find.
We can afford them. Most of these cost a few bucks more, but the service and the tastiness of the food makes us feel special.
We know what we're getting. If you're going our to eat and going a little over budget to boot, you want to know what to expect. The lack of nasty surprises is part of the charm in going out to a "nice" restaurant in the first place.
They give us a safe place to celebrate the special events of our lives. Middle class people like to go out to eat on birthdays, Mother's day, Father's day, anniversaries and the like. We'd rather go someplace nicer than McDonald's or the Sonic Drive-In to mark these occasion. We'd rather not risk spending a lot of money and then not enjoying it, so we tend to stick to places we know and can trust.

This list is in no particular order and it's my list not yours so if you disagree, please post your own list in the comments section. I always like to know about good restaurants. Also note, I left off places like Hooter's, not only because I've never been there, but because it's not the sort of place you could take your hardshell Baptist grandmother. For most of these you could take her, even those with a bar, so long as you sat at the far end of the dining area and didn't order a beer.

The Olive Garden: When both my wife and I were working in the same day care center, she as nurse and I as director, we went to the OG the same night every week after we shut down the center. They got to where they expected us, had our drinks ready for us and let us sit in the bar area while we waited. Sometimes, if the place was crowded, they'd bring our meal to the little table in the bar area so we wouldn't have to wait an hour for a regular table. We had our favorite meals, but eventually settled on Ravioli de Portabello as our favorite. Great place for anniversaries, birthdays and such. Nice relaxing atmosphere. Nice people. Food you can count on even if it is a more expensive than McDonald's.

Red Robin: I hadn't tried out RR until a few years ago when I came up to Washington to visit my sister and brother-in-law. RR is a sort of cafe' on steroids - nice atmosphere with all sorts of interesting stuff on the walls like most of these places. If you're looking for a fancy hamburger, this place has 'em. They also do some nice dinner kinds of things too.

IHop: IHop is middle class breakfast haute cuisine. IHop is where you gather the grownup siblings when you want to talk about "what to do about Dad". They do have some nice dinners, but it's not the sort of place you go to celebrate birthdays and special occasions. They do maintain a booming business on Sundays before and after and during church (You find a lot of heathen Dads in there between 10 and 12 after they've dropped Mom and the kids off at Sunday School.

Red Lobster: Red Lobster holds title to probably the most popular semi-uppity seafood place. They rank about third in the nation for restaurant chains so they must be doing something right. While, I've never been there, but my son loved the place and took his girl there whenever he wanted to part with some money in exchange for looking like one of the swells. If Micah liked the food, I could always trust his good rating. He was a manager at several restaurants while he was going to college and had his mother's eye for cleanliness. If they got past his inspection and he thought the food tasted good, you could count on his recommendation. Since I don't eat crab, shrimp, lobster or other shellfish, their reputation with me would depend on their fish dishes which I have promised myself I would try.

Cheddar's: Cheddar's is basically a slightly higher priced cafe with atmosphere. The food is consistently good, but the menu can be limited if you don't eat bacon. They do put bacon in a lot of things, so if you're Jewish, Muslim or Seventh-day Adventist, you may have a limited, though tasty selection. The Cheddar's we used to go to tended to be a bit noisy, but they made a good steak and had a nice variety of homey American foods.

Chili's, Applebee's and TGI Friday's: Applebees has some really good food and their prices are reasonable. It is a bar and grill, so expect some noise from the bar area on Friday and Saturday nights. Our favorites are the steak (my wife is a closet carnivore) and the oriental chicken bowl. Very nice. I combined Chili's and Applebee's in one entry because they are a lot alike in atmosphere and menu. One thing Chili's does that I appreciate is offer a vegetarian version of any of their burgers. Just ask for the Swiss Mushroom Burger with the black bean burger. It's what I always have at Chili's. TGI Fridays has pretty good food of about the same bar/grill style cuisine as the others. Any one of them are good for after the ball game on the weekend and for miscellaneous celebratory gatherings.

Chuys: Chuy's only has added some 70 locations, from Texas to Chicago to Virginia since this article was first written. It's well worth a visit. There are other great Mexican places like On the Border, El Chico and such, but Chuy's is special. First, it's distinctly Tex-Mex. It's an odd place, usually in some weird part of town and you often have to park six blocks away because their parking is often very limited. I think they do that to keep the traffic down. There's almost always a line to get in, though it moves pretty quickly. The prices are very very reasonable. The food is amazing and the decor is weird. They have this Elvis/50s thing going that gets a little crazy with hubcaps on the ceiling and such. They started out in Austin. Lance Armstrong and other Austin celebrities are regulars there, but the management never got snobbish about it or jacked up their prices, just carefully added new locations around Texas. The Dallas restaurant has a statue of Elvis standing in a fountain in the semi-outdoors part of the restaurant. The food at the one they built in Tyler just before I rashly moved to Washington State was beyond incredible and the service for the big group I went with was unbelievable. We were swarmed by staff determined to make sure we were happy with everything. They have their own private pepper supply some place in New Mexico and their chefs personally inspect the crop each year I'm told. I don't know what secret ingredients are in their recipes, but their chefs are geniuses. And you will be pleasantly surprised by the bill and the quality of the guacamole.

Golden Corral - As family buffet steakhouses go, GC is one of the best. They even do breakfast. Golden Corral is where you go after church on Sunday or whenever you're really hungry and want to stuff yourself to the eyes. The food is consistently good and the service is quick and efficient.Their salad bar is fantastic and the chocolate waterfall that you can dip fruit into has earned them the undying love of overweight Americans everywhere.

Texas Roadhouse - There are probably a lot of different restaurants with some variant of this name. The one in Tyler where my granddaughter worked is a really good steakhouse with a Texas flavor to it. They have those big barrels of unshelled peanuts sitting around where you sit to wait for a table and bowls of them on the table when you get there. It's fun because everybody throws the shells on the floor, so the place is crunchy when you walk around. The baked potatoes are lovely and steak is their specialty. The prices are higher than Golden Corral, but less than The Outback.

Outback Steakhouse - If you know somebody who loves steak and want to make them feel special, The Outback is place. It will cost you more than most of the places here, but still manages not to break the bank. My wife loves the place. I don't really see that it's any better than the less expensive places, but she assures me it is. Being raised almost vegetarian, I don't have a lot of opinion on the value of meat. Now if we were talking salads.....

I do have to mention a couple of places that didn't make the list because they either aren't chains or aren't semi-uppity enough to qualify for this list. You'll notice I didn't put any pizza places up there. Pizza tends to fall into the fast food category. If I were to choose my favorite pizza chain with a dining room it would probably be Pizza Hut or Pizza Inn depending on the quality of the local outlet's salad bar. I lean toward Pizza Hut because my boys worked there while they were in school.

Very honorable mention goes to my favorite Mom and Pop Pizza/Italian place, a place in Tyler, Texas called "Little Italy". It's in an old KFC location (still has the steeple on top). They make a dish called Chicken Murphy that I've never seen anyone duplicate anywhere. I always say I'm going to try something else, but I seldom do. It's just too hard to resist. It's spaghetti with chicken breast and this amazing sauce with peppers and onions and mushrooms and a scattering of jalapenos to give it some flair. Sometimes the chef gives it a little extra flair so if you are sensitive to jalapenos, you can just remove the jalapenos with a fork and enjoy the lingering spicy flavor without burning your tongue if, like me, you like your peppers milder than most East Texans.

If one of your favorite casual dining restaurants is missing from this list, feel free to add it in the comments section. I probably just haven't been there yet or this would be a top 20 or top 50. Hmmm. I may have to expand my list someday soon.

Tom King

The Best Television Series Ever - There's Only One in This List

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:04:00 +0000

Someone over on Hubpages asked:
If you could revive (or extend) any TV series of the past 50 years, which would it be, and why?

It took me about 1 second to come up with an answer.

"Firefly".

No question about it. If I were asked to name the best TV series ever, my choice would be the same.

Retired after just 13 episodes, this Joss Whedon sci-fi gem, was badly handled by Fox, largely because Fox didn't understand its audience. Firefly only ran 13 episodes and Fox bounced it around the schedule so much nobody was really able to find it. Those that did were hooked on it. After Fox managed to mishandle the movie version, they pretty much buried it so it could never be revived.

Too bad. Firefly had the potential to draw a lot of sci-fi viewers that had long ago been turned off by Star Trek's inexplicable pie-in-the-stars smooshy liberalism after Captain James Tiberius Kirk retired.

Firefly was a gritty look at humans once again on the frontier; the space western motif was perfect and made sense to hard sci-fi fans. The lack of encounters with big-headed rubber aliens cleared out most of the horror movie sci-fi fans. Firefly was thinking man's science fiction and had more people had time to find it and watch a few episodes, they'd have been hooked. Many who have watched the series on the Syfy Channel or one of the Science Channel marathons or borrowed some Firefly groupie's DVD set have become hard core fans.

Firefly fans are more fanatic than Ron Paul supporters. The cast was perfect and every one of them has said they'd do the series again in a heartbeat. Nathan Fillion, Firefly's Captain Malcolm Reynolds, still manages to scatter a few Firefly references into his new series, Castle. He and the rest of the crew do appearances at conventions and to a person call the Firefly series one of the best, if not THE best acting work they've ever done.

If you have not seen it, jump onto a Sci channel marathon some weekend when they run the whole series and the movie back to back in one day.

You will not regret the day wasted unless you're an ignorant boob and then, don't worry. Fox still has plenty of reality TV shows where they eat worms and stuff. You'll be alright.

Tom

Five Steps to Happy Feet

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 20:59:00 +0000

A lot of people hate their feet. They hate other people's feet. They hate the very idea of feet. These are not people with happy feet. I, on the other hand, am a person with happy feet. They have served me well. My 10 ½ triple E's have a few scars and a flaw or two thanks to inuries over the years, but all in all they have held me up well. My right little toe is permanently numb, but then, when you kick a chair that hard, you can expect a little nerve damage.

So how do you get to the advanced age of 57 and still have healthy happy feet?

Step 1: Go barefoot as a child.

Nothing is better for your feet than exposing them to the varieties of surfaces and textures you'll encounter in the average backyard. The bones in growing feet need to flex and move freely if they are going to develop properly in order to hold us up when we reach our full height. Mom's overprotect kids feet, I believe. I have a nice wide stable foot thanks to running barefoot most of my childhood (and Mom saved a fortune in tennis shoes).

Step 2: Accep minimal support.

Sandals are wonderfully unsupportive. I used to wear thin-soled canvas running shoes as a kid. They had virtually no padding or arch support in them and my Mom didn't like them because she thought they'd ruin my feet. But since I had my own paper route, I could buy the shoes I wanted and track shoes were as close to barefoot as you could get and still be allowed to go to school. So that's what I wore and they did not ruin my feet despite Mom's dire warnings. Science backs me up. There are Indians in the mountains of Mexico who run marathons wearing only Huarache sandals. Curious researchers found that these thin, almost non-existant shoes allow the bones in the foot to absorb impact more effectively than expensive running shoes. Turns out there is evidence that all that support in so-called "scientifically" designed sports footwear may actually cause more injuries than they prevent. Giving the foot too much support can, apparently, weaken the foot's ability to absorb shocks. A foot that can flex is a foot that will hold up under long usage.

Step 3: Ventilate your feet.

If you must wear shoes, go for ones that ventilate well. Fungal infections of the foot require a warm moist environment to grow – environments like the inside of a poorly ventilated shoe and thick socks. If you do, for whatever reason, need to don Nikes and sports socks, for goodness sake get out of them and air out your feet for several hours afterward. Wash and dry thoroughly, then run around unshod for a while. If you're out in hiking boots, get wool socks, even in summer. They wick off the moisture and keep your skin fairly dry. Around the campfire, though, kick off the boots and lounge about in flip flops or a pair of Huarache's you keep dangling from your backpack.

Step 4: Go bare-footin'.

No need to spend a fortune on a foot massage or a reflexologist. Find a safe place to walk unshod and take a hike once in a while. The textures of the ground, rock, grass and earth, not only thoroughly and naturally massage your feet, but the sensations give you an all over sense of well-being. Mother Earth was meant to be felt through our soles. In the process, you'll also build a nice thick protective layer on the bottom of your feet – something that may come in handy some day if you ever have to cover some ground sans Gucci loafers.

Step 5: Let your toenails grow out a little.

When they advise you to cut your toenails straight across, there is a good reason. If you let the edges of your toenails grow a bt beyond the skin and don't cut them low in the channels along the sides of the nail, you'll save yourself a lot of pain from ingrown toenails. Buy yourself some proper nail clippers for toes and keep up with your toes. An ingrown toenail is very painful and can even require surgery to remedy. If you go barefoot a lot, you'll be more likely to notice a developing problem.

People don't appreciate how important their feet are to their happiness. Show me a man with unhappy feet, I'll show you a miserable human being capable of talking on his cell phone in the theater, committing genocide or starting a nuclear war.

May the road rise up to meet you and may your feet be happy upon the road you have chosen!

Tom

Who's Your Favorite Conservative Science Fiction Author?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 22:17:00 +0000

As a conservative, I find it almost impossible to stomach some of the leftist nonsense that comes out of the science fiction genre. I grew up on sci-fi as a kid, but was lucky to have found a wide range of political ideology in what I read. Some rang true to what I had learned in history and sociology (often in spite of my history and sociology teachers). Some did not. I remember being drawn to elements in science fiction that seem to be a recurring theme - even in the works of writers who probably see themselves as ardent progressives. Liberty and freedom of the individual is one of these themes and the only way to pit liberty and freedom against an adversary is to pit it against a believable one.

What you get are sorely confused people writing about the heroic, rugged individualist fighting against the evil corporate dominated governments, insect hive minded aliens, brutal tyrants and evil forces bent on world domination. And yet, how many of them go out and vote for political parties that would increase the size power and intrusiveness of government? Sci-fi writers flirt constantly with the idea of a government by the wise (and let's face it most sci-fi writers consider themselves among the "wise"). Such a government, if managed by the proper folk, the pure nobles, the great wizards or wise men or sorceresses, would manage everything so all the regular people would be fat and happy and satisfied with their lot in life.

But it never really works that way does it?

We never can quite get away from the obvious defects of such a system. You'd have had to be blind not to have seen the horrors of unfettered communism once the Iron Curtain collapsed in the late 80s. Turns out communism was far worse than we ever knew. Even the Chinese have realized the problems with communism and are moving away from it, retaining the authoritarian bits, of course. The Chinese always preferred their governments authoritarian for some reason. I suspect preserving an authoritarian government machinery has always been the point of progressivism, socialism and communism anyway. Many SF authors point out this problem that authority has in co-existing with freedom in their novels, movies and stories - sometimes unwittingly. That's why you get leftist writers writing the most damning things about big governments.

My top ten favorite SF authors whose works ring true for me include:

Poul Anderson: Anderson is not only a scientist, but a student of history as well. His future cultures recognize the problems with bureaucracies, corporate or government and his stories deal with the impact of such repressive societies on men and women with brains, creativity and a love of freedom. The man almost preaches sometimes. He produced a steady stream of characters like notorious trader to the stars, Nicholas Van Rinjh, Dominic Flandry, David Falkyn and a host of others provide an almost endless stream of reading - the man was a voracious writer. If you're a conservative/libertarian like me, you'll find yourself nodding in agreement as you read his finely crafted stories that weave history, anthropology, sociology and science into a seamless whole.
Orson Scott Card: Orson sits on the outside of mainstream science
fiction. A Mormon like Glenn Beck, Card is not shy about his political opinions. His masterpiece, "Ender's Game" is on the commandant of the Marine Corps' recommended reading list for Marine officers. While, I'm not particularly a fan of his fantasy work, his hard science fiction is a delight and I hope he never runs out of Ender sequels.
Dr. Jerry Pournelle: You probably know this very intelligent man from his work with Larry Niven, but he has quite a few novels of his own. He, like Poul Anderson, believes that space exploration is the royal road to freedom for man and has long promoted the idea that if we focus on the stars, it will reduce the problems we have here. He opposed the Gulf Wars saying that if we spent the money developing nuclear and other energy technologies we could tell the Arabs to go drink their own oil and not have to meddle with them. His SF work will not make you cringe.

C.S. Lewis: A surprising number of people don't know that Lewis wrote a science fantasy trilogy. The books are "Out of the Silent Planet", "Perelandra" and "That Hideous Strength". His fantasy series "The Chronicles of Narnia" have been made into a series of movies. Lewis was a firm opponent of socialism and wrote several fiery condemnations of the creeping "nanny state" in Britain. His SF work, while implausible scientifically given what we now know about Mars and Venus, is a wonderful philosophical treatise on the consequences of the lust for power. His very funny "Screwtape Letters" is a brilliant take on demons and the devil.
Michael Flynn: I got into Flynn after stumbling on his first book, "Firestar". Firestar depicts an independent woman, a corporate magnate, who has a childhood fear of an asteroid striking the Earth and wants to see a system put in place to protect the planet. Tired of waiting for a foot-dragging government to do things, she starts her own school system that trains up kids to be astronauts and scientists in her own privately funded space program. In this, Flynn anticipated the power of private commercial space companies to innovate their way to space out in front of plodding government sponsored space efforts. The series definitely leans conservative in its disdain for bureaucracies. Whatever political views Flynn may espouse privately, he gets me as a reader for that.
J.R.R. Tolkien: While more strictly a fantasy than a science fiction writer, I include him on the principle that if the Syfy Channel can show horror movies and wrestling matches, I can include Tolkien in this list. I like that, while his novels are full of kings and nobles, its the small fry that count. Big powerful forces in his novel, when they are doing as they should be doing, serve to support the meek who are the ones who really make the difference in the end.
Michael Crichton: If you're looking for a smart writer, pick one that finished med school and chose to become a science fiction author. His brilliant "State of Fear" is a scathing indictment of the global warming scam that has upset more than a few of his Hollywood colleagues. We will miss his intelligent observations about science medicine and technology. I bet he had some doozies left to write.

Daniel da Cruz: Daniel didn't write a whole lot of books and he's not well know, but worth discovering. He spent most of his career as a journalist and general man about the world. In the 80s, however, he wrote one of my favorite sci-fi series of all time. The first entitled, "The Ayes of Texas" takes place during the Carter years when the US is being sold piecemeal to the Soviets. A charismatic Texas governor and billionaire inventor join forces to lead Texas out of the union and re-establish the Republic of Texas, prompting a war with Russia. In a classic shootout, the upgraded Battleship Texas dukes it out with a Russian Fleet that attacks Houston and finishes it off in convincing Texas Navy fashion. In the second book, "Texas on the Rocks" the inventor's son brings an iceberg to Corpus Christi and supplies water to a drought-stricken US Midwest and fights off assorted villains that want to bring down the fledgling Republic of Texas. In the last book, Texas Triumphant", our hero drills a tunnel from Texas to Moscow and sets off an unusual and non-lethal bomb that destroys the Soviet Union once and for all. The solution that wins the war is one of the most original weapons of war I've ever heard of. If da Cruz had written nothing else, these books set him as one of my favorites in the SF genre. Every Texan should own the set.
Robert A. Heinlein: It's fascinating to me that one of the most hard-shell conservative sci-fi writers of all time is also responsible for the science fiction book that was embraced most warmly by the hippie counter-culture of the 60's - "Stranger in a Strange Land". One of the "Big Three" of science fiction along with Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, Heinlein was one of the first to push the genre into the mainstream. Heinlein's work addressed the themes of individual liberty, self reliance and the obligation individuals owe their societies. He also wrote controversial works that examined the influence of organized religion on culture and government and the repression of nonconformist thought by governments and societies. Because he touched on so many themes, it was difficult to pin down exactly what his views were politically sometimes. His very conservative 1959 book "Starship Troopers" examines an interstellar military at war. Troopers infuriated the left when it was written. The leftists finally took a little revenge in 1997's movie version of the book. The movie converted Heinlein's more likeable and humane Earth government into a white-people-only cartoonish Facist state; something it never was in the books.
Frank Herbert - Best known for his seminal series "Dune", Frank Herbert viewed his

troubling future universe through definitely conservative eyes. His heroes battle the system and it's collection of nobles, managers, emperors and unions with a surprisingly altruistic disdain for inherited titles and blood rights. Herbert shows us a universe governed by hereditary insiders and challenged by a series of messianic heroes, who mange to give the governing elites more than one black eye in the process. He's not the first sci-fi author to challenge the kind of unrealistic progressive pipe dream universes those dreamed up by the later Star Trek guys. By the way, has anyone ever figured out how The Federation pays its Star Fleet personnel and do they all make the same amount or does everybody just use that machine that makes coffee to make anything they want. Herbert had it right. It takes a messiah to break up a hegemony of "leaders" intent on managing everyone's lives for their own fun and profit. He had it exactly right!

Now it's your turn. Leave a comment below telling us a sci-fi author that warmed the cockles of your conservative heart. I'm looking for new reading material.

Tom King

If You Love Series Fiction - 12 Great Reads

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 04:31:00 +0000

My Dozen Favorite Book Series

If you've come to the end of the Harry Potter books and you need another book to read, but you want one that will be with you for the long haul, what you want is a book series. Have I got some winners for you. These books take you deep into the lives of some characters you will love. If you're a voracious reader, you've probably read most of these. If you're new to series fiction, however, then you are in for a treat. To wit - my top ten book series............es. Oh, to heck with the grammar. On with the story......

1. "The Chronicles of Narnia" by CS Lewis. I discovered this gem in college in a children's literature class I took for my teaching certificate. We were supposed to read "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" by Friday. I read all seven in chronological order (not the order of writing which I recommend by the way) and was finished to my regret by Thursday night. Lewis' highly readable and engaging Christian allegory chronicles the dealings between eight English schoolchildren, Digory, Polly, Peter, Susan, Edmund, Lucy, Eustace and Jill and a powerful lion king called Aslan in the land of Narnia from the Lamp Post to Cair Paravel. Narnia keeps summoning the kids to itself via magic items like horns,wardrobes, rings and pictures from train stations, back bedrooms and holes in walls. The books carry you on to the end of the world itself where Narnia and Earth become one. It is a lovely trip The books in logical order are:

The Magician's Nephew
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The Horse and His Boy
Prince Caspian
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Silver Chair
The Last Battle

2. "Horatio Hornblower" by CS Forester. It is a complete and total accident that my two favorite series are by authors with the initials CS. The C and S both stand for different names altogether, but that doesn't matter. I stumbled on these after watching a Gregory Peck movie on the late show one night. I didn't know that Captain Horatio Hornblower was the subject of a series of books. The novels trace the career of an awkward young commoner midshipman, without advantage or patron who rises in the British Navy on brains, nerve and an innate understanding of just what it takes to be a captain. I'm told Gene Rodenberry studied Capt. Hornblower in designing all the captains in the Star Trek series. He could not have picked a better character study in leadership. The books, again in chronological order, not the order in which they were written are:

Mr. Midshipman Hornblower
Lieutenant Hornblower
Hornblower and the Hotspur
Hornblower and the Atropos
Hornblower During the Crisis
Beat to Quarters
Flying Colors
A Ship of the Line
Commodore Hornblower
Lord Hornblower
Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies

3. "The Polesotechnic League" by Poul Anderson.

I discovered Poul Anderson early in my science fiction reading. Nicholas Van Rinjh, a recurrent character in the series is a fat Dutch trader who is wildly wealthy, a thorn in the side to the authoritarians in the League and a genius at horse-trading with alien cultures. His purpose in life seems to be to figure out how to get everyone to play nice so he (and they) can make a little money. Van Rinjh is the ultimate capitalist. These are most of the books and story collections in the Polesotechnic Universe:

War of the Wing-Men
Trader to the Stars
The Trouble Twisters
Satan's World
The Earth Book of Stormgate
Mirkheim
The People of the Wind

4. "The Time Patrol" by Poul Anderson. I keep coming back to Anderson. His Time Patrol series is more of a psychological, sociological and historical study as it is impacted by future science. Manson Everard, an out of work ex-soldier/engineer answers a cryptic want ad and finds himself taking a job that sends him to the Cretaceous Era for basic training and up and down the time-line as an unattached agent and Time Patrolman, guarding the timeline against interference by future time travelers. The historical detail is breath-taking and the situations are mind-bending. I recommend buying the collections so you get all the stories in the series:

Time Patrol
Brave to be a King
Gibralter Falls
The Only Game in Town
Delenda Est
Ivory and Apes and Peacocks
The Sorrow of Odin the Goth
Star of the Sea
The Year of the Ransom
The Shield of Time
Death and the Knight

The shorter novels above have been collected in "The Time Patrol" or "Annals of the Time Patrol". If you love history and science fiction, this series gives you both with a taciturn hero and great back stories.

5. Robots, Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov. Asimov built these three series over decades of his science fiction career, then came back after a lengthy hiatus and wrote the ending in which he connected the three series into one long chain. Asimov explores the idea that robots and/or smart people can "take care" of the human race over long periods of time and keep the galaxy from going to hell in a handbasket. It's a progressive fantasy, but I have to give it to Asimov, he does point out the flaws in the concept quite nicely. Asimov is himself a scientist with four or five Ph.D.s and an exhaustive collection of dirty limericks. He takes a long look at the human race and how our creations may one day wind up our masters. While not as much fun as Anderson's rough and tumble capitalist universe, it's a fascinating look at the possibilities and dangers of scientistific meddling. Hint - Asimov comes down on the side of science. Here they are in roughly the order I'd read them:

Robot Visions (Includes the original "I, Robot") with inventor Susan Calvin and introducing Elijah Bailey and his partner, R. Daneel Olivaw
The Caves of Steel (Bailey and Olivaw)
The Naked Sun (Bailey and Olivaw)
The Robots of Dawn (Bailey and Olivaw)
Robots and Empire (Last with Bailey and Olivaw)
The Current of Space (first of the Empire Series)
The Stars, Like Dust (Empire)
Pebble in the Sky (Empire)
Prelude to Foundation (Empire and Foundation - Hari Seldon)
Forward the Foundation (Foundation - Hari Seldon)
Foundations Fear (by Gregory Benford - Foundation, and Hari Seldon)
Foundation and Chaos (by Greg Bear - Foundation, Hari Seldon, R. Olivaw)
Foundation's Triumph (by David Brin - Foundation, Hari Seldon, R. Daneel Olivaw)
Foundation (Foundation - Hari Seldon)
Foundation and Empire (Foundation)
Second Foundation (Foundation)
Foundations Edge (Foundation)
Foundation and Earth (Foundation and R. Daneel Olivaw)

The ending is a stunner. Save for the three editions not by Asimov himself, the series is tight, a smooth read and masterfully plotted. I've not read all the new stuff yet, but most of it and am collecting original editions to complete my set. Isaac will be missed.

6. The Ender Saga by Orson Scott Card is sixth because I'm more or less writing in order of discovery. Ender's Game is a stunning novel about the misuse of brilliant children. It leaves us with no clear answers about the morality of it, because, after all, the Earth is saved and the pupils soon become the masters in this brilliant series and it's take on how to effectively respond to bullying is disturbing, if effective. The book was so ahead of itself that it's taken 30 years for the movie industry to figure out the technology to make it into a film. Here's the more or less chronological list as it now stands:

Ender's Game
Ender's Shadow
A War of Gifts
Ender in Exile
Shadow of the Hegemon
Shadow Puppets
Shadow of the Giant
Shadows in Flight (soon to be published)
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind

7. "The Dragon Riders of Pern" by Anne McCaffrey. McCaffrey is a relentless serial writer. It's like science fiction meets romance novel in some ways. Her female characters are strong and well drawn. She can be a little corny. The novels of Pern are an easy read, big fat books and a fun alternative to television and you're not likely to run out of reading material any time soon. Once every four years, the colony world of Pern is visited by a space born rain of fire called "thread". Genetically bread fire-breathing dragons and their riders burn the thread up in the sky to prevent wholesale destruction of the colonists below. Each 150 some odd year visitation is called a "pass". Here they are chronologically:

First Pass

Dragonsdawn
The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall

Second Pass

Dragonseye

Third Pass

Dragons Kin
Dragonsblood

Sixth Pass

Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern
Nerilka's Story

Ninth Pass

Dragonflight
Dragonsong
Dragonquest
Dragonsinger
The White Dragon
Dragondrums
Masterharper of Pern
Renegades of Pern
The Girl Who Heard Dragons
All the Weyrs of Pern
The Dolphins of Pern
The Skies of Pern
A Gift of Dragons (collected short stories)

8. The Aubrey/Maturin Series by Pat O'Brian. This series brings me back to my love of swashbuckling sea captains. Also set during the Napoleonic Wars, Captain Jack Aubrey and his ship's physician, spy and naturalist Stephen Maturin would have been Horatio Hornblower's contemporaries. Truth be told, I don't like Captain Jack as well as I do Hornblower. Aubrey is a deeply flawed man and there are times I'd like to thrash him. His sins, for some reason, are, though common to sailors, less forgivable than are Hornblowers. That said, the series is a deeply detailed look at the lives of sailors and their captains and officers and O'Brien brings us another worthy study in the art of leadership. In chronoligical order, the books are:

Master and Commander
Post Captain
HMS Surprise
The Mauritius Command
Desolatin Island
The Fortune of War
The Surgeon's Mate
The Ionian Mission
Treason's Harbour
The Far Side of the World
Reverse of the Medal
The Letter of Marque
The Thirteen Gun Salute
The Nutmeg of Consolation
Clarissa Oakes
The Wine-Dark Sea
The Commodore
The Yellow Admiral
The Hundred Days
Blue at the Mizzen
The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey

9. "Rumpole of the Bailey" by John Mortimer. I am not a big fan of the mystery genre, but then Rumpole is not a detective. Rumpole is a pudgy, opinionated, small-cigar-smoking Old Bailey Hack - a lawyer of all things. I am not fond of lawyers, except for perhaps, this one. Rumpole lives his live between the Old Bailey, London Sessions and his Froxbury flat with his wife Hilda (SHE WHO MUST BE OBEYED). They made a series out of the books that's as funny as the originals. It's more leisurely reading the books and wll worth your time. You'll feel you've made a friend of old Rumpole. I find him one of the most sympathetic barristers in all of literature, right down to the spattering of ash on his waistcoat. The series, originally written for television, later became a book series and I prefer them that way. The books include novelizations and short stories from the series.:

Rumpole of the Bailey
The Trials of Rumpole
Rumpoles Return
Rumpole for the Defense
Rumpole and the Golden Thread
Rumpole's Last Case
Rumpole and the Age of Miracles
Rumpole a la Carte
Rumpole on Trial
Rumpole and the Angel of Death
Rumpole Rests His Case
Rumpole and the Primrose Path
Rumpole and teh Penge Bungalow Murders
Rumpole and the Reign of Terror
The Anti-Social Behavior of Horace Rumpole
Rumpole at Christmas

10. "The Lord of the Rings" by JRR Tolkien. Tolkien, also a member of the "Inklings", the famous group of English authors that also included CS Lewis, writes my very favorite fantasy series. It is my favorite sword and sorcery novel because of it is also a powerful and unashamed Christian allegory about the misuse of power and the power of ordinary people. A huge body of work and one of the most remarkable pieces of world-building ever done by a novelist. The series in order:

The Silmarillion (a prequel consisting of Tolkien's massive collection of background notes for his Lord of the Rings series. He invents most of two or three languages and a complete mythology of Middle Earth).
The Hobbit (the lightest of the three follows Bilbo Baggins on a quest for treasure)
The Fellowship of the Ring
The Two Towers
The Return of the King

11. "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeline L'Engle. A Newberry Award winner when it first came out, L'Engle tells the story of the highly intelligent children of two scientists. It begins by violating the first rule of novel writing (Never, ever begin a story with the sentence, "It was a dark and stormy night." L'Engle doesn't pay much attention to such rules, spending time describing home-cooking over a Bunsen Burner in Mom's home laboratory and sending children across the universe via tesseracts with extra-dimensional old ladies. The books are brilliantly written and do not talk down to kids, challenging them at every turn to think hard about what they believe. Before the series is over, every member of the family is tossed about in time and space and become, not only a visitor to the past, but a part of the future. The series in order is:

A Wrinkle in Time
A Wind in the Door
A Swiftly Tilting Planet
Many Waters
An Acceptable Time

12. "Harry Potter" by JK Rowlings. I came to Harry Potter late and with some reluctance. I was put off by the sorcery quite frankly. Though some of my favorite novels (Lewis and Tolkien, for instance), contain quite a bit of it, they manage to use it to good purpose and not to dabble in evil. I wasn't so sure about Rowlings. Then, on the recommendation of a Christian reviewer, I gave the series a go and to my surprise, found that Rowlings was more of a child of God than she gives herself credit for. The point of the whole book is that you should always do the right thing. When you choose yourself first, the consequences can be worse than if you chose to do the hard and unselfish thing. She also emphasizes that no person can take everything on their own shoulders - that we must depend on one another and hold each other up. Her magic is incantational and not invocational which makes me feel better. The protagonists do not summon up evil spirits (unless, of course, they are evil. In Lewis' and Tolkien's work it was the same. Evil people inevitably summon evil spirits and that is more true to life than most of us want to admit. Here's the series in order:

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkeban
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

In conclusion...

My birthday is coming up in April and I am very partial to boxed hardcover sets and first editions, so.......now you never have to wonder what to get me. You have the list.

15 Foot-Stompin' Country Music Songs

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 04:31:00 +0000

There are a few country songs that, whenever you hear them, you can't resist stomping your foot and clapping your hands, singing at the top of your lungs while throwing in an occasional, "Yeehaw!" Here's 15 that make me do that. You may not agree with me, but if you did this bunch as a set, you'd have everybody hoarse by the time the set was over..

1. Thank God, I'm a Country Boy - John Denver's anthem to fiddling and country living is one I defy you to listen to without your foot starting to tap involuntarily. Don't be ashamed of it. Go ahead and "Yeehaw" if you want.

2. Mama Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys - Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings do this one. I just love jumpin' in on the chorus.

3. Take This Job and Shove It - The David Allen Coe version is the best one. He was the won that wrote it. Johnny Paycheck just did the first version. If you've ever had a crappy job, this one makes you weep.

4. Hey Good Lookin' - Hank Williams Sr. wrote some of the best foot stompers. It's little wonder given the dance halls where he built his career. My favorite version was by Buckwheat Zydeco. I love the way that accordion warbles.

5. Jambalaya - Hank Williams Sr. gets on my list again for this Cajun anthem. My favorite version is the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band rendition

6. Kaw-Lijah - Once again Hank Williams Sr. tosses out a rowdy party anthem about a cigar store Indian's fateful romance. My favorite version is by an East Texas Celtic Band, Beyond the Pale. They do a medley version with bagpipes and fiddles.

7. Okee from Muskogee - When Merle Haggard sings this song, it makes us all wish we wer Okees.

8. Luckenbach, Texas - Then Waylon Jennings sings this one and makes you glad you're from Texas.

9. Waltz Across Texas - Ernest Tubbs wonderfully twangy country anthem makes you want to snatch up your woman and twirl her around the dance floor.

10. Blue Suede Shoes - Elvis. I would have liked to see this one when he was playing at the Louisiana Hayride.

11. Elvira - The Oak Ridge Boys lit a big fire with this one. Oompapa, oompapa, mow, mow!

12. Achy Breaky Heart - To be honest, I included this one by Billy Ray Cyrus because next to "Boot Scootin' Boogie" (which narrowly missed this list) it was the country song that most irritated my teenage boys during their punk/garage band years. I used to do this little dance.......

13. Lucille - Kenny Rogers asks, "Why did you leave me Lucille?" It was downright heartbreaking. Made you want to help him harvest his crops.

14. All the Gold in California - The Gatlin Brothers told where all that gold was in this rowdy song. My favorite version was one they did at the CMA awards once. They sang "All the gold in California. Is in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills in Kenny Rogers name!" I about fell off my chair.

15. Drinkenstein - Here's one you probably forgot by someone you would in no way consider a country singer. Written by Dolly Parton and performed by a very Italian Sylvester Stallone in the very funny "Rhinestone". The movie really hacked off country music fans, Stallone fans, Dolly Parton fans, critics and almost everybody except me. I loved the film and Stallone's performance doing "Drinkenstein" was priceless. "Budweiser you've created a monster....and they call him Drinkenstein." I just howled.

You probably hate some of my choices on the list, but I don't care. I like 'em all!

Tom

Ten Ways to Stop a Bully

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 20:00:00 +0000

Let me say up front that there are few things I find more repugnant in this world than a bully. Whether the bully is a playground hoodlum, a snotty cheeerleader or a third world dictator matters not. Anyone who torments, teases or pushes around another person simply because he is stronger or because the person is vulnerable deserves to rot in a special circle of hell if I believed there were such a thing. As it is, I think that evidence of bullying in our children and adolescents should be dealt with severely and swiftly. Here are ten things you can do based on my own experience.

1. Tell your Dad (or Mom). This seems obvious, but it's surprising how many Dads will blow an opportunity to be a hero to his son because of some misguided notion that the kid needs to be tough and handle it himself. "I can't always be there to protect him." you might argue. That's a truckload of fertilizer if you ask me. So what if you can't always be there? If the times you are there to protect them are spectacular enough to put the fear of God into the young thugs, they will at all costs avoid a repetition of Dad getting into the act in future. Sure your kid may get teased because Dad intervened, but the teasers will do so from a safe distance and no one will be left hanging by their shorts from a coat hook in the boys restroom.

A bully once threw rocks at my son and chased him home. I made my son tell me who it was. As it happened the would-be felon was peddling his way back up the street at the time, having followed Micah home. I handed my son off to his mama for treatment, jumped in the car and burned rubber out of the driveway. I caught the kid about 4 blocks away on his bike headed homeward. I pulled up on the curb and cut him off with my car. He stopped confused, wondering what was about to happen. I jumped out. Chris paled. I strode up to his bike, place my hands on the handlebars and looked him square in the eye. He started right into denials and trying to tell me I had no evidence. I shut him up with a look and in measured tones, told him this.

"You made a mistake going after my son. This time you get to go home lesson learned. Next time, I pluck your fuzzy butt off that bicycle and drag you kicking and squealing down to the police station where I file charges. Then you will spend some time locked up till your mama comes to get you and then I will have some words with her. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

2. Confront the bully directly. Worry about his mama later. Yes the parents may try to get you arrested, but that only bothers you if you actually care. The cops will probably be on your side. If like me you'd rather go to jail than see your kid abused by some two-bit junior wiseguy, you prefer effectiveness to political correctness

The first word out of Chris's mouth was "BUT". I cut him off. "If you're going to tell me I can't, I can give you a demonstration here and now. It's four blocks to city hall from here. I can carry or drag you or you can indicate with a nod of your head that you understand that I will not tolerate your bullying my children - EVER AGAIN."

He nodded and that was the end of the bullying. He never told his mama. But I did!

3. Follow through with the bully's parents. Operate from the assumption that no parent wants their child to be a bully.

I later discovered Chris was bullying other children in our church youth organization and went straight to his mama. He left the youth organization a short time later and the hazing stopped. The next summer on a T-Ball team, Chris took to threatening base-runners from my team. The kids were all emotionally disturbed and abused kids from a local group home. Again, I explained to him and his mama (their coach) that my protection extended to these children also and when my kids got up to bat, I loudly and clearly told my kids they need not be afraid of this child. His mama complained to the umpire. I told the umpire I felt the reassurance was necessary as Chris had been telling base runners that if they scored he would beat them up. The umpire warned Chris that if he heard that complaint again he would be permanently removed from T-Ball. He then asked me politely to issue my assurances before the child entered the batters box. I assured him that given his support in opposition to the bullying in question, I felt quite comfortable doing that. Chris' mother was heard complaining later about what a terrible example I was to the kids. One of the other mother's told her she thought I had done exactly the right thing.

4. Teach by example. Isn't it odd how people with fight to protect a system of unspoken tolerance for bullying behavior and will even oppose efforts to interfere with the very system of silence that supports bullying. We develop this elaborate rules system that treats telling about abusive behavior as somehow an "unfair" method of dealing with it. Instead, too often, we support a primitive tribal sort of self-government among children in which the strongest and most willing to inflict pain become the leaders. If that's not the kind of government we want in our society, we damned sure need to be teaching it to our kids.

I taught my sons and daughter to loathe bullying. I taught them by confronting bullies, not with violence, but with steely determination. They all came to despise it when kids who were smaller or more vulnerable were persecuted and mistreated. They all three got into trouble at various times for standing up to thugs on behalf of smaller classmates in school. I was proud of them and told their teachers so when the subject came up.

5. Don't allow fear to prevent you from confronting the bully. One young thug beat up my middle son in sixth grade. He and a friend held him down an beat his face till his eye bled. I had to take him to the doctor for the damaged eye. The school wouldn't deal with the problem, wouldn't even give me the boys parents' names or bring in the police or acknowledge that the incident had happened. So I went to the parents house and managed to explain to them that I was unhappy with their son's attack on mine (they spoke little English) and that I would see him arrested next time if I had to arrest him myself and carry him bodily to the police station. Whether they fully understood or not, the boy certainly did. He was translating.

I risked a lot by confronting him at home. His parents had little control over him. The boy later killed a man and fled to Mexico. As far as I know, however, he left my kids alone after that.

6. Get involved at the local level. It's all well and good to get involved in national anti-bullying programs or to watch Oprah episodes, but there is no substitute for direct LOCAL involvement. After the incident with my son, a second incident followed that spurred us all to action. A teenage girl broke up with her boyfriend at school one day. He apparently texted his Mama about the girl having spurned him because Mama showed up at the school at 3:00 and attacked the girl right there on the front lawn of the school. Everyone scattered and no charges were filed again. The school did not want to get involved.

So a bunch of us parents decided we would get involved. We began attending local school board meetings and ran our own candidates for the board when it was unresponsive. We helped get the old school board voted out and replaced with concerned parents from our PTA anti-bullying task force. They instituted a zero-tolerance policy. That was the last time something happened like that on the school ground.

Did they over-react in their enforcement of zero-tolerance in order to be "fair" to certain groups. You betcha! A couple of times they got really ridiculous about stuff, but always we were able to talk them out of it. It helped that the school administration knew that we were a group of parents who had no qualms about getting involved directly with the school board over issues like that.

7. Be willing to do what it takes. The secret to dealing with bullies is to confront them hard and fast and do not let up. It will mean inconvenience and discomfort on your part, but if you keep your temper and your wits about you and if you are brave, bullies tend to slink away into dark corners when confronted. Like those big roaches, they scurry away from the light. Talk about the bullying openly and name names.

One of the bullies we dealt with decided to get even. My wife started getting obscene phone calls in the middle of the night after she had it out with the boy's mama. The third time he called, she knew who it was. When she answered the phone, she said, "Chris, I know this is you. As soon as you hang up, I'm calling your mother." She hung up and then dialed his home phone. It rang twice, a voice answered and she asked to talk to his mother. He hung up and after that calls to his house received a busy signal. The calls stopped.

8. Don't let the teachers off the hook. If there is rampant bullying, the teacher is not doing what he or she needs to do to stop it. I taught school for five years and worked in a mental facility for kids and day care centers for 18 more years. There is no excuse for a teacher allowing bullying. The kids will tell if they think you will do something about it. Surprisingly, most parents of bullies will cooperate with you to do something about it if you offer to help them. There are plenty of resources out there to help parents cope with bullying of their kids or deal with their own kids who bully.

9. Come to terms with your own bullying. The greatest tool you can have as a parent is a passionate moral outrage against bullying. Unfortunately too many of us were jocks or part of the ruling clique in school and recognize our own school-age behavior in the bullying our own children do. It's hard to work up a whole lot of moral outrage against bullying if you were something of a bully yourself at that age. If that's the case, you need to own your previous bad behavior and do what you can to atone for it. You'd be surprised what a note on Facebook or an e-mail or letter to a kid you once picked on with an apology can do for that child as an adult. You could save a life by asking forgiveness for your own bullying. If you don't exactly save a life, you will certainly at the very least confer a little peace of heart on that person by your free admission that you did them wrong.

And it won't hurt you none, either.

10. Cultivate a culture of courage in your home. Courage is the only effective weapon against a bully. Show your kids how to be brave, not by screaming and ranting and raving, but by steely-eyed, nose to nose opposition to the bullies of this world. Hold up as heroes, men and women who had the courage to stand against thugs and tyrants. There are plenty. As a kid, stories about King Arthur taught me that the strong have a duty to protect the weak. My heroes were always looking out for the underdog. From Joan of Arc, Huss and Jerome, Jesus and Joseph, I learned how to take a stand for what's right, no matter what it cost you. You may get yourself socked in the process. I remember standing up to a bully in 7th grade who stole the basketball from a group of smaller kids. I told him he was wrong and used a descriptor of his actions that he took offense with. He hit me hard in the face. Oddly enough, once you've been hit in the face once, you don't mind so much anymore. Soon, taking a couple on the chin for a good cause actually feels pretty good.

And teach your family not to be afraid of lawsuits. It's the latest form of bullying to become popular. Using the fear of a lawsuit to control your actions is just another form of bullying and intimidation. But, that's why we have judges and courts to sort things like that out. In my brief experience with the legal system, I was surprised to find that judges like nothing better than a plaintiff with a righteous cause and many of them hate bullies too.

So be of good courage. I'm told the bullies are going to lose the war in the end anyway.

Tom