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  • I’ve been meaning to write a post listing some great movies about the press. Normally, I would make this a “top-10” list, but the fact is that I couldn’t think of that many, unless I resorted to some cheating (yes, Citizen Kane involves the muckraking journalism of the early 1900s, but you can’t really call it a…

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  • Anyone who is all interested in mystery fiction might avail themselves of this long (three chapters!) sample of the audiobook version of Twice the Trouble. It’s free on Youtube from Google Play. Check it out…!

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  • Not surprisingly, my first exposure to Peter Murphy was from a movie. It was his face and music that are used in the first frames of Tony Scott’s great and underrated horror masterpiece, The Hunger. At the time, Murphy was of course the lead singer for the archetypal goth band Bauhaus, and it is their…

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  • In one of those strange, synchronicity moments that sometimes happen, I recently stumbled upon an article in Collider about how the classic John Carpenter film Escape from New York is getting a new 4K release from Shout Factory.  This was a heart-warming bit of information, for me, since the film has been one of my…

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  • The 1990s had so many great, iconic bands–Nirvana, SoundGarden, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and on and on–that it’s easy to forget that there were lot of other, damn good bands around that were scrambling for attention. Third Eye Blind was such a band. They broke through a few years after the grunge wave had…

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  • For those of you who might be in the Atlanta area on October 7, please stop by the Flat Shoals library for my book talk. The event is at 6:00 p.m., and I’ll be reading from my mystery novel, Twice the Trouble.

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  • Back in the late 1990s, every guy I knew under the age of thirty had a copy of The Prodigy‘s Fat of the Land album. This was the case even though there was nothing particularly new about the record itself; Big Beat had been around for years, and some of the songs on the album…

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  • R.I.P. James Earl Jones

    Let’s face it, 99% of the people alive today who knew anything at all about James Earl Jones knew about him from Star Wars. He was, after all, the voice of Darth Vader, the most commanding villain in all cinema. My first memory of Jones, however, was from the early 1970s, when I was a…

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  • Ursula K. Le Guin was one of our finest science fiction writers, and The Left Hand of Darkness is probably her best book. Not only did it anticipate by half-a-century the seismic cultural shifts that are currently roiling Western society regarding issues of gender-identity and sexual orientation, it’s also just a damned good sci-fi story.…

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  • Back in the dot.com boom of the 1990s, I was lucky enough to work for an IT company based in New York City. I was a remote worker, writing software eight hours a day in my spare bedroom in Gainesville, Florida. It was a win-win situation. I got to work from home, and my bosses got a…

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