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  • I must admit that I had never heard of Awolnation until a few years ago when my son played me a couple of their songs. This song, in particular, has a big, anthemic sound of the sort one doesn’t hear very often in alt-rock. I really like it. Even the soft parts sound really, really…

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  • Well, over a week has passed since Halloween, and I’m still working through the classic horror and sci-fi movies that I rewatch every year around this time. One of my favorites (heck, one of everybody’s favorites, as far as I can tell, assuming that everybody is a nerd of a certain age) is Roger Wise’s…

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  • A lady I follow on Twitter named @johnstonglenn posted earlier that on this day in 1925, the famous Welsh actor Richard Burton was born. Yes, this would have been the great man’s 100th birthday. I’ve written about Burton a lot on this blog (see links below), and so I thought I would share this bit…

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  • Author’s Note: There has a been a lot of really cool UFO news lately (especially this article), so I thought I would re-share an old post I wrote some years ago regarding a fine book on the subject. Enjoy! From 1989 to 1992 I went to graduate school at the University of Arizona. This was…

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  • Shameless Plug Saturday

    Ever since the paperback edition of my mystery thriller book, Twice the Trouble, came out in August, the price of the hard-cover edition has dropped through the basement. That’s bad for me but good for you (assuming you like hard-cover mysteries). It’s currently on sale for $6.00. Yes, that’s six Ameroes. Cheap! It would make…

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  • There have been a lot of great rock duos over the years—Hall and Oates, Tears for Fears, The White Stripes, David and David—but there haven’t been that many hard rock duos. I’m guessing this because you typically need a minimum of three musicians to form a hard rock band: a drummer, a bassist, and a…

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  • I recently learned that this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics went to a team of scientists who conducted experiments on quantum tunneling. Their experiments were conducted in the 1980s, which is typical of how the Nobel committees work—it takes around thirty years for a scientific consensus to build that a body of work was truly…

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  • Perfect Films: Tár

    Author’s Note: I first posted this essay a few years ago. I’ve decided to repost it now due to some recent interest. When I finally watched Todd Field’s 2022 movie Tár, starring Cate Blanchett. I really didn’t know much about the film, except that it had been well received (Blanchett received an Oscar nomination) and…

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  • I’m very happy to announce that my short story, “Cerulean”, has been published by Killer Nashville Magazine! Many thanks to Isabelle Kanning and the rest of the editorial staff for accepting it. Check it out if you have time. It’s free to read…

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  • The most important novel in the dystopian science fiction sub-genre is George Orwell’s 1984. The second most important is Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. I would go so far to argue that Burgess’s book has, in some ways, been even more influential and culturally significant than Orwell’s, especially for those generations that grew up in…

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