Ironhold

The 355. Plot contrivance after plot contrivance, followed by pandering and real-life politics. There's nothing redeeming about it.

Ironically, they're often some of the most racist people you'll ever meet because they use it to justify holding patronizing and often backwards views.

For fun - You're tasked with helping to stock a brand-new library that will be open to the public. The usual items - an encyclopedia set, a dictionary, a thesaurus, local newspapers, holy books, and such - are already taken care of. What's the first book you order to put in there?

Finished re-watching "After The Sunset", this time for review purposes. The US military periodically relocates people between duty stations as needed, and will pay for their relocation provided that the total weight of their household goods is below a certain amount; they have to pay for anything over it. Because of this, it's quite common to see people unloading books, DVDs, CDs, and the like cheaply where I live. When I was in college, I started a plan wherein I would buy what I could find, sell whatever was still brand new or slightly used, and then donate what I didn't want to keep. This backfired spectacularly, leaving me with a large quantity of DVDs I have yet to unload. So, I'm going through them one at a time for purposes of writing "retro" reviews for my column. This one was awful the first time I watched it, and remained awful thereafter. Pierce Brosnan plays a master thief who tries to retire after he's nearly killed during a major caper, only for the FBI agent who nearly killed him to entice him into one last job. It's slow, often boring, and deliberately uses female nudity and sexual content to distract from this.

"American Underdog" Kurt Warner and his wife Brenda were producers on their own bio pic, so of course it's fairly accurate even if they did have to trim a few things out (like his short stint playing football in Europe) for expediency.

Disney is dealing with a fair bit of legal drama concerning the Spider-Man character. Not only do they still have to share the movie rights with Sony, the estate of Steve Ditko has announced its intention to sue for partial control of all characters Ditko created or co-created, which will mean Disney would have to pay royalties for their use and possibly have to submit certain things to the Ditko estate for approval. The movie, to put it bluntly, was Disney realizing that as popular and lucrative as the character is, he was now something of a liability and they needed to sideline him until the legal stuff was all taken care of.

It was. It's supposed to explain how the Kingsmen organization is first developed and why. As far as the second movie goes, you're better off not watching it. It ended in such a fashion that there's no real way forward for the franchise, hence the prequel.

"The King's Man" We have a film that got a double whammy in terms of "being a prequel and so had to fit with what came after" and "film that is set in a fixed historical period and so had to fill in the gaps", the end result being that we have a movie which was smothered under its own premise.

This year, we had a stake activity in which the youth were gathering food and care supplies for local food banks. The first Sunday they had anything up at my chapel to collect, it was literally just myself and one other person who donated, and we both donated a lot. This seemed to light a fire under everyone else, at which point the next Sunday saw people flood the bins with product.

Many years ago, someone I knew served a mission in Sweden. What he told us when he came back was that there were a lot of people who had been raised within Islam, but had come to disagree with it theologically and wanted to leave. However, he claimed, most of these people feared that if they left they would be subject to discrimination, persecution, and even violence. Leaving Islam would mean having to uproot themselves and relocate a goodly distance away from anyone who knew them.

As I've mentioned before, in real life I have an MBA. I took classes (yes, plural) that heavily leaned into sales / customer service / formal communication. Every word and phrase had to be measured to ensure that they were as inoffensive as possible and always expressed as much optimism and cheer as appropriate. I mastered it, of course, for the sake of my grade, but pretty quickly caught on how much of it was acting. The original idea behind it all was that you have to check your emotions at the door so that you can focus on getting the job done, but at no point did they ever say "Yeah, once you're off the clock you're good". I think that's part of what your dad fell into, as no one ever gave him permission to drop the mask once he was off the clock. The other part? In the US military, there's a culture that the way the family of each service member behaves is a reflection of that service member, with many civilian spouses presuming that they have the rank of their military spouse. I was raised in that way, and so know how it is that people sometimes hold up their own families as "see how model they are? It means I'm a model person as well!" without thinking through the implications. After a while, everything goes to maintaining that facade even if what's underneath it is falling apart, the whole bit about "whited sepulchers". Yes, this is the same overall program where I wound up being taught the "applied psychological warfare" side of marketing.

The reference is "Transcendence" by Crimson Glory, a pioneer in the progressive metal genre.

As explained in the song "We Three Kings", the gifts were symbolic. "Born a king on Bethlehem's plain, gold I bring to crown him again." The gold was a symbol of his status as a monarch, as he was of the line of King David. As a monarch, Jesus should by all rights have lived a life of finery and riches, from a crown on his head to the throne he sat on. "Frankincense to offer have I. Incense owns a deity nigh." The frankincense was a symbol of his divine nature. As a divine figure, it would have been common practice for incense to be burned as an offering towards him, its scent filling the worship chambers. "Myrrh I bring, a bitter perfume." Myrrh was often used in the embalming process, a way to deal with the smell and other side effects of the process of decay. It was a recognition of the prophecies that he would die and be reborn.

In a word? It's horrible. The assault on the senses starts almost immediately, when you're hit by lighting that alternates between pastel and neon. Then you realize that they did some heavy digital effects work to change the skyline, even going so far as to alter the weather for certain scenes. As if that wasn't bad enough, you literally have digitally-inserted lens flare in some scenes. Throw in the odd camera angles, and it's downright surreal at times. Then we get to the initial brawl between the Jets and the Sharks. One kid literally gets a nail punched into his ear, and we see the whole thing, nail, blood, and all. After more surreal lighting and camera shots, we find out that the pharmacist is dead and his widow is running the store, something done so that Rita Moreno could have a role in the movie. Turns out that the reason why the pharmacy is a neutral spot in the turf war is because a white guy married a Puerto Rican woman, so neither side wants to try anything there. Once you get past these and other changes, you realize that they changed the order and context of a number of the songs. Yes, they did that. Several songs are now sung by different characters and under different circumstances, such as "Cool" now being sung by Tony as he tries to talk the rest of the Jets out of fighting. In the middle, you notice that whenever the girls have a dance number their skivvies are visible as their skirts twirl, a further reminder that it's no longer the 50s / 60s. Anybodys has been remade into a full-on transgender individual rather than simply a tomboy, which ironically explained why the kids wanted nothing to do with her because of the stigma that being transgender had in the 1950s. Yes, it seems like whenever Hollywood finds a tomboy or a pretty boy in a work they have to make them transgender for some reason rather than stopping to understand why the original character is the way they were. Maria and the other girls are now maids rather than garment industry workers, something that even the Puerto Rican community has protested, given how critical the garment industry was in providing jobs for young women like her in NYC and removing the context behind her sister-in-law's desire to strike out on her own. Several key sequences were also changed, including the finale between Chino and the police. The cast did the best with what they were handed, but what they were handed was an absolute disaster.

I have a history of head trauma. This, combined with stress, lack of sleep, and other issues, have severely affected my memory. A lot of my childhood possessions are dear to me because of this, as I can still remember things associated with them, and that helps me keep my past in order.

Yes folks, Hasbro got Clint Black to do music for a Transformers series.

This is a thought that came to me while tossing around some ideas in my head. For a sci-fi series, I had the idea of a character I have tentatively dubbed "The Undying One" During a major space war, the character, who was born and raised on another planet, became cybernetically-enhanced to better fight the war during a critical period when it looked like the bad guys would win. This turned the tide, but it was his recovering a powerful and potentially magical / divine artifact that won the war... seemingly at the cost of his own life. Mortally wounded in the effort, he set his ship on a collision course for what at the time was a planet few even knew existed, let alone knew the coordinates of... Earth. But while his body did cease to function, the combination of the cybernetics and the artifact did something even he doesn't understand that preserved his consciousness and spirit on Earth, and before long he found himself "reborn". He crashed in the desert, but it was near enough to a city. In the city was a woman who was pregnant with an infant that died in the womb and would have been stillborn. Instead, he took possession of the infant's body in a process that initially blanked his memory. Thus, he was born again, slowly remembering who he was and realizing that he was living a second life. As much as I want to tell a story with implications that'll leave the readers scratching their heads and debating, I do wonder what this would mean for church theology. He himself didn't actually die per se, but he has been literally reborn.

There are a lot of places in my area that collect toys, and the last few years it's been hit-or-miss as to who donates what. Because of this, I've had to limit my individual donations to $10 or less per item donated so that I can get the maximum amount of items in the maximum amount of bins. Last year was so bad that when the local movie theater was collecting it was literally just myself and a few of the theater workers kicking anything in, and that's *with* the theater giving away $5 gift cards for their arcade to anyone who donated. I think I eventually talked the manager to just throwing the leftover gift cards into the mix so that they had more things to give to the kids who needed it.

I prefer this version better, as it sounds like someone who has been through a terrible time still trying to be optimistic.

Manowar. Heavy metal band best known for their Viking war anthems and for having once set a record for loudest concert. This is literally the most divine version of the song I've ever heard.

One of the more traditional Christmas songs I play each year.

People often have significant differences in what they mean by "disrespect". At the extreme end, this can even include "I'm right, and anyone who disagrees is being petulant".

In my annual Halloween safety column, I recount an incident that happened to one of my brothers. He was at a convenience store buying gas. He also picked up a bag of off-brand gummi candy while he was in there. There were wooden splinters in the gummi candy. Yes, I was there when he opened up the bag. The only thing he can figure is that something broke apart at the factory, the splinters made it inside, and quality control missed it.

In the case of the poisoned Halloween candy, however, there is an actual origin: a man who was deep in debt attempting to murder his children for their life insurance policies. The story was continually circulated without vital context, and it exploded from there.

A few years ago, the folks at controversial internet forum 4-Chan began to question whether certain "progressive" news outlets were actually doing any sort of independent investigation into certain topics or if they were just taking initial reports at face value. To this end, one user came up with a fictitious story about the OK symbol being adopted as a "white power" gesture and started farming it out in various forms to different "progressive" outlets. A group known as The Root took the bait and ran the story, using this 4-Chan user as their primary source. It didn't take long for 4-Chan to blow the whistle and reveal what had happened, but by then it was too late as many "progressive" internet forums had already taken the initial The Root article at face value and were spreading the word accordingly. Once word started getting around that the OK symbol was now supposedly racist, actual white supremacist groups started using it. For obvious reasons, only very biased and uninformed people now use The Root as a source.