Building Castles on the Beach

This is in no way culturally timely (sorry for the misleading title), but I just finished watching the series Friday Night Lights . I know I'm late to the party. I nearly always am. But since my wife recently got to rant about the show Smash , I thought I might rant about something I've watched. I read a part of the original Friday Night Lights non-fiction book and enjoyed the feature film based on the book, but I wasn't about to invest in a weekly TV show about football. But I read a lot about stuff and the critics kept telling me it's a great show and that it's not really about football anyway. Or at least, there's very little football in a show about football. Then my wife watched it, the whole series while I was busy doing other stuff, and she kept telling me it's a great show and that it's not really about football anyway. So a few months ago I decided Friday Night Lights would be my new treadmill show. There are five seasons, only the fi...

My husband, Brent, has been preoccupied lately with the successes of a few (very few) writers who have self-published their novels. There is a feeling that by self-publishing they’ve somehow subverted the talent-driven system of agents and publishers. To that, I snort though my nose and cry “Hah!” (Blog owner's note: My wife says I've been preoccupied, but apparently she's been preoccupied herself since rewatching the entire season of Smash already this summer. I've offered her the platform of this blog to get some things off her chest.) I don’t believe in the talent-driven system. As far as I’m concerned it’s a myth that we share with others to promote hard work and persistence – it’s the Santa Claus of the creative world. Cute braids require long hair, not a mullet. I lost my faith in this particular Santa Claus when I was 7-years-old and I auditioned for a part in a community production of the Sound of Music . I loved that show. I knew all the songs. I...

I'm fascinated with stories of the far future. Something about speculation showcasing the future of the human race through time and space speaks to me on a cellular level. Recently I've engaged in a few of these kinds of stories, and I want to try to explain what makes them meaningful to me. As a result, this post might be a bit lengthy, so if you don't want to read about the books, skip down to the part about Star Trek because that's where I gets provocative. This trip starts with my perusal of the book Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson. It's the third (probably the last) in a series that begins with Spin and then  Axis . The premise begins with the day the stars go out. Spin is about how the Earth is suddenly encircled by some kind of force field that allows the planet to experience time at a much slower rate than the rest of the universe (which is the phenomenon they dub "the Spin"). Millions of years pass on the outside, while just a few pass for ...

When I met my wife I made fun of her magazine subscriptions. She had set both The New Yorker (swanky) and Entertainment Weekly (trashy) next to each other on the end table. Outwardly, I mocked her contradictory sensibilities, but I knew I would never read The New Yorker and instead would secret away the EW to the back porch or the bathroom to read while she wasn’t looking. It was my pop culture porn: I was ashamed that I couldn't look away. I gradually gave up trying to hide my gratification of the pop culture dish that is the EW . Now I proudly read nearly every word every week. My descent into a pop culture junkie wouldn't have happened without it. I eagerly await the arrival of the next issue. If it doesn't show up in the mail on Friday, I'm desolate until Saturday when I hear the mail carrier open that mail slot. And if it's not there and I have to wait until Monday? Oh, the humanity! I take a new  EW and flip through the pages, identifying the major...

I had such lofty goals. My Netflix cue was paved with only the best intentions. But, alas, I fear time has run out. When we brought the baby home from the hospital back in December, we set up a feeding station in the nursery. Our comfy glider/rocking chair fit perfectly in the corner between the crib and dresser drawers. We set up a small shelving unit and situated in it the hospital-grade breast pump we rented and a couple of baskets for various feeding accessories. Mostly, though, the baskets ended up storing our Kindles and iPods. This is as good a place as any to mention that May wanted to nurse the baby and began pumping her breast milk as soon as she could after Xander was born. He nursed now and then as he learned to eat during the month he was in the hospital. (See here for the beginning of that story. The rest is still pending.) But when we took him home and were left to our own devices, we worried about his nutrition. He needed calories, and with breast feeding we couldn...

You could say I've been a science fiction geek from a pretty early age. But growing up, I didn't watch Doctor Who . All I knew about it was a mishmash of sci-fi hokum, cheesy effects, big white-guy afros, and somehow Gary Glitter was mixed up in there, too. I'd seen bits of the show on PBS stations early Saturday mornings or late Friday nights, but it always seemed at least a decade dated and I could only watch for a few moments before losing interest. I remember once distinctly thinking I was watching cable access, like someone was making their own version of Doctor Who in their backyard, when Tom Baker entered the shot and I realized it was the real show. How I knew who Tom Baker was, I don't know. Perhaps my hyper-awareness of the goings-on in pop culture began before I knew it. Perhaps I'm just a giant nerd. Then in 2005 or thereabouts (it might have been 2006 when it started in America), I saw ads that the SciFi channel was going to start broadcasting a ...