Styx River Rapids

**Click here for Silver Surfer action Silver Surfer was one of those super heroes that I knew almost nothing about. I knew of him, I knew that he was “Galactus’s herald” (whatever that meant) and that he acted as a sort of scout for the cosmic villain. He was silver, he rode around on a…

 Nickelodeon was the name for the original small theaters playing “moving pictures” in the early 1900’s, so named for the nickel price for entry.  Nickelodeons were seen as, “…disreputable and dangerous..” by many civic groups. They would often pop up in converted storefronts, so I guess they were sort of the original Spirit Halloweens.  I…

It began in 1951 (‘Distant Drums’)…decades later, Wilhelm is still screaming.  The Wilhelm scream became iconic in popular culture when motion picture sound designer Ben Burtt, who had come across the original recording on a studio archive sound reel, incorporated it into the scene in Star Wars (1977) in which Luke Skywalker shoots a Stormtrooper off a ledge. The effect is heard…

  We recently took a trip to the Scandinavian peninsula and visited three countries there: Denmark, Sweden and Norway. It was an amazing trip – The cities were steeped in culture and history, the landscape was stunning and the food was delicious (especially if you like fish and other things pulled from the water) We…

  The word “map” originates from the middle age Latin term “Mappa Mundi” which roughly translates to “sheet of the world” (per a quick google search). They have classically been used for navigation but there has always been other meta-data in there… here there be monsters The sea is treacherous and mysterious; these attributes were…

Ursula just needs your signature to make all your dreams come true, e-sign with your finger (or fin). but before you sign, consider this campy, bombastic villain with whom you’re doing business.  Our tentacled sorceress is based on a minor character from the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen novel, “The Little Mermaid”. In the children’s fairy…

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10458494/ This is the dairy I used to work in as a kid on my family’s farm back home. I would help out when needed and learned to milk the cows and bottle feed the calves in the adjacent barn. It was fun.  We visited Sweetwater Valley Farms this weekend and got to take a…

 I just listened to a very interesting interview with Kelsey Hightower on the Changelog podcast. There were lots of good points made but one story he shared has been on my mind this morning – at a tradesmen competition he attended he observed that the man who won actually moved much slower and more methodically…

Too bad! Same old story! Once you’ve finished building your house you notice you’ve accidentally learned something that you really should have known—before you started. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Amazon is launching satellites.  I love the name of their program, “Project Kuiper”, i.e. (I assume) the Kuiper Belt, the band of “trans-Neptunian objects” of…