Father’s Day is coming up next month and some kids are probably debating what tools to get their dad, but I’m thinking of some of the tools he gave me …in part because a spirited discussion about what constitutes the best multi-tool or if any multi-tool can be good has erupted on a techie forum I frequent. We all got a pocket knife around age nine or ten, similar to a pocket knife my dad…
I’ve been thinking of Monday’s post about Roger Corman and how B movies are chock full of tropes. Tropes for days! This reminded me of another Corman story where the movie poster was created before the film: it provided the inspiration for what the film would be. I forget the specifics. It might have been a giant dinosaur rampaging downtown a la Godzilla or even Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. A delightful creature feature trope to…
A bit overdue for Father’s Day, but definitely thinking of my dad, for whom heraldry was a passion, here’s CGP Grey ranking all the state flags with the requisite amount of snark because so many of them are just so bad as flags. My dad also loved flags and would have approved of many of the guidelines Grey (and others) mention for good, clean, flag design. Not sure if he’d agree with all the rankings…
Once upon a time, before the Internet was in full bloom, my dad decided to look through the latest U.S. Army guides on countries (now known as “country studies”) and compile economic data to determine people’s standard of living in various countries based on GDP and local buying power. He did this for fun. It was how he rolled. Since I had recently been living and studying in Indonesia (and yes, my dad gave me…
Growing up near Washington, DC during the Cold War left an impression on me. It could be that my dad, a physicist, had explained how the U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals were large enough to reduce the world to dust and have nukes left over to shake up the dust. Okay, that’s a bit of hyperbolae. My dad would probably qualify my sentence by pointing out that the nukes wouldn’t obliterate the entire surface of the earth……
As many of my fellow filmmakers know, I’m not overfond of most horror films (apologies to Lonnie and my other filmmaking colleagues who love ’em). At the same time, I do love “creature features.” This is probably due to two reasons. First, like many kids of my generation, I enjoyed the steady stream of good, bad, and less-than-spectacular kaiju films played endlessly on TV on Saturday afternoons. In our case, it was good ol’ WDCA, Channel 20…
Being proud of our Norwegian heritage and an above-average amateur historian, our dad made sure we knew from an early age that real Vikings didn’t wear horned helmets. But why do so many people think so? An article in Vox gets to the root cause. Dang costume designers. Growing up, we didn’t have a wealth of Viking drama, so it was inevitable that the family would seek out what they could. That inevitably led to that…