PicoBlog

Darn! A missed opportunity. Alas, I am too far down The Big C path to turn back now. And I am not sure how sustainable a Big B Banana Blog would be. Whereas, let’s face it, I can keep writing about me! pretty much ad nauseam. Still - had I known that bananas! even hospital floors! would generate so much lively reader traction, I might have blogged about them first. A few minutes here to muse on what I could have!

#23. A Clockwork Orange (1971) Coming in at number 23 on the list of my 100 Favorite Films of All Time is the 1971 dystopian crime film, A Clockwork Orange. A Clockwork Orange was directed by Stanley Kubrick and stars Malcolm McDowell with supporting performances from Patrick Magee, Michael Bates, Warren Clarke, and John Clive. A Clockwork Orange is the third of three Kubrick films to make my Top 100 list and it’s my favorite by a mile.

Whenever I see 'pushcart nom' in a writer's bio, I can't help thinking NOM NOM NOM. But I'm a child. Pushcart is a prestigious award for small works published in indie lit since the 70s. The only way your work can be nominated for the prize is if the magazine you publish in chooses it. Here is how it works. Each year, from October to December, magazines can nominate six works to be considered for a Pushcart Prize.

O.J. Simpson is having a pretty good year so far. He’s busy on Twitter talking about football to his nearly 900,000 followers (including me). His parole for a 2007 armed robbery and kidnapping conviction — a case that sent him to prison for nine years — ended in December. He’s now free to leave Nevada and live wherever he wants. He’s nothing if not resilient. Based on his social media posts, Simpson appears to spend his days golfing inside the gated community where he resides in Las Vegas.

On September 29, 2021, the Nintendo 64 will turn 25 years old in North America. Throughout the month of September, I’ll be covering the console, its games, its innovations, and its legacy. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link. If Goemon’s Great Adventure isn’t the best side-scrolling platformer on the Nintendo 64, then it’s without question the second-best. That can be said so confidently in part because of the relative paucity of side-scrollers on the N64 — the world went a little overboard with making every possible 2D platformer into a 3D platformer in a post-Super Mario 64 world, to the point that certain kinds of reviewers would be openly and illogically angry at the existence of side-scrolling games on the various systems — but it’s also because the game is, well, great.

I was one of those Kurt Vonnegut kids. Surely, there were one or two of us at your high school? At 16, during my junior year, we had to complete a year-long research project, and I committed myself to analyzing the work of Vonnegut. I’m sure there was one of us every year, but I felt special and edgy and cool for this choice.  Vonnegut appealed to the little goth in my teenage heart — the kid I think could see something both dark in life’s promised brightness and bright in its feared darkness.

Season 1 of The Green Lantern was a triumph of laid-back meticulous planning, with most issues written a whole year ahead of publication. I’d never been a particularly big fan of the Hal Jordan character and wanted to take the time to do him justice with a series of stories that showcased what I saw as Jordan’s resourceful nature and unflappable cool. Hal Jordan’s continuity, as refined by Geoff Johns, hadn’t changed much since he made his Silver Age debut as Earth’s Green Lantern in Showcase #22 from 1959.

When Luke Fickell and the University of Wisconsin football team take the field against No. 13 LSU in the ReliaQuest Bowl on New Year's Day, the Badgers will do so with a depth chart that looks substantially different. Since the Badgers took down Minnesota in the regular season finale to reclaim the Axe, Wisconsin, like all schools, has had several players transfer out who were in the two-deep or opt-out to prepare for the draft.

“Knowledge becomes really such only when it is assimilated in the mind of the learner and shows in his character.” -Inazo Nitobé The Buddhist tradition recognizes three different levels of wisdom: Received wisdom, intellectual wisdom, and experiential wisdom. Received wisdom is acquired through reading texts or listening to a teacher and understanding the knowledge that you’ve received well enough to remember it. Intellectual wisdom requires us to be more active and to engage in the intellectual process so that we may come to a clear understanding of why an idea that we read or heard makes sense.