Without going into boring details of interest only to myself, let me say that, so far, 2016 has not been a kind year to me. Between financial troubles and bad health, I’ve been struggling to stay productive and energized. I have no time for self-pity, and no patience with my own melancholy, nor...
A beast haunts the moors of Devonshire–a giant hound, ghostly in appearance, demonic in purpose. It is the curse laid on the Baskerville family by the evil done by one of its ancestry. The ancestral lord abducted a local girl and planned to rape her, but when she escaped, he hunted her with his...
Years after the fall of the Galactic Empire, a new threat to freedom arises in the form of the First Order. With the goal of destroying the Republic and becoming the dominate government, the First Order found itself faced with a new generation of freedom fighters, the Resistance. Led by General Leia Organa, the...
On January 15, 1942, a few weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote: I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going. There will be fewer people unemployed and everyone will work longer hours and harder than ever before. And that means that...
Why read the book? Why, indeed, when you have the HBO series to watch? It’s a popular series, now in its 5th season, and it has a lot to recommend it. Well-written dialogue. Dramatic performances by Sean Bean, Lena Headey, Kit Harington, and too many others to name. Let’s face it, watching Peter Dinklage...
One doesn’t have to dive deep into Sherlock Holmes research before he learns that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle grew to resent the character and regret his success. He began publishing Sherlock Holmes tales in 1886, and by 1893, when these stories that make up The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes appeared in The Strand, Doyle...
Early one winter morning, an elderly farmer woke up to an eerie silence. Though he had no idea what woke him, looking through the window, he realized there was something amiss at his neighbor’s house. At his wife’s insistence, he donned his clothing and went to investigate. When he looked through his neighbor’s window,...
I first saw The Dreamers (2003) a few years ago. I had just seen Eva Green play Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale (2006), and since she played a different type of Bond girl and gave a good performance, I wanted to see her in another role. At the time, there was not much to...
I close my eyes and imagine Sherlock Holmes. I see a tall, thin man, a long hooked nose, and sculpted cheeks. He had deep-set eyes and thin lips. Both his arms and legs are long and lanky. His demeanor is serious, humorless, even stoical. Though he enjoys explaining how he came to the solutions...
I first saw Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979) in December of 1981. It was my final quarter at Western Washington University. My roommate, Eugene, and I needed a break from studying, and the movie was playing at a campus auditorium. At the time, I had never heard of Thomas Hardy or of his infamous novel,...
