No matter how much you may regard yourself as a film buff, it is unlikely you are familiar with the name Milicent Patrick.  It is equally unlikely you know her by her birth name, Mildred Elizabeth Fulvia di Rossi, or the (at least) three other names she would adopt in her lifetime.  But it was […]

One of the books that had the greatest influence on my life was The Fringes of Reason: A Whole Earth Catalog.  I discovered it in a tall stack of remaindered copies at a used book store chain in the early 1990’s.  As stated in its introduction, it was a celebration of “strange beliefs and eccentric […]

November used to be one of my least favorite months.  It always felt like a time in limbo, a sort of non-month.  In the past few years, it has come to be my second-most favorite, just behind October and essentially a coda of that month.  It is like the last note of October is held […]

I have been actively collecting records for nearly four decades now and so have a fair-sized library numbering a couple of thousand discs.  I don’t have anything extremely rare.  It’s not like I have a copy of Yesterday and Today by The Beatles with the pulled “butcher” sleeve.  My original copy of The Velvet Underground […]

Although I am a CIS heterosexual man, and the sight of female breasts silences all other thoughts in my brain, I have always found it tacky that Elvira’s prestigious bosom seems to be all most guys ever notice about her.  Myself, I always think of what a quick wit she is.  Still, I have never […]

Are you miserable in the summer heat?  Might I recommend cooling down by reading non-fiction that will transport you to a frozen wasteland?  I have read many books about Antarctica, and the various expeditions to there, but the best I have read to date is Gabrielle Walker’s Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of a Mysterious Continent. […]

Strange but apparently true: stealth aircraft are so effective at avoiding radar, bats fly into them.  I like bats, so I wasn’t thrilled to learn this.  The aircraft also deflect sonar, which makes it almost impossible to take a Polaroid picture of one.  Those types of cameras use a form of sonar to auto-focus, which […]

In the Laserblast episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, much is made of the fact that Leonard Maltin gave the movie 2 ½ stars in his movie guide.  Mike and the bots go on to list some of the films they are appalled to learn received the same rating from the critic: A Fish Called […]

I am a huge fan of Rifftrax and Mystery Science Theatre 3000.  One aspect of Rifftrax I especially like is they often have additional riffers beyond their legacy group of three guys formerly of MST3K.  They don’t have many female riffers, but the ones they do use on a regular basis are phenomenal: Bridget Nelson, […]