Browse: Page 11
By J. Timothy King on September 7, 2012
As you may have noticed, I’m slipping on the posts… again. I continue to struggle with the idea that I really want to post regularly, every day, something, just something every day. And I even got caught up one week, to the point that come Monday, I had posts finished and scheduled for every day that week, and posts planned for the following week. And then life happened, and my friend passed away (which I mentioned in a Thursday post), and I had a series of sleepless nights and migraine-filled days, and I had a friend’s book to publish (the draft of which I’m finally expecting, today), and I really had to get going working on new books of my own (even just ebooks that I can sell for 99¢ a pop), and school started again and I realized that maybe getting up at 6:30 AM (when I’m naturally an evening person) and driving back and forth to Tyngsborough every day isn’t actually better than having the kids at home with me interrupting me every 15 minutes… Sigh.
But I’m going to try it again. Try, try again. Try a new motivation. Try a new tactic. Try something different. Keep trying, either until I get it right or until I die trying. (Or dye trying.)
(On the bright side, I do have a number of posts I’m working on for next week. And I’m excited about them.)
In the meantime, I thought I might share with you the contents of my Netflix Instant Watching Activity log. (Which you might consider part of the reason why I don’t have a real post to share today. And you might be right.) Most of these titles are TV series or mini-series. I love TV, because I can consume massive amounts of content that I enjoy, in bite-sized pieces.
Beginning at the most recent: Continue reading “How I Waste My Time (The last 7 shows I watched on Netflix)”
Posted in Entertainment, Television | Tagged How the Earth Was Made, Jim Gaffigan, Magnum P.I., Murder She Wrote, Mythbusters, Quincy, Star Trek |
By J. Timothy King on September 4, 2012
Through Labor Day, I finished up the publishing of my friend John P. Lathrop’s next book, Dreams & Visions: Divine Interventions in Human Experience.
In the New Testament a number of people received divinely-inspired dreams and visions. Their experiences were unique, powerful, and produced action. And the Bible indicates that dreams and visions will continue to the present day. But these two areas of biblical experience we often overlook, or even dismiss, in the West. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, even today, dreams and visions are still being experienced. Dreams & Visions explores not only the biblical theology of these phenomena, but also numerous modern accounts.
The paperback should hit Amazon and B&N later this week. I’m still working on an ebook release (coinciding with a long-overdue overhaul of my ebook-mastering process).
Today’s teaser, from chapter 2 of Dreams & Visions: Divine Interventions in Human Experience: Continue reading “Teaser Tuesdays: Dreams & Visions (by Rev. John P. Lathrop)”
Posted in Books, Christianity, Religion, Teaser Tuesdays | Tagged Dreams & Visions, John P. Lathrop |
By J. Timothy King on August 31, 2012
Some time ago, I posted some miscellaneous cellphone pictures that had been taken on my old cell phone. Now that I have a new smartphone, with a (slightly) higher resolution camera, it seems lots more pictures get taken. And most of them not by me.
Actually, my Little One, “Abbie the Artist,” has been taking quite a shine to the camera. Her artwork, of course, has greatly improved since I last posted some of it three years ago. She says she thinks in pictures, which sounds like a good name for a photo-memoir… or at least a good name for another blog post. (Stay tuned.)
You can tell she’s artistic, because she dyed the ends of her hair purple. And then started to complain when they faded to pink… -ish. Continue reading “Some More Photos I Found on My Cell Phone”
Posted in Family | Tagged Abbie King, birthdays, Carrie, games, photos, shopping
By J. Timothy King on August 30, 2012
Links and things that I’ve run across recently.
Hey, Can I Get Facebook on This Thing?
Old Commodore 128 (versus the flat-screen TV)
August 1 was the 30’th anniversary of the release of the Commodore 64 home computer. To commemorate the event, Pingdom posted a series of C-64 photos on his blog, and I guess, yeah, we all looked pretty dorky back in the 80’s. (You’re welcome to guess which one is me. And you’d probably be right, since my name is cited right there under my photo.)
Meanwhile, my brother and father and I commemorated the event by digging out my old C-64… which we couldn’t find. Apparently, we had already gotten rid of it. (Unless it’s buried somewhere in my basement, which I guess it may be.) The C-64 was named after its 64KB of RAM (not MB or GB), which was quite a feat for the day. We did, however, find the old Commodore 128, the next-generation system with 128KB RAM, which only half worked. That is, it still works in high-resolution mode (Ha! Good one.), just barely, but the low-resolution video generator seems not to be working anymore.
Regardless, unfortunately, we couldn’t find any floppy disks that still had usable data on them.
Don’t Know What It’s About
Continue reading “Bits & Pieces 2012-08-30”
Posted in Bits & Pieces, Judaism, Religion | Tagged Commodore 64, death, Gilmore Girls, J. Michael Straczynski, photos, sadness, shiva
By J. Timothy King on August 29, 2012
As you may know, I’m not Jewish. My wife and kids are. From a spiritual perspective, I’m a Gentile living in the land of Messiah. And I’m satisfied that that’s where I belong, at least for now. But none of the unusualness of this increasingly common situation is going to keep my girls from becoming bnot mitzvah. And that means a bunch of my Gentile relatives and friends, who have never been to a bat mitzvah and don’t know what to expect, are going to come to my girls’ bnot mitzvah… and still don’t know what to expect.
When I first started attending synagogue with the rest of my family, I also didn’t know what to expect. Fortunately, I found the people at Ruach Israel friendly and accepting. But the liturgy overwhelmed me a little (despite the fact that I already knew a little Hebrew), and I didn’t know what the rules were. And it wasn’t until years later that I had learned enough to begin to truly appreciate some of the magic of the weekly Shabbat Shacharit (or even knew how to spell “shacharit”).
So this post I’m writing primarily for those friends and family who will be visiting for the bat mitzvah, to give them a heads-up on some of the things I wish I had known six years ago. Continue reading “So You’ve Never Been to a Bat Mitzvah”
Posted in Judaism, Religion | Tagged bnai mitzvah, Ruach Israel |
By J. Timothy King on August 28, 2012
I’m still reading The Man Who Did Too Much, a comedic mystery about two very-unlike-each-other characters who get sucked into the danger of international intrigue. I finally got some serious, quality time to spend with this novel, and found that I can’t put it down. I found myself laughing out loud at Karla Marquette and some of the bizzarre she gets herself into— George Starling is the straight man in this pair. And yes, I too searched Google for “flamingo yo-yo fantasia.”
But that’s not today’s book. Still on the theme of mysteries that need to be solved, today I’m posting a snippet from a classic SF-mystery favorite, because I recently realized that I don’t read enough SF anymore— and there seems to be so little good SF to read.
The Investigation, by Stanislaw Lem, one of my all-time favorite SF authors: This is a story of increasingly strange occurrences. In a plot worthy of the best of The X-Files, detective Lieutenant Gregory of Scotland Yard investigates a series of incidents in which corpses have been moved (or have moved by themselves). Initially dismissed as practical jokes in poor taste, eyewitness testimony eventually suggests a paranormal explanation… But we don’t believe that, right?
Gregory uncovers a series of possible explanations, each successively more weird than the last, some of which require mind-bending alterations in worldview to understand. Love it!
Today’s teaser, from page 8 (chosen randomly by Amazon.com) of the 1986 paperback edition of The Investigation (which is the edition that I have in my library): Continue reading “Teaser Tuesdays: The Investigation, by Stanislaw Lem”
Posted in Books, Teaser Tuesdays | Tagged Stanislaw Lem, The Investigation
By J. Timothy King on August 24, 2012
This morning, I napped while my daughters attended their bat mitzvah lessons. I’ve been exhausted after watching just about every bar-mitzvah themed TV episode ever produced (though some of them at 4x speed, just because the shows themselves were so stupid). Nonetheless, this exercise has revealed to me one important fact: the bar mitzvah is the only ethnic ceremony in the universe not depicted in Star Trek.
Now, television, over the years, has become much more relaxed about the bnot mitzvah. Culminating in the recent “Karen does her first bar mitzvah” episode of Smash. (Which reminds me, I need to make sure everyone who’s coming to my girls’ bnot mitzvah knows the words to “Hava Nagila” so they sing it.)
One of my favorite TV-watching activities is to figure out the inaccuracies and inconsistencies, especially as it applies to real-life culture. Here are some notable bar-mitzvah episodes: Continue reading “And Which Part of the Bar Mitzvah Is That?”
Posted in Entertainment, Judaism, Religion, Television | Tagged bnai mitzvah, Car 54 Where Are You?, Frasier, The Dick van Dyke Show, The Simpsons, The Wonder Years
By J. Timothy King on August 23, 2012
Links and things that I’ve run across recently.
It’s All in the Emphasis
My Daughter: No way am I gonna name my son “Jonathan.” Every Jonathan I know is a total asshole, except my dad.
Me: What about Jonathan [so-and-so]? He’s not a total asshole– uh, I mean, he’s not a total asshole…
At Least There Were No Glittery Vampires
We were watching the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Royale.” This is the episode in which the Enterprise discovers debris from a mid-21st-century NASA spacecraft— Yeah, as if NASA will still be around 40 years from now! Then they scan the planet below and find a bubble of breathable air. Of course, Riker, Worf, and Data beam down to investigate, after which they find themselves cut off from the Enterprise, in a Las-Vegas-style hotel and casino, playing out the plot of an awful novel entitled The Hotel Royale. Continue reading “Bits & Pieces 2012-08-23”
Posted in Bits & Pieces, Entertainment, Intellectual Property, Television | Tagged DRM, Google, software patents, Star Trek
By J. Timothy King on August 21, 2012
As I mentioned last week, I’m reading The Man Who Did Too Much, a comic murder mystery by Camille LaGuire… a fact that I forgot to note on my GoodReads profile. (Sorry about that.)
I don’t know much about the “comedy” part, as this story has not yet made me laugh out loud. [UPDATE: Okay, it has now made me laugh out loud. Definitely funny, and in an intelligent, situational sort of way.] But it has felt light and airy, low on the physical danger and suspense, not inducing too much anger or fear. Of course, I also haven’t yet witnessed the murder, although there is clearly danger afoot.
But the aspect of this story that strikes me—and as I expected based on Camille’s other work that I’ve read: I’ve just started reading the novel, and already I luuuv the characterization. I don’t know whether Camille uses character-creation techniques similar to mine; regardless, she hits the characters’ emotional needs and reactions right on the money, weaving compelling story conflict and (therefore) a compelling plot.
So I am in into this story, and I wish I had more time to read it faster.
Today’s teaser, from location 211-215 of The Man Who Did Too Much: Continue reading “Teaser Tuesdays: The Man Who Did Too Much, by Camille LaGuire (again)”
Posted in Books, Teaser Tuesdays | Tagged Camille LaGuire, The Man Who Did Too Much
By J. Timothy King on August 20, 2012
Carrie’s Unfinished Tallit
Sometimes so many things get going on, it’s hard to keep track. One big project coming up is my girls’ bnot mitzvah.
For those of you not in the know (which included myself up until recently), that’s “bnot mitzvah,” which is more than one bat mitzvah. So each of my girls is having a bat mitzvah. Both of them together are having two bnot mitzvah. Kind of like “culs-de-sac” or “attorneys general,” which lots of people also tend to get wrong. I thought more than one bat mitzvah would be “bat mitzvahs” or “bat mitzvot”… because the plural of a Hebrew “-ah” word ends in “-ot” (or “-os,” in Ashkenaz), which is why the plural of matzah is matzot (or matzos). But none of that is relevant here, because the plural of bat is bnot, so the plural of bat mitzvah is bnot mitzvah, and that’s that. That’s also enough grammar for today. Continue reading “The Day My Daughter Becomes a Man”
Posted in Judaism, Religion | Tagged bnai mitzvah |
