Sunday at NaFF

From NaFF

I have now seen both of the Tennessee Film Night blocks. I didn’t realize until halfway through the second block that they split them up between narratives and docs. The narratives were much stronger. I loved For Memories Sake but the other docs even if interesting just didn’t have a strong focus. Not to carp, everything I’ve seen so far has been worth watching and it’s a hell of a lot offun hanging out. Right now I’m just killing time before the start of Lunopolis.

NaFF Kick’s off Tonight

Well technically it started last night. They opened up the VIP tent and were handing out laminates and you could buy tickets and pick up will call tickets. I got my laminate and picked up a thick stack of tickets and then hung out with a cool group of people until they were packing up tables and security was looking around trying to decide which group of laggards they would try to roust first.

I’m about to get cleaned up and head out there for tonight’s festivities. Nothing officially starts until 6:00 but I figure something will be going on. I actually not seeing the opening movie Nowhere Boy tonight. I’m going to see it tomorrow though. Tonight I’m going to the Tennessee Film Night One. Then it’s the Opening night party.

Happy Birthday Stephen

From Stephen's Birthday

Today is my best friends birthday. Happy birthday buddy. Because of the Nashville Film Festival cranking up tonight we celebrated a bit early. Here’s a few pics.

From Stephen's Birthday

From Stephen's Birthday

From Stephen's Birthday

And my favorite of the night

From Stephen's Birthday

I know I’m weird.

Reconciling Science and Religion

Okay, I’m going to wade out into the waist deep water for a bit here. I have never understood the problem with reconciling science and religion. Maybe I should clarify that by religion I mean Christianity as it’s the only religion that I’m even halfway familiar with. On one side you’ve got an all powerful, all knowing, all encompassing God. On the other physical evidence. To get specific let’s look at creation. On the one hand you have the world created in seven days. On the other a universe that took billions of years to create. On the surface there appears to be a discrepancy, but let’s take a look at the God part again. We are dealing here with an entity that is omniscient. God can literally do anything. If God can create the earth and the universe in seven days couldn’t he have created it in such a way that the physical evidence would lead you to believe that it was created in some other way. To be brutally simplistic could not an all powerful being have created an earth that was littered with fossils that would lead you to believe, just looking at the evidence that can be seen and touched and experimented with, that dinosaurs and other creatures predated the date that strict creationists see as the beginning of the planet. That man and all the other life on the planet were built in such a way that again would lead someone to believe, based just on what their senses and power of reason could tell them, that all life evolved from some original source. If you grant that God is all powerful then the answer, by definition, is yes. I really don’t understand why you need to go any further than that. You could ask why, but again we are dealing with an all powerful, all knowing being. When faced with the problem of evil, say why does God let the innocent suffer and the wicked be rewarded the common answer from the devout is that God is so far beyond us that it is impossible for us to see his plan. Which makes perfect sense as long as you grant the existence of some kind of omnipresent being. Why then is it necessary to twist and distort the facts to come up with pseudoscience like Intelligent Design. It’s almost like the proponents of babble like Intelligent Design aren’t quite able to believe that God could be so creative. They want to replace a beautiful subtlety with hamfistedness. Grasping this idea would seem to make the path of discovery an unbelievable joyful activity for the devout. I could imagine the thought process of some believing scientist to be something like this. “Yes God I know in my heart of hearts that you created everything about six thousand years ago exactly like it is laid out in Genesis and other parts of the Bible, and by the way any discrepancies I find therein are a failure of my understanding and not of the actual text, but I am fascinated by how you brought this bit of light I’m seeing into being so that it appears to have originated a million years ago on the other side of the galaxy.” Every new piece of knowledge would be a tiny step closer to knowing the mind of God. Every new bit of data collected would be literally a message from God and a confirmation of his love for us. Imagine the entire universe is one big puzzle lovingly created for us to unravel, to discover what our ultimate purpose is. Of course being a non believer I may be missing something very basic. I am the person who had to raise his hand in an Old Testament class to clarify that we should take it as a given that God is good after all. Maybe it’s my lack of faith and certainty that obscure some reasoning that throws a monkey wrench into what I’m trying to get at. Anyway it’s late, so here are some pretty pictures in case you actually got this far.

From Nighttime

And one more.

From Nighttime

Where the Hell have I been?

Well I’ve been to San Francisco, LA twice, Memphis, Louisville, Metropolis. It’s been a busy winter and spring. I’ll be going to Gulf Shores, back to Louisville at least once, and hitting Lexington before the summer is over then in the fall I’ll be going back to LA for a couple of days. When I spell it out like that I realize I’m one lucky SOB. About half of this travel was for work and half was tagging along for shooting ConTrek episodes. Along the way I’ve taken a ton of pictures, over six thousand. Of which about 60 are worth sharing. What’s that a .1% average? I’ve read a few books and seen a few movies of course. Hopefully over the next couple of weeks I’ll fill in some of the blanks and get back into the habit of posting here.

Resolutions Don’t Start Until Monday

It’s official, I looked it up, US Code Annotated 1902.002 §167 ¶182. If New Years Day falls on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday then any New Year’s Resolutions  you’ve made do not have to be honored until Monday. The statute doesn’t say anything about when you have to go back to work or anything like that but at least you don’t have to start your resolutions in the middle of the week.

Interestingly,  in Rickmanbergstien from 1838 till 1987 the New Year always officially  started on a Tuesday.  In 1837 Rickmanbergstien planned to attack  Allonsbergstien on New Years Day.  A spy was captured in the Royal Rickmanbergstien Palace and it was feared that the date of the attack had been passed to Allonsbergstien.  To keep from having to print new orders, the current Regent of Rickmanburgstien was notoriosly cheap, but still not have the attack spoiled by the Allonsbergstienians knowing what day it was coming New Years Day was just moved to Tuesday. While this did save the day as far as the attack on Allonsbergstien was conserned, Rickmanbergstien kicked their butt, the tribute extracted from Allonsbergstien never came close to paying for the lost trade caused by the date mismatch between Rickmanbergstien and the rest of the world The practice was regarded by the rest of the world as one of those qaint, charming, stupid things that the little city-states of Eupore does, but after Baron Buckminster von Hookes the last of the great Rickmanbergstien calendar makers died the practice had to be discontinued as having custom calendars printed for all Rickmanbergstienians would have consumed thirteen percent of the city state’s budget.

Holiday update

Well the holidays are all over now (well they will be at the end of the day at least) and everything can go back to as close to normal as it gets. The next couple of months are going to be a little crazy. I’ve got three business trips coming up; Memphis, San Francisco and Indy, and likely weekend trips to Lexington and Atlanta. I’ll get to drive to Indy and Memphis, but I’ll be flying to San Francisco. I’d love to drive to San Francisco but it just ain’t practical. Anyway that’s me till the end of February.

I’ve been watching a lot of stuff on DVD since Christmas, got the Jeeves and Wooster and Blackadder complete box sets for Christmas, thanks Mom. I’ve just barely cracked into them so far. I’ve been distracted by a little four dollar treat from the Great Escape. It’s one of those multi disc el-cheap-o packages of mostly public domain movies. This one has twenty movies that have some, sometimes quite slight, connection to racing, or cars. They are all B level or worse films but they are all pretty interesting for one reason or another. The older ones have plots of varying levels of ridiculousness and tons of stock footage, one even has some glorious clips of European Grand Prix racing. The real jewels though are three movies made in the seventies. One biopic of Richard Petty starring Richard Petty, he’s not bad actually, and the dad from The Christmas Story playing Lee Petty, There’s some fun car chases with vintage iron and seventies NASCAR racing. Then there is the sublimely bad, a movie about a couple of dope smugglers and one about the most unlikely California Highway patrolman turned repo men you can imagine. They make Cannonball run look like Citizen Kane. What’s cool about them though is that they got made at all. You can just imagine the filmmakers hitting up their families and friends for money and maxing out credit cards to finish the things. The scripts and acting are pitiful but they still manage to put up some interesting car chases.

Then there is another movie that I just got my hands on Monday. I couldn’t watch it Monday night, I had to watch something to review for Cinegeek Monday night so I didn’t get to watch it till Tuesday, but I’ve seen it three times since then and I didn’t get in till about two am last night. It’s Gran Torino Clint Eastwood’s latest movie. It is amazing. A perfect movie. When you get a chance you have to see it. I’m not saying anything else about it so I don’t ruin it for you, if that that’s possible, but it is fantastic.

Well I got just enough time to get this posted and then get cleaned up to meet some friends for lunch so I’ll cut this off for now.

Happy New Year everybody.

The Weekend

Art’s birthday was Thursday so we all went over to Art’s Friday night for some birthday cake and other assorted revelries, by other assorted revelries I mean conversation and video games. “Other assorted revelries” sounds like some sly euphemism employed to mask illicit but extra cool activities. All of my illicit activities are licitly boring and I have no illusions about my coolness deficit. Anyway Friday night was a lot of fun as is every night i can spend with friends.

I did try something new Friday night. I don’t know if it was Rock Band or Guitar Hero, but I played it Friday night. I sang. It was fun. Singing has got to be the easiest part to play. I don’t know how anybody can do the guitar or drum parts. Like I said it’s fun but it kind of bugs me a bit too. How much harder would it be to actually create music instead of pretending to create music. Sure it’s not going to sound as good as what you hear in the game, but surely the fact that it’s actually you doing it would make up for that. Still I would play again given the opportunity.

Spent most of Saturday reading the Watchmen and watching Stephen, Daniel and James play Magic. More notes on Watchman in a separate post. That night we went to see JCVD , which again I will discuss in more detail in a separate post, but I will say it was great, see it if you get the chance.

Went to see Billy on Sunday, It’s been forever since I was out his way. Discussed possibilities of another Wyoming trip. Need to work up a load for my AR so we can start reloading.

I’m Back

Wow it’s not been as long as I though it was. Among other things I’ve been doing a little reading over the last couple of months. The 1000 book thing is still on my mind. What I will do is post a brief, or maybe not so brief note each time I finish a book and put it in the “1000 Books” category. That way I can keep track of what I’ve read.

My Apologies

Yeah well, I could try to make excuses about the inactivity here but I’d just have to make stuff up so I’ll just apologize instead.

I’m sorry.

Posting will still probably be light for awhile as I’m currently sans internet at Clovis Chitwood Heavy Industries World Headquarters and probably will be for at least the next week or two. Well that’s not technically true. I’ve got some access with my phone, but posting from it is not very fun.

New review up at Cinegeek and another one on the way. We recorded podcast number nine last night too. I’ll post again when I see that it’s gone up.

Anyway just wanted to break the silence.