Katie and I got the chance to take a vacation deferred last week, delayed since the shutdowns of March 2020. Exploration is how I unwind and New Mexico has been on my list of ‘go-see’ for 15 years. …

There’s a trend happening these days. Some industry watcher and analyzer will give it a proper name soon, but for the moment let’s just call it ‘Big Product Placement’ or BPP. I am talking about the rise of biopics and films about famous commercial products and corporations. ‘Barbie,’ ‘Tetris,’ ‘Air,’…

This was originally a presentation for the Association of College English Teachers of Alabama (ACETA) Conference 2023. The presentation was paired with the short film, Garden Of The Gods. Edgar Allan Poe died when he was merely 40 years old, in the ancient, bygone year of 1849 CE, in the…

[INTRO] — Welcome to spoilertown! Welcome to spoilertown. If you watching Star Trek: Picard’s new season three and you have not seen the first episode, “The Next Generation,” then be warned that there will be spoilers from here on out. [SECTION 1] — Recap Let’s briefly summarize what happened in…

With the permission of the magnanimous Trek Track directors (Trek Track is the popular quadrant of Atlanta’s Dragon Con that celebrates and discusses all things Trek), we kicked off the first annual ‘Star Trek’ Salamander Awards. What are the Salamander Awards? A celebration of the best of the worst of…

I am dispassionate on matters of nationalism. I’m critical and demanding of the national story we tell ourselves, wanting desperately to understand any truths far above any emotionally delectable fable. And that yearning to understand tempers any blinding love of homeland I’ve ever had. I willingly recast our culture as…

In the waning days of the 20th century, and across the first two decades of the 21st century, the paperback publisher Pocket Books created an enormous, sprawling, self-contained, internally-consistent continuation of the Star Trek multiverse, picking up from the end of the television show Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and…

This is from a stint as a truck driver, dating to September 2008 I drove my truck down an interstate exit near the Missouri / Arkansas / Oklahoma tri-state border onto some forgotten back roads likely to have not seen maintenance since the Reagan Administration. It was the blackest night…

I was 18 when we went. As soon as I graduated from high school in May 1999, my Brazilian-brother-from-another-mother, Thiago Fragoso, and I bought Greyhound bus tickets from our small Alabama town straight to New York City. We intended to see the world and we were going to start from…