All articles filed in General

I’m currently at the Indian Castle rest area on the New York State Thruway, heading home from a two-game, one-day photo shoot for the Premier Basketball League.  In the first game, the Rochester Razorsharks (Patroons content=0%, although Jerice Crouch was a teammate of Lucious Jordan’s when both men played in Holland) defeated the Halifax Rainmen…

Yes, I’m still stoked about the new TRON Legacy movie coming to theaters in December. So I was equally stoked when I discovered this website. Actually, what’s been going on is that Disney has created this way cool viral marketing campaign for TRON, with websites like flynnlives.com, which purports to be a website for the…

Let’s get a few things straight, right off the bat. Paul McCartney is alive. Elvis Presley is dead. William Shakespeare wrote his own plays. Great. The reason I posted those disclaimers at the beginning of this blog post is because I’m not a big fan of coincidence equating to fact.  In the 1960’s, there were…

I don’t know why, even with my powerful Nikon D700 digital SLR camera, that I would even consider using this 35mm film beast. The “beast” I’m talking about is a Kiev-19 Russian-made SLR film camera. I bought the Kiev-19 camera for one reason and one reason only – it was cheap, and it had a…

This is great.  In a special five-minute film clip from the humor site Funny or Die, President Barack Obama gets visited by various past United States Presidents, as he wrestles with trying to create a consumer protection board, so that we aren’t continually clobbered by usurious credit card charges and the like. Oh, and did…

Yesterday evening, I attended a special Capital Region blog community get-together.  Sponsored by the Times-Union, it featured dozens of bloggers and online commentators throughout the Capital Region and beyond. While the event was predominantly focused on the meaning of blogging as part of the “new conversation,” I looked at it more as a chance to…

One of my favorite TV shows of all time was the early cyberpunk science-fiction series Max Headroom.  For those of you with faded memories of the 1980’s, you might recall an iconic image of a computer-generated sunglasses-wearing head, spouting off non-sequiturs and funny observations.  That was Max Headroom. From 1987 to 1988, ABC aired a…

Just so you know, that opening line was from a famous Tom Lehrer song, “Lobachevsky” – a song about mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky.  I am never forget the day… Anyways, I cite the source above because of this. Zachery Kouwe, a reporter for the New York Times, was caught quoting from sources without proper acknowledgment…

NOTE: I wrote this article for the Journal of Antiques and Collectibles in January 2007.  I hope you enjoy it. The most wondrous of toys are those that help us fulfill an accomplishment. We may not be able to take on Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai in a battle of bouillabaisse, but we can at least…