Happy New Year

Three nuts roasting by an open fire on Christmas Day

Happy New Year!

So it’s been about a month since my last post ended with the words, “See you next week!” Clearly, things did not go according to plan. Sadly, later that week, we learned that my wife’s brother had passed away, and the following week we flew out to North Carolina for his funeral. I had to come back home for work, while my wife stayed out with her parents for Christmas. (She had always planned on spending the holiday with her family, but under much less tragic circumstances.)

Between her brother’s passing, the funeral, and my being home alone (well, alone with three cats, a parrot, and a gecko), I wasn’t feeling much like writing anything. It’s been a crappy end to a crappy year that started with needing to put several tens of thousands of dollars into home repair and ended in tragedy, with health issues, work frustrations, and general upset with the state of the world filling in the middle of what turned out to be a misery burrito of a year.

Having said that, we want 2019 to be better, or at least the parts we have control over. So I thought I would talk about some of our plans, and kind of preview what you can expect to see here.

Cherry Smoked Rib Roast

Having written about enjoying prime rib at Lawry’s and elsewhere, I thought this week, I would share my adventures in smoking my own rib roast. I’ve made one before, but this is the first time I took photos to document the process.

I Make Some Hot Wings

I’ve written about the foods that make me happy before. While I love trying new and different things, my comfort foods are pretty basic: hot dogs, steak and prime rib, and fried chicken sandwiches. I also love chicken wings. However, unlike all those other foods, I had never made my own wings, instead getting ready-made ones from restaurants or grocery stores, or frozen ones. Part of the reason is that my wife doesn’t share my taste when it comes to wings. She doesn’t like spicy foods, nor does she enjoy food with bones in it. However, that all changed just a few short months ago.

The Disney Designer Collection

Over the last several weeks, the Disney Store has been releasing a series of limited edition dolls called the Disney Designer Collection. The dolls feature six Disney princess characters, not dressed in their traditional outfits, but in clothing inspired by the fashion of the years in which their movies were released. Released one a week, the collection featured Snow White from 1937, Cinderella from 1950, Jasmine from 1992, Ariel from 1989, Tiana from 2009, and Belle from 1991. The dolls sold out within minutes of their release online, and my wife and I were lucky enough to purchase three of them. They are gorgeous, so I thought I would share photos of them online.

Section Zero

There is no Section Zero.

That’s the tag line for the comic book series from writer/inker Karl Kesel and penciler Tom Grummett. The book tells the story of a team of United Nations operatives tasked with investigating the weird and unexplained. It’s kind of like the X-Files, if the X-Files had been created by Jack Kirby along the lines of Challengers of the Unknown and Fantastic Four. It’s a big, bold, beautiful comic full of intriguing characters, larger than life monsters, high adventure, drama, mystery, and humor. And, for too long, it felt like “There is no Section Zero” was sadly more than an apt tag line.

Trekker: Chapeltown

Earlier this year, I wrote about Ron Randall’s Trekker, a longtime favorite science fiction series telling the adventures of Mercy St Clair, a future bounty hunter, or trekker. At the time, Randall was raising funds on Kickstarter to self-publish—for the first time—the latest volume in the series, Chapeltown. That campaign was a rousing success, and the resulting publication is a fine one indeed. He is currently raising funds for the next volume. That campaign blew past its initial goal in less than a day, so its success is already a sure thing. But the more money he raises, the nicer the book will be. So I thought this would be a good time to talk about Chapeltown, to help shine some more light on the series.

Spoilers after the jump; this book has a bunch of pretty drastic changes to the status quo of the characters, and I don’t think I can discuss the book effectively while trying to tiptoe around those.

Magnum PI: The Remake

Today, I wanted to talk briefly about a couple of TV shows that have made me feel pretty happy the past couple of weeks.

First, we are loving the new season of Doctor Who, particularly Jodie Whitaker as the new Doctor. I’ve been a huge fan of Doctor Who since I was a kid, but in recent years, my enthusiasm had waned a bit. With this new season, though, I feel completely reenergized. Jodie Whitaker brings a similar kind of energy and enthusiasm to the part that I loved in David Tennant, and Peter Davison, and Christopher Eccleston. With just two episodes broadcast, she is completely and totally the Doctor in my mind. 

The other day, despite having been almost completely turned off by the trailers, I decided to watch the first episode of the remade Magnum P.I. As a kid, I avidly watched the last 3 or 4 seasons of the original show (followed by Simon & Simon), and I HATED the idea that it was being remade by the producers who—to my mind—got the remake of MacGyver so wrong. The previews showcased big, explodey car crashes, making it look more like The Fast & the Furious (F&F director Justin Lin directed the new Magnum pilot) than the Magnum I knew. And it looked like they had just cast a typical Hollywood pretty boy as Magnum, and really, who could replace Tom Selleck, anyway? 

But, I loved the original so much, I felt compelled to check out the new one. I mean, what if it wasn’t awful? And who was I to judge without watching at least one episode?

Turns out, I really enjoyed it. And nobody is more surprised at that than me.