During this past week’s procrastinatory idylls, I had a chance to read two very different accounts of how folks deal with the fallout of fame. The first was an excerpt from an upcoming biography of the late Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton, a man who basically apart after his playing career was over. His […]
Tags:fame·football·Mark Hamill·movies·Star Wars·Walter Payton
Columbus Day brings to mind all the various explorers who are more deserving of modern recognition than the dour Genoan you either love or loathe. One such admirable icon is our namesake, St. Brendan, who allegedly sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in the sixth century A.D. True, there is zero physical evidence to prove that […]
Tags:Christopher Columbus·exploration·Ireland·maritime·mythology·religion·St. Brendan·Star Wars
We have very vivid memories of the disappointment we felt upon first seeing The Phantom Menace. One of our pals had scored tickets to a late-night showing at the mammoth Ziegfeld Theater, and we ducked out of a raging party just to get our Star Wars on. The lights dimmed and the movie opened not […]
Still plugging away on the Kenya piece for Wired, so few if any deep thoughts this afternoon. Fortunately, The Tubes provide us with a quick and easy way to keep the Microkhan mojo going—namely, the priceless ad above for C-3PO cereal. This breakfast treat not only further lined George Lucas’s burgeoning pockets with cash; it […]
Tags:1980s·advertising·breakfast cereal·C-3PO·cigarettes·Star Wars·TV
We’re more than a little ashamed to admit we remember the brief Ewok craze of the mid-1980s, when two made-for-TV follow-ups to Return of the Jedi hit the tube. While we realize now that the Ewoks were a harbinger of the soul-crushing awfulness of Jar-Jar Binks, we were suckers for the furry critters back in […]
Tags:Bad Movie Friday·Ewoks·movies·Star Wars·The Ewok Adventure
We’re off taking advantage of our Stanford library privileges, in order to flesh out a few big-picture ideas. The wannabe emperor in the clip above, by contrast, could certainly do a better job of paying attention to the small picture—say, for example, by noticing that there are no sunsets in space. (Unless he has a […]
A quick Bad Movie Friday this week, as we’re absorbed in the game of narrative non-fiction writing (i.e. the gig that pays the bills ’round here). Let’s just say that we probably owe Krull another look; we saw it at a grade-school birthday party back when it came out, and probably didn’t yet have the […]
Had Corvette Summer been blessed with a better casting director, perhaps it would have escaped the ignominy of our weekly Bad Movie Friday slot. But no—they just had to cast the 27-year-old Mark Hamill as a high-school student, and noted character actress Annie Potts as a Vegas sexpot (a far cry from her ideal role […]
Tags:Annie Potts·Bad Movie Friday·Corvette Summer·firearms·Mark Hamill·movies·Star Wars
Tending to Microkhan Jr. has given us a newfound appreciation for great kiddie fare of yore, most notably the late, great Muppet empire. And do when we stumbled across this clip of various Henson creations “auditioning” for the role of Yoda, we couldn’t resist the urge to pass it along. Honestly, we could totally see […]
Tags:Drunken Master·martial arts·Muppets·parenting·Star Wars·TV·Yoda
After playing Captain Bringdown with all the suicide talk, I thought I owed it to y’all to post something a bit more lighthearted. I’m in the midst of doing some groundwork for my next book, which deals a lot with global trade during the waning days of the British Empire. This research has led me […]
