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Reviews of My Christmas Reading List

Posted in Agatha Christie, books, Christmas, holiday, pop culture, reviews with tags , on December 18, 2008 by Paxton

santa_reads1Well, December is upon us. The year is almost over. So, even though stores started putting up Christmas decorations 2 days before Thanksgiving, I waited until December 1 to really start thinking about Christmas. A few weeks ago I decided to read nothing but Christmas books through the end of the year. I thought it might help “jump start” myself into Kris Kringle mode. I picked my festive list of books first before I started reading because I wanted to be prepared and not caught off guard by finishing a few and then having to scramble to find some more. Many are older classics that I never really got around to reading in the first place and one is one I re-read because it was short and I enjoyed it.

So, I finally finished my Xmas reading list and I thought I’d let you all know what I read and what I thought about them.  It’s an eclectic list, and I didn’t enjoy everything I read, which is to be expected, I guess.  But enough of my incessant babbling, here’s the list of reviews.  Some of this stuff may put you in the Xmas mood, some of it may put you in the mood to punch some random Salvation Army Santa in the gut.  Pick your poison, my friend.

The 13 Problems
A Christmas Tragedy by Agatha Christie – This is one of Agatha’s short stories found in The 13 Problems collection.  Honestly, I was a bit disappointed.  The events of this short story just happen to take place during a Christmas party, that’s pretty much the only tenuous connection to the holiday.  The mystery is short and sweet, but not one of her best.  I find that Agatha is best at the novel length stories where she can build character and suspense.  When she writes short stories, there is no time to build the suspense then have a nice reveal.  It’s too quick.  So, this was only a so-so entry to my holiday reading list.

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AWESOME-tober-fest 2008!!! A Look Back at the Crestwood Monster books

Posted in AWESOME-tober-fest, books, Halloween, holiday, movies, pop culture, reviews with tags , , , , , on October 30, 2008 by Paxton

Awesometoberfest banner

Welcome to AWESOME-tober-fest Week 5!!! I revealed yesterday that there will be an article a day starting yesterday, so here’s today’s installment.   FYI…I got sick yesterday afternoon.  So  I want you to know the Herculean effort it took to get this article out.  That’s the kind of sacrifice I do for you, my readers.

Today, I want to talk about the the keystone topic I’ve wanted to talk about all month. It’s a series of books I remember vividly from elementary school. I finally acquired copies of the first six books in the series late last year. It was late enough that I didn’t really get a chance to talk about them last Halloween. However, now I’ve had a year to look at them so let’s take a stroll down memory lane at the Crestwood House Monster Series.

Crestwood Monsters cover

I have a very vivid memory of checking these books out from the HW Gwin Elementary school library. The vibrant orange color of the cover and the cool monster subjects made them a popular choice amongst my friends. Each book focused on a monster or creature from a movie or series of movies. The first six books included Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf Man, King Kong, Godzilla and Mad Scientists. Most were published in the late ’70s and early ’80s. As you can see, they are also the inspiration for my blog header this Halloween.

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Wrecking someone else’s journal

Posted in books, humor, journals, personal with tags , on September 19, 2008 by Paxton

Okay, it’s been a long week. I would have had this blog article done a few days ago but the monitor on my laptop died on me. Add to that fact that work has been really busy and the outcome is that Pax can’t finish his blog articles on time. Right now I’m having to write this blog “guerilla style” while at work. Not a problem for me because, as you know, I’m a ninja, but it’s annoying nonetheless.

So I was talking with my friend Debi at work and she whips out this kick ass book she’s been working on called Wreck This Journal by Keri Smith. It has tasks for you to do on each page that involve somehow wrecking the journal. It’s pretty cool, here’s the cover.

You get to do some crazy, random things to the book like taking a shower with it, mailing it to someone, chew on a page, glue office supplies to a page and many others. I found some sample pages on Amazon.

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Odds ‘n Ends from the last two weeks

Posted in books, humor, personal, random with tags , , , , on September 5, 2008 by Paxton

Sniffing GlueYeah, so I missed another week last week. Crap, I don’t know how that happened. Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue….or did I? Seriously, I did pick the wrong week.

Had a lot going on this past week. We went up to Columbia, SC to visit friends Kathy and Himal who have chosen to live up there as they finish their PhDs. We had a blast. They were able to procure us invites to an “insider’s only” party at a place called Jillian’s. It featured free beers and appetizers from 7 to 9pm. Needless to say, we came, we drank, we danced the Cupid Shuffle. It was a grand old time. We finished the evening by stumbling our party-ed out selves over two blocks to the IHop. What was cool, was that the IHOP was housed in the old A-frame architecture that the franchise had back in the ’80s.

A-frame IHOP

I hadn’t seen an A-frame IHOP in years. There used to be one in Birmingham, AL for the longest time but it was converted into a car wash or something.

So that was a blast.  What else happened, oh Auburn beat Louisiana-Monroe.  It wasn’t the pass-happy offense everyone expected, but I’m hoping that they held back a bit because Louisiana-Monroe wasn’t the strongest of opponents.

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Defending the Galaxy: Reviewing the video game bible of 1981 Part I

Posted in 80s, books, humor, pop culture, reviews, video games with tags , , , , , on May 7, 2008 by Paxton

Cavalcade Arcade

As some of you will recall, I went to the Jacksonville Book Fair a while ago and found a bunch of really cool books, all for about 50 cents each. One of these finds was my favorite. it was a video game book from the early ’80s called Defending the Galaxy: The Complete Handbook of VideoGaming.

Defending the Galaxy front coverDefending the Galaxy back cover

This book, according to the cover, lets the readers in on how to “blend in” and “look like” an elite video gamer. Seriously, it’s written with the assumption that the reader is not currently in the video game crowd, but let’s them in on the secrets of looking and acting like a top tier gamer. Needless to say, the book is funny. Ridiculously so. The book’s assumption that non-gamer folk even want to be “in” with the gamer folk is very presumptuous, but it leads to some really funny “tips and tricks”. What is a non-gamer supposed to do once they’ve assimilated themselves amongst the video game crowd? Study them? Learn their habits? Is this a National Geographic special? What if, while posing as a gamer, the non-gamer is asked to play a 2 player game of Defender? How do they fake their way through that? The answer is, there’s no faking your way through a game of Defender as it’s widely considered one of the hardest games ever created. You’ll have your backside handed to you by the real gamer and then be ostracized by the gaming community. So teaching you to look like a gamer when you aren’t is also teaching you to be a poseur. But, if you follow the instructions in this book, the road to becoming a poseur is awesome.

I was 8 when this book was released. At that time I was a huge video gamer and loved to go to the arcade and play whenever my parents would let me. Any trip to the local mall meant I got to play at Aladdin’s Castle. I could play Donkey Kong or Asteroids at Dino’s Hot Dogs. There was a stand alone video arcade named Wizard’s Palace that I rarely got to visit. We’d go to Six Flags on a family vacation and I’d want to spend a few hours in the video arcade instead of going on rides. My dad kept saying that he didn’t spend 40 bucks to get me in the park to play games I can find in the mall at home. That’s how much I loved video games. In my defense, there were several games in that Six Flags video arcade that I never saw at my local arcade including Super Punch Out!, Return of the Jedi and Mad Dog McCree.

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