A while ago, I started a blog. Well, a different blog. It’s out there, floating on the Internet, available through Google searches for all to see but for all intents and purposes abandoned. This may or may not be a shame – there’s like one really good post on there, and a few whose memory makes me hesitant to journey back to whatever I thought I was thinking circa 2008. It was a different world then – America, perched at the precipice and forefront of a global economic disaster, was buoyed by ‘hope’ in a promising pending presidential election, and I was reading nearly decade-old issues of Transmetropolitan and thinking about the connections between them all.

Pop culture and current events – who among us can resist the urge to comment on them? Myself, I’m writing two new columns that will add to those great debates of our time that include: is the new Pirates of the Carribean movie worth seeing? Does Pokemon have anything to do with conflict diamonds? And what do college grads with bachelors’ in the humanities do with their evenings?

Note: I don’t have a picture of me reading anything I’ve written, so I used one I took one of someone else reading what they have. It’s Inez – who teaches at BVU, where we both work – reading from her short story contribution to “Cthulhu Unbound: Volume 2,” the second part in an eldritch series that mixes Lovecraftian horror with other genres – in her story’s case, film noir.

First, I’m joining the young rambly literate types over a Super Fine Magazine, who are fast at work cranking out such intriguing pieces of political-cultural commentary as “Pac Man, Flow, and Erving Goffman” and “Cosmo-Consumption: Liking “Everything” and Meaning It” To this fine titles this week I add “It’s a Miracle Things Don’t Fall Apart When Remembering Greatest Game Ever Played”, an exploration of the pretentiousness of sports movie titles like Miracle, The Greatest Game Ever Played, and especially the soon-to-be-released Things Fall Apart. An excerpt:

 In a line of dialogue in the Things Fall Apart trailer, Coach Ray Liotta demands “You want to do it on your own terms – that is the question.” He thus grammatically mangles the first line of perhaps the single most famous soliloquy in all of literature, fraught with self-doubt and ambiguity, into an imperative to follow the “take arms against a sea of troubles” side of the speaker’s great debate. While Denzel Washington’s coach fires his team up by describing how the mythological Titans challenged the gods, he forgets to mention that they failed and were imprisoned as a result (see also, the Titanic [the ship] [not the movie]).

Expect contributions once every few weeks.

Second: For the next few months, I’ll be contributing movie reviews to Double Take, a joint column with my friend Josh Moniz over at the New Ulm Journal, the prime printed news source for the smallish Minnesota city perhaps best known to outsiders as the home of the August Schell Brewery. If you’re in New Ulm, pick up a copy! If you’re elsewhere, you can view a PDF of the current entertainment section here. Double Take‘s been running for two weeks already, during which Josh and I have reviewed Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Roderick Rules and Scream 4.  This week, we’ll offer our take on The Lincoln Lawyer. It’s a decidedly speed-of-print affair, but promises to be promising.

Look also in the coming weeks for a new tab on this site that will better catalog these articles locales’ in the Great Elsewhere of the Internet – and the occasional post letting you know when something extra cool has been loosed upon the nets. Enjoy!