Author: Vince

Movies

The Last Interest in The Last Skywalker

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(Spoilers galore. But if you haven’t seen it by now, I don’t think you’re going to be bothered by spoilers.)

A couple of days after my birthday in 1999 (I partied like it was), I sat in a theater at midnight with a few friends and several hundred new acquaintances and watched the curtain rise on the first Star Wars movie in over fifteen years. George Lucas had decided to embark on filming more of his original vision for the Skywalker saga, and the people in the theater could not have been more excited. The world was going to end in a few months if all the news was any indication, but nobody in that theater cared; we would at least go out having seen a new Star Wars.

Church

Menace to Society

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Bernadette Fox finds life, and people, stressful. She hires a concierge service from India so she doesn’t have to deal with the day-to-day details of being a wife and mother. She needs a new extra-strength prescription to handle the possibility of being on a cruise ship, even a small one with only 150 people on board. She and her husband and daughter live in an abandoned Catholic school with vines growing up through the floor. In short, Bernadette is a mess.

And the mess keeps growing. It turns out the concierge service is actually an identity theft ring, and Bernadette has given them the keys to the kingdom, and the bank accounts.

Movies

TLJ Redux

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Two years ago, these were the closing words of my post about The Last Jedi.

We’ll find out in a couple of years whether Abrams is up to that task. Past performance does not guarantee future results, but I don’t like the odds.

Having seen the movie a few hours ago (I’m living in the future right now), I can tell you the accuracy of that statement was somewhere between 0 and 100%.

Come back in a few days and I’ll try to narrow down the range.

Bible Study / Spiritual Journey

Who’s the Boss?

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I live in a fairy-tale land, a land where logic and mathematics and common sense were banished long ago. A land where the impossible is possible, where certainty is forever uncertain, where the probable is very unlikely.

I live in the land of the Dallas Cowboys.

The land was not always this way. Long ago, when dinosaurs and a fedora roamed the earth, the Cowboys were in the NFC championship game 10 out of 13 years. They set the record for most consecutive winning seasons at 20, a record that still stands, at least until next year. They played in a stadium with a hole in its roof so God could see His team play, or so the saying went.

Humor

A Movie Star and a Florist Go to a Funeral…

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Rorshach tests are supposed to tell us all kinds of things about our psychological condition. I find what we think is funny does a much better job.

I thought about this recently as I was reading Lauren Bacall’s first autobiography. (We’ve been watching the B&B movies, I’ve had the book on the shelf for a while, what are you gonna do?) Bogart had died, they’d just had the funeral, Bacall had told everyone to make contributions to the American Cancer Society in lieu of flowers. A large group of friends came back to her house after the funeral, and the telegrams are pouring in.

Generosity

Totally (In)Secure

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They did a study at the Chronicle of Philanthropy years ago where they asked people who inherited money, “What amount of money would you need to feel totally secure?” And every single one of them, no matter what they had, named a number that was roughly twice what they inherited. So that’s what you need to know about money, right? If that is your primary measure of success or value in life, then good luck with that, because it will never feel good.

From an interesting interview with a Disney heir.

I generally don’t like to quote from people talking about “studies” unless I’ve seen the original study.