Category: Current Affairs

Prepare To Be Assimilated

Before the Matrix, there were the Borg. The Borg were those half-humaniod, half-machine cyborgs on Star Trek: The Next Generation who went marauding around the universe “assimilating” everything and everyone in their path. Dare to buck a Borg, and you would end up “enhanced” with cybernetic implants and connected together with other Borg drones to function as part of a collective mind controlled by the Borg Queen and a central hub, Unimatrix One. But really, it’s ok because it was all in the name of “improving the quality of life for all species.”

Keep this charming little scenario in mind as you watch this (a hat tip to blogger extraordinaire Bill Gnade over at Contratimes for bringing this to light).… Read the rest

Monday Morning Musins’

The weekend has come and gone, and things are, well, different, than they were just a few days ago. For one thing, we are back on daylight savings time and although I awoke at my usual “rise and shine” 5:30AM the clock says it is actually 6:30AM, and therefore I don’t have my usual amount of time to write and post. So, in the interest of time and our short 21st century attention spans, I’ll go about this in bulleted fashion. If you sat through an Hour of PowerPoint at church yesterday, please accept my apologies beforehand.

  • Nancy Grace has given up on her Church of Christ cult hunt (not enough “traction” apparently) and has turned her keen journalistic eye and prosecutorial Death Ray from the Winkler case to the Duke Lacrosse Team
… Read the rest

Dr. Eyeguy, Culture Warrior

When I woke up yesterday morning, I was just regular “Mike the Eyeguy.” But then I went and wrote a post on Nancy Grace and the Church of Christ, grabbed my cuppa morning Joe, and settled into my usual rut and routine, expecting just another typical day.

Soon massive internet search engines kicked in, sorting through the roiling blogosphere for terms such as “Winkler,” “Nancy Grace and the Church of Christ,” “Church of Christ cult,” and “Rube Shelly, psychology.” By the dozens, they treked to my humble “basketball and life blog” which on a good day receives around 50 “hits,” just enough to maintain a modicum of respectability and convince me that I’m not completely wasting my time.… Read the rest

Nancy Dear, I Have One Word For You

The Church of Christ blogosphere has been abuzz the past week since one of its own ministers, Matthew Winkler, was tragically shotgunned in the back by his wife in Selmer, Tennessee. She has confessed to the crime and a motive, but so far only authorities close to the case know what she said and to date they haven’t shared that information with the rest of the world.

Of course, that doesn’t prevent folks from speculating on the “why” (after all, these things must make sense, right?) and everyone from the greeter at Wal-Mart to such paragons of journalistic excellence and integrity as Nancy Grace has their own theory.… Read the rest

Making it Right

Those of us who live in Alabama have cringed recently at the spate of church burnings in our state over the past month. We know full well that such news draws the wrong kind of attention to the Yellowhammer State and stirs up ugly memories from our racially-tinged past. Although authorities felt that the recent incidents were not racially-motivated hate crimes, their investigation focused mostly on rural residents who might have special knowledge of the backroads and backwoods where the church burnings took place. In other words, they were looking for stereotypical, Alabama “rednecks.”

However, yesterday’s arrest of three upper-middle class Birmingham area college students caught everyone–victims, authorities, family members, teachers and classmates–by surprise.… Read the rest

Fantasies on Ice

It was a strange scene, one that forced me to stop and do a double-take. There in my living room sat/slouched three red meat and potatoes, football loving, video game playing, Southern white-bread boys with table manners that would make a medieval baron blush, watching, of all things, Olympic ice dancing.

It didn’t take me long to figure out why. “Wait till you see the Americans in second place, Dad. They’re really good,” they said. I think what they meant to say was, “Wait till you see Tanith Belbin skating with ol’ what’s-his-name. She’s HOT!”

My sons, along with millions of other adolescent boys across the globe, had been smitten with the captivating good looks (and yes, she can skate well too) of Canadian-born, recently naturalized U.S.… Read the rest

Starsky and Hutch, Where Are Ye?

I thought this was supposed to be the Torino Olympic Games? If so, then where the heck are Starsky and Hutch and that hot, heavily-muscled car of theirs? Can you imagine what would happen if you let those two compete in the two-man bobsled event? Well, those prissy Europeans wouldn’t be taking up so much room on the medal stands, I can tell you that much!

If you’re like me and you’re a little confused on whether Torino is a car, a golfer or a Canadian city then help can be found at sportswriter Frank Deford’s NPR commentary and this story from NPR’s Alex Chadwick.… Read the rest

Basketball and Bobsleds

The “J.J. Meter” has been humming as of late. In last night’s 93-70 win over Wake Forest, Duke’s J.J. Redick scored 33 points (his fourth 30 plus game in a row, a Duke record) and went 4 for 7 from beyond the arc to pass former UVa player Curtis Staples’ 413 career treys and become the new NCAA career 3 point marksman. Redick is currently second on the Duke career points list behind his assistant coach Johnny Dawkins and fourth on the ACC list. He now trails all-time leading ACC career scorer Dickie Hemric by 60 points with 5 games remaining in the regular season.… Read the rest

Singing Those Super Bowl Blues

Like many of you, I was a little disappointed with yesterday’s Super Bowl. Not with the outcome, mind you, since I really don’t have an NFL favorite these days and really didn’t care who won. I do enjoy a good athletic contest, however, but unfortunately what was supposed to be pro football’s ultimate gridiron tussle turned into an anemic affair which neither team seemed to really want to win. The real news was Pittsburgh’s three road wins over the top three American Conference teams en route to the “big game.” Everything else seemed like anticlimax.… Read the rest

The Power of Pictures

My recent post on the new Nike Air Max 360 was fresh on the mind of my friend Sonya when she took a recent trip to Rome. If you look closely at the background, or better yet, click on the picture, you’ll see a large billboard hawking Nike’s latest and greatest with the invitation, “Run on Air.” One might expect to see such a scene in Times Square, but et tu, Roma?

The intersection of the ancient with the modern can be found in the most unexpected places. When I saw this, I immediately pictured Pope Benedict XVI wearing a pair of the Air Max 360s beneath his vestments as he was issuing his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (“God is Love”).… Read the rest

You Don’t Mess Around with Oprah

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape,
you don’t spit into the wind.
You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger,
and you don’t mess around with…Oprah, da do da do…

Ok, I admit that’s not how the song really goes. But if you happened to catch the Oprah Winfrey show on Thursday (I did not, mind you) and saw “A Million Little Pieces”author James Frey face an angry Oprah and a studio audience consisting of mostly p.o.’ed post-menopausal women, you may have caught yourself singing it this way.… Read the rest

“The Book of Daniel” 1/6/06-1/24/06–R.I.P.


“…take a deep breath, relax and vote with your remote rather than play the protest game. Do that, and “The Book of Daniel” and its desperate priest will be dead on the vine within the month.”

I wrote those words on January 7th. Not that I’m a prophet or anything (who, after all, didn’t see this coming?), but just remember, I told ya so!

If you haven’t heard, NBC has pulled the plug on the desperately lacking and controversial show “The Book of Daniel” after only four episodes. The folks at Focus on the Family and the American Family Association are already taking credit for forcing the network’s hand on this, and others are whining and complaining about all those drunk-on-religion Red State right-wing nut cases who have struck once again and spoiled everyone’s fun.… Read the rest

“Glory Road”–A Little Too Glorified?

While we’re on the subject of “teetering on the edge of falsehood,” I thought I would point out George Will’s latest column in which he critiques the recently released film “Glory Road.” The film relates the story of Coach Don Haskins and his five black starters on the Texas Western basketball team and their victory over the all-white, Adolph Rupp-coached Kentucky Wildcats in the 1966 NCAA Final. Will takes issue with the impression left by the movie that the Texas Western team was the first to feature black players and that the game with Kentucky was a classic “David and Goliath” confrontation (Texas Western was 27-1 and ranked third in the nation going into the final game).… Read the rest

Teetering on the Edge of Falsehood

Probably by now most of you have heard about the controversy surrounding James Frey’s number one bestseller, “A Million Little Pieces.” It turns out that Mr. Frey’s book, purported to be a memoir detailing his colorful drug and alcohol-addicted past, has been exposed by The Smoking Gun as being more fiction than fact.

Oprah Winfrey, who featured the book in her Book Club and conducted an emotional interview with Frey on her show, has come to his defense. Calling in while Frey was being interviewed by Larry King, Oprah said fabrications notwithstanding that the story still “resonates” with her and her legions of fans.… Read the rest

A Word Fitly Spoken

“A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.” Proverbs 25:11

Huntsville resident and author Homer Hickam, Jr. (Rocket Boys, The Coalwood Way) spoke yesterday at the public memorial for the West Virginia coal miners killed in the recent explosion at the Sago Mine. His words “fitly spoken” will no doubt be cherished in the years to come by the family and friends of the fallen miners. The following is an excerpt:

“There are no better men than coal miners. The American economy rests on the back of our coal miners. We could not prosper without them.”

… Read the rest