In no particular order:
- I was sad to learn this morning that singer Guy Clark has died. If you’re not familiar with his music – well, I’m not especially either. I only know him because of a single NPR story I heard once, and I only know a few of his songs. But damn, they’re good. My Favorite Picture of You is a simple little song, but one of my all-time favorites from any genre.
- This Friday is Betsy’s birthday. She’s turning sqrt(961) but doesn’t look a day over sqrt(841). Friday is also the day we find out the gender of Baby Buckley. She, and I, and my mom, have all had dreams that it would be a boy. We’ll see.
- We’ve started watching Lost Girl on Ben Trube’s recommendation. Only three episodes in. The first one was great, but 2 and 3 have lost momentum. (A lot of shows are like that.) I’m waiting for them to get off the story-of-the-week stuff and into the big story.
- I recently finished reading The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs. Not much insight into spirituality or Christianity, but a whole lot of insight into the Bible as a document, and into many of the groups that take it literally. Did you know there’s a prohibition in Leviticus and Deuteronomy against wearing clothes made of both wool and linen? Or that several groups are trying to breed a perfect red heifer without spot or blemish because they believe it will usher in the End of Days, based on another Torah passage?
- Speaking of the Bible, Betsy and I have now read Genesis, Exodus, the Gospel of John, 1 Thessalonians, and 2 Thessalonians. We’re halfway through the Gospel of Mark, with Leviticus up next. Obviously, we’re jumping around, but we do still intend to read every book. I may post more thoughts on all that when I get time.
- I’m now reading Ruthless, a book by Ron Miscavige – father of David Miscavige, who is currently the successor to L. Ron Hubbard as supreme leader of the Church of Scientology. It’s interesting. Ron is very critical of the modern “Church” (which he correctly labels a cult) and of his son, but he still believes in the basic Scientology teachings.
- Captain America: Civil War was pretty good. It’s basically Avengers 3 more than a Captain America movie per se, but I’m not exactly complaining.
- Monday, when I posted my Buffy Shakespeare thing, I also posted a link on the Buffy subreddit. The response was overwhelmingly positive, which was very encouraging. Blog traffic for that day jumped from the usual 500-ish to almost 1,000.
- Speaking of Buffy, the actress who played Drusilla – Juliet Landau – is now following me on Twitter. She follows an enormous number of people, so this is not incredibly impressive, but I still got a real kick out of it.
- I have cleaned and organized the basement. If you ever saw our basement, you know that this task qualifies as the 13th labor of Hercules. I also shoveled and spread 6 cubic yards of mulch last weekend. “But Brian,” you say, “these are fairly ordinary tasks. Do you really expect us to be impressed?” Listen. I don’t have muscles. This stuff is impressive, dammit.
- I had this crazy dream that one of our two major political parties chose as its nominee for president a man who advocated killing the families of people who attack us. Haha! Oh, man, what a crazy dream.
- Editing is going very well. I’m doing a ton of work for Dragonfly Editorial, Green Frog Publishing, and Creative Sparks Writing. And they’re paying me!
- My dad is in Italy on a business trip. He sent me this photo, with the caption “Exterminate!”
Did you get it? Yeah, you in the back, you got it, right?
Brian D. Buckley 