Missing Local Dog Goes Home on Christmas Eve. GoFundMe Link Below.

A heartwarming holiday story:

A week ago, a local guy is out walking his dogs when a kid, driving with a suspended license and without insurance, and who is speeding down the road, loses control of his car and hits the guy and his two dogs. The guy is injured, but one of his dogs is hurt badly in one leg. It needs surgery to either repair the leg, or amputate it. Cost: $7,500.  Please go to the doggie's GoFundMe page here.

Here's a pic of that poor guy, named Angus:

The other dog panics and runs off, and a week later is still missing. (Read the original news story here.) But the dog was returned to the guy today, on Christmas Eve. Cynic that I am, I told someone it wasn't a coincidence that the dog was returned once a reward was offered. Turns out, it was. A little girl living close by saw the dog on her porch, all wet, but alive. Soon the dog was reunited with its owner, limping slightly, but happy. (Read that news story here.) Here's a pic of Kacy:

Both doggie pics are from their GoFundMe page. If you'd like to donate (every penny or dollar helps), please go to this address, which is linked above and here: https://www.gofundme.com/help-us-take-care-of-angus 

And so what better way to say Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and, ummm...Blissful Days Regardless of Your Religion? Have a good one, folks, and, as always, thanks for reading.

[Please post the GoFundMe address to your Facebook, Twitter, Blog, etc. and pass the story along so others can help. As of this writing, $1,795 has been raised. I know it's a financially challenging time of year, but please do what you can, even if it's just spreading the word along. Thanks!] 

And, oh yeah, as a tip of the hat to the boss around here, a pic of my better half's peanut butter pie, with whip cream, Reese's chunks, and Oreo crust, that she made for Xmas Eve. Though I'm allergic to peanuts, I had a bite, because you cannot live your life in fear. Plus, look at it. How can't you have one?

Star Trek Into Darkness

Photo: One of the many movie posters, from its Wikipedia page

I'd been apprehensive about seeing this movie because the first re-boot hadn't overly impressed me.  In fact, I don't actually remember too much of it.  I remember that I'd thought it was okay, but nothing great, nothing memorable.  I'd also thought it was a tiny bit blasphemous, but actual Trekkies were much more concerned about that than I.  I don't remember the Uhura/Spock relationship from the show or from any of the other movies.  Was that created just in the re-boot?  Someone needs to tell me.  As unemotional as Spock had been in the show and in the movies, I couldn't (and still can't) see him in any kind of romantic relationship.  But, whatever.  That's minor, too.  The biggest thing was how bleh I felt about the first one.  Not something I wanted to waste about $23 for two tickets.

But I was wrong.  This time the movie was very well written, very well directed--and just very well-done.  I won't get too much involved in the plot, since such things are secondary in movies like this, anyway.  But the special effects are outstanding.  The acting is good--which you couldn't really say from any of the other films, besides maybe Patrick Stewart, who cannot act badly.  The best actor in this movie plays the bad guy, if you will, and I won't tell you who the character is--and the reviews shouldn't have, either.  (His smile is one of the creepiest in recent memory, and the way he made it a perfect V-formation is super-weird.)  I will tell you, though, that you should see Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (that sort of gives it away, doesn't it), or you won't get how great the writing and mirror-image homages are for the last twenty minutes or so of the film.  Many people sitting around me got most of them--including an homage to the famous scene of Shatner / Kirk completely losing his sh*t and having a conniption as he screams, "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!"  This got a huge laugh.  (Those around me thought the movie was much funnier than I did, though I will say that it was pleasantly amusing, even if I never actually laughed out loud like many of them did.)  Remember that these are homages done in reverse here, which was done so well that I didn't even think until much later about how catastrophically bad it could have backfired on the moviemakers (mostly J.J. Abrams) had it not worked.  But it did work, and really, really well.

Having said all this, I have to close by saying that I am more than a bit bothered by the extreme mayhem and death in this movie--all of which was almost blissfully ignored by the main characters.  There was a (rather dim-witted) security guard sucked into space, though he was just doing his job.  Rather innocent dimwits like this guy are often saved in movies like this, by being warned of a problem, or conveniently knocked out, or whatever.  There were a million ways this guy could've been saved.  But there were also hundreds, if not thousands (or maybe even tens of thousands, depending on how populated this very over-populated city and world was) of people who died when hundreds of buildings were destroyed at the end by a crashing spaceship that plowed through an entire metropolis, much like how the Enterprise plowed through the land in one of the Next Generation movies, before the Nexus killed everyone on the planet (for a short time, in an alternate universe).  Anyway, such ignored killing and mayhem makes the whole thing like a silly comic book, which this movie was very seriously trying not to be.  This series is taking itself very seriously, indeed--even with the lines some in the audience found very funny.

So go see this movie, and see it in the theatre because this is certainly a big-screen flick, and marvel at all of the things that I did, and have a (mostly) good time like I did.  And feel free to comment if all of the ignored death and mayhem didn't bother you.  (It's the ignoring of the thousands of deaths that bothered me the most, not that it happened.)  But see Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan to fully appreciate the last twenty minutes or so--and, if possible, take a look at the episode of the series that all the polls say the audience liked the most, "The Trouble with Tribbles." 

Comments for "So Many Reasons," now published in On the Premises

Photo: Norman Rockwell's "Merry Christmas, Grandma!" at addictinginfo.org (Not my kinda site, but it had a good photo of this painting).  Is Christmas ever this old-fashioned and homey?

"So Many Reasons to Celebrate the Season," my most recently-purchased story, about how a best-selling author deals with a collapsing marriage on Christmas Eve, was published by On the Premises (Link: www.onthepremises.com) on March 10th, in Issue #19. Use the link above, then click on "Latest Issue (March 2013)" and then click on "So Many Reasons to Celebrate the Season," four stories down on the page. Check out other good stories in that publication as well. It's all free. When you're done, please go to this blog entry and leave a comment. Let me know what you think. Thanks!

For those who care about such things, this story is especially important to me because it is the first non-genre piece I've sold.  This means that it's not science fiction, or horror, or mystery, or speculative fiction, or a specific genre like that.  It's a more everyday story, very contemporary, very today.  And it's about relationships, about how they end, and about not lying to yourself about them.  It's a tough lesson to learn that your life is crappy, and that you're full of crap as well, but that's what happens here.  But I digress: this is especially rewarding because there aren't any tropes of a genre that the writer can fall back on.  For example, in a horror story, you expect some blood, some terror, some fear.  In a mystery, you expect a puzzle, a whodunit.  In both cases, the writing itself doesn't have to be all that good, in a way, as long as the blood and terror keep coming, or as long as the reader is hooked so much on the whodunit that he doesn't notice how terrible the writing is.

In a non-genre story, it isn't that easy.  There are no bloodletting scenes, no whodunit, no YA romance, nothing that a genre writer can fall back on when nothing else is working.  It's just a real-life guy and his real-life problems.  Characterization is more important here, and so is the conflict and the reality.  So when something like this sells, the writer feels a little more confident because this type of writing can be much harder to create than a genre piece.

So if you've taken the time to read it, thank you; if you haven't, please do.  And please comment below.  Let me know what you think, good or bad.  Let's have a discussion about it.  As long as your comments are politely stated (and a specific example from the story would help), I promise to publish them.  Please, and thank you.

As usual, thanks for reading my stuff.  I appreciate and respect the time you sacrifice to do so.