"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Steeple" -- A Friends of Michael Williams Benefit Screening featuring "DR. STRANGELOVE"

This concept is GENIUS! But... we would expect nothing less from the Williams Camp. And for those of you who do not know Michael personally, yes, that is him in the poster. Pretty cool, huh?

Here's the info...

Sunday, January 24, 6:00 PM
With a personal introduction by Michael Williams
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Comedy/Thriller, 93 Minutes, Rated PG
Tickets and more information: http://guestlistapp.com/events/12054

It's good to have friends. Michael Williams has always been a true friend to the Robinson Film Center, whether volunteering his time and creativity in support of our organization or simply by being one of our most enthusiastic patrons, someone we could count on seeing in the popcorn line just about every weekend...until he was hit by a 22,000-pound steeple on Thursday, October 29.

While his recovery has gone extraordinarily well by all accounts, it has also been extraordinarily expensive. Join us for this special screening of Stanley Kubrick's DR. STRANGELOVE with a personal introduction by none other than our friend, Michael Williams. All proceeds from this event will help defray the costs of his ongoing medical care.

Can't attend? Support Michael's recovery by donating and join us in spirit by attending "virtually"! Just pick a donation amount and/or quantity above. (Two $5 donations are $10, etc.)

Please bring your receipt to the theater for admission. Unfortunately we can only sell tickets online, so make sure to buy them ahead of time.

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Week of Casey

Senior Walk at the City of Byrd. Just noticed the Jayhawks shirt; I bought that T-shirt he's wearing, in St. Louis, the year he was born. When he first started wearing it, he'd trip over it, a "sleeping shirt" that turned into a go-to T-shirt. Holes are in it now. That's been a good shirt.

Week of Casey

My son Casey will be 21 Saturday. Goodness...

About four years ago I took this picture of Casey and his twin brother, Jingle Bell. Same age and the whole deal, as twins often are. It was never too hard to tell them apart because Jing was always shorter. These are two good men that I love.

A Good Year

"And as for you, brothers, never tire of doing what is right."
2 Thessalonians 3:13 (NIV)

College football’s BowlFest, those 34 games of December and January, almost killed me.

If I wasn’t getting Clemsoned from the left, I was getting Air Forced from the right. Until bowl season, while I knew where Central Michigan was -- right in the middle of Michigan, right? -- I didn’t know they played decent football there.

But they do, and they were rewarded for it. For most of the regular season and in terms of on-the-field competition and accomplishment, they did more things right than wrong, and so they were one of 68 teams invited to play in a bowl game.

I did my part to reward their efforts; I watched bowl games ’til my eyes bled.

A once heard a good coach say this: "Never get bored with doing the right thing." The right thing isn’t always the easy thing, as some of the godly and just members of the long-ago church at Thessalonica would testify. But the right thing is always the good thing, the best thing, the God-ordained thing.

In football, the right thing is practice, attitude, and teamwork. In our Christian walk, it’s much the same thing. But what makes the journey sweeter and the rewards so much greater is the relationship we have with the Father. When we grow weary, it is because we are investing in our own abilities instead of in our relationship with Him.

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. I wouldn’t suggest anyone try to watch 34 games of football in three weeks. But there’s no such thing as "too much Jesus." We can’t out-love, out-give or out-good him. Leaning on the everlasting arms, we can instead grow and work and love through His power, and "never tire." When our relationship with Christ is right, too much of a good thing, is a good thing.

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That's my Mailman...

As you NBA fans and gun toters and even you law abiders know, Washington Wizards' star player Gilbert Arenas faces felony gun charges for pulling a gun on a teammate in the locker room.
In Washington, D.C.
Where the gun laws are very strick.
And where the NBA team changed it's team name because of the "guilt by association" situation.

The team nickname used to be Bullets. The Washington Bullets.

Click to read Karl Malone's take on the story to SI.com and to see his reaction this morning on CNN. Malone is a spokesman for the National Rifle Association, a future NBA Hall of Famer, and a guy who's played a lot of card games on road trips for some money but has yet to pull a gun on a teammate or arrive at the gym "packin'."

(Pictured: A pair of former NBA players, each a Rifleman.)

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Haute Couture

Are a cloak and a cape and a shawl the same thing?
No.
They are in the same family but not in the same phylum or sub-phylum. You'd have your 'Overcoat' branch and then you'd have your "Cape" branch and things sort of tither off to and fro from there. I'll think more about it later and chart it, but I have to work hard this week so I can't right now. Not that this isn't important. It is. It's just that I don't even have time to pick up my own outdated couture (love that word; it even SOUNDS funny!) at the dry cleaners this week -- and it's supposed to be 9 degrees Friday. I've got a lot of stuff to do. If I loaned you my thermal underwear grandpappy suit, I need it back.

But here is Sunday's column along those lines. Sure, I would have liked to have started the decade stronger, column-wise, but hey, they can't all be Pulitzers. I will catch up later this week and I will try harder next time...

DON'T TRY TO BE A CAPED CRUSADER
Jan. 3, 2010


My position at the newspaper is changing this new decade from Assistant Fashion Editor to assistant secretary for the Assistant Fashion Editor.

Not many people knew I was Assistant Fashion Editor for the past 10 years or so. Not even the Fashion Editor knew. It made it easier for me to accept slips and shawls and size 10 pumps without causing much of a stir.

But in the end, it was just too much. The fashion world is just too fast, too furious. Too fashiony. Especially for a guy like me, who hates to even tie his shoes.

Don't panic: I'll still offer tips from time to time, and here's one to carry you safely into 2010, a year that promises to be an almost-anything-goes haberdashery grab bag:

Know that in the arena of men's outerwear, a cape's not what it used to be.

True, this has been the case for, oh, 150 years or so, give or take.

But in the fashion world, in this era of red carpets and paparazzi and phones that can transmit on-site photos, can you be too careful?

I think not.

You remember the cape. Edgar Allan Poe. Washington Irving. Batman.

Used to, they served as overcoats and blankets, a loose-fitting garment handy in the days before tape measures and London Foggers. You could borrow a guy's cape and no one cared if it fit you like a choir robe.

But these days, there are not a lot of cape guys around. And this is a good thing. At some point, the cape, like the top hat and cane, began to overstate how you felt about yourself. Once the unassuming windbreaker was invented, and the zipper, capes were living on borrowed time.

I realize we men are, for the most part, worthless. If we couldn't mow grass and hang Christmas lights, most women would shoot us like snakes.

And we don't really know how to dress. "After five" means take off your shoes, not put on a tux, right?

But now and then, a blind squirrel finds an acorn.

Somewhere between the 1800s and now, we had the sense to ditch the once-popular cape. Oh, Thomas Jefferson could wear one. Even George Jefferson could wear one, but he had "attitude," something most modern-day men who wear clothes don't keep in stock, yet something you'll definitely need by the bucketful if you're going to flaunt a cape. Wear one these days and you'd better make sure you've lettered in football. At noseguard. For the Green Bay Packers.

Let's sew this thing up here with the bottom line:

Did you get a cape for Christmas? If you did, and you are wondering what to do with it, let me ask you:

Are you a professional wrestler?

Are you a superhero?

Are you Benjamin Franklin?

Do you have a Harry Potter fetish?

Are you a count, or a vampire, or both?

Are you a paid entertainer on the costume party circuit?

Are you the member of a marching band?

If your answers are "no," then get that cape and take it back to the cape store. Get a pocketknife instead.

My final bit of advice to you as Assistant Fashion Editor is this: We all have limits. Know them. Not everyone can wear everything, but we can all wear something. A good example here is the famous Headless Horseman (pictured above, in character) from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." You remember him.

Windblown and daring on horseback, the Headless Horseman looked great in a cape. Spectacular, actually. But in a cap? Not so much.

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Be Careful on the Streets!!!....

I have got to get caught up here at work on my Big Boy Job but thank goodness I got this spirits-lifting email from my buddy T in Shreveport. He'd come home for lunch, watched the Shreveport TV news just in time to see "a live remote from a house in Southern Hills where the reporter was showing that the snow/sleet had accumulated on a trash can lid and also on a car windshield! No snow on the grass, leaves, sidewalks, or streets, though...Then they had an interview with a woman who kept her kids home from school so they could play in the snow."

Beautiful...

The image above might be from the Southern Hills area, but definitely not the Southern Hills area of Shreveport, La.

Bye. Gotta go put the chains on my tires...