I am so pleased today to see The Roanoke Times print my letter about Tucker Carlson’s efforts to misinform the American public about the January 6th, 2021 attack on our nation’s capital. You can find it right here in today’s paper.
The Roanoke Times is Virginia’s third-largest newspaper, serving 19 counties throughout the southwest portion of the state. Its weekday readership is estimated at 163,000 people.
Today’s agenda — in the spirit of straight-edge punk, I need to spearhead a movement for “straight-edge dorks.”
No drugs or alcohol for me. I can get weird and moronic on my own, OLD SCHOOL.
I remember being thrilled with “Prisoners of the Lost Universe” (1983) when I found it flipping channels in the mid-1980’s. Out of curiosity, I hunted down a online copy during one of my recent episodes of insomnia. (You can find the full movie just under the trailer below, courtesy of the good people at Flick Vault.)
The film … didn’t hold up well over time. (I could only endure about the first half hour.) Oh, well. Not everything can be the goofy rediscovered gem that my beloved, rediscovered “Spacehunter” is.
But I’ll always remember being delighted by this ham-handed parallel universe tale when I was a kid.
By the way, the hero here is none other than Richard Hatch of “Battlestar Galactica” (1978) fame.
Roanoke’s oasis for night owls.
Hey kids — don’t go running through any radioactive mists! That’s the message of 1957’s “The Incredible Shrinking Man.” Okay … it’s actually a little more complicated than that. Grant Williams’ titular doomed protagonist was exposed first to insecticides, and then to the mist a couple of weeks later — so it was sort of a one-two toxic punch. (I am linking here, by the way, to the Video Detective channel on Youtube for the trailer below.)
This movie rocked my world when I was a first- or second-grader. It was the sort of thing that aired periodically on weekend television in the early 1980’s. I’ll never forget the awe I felt … along with confusion at the abstract closing narration. What did all that mean? What happens to him next?
I was surprised to learn tonight that this was adapted from a Richard Matheson novel. (He also wrote this screenplay adaptation.)
It’s … actually pretty good! It holds up surprisingly well over time. And the simple special effects are nonetheless effective. (I’ll bet the props and sets people had a lot of fun designing giant objects to make Williams appear progressively smaller by comparison.)
Fun stuff.
I am so happy today to see The Piker Press publish my short poem, “An Altogether Different Slumber.” You can read it online right here.
Thanks, as always, to Managing Editor Sand Pilarski for allowing me to share my voice through this wonderful literary magazine!
(Just having fun with one of my Rainy Roanoke photos.)
Empty are her open palms. Oblivion
rises in her irises.
All her inaudible words
are whispers now in storms of empty space.
Her recollection
is a chaos of absences.
Even her hair is empty sky, black and shining both, unreachable beside me, the unattainable stars, cascading night.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2023
Photo credit: Sarah Marie Jones, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, “Female nude portrait (cropped” [Further cropped by Eric Robert Nolan with creator’s permission via Wikimedia Commons]
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 