Taking a break from the audio courses, I picked up this set of CDs to listen to in the few times I’m in the car alone for any length of time these days. As it’s summer, I’m not spending half of my car time going to pick up or coming back from dropping off a boy–I generally have one or more with me. So it took me a while to get through this set of 5 CDs even though it only runs about five hours. In the other seasons, I can easily listen to five hours of lectures/audio books a week.
No, I’ve never actually seen an episode of Duck Dynasty. I mean, last year I read Si-Cology 101 by/about one of Robertson’s brothers in the company; the book mentions this book on a promotional page at the end, but I didn’t guess I’d get it a year later. I have also drinken the wine. And I used to buy Duck Dynasty-themed stuff for my aunt at Christmas. But not the television series.
This book, read by his son Al Robertson, tells Phil Robertson’s biography from his childhood through college football (he was the starting quarterback at Louisiana Tech ahead of Terry Bradshaw) through some booze-soaked years hunting, teaching, and running a rowdy bar until he becomes a Christian and straightens his life out. He becomes a commercial fisherman and then designs and builds a better duck call that he builds in his workshop and starts getting into stores in the south, eventually including Walmart (starting with individual stores, which was unheard of). Robertson also draws lessons from his stories to try to help the reader/listener learn from his experience.
So he’s got lots of hunting stories and drinking stories. He is a little older than my father would have been, so when he talks about boozing and hunting and being crazy, that kind of fits with what my father was through his discharge from the Marines and through the 1970s, except instead of coming to Jesus, my parents divorced.
So I enjoyed it a bit from that perspective just like I like to read the local columnists in the small town papers I take–they tell the kinds of stories that my father would tell.
So worth the five hours. I might even end up with some of the Duck Commander or Duck Dynasty videos if I stumble across them.
These books collect the scripts of the fourteen episodes of the short-lived television program Firefly which was essentially Joss Whedon’s western in space. It’s kind of funny: Around the turn of the century, when this program was briefly on the air, the geek community quite embraced it, and they embraced it hard. People dressed as the characters for Halloween and used catch phrases from the show (“Shiny” meaning “Cool,” for example). I mean, this kind of went on until my beautiful wife bought the boxed set on DVD and watched it around 2010 followed quickly by the film Serenity which appeared a couple years after the show went off the air. However, I think the show’s cultural moment has passed; now, it’s middle-aged geeks who still sometimes say “Shiny.” Although I could be wrong: I was in a games-and-comics store this weekend, and its selection of role playing games was limited, but one table had three volumes of the Firefly role-playing game displayed prominently. So maybe only my consciousness of it has waned until I bought these books at my 
Okay, so as I mentioned, it’s a western in space. The series itself does not go into a lot of exposition, but human settlers have reached other planets after depleting the resources on Earth. A power called the Alliance has won a civil war uniting the planets, but on the frontiers, their presence is not as acutely felt. A leader from the resistance/the Independents/not the Alliance–Mal Reynolds, played by Nathan Fillion, buys an old ship and, along with his second-in-command–Zoe, played by Gina Torres, assembles a crew to trade/smuggle/commit petty crimes on that frontier. They collect a pilot (Wash, played by Steve the Pirate), a mechanic (Kaylee, played by Jewel Staite), a hired goon (Jayne, played by Adam Baldwin), and an itinerant high-quality call girl (Inara, played by Morena Boccarin). They also end up with a priest who might be more than a priest (Shepherd Book, played by Detective Harris from Barney Miller) and a brother and sister on the run from the Alliance, who had the sister in a special “school” to develop her into a killing machine (Sean Maher and Summer Glau). And they have some adventures as their history unfolds along with some hints to why the Alliance was after River, played by Summer. The action is pretty episodic, though, with series business taking a back seat to the adventure of the week.
After watching 
Well, after watching the first four episodes of this twelve-episode serial 
This is kind of like a pop-up book for adults. An Andrews-McMeel Publishing concoction, you already know that it’s going to be graphically busy, but this book not only features a lot of color and graphics, but it has origami, often birds, posted in, and the table of contents is a separate card inserted into an envelope in front. So it keeps your attention busy for sure, perhaps distracted from the poetry.
Well, this is an Executioner novel. Not the worst of the series, but, again, not something memorable to read. Since I’m splitting my time between reading books and watching movies in the evenings, perhaps I should read something more memorable for my books. Well, if I ever finish Pamela, the old English novel that I am putatively reading currently but very intermittently, I will remember that I read it, although very few of the episodes in those epistles will I recall distinctly.
This film comes from the 1980s, when Tom Selleck was trying to make the leap to being the leading man in pictures instead of just being Magnum, P.I.. It ultimately didn’t work, though, as he had a couple of lead roles in films including this one and, what, 
