T-shirts are a fine way to express yourself or profess your love for something. They are like bumper stickers for the torso, stating “hey, I like and/or believe in this thing.” They can help people find members of their own tribe. They can attempt to signal status, opinion

My parents walked me into kindergarten on my first day of school. I didn’t fully understand we weren’t just visiting a new place, but that I was being surrendered to the mercy of the public school system for a long school career. I attended Kindergarten at the old A.S. Let

When channel surfing, Jaws is one of those movies that always knocks me off my surfboard. No matter how far into the movie it is, I’ll stop and watch it to the end. I can’t say how many times I’ve seen Jaws, but I’d venture to guess that I’ve seen it more than any other fi

Please forgive the generalization but geeks, (or nerds, dorks or dweebs if you prefer) are typically not very athletic folks. They are athletes of the mind, developing mental prowess instead of physical strength. Similarly, the pastimes of the geek make more use of the imagination tha

In most situations, I tend to imagine the worst case scenario. This delightful character trait is a bit of behavior I learned from my father, a catastrophist whose glass is perpetually half-empty. My talent for negative thinking has been honed to a fine art when it comes to medical or

In the lean days before home video releases of the Star Wars films, television appearances by the folks from the galaxy far, far away were pure magic for me. Having missed the Star Wars Holiday special during its one and only broadcast, I was sustained by brief guest appearances by St

In the daylight, there wasn’t much that scared the kids in my quiet suburban neighborhood in the early 1980s. The most we feared were cooties from the opposite sex and earwigs, which were fabled among us kids to crawl into your ear and lay eggs in your brain like those ear worms

Aside from the presence of the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, most of the unrest in the Star Wars universe is generally attributed to the 1997 re-release of the altered versions of the original trilogy, the subsequent revisions made to the original trilogy, and the release of the “prequ

Having just returned from the arcade with his father, Aaron bounded up the flight of stairs that separated our apartments breathless and eager to report on the newest game cabinet on the arcade floor: “You’re this yellow mouth guy in a maze and you have to eat all these pellets and th