Superb Owl

  My wife and I don't watch sports, but I was just looking around my office at all the flyers for Superbowl XLV.  It struck me as humorous that in five years they'll be having Superbowl L.  Most people are used to the Roman numerals X, V, I and M, but L and C aren't as well known.  Ask anyone on the street what they stand for and you'll see some funny facial expressions!  How is the NFL gonna make a damn L look cool and recognizable as a Roman numeral?
  You ever notice that there are different actions you take to prepare the different meals of the day?  In general, you fix breakfast, make lunch and cook dinner.  Speaking of cooking, Kayla cooks an excellent potato dish.  She puts some oil in a pan, then puts in some cut-up onions.  She cooks those for a few minutes then throws in thinly sliced new potatoes.  She peppers and salts it to taste.  The last thing she throws in is some fresh baby spinach.  Stir that around until the spinach wilts.  Serve it up while it's nice and hot!  I tell you, if America went through a potato famine, me and mine are up and moving to Ireland.  Kayla's such a good cook!  I love that woman.

Shredding!

  I can shred cheese and I can shred paper.  Why oh why can't I shred on the guitar?  With all this shredding, my rotator cuff doesn't want to rotate anymore.  Workman's comp!  Punitive (not putative) damages!  I get all this fine powderized paper on my hands (and no, FBI, it's not anthrax!).
  If you've been reading my blogs today, you've seen that I've got food on my mind.  Did you know that America is one of the only countries in the world who doesn't consider insects to be a food item?  Most cultures in the world have some bugs in their diet.
  At an Entomology (not to be confused with etymology) fair I attended once at the University of Arizona, they had several delicacies available to sample that had bugs as an ingredient.  I had meal worms, bees, beetle larvae, grasshoppers, crickets and ants to eat that night.  At a buffet line in Korea, there were grasshoppers and crickets available.  Also in Korea, silk worms are sold on street corners by vendors.  They are also available canned at grocery stores.
  Once, Cold Stone Creamery had a promotion where if you ate an ice cream cone that had a cricket in it, you'd get a gift certificate for a free ice cream dish.  I had so many gift certificates by the time the promotion ended!  When I worked at Petsmart, some people were daring each other to eat some of the meal worms or crickets that are intended as lizard food.  I think I won like $20 that day.  Meal worms taste a bit like silk worms, just to give you an idea.
  When I was trying to be a vegetarian the summer after I graduated from high school, I read a magazine full of vegetarian recipes.  It was from there that I found out that there are many species of edible flowers.  The only one I actually had easy access to was squash flowers.  If you pick the flower and rinse it off in the sink, you can make sure there are no bugs in it (unless you want bugs in it).  Then you steam them and baste them in a little melted butter.  They're so tender and juicy that way!  Yummy yummy yummy.

Cuisine

  I love food.  My wife says I have very expensive taste.  The monetary value of the the things I like to eat are sometimes cost prohibiting.  That's why I try to make due with what I can get my hands on.  I like trying to cook for myself.  Instead of going out to a Mexican restaurant for some menudo, I buy a can of Juanita's.  I cut up some cilantro and onion, put it into a pot with some water and boil it for about 10 minutes.  Add some lime juice and pepper if desired.  Then I open the can of soup and put it into the pot.  Let that heat up for an additional 10 minutes and viola!  A menudo fit for a Chinese/Korean zombie novelist.
  I love German food, Filipino, Ethiopian, Spanish, Thai, Mediterranean, Indian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, American, Italian and French food.  I also love Cajun and soul food.  I'd say I love Japanese ham sammiches, but I think that's a lost cause.  Most of these foods I had first at restaurants around Tucson, Arizona.  You don't have to be a world traveller these days to open your eyes to the varieties of tastes out there.  Did you know that the most popular way of eating food in the world is with your fingers?  Second most popular is chopsticks.  Fork and spoon only comes in third place.  Do shish kabobs count as finger food or are they in a category all their own?  I wonder where bobbing for apples ranks.

Pastry Deities

  Why is the Virgin Mary always showing up on tortillas?  That's great for reaching out to the lost of the world who eat tortillas.  I know occasionally Jesus shows up on taco shells and tortillas too.  So those of Latino or Hispanic origins are covered.  Over in the Mediterranean area, what about showing up on some pitas?  Or if you want to catch people while they're young, show up on some zwieback.  Mary could make a killing appearing on ham sammiches, unless, of course, she wants to reach Japan (by now I've probably lost the entire Japanese ham sammich demographic).
  What if the other deities got in on the pastry circuit?  You could have Vishnu on a marble rye.  I'd love to see the Buddha on a bagel or something.  Mohammad, Siva, Eck and Azna could all get in on the action.  Now there's the little potential problem of recognizability.  I mean, I wouldn't know Hermes from Adam.  Zeus yeah, everybody knows Zeus, but what about Poseidon?  If I saw him on a tater chip, I'd probably just dip him in some ranch and munch away.  Maybe that is what's going on all over the world.  People are eating up all the gods.  Oh yeah, what about those poor lost souls on the Adkin's diet?  Are there any diet deities?  A flatbread sammich would make a nice backdrop for the Unmoved Mover.  I sure could go for some proselytizing pastrami right now.
  On a side note, it occurs to me as hilariously humorous that in the French version of the Bible when Jesus was on the mountainside and fed 5,000 people with a couple loaves of bread and a few fish, it translates into pain (bread) and poisson (fish).  Sounds like he pulled a Jim Jones on them.  At least he didn't turn the water into Kool-Aid.

Thriller

  I don't know if I ever told you how I got into zombies in the first place.  Well, when I was in the 2nd grade, a music video came out on MTV called, Thriller by Michael Jackson.  I was so enamored by the zombies, it stuck with me throughout my youth.  I didn't know there were movies, books and songs about them.  They were just something from a Michael Jackson video to me.  I think the first zombie movie I ever saw was Dawn of the Dead.  From there, I was hooked!  They were more than just decomposing thespians, they were flesh-eating menaces to society.  I can dig it.
  Over the years, I've seen some clunkers of zombie movies.  If you're a zombie fan, I'm sure you have too.  Zombie Nightmare, anyone?  Seemed like for a while, people were just trying to come up with any reason to have people become zombies or at least, zombie-like.  Even the first Naked Gun movie had one.  There was The Stuff, which actually not that horrible of a movie.  In my opinion, George Romero was one of the only people using a zombie apocalypse as the background for tales about people.  The characters were not just cardboard cutout victims, they were the crux of the story.
  Being always fascinated by people and life, that is what pulled me in.  I've always studied the people around me to see what makes them tick.  Everyone has their own ways of looking at life, dealing with stress, interacting with other people, communicating with God (or not) and having fun.  I think that's also why I loved Star Wars so much.  It wasn't just laser guns and robots.  There was a very human story at its heart which touched on faith, love, betrayal and redemption.
  On a side note, my first album ever was Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' on cassette.  That same day I also bought 'She's So Unusual' by Cindi Lauper.  My musical tastes have evolved much since then, there are still some excellent songs on both of those albums in my opinion. 

Aliens

  I've got some Bible passages I've found that in my mind, talk about aliens:
-Mark 13:27 "And he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens."
-Matthew 24:31 "And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other."
-John 10:16 "I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen.  I must bring them also.  They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd."
  In my stories, I have all kinds of aliens.  In one, I talk about USOs (unidentified submerged objects) as being in our oceans for malicious purposes.  I've read that water is a good conductor for spirits.  In my story, the USOs are harvesting spirits from the ocean to put into a massive clone army in order to attack Earth.  The clones develop without souls so they are just bodies.  With the spirits harvested from the ocean, they can be brought to life.
  When I was about ten years old, my sister and I saw a group of maybe five or six lights in the night sky in Texas.  They came together, converged, then flew away as one.  We think it was a fleet of UFOs.  When I told that story to my English class in high school, my English teacher asked me, "Your sister, was she younger than you at the time?"  I replied, "Yeah, she still is."
  One night in Arizona, I was just gazing into the night sky.  I saw what seemed to be a flaming serpent swimming in the sky.  I looked it up online and sure enough, that's a documented phenomenon.  Many people claim to have seen flaming space snakes.  The website I was on even had an artist's rendition which depicted almost exactly what I saw.
  This isn't exactly on topic, but I've also seen daytime shooting stars twice in my life.  Once was in Korea when I was in the third grade.  The other time was in my college years in Arizona.  The difference between them and the nighttime variety is that during the day, they appear orange in color.  There's still a smoke trail, but it's gray during the day as opposed to white at night.  Not quite aliens, but fascinating nonetheless!
  By the way, hello, Canada!  Thank you for reading.  Hope you like what you see and continue to read my posts.  Please check out my other blogs, as well as my wife's blog!  I just published chapter 9 of the Nocent.  Hope you enjoy it.

Animals

  I've had quite an extensive history with animals.  It started when I was in the second grade.  Oddly enough, it was because I saw Mary Poppins.  There was a scene where she opens a window and a bird comes to her finger.  It amazed me because I didn't know it was fake.  I wanted to have that kind of connection with animals because they had always fascinated me.
  I always had a way with dogs.  When I was in the faux painting company, I was the designated dog handler.  We'd go into a house.  I'd gain the dog's trust, then lead it into the back yard, master bedroom ,bathroom, laundry room or wherever seemed the most humane depending on the house.
  When I was twelve, I found that I could gain the trust of birds and mice too.  I could make them come to me or at least not run away.  I've pet ducks, sparrows, geese, doves and those little brown birds.  The coolest, though was one day I was visiting my grandfather's grave.  I saw a hummingbird in the dirt.  I approached it and it looked at me.  I slowly reached out and pet it.  I thought that maybe its wings were injured or something.  Not two seconds after I stopped petting it and walked away, it flew away into a nearby tree.
  I've pet goats, cows, sheep, ostriches, horses, lizards, snakes, turtles and a bunch of other things.  I can also get airborne birds to come to me.  If I hold out a piece of food, birds will come to my hand and take it.  My sister once photographed this.  Whenever I'm able to scan in that photo, I'll show it to you along with pictures of some spiritual orbs in relation to my blog about supernatural phenomena.  Please write in with any experiences you've had with animals or spirits.