This morning I heard lions roar while I was drinking my coffee

Not a typical occurence for most people in the United States, but out here in the big empty we are not most people. Now most of the time the wildlife I see from my back porch is a ground squirrel or a bunny. Once in awhile a fox and her kits. 

I never see the lions from my porch while I have my morning coffee and smoke, but I do hear them. See I live about half-a-mile from Big Cats of Serenity Springs.

They have about 15 lions there--a pretty good size pride--along with tigers, leopards, cougar and other wild cats. It's nice that there is someone who will take care of the retired circus animals.

In the end that means that I get to hear the roar of a lion while I drink my morning coffee, and that's pretty damn cool.

With great moustache comes great responsibility

New look, originally uploaded by imjohnmoore.

I decided to go with the classic Fu Manchu with soulpatch.

The boys said I need to get a cowboy hat.

These are the days...

dylanandevan, originally uploaded by imjohnmoore.

when winter ain't so bad.

I took the boys to Fountain Creek Regional Park for a walk. It was clear and about 40 degrees--a beautiful Colorado day.

Productive Week!

I got the Twilight Blood podcast launched!

Can you see him?

Can you see him?, originally uploaded by imjohnmoore.

Man, I miss summer.

I took this picture of the little guy in the Paint Mines this summer. It's hard to see him there -- he's pretty well camoflaged.

Doing good...

'Tis the season, and all that jazz!

I thought I'd post a link to an opportunity to do some good. Many of you probably know about Project Gutenberg, the huge project to digitize and make available millions of books that are in the public domain. Gutenberg has already created a huge online library and more texts are being processed every day. Digitizing all those printed words is a massive effort. The books have to be scanned, the scans have to run through optical character recognition programs, the resulting text has to be corrected, and so on.

If you like to read and have an eye for detail here's a chance to help--The Distributed Proofreader Project. This project harnesses the skills of thousands of volunteers to proofread and correct the texts from the scanning/ocr process. All they ask from volunteers is a page a day, but that page a day from all those volunteers adds up--to date the project has completed more than 14,000 books! 

Like most volunteer jobs DP pays off for the volunteer as well. This is a chance to improve your detail skills, English skills and more.

Consider spending a few minutes to help out this great project!

Today's Skeptic Moment...

Here's a series of videos of Richard Dawkins talking to Derren Brown about psychics, cold reading techniques and skepticism. Good stuff!



From the Digital Journal.

This is the type of horror movie poster that makes it a pleasure to get up in the morning and scour the web for the latest news.

RAH!

Another stormy day

Looking west, originally uploaded by imjohnmoore.

More snow and wind today. This is what it looks like from the back porch looking west toward the Springs and Pikes Peak.

I really miss living in town. The weather may be bad there, but it's not nearly as bad as it is out here on the high plains.

Richard Randall is soooooo angry

How angry is he?

Richard is so angry that he copy and pasted an AP story about the supreme court refusing to hear the ludricrous challenges to the Obama presidency into his blog. 

I'm not sure why Richard Randall is angry that supreme Court refuses to waste its time on half-baked conspiracy theories, but he is!

Feel the fooookin' fury!

Sad News

The LA Times is reporting that Forrest J. Ackerman passed away on Thursday.

Forry, as the fans knew him, was a writer and editor who introduced a generation of horror movie fans to the classic horrors of Universal Studios in his magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. He was universally known and loved for his enthusiasm for horror, fantasy and science fiction.

Adios, Forry.

Something to thank Twiliight for

It's official, I guess. Tim Burton's next flick is Dark Shadows. You can see Richard Zanuck confirm it here. Zanuck mentions that Johnny Depp is also working on the project which is only natural since Depp has owned the rights to Dark Shadows for years.

Depp and Burton have been trying to get the Dark Shadows movie the green light for a long time and I imagine that the huge success of the Twilight has finally made it possible. It also looks like a new Buffy the Vampire Slayer may getthe go ahead but that story is a lot more nebulous at this point.

I'm excited by Depp's involvement, because, like me, he was a childhood fan of the horror soap opera who has carried his love for the old show through his life.

Woohoo!

Winter Wonderland? Bah, Humbug

, originally uploaded by imjohnmoore.

Sure it looks purty, but think about how cold it got to frost those trees like that.

COS Talk Show Host Posts AP Stories on Blog

Richard Randall, local right wing windbag (via KVOR morning radio), maintains a blog here on blogger. 

What you may ask, is the point of a blog? Some people use blogs to share their thoughts and perspectives. Some radio hosts uses blogs to post thoughts about their shows or to keep listeners up to date about issues that may not come up on the radio show. Others use the blog as a marketing tool to attract a broader audience. All of those uses are valid and good.

Mr. Randall uses his blog to post stories from the AP, without attribution, for the most part.

Other stories come from other places -- primarily conservative websites. I know this by judicious use of Google. When Mr. Randall posts stories from other sources he does not include attribution or back links to the original source. Occasionally Mr. Randall posts a paragraph or two that he has deigned to write himself, but that does not happen often.

Richard Randall describes himself as a journalist. I'd describe him as something else.

Time conflicts

Sorry that the posts haven't been coming as quickly as I'd like. Being unemployed you'd think I'd have plenty of blog time, but I've been trying to fill my time as creatively as possible -- working on a novel, developing a podcast, reading and as many positive things as possible.

I need to add exercise time to my schedule as well since I'm getting fatter than I should allow myself to get. :(