Writer. Novelist. Redneck. Granola.
Here are the Green Porch’s favorite sci-fi movies that haven’t seen the love they deserve. Why, you may ask, would I bother blathering on about such a trifle? Hey, everyone else is yammering about Tim Tebow and Ron Paul, so why can’t I give some props to a few movies that deserve more attention? (Sheesh, get off your high speeder).
Anywho, you may not have seen them, but I’ll give you some reasons as to why you should. So let’s get on with… [Read more...]
Now that you’ve slept off your fudge hangover and fully charged your new eReading device, it’s time to start binging on eBooks! But where to begin, and how to avoid the dreaded eBook hangover?
1.) Focus, focus, focus. Every port and galactic eBar in the eBook eVerse promises cheep or free eBooks. Most of these sites are trying to harvest clicks or funnel you toward their own books (of all the nerve. Oh, if you haven’t yet, click here to buy my latest book). Find a few trustworthy sites you like and learn how to get the most out of them. Learning how to find what you want on a even a high quality site for free/cheap eBooks is an art as well as a science. [Read more...]
At times like these civilized society needs more celebrities and swindlers like it needs a pudding can without a pull tab. They promise you sweet chocolaty goodness, but then stiff you when the cows come home.
In past posts I’ve written about the sustainable ethics of such outlaw heros as Bo and Luke Duke and Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly. And it still stands true, what we need today are outlaws with a heart of gold — bad guys who make us want to be good. But where have they gone? (click here to jump ahead to the punchline.)
In a day and age too glib for good guys to survive and too corrupt for the general populous to continue its complacency, we need these law-flauting, damsel-rescuing, firebrands more than ever, and yet… where can we turn? [Read more...]
Tis the season for occupation. And why not? I’m occupying my chair as I type. From Wall Street to Walmart, I say it’s time for hardworking and hard-complaining American citizens to get to occupying.
The only problem I keep running into is that I don’t know how to occupy an ideal or a concept. I’d love to occupy greed or corruption in order to break it’s will, bust it down to mere covetousness, slap it around a little and toss it to the curb. But it’s not exactly like occupying a Honey Bucket. There’s no latch on the door that switches from ‘vacant’ to ‘occupied’ (as far as I can tell).
But then again, it’s not like Wall Street or corporate greed or whatever entity we’re invading was actually vacant to begin with. So I guess what we’re talking about here is a relocation program of some sort–removing half of the venture capitalists and day traders to replace them with what? Dissidents? Hippies? That hardly seems any better. We can’t have the trading floor resounding with “Sell! Sell! Kill! Kill! while the rest of the group gets the munchies, now can we? [Read more...]
Surprisingly, despite all the nights you’ve spent awake mentally preparing for the apocalypse, there are almost certainly things you’ve forgotten to take into account. Today we’ll deal with the most commonly forgotten elements of end times preparation. Because once the plumes of ash are rising into the stratosphere you don’t want to remember you’ve left your Breathe Right strips in your glovebox (outside the safety perimeter).
When acid rain starts to fall, mutant scorpions attack and marauding wackos try to eat your flesh you don’t want to find yourself holing up in a ramshackle farm house or an abandoned flat in NYC or London. You’re going to need a practical yet functional fortress to weather the decades of madness until the dove returns with the olive branch in its beak.
To build said fortress you’ll need to consider security, self-sustainability and endurance. The answer to all three is, you guessed it, hemcrete. (Start bugging your representatives to legalize the growing of hemp now, so you can start construction before the end comes.) Hemcrete is a bio-composite building material made by mixing specially prepared hemp shiv with a lime-based binder (Montana Hemp Council Magazine, Vol. 4, 2011).
Basically, this means hemcrete is made from cooked lime and ground up hemp stalks. But the result is as zombie proof, fire proof, mutant bug proof, bullet proof, mohawk proof dwelling. [Read more...]
While I expect a few good things to happen via apocalypse (ie. a flourishing of “buy local first” and “slow foods” campaigns), I also suspect lots of crappy things could happen as result of global, wholesale Armageddon. In the comments below I’ll want to hear your list for the top three things that will suck the most, but to get the old zombie fodder cranked up, I’ll share mine.
3.) Looting of the Dr. Pepper Museum: As we all witnessed in Bagdad, then New Orleans, apocalyptic levels of looting inevitably leads to the wanton destruction of anything even remotely valuable. But the priceless relics and preserved history of our great species and the civilizations we’ve built are at highest risk. [Read more...]
Welcome to the Green Porch! Yep, this is my blog. It's a meeting place for those interested in the art of conversation, story, community and sustainability. Hey, its a big porch. There's room for all of us, so pull up a chair and I'll pour you a drink (adult beverages after 2:00pm, which where I'm from is also known as the watermelon hour).
