JBB's Media Buzz

Last weekend I got to experience bookends of SciFi, beginning with attending an in-theater showing of the 1954 classic, Them! and ending with the latest installment in the StarWars saga, The Mandalorian and Grogu. If anything, to me this signals that It’s going to be an interesting summer of movies.  Nothing quite as fun as beginning my Saturday watching a classic movie at Cinema 21, in this…

I had something else planned for today, but this video is something I really needed today. OMG, maximum cringe humor, which is so hard to do with almost no in studio audience. Enjoy and have a wonderful Memorial Day. Sources: FULL SHOW: After “Late Show” ends, Stephen Colbert hosts Monroe public access show posted by The Desk (2026-05-23), https://youtu.be/7DlF5Cf4VLM?si=W4Nu3gw1lv1VlViE Tags:…

When the movie concluded someone sitting behind me quoted the lines from a David Cronenberg film, “Be afraid, be very afraid.” This documentary begins its investigation, not with the beginning of the computer revolutions of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but with the beginning of the “scientific” exploration of “intelligence” in the late 1800s and early 1900s and its association with…

I’ve had LEGO on the brain for more than a bit. Inspired by the transit system that runs at all hours in my neighborhood, I decided to buy the street car train set and I knew that I needed something more than the train platform that came with the set. The special challenge of my set up was that the back-row of my city is elevated (so that you can see those buildings more easily) and I was…

This one popped up in my feeds and it’s worth a watch… just for the opportunity to see beautiful art and story telling at its best. If one were to believe the media or the government… as the world implodes on itself, it would be good to begin the week by remembering a time before the powers-that-be decided that flooding everyone with doom and gloom and pointing the finger of blame in every…

I just finished re-editing/re-copying journals that I wrote from 1985 to 1996. I started this project because I wanted to resurface short stories that I’d written over the years and possibly find inspiration for new stories. Not counting hand-written journals and using only journals written via computer, from 1985 to 1996 (plus essays written when I was at Fuller Seminary in 1982) I have…

After I posted my maiden voyage using Portland’s transit system and pondered whether it might be possible to do my Costco runs without it, a LV friend said that doing Costco via transit is definitely possible. She said that she does this by using a large backpack and “de-boxing” everything before putting it in her backpack. I might see if I can use a small collapsable wheel cart… but then I…

This one popped up in my feeds. I love when a new generation of musicians discovers a rock classic, in this case, The Who’s “Baba O’Riley.” For someone to hear the song without the drum parts and come up with her own approach to the song in one setting is so amazing. It makes me want to sign up for the music learning app that they’re selling. I wanna hit some skins! Enjoy. JBB Sources: Kriss…

While I’m working on various LEGO builds I usually have a podcast playing in the background or a YouTube video going and this one popped up in my feeds and being a huge Lord of the Rings fan I gave it a listen. I’ve appreciated how much work “Jess of the Shire” must put into the videos and her careful analysis of both fantasy series like the Lord of the Rings and Sci-Fi, like the Dune series is…

The role of Journalism has never been more important than now but level of trustworthy signal to noise has never been more at risk of being overwhelmed and silenced.It seems a bit odd that at a time when we should have access to all of human knowledge with a simple web search, local newspapers are rapidly disappearing and the potential democratization of information is falling victim to whoever…

There’s a lot going on with the analysis in this video. It turns out, just like with Christians, non-believers are not a monolithic group and a lot of data can be missed if you lump them all into one group. That should be easily understood in that under the surface humans are rarely just one thing or the other. So, if gathering data on non-believers is going to be attempted, one needs to allow…

In today’s video the young YouTuber laments that she’s made the worst investment of her life. She bought a recording studio because she wants to create a physical space for musicians to do their best work, even though all trends point towards all of the money in the music business eliminating humans and farming it all out to A.I. It’s a dilemma being faced by all artists trying to make their way…

The first trailer for the upcoming Godzilla Minus Zero film has just dropped and it looks like, not only it the big grey monster back, but that there will be another threat and Big-G will venture far from the shores of Tokyo. This is only two years after the events of the first film, so we know that the monument at the end of the trailer is not the smaller replica on the Las Vegas Strip… I’m…

This is the artwork that I recently put up in the entry way of my condo. I’m a bit of a Beatles fan, and I couldn’t imagine a better way to watch “A Hard Day’s Night” except in a theater full of fans on a breezy Portland Saturday morning.  I settled into my seat in Cinema 21’s theater one and it was the perfect setting for revisiting this classic from over 60-years ago. Theater one is a large…