This month marks the 50th anniversary of the most famous Bigfoot footage of all time, shot on October 18, 1967, by Roger Patterson and his friend Bob Gimlin. The first time I saw a still from Roger Patterson’s footage was in a Time Life book called Strange Stories, Amazing Facts. The book contained hundreds of one-to-two page supposedly true mysteries, both paranormal and otherwise. The infamous “frame 352” from the footage appears about halfway through the book. In that frame, Bigfoot looks back over her right shoulder directly at Roger Patterson. I saw the footage itself either on an episode… (read more)

A common phrase among writers is “butt-in-chair” time. Websites offering writing advice are particularly fond of the phrase. At its simplest, it means to write, you have to be sitting in a chair, in front of a computer. That’s hard to do for hours on end when your chair hurts your butt after only a few minutes. The chair I’ve been sitting in for the past 30 years is the brown one you see above. In the late 1980s, the oil business was booming in Oklahoma. Small oil companies and satellite offices for larger ones moved into town and were… (read more)

My dad used to say that slot car racing wasn’t any fun unless the cars could go fast enough to fly off the track. If the cars were permanently stuck to the track and there was no chance of them going airborne — no skill involved in keeping them on all four wheels — then what was the point? In many ways, my 2013 Subaru WRX STi felt the same way. The car’s computerized brain, buried somewhere deep underneath the hood, made sure that no matter how brave I got, it wasn’t more than the car could handle. If I… (read more)

I have decided, after nine-and-a-half years, to take a semi-permanent break from podcasting. I realize that in the big scheme of things, I am nobody. For me to publicly declare my podcasting retirement is the equivalent of your drunken neighbor shouting from his window at three in the morning that he will never eat at IHOP again. It really means nothing to anybody except for him, and in that same way, maybe this means nothing to anybody except for me. The decision was both easy and hard. It was easy because right now I don’t have enough spare time to… (read more)

When Ray Harryhausen passed away in 2013 at the age of 92, I wrote a tribute to the man, his work, and what it meant to me. Ray Harryhausen was a pioneer in the world of stop-motion animation, and I discovered his work at an early age through books and television shows about special effects. If you grew up watching films with stop-motion dinosaurs, giant gorillas, or mythological beasts, chances are you’re already familiar with Harryhausen’s work. If not, here’s a short YouTube clip containing many of the monsters Ray Harryhausen brought to life. Watch this video on YouTube For… (read more)