Revised and expanded edition of the original, with more than 50% more comment and content. This is the first in a series of books on Columbo, perhaps the best-known and certainly one of the best police procedural television productions ever.
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What I Recalled Watching Netflix
[Television is educational.] One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain
Seeking the King
A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do
He’s the Guy
Those social media posts of ‘this moment in this famous film was totally unscripted!!!’ as if that by itself makes it better miss the point. Moat unscripted material, like most ideas, inventions, ideas, notions, &c … fails — such is the nature of creativity: the best stuff, it is devoutly to be wished, sticks around;
‘Round Here
Imagine someone, potentially anyone, even you, perhaps, but let us, in any case, say. Yes, you. You pull into the diner – Earl’s, Norm’s, Dinah’s, something like that. A sort-of Googie architecture … but maybe not quite, as if it’d been a little late for the Space Age, and late is the one thing you
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Everyman’s Death
It’s legit unseemly. Our being ‘gutted’ and whatnot by the deaths of people we don’t know. Still, there is John Donne and there is continuity and there is in the end … us. Well, there ought to be but we usually skip not to the end — that bell tollling for we. + Also unseemly
Christians and Atheists
Christians create atheists when we do evil in God’s name. (props to Dennis Prager, who wrote: “Nothing creates atheism as much as evil done in God’s name.”)
Through the Mist
My daughter has for about 15 years known a stuffed purple rabbit, insouciantly named ‘Rabbito’. She’s quite a handful. The rabbit, I mean, tho come to mention it … Anyway. I provide the voice. Rabbito tends to suffix ‘-ito’ to words — I am Papito, for instance — an ‘l’ in most any location is
Not a Eulogy
(A Eucatastrophe) * Love the words, my friends. Pay attention to the words, I say. Christians don’t die One reason we know this is Jesus said it. In John’s account he told Michael: “You shall never taste or see death” (Indeed, as the Psalmist says, “taste and see that the Lord is good.”) Another reason
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Burning and Bleeding
These 21 essays, some quite short, cover everything from truth and love, to our humility and happiness, to celebrating meals and cursing God, to baseball and Johnny Cash. Thanks for reading.
Tebow
Can he play? Should he pray? What’s next for Tim Tebow? … This book asks those questions — and answers them. Thanks for reading.
Your Mom’s a Hypocrite
What’s so wrong with hypocrisy? Other than it being dishonest and demeaning to all that we are as humans … is it really that bad? Actually it can even be good. So, take a look at this book by a hypocrite for hypocrites. Promise you won’t regret it.
Love Every Day
Tim Keller has said that our sinfulness is far worse than we ever could imagine, and that God’s love is far more than we ever dared hope. And Christians for millennia have affirmed no better way to learn these truths – and many others besides – than to love God with all our heart and