Confessions of a Quirky Christian Artist

It’s time for a top 10 list because why not. Here you go, in no particular order. Also, yeah I’m grouping franchises together. Sue me. UHF Some of my favorite movies are great art. This one is probably not, but I still love it to bits. UHF has too many "I recognize that popular culture reference" jokes to be "Great Comedy" imo. But it also has an incredible sincerity and heart that I've never seen in another goofball comedy movie. And enough quotable lines to choke a camel! And what a shocking structure Mr. Yankovic signed off on for his big shot at a feature length movie. You'd think with a plot about a wacky character who catapults a failing TV station into sudden popularity, that character would be Weird Al. Instead they found a no-name comedian (Michael Richards: later Cosmo Kramer on Seinfeld) to be that character. And Weird Al is a ... almost straight man, stepping back and letting Richards steal every scene he's in. Really makes me love Weird Al...

My theory on creativity: The brain does two major things above and beyond basic stimulus-response and regulating body function. First, it generates narratives to make sense of the sensory impressions that your sense-organs deliver. Secondly, it edits those into meta-narratives that tie groups of impressions together into heuristics. This is how we model cause/effect, figure out that calling someone a mean name will make them angry, and that people who look like X probably will act like Y. (So pushed too far, or left to go unchallenged leads to racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc.) That meta-narrative meaning-making process is coordinated by the pre-frontal cortex (massive over-simplification) and is (mostly) shut down during sleep. During sleep our body is still receiving sensations and so the brain is still doing its narrative-building work, but without the benefit/detriment of the pre-frontal. This is why dreams feel like they make sense while you experience them, but on waking int...

Today my lil' wifey turns 39. She's also currently getting cut up by a surgeon. This is her 15th or 16th surgery (we've both lost count) in the 13 years we've been married. The last several have been for various symptoms of EDS. It's become pretty mundane at this point. So I'm going to take this time to blather about Heather Kerekffy-Foreman. Pull up a chair. Her birthdays are hard for me because now my wife is older... no wait, that's not why. It's because her menagerie of diseases means that nothing normal girls like give her pleasure. Here's an incomplete list of things she doesn't like or that actively hurt her: Massage, hot tubs, delicious food, alcohol, jewelry, flowers. Sounds like a miserable life, doesn't it? But incredibly, she is one of the sweetest, kindest people I've ever known. She sees every pain and disease (and she is literally always suffering multiple pains) as opportunities to share her experiences in order to reach o...