Newton’s Scrapple

 “Ghosts” said Pastor Plait, “I’m agin’ ‘em!” He learned early in his career that use of the vernacular helped a pastor better connect with the flock. But regardless of how he put it, those in attendance that evening at the Double Rock Fellowship had no doubt of how Pastor Plait felt about ghosts. For he had become known to many in the region as the preeminent authority on all matters related to the damnable spirits that started showing up around the globe two years before. Pastor Plait had performed “deliverance of justice” (Plait found the term “exorcism” to be too Church of Rome) on three ghosts. Though most people by this time had accepted the existence of ghosts, what with the preponderance of evidence, to actually see one was a rare occurrence. The typical encounter consisted, at most, of a fleeting glimpse, and only a brave few had actually interacted with these manifestations of a new reality. So around here, three ghosts made Pastor Plait the expert. He told his new ...

  Hi Folks! Alison and I went to Charlotte for the Immersive Van Gogh experience.  This exhibition is being held until the end of October at Camp North End in the old Ford plant, which also served as a bomb factory back in the day. I found it a little weird that an event featuring an artist known for his brilliant and beautiful representations of European town and country would be taking place in a facility that produced things used to blast the living hell out of said town and country just a few years later, but I kept my swords-into-plowshares bullshit to myself and got on with the program, using the ever-popular “well, nothing can be done to help it now” justification. Anyhoo, what this consisted of was a 35-minute film that served as an animated (but not in a cartoony way) tapestry of the master’s works. We watched it three times. It was spellbinding. The film is divided into what I remember as six or seven different theme-based segments, each of them serving as the fr...