Stephen Burckhardt's Blog: My Blog Ramblings, page 63

Whatever Wednesday: Star Trek Picard

Hello Posse, It is well documented that I am a big ole nerd. I love all things sci-fi and I do things like read physics for fun. So it should come as no surprise to learn that I am a Trekkie. I have even had photos with a few of the Star Trek captains including William Shatner and I once met Sir Patrick Stewart in London. I have been looking forward to seeing the new series Picard since I first learned is was being made. Where we live, we cannot get the normal streaming service it is available through so we have been searching to find any local service where we can get it. But while we wait to see season one, I'm already geeking over what will come in season two. Recently while Sir Patrick Stewart was visiting The View he asked Whoopi Goldberg if she would be interested in being a part of season two of Picard. It looks like Guinan will be making a return to the Star Trek universe, a character that was created just for her. Growing up Goldberg had been a fan of the original Star Trek series. Later when she was gaining success in the entertainment industry a friend of her, LeVar Burton, told her that he had been cast as part of a new Star trek series. She asked him to let the shows producers know she would be interested in joining the cast as well. It was after a call she made to Star Trek creator, Gene Roddenberry, the character of Guinan was born. Goldberg was on the Star Trek the Next Generation series for five seasons and also appeared in two movies. If you want to read more check out Trek.com. Live Long and Prosper, Dianne

Monday Movie Madness: Laugh Fest for Blue Monday!

Hello Posse! I hope you are having a great day on this Blue Monday! What is Blue Monday you ask? It is the day that is considered the most depressing day of the year. Blue Monday is said to have been championed by psychologist Cliff Arnall in 2005. He came up with the depressed holiday for a marketing campaign for a travel company which has since gone out of business. Why pairing depression with your vacation plans didn't work to increase travel business is a mystery! While Blue Monday may have been debunked, it still gives us a great reason to check out some great movie comedies! Here is a short list of some of my favorites in no particular order: 1. The Heat (Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy) 2. It Happened One Night (Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert) 3. Old School (Will Ferrell, Luke Wilson, and Vince Vaughn) 4. Shaun of the Dead (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost) 5. The Thin Man "and all of the sequels" (Myrna Loy and William Powell) 6. Paul (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost) 7. The 40-year-old Virgin (Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen, and Romany Malco) 8. A Fish Called Wanda (John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, Michael Palin) 9. Arsenic and Old Lace (Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, Raymond Massey) 10. French Kiss (Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline) This of course doesn't come close to listing all my favorite comedies but it will give you a good sampling to help perk up your Blue Monday. I would love to hear from you if you care to share some of your favorite laugh out loud movies. Enjoy! Stephen

Friday Funnies: Customers

Hello Posse! As some of you have noticed, I am fascinated with all the weird national days that are associated with every single day of the year. Today happens to be "get to know your customers day" so what better day to share customer/work jokes. I worked in customer service for way too many years so some of these made me chuckle. I hope they will for you too! Please feel free to share any funny stories you have from your own customer or work experiences. I would love to hear from you! Enjoy and Happy Friday!!! Stephen Salesperson: “This computer is amazing. It will cut your workload by 50%.” Customer: “That’s great! I’ll take two!” Not all cashiers are good at their job. For some, things are slow to register. Always trust a glue salesperson. They tend to stick to their word. The salesperson said the boots were made from alligator, but I knew it was crock. I was training to sell Velcro but I quit, I just couldn’t stick with it. A passenger loaded his luggage onto the scale at an airline counter in New York City and said to the agent at the counter, "I'm flying to San Fransisco. I want the large bag sent to Los Angeles and the two small bags sent to Miami." The agent was surprised and replied, "I'm sorry sir, but we can't do that." The passenger smiled and said, "That's good to know because that's where they ended up the last time I flew this route." #jokes #FridayFunnies #Friday #Fridaythoughts #customers #bookboost #blog #bloggers #bookblog #writers #writer #readers #humor #StephenBurckhardt #IntoTheWest #sales

Whatever Wednesday: National Booch Day!!

Hello Posse! I wanted to come and share another weird and wonderful national day with you. Today is the first ever National Booch Day! I am sure there are more than a few of you who wonder, what the heck is booch day? To be honest, I was not 100% sure what it meant. I thought it might have something to do with Komucha but I was not sure so I looked it up online and sure enough, today is the day to celebrate this wonderful probiotic drink. So what is Komucha? It is a drink that has been around since at least 220 B.C. It is a fermented blend of tea (oolong, green, black, or white), sugar, and a scoby. A scoby is a mass of bacteria that will bring all the good probiotic bacteria to this drink and ferment it into an effervescent delight. You can find many commercial brands in stores or you can brew your own at home. I have done this myself in small batches and have been very pleased with the results. It is not a difficult process, it just takes a time. When I gave up soda years ago, I turned to komucha as a replacement. I love tart tastes and it was easy to find tart, bubbly komuchas I loved. There is a wide variety on the market now to meet just about ever taste from sweet to sour and some even come with chia seeds. Or visit Kegerator for more information on home-brewing your own kombucha. Besides being a very tasty drink, kombucha contains billions of healthy probiotics, loads of B vitamins, and antioxidants. How doesn't need that? So why not celebrate today by giving komucha a try? You might find a new favorite drink. Enjoy! Dianne #bloggers #writerslife #WednesdayMotivation #WednesdayThoughts #wednesdaymorning #WednesdayVibes #healthy #healthcare #NationalBoochDay #kombucha

Monday Movie Madness: The Magnificent Seven, 2016 Remake

Hello Posse! Last week I introduced you to the 1960 release of The Magnificent Seven so this week I want to share the 2016 remake. As with the 1960 version, the modern remake can be linked to Japanese film maker Akira Kurosawa's classic, Seven Samurai. The 2016 remake of The Magnificent Seven was released by Sony Pictures and once again featured a stellar cast including: Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Byung-hun Lee, Vincent D'Onofrio, Miguel Garcia-Rulfo, and Martin Sensmeier. In this remake, the story has changed a bit. This incarnation takes place in an American town which has been essentially enslaved to work as forced labor in the mines owned by a robber barron, Bartholomew Bogue played by Peter Sarsgaard. When the town church is burned down and townspeople are killed, those left behind have had enough and decide to fight. The widow of one of the victims and her friend sneak away to find help. They meet an African-American U.S. Marshal, Sam Chisholm played by Washington, who agrees to help them. Marshal Chisholm recruits a posse to go to the town and face the robber baron and his henchmen. The characters in this remake do have slight resemblances to the original 1960 version but many of the characters are given a much more interesting backstory in this remake. When the battle for the town begins, we learn just what these characters are willing to sacrifice for each other and the town. I hope you will add this to your to be watched list. Enjoy! Stephen #western #cowboys #movies #movieblog #blog #movieblogger #StephenBurkhardt #IntoTheWest #Monday #MondayThoughts

Friday Funnies:

Hello Posse! I am trying to form a game plan to allow me to get a lot of writing done in the next few months. I want to finish the Into the West Saga Serial which would be possibly two more books after Into the West: Most Wanted to get the story to the ending I want. It is very ambitious considering how long it has taken to me get to book three in the serial but I know it is possible, I just have to figure out how. Keep watching the blogs for more information as I get my plans set. Think good thoughts for me, please. For today, I think we just need a good laugh (or an amused groan if the jokes are bad). I seem to have found most of the good clean cowboy jokes I can find online so I thought I would try jokes about my home state of Kansas. Enjoy . . . I hope. Stephen Dorothy missed Kansas but what did Toto miss? They missed the rains down in Africa. What do a Florida hurricane, a Kansas tornado, and an Arkansas divorce have in common? Some poor sap's gonna lose a trailer. What do buzzards in Kansas eat? Carrion, my wayward son. A man had a terminal illness. His doctor says he only had six months to live and there is only one treatment. The doctor tells him he had to marry a woman that yells at him constantly and move to Kansas. “Will it help?” asks the man. “No,” says the doctor, “but it will be the longest six months of your life.” #jokes #FridayFunnies #Friday #Fridaythoughts #kansas #bookboost #blog #bloggers #bookblog #writers #writer #readers #humor #StephenBurckhardt #IntoTheWest

Whatever Wednesday: Weird Holidays

Hello Posse! If you look up weird holidays online you can find lists of crazy things people celebrate every single day of the year. In fact, there are almost always more than one holiday listed for every single day of the calendar year. Now, there are the ones that pretty much everyone in the modern world knows such as Christmas, New Year, Chinese New Year, Thanksgiving in the US and in Canada, but the ones I really love finding are the obscure holidays like the one that falls on my birthday, September 19th, also known as Talk Like a Pirate Day. If you follow me on Facebook (which you definitely should do), I am sure you have seen my posts asking for you to share photos of your dog on Mutt Day, or to share your favorite recipe on Hot Chocolate Day. While I doubt there is a hoard of people out in the world who take these obscure holidays seriously, I have to admit they are just plain fun, and who couldn't use more of that in their life? With today's holiday, I can celebrate an obscure holiday and give a shout out to another small business owner (and a friend) in the process. Today happens to be National Winter Skin Relief Day. I know when the weather starts to turn cold every year, my hands start to look like they belong to the Crypt Keeper, so this holiday is one that makes perfect sense to me. What better way to celebrate this national day than to find great natural products that are good for your skin? The first place I think of for those kinds of products is Wise Oak Soapery LLC. This family owned business was started by a mother, Kara Vogt, who couldn't find good, healthy products that worked well for her own family's needs. After some research, she started creating them herself and eventually turned her passion into a business. If you want to pamper yourself and find a great way to celebrate National Winter Skin Relief Day, I highly recommend checking out Wise Oak Soapery LLC's website and follow them on Facebook. Just click on their name and go. You will not regret it! Have a great day! Stephen #holidays #holidays #holiday #holidayseason #Wednesday #WednesdayThoughts #wednesdayvibes #healthy #healthcare #natural #allnatural #StephenBurckhardt

Good News and Big Plans

Hello Posse! I just wanted to share a bit of good news I received this week. You might have noticed this past year that my first book, Into the West: The Orphan Train was a finalist in the 2019 TopShelf Indie Book Awards. Unfortunately, it was just a finalist and did not take first place. Which is still amazing for a brain damaged writer who tends to forget how to spell their own main characters names at times. However, this week I received a letter from TopShelf and they have nominated my book for a second chance in their 2020 TopShelf Indie Book Awards. The letter I received stated their panel, which is made up of agencies, publicists, publishers, TopShelf scouts, and Insider members, felt my work deserved another chance to take first place so they are nominating it for this years contest. Which basically means they waived almost all the fees and are allowing me to enter my book in the contest again. Most of you already know that Stephen Burckhardt is a pen name and not my legal name. I chose to write under this name because I was worried that after surviving all the brain surgeries I would not be able to write the way I used to before the accident. With a pen name, if I completely screwed up and my books were horrible I could always just stop publishing, walk away, and no one would ever know it was me who wrote them. So now, I find it rather ironic that the very first book I wrote has not only been a finalist in the TopShelf Indie book Awards contest but now it's nominated for this years awards as well. I think I am still in shock about it all. I never even considered what it would be like if my books were good, I just wanted to write them. I will be honest, I have no idea how much weight these awards actually carry in the literary world but I do know readers take notice if a book has awards on the cover. I know my book sales have increased since I started posting the award seal on the book cover. No matter what, this positive feedback from industry insiders does boost my self-confidence. It makes me want to push to get more attention for this entire serial. This brings me to my ambitious goals for this year. I want to finish writing all the books in the Into the West Saga Serial and get at least the audiobook for book one finished. I want to get my books on the shelf of at least one local bookstore. And the biggie, I want to go to the Frankfurt Buchmesse in Frankfurt, Germany this year. It is one of (if not the) biggest book conferences in the world. Authors, publishers, agents, editors, scouts, PR specialists, graphic designers, and so many more people from around the globe who are involved in any field to do with the literary world will be there. There is also a big book fair that has happened here in town the last few years but I do not see any dates listed for 2020 yet. If it comes back this year, I want to have a booth to sell my books and book bags at the fair. I will have to wait and see if I can get more information on that. I would like to be able to start work on my autobiography by the end of the year. I have been wanting to write it for a while now. My college advisor in the journalism department, Les Anderson, used to tell me that was the story I should write. He said with my unique condition and the crazy series of unfortunate complications, people would be intrigued and inspired by what I was able to overcome. I've had the title in mind for years: Free Bad Haircuts With Each Craniotomy. This comes from a T-shirt I made for myself when I was going into the hospital for my first brain surgery. I was trying to find ways to have fun and find humor with what I was about to go through because, honestly, I was scared out of my mind. I threw a party and had the MRI of my brain put on a cake that we got to cut into. We drank bloody brain shots at the party too. At the time, I was a graphic designer so I designed T-shirts to amuse myself. Going into the hospital I wore the one that read "Free Bad Haircuts with Each Craniotomy", it also had my neurosurgeons name listed on it as the hairstylist to the hairless. Then, when I was ready to leave the hospital, I had another T-shirt with a picture of a crazy cat on it and it read, "I had brain surgery, what's your excuse?!" I am still making my game plan and trying to figure out all the details but with any luck this could be a great year for me and my writing. Please keep your fingers crossed, keep reading my blogs, and (if you have a mind to) share my blogs with your friends. It costs you nothing to share a post on your social media but it might actually help me rebuild my career. Your support means the world to me. Thank you so much for following me! Stephen #braininjury #brainsurgery #Neurology #book #booklovers #bookboost #Reading #writerslife #writingcommmunity #writing #author #awardwinner

Monday Movie Madness: The Magnificent Seven

Hello Posse! I hope you are all recovering nicely from the holidays. I still feel a little drained from all the late night TV bingeing with P.R. We bought a new Xbox One for ourselves and found it has a lot of streaming services on it that allow us to get shows we don't see on Netflix or Prime so we have been indulging in way too much TV watching. But with P.R. recovering from a broken leg, we have tried to find activities we can do together that will not hinder P.R.'s recovery and TV watching together is an easy one. We have also been catching up on our movie watching as well. Over the holidays I found out P.R. had never seen Love Actually! We corrected that injustice. We also had our traditional Christmas Eve dinner while watching Die Hard. It is a holiday must in our house. One movie that is still on our to be watched again list is the one I am featuring today, the Magnificent Seven. Like so many great classic movies, The Magnificent Seven has a modern remake that was released in 2016 and can be linked to another of Japanese film maker Akira Kurosawa's classics, Seven Samurai. According to the movie's Wikipedia page, in 2013, this movie was chosen for inclusion in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress siting it as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".The Magnificent Seven was released by United Artists in 1960 and featured an all-star cast which included: Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Charles Bronson, Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, James Coburn, Brad Dexter, and Horst Buchholz. Wallach played the head of a gang of bandits that terrorised a small Mexican village. The gang would periodically raid the village stealing food and other items. When the bandits end up killing a villager, the townspeople get together and decides it is time to find a way to stop the continual raids. A small group of men travel across the US border to buy weapons to defend themselves. What they find instead is gunslinger Chris Adams played by Brynner. Brynner convinces the villagers that their money would be better spent hiring gunfighters to fight for them. At first, Brynner only wants to work as a recruiter for the villagers and does not want to be part of the fight but he eventually joins the band. The hired guns travel across the border to help the villagers reclaim their town. I do not want to give too much of the plot away here because I really think you will be better served by watching it yourself. But I will say that the hardened gunslingers find themselves being very affected by their time with the villagers and the ending really leaves you with an interesting message. I hope you will give this movie a try. Next week, I'm going to introduce you to the 2016 remake. I am always sceptical when Hollywood remakes a classic I have loved since childhood but, just like with Jeff Bridges' True Grit performance, I was pleasantly surprised with this one. Have a great week! Stephen #western #cowboys #movies #movieblog #blog #movieblogger #StephenBurkhardt #IntoTheWest #Monday #MondayThoughts

Friday Funnies: Happy New Year!

Hello Posse, I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season. P.R. and I had a nice quiet time at home. We got the pleasure of enjoying each others company for two entire weeks. It was amazing. I am sure you noticed I, more or less, disappeared from social media for a while. Normally, P.R. works 12-14 hour days and we rarely get to see each other during the week. So when P.R. ended up with a broken leg which forced P.R. to take a break (pun intended) from work and stay home for a few weeks, we did everything we could to enjoy that time together. We celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary, had a lovely Christmas and New Years at home, we saw the new Star Wars movie, binge watched several TV shows, and caught up on a lot of movies we missed in the theater. Now, P.R.'s leg is healing very nicely and we have both started to get back to work. I have made my goals for this year: finish the Into the West Saga, finish at least the first audio book for the saga, get my books on the shelves of at least one local book store, and go to the Frankfurt Buchmesse this year. If you are not familiar with that, it is one of (if not the) largest book fairs in the world. I would also like to look into being part of the book mile book fair they have here in town every summer. It is a mile long row of tables and tents of books. You can find everything there from rare collectables to new releases. It would be amazing to be part of that. I need to get more information first, then we will see about that one. I have a chance to win another award for my first novella, Into the West: The Orphan Train. TopShelf has nominated it for a "second chance" in their 2020 Indie Book Awards. Meaning, I get to submit it again for another chance to win first place. If I accept, the book is automatically awarded a "nomination" certificate and cover badge from their awards contest. I honestly have no idea how much weight that might, or might not, carry in the literary world but I do know the more awards a book has, the more attention it gets, and my books need more attention. For today, I just wanted to hop online and briefly check-in. I wanted to let you know I'm getting back to work and hope to have new sneak peeks and more good news coming soon. I know today is normally Friday Funnies so I want to leave you with a few New Years Jokes. All our best from P.R., Dianne, Shaggy, and myself for a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year! Stephen On New Years Eve P.R. asked me where I see myself in the new year. I replied, "How would I know, I don't have 2020 vision." I made a New Years resolution to read more . . . . . . so I put subtitles on my TV. I was going to make a resolution to quit all my bad habits in 2020 . . . . . . but then I remembered that I am not a quitter!! You just know 2020 is going to be filled with all kinds of "perfect vision" puns and jokes. I can't wait to see them all as soon as I find my glasses. I am already looking forward to New Years Day 2021. Then I can say, hindsight really is 2020! #NewYear #NewYears2020 #2020# #jokes #IntoTheWest #Westerns #TopShelf #StephenBurckhardt #blog #bloggers #bookblog #reading #amwriting #bookawards