There was a time—eons ago—when watching a movie at home on television was a big deal to me. In the 1970s, it meant that one of our four channels had a “movie night” that came around about once a week or the occasional Sunday afternoon Burt Reynolds flick on one of those Columbus TV stations. By the early 1980s, it meant that we got one of those free weekends of HBO that my dad hated. He didn’t like that a lot of these movies had dirty words—sometimes right in the middle of the afternoon—but they were no worse than what […]
Tag: Netflix
2026: The year in PREVIEW
I don’t know exactly how long I’ve been doing my annual Year in Preview, but it’s been at least a quarter century. I’m talking way back when there was no Facebook, Donald Trump was still good buddies with Jeffrey Epstein, and Mike Lindell was more into drugs than making pillows and being America’s No. 1 source of news from The Pentagon. It’s become an annual tradition, like Christmas, the War on Christmas, and GOP lawmakers lining up under the White House mistletoe to kiss President Trump’s behind. Therefore, I must reveal my 100 percent guaranteed-to-be-true prognostications for the year ahead […]
Tracing my roots from jolly ol’ England to MY very own island
(Photo: My wife and I on the south side of Georgia’s beautiful Jekyll Island a few years ago.) “I’m a Derry Girl!” my wife Shellie shouted with her hands in the air after diving deep into the rabbit holes of her lineage at Ancestry.com. By the time she traced her maiden name of Hillhouse as far back as she could go, she found her roots in Scotland back in the 1500s, though her family spent much of the next 200 years in Ireland and Northern Ireland — including Derry. That’s the setting of “Derry Girls,” a brilliant series that ran […]