This type of stuff is why Christian movies and music are terrible and almost never get mainstream attention The left gained control of Hollywood by putting their messages subtly into stories most people could relate to For example, I had to explain to my poor devout Christian brother that George Harrison was a Hindu and My Sweet Lord is not about Jesus, but it doesn't become obvious until the final part of the song But as a Christian, I can still relate to the feeling he's expressing in that song because Harrison was a great songwriter. Apart from the last verse, it is hard to tell which Lord he's talking about because good writing requires that kind of subtley Traditional Western horror has always been subtley pro Christian Think about what hurts vampires Crosses. Holy water. Churches. The reason they can't see their reflection is because they don't have souls. These are all essential staples in vampire lore. Bram Stoker was a Christian Who are the heroes in The Exorcist? The priests In fact, The Exorcist is about a priest struggling with his faith and he comes back to God after encountering true evil. Reagan's mom in the story starts out as an atheist, and she gets blindsided by the reality of spiritual warfare when she realizes secular doctors can't help her daughter. The author of the book and screenwriter of the film, William Peter Blatty, was also a Christian Ed and Lorraine Warren were devout Christians who wielded their faith to save countless people from demons The point of horror is to show how evil the world can be, and that good prevails if you're willing to fight for what's right and true Christian authors used to understand the importance of subtly in storytelling (Lord of the Rings being another fantastic example), and secularists in Hollywood learned from their craft But now thanks to people like Allie who have a proverbial stick up their butts, modern Christian authors are scared stiff of writing anything with more grit than Veggie Tales Until Christians are willing to write stories about people who cuss, people who cry, people who fornicate, people who scream and suffer and are damaged and make horrible decisions that put themselves in such a deep hole that only Jesus can pull them out, our stories will always be boring and unrelateable to the average person What's funny, though, is now Hollywood is making the same mistake by forcing woke nonsense into everything, which many Christian conservatives will correctly make fun of, but then they don't see the irony in that their own creative works have the same artistic problem

If you don’t have a Tea Olive in your yard in South Carolina, you’re missing out. Not sure there is a better smell in nature, and my entire property wreaks of its sweetness from only 2 mature shrubs. To those with entire hedge rows of Tea Olives, your community service work is complete. Thank you.

Found Kodachrome slide. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. This one is Miami Beach. I was pretty sure the first time I scanned it. Behind her, on the white mid-rise, the sign reads Atlantic Beach. That is the old Atlantic Beach Hotel at 3400 Collins Avenue. Roy France designed the original Roberts Beach there in 1938. Polly Lux bought it in the 1940s and gave it the name still sitting on the slide. But it is the woman who makes this slide. I first posted her in February 2020. Back then I had not started putting the found slides into albums yet. I was just scanning boxes and throwing them onto Flickr one at a time. Found Kodachrome Slide. Found Kodachrome Slide. Found Kodachrome Slide. That was the whole system. One of my contacts kept noticing her. Same face. Same short 1960s hair. Same way of looking at the camera, with so much flair and style. He would write me. Then he would write me again. Do you have more of her? Who is she? I knew nothing. I still know nothing. We decided I should gather her anyway. He gave her a name. A placeholder, really. Lady Zelig. She could walk into any room and become whoever the room needed. She does something close to that across a whole decade of other people’s vacations. She is on the beach in Miami. She is in San Francisco in the 1960s. She is in Rome. She is in Vienna. She is in Austria beyond Vienna. She is in New York, of course. She is in wedding after wedding after wedding. Never the bride. As I kept working the collection, other women started repeating around her. Same eyes. Same bone structure. Same clothes passed between frames. Were they sisters? They could be. So we dubbed the larger set Found Kodachrome Sisters. The album is here: flickr.com/photos/thomashawk… There are more than four hundred slides in it now. She went everywhere. That is not a figure of speech. The photographer, whoever it was, followed this little orbit of women across hotels and airports and church steps and city squares. Miami Beach. San Francisco. Rome. Vienna. New York. Weddings in rooms I still cannot name. Streets I am still trying to place. The clues are all in the frames. A sign. A steeple. A storefront. A stretch of beach with a scalloped cabana roof and a high-rise behind it. For more than six years she has been living on Flickr in public. Nobody has identified her. I get asked about her more than almost anyone else in the whole found collection. A friend asked me about her again today. That is what prompted this post. There is a reason for that. She is striking. Attractive in that unforced way that does not need a studio. The pixie cut. The black one-piece. The sunglasses. She looks like she could walk out of 1964 and order a coffee. She is young in these pictures. Quite possibly still alive. I collect these pictures because they were about to disappear. If I do not save them they will almost certainly die in obscurity. Lost in landfills. Never again to see the light of day. Boxes from estate sales. Cartons from eBay. Slides that sat in a closet until the closet got emptied and the closet’s owner was gone. You pull an orphaned image out of analog obscurity and you give it a digital life that might last. Most of the people in them stay anonymous. Sadly, that is the usual ending. This one bothers me more than the usual ending. I am not sure why. Somebody loved her enough to burn through roll after roll of Kodachrome. Somebody stood in the sand in Miami Beach and made this frame. Somebody stood in Rome and made another. Somebody stood at the edge of a wedding and pointed the camera at the bridesmaid instead of the bride. That person is probably gone. She might not be. If she is still alive, she would be older now. If she married later. If she had children. If there is a family that never saw these pictures because the slides left the house in a box and never came back. They are looking at a hole in their own history. They do not even know the hole has a Flickr album. I have watched the Flickr community identify locations I could not identify for months. Even families. Even names. They are good at this. X reaches further though. Especially if people like or share it. If you know this face, say so. If your mother had that haircut. If your aunt was always in the wedding pictures and never in the white dress. If your grandmother kept a box of Miami Beach slides and then the box vanished. Look at the album. It is a wonderful journey through the 1960s. But more than that, look at the woman in this frame. Look at the women around her. Tell me if you have any idea who they might be. Study the clues in the photos. The locations. The rooms. The other faces. Surely I am missing something. Lady Zelig. Always the bridesmaid. Never the bride.

Fluff told me, ‘Once we get to scoring, they are going to be quiet and are going to leave.' Mississippi State’s plan: Limit LaNorris Sellers, get USC home fans moving to exits thestate.com/sports/college/…

Shane Beamer on why this year's team won't repeat the mistakes of last year's team that struggled to finish games: "It's a completely different team. There's a lot of guys that weren't even here last year." @GamecockFB | @wachfox Q from @johndavisreport