Missouri

We’ve come to the end of the traditional flurry of holiday game releases. The “Rock Bands,” “Guitar Heroes,” “Fables” and “Mirror’s Edges” of the last months are, for better or worse, now on shelves or in our homes.

Now we face the vast expanse of Q1 2009, mostly devoid of major releases simply because publishers know adult gamers are still paying off holiday-season credit card bills, and younger players aren’t likely to get any more money out of parents so soon after the Christmas spending spree.

But what some might see as a looming desert of existential despair I choose to view as an opportunity.

You see, the almost-weekly releases of must-have games left me with little time for other activities – like actually playing the games I bought.

Maybe I’m admitting to a fundamental weakness, a lack of uberness that prevented me from finishing one game in the six days before the next big thing dropped.

(Read the full post about ‘James Post: Gaming doldrums a blessing in disguise’…)

When people ask me how they can ensure their pets will be taken care of in case of the owner’s death, my answer is an old adage with a different meaning: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

There are a couple of steps you have to take before you put anything in your will. This is a great New Year’s resolution, as it will bring peace and comfort to you and security for your animal companion.

As a responsible pet owner, you owe it to your pet to ensure he or she will be provided food, water, shelter, veterinary care and love, even if something happens and you are unable to continue your responsibilities.

(Read the full post about ‘Pet Talk: Ensure pets’ care through a will’…)

Like many people fresh out of college, Connie Davis-Cressy was stretching her dollars while working to get her career off the ground.

And like many young professionals, having and affording health care coverage was a top concern - especially for her cocker spaniel, Sammy.

"That was something I was willing to spend" money on, the Peoria, Ill., resident said Friday. "For me, having an uninsured pet would be like having an uninsured child. … They are family."

Davis-Cressy has four dogs - Kaia, Chloe, Tucson and Jackson - covered under a basic pet-insurance plan, which costs her about $75 a month.

(Read the full post about ‘Even in tough economic times, pet owners willing to insure companions’…)

When Donald Gallinger was growing up in Norwich, Conn., his parents frequently had over for dinner what he thought was a gentle, ordinary, even “humdrum” couple.

Years later, he learned they had been partisan fighters in World War II, hiding in the forest to ambush Nazis, even giving birth to a son, who they were worried wouldn’t survive. Their immigration to America was considered miraculous.

(Read the full post about ‘Novelist explores effect of mom’s violent legacy on son’s dreams’…)

CARTHAGE, Mo. -

Grace Pointe (First) Assembly of God invites the public to hear singer/saxophonist/songwriter Greg Winn on Sunday, Jan. 4 at 10:30 a.m.

Greg began singing and performing Christian music by forming his own group while still in high school. He traveled around much of the United States with various singing groups while in college, and then began his solo ministry in 1988.

Since that time he has ministered to tens of thousands of people in almost every setting from churches to the corporate stage, inner cities and prisons to various missions’ endeavors both at home and abroad.

Greg’s concerts have something for everyone.

(Read the full post about ‘Assembly of God presents Greg Winn’…)

Ever hear of a “MacGuffin”?

It’s the thing in a story that everyone is after, and therefore drives the plot. Alfred Hitchcock coined the term, if not the concept.

The funny thing about a MacGuffin is, it doesn’t really matter what it is. All that matters is that people want it and they’re willing to do interesting things to get it. Think of the letters of transit in “Casablanca,” the Death Star plans in “Star Wars,” the briefcase in “Pulp Fiction” or the never-revealed government secrets in Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest.”

Does it really matter what they are?

(Read the full post about ‘Will Pfeifer: Band of idiots weave fascinating tale in ‘Burn After Reading’’…)

The last time Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet got together, they collided with an iceberg. In “Revolutionary Road,” their first pairing in the 11 years since “Titanic,” they ARE the iceberg. The movie, unfortunately, is the sinking ship.

As hipster suburbanites Frank and April Wheeler, a couple fighting desperately not to become bourgeois whenever they’re not fighting with each other, the actors strive for something approaching “Virginia Woolf” but come off more like Virginia ham.

Their emoting knows no bounds in a headache-inducing melodrama rife with yelling, screaming and weepy histrionics, all rooted in the horrors of living in an upper-middle class section of southwest Connecticut in 1955.

It may as well be Compton or the Bronx in the eyes of British director Sam Mendes, who, along with screenwriter Justin Haythe (“The Clearing”), paint a ridiculously bleak picture of suburban life.

(Read the full post about ‘‘Revolutionary Road’ best avoided’…)

Alfred, N.Y. -

It has been more than 50 years since Alan Littell ventured the deep blue seas as a merchant mariner, but it all seems like yesterday in his book “Courage.”

Littell, of Alfred, is a 79-year old author who is the senior member of a family with a writing history.

Littell himself has written for more than 40 newspapers in his lifetime. He is currently the travel editor of The Evening Tribune, but once worked as a reporter and editor in Paris and Boston. His most distinguished credits come from writing for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Travel & Leisure magazine and Ocean Navigator magazine.

(Read the full post about ‘‘Courage’ tells tale of the sea, reflects on author’s literary journey’…)

Rather than pick his “top albums” of the year — which would insinuate that he listened to all or even most of the albums that came out, and then compared them, and who has that kind of time? — Peter Chianca of the Blogness on the Edge of Town blog offers his list of five albums that may have passed you by in 2008, but shouldn’t have.

1) The ’59 Sound, Gaslight Anthem. I’m hesitant to call these guys the next big thing, because whenever I say that about a group it disappears almost immediately into the entertainment ether, never to be heard from again.

(Read the full post about ‘Five albums you should have bought in 2008′…)

PEORIA -

Gov. Rod Blagojevich might deny selling the state’s U. S. Senate seat, but "Al the Jeweler" is hopeful the public will want to buy plenty from him.

Brad Pettet, owner of Pettet Jewelry Designs at the Metro Centre, is selling 3/4-inch tall charms for necklaces and bracelets shaped as a U. S. Senate seat.

"The whole point of this is to have a little bit of fun," Pettet said Tuesday about the governor’s scandal. "People say they are embarrassed to be from Illinois. I’m not embarrassed. It’s Chicago politics.

(Read the full post about ‘Senate seats for sale: Jeweler satirizes Blago’…)