The Year of Hanks

You know that feeling when you're at a birthday party and there's some mediocre music being played and the snacks are just sort of meh and you don't really know anybody so you just sort of hide in the corner and wait for someone to bring out the cake? This movie was kind of like that.  Hanx didn't show up until about 58 minutes into the 93-minute stabfest, so in the meantime, we had plenty of time to get to know a whole lot of people in freshly creased jeans and crocheted tam-o-shanters, and one jilted dude wearing eyeliner who just can't seem to let go. I'm just going to warn you right now - if you don't want a very, very cheesy 80s horror flick spoiled for you, you should probably stop reading now. I've never been what you'd call a horror movie buff, so I have no idea if all slasher flicks of the era are this inherently cheesy, but if they are, I might have to give it another look. I rather enjoyed heckling the characters fro

Tomorrow's the big day. I'm more excited than I should be about watching a movie, but I've built this up in my mind as a pretty big deal. I'm kind of notorious for starting things I can't finish, and in the past, blogging about a project has been a surefire way to guarantee that I'll actually get it finished rather than abandoning it halfway through when something shiny caught my attention. I've managed to finish a couple of big projects this way, so I'm confident that I'll accomplish it with this one as well. I feel like I'm going to need some kind of medal or something when this is over, sort of like having completed the Seven Summits. I'd like a Hanks-themed certificate of completion of some sort. I suppose I've got a year to figure it out. At any rate, here's our hit list. On average we'll be doing one per week, but due to previous commitments and such, we'll have to double up here and there. We haven't quite w

In my previous post, I mentioned the letter I'd written to Tom Hanks in my senior year history class requesting that he tell me about someone he wished he'd studied more about in high school. We each chose three, figuring that it'd up our odds of getting a response. The Hanx was the one person I wanted the most to hear from, and he was the one person who came through. I've moved a big handful of times since high school, and I suppose back then my admiration wasn't quite to the level that it is now, and much to my regret, I'd lost my copy of the letter.  You can say what you want about social media (hell, I've been known to gripe about it on occasion), but it has afforded me the opportunity to keep in touch with folks I otherwise may never have spoken to again, given that I'm now living on the opposite coast of the country from where I grew up. One of those people is Tom Jordan, my high school history teacher.  I had no shortage of great teachers