Confessions of a Conservative Atheist
The world’s only one man media empire
How did an illiterate peasant that never sat on a horse in her entire life, much less have military training of any kind, march to war at seventeen years old, change the entire fate of France, and then defy the learned authorities of the Church for six months before being executed at nineteen? In many… Continue reading The impossibility of Joan of Arc, the one story that could transform even Mark Twain into a believer
As my lovely wife is fond of saying, we and our beloved doggies are thrown together by fate, but I want to go much further back in time than she’s normally thinking to consider what fate had in store up to a hundred million years ago when humans and canines were one species. Since every… Continue reading Me, my dogs, and our long march together through evolutionary time
If Henry V survived, he would have been king of both England and France, forging one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful country on Earth at the time. After I killed him however, a slow, agonizing death, not suited for a warrior, the world was changed forever. I am an amoeba and… Continue reading I am a lowly amoeba and I just killed the most powerful man in the world, changing all of history in the process
It’s the year 1600 and I am already an accomplished playwright, having written plays and created characters like Romeo and Juliet that would be revered for centuries. This might have been enough for any other artist, but I am not any artist by any means. I am William Shakespeare about to write Hamlet. It’s the… Continue reading I am William Shakespeare about to write Hamlet
Henry V was literally and figuratively born in blood, especially as his father became king after starving the former ruler, Richard II. We should probably not spare Richard too much sympathy, however. He was the last of the Plantagenet kings, who rose to power on a tide of violence in the 12th century, violence that… Continue reading The real Henry V, the Magna Carta, and the glorious depravity we are heir to
It’s human nature, but if you value what you have now, what you’ve seen, done, and hopefully learned, why would you want to go back to a point where you had none of it or at least less of it? Aging is a funny thing to say the least. I suspect almost all of us… Continue reading New Year’s, the mysteries of aging, and whether we’d really want to go back in time to be our younger selves
The British actor and director released his first film, Henry V in 1989, when I was a tender thirteen years old. It passed without notice for me during its theatrical run, but the video rental store, that monument to entertainment, where most families made at least a weekly pilgrimage before the rise of streaming, was… Continue reading How Kenneth Branagh changed a fantasy geek’s life and transformed him into a Shakespeare fanatic
Rather than the fearless, master horseman who led charges, the film depicts a far more reserved and fearful man. Rather than the dynamic, workaholic it shows us a moribund, borderline depressive. Rather than anything resembling the whirlwind of actions and contradictions the real man must’ve been, we are left with only with a poor, bittersweet… Continue reading Only Hollywood could make Napoleon a boring, lovesick mope rather than one of the most dynamic and engaging personalities in world history
It is a tragedy not of a single individual or even the entire Roman Republic, but one of power, who has it, who wants it, how they get it, and how it ebbs and flows at the whims of the crowd, exercising their free and fickle will to support who they choose at any given… Continue reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the nature of power in the hands of the people
Shakespeare isn’t a puzzle box to be unlocked or a cipher to be decrypted. He is instead a universe to be explored and in that regard, no one in history has even come close. Ultimately, your opinion is likely based on your opinion on the purpose of art itself. The 400th anniversary of the publication… Continue reading Shakespeare friends and foes, Falstaff, and the idea of art as a mirror to the soul
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 