John B. Marek

On Saturday, I replanted a flower bed near my garage. I have been trying to grow lavender and creeping jenny there for the past few years and the results have been underwhelming. I decided to pull everything out, double-dig the whole bed, add some peat to improve drainage and replant it. About halfway through the process, my shovel hit something metallic. Looking down, I was able to make out the remnants of some sort of cylindrical object. Believing that I might have stumbled onto a major archaeological find, I proceeded slowly, carefully removing the accumulated dirt and debris from around the object. Although it was now badly deformed and in two pieces, it was immediately clear to me that the artifact was originally a single tube-like structure, about five inches tall and two inches in diameter. It was made from a light, flexible metal and painted in bright red, green and white shapes. Although the condition of the object made it difficult to ascertain what the design might have ...

I went to see THE MEG on Saturday afternoon. The wife was out of town and I needed a break from work around the homestead, so mid-afternoon I showered up, put on a clean tee and headed north to Our Town Cinemas in Davidson for the $8 matinee showing. I had every reason to believe the movie was going to be stupid, but that was okay; Our Town has a wide selection of craft beers, the A/C works just fine and the pretzels are soft and salty.  The movie was predictably bad, so much so that I’m not even going to attempt to review it. Instead, I’m going to take a trip down memory lane to the last time I purposely saw a bad shark movie in a theater (Sharknados on TV don’t count). It was the summer of 1983, my second summer working as a busboy at the Catawba Island Club. I was between colleges at the time, having left Ohio U the previous spring and enrolled at Bowling Green for the upcoming semester. My high school buddy Carl also worked at the club, so our schedules were often in syn...