Welcome to the website of author Edward Trimnell!
Welcome to ‘The Daily Ed’: the source for my regular updates on new books, online stories, and serials. Plus some commentary and random notes!
My latest books can be found here.
Go here for free short stories, and extended excerpts from my published works.
Get THE CAIRO DECEPTION: THE COMPLETE SERIES in a single Kindle omnibus box set..
Finally, this is the season of Halloween! Be sure to check out 12 HOURS OF HALLOWEEN, my coming-of-age supernatural horror tale set in 1980.
These appeared on the horizon early this morning. Yesterday my HOA festooned the common access area trees with Christmas lights.
(Oh, wait—I’m supposed to be politically correct and say, “holiday lights”. Oh, wait–I’m not politically correct, so let’s not go there. Christmas lights they are.)
I know that anytime after Thanksgiving is technically fair game for Christmas decorations. So I won’t, in Scrooge fashion, start bah humbugging here.
Still, I’m a bit of a sticker on such matters. December 1 is plenty early enough to begin decorating for the holidays Christmas.
Joshua Heath, an Anglican clergyman in the United Kingdom, declared in a recent Evensong sermon that Jesus had a “trans body”.
Apparently Heath attempted to draw a metaphor between the wound from the Roman spear…and a vagina.
Because, logically, whenever any man receives a puncture wound, or a large laceration, the wound automatically becomes a vagina, right?
Any man who has ever undergone surgery, in fact, has become at least temporarily transgender. Continue reading “Jesus was trans too?”
In the above video, yet another dissertation about the wussification of America from one of my fellow Gen Xers.
This is a matter that I have opined on myself in the past. I therefore won’t belabor the issue again here. Suffice it to say: growing up in the 1970s, 1980s (and perhaps even the 1990s, depending on who and where you were) was nothing like the hermetically sealed, digitized, and hyper-managed upbringing of the typical suburban child today.
Since I was a kid during the 1970s, this video brought back memories for me. I don’t remember everything mentioned above; but I do remember (and concur with) most of the basic points.
If you’re a Gen Xer yourself, the video is worth your time solely for the segments about 70s’ bike culture, and those old metal lunchboxes. But there is much else here.
If you’re too young to remember any of this, you might enjoy this look at a better, vanished version of childhood.
This video makes me grateful, yet again, that I was born who I was, where I was, and when I was. The twenty-first century belongs to the young; and the young can have it.
I am old enough to remember the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and how a group of backward, medieval Islamists condemned the Iranian people to four decades of misery.
Things might have worked out differently. Iran in the late 1970s, prior to the Islamic Revolution, was on the way to becoming a modern, fully industrialized country. One of my former colleagues worked for Bell Helicopter in Tehran in 1977 and 1978. He had mostly good things to say about his experiences there.
Under the mullahs, though, Iran has been an economic basket-case and an international pariah. Continue reading “Things get worse in Iran…but for how long?”
Above, a good video on the rise and fall of Pizza Hut.
Pizza Hut was an iconic chain from my 1980s youth. I recall eating there many times during grade school and high school.
Here in Cincinnati, there were basically two choices: Pizza Hut, or LaRosa’s–our local, Cincinnati-based chain.
(Back then, you had to be Italian to get a LaRosa’s franchise. One of our neighbors, a fellow with Neapolitan and Sicilian roots, operated the nearest LaRosa’s.)
But Domino’s, Papa John’s, Marco’s…we’d never heard of them. Some of those pizza chains didn’t even exist, or were barely on the map.
And then Pizza Hut went into a long decline, as the others rose to grab market share. Continue reading “The decline of Pizza Hut”
Music is one art form for which I am content to remain in the audience. And I love nothing so much as 1980s rock.
About a year ago, I began following Sina Doering, a young German drummer, on YouTube. Sina came to my attention because she specializes in 80s-era rock.
Sina started out making drum covers. But as her channel has grown, she has expanded into full-band productions, like the performance you see above. Continue reading “Rock aus Deutschland: ‘Sledgehammer’”
Today is Black Friday, and I suspect that many of you spent the wee hours waiting in line for stores to open. The Best Buy near my house opened today at 5 a.m.
Not me…there is nothing in the stores that I want that badly, even at a steep discount.
To close out Thanksgiving here at the blog, I present you with this Cincinnati favorite, the infamous “turkey drop” episode from WKRP in Cincinnati, a sitcom that aired on CBS from 1978 to 1982.
Cincinnati, Ohio has never gotten much attention from Hollywood, even though several movies (Rain Man, Fresh Horses) were filmed here in the late 1980s. So to have a primetime sitcom named after Cincinnati, and set in Cincinnati, was kind of a big deal. (Keep in mind: this was before the Internet or cable TV, and folks were more easily amused.)
The above ‘Thanksgiving turkey drop’ episode, which originally aired in 1978, has long been a cult favorite. This is one of those television memes that just never goes away.
Rewatching the pivotal scene above, I found it “mildly amusing”, worthy of a chuckle.
But worthy of four decades of persistence in the collective memory? I’m not so sure, my predilection for nostalgia notwithstanding.
I’ll let you be the judge, upon watching the video clip above.
An obvious take-off on the famous Chik-fil-A cows (below), the above presents a little poultry-themed black humor for your Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
I like both chicken and turkey, by the way. Low carbs, high protein. What’s not to love? These are two of my favorite animals.
Photo credit: Chik-fil-A
In honor of Thanksgiving, when many people like to watch football.
Back in the day, I had one of these handheld football game units from Mattel Electronics. As I recall, the players of each team were represented by little red dots of light on the screen.
This was probably an overly ambitious game for the technology of that time (late 1970s/early 1980s). I found it somewhat confusing to operate, and I never did learn what the difference between “Pro 1” and “Pro 2” was.
There’s also the fact that I am not–and never have been–much of a football fan. So maybe I’m not the best 80s kid to ask about this one.
The World Cup is presently underway in Qatar.
As I noted previously, the Western media has discovered that Qatar is a rich oil sheikdom with laws and social mores straight out of seventh-century Arabia. The Western media has repeatedly pointed out that, golly gee, Qatar isn’t much like France, Sweden, or the United States.
Qatar is not even much like Red State America, much as progressives on MSNBC like to whine about the “Christian Taliban” in Trump Country.
While folks in Trump Country might not embrace gay marriage and drag shows for second graders (I feel creepy even typing that last phrase), no one in the American South is proposing that gays be locked up and beaten…along with adulterers.
Welcome to Qatar! Where—oh, by the way, you can’t drink alcohol, either. And ladies, put those midriff-exposing tops away. Try this nice burqa on for size. The burqa is available in either black or brown. Take your pick! Continue reading “The Qataris are not impressed”
In honor of simpler, saner times in America, here is a look at some of the Thanksgiving-themed paintings produced by artist Norman Rockwell during the mid-20th century.
Wherever you are, dear reader, I hope you enjoy the holiday with family and/or friends.
Be safe, and beware that second slice of pumpkin pie.
This young woman performs “The Trooper”, from Iron Maiden’s 1983 album, Piece of Mind.
I can’t imagine the talent it would take to pull this off. Bravo.
For reference, here is the original heavy metal song below:
As I recently noted, the GOP performed miserably in the 2022 midterms because of a.) Trump, and b.) culture-war issues (specifically, abortion).
The Republicans’ 2022 strategy—digging in their heels on both abortion and Trump—went against both public opinion polls, and the 1994 GOP playbook. (In the 1994 midterms, under President Bill Clinton, the GOP took back both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Now that was a red wave.)
Which brings us to the Respect for Marriage Act. The Respect for Marriage Act would bring about the federal recognition of same-sex marriage. This would prevent socially conservative state legislatures from invalidating same-sex marriage at the state and local levels.
To state the conclusion from the outset, I believe that Republican lawmakers should support the so-called Respect for Marriage Act…though my reasons are not as politically correct as some of you might think. Continue reading “The GOP and the Respect for Marriage Act”
We are only beginning to learn about Anderson Lee Aldrich, the 22-year-old whackjob who shot up a gay nightclub in Colorado over the weekend, killing at least five.
But we know, by now, how these things go. They have become predictable. After all, there is a new headline about an under-30 mass shooter practically every month nowadays.
Aldrich will doubtless turn out to be a young man with no girlfriend, who is awkward around girls. He might be a self-identified “incel”. Aldrich will have no pressing problems, as such, but a psychological evaluation will show that he was unable to cope with life’s daily pressures. (Ya think?)
We’ll learn that Aldrich was “radicalized by online hate speech”. Because, of course, if you read something online, you absolutely must act on it. Twenty-two simply isn’t old enough to discern otherwise.
So the first thing we’ll need to do is clamp down on social media. Appoint another committee to study the problem.
And as for guns: the White House has already made a renewed call for an assault weapons ban.
I don’t mean to be glib here. But there is something wrong with the idea that otherwise sane and well-adjusted young men can be turned into mass murderers by something so peripheral as social media. Ditto the notion that mass shootings must inevitably occur simply because guns are available. Continue reading “Another Gen Z mass shooting:
some necessary but unasked questions”
FIFA President Gianni Infantino is upset that you’re upset about human rights abuses in Qatar. The World Cup is about to open in this small Arab sheikdom, and the FIFA president wants people to stop kvetching about what a bad place Qatar is.
Infantino even resorted to classic whataboutism at a recent press conference: “What we Europeans have been doing for the last 3,000 years, we should be apologizing for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons.”
The difference, of course, is that western nations constantly flagellate themselves over their long-ago sins, both real and imagined. Self-reflection, as a cultural practice, has yet to reach the Muslim Middle East in any big way. Continue reading “Yes, Qatar is a human rights hellhole”