Biography of Bruce Parsons

Bruce Parsons was born on October 13, 1980 in Pikeville,KY. Growing up, he wanted to draw comics, while he has always wanted to make movies it was way too expensive. He can recall when he was in seventh grade, his parents asked where he wanted to go to school and he said “The Joe Kubert School of Sequential Art” which his parents called it the “Orville Redenbacher School of Art” Bruce did not attend, however instead he chose to study Graphic Design at Morehead State University where he graduated in 2005. Wanting to make movies for a while, but never being able to actually learn the art form he decided to attend The University of Ohio where he earned an MFA in Film. The biggest influence on Parsons life have been good friends who share a same compassion of always creating projects “There is a little friendly competition there, but there is also a bunch of collaboration, and so we drive each other to try new things and not to settle in life but to figure out what we’re doing not just now but three years from now.” said Parsons.

Parsons is many things father, husband, teacher, filmmaker and a beekeeper. Yes beekeeping is his biggest hobby, he currently has three hives but has held up to six. The interesting thing about him beekeeping is that he doesn’t like honey, but rather enjoys the process of keeping the bees and just gives the honey away. He is also a huge fan of baseball his Major League Baseball team is the Chicago Cubs and he cannot wait until his son is old enough so he can teach and watch his son play a game that meant a lot to him growing up. Being a jack of all trades there is something that parsons wishes he was better at without hesitation, he said “Math!”
One thing that he would like to accomplish that he hasn’t yet is to create a feature length Narrative or Documentary film. He has made a couple of short films and has helped others working on features. He hopes in the next 20 years to accomplish maybe both.

If he could have any super power it would be a healing power, one that not only heals himself but others for his non selfish answer. The most practical super hero ability would be he could stop time and be able to nap whenever and have the ability to jump right back into it and work 24 hours straight. If he could be anyone in history, he named three inventors Thomas Edison, Eadweard Muybridge and Niccoli Tesla because inventors these days are re-purposing old ideas while these guys were coming up with their products out of thin air.

Bruce Parsons has been at the University of Pikeville going on five years, and has been a crucial piece of the growth that the University has seen as he helped rebuild an outdated website and collaborated with president Hurley to create the logo for the University. Recently this year he became an adjunct film and media arts professor formerly a full time professor. He pushed his work load back to introduce TheHoller.org which is a social learning network designed for users in central Appalachia. The holler is divided into two sections the social network and self paced regional online courses, including digital storytelling, web design, application and game design. It also features courses from 17 regional K-12 institutions that want to flip the classroom upside down and provide students with professional initiatives to their students. The way the holler is looking the potential is through the roof. For now parsons is excited with what the future holds for his family, friends and holler.

OK Go’s creativity continues with newest music video single “I Won’t Let You Down”.

What will Alternative-Rock band OK-GO create next?

The band’s creative music videos have used treadmills, dominoes and optical illusions. In its latest, “I Won’t Let You Down,” the foursome takes to the road and the sky thanks to camera drones and some personal Honda vehicles called UNI-CUBs. They take you on a magical ride with them once again, The video which already has 12 Million views on YouTube is absolutely beautiful.

The band worked with Japanese director Morihiro Harano to devleop a 5-minute-plus clip, which begins with the band on UNI-CUBs doing some choreographed leg moves and then rises, taking the viewer high over a building lot while the band is joined by several and then dozens of umbrella yielding Japanese schoolgirls.

Eventually we are taken to the warehouse for the conclusion, then a colorful display of what looks like a jumbo-tron in a stadium using flip-card maneuver that includes pictures of the band members and a “ribbon” showing the title of the song.

For OK Go creative videos are nothing new, the band released “Here it Goes Again” which won a grammy for best music video in 2007. The band just released it’s newest album a few weeks ago “Hungry Ghosts”.

Death with Dignity Law, Allows Woman to End Her Own Life.

Brittany Maynard, 29, kills herself under Oregon’s “Death with Dignity” law, which allows eligible patients whom are dying within 6 months to receive medication to end their own life.

The terminally ill woman who revived a national debate about physician-assisted dying ended her life on November 2nd by swallowing lethal drugs made available under Oregon’s law that allows terminally ill people to end their lives. She would have been 30 this month.

Maynard had been in the national spotlight for about a month since publicizing that she and her husband, Dan Diaz, moved to Portland from northern California so that she could take advantage of the Oregon law.

The issue of physician-assisted dying is not new, but Maynard’s youth and vitality before she became ill brought the discussion to a younger generation. Working with Compassion & Choices, Maynard used her story to speak out for the right of terminally ill people like herself to end their lives on their own terms.

Maynard’s choice was not without detractors. Some religious groups and others opposed to physician-assisted dying voiced objections.

Oregon was the first state to make it legal for a doctor to prescribe a life-ending drug to a terminally ill patient of sound mind who makes the request. The patient must swallow the drug without help; it is illegal for a doctor to administer it. More than 750 people in Oregon used the law to die as of December 2013. The median age of the deceased is 71. Only six were younger than 35.

Four other states including Washington, Montana, Vermont and New Mexico allow patients to seek aid in dying.

Afroman releases “Because I Got High” remake supporting Marijuana Legalization

Thirteen years after Afroman released his weed-themed novelty song “Because I Got High,” the rapper-singer has returned to remake his breakthrough single to support nationwide marijuana legalization efforts

Where the original song found the rapper making a series of increasingly poor personal decisions because of weed, the “Because I Got High” Positive Remix above takes a more pragmatic approach, detailing the advantages of legalizing weed. “I had problems with glaucoma/But then I got high/Smelled the cannibis aroma/And I got high/Glaucoma getting better and I know why,” sings Afroman.

The Grammy-nominated artist goes on to extol the added revenue states like Colorado and Washington have realized since relaxing their respective marijuana laws. “They built a school or two/Because I got high,” sings Afroman. “Now the state can fund drug treatment/And I know why.”

The rapper released the video in conjunction with medical marijuana dispensary locator Weedmaps and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). “NORML is thrilled to have brought Weedmaps and Afroman together to create this unique cultural collaboration merging art, entertainment and activism into a single campaign that highlights many of the positive benefits of cannabis, and raises awareness for the legalization initiatives coming up in the 2014 November elections,” NORML Director of Strategic Partnerships Sabrina Fendrick said in a statement.

The video was timed to the release of Smoke the Vote, which hopes to bring notice to the November 4th votes in which Alaska, Oregon and the District of Columbia will decide on the legalization of marijuana and Florida will vote on a medical marijuana amendment.

One Last Game

Before she dies, Lauren Hill hopes to fulfill one last dream: playing a college basketball game. The freshman at Mount Saint Joseph University was recruited there to play, but a terminal cancer diagnosis will sadly cut her career short.

In the middle of her senior year of high school, Hill started feeling dizzy, and her play started to get sloppy. She’d fall, collide with teammates, and just be out of sync. After getting an MRI, she was diagnosed with DIPG (diffused intrinsic pentene gleoma), an inoperable form of brain cancer, and told she only had two years to live.

The only thing that mattered to Hill was whether she’d still be able to play basketball. So she underwent grueling chemotherapy and radiation, and hit the court again. Still, the tumor kept growing, and doctors now tell her she likely won’t make it to December.

But that means there’s still room to play basketball. And her coach at Mount Saint Joseph’s is going to try and make it happen. Their first scheduled game against Hiram College was supposed to be an away game, but the college agreed to move it to a home game on November 2nd, so Hill could play. That may be Hill’s first and last college game.

Instead of giving up, Hill is using her final days on Earth to raise awareness about childhood cancer. “I never gave up for a second, even when I got a terminal diagnosis,” Hill told WKRC-TV. “ I never thought about sitting back and not living life anymore.”

5 Shows you Haven’t Seen, but Should.

1. Continuum
3 Seasons: 36 Episodes
Netflix

Continuum is a Canadian Sci- Fi that centers on the conflict between a group of rebels from the year 2077 who time-travel to Vancouver, BC, in 2012, and a police officer that accidentally accompanies them. In spite of being many years early, the rebel group decides to continue its violent campaign to stop corporations of the future from replacing governments, while the police officer endeavors to stop them without revealing to anyone that she and the rebels are from the future.

2. Orphan Black
2 Seasons: 20 Episodes
BBC
Orphan Black is a Canadian Sci-Fi that is a very underrated show that has started gaining a lot of fan following as more and more have become aware of this interesting series that focuses on Sarah Manning, a woman who assumes the identity of one of her clones, Elizabeth Childs, after witnessing Childs’ suicide. The series raises issues about the moral and ethical implications of human cloning and its effect on issues of personal identity.

3. Rick and Morty
1 Season: 10 Episodes
Cartoon Network
Is an animated comedy series. Rick is an elderly and mentally unbalanced alcoholic who has recently reconnected with his family. He is also a scientific genius. He spends most of his time taking his young grandson Morty on dangerous, outlandish adventures throughout our own cosmos and alternate universes.

4. The Leftovers
1 Season: 10 Episodes
HBO
The Leftovers takes place three years after the October 14 global “Rapture”, known as the “Sudden Departure”, which caused the unexplainable disappearance of 140 million people, 2% of the world’s population. The story focuses primarily on the Garvey family and their acquaintances in the fictional town of Mapleton, New York. Kevin Garvey is the Chief of Police. His wife, Laurie, has joined a cult called the Guilty Remnant. Their son, Tommy, has left home and college while their daughter, Jill is acting out.

5. Silicon Valley
1 Season: 8 Episodes
HBO
Silicon Valley focuses on the six young men who found a startup company In the high-tech gold rush of modern Silicon Valley, the people most qualified to succeed are the least capable of handling success. A comedy partially inspired by Mike Judge’s own experiences as a Silicon Valley engineer in the late 1980s.

Hawkings Warns of The God Particle

Respected physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawkings has just turned into a doomsday prophet. The scientist is worried about the particle know as Higgs Boson, also known as the god particle ”has the worrisome feature” that it could become unstable at extremely high energies and create a “black hole” potentially wiping out earth and even the whole universe warned in his new book Starmus.
“This could happen at any time and we wouldn’t see it coming,” Hawking claimed in the book.
But, hold on; don’t quit your day job and empty your bank accounts just yet. Such a black hole described could take trillions of years to form and dissolve the universe; scientists don’t even have a fast enough particle accelerator to depict the doomsday Hawkings is depicting.
The largest existing accelerator- The Large Haldron Collider (LHC).The LHC is a real triumph of human civilization, it’s easily the most powerful and complex machine human beings have ever built. Simply by firing two protons into each other and having them collide with an enormous release of energy recreating conditions close to the beginning of the universe where energies were that high helped discover the Higgs Boson, in Switzerland in 2012. Other physicists note that it’s highly unlikely the described scenario would ever occur, but Hawking disagrees. “It places important constraints on the evolution of the universe.” he said.
Though, Hawkings stresses the importance of not exploring into the realms of recreating the particle to its truest form, we must take his warning with a grain of sand because learning more about this particle is the key to the universe and eventually may be the key to traverse through time and space with the use of anti-gravity. The next scheduled launch of the LHC is summer of 2015.

25 Years and Counting In Exile

 August 24, 1989, Thursday, 9 a.m. Giamatti, the commissioner of baseball, steps up to a microphone in New York City.

“One of the game’s greatest players has engaged in a variety of acts which have stained the game, and he must now live with the consequences of those acts,” he tells a packed room of reporters.

With that, Giamatti announces that Rose, baseball’s all-time hits leader and one of history’s greatest players, has been banned from baseball for life for gambling on baseball.

“There had not been such grave allegations since the time of Landis,” Giamatti says, referring to Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the commissioner who suspended for life the Chicago White Sox players involved in the Black Sox scandal after the 1919 World Series 

Pete never did anything wrong while he was a player, he did all the little things right.   Pete Rose was banned from baseball  during his tenure as the manager of the Cincinnati Reds, for gambling in favor of his own team.  Standing at only 5’11 190 lbs Pete made a living not by being the most athletic or well built, but did it solely on the way he played the game, on his hustle. No one wanted it more than Pete.  One blemish on a great playing career, has exiled “Charlie Hustle” from MLB’s elite. He was sentenced to a punishment harsher than most MLB players today receive for using performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). For example, Barry Bonds, the Home Run King, was indicted for using PEDs during his career.  He is now a spring training coordinator for the San Francisco Giants. Mark McGuire, another outstanding player, was indicted for using PEDs as well and now serves as the Los Angeles Dodgers hitting coach. Alex Rodriquez and Ryan Braun both caught using PEDs will only have to sit out a year for using.

The question becomes, by what standard does the MLB rank violations? When a gambling manager is banned for 25 years and counting, while players who use performance altering drugs are given a respective slap on the wrist, it makes one wonder if Pete Rose’s sentence was just.  

25 years and counting… let’s reinstate Pete, one of MLB’s greatest players, so he can enjoy and be around the game he loves before it’s too late.