Author Archives: Randall A. Golden

The Indiana Historical Society’s Festival of Trees 2025: Indoor Christmas Forest Fun

November 21, 2025 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Pink and white Christmas tree with Ralphie ornaments and bunny ear topper. Next to it is a cardboard standee of Ralphie in bunny suit from "A Christmas Story".

I’d give it a major award if I could: Booth Tarkington Civic Theatre celebrates their upcoming performances of A Christmas Story: The Musical, December 5-27.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: each year the Indiana Historical Society in downtown Indianapolis hosts a special Christmas exhibit called the Festival of Trees, for which dozens of local businesses and charities festoon a tree (or sometimes alternative objects) with decorations befitting their interests, causes, products, and/or colors. For the fourth year in a row my coworkers and I took a lunchtime field trip to their museum and immersed ourselves in holiday spirit, local pride, and tree-trimming cuteness.

The participating companies and entities come and go. Some put up a tree each and every year without fail; newcomers will often join in the festivities alongside them. (Alas, this year saw no trees from past providers such as the Eiteljorg Museum, the Avon Chik-Fil-A, and our Indianapolis Colts despite going a strong 8-2 as of this writing.) Once again my wife Anne couldn’t tag along this day because she has her own employer and perks, so I took pics to share with her and with You, The Viewers at Home. Please enjoy this selection from this year’s assortment of 84 different displays.

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“Predator: Badlands”: Yautja, Yutani! Yutani, Yautja!

November 16, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Elle Fanning and guy in Predator costume standing back to back, sternly.

She’s a happy-go-lucky corporate android! He’s a space hunter with a grudge! THEY FIGHT CRIME!

The Predalienator Cinematic Universe is in full effect, or whatever we’re calling it! Fans of the formerly standalone IPs never expected 20th Century Studios would use the two Alien vs. Predator crossover films — one a mediocre slog with a decent Final Boss Battle; the other, amateurish drek — as the foundation of a unified transmedia empire a la Marvel and DC. After both lay fallow for years except in licensed comics, they’ve been called back to active duty and merged into a single science fiction canon through the magical power of Easter eggs.

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Our 2023 Road Trip #14: 82 Queen and Back to King Street

November 13, 2025 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Cup of she-crab soup topped with a few herbs, served in white cup on white saucer with white doily on hardwood table.

She-crab soup! That Charleston specialty was the best bite I had all week. Yes, even better than donuts.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Every year since 1999 Anne and I have taken one road trip to a different part of the United States and seen attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home. From 1999 to 2003 we did so as best friends; from 2004 to the present, as husband and wife. After years of contenting ourselves with everyday life in Indianapolis and any nearby places that also had comics and toy shops, we overcame some of our self-imposed limitations and resolved as a team to leave the comforts of home for annual chances to see creative, exciting, breathtaking, outlandish, historical, and/or bewildering new sights in states beyond our own. We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.

For 2023 it was time at last to venture to the Carolinas, the only southern states we hadn’t yet visited, with a focus on the city of Charleston, South Carolina. Considering how many battlefields we’d toured over the preceding years, the home of Fort Sumter was an inevitable addition to our experiential collection…

By noon our long walk through downtown Charleston had taken us over a mile south of our car and into their version of the French Quarter — a mite smaller than New Orleans’ own that we’d visited a decade earlier, and nearly as sweltering, but 100% fewer drunkards bumping into us. We tried to focus on the sights all around despite having emptied our water bottles.

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“Bugonia”: What If Rod Serling Made a Lifetime Movie

November 12, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
In a basement, Jesse Plemons and Aiden Delbis in rumpled suits standing over a seated and angry Emma Stone, whose head is shaven.

Reservoir Dogs x V for Vendetta.

Two-Time Academy Award Winner Emma Stone has earned the clout to do only whatever she feels like after La La Land and Poor Things cemented her in the Hollywood history books, not to mention her nominations for Birdman and The Favourite. She could easily coast for the rest of her career playing unstoppable world-changing women with the best fashions, hairstyles, and male costars equal or lesser to her in power rankings. She’s more than earned the right to just sit back, relax, and coast along as the headliner in a network or streaming legal drama for the next ten years.

Instead with her latest she’s doubled down on her current outré mood. Anyone who hasn’t seen her previous black comedies she made with the idiosyncratic director Yorgos Lanthimos — not just The Favourite and Poor Things, but also Kinds of Kindness, which I have yet to endure — may be unprepared for their latest collaboration Bugonia. Technically it could be reduced to a too-basic streaming-menu logline: “Resourceful businesswoman must escape the madmen who kidnapped her.” Sounds like it could be slotted snugly in between 20-year-old basic-cable remainders and Netflix’s increasingly middlebrow offerings, right? Like a prime candidate for an inaugural Investigation Discovery TV-Movie of the Week? You could maybe even con subscribers into thinking it’s a vanguard in that burgeoning new pop culture market, “Based on a True Crime Podcast”. Eventually — and it does take a while — the viewer realizes with growing horror that it’s none of those things as Lanthimos gets down with his outlandish Lanthimosian self.

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I’m a Funko Pop!

November 11, 2025 By in Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments
A custom Funko Pop with my name on the box. Figure has curly grey hair, beard, glasses, remote, comic, and blue shirt.

Sorry, shoppers, this was a one-and-done exclusive. I’m all sold out!

Of all the adjectives ever used to describe me, “toyetic” has never been among them. Here I am anyway!

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WordPress Blogger Weeps Upon Realizing Chinese Bot Swarms Don’t Count as “Found Family”

November 9, 2025 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Kent Brockman from "The Simpson" on TV with caption in Matt Groening font, "I for one welcome our new robot overlords!" Next to him is photo of a real-life Chinese kung-fu robot. Yes, that's a thing now.

No, this entry isn’t about how Chinese scientists have made their very own versions of DC Comics’ Shaolin Robot. That part’s wild but incidental to the topic at hand.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: sometimes this site gets hits, which I chart at every year-end as self-reflection on what I’ve done over the previous twelve months — what worked, what didn’t, which entries got looked at most, which times did SEO seemingly help even though I never give it much thought, etc. By and large, as a stats junkie I get what I need from the WordPress dashboard, even though I’m confident the results are typically a more accurate measure of how many search engine crawlers acknowledge MCC’s existence, as opposed to gauging attention from real people. But same as in video games, a score is a score, and I’ll take whatever points I can get.

At least, that was my philosophy until a few days ago. Site traffic has been weirdly, consistently higher than usual ever since our Dragon Con 2025 cosplay galleries, though live human interaction remains as catatonic as ever. But a funny thing’s been happening since November 6th: that already-boosted activity inexplicably quintupled. None of those hits were referred here from social media or another site, either — they just materialized from nowhere and then disappeared into the night, like ghosts shouting “BOO!” just to amuse themselves.

I looked a little harder at the other dashboard sections that I usually take for granted and noticed a new anomaly: over 85% of my everyday traffic is suddenly, inexplicably coming from China.

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Del Toro’s “Frankenstein”: 9 Reasons Why You’ll Need a Bigger Screen

November 7, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Frankenstein Movie Poster 2025 displayed outside a theater at night. The monster is a gangly tatterdemalion behind the logo and the logline "Only Monsters Play God".

Now showing at a theater near few!

Midlife Crisis Crossover Calls Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein One of the Year’s Best Films™!

Once again the Academy Award Winner has collaborated with Netflix after the previous successes of his animated version of Pinocchio, his Cabinet of Curiosities anthology miniseries, and the Trollhunters stuff I never looked into. Frankenstein was clearly one of the highest ranking dream projects on his wish list, fulfilled at last with a noticeably enormous budget, a stellar cast, his most lavish production design ever, and a too-brief theatrical exhibition before the November 7th relegation to its forever-home in the app’s small-screen back-catalog cellar.

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Happy Belated Halloween from MCC!

November 1, 2025 By in Mundane Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
Anne and me doing jazz hands in front of an arch made of inflatable jack-o'-lanterns.

Halloween joy on Friday night!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: each Halloween night my wife Anne and I are among the few holiday observers still handing out candy to trick-or-treaters in our suburban neighborhood. However, this year marks the first time since 2006 that we shirked the tradition, but it was for a very special, one-time reason: we were invited to a Halloween wedding.

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Cincinnati Comic Expo 2025 Photos: Cosplay and the Superman Family!

October 26, 2025 By in Conventions & Events Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Anne posing with Karen Allen at her table while holding an autographed 8x10, both smiling very sweetly.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Marion Ravenwood herself, Karen Allen!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife Anne and I enjoy attending entertainment and comic conventions together, whether in our hometown of Indianapolis or in our neighboring states (and sometimes even farther). We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

This weekend we once again drove two hours southeast of Indianapolis to attend the fifteenth annual Cincinnati Comic Expo, which is normally held in the heart of their downtown that’s not so different from ours. However, while the Duke Energy Convention Center has been undergoing a two-year renovation project, CCE relocated to the Sharonville Convention Center, a smaller venue on the city’s north side that we previously visited for HorrorHound Cincinnati in 2018 and 2019. This was our fifth time at CCE, two years since our last one. This year’s event celebrated a unifying theme: Superman! Nearly the entire guest list had credits from various works featuring the Man of Steel — a proud commonality to celebrate here in the year that saw the release of The Greatest Superman Film of the 21st Century So Far.

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Our 2023 Road Trip #13: Calhoun and the Slave Mart

October 24, 2025 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Three pairs of 19th-century slave shackles hung in a single vitrine.

Shackles on display at Charleston’s Old Slave Mart Museum.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Every year since 1999 Anne and I have taken one road trip to a different part of the United States and seen attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home. From 1999 to 2003 we did so as best friends; from 2004 to the present, as husband and wife. After years of contenting ourselves with everyday life in Indianapolis and any nearby places that also had comics and toy shops, we overcame some of our self-imposed limitations and resolved as a team to leave the comforts of home for annual chances to see creative, exciting, breathtaking, outlandish, historical, and/or bewildering new sights in states beyond our own. We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.

For 2023 it was time at last to venture to the Carolinas, the only southern states we hadn’t yet visited, with a focus on the city of Charleston, South Carolina. Considering how many battlefields we’d toured over the preceding years, the home of Fort Sumter was an inevitable addition to our experiential collection…

Our day-long walk through downtown Charleston continued beyond King Street’s south end as we digressed from browsing boutique windows to observing two commemorations of American history along our path — one a cemetery, the other a museum. Those functions are common stops for us in past trips, but rarely do we find one of each within close proximity to each other and yet representing opposite ends of the moral spectrum, insofar as the unavoidable topic of slavery.

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