10 Favorite Ghost Adventures Episodes

Photo Credit: Ghost Adventures / Travel Channel

The crew of Ghost Adventures - Zak, Nick and Aaron - travel to some of the most abandoned and historical sites around the world to capture supernatural evidence in lockdowns from dusk until dawn.

When you catch one episode of Ghost Adventures, you're bound to call it - at first sight - fake. "The orbs they catch are bugs or dust." "The voices that are recorded are fake." Or that Zak is psychotic. (If you see any of his brilliant over-the-top monologues, you'd agree he really just like catching evidence of ghosts.) I'll agree with only the latter.

I never happened to believe in ghosts nor entirely deny the existence of the supernatural..but the biggest skeptics will find themselves in love with the investigations of asbestos infested and abandoned historical sites. I happened to catch the show one afternoon on a fourth of July weekend, my sister denounced it fake, I forced her to keep watching, and now we've been avid fans for three or four years strong. As another Halloween season is coming, I just couldn't pass by an opportunity to spotlight my ten favorite episodes. These are our Ghost Adventures!

Master of Resurgence: The Strangely Brilliant Career of Ben Affleck

In comparison to the McConnaissance - a media-wide hailed return of Matthew McConaughey - Ben Affleck's star status has held up strong despite the variety of guilty pleasure movies he's starred in. After nearly twenty years in showbusiness, the California actor has evolved into a filmmaker forging a strangely brilliant career.

Before he had taken on roles in major blockbusters, Affleck's filmography kicked off on a high note. After acting in several indie movies, the young impressive star and co-star/writer/actor/friend Matt Damon struck gold with Good Will Hunting. An unrecognized genius student (Damon) is forced to become a therapist's patient (Robin Williams) after assaulting a police officer. Gaining critical acclaim, the 1998 drama earned the newbies an Academy Award for Best Screenplay and an Academy Award for supporting actor Robin Williams.

Divergent by Veronica Roth

Set in a futuristic Chicago, a city is made up of five factions based on various virtues. As teenagers, your rite of passage into society is to take an aptitude test which shows you which house you belong in. If you're brave or smart you belong in Dauntless or Erudite, respectively. Or you may belong in Abegnation or Candor, if you're selfless or honest. And, there's Amity, which stays out of the conflict by holding onto peace. If you don't belong in any faction - which holds more value than your own family - you are Divergent.

Veronica Roth's series follows Beatrice Prior, a young woman who grew up in Abegnation and choose to join Dauntless. Her reasons, however, are skeptical. After her own aptitude results, she discovers that she is Divergent. The true faction that she belongs to is one that can't be controlled by the government, where its people live on the outskirts of the city, homeless, jobless, and without a respectable place in society.

By choosing Dauntless, Beatrice tries to form a new identity - changing her name, making new friends, and doing her best in her faction. Her odd position in-between factions leads her to discover secrets about the entire society and it functions.

Told in first person from Beatrice's point of view, it's hard to recognize the differences between characters and the factions. To be honest, the world-building is a mix of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, and its writing blurs together. Despite the story centering on drastically different virtues, the characters from alternating factions sound and act alike. Fellow Dauntless initiates Christina (from Candor) sounds like Al (from Candor) who sounds like Will (from Erudite) who sounds like Beatrice. They try to be "brutally honest" with each other, yet are just throwing melodramatic insults and comebacks back and forth. Their tones rarely vary nor do their sense of humor or emotional responses.

And, there's also Beatrice's love interest - Four. In this new surprising world of pulling knives on each other and getting drunk (a lot), Four is the brooding mysterious leader of the initiate's training. Tris feels a connection to him yet can't pinpoint if he really likes her or not. She becomes his undoing of not playing everything close to the chest anymore, and he wills her to be strong enough to take care of others and lead a revolution. It's not a particularly engimatic romance, but it's just okay as far as young adult relationships go.

What Divergent struggles with the most is its own world-building. The reasoning behind why Divergents are so dangerous binds the book for its nearly 486 pages. A mysterious unrest within Erudite is slowly unravels as its leader Jeanne is raising an army of sorts. The motivations of which are skewed - she wants order and control among the factions, but she does it through brainwashing and chaos. Besides turning portions of society into mindless drones, she's not much of a villain.

Additionally, it was hard to take the baseline of what makes the factions work together and fall apart seriously. Dauntless members test themselves by  hopping on moving trains, physically beating each other to a pulp, perform through hallucinatory tests where they experience their greatest fears, get tattoos...and so on. There's no real line drawn between forcing yourself to be an adrenaline junkie or showing true bravery.

As an author, Roth is admirable for creating a series that has hit it big. While reading Divergent, I questioned which faction I'd fall into naturally and which one would I choose to join. On the same level of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, her book contains unique interactivity between the words on the page and the reader.

Overall, looking at the writing, I found it to have poor world building, cliche prose, and a mix of popular aspects that worked for other series. I felt like the book was trying to push this idea of a personality divided society with very little to go on about why we should care about Abegnation, Amity, Erudite, etc. besides their individual traits - which made it hard to relate to the characters.

Perhaps if this book was the second of the series, where the first developed a relationship between the people and their factions I would've been more intrigued. Otherwise, it all feels a bit forced and not a strong debut  considering it's a literary young adult phenomenon. I think I'll be waiting for the movies to find out what happens.

Rating: ★★☆
Have you read Divergent? What did you think?

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

At age twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed had lost her mother Bobbi to cancer, who she considered to be the love of her life. Her brother, sister, and step-father essentially drifted apart after Bobbi passed away and was the glued that held them together. Strayed became an heroine addict and cheated on her husband with multiple partners to the point where her confession led to their divorce. The trip alongside the Pacific Crest Trail is one of purging her spirit of things that had happened to her, and understanding how she ended up where she is by taking one long physically-emotionally exhausting path to do so.

Strayed provides a wonderful narrative of her life that is both broken and solid. There is a trend in Hollywood and literature that females are not considered adults, therefore have to baby up their language, sexuality, brains, and humor in order to gain a wider audience. Strayed had so much baggage it feels like you were wearing her overstuffed mountain gear along with her as she shares her experiences of cheating, her mother's death, and her family's undoing. So many of her passages emanate the loss of what she went through, and Strayed doesn't glamorize her experiences or push specific spiritual lessons for the readers. It's her journey and we're along for the ride. There is no beating around the bush with her blunders nor her desires, and I liked that Strayed is of a young adult woman's voice is - honest, tormented, humorous, grateful, and enlightened.

Such a major attraction to this memoir is the search for discovery through a singular experience with yourself, and not allowing obstacles in the form of addiction, broken family relationships, etc. stop you. Nature has a way of enveloping us into its arms, if we allow it do so, and Strayed's experience is one that allows us to see the possibilities of what a trip like this can offer us - the solitude, the resolutions, the inner reckoning. Way back when in the early eighties when audiences saw Top Gun (starring Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer) and immediately wanted to become an Army pilot, I read this book and won't be ashamed to say that I am inspired to do something similar - to take a trip somewhere and sort myself out. It is not to replicate Strayed's experience nor to see if trekking solo lives up to the idyllic poetic imagery this book served but more for my own sanity and thirst for adventure/self-reconciliation too. Going through a ton of shit myself, I envied and was emboldened by her choice to deal with her demons in this way. To be ignited enough in her life by her mistakes, the grief of her family, and emotional pain of her past to gain a clearer understanding of who she is.

One thing should be of note with this book is that Strayed's experience is extraordinarily rare. Using guidebooks and having zero experience to hike, this woman completed her mission entirely underplanned. Her boots were too small. She arranged for a friend to send her care packages with twenty dollars at different rest stops; often leaving her with only a few cents in her pocket to get between towns. It's easy to read this and think that she should have been more prepared, but we are living in a different age of technology with cellphones at fingertips. I can't criticize the choices Strayed made, but I think it's a fair warning to those who might be encouraged to read this review to consider your full range of options before trying a trek of this magnitude on your own or with friends. She made plenty of friends and acquaintances along her trip that helped her but many of them are occurrences where her life and physically well-being were in danger. To read her journey from beginning to end, it's almost unimaginable to comprehend how she survived.

The most poignant aspect is how Strayed deals with her mother's death and how it led to her abandoning herself through addictions to companionship, sexuality, drugs, and validation. Far from chick lit, or even chick flick, this book is a refreshing memoir and story of a woman who has muddled big time and needs to reconcile all the parts of her life that has become brutally undone. The story is as much as an adventurous trek as it is deep spiritual or personal reflection for Strayed. It easily became one of my favorite books of the year.

Coming to theatres in December 2014 starring Reese Witherspoon, I am so excited to see the adaptation of Wild in the coming months.  Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (The Dallas Buyers Club), and premiering during the Toronto Film Festival, has already garnered the movie rave reviews for Witherspoon. It's coming out on my birthday week, and I can't think of no other way of being excited to see it and go on the quest into the wild...except to plan my own excursion to take one day too.

Wonder Women: Samantha Brown

Before Travel Channel became obsessed with men gorging on food and treading into limited access sewers, a female host took the network by storm. Her exuberant personality and sense of humor were something I was obsessed with a teenager. Her name was Samantha Brown.

Brown started out with giving tours and staying overnight in ritzy houses and in the tropical United States. Having no previous experience in hosting for television, Brown had been found through The Travel Channel through an audition tape. Luckily the network knew they had someone really special on their hands, and Brown grew to be the first lady of on-air travel.

With her next series Great Hotels, Brown scoped out the North American landscape staying at the finest hotels and exploring the local culture. You couldn't help but fall in love with her. She was the girlfriend and best friend you wanted to hang out at home and abroad. Her love for chocolate and ice cream was your cravings. While you wished to be bouncing on beds, playing games in a hotel lobby, or venturing outdoors on nature escapes or connecting with the locals, she did it with charm and wit.

In her second series titled Passport to Europe, which lasted two seasons, Brown traveled the Euro-world in style, hitching up in places like London, Germany, and Italy. In another series, Brown took temporary residence in Mexico and China. Her willingness to try new things took us sword dancing, rollerblading through Paris at night, snorkeling, and dog sledding.

Her travels weren't always full of smiles. Behind the camera journeying across the world brought long schedules away from family and friends, and going to explored places on her own with a small camera crew. But rarely did those struggles ever come across on-screen. Brown was always a down-to-earth people person.

Forging on with her travels, she never failed to show us everything that could be done in every corner of the world. She taught us the best sights to see, how to save money to travel locally, which hotels to check into and during which season. Her honesty came through when she ate something atrocious or wanted to try something again and again. Meetings with tour guides and special-interest instructors were with a keen interest and open mind. With more series to come like Passport to Asia and Great Weekends, Brown clocked in more than a 160 hours of television. And, she remains one of the sole female hosts to ever grace Travel Channel and really do it all.

She was funny, smart, and down to earth. Brown is one of the few - next to only - explorers (once) on television who didn't have to chow down impossible gargantuan meals in two minutes or live on an island by herself for sixty days and peruse all her survival skills. This woman-sized bubble of enthusiasm proved that we can have an adventure any place we travel, especially with a few spoonfuls of style, humor, and a smile.

Stars I Love: Amy Adams

"If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?" When I first heard actress Amy Adams answer  "Green" quite blondily in the film Drop Dread Gorgeous (1999) I was in love.

Years later, and this actress became a four time Academy Award nominee. And her career has never slowed down. She kicks ass and takes names in every film, photoshoot, red carpet event - you name it. You just can't merely call her an actress. She's a super one.

From her early start as the bimbo classmate trying out for Miss Mount Rose American Teen Princess in Drop Dead Gorgeous and playing inexplicably adorable Daddy's girl in Catch Me If You Can, she's incomprehensibly able to fit every single role.

Her supporting role in the 2005 film Junebug confirms how easily she's able to capture then break our hearts. Not appearing in the film for more than a few scenes as pregnant Ashley, she earned the Academy's attention with a heartbreaking scene where she grieves over the loss of her newborn baby. This was the first of a few downright worthy Oscar nominations to come.

With Enchanted, Adams made every little girls' dream come true by transforming the 2D princess into a 3D world. Critics praised and audiences had no choice but to agree. She was exquisitely innocent, girlish, and had a heart of unbelievable gold. Playing Giselle paved the way for Adams like Julie Andrews and Mary Poppins; she was cemented as an icon for younger audiences around the world and as a showcase actress who could take the most innocent roles and make them work realistically.

This 5'4" firecracker just keeps churning out versatility like none other. Adams is able to curse up a storm and battle against five New Jersey sisters in The Fighter, and then change into lovable effervescent friend in The Muppets. These little movie name droppers don't even cover some of her invincible roles as out-nunning Meryl Streep in Doubt, going Marilyn Monroe-esque in Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, or tackling leading lady indies like Sunshine Cleaning. The funny thing about Amy Adams is even if the movies sucks - which is rare - she always comes out as a favorite. (The Wedding Date - comes to mind).

Let's just take a moment to admire her face and style because it's honestly not one too bad to gawk at.

Many actresses can well-disguise themselves in indies and blockbusters, but somehow their transformations are always tracked - maybe because their off-screen fame is bigger than their on-screen ones, or their pathetically more valued for their beauties than their talent. Adams, along with a small special legion of leading ladies, has been able to take her doughy wide eyes, red hair, and overwhelming talent to be more than just a red carpet clothes hanger or a feminine sidekick.

"I think a lot of times we don't pay enough attention to people with a positive attitude because we assume they are naive or stupid or unschooled. But what if she sees the truth about her life, understands it all and ultimately makes the choice that this is what she wants? Is she goofy? Yes. But she could ultimately be the most intelligent person in the movie."

Like an actress from Old Hollywood, her off-screen isn't personality wrapped up in publicity or tabloid propaganda. Neither in interviews does she try to be outrageous, forcefully quirky or manifesting personalities to suit different interviews. She's always herself; genuinely likable, smart, a bit of a fan girl (to her leading men), and someone who has fun with show-business but wants to make a lasting career with every film.

Her small town roots as an employee at the Gap and musical theater transformed Academy Award nominated powerhouse. When commenting on one of her Oscar appearances, Adams admitted to having an existential crises sitting next to Sean Penn and Meryl Streep; questioning she didn't belong there and that it all could be taken away. Nobody in their right mind can ever take away what is rightfully hers; a shining beacon in cinema.

AFI's Best in Film 100 Years 100 Movies Exhibit Photos

Each Walt Disney World theme park celebrates something unique; for Animal Kingdom it's nature, at Magic Kingdom you see all of your favorite characters, and so on. Disney's Hollywood Studios, once upon a time named MGM Studios, celebrates the worlds of film, television, and music with attraction rides, shows, and restaurants inspired by icons from Hollywood and beyond.

If you've been to Disney's Hollywood Studios in the past ten or fifteen years, you may have come the Studio Backlot Tour. After a vehicle ride of movie props showcased on the theme park grounds, guests are taken to a brief walk-through museum of film props like costumes, photos with information, and old film cameras. For almost several years the exhibit showcased famous film villains like Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood, Darth Vader and storm troopers from Star Wars, and Aliens from the Alien series.

Recently on a visit to Hollywood Studios, I was pleased to see that the museum has an entirely new look with artifacts from Hollywood's most iconic motion pictures. Now titled: AFI's Best in Film: 100 Years, 100 Movies