So, this morning I walked into my office building, and two nice ladies who work for the company that runs the place stood near the elevators, handing out candy from several large buckets. Loving all things Halloween I was utterly charmed, and I thanked them as I chose a small package of Whoppers. The elevator […]
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
I remember hearing somewhere that the scion of a local grand (i.e., filthy rich) family was a failure because he was the first who failed to exponentially increase the family fortune—that is to say he didn’t make them multi-billionaires after they’d spent a century as mere multi-millionaires. I don’t know how true that is, but […]
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Monday, September 27, 2010
I recently finished a double-bill of non-survivalist media by reading Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and watching Werner Herzog’s film Grizzly Man. The thread running through both works is obvious—young to youngish fellow enters the Alaskan wilderness to escape civilization and become one with nature, eventually perishing when nature proves a terrible host. They’re both […]
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
David Brooks and I, in a rare alignment of planets, agree on something. Performing his usual trick of writing a book review and piggy-backing on another writer (usually issuing his own spin on the writer’s intentions), he addresses literary darling Jonathan Franzen’s latest book Freedom. In-between the sycophantic flattery to ensure he’s on future guest […]
Friday, September 17, 2010
If the 1990s were the age of irony, where everything sat between double quotes, the 2000s and 2010s are promising to be the age of the participatory lie. Bush’s claim of WMDs was the most egregious example. Even in the face of contradictory evidence, even now, long after it’s been proven that Hussein had no […]
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
I certainly won’t say that Molly Norris should have censored herself (especially considering the dweeby innocuousness of her own cartoon), and that she needed to placate the world’s fundamentalist freaks. That just lends ammo those who think honoring other religions’ points of etiquette is the same as mailing plutonium to bin Laden. No, this is […]
Thursday, September 9, 2010
I used to cram in a post or two a day, and turn out an article a month. I don’t blame parenthood entirely, because things used to be much looser in other areas of my life. I used to fear being crammed into a box. Now it’s obvious that there’s an organized campaign to stuff […]
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
I love a good hoax or practical joke, but the gist of the Dry Erase Board Jenny hoax seems to be, “Ha ha! You thought she was real! But she wasn’t!” There’s no game here, other than, I suspect, an attempt to garner some hits with a hot piece of… Uh, a very pretty girl. […]
A.O. Scott demonstrates the tendency to try too hard to validate Todd Solondz’s plodding, soulless movie-making. “He is unsparing in his attack on the complacencies of the suburban upper middle class, but to describe his attitude as cruel or contemptuous is to miss the compassion and the almost rabbinical ethical seriousness that drives his inquiries. […]
I want a term for an individual who receives acclaim for being an unapologetic prick from masochistic journalists and intellectuals who should know better. An individual who seems to be more about criticism not for the sake of improving art, society, or culture, but for simply being disgusted with whatever is placed before him or […]
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