It’s a damn fact: movies are made either for 13-year-olds or bicoastal glitterati/literati pc pundits. So if you want to watch the Avengers avenge something, or see a woman make love to a fish—because all men are you should excuse the expression pigs—be my guest. I prefer to stay home and laugh. My resources o’…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Shorter Dick: Do as I say, not as I did
Or, maybe, do as I did, not as I say. Or even, do as I say, not as Reagan did. You may have heard that our former veep, Ragin’ Dick Cheney, ripped our current veep, Mild Mike Pence, a new one over the Trump Administration’s less than rumbustious foreign policy. Money quote (or money shot)…
Blimps are back, baby! Big time! Sort of!
Oh, yeah, baby, blimps—or rather rigid-frame airships—are back! This time, for sure! Why do I care? Well, settle back in your easy chair, and smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, because the backstory for this post is intense! Close to 40 years ago, I worked with “Dee”,1 a woman who, in addition to a Ph.D….
Charlie Byrd Trio—“Blue Monk” New Orleans 1993
To my untrained if not indeed untrainable ears, Charlie simply plays a standard blues using the chords to Monk’s composition rather than basing his solo on the composition itself, which is what many people do when playing Monk-which, of course, is not what Monk wanted. However, I used to see Charlie way back in the…
War! What is it good for! APPROPRIATIONS!
Some time ago—well, thirty years ago, more or less—I read a reminiscence on the journalism biz by Michael Kinsley, recalling the words of journalistic wisdom he received as a tyro from a legendary pundit whose name I have forgotten: “Always sell the same piece at least three times.” By that standard, I’m a motherfucking journalistic…
No Life? No Problem! Slate explains why you have to see the 12 precious additional minutes to “A Star Is Born” in the “A Star Is Born Encore” edition now playing in movie theaters across the country
Yes, you can fill up a good three hours of that empty void you call you by going to see A Star Is Born Encore, but you can also kill a good 20 minutes more just by reading “The Best and Worst New Scenes in A Star Is Born EncoreI” in Slate. Heather Schwedel ably,…
Trump stumbles his way to peace. Or not.
Donald Trump’s decision to “walk away” from his always dubious summit with North Korean strongman/torturer/mass murderer Kim Jong-un was greeted with sighs—indeed heartfelt gasps—of relief on the part of the MIC (Military Intellectual Complex), including the editors of the National Review who rightfully pummeled Trump for his obvious and continuing affection—and indeed admiration—for Little Kim,…
Ilhan Omar: The strange case of the little girl in the headscarf who noticed that the emperor has no clothes
Oh, Ilhan Omar, what have you done? Yes, speaking the truth in the halls of Congress has always been hazardous to your health, but when little Ilhan, newly elected representative for the fifth district of Minnesota (basically Minneapolis and environs), remarked that “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says…
Nate Silver explains it all for me. Pretty much.
Before the 2016 election—before the death of reason—elections impresario and general numbers dude Nate Silver put together and posted on his fivethirtyeight website the video shown above, “Long Before Trump, There Was Ross Perot”. What was interesting to me was not so much Perot seen as a precursor to Herr Donald as the conviction expressed…
The dollar still sound as a dollar, studies show
If you search on the Internet for “Why the dollar will never collapse” or, conversely, “Why the dollar will collapse”, well, you’ll get a lot of hits. What you won’t find, unfortunately, is a piece I read in Bloomberg several weeks ago explaining, well, why the almighty dollar remains so goddamned almighty, and which I…