Legal humor here. “Very pretty! But can it fly?” “You tell him you’re a Guinea Hen. I’ll take my chances.” “Pretty tails hatch no eggs, Helen. Pretty tails hatch no eggs.” “After three drinks they all look pretty to me.” “He’s kind of a one-trick pony, if you know what I mean.” “Well, you ought…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Bluff in the Buff: The Unspeakable Nudity of Jeffrey Goldberg
A few weeks back, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a column, via “Bloomberg View,” that, after a certain amount of adroit throat-clearing, advanced the following thesis: I’m talking about the belief, advanced to me by a former senior Israeli military official, and echoed by other non-insane people, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is bluffing: He has…
Not stranger than fiction, but worse
Joe Biden, whom I’ve tagged so frequently as the dumbest man in Washington that I’ve gotten tired of it, isn’t listening to me or Osama bin Laden.* Joe, who may perhaps be forgiven for believing that he wouldn’t be worse than either Obama or Mitt Romney, “has quietly assembled an A-team of advisers who would,…
James Q. Wilson good, James Q. Wilson not so good, Part II
Yesterday I had mostly good things to say about the late John Q. Wilson; today, mostly not so good, taking off from his May 22, 1995 review of Alan Brinkley’s The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War in the New Republic (subscription only). Confronting FDR, the liberal god himself, Wilson doesn’t…
Flying Dutchman cracks the Da Vinci Code
Dutchman Jarno Smeets gets his wings. Full details here. Sorry, but I lack the technical expertise to give you the full picture. I also apologize for the “Chariots of Fire” background music, which was not my idea.
James Q. Wilson good, James Q. Wilson not so good
James Q. Wilson, paired perhaps too conveniently in death with the rowdy Andrew Breitbart, was hailed as one of the best, or at least one of the most tolerable, of the neo-conservatives, no doubt because he was careful to avoid foreign policy. The “necessary” war in Iraq, and now the even more necessary war in…
U.S. Commerce Department to China: Your solar panel subsidies are more illegal than our solar panel subsidies
You may have heard that the Obama Administration spent $500 million subsidizing a solar panel company named Solyndra, which went bankrupt largely due to competition from solar panels imported from China. Well, now the U.S. Commerce Department, supposedly at the behest of disinterested bureaucrats rather than pissed-off politicos, is going to slap a tariff on…
Thought for the Day—with apologies to Montaigne
Is God always fucking with me, or am I always fucking with God? AfterwordsI promise not to make a habit of this.
The Giants of Jazz, 1971—“Round Midnight”
Monk with Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt, Kai Winding, Art Blakey, and Al McKibbon. The fact that these legendary figures couldn’t land a gig on their own says a lot about the state of jazz, and the crushing impact of the Beatles et al. on the music business in general. Frustrating mike problems practically silence Dizzy’s…
Pseudo-New Yorker
Legal humor here. “Yucca Flats. Why?”* “I’m sure it does surprise you. It surprises everybody. But it wouldn’t surprise ole Bobby Oppenheimer.” “It’s just like a horse, ceptin’ it don’t eat apples. Not without taking your whole damn arm off at the same time, leastwise.” “Cause the seagulls ate all the little ones, that’s why.”…