I still haven't read any of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest), but, what with the 23 December release of the U.S. movie adaptation of the first book, directed by David Fincher (Alien 3, se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin ( Read more... )

Last week, the electromagnetic real estate holdings of various magazines were a'quiver with the possibility that either Israel or the United States could wage a preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, which -- disciples of Gen. Curtis LeMay notwithstanding -- will very likely spawn a regional war even worse than the wars that currently ( Read more... )

I recently (OK, OK: Sunday, 4 October) reclaimed my complete run of Grant Morrison's comic book for DC's Vertigo imprint, The Invisibles, from a mostly non-comic book-reading friend I'd loaned them to back in 2007; as he'd not read more than the first four issues of Vol. 1, despite my occasional urgings to do so, I finally asked for them back ( Read more... )

Anne Pressly, the anchor at the Arkansas TV station KATV who had a cameo as a talking head stand-in for provocative conservative commentator Ann Coulter in Oliver Stone's new movie W.? The one who was savagely beaten during a robbery of her rented home in a trendy section of Little Rock on either Sunday night or early Monday morning (19 Oct. or 20 ( Read more... )

This past Wednesday (28 May), the nationally-syndicated National Public Radio programme Here & Now, which originates at WBUR-FM in Boston, aired two stories pertaining to the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the resultant rising tide of foreclosures ( Read more... )

Yesterday (Wednesday, 21 May) was quite the trifecta for oil news:

Not only did crude oil hit a record high of U.S. $134.15 a barrel before settling at $133.17 (and Bloomberg's reporting today that it hit $135.04 in after-hours trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange...); not only did executives at the U.S.'s five largest oil companies take ( Read more... )

National Public Radio had sent two hosts of its late afternoon/early evening news programme All Things Considered, Robert Siegel and Melissa Block, to Chengdu in Sichuan Province in China last week, to broadcast parts of the show from there during the week of 19 May -- 23 May as a kind of pre-pre-game show for the upcoming 2008 Beijing Olympics, so ( Read more... )

The syndicated National Public Radio (NPR) programme On Point, which originates from WBUR in Boston (90.9 FM), had in its first hour this past Monday, 28 April an interview with Steven Greenhouse, the labor and workplace correspondent for The New York Times, who was flogging his new book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American WorkerThe show ( Read more... )

Spotted a depressing -- and, in the event, minatory -- passage while browsing through Richard Slotkin's endlessly fascinating Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (NY: HarperPerenniel [a division of HarperCollinsPublishers], 1993; originally published in hardcover in 1992 by Athenaeum, a division of Macmillan ( Read more... )

From the Associated Press, posted on NPR's (National Public Radio) web site yesterday (Tuesday, 16 October 2007); URL: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15275729

Putin Visits Iran, Sends Warnings to US

from The Associated Press

( Read more... )