From Wednesday, 11 March to Sunday, 15 March, I read Elmore Leonard's Bandits (NY: Arbor House Publishing Company, 1987; ISBN: 0-87795-841-6; 345 pps.).

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The April 2013 issue (Vol. 326, No. 1955) of Harper's Magazine leads with the first chapter of John le Carré's forthcoming new novel, A Delicate Truth, followed by le Carré's afterword to the 50th anniversary edition of his breakthrough novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Unfortunately, Harper's only lets subscribers read the online versions ( Read more... )

(With apologies to Rick Springfield.)

Just finished watching the second season of 24 on DVD; owing to, oh, many different factors, I never watched the show when it was on, but I sure heard and read about much of the kerfuffle over it, chiefly over the frequent use -- and efficacy -- of torture, but also over the fact that Los Angeles gets nuked ( Read more... )

Finally finished watching Season One of Dexter, the still-running Showtime TV series about a "righteous" serial killer (played by Michael C. Hall) who works as a blood spatter analyst for the Miami police department by day and targets other serial killers by night ( Read more... )

When I heard my youngest refer to President Obama's swearing-in as the "inniggeration," I realized that, had my company been open today, I would've very likely heard the same unlovely phrase from at least three or four of my co-workers (not including a couple of my bosses); even money that at least one of them would've coupled it with describing ( Read more... )

I've been gradually picking my way through Warren Ellis's and Darick Robertson's much-ballyhooed Transmetropolitan series as my whims and the vagaries of the inter-library lending network permit; I think I'm a little too old and a little too inoculated by having read a fair bit of Harlan Ellison for this series to really hit me where I live, but it ( Read more... )

A couple of thoughts that aren't exactly "senses-shattering" (as many a blurb on a Marvel Comics cover in the 1960s and 1970s would have it) that occurred to me this weekend:

• After watching the second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force -- this is the one with (SPOILERS!) the execution squad on the police department being secretly run by the ( Read more... )

I received a postcard -- a U.S.P.S. Forever postcard, with a picture of a sailboat for the stamp -- today from someone who kept her (his?) surname and address secret.

The text of the card reads:

The coming Presidential Election is one of the most important in the history of the U.S. Our Economy is decreasing and jobless rate is increasing. ( Read more... )

Slate's William Saletan posted an enlightening comparison between Mitt Romney's being secretly filmed saying, this past May, "'There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what....There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government ( Read more... )

The U.S. presidential election of 2012 is showing new iterations on old themes, to wit: Israel is still trying to push the U.S. into providing aid, or at minimum, cover, to its proposed preemptive attack on Iran, to disable Iran's supposed nuclear weapons program.

While there were indications that the administration of "Bush 43" was perfectly ( Read more... )