Since there seems to be an endless roster of people ready, willing, and able to scold President Obama for something that he didn't say -- including South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley at last night's Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida -- I thought I'd reproduce Mike Thompson's editorial cartoon rebuttal from last Friday's (24 August) ( Read more... )

I've said it elsewhere, but it bears repeating here: can we please, please have a moratorium on all championing of Ayn Rand's Objectivist "philosophy" in mainstream political discourse in this country?

I've read enough about her over the years to determine that I've no real interest in actually reading her "masterpieces" Atlas Shrugged and The ( Read more... )

Gore Vidal died on Tuesday, 31 July at the age of 86 due complications from pneumonia; the Internet pretty much blossomed on Wednesday, 1 August, with remembrances and "good riddances", which trickled to a stop by Friday, 3 August (or, in some quarters, Sunday, 5 August ( Read more... )

From Saturday, 28 January through, 5 February, I read an out of print book I'd checked out via inter-library loan (specifically, via MeLCat, a.k.a. Michigan eLibrary; this copy came from a remote storage facility of Michigan State University's main library): Peter Crookston's Villain (London: Jonathan Cape; 1967; 155 pgs.); I'd learned of it during ( Read more... )

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... )

Yesterday, the first thing that leaped out at me from the Google News feed on my computer at work was the hardly unexpected, but no less devastating, word of the passing, on Thursday night (15 December) of British-American professional provocateur Christopher Hitchens (journalist, essayist, book critic, public intellectual, public gadfly), from ( Read more... )

Thanksgiving 2011 gave me good reason to be thankful for the movie theatres in my exurban area being open on that day, so I could cheaply and pleasantly escape an especially AWK-ward familial brouhaha. (I'm also thankful -- I guess -- for McDonald's and Sonic being open so I could get calories from somewhere other than a 7-11; but neither ( Read more... )

I read Richard Condon's A Trembling Upon Rome (NY: Pinnacle Books; 1983 [1st mass market paperback Pinnacle edition published in January 1985]; ISBN: 0-523-42324-1; 382 pps.) from Wednesday, 7 September through Sunday, 2 October.

( Read more... )

New York Magazine's "Daily Intel" blog linked yesterday to a just under eight-minute interview that the Wall Street Journal conducted with Donald Trump, whose latest bid for media attention has been to jump on board the so-called Birther bandwagon (i.e., those folks who loudly insist that President Barack Obama is not an American citizen by birth ( Read more... )

For various reasons, my updates to my LJ fell way off in 2010. Given that some of those reasons were (a) my desktop blowing up and getting (semi-) resurrected; (b) a dodgy internet connection at home; and (c) dodgy electrical power at home (seriously, DTE, WTF?!), I should be devoutly thankful that I don't telecommute and/or take classes on-line ( Read more... )