"When I do not want to say things in real life I often say them here." — Mimi Smartypants
“What has happened to you? How did you turn out this way? You know everything about me. I don’t know shit about you. Not a damn thing.” “That’s the way it is.” — Michael Nyqvist (as Mikael Blomkvist) and Noomi Rapace (as Lisbeth Salander) in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Shutter Island (2010) I […]
The difficulty of getting at the truth of a story was increased today by Wonkette, an influential political blog, then multiplied by Fox News, a conservative propaganda outlet. Starting with the onion’s outer layer, here’s the headline and blurb from Wonkette: An American state has decided to promote illiteracy? What, are they shutting down schools? […]
Our friend Darrell makes the most wonderful cards. I’ll never forget the one he made for our daughter Polly on her birthday a couple of years ago — it was a small shoebox, and when Polly lifted the lid off there was suspended from it a mobile made of small objects and photos of Polly […]
A zippier title for this post would be State Secrets & Shit Lists, but I’ll refrain. The way the authoritarians in our midst are calling for Julian Assange’s assassination, I can’t help thinking of Orwell’s 1984, where the citizens of Oceania turned to their viewscreens once a day for the Two Minutes Hate directed against […]
On this day in 1965, Australia and New Zealand exchanged instruments of ratification for an agreement on a limited free trade area. In the USA, the top song on the popular music charts was The Supreme’s I Hear a Symphony. In Wiesbaden, Germany, two frightened 19-year-olds exchanged vows. Of the three events, the most momentous […]