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Regular readers are aware of my fascination with all things North Korean. I check the Korean Central News Agency site almost every day, and just this morning found this gem: China Strives to Create Sound Social Atmosphere Beijing, February 20 (KCNA) — China intensified the campaign against yellow culture and illegal publications in order to […]
“You failed to maintain your weapon, son.” — Michael Caine as Harry Brown in Harry Brown. The Last Station (2009) Confession time: I never read War and Peace, or Anna Karenina. I knew nothing about Tolstoy. Now I know something, and what I learned was interesting enough to make me want to know more. There […]
“Are you old?” “No. I’m only twelve. But I’ve been that for a long time.” — John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In Djibouti, by Elmore Leonard I’ve always loved Elmore Leonard’s novels, not just for the pitch perfect dialogue, but also for the inevitable presence of memorably cool characters: Chili Palmer, Ray Givens, […]
Nancy Nall sums it up perfectly: “It’s just as well that the weekend is coming, as I need to unplug from the internet and stop paying attention to politics for a while. I’m starting to feel that old sourness, the simmer I maintained from roughly 2004 through 2008 … no, through now, that pecked-to-death-by-ducks feeling.” […]
When I was young my father told me a story I’d never forget. It was about a cousin I’d never met, the son of my father’s younger brother in Nebraska. Still an infant, the boy started to run a fever. The fever climbed to 104° and stayed there. Though my uncle and aunt didn’t yet […]
Valentine’s Day, our 45th. Should be old hat by now, right? Not to mention that V-Day’s one of those “Hallmark holidays,” concocted and forced upon us by corporate overlords hoping to encourage a small off-season spike in flower and chocolate sales. So you’d think I could be forgiven for forgetting . . . but I […]
A friend asked me which Superbowl ads I liked best. The very idea of advertising rubs me the wrong way, even though I grant the necessity — have I not plugged my own blogs here and there around the internets? Still, watching and critiquing Superbowl ads has become a tradition, and who am I to […]
Please excuse the silly sibilance of this post’s title. I couldn’t stop my star-spangled self. At the start of yesterday’s Superbowl game they offered up, in effect, two national anthems. Lea Michele sang America the Beautiful and Christina Aguilera sang the by-now traditional Whitney-Houstonized version of The Star-Spangled Banner (she didn’t quite pull it off, […]