"No matter how cynical I get, I can’t keep up.” — Lily Tomlin
Forever, by Judy Blume. Prominent on any list of banned and challenged books is Judy Blume’s Forever. It’s a great title, but Judy Blume could just as well have named it My First Fuck. Considering that Blume’s audience is made up of pre-teen and early-teen girls, it’s easy to understand why so many parents have […]
“The world breaks us all. Afterward, some are stronger at the broken places.” Ernest Hemingway, Farewell To Arms The Girl Who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larsson A Swedish journalist delivers three manuscripts to a publisher. He then dies. The manuscripts are published posthumously, one by one. No, this isn’t some high-concept movie pitch, it’s […]
“Hey, don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love.” — Woody Allen (as Alvy Singer), Annie Hall (1977) S. Darko (2009) I liked Donnie Darko, but I didn’t see much point in S. Darko, unless the point was to cash in on the the success of Donnie Darko. Movie producers don’t do that, do […]
Wow, what an extraordinarily beautiful morning to wake up to! We have an east-facing sliding glass door in our bedroom. It has vertical blinds but we never close them at night, because we like to wake up to the dawn. I knew right away this morning was special — the light was different. When I […]
Yesterday morning I mentioned to Donna that our charcoal-lighting chimney had rusted out. That afternoon I got this email: “Amazon.com recommends Weber 87886 Chimney Starter.” At the coffee shop earlier today our friend Darrell mentioned actor Tom Hanks, and I commented that he and I both went to Sacramento State College. A few minutes ago […]
I grew up hearing the years between 1900 and 1909 called “the aughts,” as in “nineteen-aught-four.” Somehow I doubt that’s what people called them at the time. I bet the people who lived those years had many different names for them, just as we do today for the years between 2000 and 2009. Some call […]
Unconnected thoughts and observations which don’t rate separate blog posts, but when aggregated together might just amount to something: Tasers: This seems like good news, and it comes not a moment too soon: “Police need reasons to believe a suspect is dangerous before firing a Taser and can’t use their stun gun simply because the […]
Some reviewers dismiss Avatar as a 2 hour and 40 minute visual effects feast with 20 minutes of plot. Other reviewers slam it for having a plot based on exploitation and imperialism. Okay, Avatar is a long movie. But I was riveted to my seat the entire time, and not merely by the visual effects. […]