This week, a little something different: Usually, I start my Friday post by pulling something at random from the last seven days’ selections at whiskey river. Then I go on to include a handful of poems, quotations, film clips, and/or songs to which the whiskey river snippet led me (by whatever inscrutable chain of thoughts).
Today, [...]

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In the previous post, I sort of blew off the significance of the day as if I didn’t take it seriously.
It’s not a joke. I’m trying real hard not to get too puffed up and all “Gee aren’t we Americans wonderful?!?” (As a column in today’s paper said, we don’t even know yet whether he”ll [...]

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Wow — four hundred years, and (many) people still don’t even furrow their brows when you say the name “John Milton.” Most of us aspire to be remembered for one-fourth of that span, if that much.
Today, Milton’s memory is honored (if not read, exactly) principally for his epic works, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained — [...]

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My head keeps saying This isn’t a political blog… this isn’t a political blog…
My heart, though, can’t deny the huge chunk of me myself which is political…
Short version: I have voted in ten Presidential elections. That’s 36 years. For nine of those elections, I have watched the returns on TV and read about them the [...]

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Cartoonist Keith Knight is a regular contributor to my favorite monthly magazine, The Funny Times. To break the routine from his main comic strip, called The K Chronicles, he occasionally does a strip called “Life’s Little Victories.” He builds these strips from ideas submitted by readers — little one- or two-panel ideas describing the little [...]

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Courtesy of Steven Spielberg and, well, pretty much everybody.

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Kidding. Sort of.
I mean, look, the guy’s made almost 60 movies, in a career spanning more than 25 years (per his Wikipedia filmography, at least). It’s pretty much impossible to make that many films and have nary a stinker in the bunch.
Granted, I haven’t seen all or even most of those five dozen films. (Which [...]

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In a college linguistics course, I first encountered the work of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), a pre-World War II organization — we’d probably call it a think tank, nowadays — which (per Wikipedia):
…formed with the general concern that increased amounts of propaganda were decreasing the public’s ability to develop their own critical thoughts. [...]

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Talking Heads was one of those bands which I probably never would have picked up on — not on my own, anyhow. Predictably, in retrospect, it took a nudge from my brother.
Or rather, a couple of different nudges. One of the later ones came in 1986, with the release of the musical film True Stories. [...]

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The Missus and I live in a smallish subdivision some distance away from downtown. Nonetheless, the area around the development is all within City limits — except for the development itself, which for whatever mysterious reason has never agreed to annexation. We (TM and I) refer to it, privately, as The Principality — because it’s [...]

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