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From Keith Knight’s Mouth to God’s Ear, Please
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 [...]
Democracy 101: Great Apolitical PSA
Courtesy of Steven Spielberg and, well, pretty much everybody.
Has John Cusack Ever Made a Bad Movie?
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 [...]
Fact, Fiction, and the Gray In-Between
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 [...]
Puzzlin’ Evidence… Done Hardened in Your Heart
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 [...]
Department of Neighborhood Security
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 [...]
The Others Next Door
Stewart Neville (who participates as “Conduit” in the blogalogue at various writerly sites) is an Irishman with a hard-boiled fictional voice and a voice of sweet reason — or at least reason, period — when not constrained by a “Once upon a time… The End” frame. His post yesterday offers up a case in point. [...]
When Language, Pop Culture, and Politics Collide
You know what driver’s-ed classes don’t teach you? They don’t teach you how complicated it is to make your way through a busy intersection of more than two streets, especially when there are no traffic signals. I thought about this failure today, in connection with the 1972 film of the musical 1776. Until last night, [...]
Real War
Courtesy of Steve King’s Today in Literature e-newsletter, I learned that today was the birthday (1831) of journalist Rebecca Harding Davis. Without further comment, I offer you here an excerpt of Harding Davis’s writing, looking back on the Civil War. I had just come up from the border where I had seen the actual war; [...]
Forty Years On
From the NY Times, RFK’s kids remember him: Kerry Kennedy But most of all, he believed it imperative to question authority, and those who failed that lesson did so at their peril. Joseph P. Kennedy II Robert Kennedy had a wonderful way of allowing others to tell him how the world looked through their eyes. [...]
