Legal humor here. “Basically, he says we’re in big fucking trouble, but for ten grand he can make it all go away.” “Okay, this is weird. He says he has three names—‘Rip’, ‘Van’, and ‘Winkle’. So I say we eat him.” “He says he’s from the future. If that’s true, it knocks our entire understanding…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Dylan Byers, explaining why Bill O’Reilly hasn’t said what Bill O’Reilly has said
Politico’s Dylan Byers attempts to clear the air regarding the charges made against Bill “Golden Boy” O’Reilly: Had O’Reilly falsely claimed to have been on the Falkland Islands when he wasn’t, the Fox News host might be in serious trouble. But he never really said that. He has said that he was “in a war zone in…
Freeman Dyson and the continuing myth of the international freemasonry of science
Freeman Dyson has an interesting—alas, far too interesting—review of Frank Close’s new book, Half-Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy, which I guess should be titled “Physicist and Spy,” although Dyson pretends he isn’t sure if Pontecorvo, a brilliant experimental physicist who worked with the legendary Enrico Fermi, actually was a spy,…
Obama failed to predict future, experts say
Graeme Wood has an article in the Atlantic that’s getting lots of play, explaining that “we” have been getting those ISIS guys all wrong, that what they really want is a big battle in Dabiq, a place in Syria, to fought by the Muslim faithful against the armies of “Rome,” a battle that will ultimately…
Dylan Byers is confused
Over at Politico, Dylan Byers has been reporting, in voluminous detail, on the war of words between lefty pub Mother Jones and Fox talking head Bill O’Reilly, regarding whether Bill’s frequent past claims to have been in a “war zone” during the Falklands War constitutes a reasonable mot juste, since Bill was in fact in Buenos Aires at the time….
Whiter than the foam that drips from Kevin D. Williamson’s lips
Kevie D has an absolutely epic rant over at the National Review, a rant that starts with Rudy Giuliani’s howler that Obama doesn’t love America but goes beyond it to argue, with hilarious vehemence, that our two-term president doesn’t even like America before somersaulting to the astonishing conclusion that no one should love America because,…
Pseudo New Yorker
Legal humor here. “You’ll be riding shotgun.” “You have a choice of Wilber or Orville.” “I’m afraid we won’t be able to take you all the way to Chicago today, Mr. Prescott. But we can take you 120 feet closer than you are now, guaranteed.” “Beverage service will be limited. And, frankly, so will everything…
David Carr and the Great American Media Machine
The death of New York Times media critic David Carr has been greeted with a universal outpouring of affection and grief for a man who “was sometimes blunt, almost always searingly honest,” in the words of Times executive editor Dean Baquet. I guess I don’t entirely agree. None of the articles I read about Carr mentioned the fact that…
The case against the case against the case against the Crusades
Ross Douthat, whom I’ve more or less left alone for some time, has a considered pushback against President Obama’s recent prayer breakfast talk during which he alleged that Christians could, at times, be as bad as Muslims, citing the Crusades and the Inquisition as examples. Douthat wisely leaves the Inquisition alone1 but is not completely…
No tears for Brian Williams
Did you hear about former NBC nightly news host Brian Williams? Well, if you haven’t, he’s out, and all the complaints about an outrageous and hypocritical media firestorm can’t conceal the fact that the petard on which poor Brian self-hoisted and self-destructed was a cream-puff nightly news item about a non-event starring Brian himself! Did…