One good thing leads to another, right? Especially when the good thing is Duke Ellington. This is a “soundie” from 1943. “Soundies” were cheaply filmed musical performances. The band is actually playing, but the soundtrack is pre-recorded, so what you see doesn’t always match what you hear, allowing the musicians to ham it up if…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Those socks won’t coordinate
Over at the New Republic’s lead blog “The Plank,” Jason Zengerle makes mincemeat of Tom Brokow’s tribute to Tim Russert in the NYT (Yes, this is awfully inside, but it’s the Internet, damn it! It’s supposed to be inside!) Zengerle’s takedown needs to be read in full, but the essence is that Tim and Tom…
Ruth Marcus: just too damn much mercury in her sushi
Or else she’s just too damn stupid. Just weeks after demanding that Caroline Kennedy be appointed to the U.S. Senate because it would a fairy tale come true, she’s saying that Ronald Reagan was right to pardon Mark Felt for conducting illegal bag jobs on Bill Ayers and his Weatherman pals and that, by extension,…
Blogojavich. Rod Blogojavich.
I am one of those who think that B-Rod is getting a bit of a raw deal here. Sure, he’s talked a lot of trash, but if your name was Rod “I’ve heard all the jokes so shove it” Blogojavich, you’d talk a little trash too. Despite his mighty efforts to get people to do…
Dr. Mankiw’s favorite chart
Or at least a chart from his favorite textbook (guess whose). Remarking on the above, Dr. Greg sez “The most noteworthy feature of these data is the substantial growth of government from 1929 to 1945. It is easy to understand why the size of government grew so much during this period: The nation was responding…
What’s up with Detroit ?
By now only the willfully ignorant do not know that UAW members make $73 an hour, or rather the labor costs at Ford, GM, and Chrysler come out to roughly that figure, thanks to lavish benefits for retirees on top of an approximate $50 an hour wage for actual workers, comparable to non-union auto workers’…
Fortunately, they were too drunk to care
The Bush Twins on their replacements, Sasha and Malia: “They’re a lot younger than we are, cuter than we are. We’re old news.”
Ross Dumbfuck does it again
A few weeks back I took a trivial slap at Ross Douthat for a lame squib he wrote at the expense of poor Adrian Grenier (yeah, that Adrian Grenier) who I suspect is not quite as untalented as Ross says he is. Well, today it’s a lot more serious, thanks to an abysmal post Ross…
Don’t say the Washington Post never granted you any gratuitous and unmerited favors, departing Bush Administration
The Washington Post has been a persistent and aggressive critic of the Bush Administration’s disgraceful violation of the basic laws not only of democracy but of humanity, but somehow it can’t, or at least doesn’t, resist throwing that vicious crew an occasional bone. The editorial page of today’s Post provides a forum for a thoroughly…
Goin’ Postal—Three Things You’ll hate about the Sunday Post
There’s a lot to dislike in today’s Washington Post. The usually reliable Richard A. Clarke slides way off the rails with one of those “this didn’t happen but it could have” imaginative reconstructions of what Osama et al. might be talking about these days, what they might be talking about, that is, if Muslim terrorists…