Anne Applebaum is back from Afghanistan, and she has a tale to tell. According to Anne, the job is tough but doable. “Though Americans like to talk about “winning” and “losing” the war in Afghanistan, on the ground it’s clear that those categories aren’t relevant. Of course we can “win”: The real question is whether…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Two and 44/100s cheers for capitalism
A fascinating story in the September 9 Washington Post tells the tale of a come on practiced by some DC-area car dealers: Come on down and win $30,000 in cash! Or a Silverado truck! Or a flatscreen TV! Or a voucher for 150 gallons of gas! Now, granted, the odds that anyone would win any…
Drill, baby, drill or Toke, baby, toke?
A rather off-topic scandal is unearthed at the NY Times among those W&C guys at the Dept. of the Interior, involving drugs, sex, and free tickets to Toby Keith concerts.* Back in the day, my dad had a friend who thought that he and my dad should run the Bureau of Fish and Wildlife: “You…
Tales From The Bucket—Oh Yeah!
Okay, I’m tired of being serious. Besides, this is huge. You may remember a week or two ago I went off on a tangent about comics (here and here). Well, I thought I had kicked the habit, but I gotta tell you, the old “Woodcut Gil” Gil Thorp artist is back. Tales From The Bucket…
The snark that would not die
Not if I can help it, anyway. I recently posted a comment at the New Republic, regarding an article that Martha Nussbaum had written on Roger Williams, a commented that suggested, among other things, that I hoped I would live long enough to see Martha, Richard Posner, and Justice Scalia fighting it out with socks…
Benny Green—Cottontail
Benny Green, pianist with the Ray Brown trio, takes the lead in this version of Duke Ellington’s “Cottontail.” The trio includes Brown on bass, taking the backseat on this one, and drummer Jeff Hamilton, enhanced by a very large European big band. Recorded in concert in Cologne in 1994. Green quotes too much to be…
Surge n’ Pause, n’ Pause n’ Pause
OK, enuff with the Mary Worth stuff. I’m also an expert on foreign policy. Seriously! In today’s Washington Post, we learn that “Pentagon leaders” want to delay any reduction in U.S. troops in Iraq for at least another Friedman unit—that fabled six months after which “we’ll know a lot more” and our “real but fragile”…
Don’t laugh. That plummeting mote was once Cynthia Oznick.
Cynthia Oznick, on the occasion of her fœtid bemedalling with the 2008 PEN/Nabokov Lifetime Achievement Award: “Nothing is more poisonous to steady recognition than death: how often is a writer—lauded, fêted, bemedalled—plummeted into eclipse no more than a year or two after the final departure? Who nowadays speaks of Bernard Malamud, once a diadem in…
More Mary Mega Madness!
Well, just a little, to get you going. Josh, the Comics Curmudgeon, offers a link to Mary Worth, Style Maven,” maintained by “Tina,” who introduces herself thusly: “I’m a seamstress and grad student and I don’t sleep nearly enough.” Well, I’ll say. Tina offers, among other things, black and white repros of Mary Worth strips…
The baffling, or if not baffling then almost assuredly plot-driven bigotry of “The Closer”
In my ceaseless effort to stay two or three years behind the times I recently rented the first season of The Closer, TNT’s pride and joy, starring Kyra Sedgwick as Los Angeles Deputy Police Chief Brenda Johnson, a country girl nailin’ perps like the city boys just don’t know how. In the first episode, Brenda…