Which elephant, you say? Why, the elephant that’s always there. The elephant of race. It was the assassination of John F. Kennedy that first brought liberals’ long-running distaste/discomfort/hatred of guns to the fore. However, it was the race riots of the sixties, and the dramatic increase in violent street crime among young black men that…
Author: Alan Vanneman
The New York Times thinks I’m an idiot
The New York Times, which, the last time I looked, was, you know, a corporation, has a new series up about the creeping horror of private equity, sort of a multi-graphic PowerPointy sort of thing, written more or less at the sixth-grade level, with virtually no facts and virtually infinite innuendo. Did you know that…
Pseudo New Yorker
Legal humor here “O Gracious King, yada, yada, yada, please accept this humble gift, yada, yada, yada, we your loyal peasantry, yada, yada, yada, may your reign be blessed, yada, yada, yada, man, there’s a ton of this stuff, as we recall the many treasures of your bounty, yada, yada, yada, it doesn’t stop, does…
Stan Getz—“Lester Left Town”
No word on the personnel, or anything else. It looks pretty seventies. Posted by Ray Aichinger Jazz
Pseudo New Yorker
Legal humor here “The only climbing walls I’m interested in are the climbing walls of the mind.” “Even a lack of obstacles is no obstacle to the truly motivated.” “Just think of it as an exercise in self-overcoming.” “I see things other men can’t, Harold. I see things other men can’t.” “It’s my own personal…
OK, Bernie’s a mensch
I have never been, nor am I today, a fan of Bernie Sanders’ economic ideas, which I find uniformly awful. Unlike Bernie, I am not a mercantilist. I do not believe that there are X number of “good jobs” in the world, or that it is the duty of the U.S. government to ensure that…
Bojack Horseman—It’s like an “Archer” for horses!
https://youtu.be/VESKjoxAmZg Comedy, said Aristotle, shows us as worse than we are. Well, let it never be said that Hollywood neglects the Stagirite. A case in point is that cynic’s delight, Bojack Horseman, co-created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Lisa Hanawalt, now in its third season on Netflix, filling us in on all those glamourous folks in…
Peter Thiel explained: He hates chicks
OK, let me unpack that. Thiel is on record as saying that chicks shouldn’t be allowed to vote, because they don’t vote the way they should: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the…
Wynton Marsalis Septet—“Brake’s Sake”
When Thelonious Monk signed with Riverside Records in the mid-fifties, producer Orrin Keepnews had elaborate plans for selling Monk to the greater jazz world, plans that included de-emphasizing Monk’s original compositions. Somewhat miffed, Monk, who miffed easily, took a gig as a sideman on a date with saxophonist Gigi Gryce and used the date to…
Alan Vanneman won’t shut up about Paul Ryan
Well, I won’t. I won’t, because I now have a theory to justify my bombast. For months—nay, years—I have been berating the mainstream media for its continuing Paulie worship (catch up on all the bombast right here). Well, now that the scales have been falling from some eyes, thanks to Paulie’s continuing embrace of Donald…