Back in the day, Harry Cohn, notorious chief of Columbia Pictures, had a foolproof way to judging a film’s merit: “If my fanny squirms, it’s bad. If my fanny doesn’t squirm, it’s good. It’s as simple as that.” To which Herman Mankiewicz responded, “Imagine, the whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass!” Carmen Fariña, New…
Pseudo New Yorker
Legal humor here. “I know I’m a pretty bird! Just leave it alone! For God’ssake!” “We’re going to win and I’m going to tell you why. Because advertising is all about repetition and repetition is what we parrots do best. Just be yourselves and we can’t lose.” “Bob, stop talking like a mynah bird. I’m right…
Oberlin’s Gridiron Glory
A week or so back I was delighting in George Will’s annual disparagement of the Super Bowl and suggested that perhaps, when young George was at Princeton, he’d been humiliated by some football hearties, leaving him forever embittered, and suggested that if he had only gone to Oberlin, like me, where there are none such,…
The story was big! It was bigger than Jill Kelley’s boobs!
The thirteen-year-old boy in me* thanks the Washington Post for thinking up another reason to run a picture of Jill Kelley’s mighty bust, shown above, but the news value the Post obtained by rummaging through Jill’s emails to the hapless (or stupid) Marine Gen. James N. Mattis, discussed in the accompanying article, is hard for…
Joe Must Go!
Joe must go! Joe must go! Joe must go! Yes! It’s time for us to take Joe out! I mean, the man is evil! Let’s not just take him out, let’s take him down, six feet down in the cold, cold ground! Well, Josef Stalin was evil, and if any man deserved hanging, he did….
Pseudo New Yorker
Legal humor here. “Kids, I thought we were going to do it half an hour on the table and half an hour off. Because you’ve been up there for more than forty-five minutes.” “So we’re agreed? Demitasses all around?” “Hey, a suit that fits. I could write a book on that one. Do tailors think…
Yes, American Sniper is very largely a meretricious piece of crap
Director Clint Eastwood, quoted by the Hollywood Reporter after a screening of his new film American Sniper, did not sound like a clone of William Kristol: “I was against going into the war in Iraq since I figured we would probably trip over ourselves in some way,” I had a big question when we went into…
Thelonious Punk—“Monk’s Dream”
Live from Kerikeri, New Zealand. Check out the band’s website here. Featuring Bevan O’Brien, drums, Victoria Landgraf, bass, and Reese Helmondollar, sax. Video by Mark Graver
The undeflatable George F. Will
There isn’t much about George F. Will that I find endearing, but the one thing that I find totally endearing is his deep dislike—verging on an irrational loathing, really—of football and, most particularly, the Super Bowl. For some reason, the Super Bowl seems to make George feel like—okay, I’m going to go for it—a Jew…