A week or so ago I had a good laugh at the expense of National Review roving correspondent Kevin D. Williamson, who worked himself into a tizzy over the State of the Union circa 2015, bouncing off of Rowdy Rudy Giuliani’s celebrated banalities regarding President Obama’s supposed lack of patriotic fervor. Kevin concluded his rant by citing, and expanding…
Oscar Peterson, Barney Kessel, & Niels Henning Oersted Pederson at Ronnie Scott’s 1974
Pseudo New Yorker
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…
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…