Mitt Romney shouldn’t play politics with his choice for vice president, says ex-Veep Dick Cheney, according to a recent article in Politico. Picking a woman or an Hispanic simply for political reasons would be bad, in the opinion of the non-woman, non-Hispanic Cheney. Cheney, who, after his latest operation, has no physical heart at all,…
Joe Pass—“Sweethearts on Parade”
Back in the fifties, the rise of rock ‘n roll was taking a lot of the fun out of jazz, causing Norman Granz to sell his entire Verve catalog, one of the richest in jazz, and move to Europe. A very rich man, he used his money to attract a lot of big names, including…
Leon Panetta: Less than inch from being a douchebag
U.S. troops film themselves urinating on corpses in Afghanistan. U.S. and allied troops burn copies of the Koran. A U.S. soldier goes berserk and murders 16 innocent Afghans. U.S. troops pose for photographs holding severed hands and legs. U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, we learn, has been flying home every weekend, to visit his…
Pseudo-New Yorker
Legal humor here. “He’s pretty playful, so watch your ass.” “LOVIN’ the Mojitos, Jerry. I mean, these are bitchin’!” “He doesn’t look herbivorous.” “So this is why you insisted on building an outdoor pool in Loch Ness.” “Who did your caulking job, Jerry?” “Yeah, I thought having a pool would be heaven, but after six…
For Günter Grass, who, while attempting to shoulder the burden of history, falls frequently though not continuously on his broad German arsch
Back in high school—waaaay back in high school—I read Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum. Eighty-five percent of it surely went over my head, but the remaining 15 percent impressed me. A few years later, I essayed The Dog Years. I missed about 95 percent of that one, so I never made it to the end….
Günter Grass—What Must Be Said
Why do I stay silent, conceal for too long What clearly is and has been Practiced in war games, at the end of which we as survivors Are at best footnotes. It is the alleged right to first strike That could annihilate the Iranian people– Enslaved by a loud-mouth And guided to organized jubilation– Because…
Not “allow,” Peggy; “demand”
Over at the Wall Street Journal (subscription only), Peggy Noonan, wrapping up the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, complains that Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, et al. “are allowing the GOP to be painted as the war party.” They aren’t “allowing” it to happen, Peggy. They’re demanding it. But thanks for putting in a plug…
Joyce Maynard, she’s entitled
Over at the New Republic, Tim Noah has a bit of fun with Joyce Maynard’s breathless account (for the New York Times) of the quasi-countless benefits this fifty-something gal has derived from her brand-new $800 haircut: “It’s only hair, of course,” Joycie tells us. “Still, two weeks later, I observed in myself a marked elevation…
There are markets, and then there are markets
I agree with the Wall Street Journal on a dismaying number of issues. Free trade is an easy one—increasing incomes abroad while decreasing the cost of living at home has always seemed like a no-brainer to me. Like the Journal, I have a hearty dislike of subsidies—farm subsidies of course, but energy as well. Clean…
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, don’t they?
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is Noam Chomsky’s classic example of a grammatical sentence that doesn’t compute, his way of demonstrating that the human brain processes linguistic information in several ways at the same time. But if we fiddle with Chomsky’s sentence, we can show that the English language is perhaps more flexible than is…