When I was a little boy, I liked to take baths. And when I was taking a bath, I liked to rock back and forth, causing the water to swish back and forth, my ultimate goal being to cause the water to swish back and forth so violently that at one point all of the…
Felix Salmon, swimming upstream
I continue to be impressed by Felix Salmon’s column for Reuter’s “A Slice of Lime in the Soda” (well, everything but the title). I love his omnivorous appetite for economic data, his command of financial minutiae, his, well, a lot of things, but I also continue to be amazed at his intellectual flabbiness when confronted…
Is rape the new toilet paper?
A little background. Back in the early days of the DVD era, I rented a disc with the specials that Rodney Dangerfield did for HBO back in the eighties. After sitting through three or four hours of standup, most of it not by Rodney, I could only imagine that when comedians got together for drinks,…
Ho, ho, ho, Ho, ho, ho. Gingrich got $1.6 million from Freddie Mac
Super Committee, last seen discarding genitals
When you’re a Super Committee, you can do whatever you damn please, right? Anything! And anything includes nothing, right? The null set! Which is just what the super committee set up by Congress a few months in a fit of “this time we mean business” fury seems ready to do. Over at Politico, which takes…
Why, Oh, Why Can’t We Have A Better Press Corps? Mark Halperin just wants to be liked
I really shouldn’t read Time magazine, and I especially shouldn’t read Mark Halperin, aka Captain Kiss-Ass, but I did, and I have to pay the price—I have to suffer as Mark rates Newt Gingrich an A- for saying, among other things, that he would use sabotage and assassinations, plus “absolute strategic pressure” (which is kind…
New at Bright Lights: Chaplin at Keystone, Part 1
The new issue of Bright Lights Film Journal has another of my pieces on the films of Charlie Chaplin. Flicker Alley recently released virtually all of Chaplin’s 33 odd films made in one year, 1914, at Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios in Los Angeles. I take a look at the first 18 films Chaplin made. The…
Newt and the Neo-Cons, updated
Last week I noted that noted Likudist Jennifer Rubin has been industriously pissing on Newt Gingrich and every other Republican presidential candidate not addressed as “Mitt” and suggested that this was all a plot on Jennie’s part. Well, welcome Charles to the party, as in Krauthammer. Charles is a lot more subtle than Jennie. Instead…
Again, NTNY
If you want the official New Yorker cartoon contest, go here. And stop wasting my time. “Yes, I am a stripper. But I’m a very nice stripper.” “How can you eat? Well, why don’t you just leave that to me.” “Okay, this is the part where I question you intensively about your toilet training.” “I…
Newt Gingrich, not really a friend of Israel, it seems
Not enough to satisfy the admittedly exacting standards of Jennifer Rubin, at least, who plants one of her many long knives between the former Speaker’s shoulder blades here. While other conservatives politely averted their eyes from Newt’s whopper, delivered in last night’s debate, claiming that he charged Freddie Mac $300,000 in 2006 to tell them…