“In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke it is written, the kingdom of God is within man, not one man or a group of men but in all men.” That’s what Charlie Chaplin told the world in The Great Dictator, in a vain attempt to somehow end World War II with an appeal for international…
Washington, D.C., March 16, 1991—St. Patrick’s Day—Two Poems for One Outrage
IOn Washington’s sidewalks youths gatherEager for a sunlit drunk.Jeering whites pass in shining cars.I hear them hooting—a poor fish bent to their ridicule.Was I always such a figure of fun?I walk on, gray-thatched, my absurdity confirmedAn old man condemned for nonconformityI was never one of them—sweet victory. IIA March sky blossoms overheadBearing clouds Canaletto might…
Oh, I’ve Been Fucked
Oh, I’ve been fucked, and fucked quite wellNot by my husband—I wonder, is that always so?He was handsome, yes, and considerateA gentleman? Not really, much more of a boyI doubt I’m grand enough for a gentlemanBut it was sweet being conqueredI never would have guessed how it could be soTo be taken, well, I don’t…
National Security Adviser Jim Jones, so not a stand-up
National Security Adviser Jim Jones, apparently intent on dispelling the rumor that Joe Biden is the stupidest man in Washington, began a speech at the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy with a Jew joke—a Jew joke that went like this: A Taliban militant gets lost and is wandering around the desert looking for water….
Dave Samuels—“Bemsha Swing”
Vibist/Marimbist Dave Samuels with Mark Walker, drums, and Oscar Stagnaro, electric bass, during the Berklee Percussion Festival in June 2009. The melody emerges around three minutes in.
What happens when you weigh around four megayottagrams
You explode, of course, as a result of “runaway thermonuclear reactions triggered by gamma ray-driven antimatter production,” as the Daily Galaxy has it. If you scroll on down, you’ll learn that about 3,000 years ago, a white dwarf may have gone Type 1a supernova on our asses, releasing sufficient radiation to destroy us all. Or…
Fuck the Blacks. They never vote for us anyway.
Over at Politico, we have the following report on Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s view of the recent unpleasantness in the Old Dominion regarding that least interesting and most trivial of subjects, the oppression of tens of millions of Black Americans by their masters for, oh, two and a half centuries or so. ‘Mississippi Gov. Haley…
iAd? Eye Ow! Steve gets the cash, you get the pain
Steve Jobs, black shirt extraordinaire, introduces a brand-new app, the iAd, which makes life a whole lot easier—easier, at least, for people who want to sell you things. Over at Slate, Farhad Manjoo sounds a bit bitter at the prospect of ads “that require me to type in my name, play a game, answer some…
Because he wrote like an idiot, that’s why
Rod Dreher, here, wonders why Catholic novelist/windbag Walker Percy is “almost forgotten” and unwittingly supplies the answer by quoting from a speech Percy gave at Notre Dame (I’m guessing, the Indiana one, but, really, who knows) upon receipt of the “Laetare Medal”—whatever the fuck that is: “It’s no accident that I think that German science,…
Douglas Brinkley pops open a double case of Kiss-Ass
In Sunday’s LA Times, historian Douglas Brinkley describes The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, by “Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist” David Remnick, as a “brilliantly constructed, flawlessly written biography.” I don’t know if I would have read The Bridge if I hadn’t read Doug’s review, but now that I have, I do: I’m not.