Recently on the road again, tripping across the fruited plain. Been doing so since Jack Kerouac wandered from coast to coast. Yours truly trod those plains with the same kind of Jack Kerouac/Walt Whitman reverence for these vast united states. Only… Only, things have changed. The fruited plain was still bearing its vast crops, but […]

“It’s a juicy headline, BJ.  Some kid murders his entire high school.  He’s actually arrested while devouring the mutilated body of an English teacher!” “Totally hot! Let’s put it on.” “Love to, BJ, but..” “What but? Don’t give me but…” “But there’s a problem.” “What do you mean problem?  You’re the producer.  This is a […]

When Marlon Brando was asked why he chose to star in Last Tango in Paris, his answer was brief: “I wanted to get everyone’s head out of the popcorn.” Indeed, the film featuring a nude Maria Schneider parading full frontal and getting her butt anointed with butter was sufficient to keep audience heads out of […]

Thanx to a few who have commented on this blog, it has occurred to me that the identity of the author has been kept secret.  Not that that was intentional. Not that there is much identity to reveal, but there are some dues. So we (using the editorial we since there’s only me and a cat […]

  When a group of Berkeley proto-PC protesters stymied the head Nazi from speaking at Sproul Plaza, what they were actually doing was exhibiting a deep disrespect for their own mentor. After all, since political correctness was born out of the Reich movement, sprung out of the demented head of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, those […]

Al Franken finally redeemed himself. After failing miserably as a comic on Saturday Night Live, and then helping with the decline of SNL itself, he got to become the funniest senator. In fact, the decline of humor in Saturday Night Live can pretty well be traced directly to Al Franken. He was the first in […]

  ☞ Nothing says global gobble quite like the flight of Boiga irregularis or the Indonesian Brown Snake. By global gobble we mean that broad system of economic consumption which knows no borders, nor limits, nor allegiances to where it goes to shuck and pluck its wares. Not a new thing, the global gobble has […]

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, wrote the poet. And lack of love for the Cold War Wall in Berlin was the essence of an absence of love. It marked instead the cruelest separation. The animosity at that time between the communist and democratic world was— to borrow a phrase from the time— […]

Being an ist of all isms, it’s time to enlist attention on the ism of sexism, or sexist, which is not really a word at all. In the strictest definition— root and suffix— sexist means pertaining to sex or one who practices it. Who’d throw stones at that? But in our topsy turvy world, the Webster […]

It’s always been a personal disappointment that among all the foolish presentations the Nobel Committee has made (sic, Obama Peace Prize), there was never any mention of awarding that hallmark of august achievement to Dr. Lawrence Peter, author of the Peter Principle. In an era when there’s hardly any one who does not represent the […]