I was done with you, you old dead grump. Yes, I liked the Hitchhiker series in my early adolescence. Early adolescence is the right time for silly stories finding the funny side of planetary extinction and philosophical fail. A send-up of the whole sci-fi genre was long overdue, and Douglass supplied them in witty style. The… Read More Geek Heresy Episode 2: Damn You, Douglas Adams.
58. The Rolling Stones — Let it Bleed Recently I issued a half-formed opinion on double-albums. A prejudice, really, arising as much from ADHD as any learned assessment of music criticism. At best, an observation: I don’t usually like double-albums. I find them generally undisciplined, self-absorbed affairs. Sometimes, as with The White Album, or Exile on Main Street,… Read More Rating My CD’s: Exile on Main Street
I picked up the new Three and The Star Wars yesterday. They’re pretty awesome, but I’m saving my discussion of them for a later post. Today I’m going to pick up a gauntlet cast down last month, and talk about Superman: Red Son, which will dovetail nicely into this piece by Chris Yogerst in the Atlantic, “Stop Calling Superheroes… Read More December Comic Book Post: No, Batman is not Fascist.
I am not among the woeful who spend their day reading Slate, so I must admit I have never truly savored Yglesias’ thumbless-monkey prose. But a despicable troll in the sub-cockle of my heart delights in literary takedowns, and has ever since he first read the beating Mark Twain administered on James Fenimore Cooper. So read CJ… Read More Let us Now Abuse Matt Yglesias
I’m starting to think I should keep all my short-form content free on Amazon. Sarah Hoyt advises it, and now I’m starting to wonder if the price of zero would spare me reviews like this: No true fan of Aaron Burr would like this book., November 23, 2013 By jaybee43 Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?) This review… Read More I Get Bad Reviews
Cracked has a good article (how many blog posts have started with those five words, I wonder?) about how awful nerds/geeks are as human beings. Read the whole thing, obviously, but in brief: We Feel Like We’re Owed Our Favorite Things … Forever We Secretly Hope Our Favorite Artists Aren’t Successful We Think We Have… Read More Getting Around the Nerd Behavior Paradigm
I don’t know if it’s my subconscious ruminating on the debased state of American politics, or just the idle curiosity to re-watch a train wreck, but I found myself viewing, for the second time, the 1979 film Caligulia with Malcolm McDowell on Netflix. I only got an hour or so into it before I decided that… Read More Madness in Great Ones Must Not Unwatched Go.
Normally, when a piece of legislation is flawed, the spirit of bipartisanship demands a responsible effort to fix it. In this way, both critics and proponents can work together democratically to best benefit their constitutents. But not this time. This time, the Democrats can eat it. This time, they passed a law that every Republican… Read More Jonah Goldberg on The Vital Importance of Saying “I Told You So.”
Richard Cohen is beneath contempt. In all the years I read the Washington Post, I never saw a column of his that was not cheap and tedious. Sure, I’ll fisk E.J. Dionne, because Dionne is a Dem apparatchik in journalist’s clothing, announcing the party line. His columns thus rise to the level of argument. Cohen’s… Read More Richard Cohen Calls the Tea Party Racist, But He Used the Wrong Words or Something…
Yesterday I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for years, organize and file my comic books. It took me the better part of a morning, but I’m terribly pleased with the general sense of imposing order on chaos. I am no more than a dabbler in comic books. I read them sporadically as… Read More November Comic Book Post: The Geek Returneth
Content Blues 