Subscribe to Excerpts
Subscribe by Email
Back in the day, the president of Harvard stood up to an unaccountable, unAmerican, evil conspiracy. I also count Joseph Welch, a Harvard Law alum, (and coincidentally, another Iowa boy) as one of my heroes in the same national battle. Of course, the stakes then were limited: only the survival of American liberty and the [...]
Archive for the ‘Popular Culture’ Category
January 28th, 2012
January 20th, 2012
Category: Film
Alfred Hitchcock had a successful directing career in Britain that preceded his American super-stardom. Hitchcock fans rightfully consider the 1935 comedy-romance-thriller “The 39 Steps” among the very best works of the Master’s “British period”. Robert Donat cuts a dash as Mr. Hannay, the hero of the film, who tries to save England from the threat [...]
January 15th, 2012
The movie studios currently promote their coming attractions through press junkets. The star sits in some hotel room with a poster or prop from the movie in the background, and then a zillion reporters are run through the room for a quick “exclusive interview”. Paul Newman likened the experience to being double parked in front [...]
January 14th, 2012
Category: Crime Control, Film
How much would you charge to dig a 100 foot long tunnel, install supports and lighting throughout it and then break through more than a foot of concrete at the end? Surely more than the 6,000 pounds (about 10k USD) earned by these thieves in the UK. The tunnel diggers did all their work to [...]
January 13th, 2012
among them was Walt Kelly. I grew up on Pogo, as my kids did on Calvin and Hobbes. Finally, here is volume I of something that should have been done a long time ago (all the Amazon reviews seem to say, correctly, “Finally!”) . My daughter gave it to me for Christmas and after all [...]
January 13th, 2012
Given that I am in London and sitting in the very chair you see pictured here, it is only natural that I make this weekend’s film recommendation the movie in which it appears: Matthew Vaughn’s stylish and brutal “Layer Cake”. That’s obviously not me pictured, but the magnificent Sir Michael Gambon. He plays wily drug [...]
January 13th, 2012
Category: Film, Middle East Politics
Andrew Sullivan flags a propaganda video made by the Assad regime that uses Darth Vader’s theme as background music. That would actually be a compliment to Assad; at least Darth was competent and cool-looking. The movie joke I have heard over and over about Bashar Assad in the Middle East is both more accurate and [...]
January 10th, 2012
Rolling Stone has a list titled “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”. Not “…of the specific time and style of music my little world encompasses,” and “…where great means “even I sort of understand it, it’s got a good beat, nice to dance to”: greatest of all time. It is the kind of list [...]
