No sooner had I asked Helen (who likes boxing, monster movies, and other violent manifestations of culture) whether she likes the Saw movies and been reassured to find that she doesn’t…than I learned that a friend of mine, Courtney Balaker (who herself portrayed a vampire in the film Sleepless Nights), helped produce the horror movie [...]
Given humanity’s boundless capacity to blame the other guy when things go wrong, I wouldn’t be too shocked if I lived to see humanity exterminated by out-of-control robots and the last living pundits fighting over whether nerds should be thanked for warning of this possibility (in sci-fi) or condemned for building the robots.
(Certainly, such a [...]
Walking last night to an event hosted by an anarcho-capitalist I know, I heard my name called out and realized I’d been spotted on the street for the second time by a guy I know as he attended an anti-government-spending protest, and unlike last time (when I was doing a quick pass through the Times [...]
The comments thread under my Saturday blog entry, about Henry Louis Gates’ overreaction to the police, contained a couple jokes about Starbucks as a place of ethnic blending — and that’s fitting, of course, since even in other parts of the world, American-style franchise restaurants (much as the cultural-protectionists of both left and right, not [...]
While I was in DC Saturday, Helen and I stopped in the Cop Shop, the giftshop portion of a crime and police museum, and we were pleased to see they had copies of a book by libertarian Alex Tabarrok on private prisons. Coincidentally, earlier this month I’d seen Donald Boudreaux’s announcement that Tabarrok and [...]
More evidence we probably wouldn’t be better off with government controlling all of healthcare (instead of just the half it does now): the half-billion dollars in Medicaid fraud New York State was found to have committed that just led to my already cash-strapped state having to give the money back to the federal government. Yes, [...]
I’m in DC today and thus once more in a position to give advice to Obama, if he’s reading the blog (my apologies to him and others for still tending to do one long entry per day instead of the multiple short ones per day, which is the rhythm I’m still moving toward). My [...]
I saw a huge poster of model Agyness Deyn in a clothing store this week — and that’s hardly unusual, but her British-raised New Wave tendencies are somewhat unusual at this late juncture in history (though growing less so in the past couple years, which is nice). A few months ago, I praised a [...]
Three years ago, this article made the case that the A-Team would make good representatives of anarcho-capitalism. The point is every bit as relevant — and important — today as it was then.
Oddly enough, in the past few weeks I’ve also seen a blogger at First Things’ site refer to Aristotelians as the A-Team [...]
So. Today I purchase my final comic book, the fifth and final issue of the miniseries Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds, written by Geoff Johns (who’s now writer/producer on the Flash movie, apparently) and drawn by George Perez. This comic nicely encapsulates comics history and my own history of comics-reading, long an [...]
Our celebration of space continues today with a reminder that the Japanese animated series Gatchaman, known in the U.S. as Battle of the Planets, had an odd lead villain called Zoltar who, like a lot of Japanese animated villains — but almost no American animated villains — was a hermaphrodite. Interestingly, the inevitable interpretation [...]
I was delighted to hear about the arrest of Kyle Shaw, the teen and ardent Fight Club fan accused of bombing a Starbucks not too far from me on the Upper East Side. As Fight Club teaches us, nothing’s more inspiring and noble than pointless destruction and physical punishment, without which we would have [...]
I dread the inevitable David Brooks column cheering talk of a new manned mission to the Moon (forty years after Apollo 11), calling it national greatness to waste even more money we don’t have on grandiose projects (whether it’s Obama visiting Earth’s satellite or Bush going to Mars — though I suspect NASA largely stumbles [...]
John Farley of the Phillips Foundation pointed out to me a recent article by Jonathan Last (who I first met because he wrote a Weekly Standard article about Star Wars and was briefly worried that an e-mail I sent him about blowing up the Death Star might have been part of a series of threatening [...]
ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (July 2009): The Devil’s Piper by Susan Price
With the world excited over the release of the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince movie this week, it’s worth taking a few minutes to laud a fantastical — and far creepier — children’s story by another British author, Susan Price.
I was [...]