You know, a libertarian novelist friend of mine is visiting the City, and it’s sort of amusing timing, since tomorrow sees the start of my “Month of Ayn Rand.” The friend is arty and subtle; Rand, notoriously, was not. My friend will probably have to spend a substantial portion of her life saying “but not [...]
I was always the sort of nerd who, once he decided he liked some TV show, saw every episode and remembered all the plotlines — thus, too, my musings on comic book continuity in more than one entry on this blog over the past three years.
At some point in the past few years, though, I [...]
Let’s do a weekend of entertainment-related notes before starting my “Month of Ayn Rand” on Monday:
The alien abduction movie Fourth Kind is a good example of the bad things a culture produces when people care more about whether claims are interesting than whether they are true. Since Fourth Kind is, in truth, a monumental [...]
This has been a pivotal week in my relationship with a loved one: I mean, of course, Fox News. I will have appeared briefly on their spin-off Fox Business Network twice, the second time in just over an hour, as I type this, since I’ll be seen defending Twinkie consumption at the very end of [...]
I’m pleased Jen Dziura is devoting this week on her blog to wordplay inspired by my favorite childhood sci-fi character, Tom Swift, boy industrialist. Jen, one of the most entrepreneurial liberals I know and a dweller in the Wall Street area, also e-mails a link to this Keynes vs. Hayek rap Russ Roberts co-created [...]
David Boaz, to whom many libertarians like me owe a great deal, announces he’s written a report with David Kirby about what portion of the voting public is libertarian or near-libertarian (not nearly enough but more than you might think). The executive summary is here and the full PDF here.
Boaz notes that some 14% of [...]
Actor Ernest Borgnine turned ninety-three yesterday. From the Poseidon to Airwolf, the freaky-visaged actor has served us well. Last year, at ninety-two, he starred in the film Another Harvest Moon.
This reminds me, though, of a likely injustice: Years ago, when my friend Ali Kokmen was in the habit of leading several of us to a [...]
It was naively scientistic 1960s sex researchers — more than hippies in the proper sense — who were targeted last night in Jonathan Leaf’s play Sexual Healing — but thoughts of hippies in general reminded me of the very pro-hippie novel Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins, who has a bit of that ecstatic/paranoid Thomas Pynchon [...]
I. Diesel jeans has launched “Be Stupid” ads showing people taking absurd risks — and they probably ought to deploy Weird Al Yankovic’s Devo-influenced song “Dare to Be Stupid” at some point in the campaign. It’s tempting to lament that we’ve hit bottom, to see this as the sad denouement of the anti-intellectual [...]
As if New Englanders sending a Republican to the Senate weren’t exciting enough (in this wonderful week that’s near-simultaneously seen campaign finance rules rightly loosened and Air America going out of business), I see that a Maine resident also threw fox urine on union protesters, which seems like another step in the right direction for [...]
REO Speedwagon is almost the precise opposite of punk, arguably the opposite of rock n’ roll itself. Like a sort of anti-Rush, they’re soft in the places they should have been powerful, nasal in places where they should have been operatic, resolutely bland in the places where some small dash of melodic variety could have [...]
Sure, it’s a bit sad that we who oppose the growth of government can do little better right now than celebrate the fact that we’re still able to muster a filibuster — but I’m willing to celebrate anyway. Please join us — we of the Manhattan Project political drinking society — in doing so [...]
Lionsgate bought the auctioned-off rights to the entire Terminator franchise recently for a mere $15 million from its financially beleaguered owners. I have four reactions:
(1) Now that James Cameron has even more money, I wonder if he wishes he’d found time to buy the killer-cyborg series he created.
(2) Joss Whedon put in a joke bid [...]
ToddSeavey.com Book Selections of the Month (January 2010)
Would you rather be a traditionalistic, sword-cane-owning British eccentric, devoted to his wife, living in the early days of the twentieth century — or a highly attractive young person in the early twenty-first century having covert sex on an airplane?
This is the question with which I was confronted [...]
I partied with at least two linguistics experts last week and may finish up partying with poets tonight — but the important things are the clip of me on YouTube asking a Stossel guest about Ayn Rand and the series of clips of Chris Elliott on YouTube portraying FDR. The situation, in ten bits:
1. [...]