The circle is now complete. With today’s Retro-Journal entry, the fortieth in a series of forty, I have fulfilled my forty-week mission to recount the past twenty years of my life (just over half my life so far), six months in each weekly entry.
Today, in 2008, theatre-goers flock to see a brooding pop culture […]
In late 2006, elections ousted Republicans and put Democrats in control of Congress (since which time Congress’s approval ratings have slipped to single digits for the first time in the history of polling).
That was also the half-year during which I posted my first, experimental blog entry on ToddSeavey.com, recounting my experience of Election Night […]
You can’t help noticing the thin line between hero and bad boy in American culture from the get-go. It’s not just anti-heroes like the fictional Hancock and mostly-non-fictional Hunter S. Thompson, about whom there are movies out this week (I already know the first is good). It’s also the fact that we were […]
The second half of 2005 was a very different time from today — it started out for me with a trip to New Hampshire to see college pals Laura Braunstein, Christine Caldwell Ames, and Scott Nybakken, and Laura and Christine’s husbands. Hey, wait, that’s exactly the same as today. In fact, I should […]
Things appeared to be going very well from my perspective in early 2005 as Bush began his second term. Consider:
•Bush had unexpectedly seized upon his re-election as an opportunity not to launch another war but to turn his attention to the domestic economic reform libertarians had waited for so patiently, proclaiming his vision […]
The 2004 election was ugly and divisive, but it was much simpler than this year’s, which had myriad primary contenders. The 2004 election also lent itself to a grand narrative of which libertarian aims, contrary to subsequent pessimism, still seemed a part.
•I recall starting out the second half of 2004 seeing a speech by […]
This week, in mid-2008, brought our Debate at Lolita Bar about Bob Barr, seen above with yours truly in an anti-Clinton t-shirt that’s likely to be outdated soon, possibly even today. The same day as the debate, Clark Caldwell of CBS shot a vlog of Barr’s reaction to the possibility of Hillary Clinton as […]
Today was the purported unveiling of videotaped alien life (ha!) by some guy who’s been trying to inspire the creation of an office of extraterrestrial affairs in Denver, as you may have read in the “news” — and tomorrow’s the last day of this blog’s Month of the Nerd (assuming the aliens don’t take over […]
In the present, it’s Memorial Day weekend, and we think not only of real-life war dead but of Indiana Jones fighting the twin threats of communist totalitarianism and space aliens on the big screen — even as the Libertarian Party convention this weekend confronts the twin threats of big government and the Martian-civilization NASA cover-up […]
Today — May 16, 2008 — moviegoers are getting a small dose of Christian allegory along with more blatant forms of fantasy via the movie The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. Five and a half years ago, I was getting a big dose of Christianity in the small form of girlfriend Dawn Eden.
Dawn is […]
Today, audiences thrill to the big-screen adventures of Speed Racer — much as they thrilled to our debate on congestion pricing for Manhattan traffic on Wednesday — but six years ago…
I first met people who explored the City not horizontally but vertically, the “urban exploration” buffs of the Jinx Society, who ventured into sewers and […]
Today, audiences are enjoying the Iron Man movie, about a weapons merchant whose own technology is used against him but who fights back.
Back in the summer of 2001, shortly before American technology was turned against itself by terrorists, I had just left the employment of John Stossel — who looks a bit like Tony Stark […]
The first half of 2001 saw my final six months working for ABC News, a period that began with the airing of what was without question the most libertarian hour in the history of network television, the special John Stossel Goes to Washington, for which I was an associate producer (perhaps the future of libertarian […]
Ah, my favorite election ever: the unbelievably protracted, legally-contested, anger-inducing, confusion-spawning Gore-Bush presidential election of 2000, which reportedly caused some psychotherapists to see an influx of patients expressing anxiety over their uncertainty about who was really president, who would “lead” us. For people who feel an emotional need for things like political or […]
In the relatively quiet first half of 2000:
•January saw the peak of the dot-com-era stock market — and within weeks Wall Street saw trading shut down early by an impromptu concert by leftist band Rage Against the Machine and disrupted weeks later by a non-fatal explosive blast that injured several people.
•Meanwhile, al Qaeda members had […]
