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 just discovered the bar/restaurant Fetch not far north of me in Yorkville (the less well-known name for what lies north of the Upper East Side), and I liked it. I ate some very tasty dish involving a bowl full of hamburger, rice, string fries, and fried egg (much needed after awaking too late for [...]
It seems like every time I visit my parents in Norwich, CT, my once-harmless hometown has some new menacing species harassing everyone’s pet cats or even dogs.
We worried about nothing of that sort when I was a kid, then came Lyme-carrying deer ticks, coyotes, a bear or two, and the recent plague of wild turkeys, [...]
Earthlink (or some subset of it) was down from shortly after noon (Eastern time) today until at least 5pm, and it may still be screwed up. I think e-mails sent to me (at least during that time) disappeared completely. They may still be disappearing.
For this week at least, best to use my work address at [...]
A note from the decidedly non-utopian real world we inhabit: I’m sure the leftward spin on this tragic story will be that a gun-toting soccer mom died by means of the same sort of weaponry she favored packing, live by the sword, die by the sword (though that expression should perhaps be reserved for stories [...]
I didn’t quite get around to writing the entry I intended on Bernanke and Keynes having pro-market supporters, but here in the interim is a link to the fascinating Wiktionary page on the word “dingleberry,”* which has some surprising uses.
*Come to think of it, I suppose I should dedicate this lexicographical blog entry to the [...]
I hope the left won’t react to this story with a call for a samurai sword ban to combat the “climate of sword violence” in Baltimore. We can’t know the details with certainty, but for me, all political and economic thinking basically starts with whether you recognize our right to fight intruders. That’s [...]
I should have mentioned when I plugged The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging a few months ago that I’m quoted in it as calling “I don’t know” the three most important words in the language. (And they are, you know.)
But in the interests of full disclosure, here is the list of all the books [...]
Last night, I saw the fifteen minutes of IMAX 3D teaser footage from James Cameron’s Avatar (the full film due out in December), and I fear Cameron has a $237 million bomb on his hands.
Not that it was bad, really, but it’s aiming so high, the hype’s already so big, and the end result is [...]
I just wanna say what all my smarter readers are thinking: Cheney and the CIA were plotting to kill al Qaeda leaders? Secretly?! An outrage! Thank goodness the Democrats are putting a stop to that.
Yeah, civilization’s gonna be just fine.
I know what many of you are thinking: that I’ve been too moderate, often too kind — that my blog entries have sometimes been too long, perhaps too thoughtful. Well, that ends today.
Oh, I’m not saying there won’t be the occasional longish essay, but it’s a fast-moving world, and perhaps I can accomplish more [...]
Excellent nerd-film romance note: Sarah Douglas (who played Kryptonian villainess Ursa, the woman who slammed Superman in the gut with a thrown manhole cover after saying “Oh, Superman” in a delightfully taunting fashion in Superman II, possibly turning a lot of young nerds into dominatrix fans in the process and maybe inspiring the career of [...]
I mentioned last week that this blog’s been fully active for about two years. In that time, I’ve done eight “theme” months, each a month of blog entries all on a single topic. Here’s a handy table of contents of those extra-focused blog entries:
•The Month Without God
•The Month Without Buckley
•The Month of the [...]
One curse of being substantially smarter than the average person but not wanting to flaunt it — due to being genuinely kind, of course — is frequently realizing you’ve been overly generous, by too hastily assuming other people know what the hell’s going on. Contact with said other people, then, can sometimes be very [...]
Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and I’ll be traveling to North Carolina and Connecticut over the next several days, so I’ll resume blogging on New Year’s (next week!) — the first day of my “Month of Liberty (i.e., Property).”
I resolve to blog in a civil and open-minded fashion, as if for well-meaning and innocent newcomers. [...]