A Review of the Biopic Elvis
I grew up in the 1950s, and heard him on the radio (AM stations playing pop music, of course) in the late part of the decade when Elvis was at…
Ian Chadwick
Now is the Summer of Our Disconnect
I was reminded this morning of Henry David Thoreau, who wrote about his bean field in Walden, his famous journal of contemplations about living on his own in a rustic…
How Another Film Triggered Fragile MAGA Men Into Manufactured Rage
Elon Musk, aka the MAGA SpaceNazi, was so triggered by Christopher Nolan’s recent film, The Odyssey (or more accurately the casting in it), that he huffily screamed on Xitter that…
Red Scare Number Three
The USA is going through yet another Red Scare — its third in barely a century — according to the paranoid, hyperbolic statements made by the Deranged Dictator Donald Trump…
-ocracies and -isms: How the USA Broke
Once upon a time, the USA was a democracy. While vestiges of democracy can still be found in the USA, it is being actively and aggressively eradicated at the federal…
Safety Razors and Shaving Again
It’s been a few years since I last posted about my excursions into shaving with a safety razor (double-edged blades). In my last post on the subject, dated almost exactly…
Richard Dawkins and “Cultural Christianity”
Richard Dawkins is no stranger to shaking the cultural tree to see what falls out. In 2024, Dawkins was interviewed by Rachel Johnson on British TV. He noted in that…
Harold Hill and the Apostle Paul
As I was watching the musical, The Music Man, recently, it struck me that there were obvious parallels between the plot of the musical and the story of the Apostle…
How Not to Communicate by Email
The average person, the MIT Communication Lab tells us, “receives ~120 emails/day and spends about 11hrs/week sorting through emails.” Matt Plummer, in a 2019 article titled, How to Spend Way…
The Stepford Wives in Novel, Film, and MAGA Policy
They never stop, these Stepford wives;/The work like robots all their lives. That little ditty is said by Joanna, the protagonist in Ira Levin’s 1972 novel, The Stepford Wives. She…
Pray for a Parking Space
Before I started down this rabbit hole, I had imagined that any post or video about praying for a parking space would be a joke, or perhaps a spoof of…
Goodbye to an Old Friend
Some days there are moments that make you stop and ask yourself how you ever got to this time and place. You stare at the clouds, unfocused, remembering, the past…
The Thousand and One Nights
Humans have always been storytellers. From the time when humans first developed language around 100,000 years ago, we have been telling one another stories. Long before we could write, we…
The Age of Doubt
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of scientific advancement; it was the age of flat-earthers and chemtrail fanatics. It was…
Back on the Open (World) Range
This week, after 300 hours of play, I came to the end of the Ubisoft game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla game. During those hours, I spent my time as a Viking,…
Why The Great Revolt Matters Today
Thirteen eighty-one. Almost 650 years ago in the time of Chaucer, the English people did something unprecedented: they rose up against their oppressive king and nobles. It is known today…
Tubes to Transistors to Today’s Chip Crisis
When I was a young lad, in the latter part of the 1950s (not long after the Stone Age ended…), one of my self-taught technical skills was to be able…
Thomas More’s Words Are Still Appropriate Today
I can always find something in Shakespeare’s works to console, inform, delight, or move me, and more often than not, something that is remarkably relevant to current issues and events.…
The Moreness of Everything
The title of this post comes from a subhead in Thomas De Zengotita’s book, Mediated: How the Media Shape the World Around You (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005) in which the author…
Trump’s Nazification of the USA
Project 2025 was the MAGA world’s blueprint for turning the USA into a totalitarian state run by President — now dictator in all but name — Donald Trump. But the…