Category Archives: Popular Culture
Sid Caesar
RIP.
Most people are probably too young to know who he was, but he was a comedy genius, of my parents’ time.
[Update Saturday morning]
OK, so I was a year late with the announcement. I was on an airplane just following Twitter links, and didn’t check the date. Worth remembering anyway.
The Hugo Wars
On the sad state of science fiction:
Wherever they emerge, social-justice warriors claim to be champions of diversity. But they always reveal themselves to be relentlessly hostile to it: they applaud people of different genders, races, and cultures just so long as those people all think the same way. Theirs is a diversity of the trivial; a diversity of skin-deep, ephemeral affiliations.
This is one of the reasons I haven’t read as much as I did when I was younger. And sadly, the situation is similar on many college campuses.
Angelina Jolie
…takes a stand against ISIS, in Iraq.
Good for her.
The Ukelele
My dad had one, with a Burl Ives book.
When I was growing up, we pronounced it Youkuhlaylee, but as the article points out, Hawai’ian is the most phonetic language in the world (because the written language was invented to be so by the missionaries). So the proper pronunciation is (as the article notes) Ookaylaylay. Also, Honolulu is Hohnohlooloo, not Hahnahlooloo, which is the popular mainland haole pronunciation.
Groundhog Day
A movie for all time.
And yes, I know it’s an oldie, but worth a re-read.
The Hollywood Blacklist Narrative
Which surprises me not at all. It goes part and parcel with Stalinism.
Fox News In Israel
The guy who showed me how to use the television turned it to Fox News without my even asking. “It’s our favorite in Israel, they’re the only ones who report what is really happening. Well, until the past few days…”
Anyway, I’ve been seeing these little segments called “Fox News Extra,” with people like Patti-Ann Brown or Laura Ingall doing little interviews, and wondered if they were a new thing. Then I realized that I wasn’t seeing any commercials.
Hollywood’s Omerta On Its Anti-War Stance
It’s been broken by American Sniper.