They loved him to death. More on the divorce theme.
Category Archives: Popular Culture
Big Bird
[Update a few minutes later]
Would Big Bird be a small-government Romney voter? This puts the episode in a whole new light.
I Missed This Part Of The Debate
The Libertarian Democrat And Fifties Radios
Some thoughts from Lileks.
I was struck by the prices of those old AM radios. I hadn’t realized how expensive they were back then. In today’s dollars, you’d be paying two or three hundred for an AM radio, though it would probably have much better sound quality than a modern one. The tubes have their own audio quality that remains hard (and expensive) to replicate with solid state. Of course, they were also built to last, and unlike a modern device, repairable.
Pawn In Game Of Life
…is about to be taken off the board:
Alex Karras, who later became a TV star, is reportedly near death, following recent kidney failure.
The 77-year-old former defensive tackle has been given only a few days to live, the Detroit Free Press reports.
He was a great player.
Small Words, Lame Thoughts
Betsy Woodruff made a major sacrifice, and read the governator’s 600-page autobio so we wouldn’t have to:
…here’s the CliffsNotes: Arnold Schwarzenegger started exercising a bunch, bonked a lot of gorgeous women, won a ton of prizes for slowly flexing his chiseled bod to background music, made piles of cash by beating up people in movies, met a boatload of famous people, married a Kennedy, got to be governor and was totally awesome at it, kind of buggered up his family dynamic by having a love child and then not telling his wife for 14 years, and then made a nice list of life tips so you can be an all-American success story too.
Of course, you still might want to read this book, especially if you want to hear all about the intricacies of the European bodybuilding circuit in the 1960s or Maria Shriver’s approach to reupholstery. And if you also happen to like pictures of preposterously pectoralled menfolk in Speedos but for whatever reason have trouble finding them on the Internet, you should boogie on down to your local Barnes and Noble posthaste for a copy of your new favorite book.
Her review is much more entertaining than I can imagine the book is.
The Midsummer Night’s Dream
Is it the end, after four and a half long years, and not just a midsummer night?
You may remember the plot. Titania, queen of the fairies, has been placed under a spell by Oberon with the help of the mischievous Puck. It has caused her to fall in love with a cloddish man named Bottom, who has in turn been placed under a spell that has turned his head into that of an ass. Later on she receives the antidote that magically undoes the spell. Looking at the creature she formerly adored, she is now not only repelled, she wonders how it was that she could have ever been so thoroughly fooled:
TITANIA: My Oberon! what visions have I seen! Methought I was enamour’d of an ass.
OBERON: There lies your love.
TITANIA: How came these things to pass? O, how mine eyes do loathe his visage now!
We in this country have had many kinds of presidents, good and bad, beloved and detested. But have we ever before had a president whose career and persona have been based to such an enormous extent on a carefully constructed narrative that in turn rests on weaving a spell over a charmed public? And was the antidote finally administered last Wednesday night, at the hands of that not-so-very-Puckish guy, Mitt Romney?
Let’s hope so. For those of us never bought in, it’s been a long nightmare.
Zombies On The Titanic
This post isn’t about the Democrat campaign, though that would have been a good guess.
No, someone is asking the really important questions.
[Via Geek Press]
The President’s Character
…exposed:
Barack Obama is a narcissist and a sociopath, with the skills of persuasion that children abandoned by their parents learn as a survival mechanism. In the adoring light of the liberal media, Obama reflected power and self-confidence — so long as he was in control, and stood in front of the teleprompter. The real Barack Obama is the one who cowered in the Oval Office protected by his Praetorian guard, who declined to hold cabinet meetings or meet with Republican leaders: McBama surrounded by the weird sisters, Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice and Michelle. Obama’s greatest strength always has been his greatest weakness, potentially a catastrophic one: he manipulates so effectively because he has a compulsion to be in control. When he knows that he is not in control, Obama is paralyzed. Absent last night were the easy rhetorical flourishes and rock star pose of 2008.
As I wrote earlier, that’s the Obama I’ve always seen, but I think that the contrast with Romney opened up a lot of eyes anew.
Taking On The Important Projects
A stop-motion Lego animation of Dr. Strangelove.