…is autobiographical. I don’t believe that Springfield is in Oregon, though. There are deserts, but no saguaros in Oregon.
Category Archives: Popular Culture
Hunger Games
Will it scar your child’s psyche?
I hadn’t even heard of the book before the movie came out, but it sounds like the whole series might be a useful corrective against the increasing fascism in the country.
Bravissima, Jennifer Lawrence
“Screw PETA.”
The First NASA Astronauts
We met them fifty-three years ago today. It was slightly over two years since Gagarin’s first flight, whose fifty-first anniversary is on Thursday.
Günter Grass
An open letter and history lesson:
All this is well known. I should like you to think about something that is less well known, Herr Grass, and that is the fact that the First and Second World Wars were entirely unnecessary. That’s right: the fact that they were fought in the first place is entirely the fault of people like you, and specifically of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who could have pre-empted them in 1905. Kaiser Wilhelm II and Günter Grass: a couple of soul-mates.
Like some of the commenters there, I always found The Tin Drum unreadable, in German or English.
Innovation Starvation
Some thoughts on our seeming inability to any long do the big technological things, from Neil Stephenson.
Big, Bold Science Fiction
Why we need it more than ever. I’ve read more than half of Glenn’s picks, but not all.
Inside The Tube
This is one hell of a surfing photo.
Remembering Earl Scruggs
Over at Garden and Gun.
Earl Scruggs
The king of the five-string banjo has finger picked his last. Along with Lester Flatt, Chubby Wise and of course Bill Monroe, he invented a new American jazz form. And of them, he was the last to go. If there’s a heaven, let’s hope they get their own instruments, and not harps.
[Update a couple minutes later]
(Transplanted Brit) Andrew Stuttaford remembers him.
Here he is (via Alex Massey), playing his signature classic with Steve Martin, who has some thoughts here.
[Late afternoon update]
I should add that, with all respect to Lester Flatt, he wasn’t the pioneer that the others were — he was just in the right place at the right time. He is known primarily for the “Flatt lick,” which he didn’t invent, but did popularize, but as any bio will tell you, he didn’t want to move into the sixties, and he wasn’t a real flat picker — he really just played rhythm. It took the likes of Doc Watson, Clarence White, Dan McCrary, Norman Blake, Tony Rice (and others I’m probably leaving out) to catch the guitar up to the rest of instruments in the genre, in terms of virtuosity.