October 2, 2025 I am off to Japan and Hong Kong for a few weeks and will pick this wild ride up again in November.In the meantime, it looks as though the man-baby in the white house is truly cracking…
Sometime during the years of our country’s seemingly endless “Cold” War, President Richard Nixon and his minions developed a strategy they hoped would bring our enemies in North Vietnam to the negotiating table. Nixon wanted them to believe that he…
In Kurt Vonnegut’s darkly prophetic novel, Mother Night, the Reverend Doctor Lionel J.D. Jones is a minor character, but, like so many in that thinly disguised description of the growth of American Nazism in the 1930s and 40s, his character is…
“There he goes again,” as former President Ronald Reagan liked to say to his opponent, Jimmy Carter. Yet again, the current white house resident has posted a selfie in costume, this time posing as the demented Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore…
In 1903, Edison Manufacturing Company employee, Edwin S. Porter, put together a short silent film called The Great Train Robbery. Over the years, the film was widely identified as the first western movie, and it well may have been the start…
What’s in a name? The name “Republican”, for instance. One would think it would denote a party devoted to principles that define a republic, which currently describes a form of government that is not a monarchy, but rather invests supreme…
In Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg’s 1957 classic, A Face In The Crowd, we were given a prophetic peek at the growing connection between media and politics and, perhaps, a hint on how that can quickly turn sour when exposed to…
The Very Newest Beautiful Newspeak In George Orwell’s iconic sci fi classic, 1984, the totalitarian government of the fictional superstate of Oceania invents and promulgates a new language called Newspeak. Using this change in language, they shrink the number and usage of words…
The idea that, given enough freedom to make foolish decisions, one may eventually use it to one’s own detriment, is expressed in a number of different languages as having enough “rope”. In Hindi, the full quote translates as “If you…
On a table in my living room, there is an arresting, kinetic sculpture of a circus tiger by New Mexico artist, Frederick Prescott. Prescott’s sculptures move because he attaches a weight to one of the elements, allowing you to give…
In 1971, “gonzo” author, Hunter S. Thompson, debuted his novel, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. His soon-to-be-classic became a seminal part of over-the-top fiction depicting the exploding phenomenon of a drug-fueled counter-culture and a wild disregard for the behavior of the…
Author, Joan Didion, in her thought provoking book on coping with the death of her husband, referred to her recurring expectation that her husband would walk back in the door, or her inability to throw out his shoes, as “Magical…
If you’ve seen the movie Footloose even once, you are familiar with Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler’s rendition of the Steinman and Pitchford song, “Holding Out For A Hero.” It was covered by the fairy godmother in Shrek 2 as she tried to manipulate Princess…
In 1926, Charles F. Lummis, a city editor for the Los Angeles Times, historian, and city librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library, wrote, “Most of us know as much of history as a pig does of lipsticks”. Over time,…
Two hundred and fifty years ago, on June 14, 1775, the Continental Congress voted to raise six companies of militia in Pennsylvania (84 men in each, including officers, volunteers and one drummer or trumpeter), two in Maryland and two in…
