RIP, Nora Ephron
The news that Nora Ephron has died at 71 took me by surprise. I had no idea she was even ill, but it was more than that—she was just so funny (which is a stupid thing to say, I know, … Continue reading →
Category Archives: Arts
Climb every mountain, ford every stream?
Tamae Watanabe, 73, has become the oldest woman to climb Mt. Everest. According to the article, this should be an inspiration to us all. My hat is off to Watanabe, but it makes me a bit weary. Now it’s not … Continue reading →
Mark Steyn eviscerates Obama the memoirist
Steyn writes: In an inspired line of argument, Ben Smith of the website BuzzFeed suggests that the controversy over “Dreams From My Father” is the fault of conservatives who have “taken the self-portrait at face value.” We are so unlettered … Continue reading →
Not much news today
Sometimes I wonder what makes me pick a topic to write about. Some days there’s a story du jour that cries out for treatment, even if only to provide a forum for commenters to talk amongst themselves about it. Sometimes … Continue reading →
Flying the friendly skies
I’ve watched the TLC show “On the Fly” once or twice (only while double-tasking, so please don’t mock me too much). According to TLC, it “gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the modern air travel experience, sharing the large-scale operations … Continue reading →
Alice Walker: no Color Purple for Israel
You’re probably familiar with Alice Walker’s Pulitizer prizewinning novel The Color Purple. It caused a sensation when it was published way back in 1982, with its story of a poor black woman who rises from a history of abuse and … Continue reading →
Juliet Poynz, changer?
About a week ago marked the 75th anniversary of the disappearance of Juliet Poyntz. She’s hardly a household word, but her story is not atypical of those highly-placed Communists who turned on their former colleagues. Poyntz was a Barnard history … Continue reading →
Dance: three genres
A friend sent me two videos of the precocious preteen dancer, Israeli Gaya Bommer. The first featured Bommer in the sort of weird, techno, robotic, gymnastic sort of choreography that’s known as “contemporary” but that I don’t quite get and … Continue reading →
Obama’s bad week: losing his turns
There have been a lot of articles lately about Obama’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. The “private sector is doing fine” remark seems to have been a catalyst, but there have been a host of other indications lately … Continue reading →
A science fiction giant…
…is gone: [Bradbury] attributed his success as a writer to never having gone to college–instead, he read and wrote voraciously. “When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week,” he said … Continue reading →
Alien spam
I got some spam email in my mailbox that began this way: Who I am? Shiny green eyes, twenty two years… It went on to catalogue her other enticing body parts—“C cup,” for example, which I would have thought was … Continue reading →
Speaking of Obama and Jews…
…(and we were, at least sort of) did you know that some of his best friends are? And that he thinks he knows more about Judaism than any past president, because he read about it? By the way, at the … Continue reading →