There’s nothing funnier than a bullet riddled chimpanzee corpse to make a humorous point about the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil logic of Washington deal makers. At least that must have been the considered opinion of the editorial leadership of the New York Post when the best and brightest at the Post agreed to run the dead monkey gag by cartoonist Sean Delonas on the the paper’s saucy Page Six. On the pavement of the cartoon lies a great ape turned to Swiss cheese by bullet holes. Behind the smoking gun, from the mouth of the police officer who shot him, come the words, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

Har-Dee-Har-HAR-Dee-Har-HAR!

Boy, did he skewer the Washington elite with that topical gag “ripped out of the pages” of this week’s newspapers. See, there was this famous performing chimp in Stamford, Conn., that went nuts and almost killed an old lady. When police responded to a frantic 911 call from the animal’s owner, the chimpanzee named Travis turned its anger on the men in blue who — get this — ran away and jumped inside their patrol cars. Tee-hee!

Eventually, the police fired several shots at the 200-pound primate, which has between five to seven times the strength of a man that size. Travis ran back into his house where he was found dead inside his cage. His 70-year-old victim lies in a hospital bed clinging to life. Meanwhile President Barack Obama signed the $787 billion stimulus package that was greeted by investors on Wall Street with a 300-point drop in the Dow.

It was a perfect storm of non sequiturs. [Read more →]

Tags: race & culture, trusted media & news by Clark DeLeon
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January 7, 2009
I dream I am hanging out near the indoor swimming pool at a Jewish Community Center. Actor David McCallum is at the pool chatting amiably with anyone who approaches him. He explains that he often comes to the JCC on the weekends. Meanwhile, I have to leave to attend a final rehearsal for a musical that opens at the JCC that night. I don’t know the lines or the songs, but the first number choreography involves tipping your top hat and dragging yourself around the floor in a circle.

July 12, 2008
I dream I audition for Play it again, Sam at the Jewish Y. I put my name on the list, see there are five people ahead of me, and figure I have time to go to the bathroom. The people recommend I don’t, but I say “the bathroom is right there; I can take care of this thing.” I am followed in by a teenage boy and a teenage girl. I say to the teenage girl, “You know, this is a men’s bathroom, don’t you?” She doesn’t care, so I tell her to get the fuck out of there. She says I should be ashamed of myself for saying “fuck” to a teenage girl. I say “I’m not ashamed of saying ‘fuck’ to a teenage girl who hangs out in men’s rooms.”

June 12, 1998
I dream I am working at a combination university/Jewish Community Center. My nemesis finds two beautiful Jewish women, convinces us all to get naked, fill up a steam shovel with cold cream, and take turns giving each other rides. After awhile, my nemesis slips away and brings the staff of the university/JCC to watch me frolic with the women. Once again, my nemesis makes me look bad.

Tags: Fred's dreams by Fred Siegel
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He cheated. Alex Rodriguez cheated. He may claim ignorance, but honestly, does that really matter? If a guy gets a blow job at a strip club and later tells his wife that he didn’t really think he was cheating — there is no doubt that he was, in fact, still cheating. The question is, if you were that guy, if you did something wrong (really wrong to some people, and so-so wrong to others), how would you handle the situation? Maybe you aren’t that dumb. Maybe you know better and would never be in this predicament. Maybe you never did anything illegal or stupid your entire life (even when you were 20). There are probably very few of you out there. In any case, what happens next?

Does your wife forgive your indiscretion? Do you start marriage counseling to “figure out” (as if you didn’t already know) why you strayed? Do you tell yourself it’s not like you were falling in love with someone else, you were just getting off every once in a while? What if you went back and got that blow-job twice a month for six months but then your wife found your credit card receipts? You have to fess up now, but how do you gain her trust again? Some women would write you off but others would work through it with you. The fans of New York are a tough bunch. The baseball writers are even tougher. They both expect more.

So what happens now? Do we string Alex up or let him play out the next nine years for the Yankees (or whatever his remaining overpriced contract is for) and see what he can do? Bill Clinton did not have “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky either. Do we forgive A-Rod and see if he can play worth his pay?

I am certainly not an expert on baseball but I know there were high expectations for Alex. He was going to “save” the game from all of this steroid use. He was going to break Barry Bonds’s tainted home run record and bring respectability back to the game. Oh well… being a fan is difficult sometimes. Alex isn’t the savior. Can we move on?

Tags: drugs & alcohol, sports by Amy Boshnack
7 Comments »

Words are sounds, and as such may mean something besides what they denote. Azure, indigo, ultramarine are more than blue. They echo, somehow, the sound of the infinite.

Not surprisingly, those who are fond of poetry — and poets themselves, of course — seem peculiarly sensitive to words as sounds. One Saturday night, when I was in my early teens, I read all of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. During the night I found myself waking up with snatches of his poems still running through my head, and the next morning there were some I just couldn’t get out of my  mind — the way it is when you keep hearing a tune over and over.

This was especially true of “Romance.” Certain phrases from it — “a painted paroquet … eternal condor years … trembled with the strings” — just wouldn’t go away. And it was the sound of them, not the sense — after all, what exactly are “eternal condor years”? — that enthralled me. Earlier, nursery rhymes had had the same effect. “Hey, diddle, the cat and the fiddle …” — I could repeat that one to myself endlessly. There is a phrase from Keats’s  “Ode to a Nightingale” — “O for a draught of vintage!” — that from the first time I read it to this very day casts a magic spell over me, transporting me simply by its melody and rhythm to a sunny day in a sunny clime in a time of romance.

W.H. Auden says somewhere that certain lines of poetry transcend language, that you don’t have to know the language or what the words mean in order to know immediately that they are poetry. [Read more →]

Tags: language & grammar, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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Congratulations to contributor Frank Wilson, whose blog Books, Inq was named one of the “100 Best Blogs” by the Sunday Times. Of course, we knew Frank when he was only famous to the many fans of his blog and to book lovers who appreciated his great work as book review editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer. We’re cutting edge like that. Don’t forget to read Frank’s column That’s What He Said every Tuesday morning at When Falls the Coliseum. Eight-thirty sharp.

Tags: announcements, books & writing by Coliseum
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Paula: I want to discuss the quality of student writing. Since both of us have taught for a long time, it seems to me something we can address. I have to say that I’m confused when I hear people as diverse as merchants in the stores I frequent and women at the gym I go to gripe about how badly kids write nowadays. I happen to think that they write better, in certain respects at least, than they ever have before. Yes, they don’t always understand comma usage, but they do seem capable of writing, when they want to, with fluency and verve. You’ve taught your share of writing courses, Robert — what do you think?

 
Robert: The gripes you mention are definitely a pet peeve of mine. I think society is ignorant about the nature of writing and what it means to write well. There is a widespread belief that good writing is all about knowing where to place a comma, knowing the various parts of a sentence. This misconception comes on top of a recurrent and strange tendency each generation has of insisting that the writing of the successive generation has deteriorated.

I remember talking with my optometrist a while back (he’s just one of many examples), and he asked me what I did for a living. I said I teach freshman writing in college, at Drexel. “Oh, that must be a really difficult job.” I may have laughed nervously or something, but I wanted to say, “Not for the reasons you think, buddy.” The reason my job is hard is because grading papers (I teach four courses a term) is exhausting. It’s not hard because student writing “is bad.” [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, conversations with Paula and Robert by Paula Marantz Cohen
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10. Wanted to prove that the Securities and Exchange Commission is a friggin’ joke.

9. Thinks them there ankle bracelets look really cool.

8. Knew he’d never get hard time, due to corrupting influence on other prisoners.

7. After seeing The Green Mile, thought prison would be kinda neat.

6. Wanted to devise intricate plan to see if his sons could keep a secret.

5. Always hoped to immortalize the family name.

4. Likes “Knock knock” jokes that end “Made-off…with 50 billion!”

3. All that financial stuff is way too confusing.

2. Believed going billions of dollars into debt would make him eligible for government work.

1. Thought a Ponzi scheme had something to do with the TV show Happy Days.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, on the law by Bob Sullivan
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We live in strange times, you and I. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Nothing is new that way. But the rich getting richer are doing so in almost unimaginable ways. And they’ve been doing it for so long that we don’t even question it anymore. In 1931 durng the brutal early months of the Great Depression, Babe Ruth was awarded an $80,000 contract by the New York Yankees. Ruth, who would retire four years later with a lifetime batting average of .342, on top of the all the home runs and all the strike outs, was asked by a reporter if the Babe deserved to be paid an annual salary worth $5,000 more than the President of the United States. Famously, the Bambino answered, “I had a better year than he did.”

Having a better year than Herbert Hoover in 1931 was the presidential equivalent of having a better year than (4-8) Phillies pitcher Adam Eaton in 2008. The difference is Hoover got voted out of office and Eaton got paid almost $8 million last year — 100 times what Babe Ruth was paid in 1931 and 20 times what Barack Obama will earn as President in 2009. As obscene as everything that went on on Wall Street that has collapsed before our eyes because of the greed that inspired it, we live in a Lala Land when it comes to what we pay professional athletes compared to, for instance, the president of the United States. Forget about you and me. What’s a President Obama worth? How much should he or any president get paid compared to an average ballplayer in any one of the major league sports?

The median or average salary of a Major League Baseball player is four times what the president makes, $400,000 a year. The only MLB club that pays its average players less, according to the USA Today database, is the Florida Marlins at $395,000. The average — the union scale — player in the NBA earns seven times more than the president. The NFL is modest by comparison. The average player in the National Football League makes two to three times what the president makes, which is not bad pay for offensive linemen. I was surprised to see that the average NHL player makes more than three times as much as the president. Let’s call it the Obama Line.

Let’s start keeping track of anyone’s salary — athletes, entertainers or bankers — as it compares to the annual salary of the President of the United States. If someone is being paid 700 points above the Obama Line, he’d better have a very good year.

Tags: money, sports by Clark DeLeon
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A friend wrote me the following yesterday, in response to my piece about the iPod. He suggested I do a follow-up, but I can’t improve on this.

Thesis: Technophoria, rather than technophobia, is what led us to the current dismal state of the music industry.  It isn’t so much (or only) that the big labels failed to respond to the technological innovations of Napster and other digitizing file sharers, it’s that the digitizing, in and of itself, carried the seeds of music’s destruction, in terms of the weakening of the influence of the major labels, the de-professionalization of music, the cheapening and commoditization of music, the lower sampling (bit) rates of digital versus analogue, the poorer sound quality, and on and on.

Now the same thing is on the verge of happening to books. As in music, we’re beginning to do things only because they’re possible, not because they’re desirable. But do we really want to see all books digitized (and their contents commoditized and cheapened) merely because we’re all afraid of being accused of being old fogeys and technophobes?  Do we really want to throw away thousands of years of printed history just because it’s possible to digitize books?  Not all technological innovations are good ones (cf. nukes and frozen burritos.)  E-books, in and of themselves, are not a bad idea — but the possibility that printed books and other forms of printed literature will as a result entirely disappear will be very, very bad for literature, in my opinion.

The irony is that the techno geeks who want to shove everything analogue into the shadows are themselves less capable of envisioning the future than the old-fogey technophobes.  Because they clearly didn’t see what digitization would do to music, and they can’t see how digitization will destroy books the way it’s destroyed music.

Now, I am not a Luddite. I love my MacBook and my Blackberry Curve. But, in terms of the quality of experience, it seems to me self-evident that: 

A home library is better than a Kindle.

The New York Times paper is better than the New York Times online. 

The New York Times Book Review is better than the book review section of Popmatters. (And I write for the latter!) 

Compact Discs are better than Mp3s.

A stereo sound system is better than an iPod. 

Talking on the phone is better than texting. 

A letter is better than email. 

A great bookstore is better than Amazon. 

A great record store is better than iTunes. 

But, in ten years, we’re likely not to have the New York Times, CDs, and book and record stores, while talking on the phone (at least for my 17 year old), the letter (we call it “snail mail”!), and home stereo systems are virtually gone already. And, as my friend suggests, will books be far behind? What is it about our culture that we happily trade quality of experience for convenience, portability, and quantity of experience?      

Tags: music, technology by Christopher Guerin
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Shrimp is by far the most popular seafood choice of American diners. The U.S. has had a thriving shrimping industry along the Gulf Coast states for hundreds of years to meet this demand. So why are we now  importing 85% of the shrimp we consume from thousands of miles away? Of course there’s only one reason — because it’s cheaper. 
 
Almost all of the shrimp you eat at home or in restaurants is farmed in Thailand….In other words it is raised in man-made ponds pumped full of antibiotics, fungicides, and pesticides. It is then frozen and boxed up, and in transit for days before it reaches your city. Then it is defrosted for several more days at your local fish market before it finally arrives in your kitchen or local restaurant. Meanwhile, our domestic waters are teeming with beautiful, wild saltwater shrimp: large, white shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico, or sweet, pink shrimp from the Pacific Northwest. But we are not eating this shrimp. Mainly because its high quality means that we consumers need to pay a little more for it. Restaurant owners and Fishmongers don’t think you care enough about what you put in your body to pay more, so they don’t buy it.  
 
What’s the solution? Start asking for Wild American Shrimp…at your grocery store, favorite restaurants, and fish markets. If they say they do not carry it, ask why. Tell them that you will pay more to know that the food you are feeding your family is safe. If we demand it, they will supply it. 
  

Tags: recipes & food by Jessica Alfreds
3 Comments »

With our coinpurses clutched ever tighter in our sweaty fists, Valentine’s Day is shaping up to be a little, well, limp, this year.

Lots of romance-related industries are feeling the pain — wine shops, restaurants, hotels, travel. Long thought to be recession-proof, even the adult entertainment industry is down, according to an article on Newsvine. Where’s the love?

At my house, we’re having a Valentine’s Day dinner party for 6, which is great for my guests, but it cost me $20 for a bag of shrimp and another $20 for a chocolate cake. What the hell? Of course, the cake was my idea and, obviously, it was a necessity because truffles are involved. It’s still cheaper than a dozen roses, but damn, the days of la-dee-dah boxes of Godiva and wild orchids are over, baby. It’s cake or candy or flowers. And maybe it’s a cupcake and nothing. Or a pancake. Things are tough all over. My husband could spit nails.

But, instead he’s working on his new passion, which is homemade pasta. Flour, egg, salt. Hours of entertainment + dinner. The kids get to turn the crank, mom gets linguine with butter, and my husband (He Who Cares Not a Whit for Mitre Saws) has Thursday night something to do that doesn’t cost hardly any damn money. I let him go crazy with the mascarpone from time to time, but it’s really not expensive. The pasta machine itself was not free, but there are a hundred on eBay for less than $50. Close to a hundred. Chances are you know some couple with one in their garage, a wedding gift that’s never been used.

Me? I bake. But, I’m always sneaking in whole grains, so my stuff is not always wildly popular in the house. But I found this recipe for an Italian boule bread that you supposedly can keep as dough in the fridge and whip out and bake whenever you want hot bread. And when do you not want hot bread? When you’re asleep? Even then.

It works. There’s nothing tricky about it. I’m too much of a novice to mess with the recipe by adding flax or oats or anything, so it’s just a muy crusty white frenchy hot loaf of carbs. It goes great with the homemade ravioli, with chili, with Kraft macaroni and cheese, with Ramen noodles, as low as you want to go. Bake a loaf with your stone soup, every day this week. If you don’t have a pizza stone, go buy a big unglazed ceramic tile from the hardware store discontinued pile, and use a smallish wood cutting board for a pizza peel. No kneading — honest. You can eat the first loaf the same day you make it if you give yourself a 5-6 hour headstart for the rising and stuff.  http://www.motherearthnews.com/Real-Food/Artisan-Bread-In-Five-Minutes-A-Day.aspx

Mother Earth has some good stuff in it, if you skip over the churning butter and gelding piglets. But, as you can expect, there isn’t much in there about skanking up your sex life on Valentine’s Day for ten bucks or less.

For that, you go to Ruby. And my solution here to the problem posed in the title? Red Vines, bags and bags of them. Figure it out. Hope it takes all night.

Later, after the lovin’, write me in great detail about something else. Something PG or PG-13. Or just a little R. Okay, tell me everything. It’ll be good to get it off your chest.

Tags: advice by Ruby Mac
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For several months now, our television has been displaying those “closed caption” subtitles even though we don’t want them.  We just can’t figure out how to turn this feature off (we’ve tried all the obvious stuff on all of the menus, but nothing works.)  It can be annoying, especially when I’m watching my beloved UFC (mixed martial arts) on Spike TV, because the subtitles run across the top of the screen, inevitably cutting off the head of a fighter at just at the moment he gets clobbered with a spectacular spinning back fist.  So when Joe Rogan yells, and the screen displays, “WOW!  Did you see that punch!”, I tend to yell back at the screen, “NO!  I DIDN’T!”

But there’s a benefit to closed captioning: the hilarious errors that the computerized transcription system generates.  Tonight, for example, on the 10:00 news, there was a feature on President Obama’s tribute, earlier in the day, to Abraham Lincoln on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth.  Except that, at the moment the announcer said, “today, President Obama honored the legacy of Lincoln,” the closed-caption subtitle read, “today, President Obama honored the legacy of Lenin.” 

I suppose that this could have been something other than a computer error.  For example, there may be a real live person who’s responsible for typing in the transcription, and he could have been spelling-disabled (which reminds me of the joke: “Two dyslexics walk into a bra…”) 

Another possibility is that the transcriber is unhappy with what he considers to be the socialistic implications of the Wall Street bailout, and, in the grand tradition of the Boston Globe staffer who inserted the headline “Mush from the Wimp” over an otherwise sober editorial about Jimmy Carter, was committing a nasty little political grafitto.  If the latter is the case, I suspect he’ll be getting a bit of a spinning back fist of his own from his bosses tomorrow morning.

Tags: ends & odd, trusted media & news by Michael Antman
3 Comments »

I came across this post and had to share. PunIntended.com has a list up of seven towns with bizarre names. My big question — would you move to a place called Boogertown?  Some of my favorites:

1. Ding Dong, Texas

2. Boogertown, North Carolina

3. Conception Junction, Missouri

4. Satan’s Kingdom, Vermont

There is one road in my town called Stoner Avenue. I’d rather my kids grow up on the next block, assuming the house of my dreams isn’t over on Stoner.

Ever come across any strange streets or town names? Would love to hear them.

Tags: ends & odd, language & grammar by Amy Boshnack
6 Comments »

Last spring an 11-year-old girl from Wisconsin named Kara died because her parents prayed for her to get better — instead of calling a doctor to treat her diabetes. The girl’s parents are being tried this spring for reckless endangerment. Kara’s condition was easily treatable.

I can’t imagine her parents wanted her to die. At least, I would like to think they didn’t want her to die. But as a parent who would do whatever necessary to help my kids, I just can’t understand the logic. And certainly there is a time for prayer if you believe in that sort of thing, but not instead of medical treatment that would save her life. Religious Jews would drive to a hospital on the Sabbath if their health were at risk. Wouldn’t God prefer that? If you believe in God, isn’t it God who helped to “create” the scientists who are discovering these treatments? Isn’t it in some way under that guidance that we’ve come as far as we’ve come medically?

Kara’s parents are challenging the trial by saying their religious freedom is being trampled. They are right — it is being trampled — and to that I say, when it comes to a child who can’t make her own decisions, too freaking bad. There is a time and a place for everything. If you want to pray for your own health, instead of getting treatment, be my guest, but a child has the right to get treatment when her parents are choosing to deny it to her. Kara is dead because her parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, chose to pray instead of calling a doctor.

Tags: health & medical, religion & philosophy by Amy Boshnack
1 Comment »

I invented the iPod. Or, at least, I invented the iPod that’s currently on my desk. In 1970, an avid music-lover, with hundreds of LP’s in my collection (no, for those of you too young to know, I won’t define LP), I dreamed of having a portable way of listening to all of my music. I called it my “universal jukebox.” I couldn’t envision the actual technology, of course, but I imagined a kind of personal radio, with me as the DJ, spinning only my records, at the touch of a button. (I also invented the compilation CD, but that’s another story.) 

Today, I have 3 iPods. One has all my contemporary classical, from Karlheinz Stockhausen to John Adams. One has approximately 20,000 tracks, mostly from the last 10 years, ripped from CDs, downloaded from iTunes, and free downloads (not a single one illegal) from sites like 3Hive and Daytrotter. My universal jukebox, though, is my 30 gig iPod classic with 670 albums, all ripped from CDs, every great album from the 60’s, 70’s and a few from later decades, what I call the “canon.” [Read more →]

Tags: music, technology by Christopher Guerin
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January 30, 2009
I dream I am in a cooking show/cooking school and the challenge today is “mouse cooking.” With a certain naughtiness, the chef pulls a little white mouse from his costume, covers it with flour and sugar and puts it into the center of a metal ball that screws together. Later, it comes out in a deep fried state. I am disgusted and I refuse to eat it, but on the way home I am with other people and a bird swoops toward me. I accidentally injure it. One of my companions, the former head of the Department of Performance Studies at NYU, insists that I must now take care of the bird because I have altered its life. I find a box in my garage in which the bird can heal.

January 18, 2009
I dream I am on a bus trip to an unfamiliar city with mazelike streets. I explore the magic shop, which seems to be well-stocked, but nothing interests me. On the way back to the room, I hear that a present is waiting for me. In the bathtub, there is a small puddle of scum, a fish head, and a half mouse that is still alive. Nearby I find a bucket and a pair of mouse tongs. Using the mouse tongs, I place the half mouse into the bucket and fill it up with water. I hold the half mouse under until it is dead.

January 5, 2009
I dream I live in a cross between my father’s house and a hostel for wayward youth. I need to go to the bathroom, so I steal a padlock from outside the bedroom of Curly from the Three Stooges. I use Curly’s lock to keep the bathroom secure. The bathroom is squalid, so I try to do my business quickly. There is wind coming in and it makes some toiletries move to the edge of the sink and then fall off. This creates kind of a shadow play. One of the bottles is shaped like Mickey Mouse, and Mickey’s silhouette appears to commit suicide by jumping off the sink.

Tags: Fred's dreams by Fred Siegel
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1.  LEMON CHICKEN; Serves 4

Ingredients: 4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts; 1 cup of bread crumbs; 2 lemons; 1 cup of flour; salt and pepper; 4 Tbsp olive oil; 3 Tbsp unsalted butter (optional); 2 eggs; 1/2 cup white wine; 2 cups chicken stock; 2 Tbsp chopped capers.

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees. Trim 4 chicken breasts of skin and fat and cut them in half (so that they are half as thick as they were). Now you have 8 thin chicken breasts. Coat them with flour and shake off the excess. 

Whisk two eggs in a bowl and season them with a pinch of salt and pepper. Spread 1 cup of bread crumbs on a dinner plate. Dip the floured chicken breasts in the egg, then coat them with bread crumbs. Press down on the chicken with your fingers as you apply the bread crumbs to make sure they adhere well. 

In a large non-stick saute pan, heat four Tbsp of olive oil over medium-high heat. Add chicken to the pan — don’t crowd it, they should not even be close to touching. If you need to, cook chicken in two or more batches.  Saute three minutes. Flip over with tongs. Saute four minutes more. Remove chicken from pan and place on an ovenproof plate. Put the plate into the warm oven while you finish your dish. [Read more →]

Tags: recipes & food by Jessica Alfreds
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I went to a mixer last night that was, according to the invitation, to be on the topic of “publishing,” and brought along a friend, a publicist for a boutique publishing house in the Chicago suburbs, who was looking to do some networking and meet some of her peers.

As it turned out however, two of the three advertised speakers (the third didn’t show up) were members of what I like to call the Screen-Based Community, which is to say professional bloggers, and the discussion was entirely about online publishing, micro-blogs, corporate blogs, and the like. 

Attempting to be a devil’s advocate and a mild-to-moderate pain in the ass, I tried during the discussion session that followed the presentations to question the largely unquestioned assumption by at least one of the presenters that, as he put it, “print is dying a slow and painful death.”

It is inarguable that many print publications are exhibiting these days all of the signs of “cachexia” (wasting away), and it is equally inarguable that, if present trends continue, we may sooner or later be left with only a handful of print newspapers — the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and so on — and few if any of the traditional city newspapers.  Here in Chicago, in fact, there appears to be a spirited race between the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune to see whose pulp incarnation will disappear first.

Magazines, most of them anyway, would appear to be in trouble too, as their lifeline, advertising, slowly bleeds away to the Web.

But, as I pointed out during the discussion, “present trends almost never continue.”  The reason is that technology trends, and trends in general, rarely if ever move in a straight and predictable line, and are instead subject to reconsiderations, reversals, and revivals of older and seemingly abandoned methodologies.  [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, trusted media & news by Michael Antman
9 Comments »

Last week, I posted on my blog a link to a piece by Gene Callahan about the British philosopher and historian Michael Oakeshott called Michael Oakeshott on Rationalism and Politics. According to Callahan, Oakeshott’s view was that “the rationalist, in awarding theory primacy over practice, has gotten things exactly backwards.”

This brought to mind something Nietzsche says in Twilight of the Idols: “I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” What reminded me of this was the realization, while I was reading the piece on Oakeshott, that rationalism is the foundation of every so-called system. Or, to put it another way, every system is an exercise in rationalism. [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
4 Comments »

10. Solid gold toilets, to replace their gold-plated ones.

9. More homes than John McCain can count.

8. A tree that really does grow money.

7. Diamonds on the soles of their shoes

6. Costa Rica

5. A real 100 Grand Candy Bar

4. A “World’s Wealthiest Man” coffee mug

3. Special glasses that block out the sight of “poor” people (6 figures or less annual income)

2. Their dignity (though they won’t have nearly enough cash).

1. More Congressman, to vote for their next round of bailouts.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, money by Bob Sullivan
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