Glee (FOX, Fall, 2009) — I had high expectations for this and it did not disappoint. It was actually better than expected, not because it was oozing with cheese, but because actually, it wasn’t. Obviously, it’s had its cheesy moments, but I actually saw some similarities between Glee and the 1999 dark comedy, Election. It’s funny and entertaining, yet quietly odd (and the main chick, Rachel, is reminiscent of Reese Witherspoon’s award-nominated role as the uptight teacher’s pet, Tracy Flick). [Read more →]

Tags: television by Lauren LaBumbard
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Rarely has an athlete who has shown up in the papers for the wrong things as often as John Daly had so much positive press at the same time. Sure, he has won some tournaments and wowed crowds with his long-distance drives. But he has also been a human train wreck. Issues with alcoholism and weight have chased him his whole career. Fans have always flocked to him, though, drawn in by his everyman persona and his sense of humor.

This week, he leads off our Good Sports section by showing his support for the plight of fellow golfer Phil Mickelson’s wife, who has breast cancer, by wearing pink pants at the BMW PGA Championship in England. [Read more →]

Tags: sports by Alan Spoll
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10. Enchantment Under the Bleachers

9. An Evening to Forget

8. Crepe Paper, Bunting, And That Gym Sock Smell!

7. Save the Last Dance for Your Hot Friend

6. Dry Hump Dreams

5. Goodbye Textbooks! Hello Minimum Wage!

4. Herpes-palooza!

3. Moon Over Abu Ghraib

2. A Midsummer’s Night Grope

1. Memories to Last a Nighttime

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, education by Bob Sullivan
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Author’s note: For 10 months I traveled to work in New York City from my home in southeastern Connecticut. Notice I used the word “traveled” and not “commuted.” The difference, to me, is mileage and duration. My daily “commute” was three hours each way, including a 45-minute drive, an hour-and-40-minute train ride, and subway rides across and uptown. Occasionally, I took notes on the people sitting around me on the train. What follows are the fourth and fifth of several stream-of-consciousness entries I made in an untitled journal.

Monday, July 28, 2008

I appreciate each and every person who passes. Apparently there is a more appealing seat than any of the three surrounding me. [Read more →]

Tags: diatribes by David A. Brensilver
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The most powerful work of public sculpture I’ve ever encountered is Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. I first visited it late one spring night in 1985 when I was 32. I was astonished at how many people were there at nearly midnight. I found the experience deeply and unexpectedly moving, not least because it caused me to think how lucky I’d been not to have to go to war myself. I wrote this poem soon after and left a copy of it at the Memorial when I returned a year later.

[Read more →]

Tags: terror & war by Christopher Guerin
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I am not a Luddite. I love my MacBook, my iPod, and my Blackberry Curve. I have my doubts about the effects on literature and music through digitization, the Kindle, downloading, etc., but I accept the premise that, on balance, such technological progress is a good thing. I also eagerly await the progress of medical science in the areas of Alzheimer’s and hip replacement, two things I worry about. Now, a recent article in The New Scientist reports on a recent conference on Neuroscience, and proclaims, “It will soon be possible to boost human brainpower with electronic ‘plug-ins’ or even by genetic enhancement.” [Read more →]

Tags: black helicopter watch, technology by Christopher Guerin
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What do you do when you’ve taken a great concept, squeezed it until it’s bled dry, and made it a non-viable entity? In cinema, the answer is the “reboot”. And the best way to reboot a franchise is with a “prequel”. Following the path led by George Lucas and the Star Wars prequels, movie makers are revisiting some of the best sci-fi concepts that have been ruined by greed, and the American need to make each sequel to a movie (insert Schwarzenegger accent here) “Biggah, bettah, with even moh exploshons!” Star Wars worked to a point, with each prequel getting better and better. (Best in my opinion was The Clone Wars movie and animated series). Star Trek‘s new movie was mostly very good, with an interesting twist on the “reboot” concept, using an alternate timeline. Terminator Salvation, though, falls woefully short of these rebooted prequels. [Read more →]

Tags: movies by David Alfreds
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This week, all the major networks made their presentations and unveiled their fall/mid-season lineups to the media and its buyers. As an obvious fan of TV and its miraculous storytelling, I look forward to this week every year. As all my shows come to a close, this is a reminder of what’s to look forward to and figure out just how much time I will consume engaging with my fictional friends and family, and how little time I’ll be spending with my real life friends and family. Here it is…. [Read more →]

Tags: television by Lauren LaBumbard
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The study is out and the facts are in. Nearly 80% of a sampling of women surveyed in the UK (as stressed and recessed as anywhere else economically) admitted that they would still “splurge to cheer themselves up.”

According to Karen Pine, a University of Hertfordshire professor and author of “Sheconomics” (and soon-to-be-nominee for Author of Most Dumbass Title of the Year Award), “This type of spending, or compensatory consumption, serves as a way of regulating intense emotions.” [Read more →]

Tags: advice, money by Ruby Mac
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A survey by the Pew Research Center found that some of the most supportive of torturous acts are also some of Christianity’s most pious.  54% of Christians who attend service at least once in a week said the use of torture against terrorist suspects was either “often” or “sometimes” justified.  In the survey, 19% of White non-Hispanic Catholics answered that torture can “often” be justified to gain important information.  White Evangelical Protestants accounted for 18%.  These two groups led all other groups in the survey, which also included mainline Protestants as well as religiously unaffiliated. [Read more →]

Tags: politics & government, religion & philosophy by Nathan Cushing
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So apparently there is a boom in tiny bedbugs. Maybe even the “biggest outbreak since WWII.” They are strong little suckers, resisting many pesticides — and apparently they like to travel, spreading fast through hotels, dormitories, and buildings. So when you tell your kids at night, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” you really may mean it. And when my daughter says, “Mommy, there aren’t really bedbugs, right?” I lie and tell her, “No, of course not honey.” [Read more →]

Tags: health & medical by Amy Boshnack
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Earlier this year, when the pop signer Rihanna, was beaten, allegedly by her 19 year old boyfriend, the subject of teenage dating abuse was discussed in the mainstream media, perhaps for the first time.  As brutal and shocking as the attack on the singer was, what horrified me even more was the reaction that young people — particularly girls — in this country had towards it. [Read more →]

Tags: family & parenting, trusted media & news by Louisa Wright
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Novelist Dan Fante has paid his dues; he has overcome alcoholism, scores of crummy jobs, and the desperate fate accorded so many sons of famous fathers. But after nearly 20 years of writing fiction, 2009 is shaping up to be a great year for Dan. His new novel 86’d will be published by Harper Perennial on September 22, 2009, and his three previous Bruno Dante novels will be rereleased on December 1 of the same year. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, drugs & alcohol by Alex Kudera
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Nancy Pelosi’s readiness to blame the Bush Administration, the “all-purpose political punching bag” of liberal imagination, for her own imperfections, indicates that President Obama has not yet broken the “pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.”

If the President truly wishes to change the tone in our nation’s capital, he’s going to have to do two things: [Read more →]

Tags: politics & government by B. Daniel Blatt
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I realize that the next book in Mary Balogh’s Huxtable series came out on Tuesday, May 19, but I won’t be reviewing it for today’s column. Instead, I will be reviewing To Beguile a Beast by Elizabeth Hoyt, who is one of the few historical romance novelists whose novels I enjoy for the writing itself (as opposed to just for the story). It is in the way she tells the story, the words she uses, the formatting she employs, as well as the direction the story progresses, that allows me to put her in a higher class than the typical romance novelist. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, romancing history by Katie Colvin
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Sometimes a book comes along at the right moment in your life and helps you through a rough patch. And this book is one of them. 

Let me begin by saying this The Bro Code has no merit. It isn’t literature. It isn’t even a narrative. It’s based on a book in the TV series How I Met Your Mother. In the show a male character, Barney, a complete womanizer, quotes endless rules on how guys should act. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing by Steve Mazzeo
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The New York Knicks paid Stephon Marbury $19 million this season not to play. Let that sink in for a moment. The Knicks deemed him so poisonous to team chemistry it was better to give him million after million after million — repeat this 16 more times for his full salary — than to risk him being anywhere near the other players. The most contact he had with his teammates was when he bought a seat to their game against the Lakers in Los Angeles (news accounts said he sat by Spike Lee and spent most of the game talking on his cell phone). Recently I wrote about Mike Tyson, who is by his own admission a chronically unfaithful man prone to violent rages he can’t remember, much less control, plus a convicted rapist. I still like him more than Marbury. [Read more →]

Tags: sports by Sean Cunningham
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March 20, 2009
I dream I am embarrassed to be in a supermarket with my mother. I tell her that I will get her a cart and put saltine crackers into it and then give it to her and meet afterwards. I am crestfallen to discover that they are out of saltine crackers and therefore I can’t complete my task. On the way home, I get turned around. Fortunately, I have with me a small model of a car which contains the soul of the car I’m driving. I get out when the traffic is slow and I turn around my model car with the assumption that this will fix things with the car I’m driving. It doesn’t work and I am stuck on the road. People honk. [Read more →]

Tags: Fred's dreams by Fred Siegel
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My initial response to Rick Barot’s Want (aside from the inevitable “ooh” that comes from trailing one’s fingers across a volume from Sarabande Books) was to think, immediately, that he is an amazing poet. This is someone whose work I’m almost obliged to share with others. Indeed, the first three poems in this, his second collection, are currently jockeying (along with a 20-minute rendition of a Pink Floyd song) in my mind for inclusion in this review. All are damn fine poems, and I want to tell you about all of them. I want, as a critic, to tell you about most of the poems in this book, to gaze in as minute detail as is possible into the soundness of the lines and the vividness of the imagery. Alas, criticism, like any other form of writing, is a negotiation with such competing desires (and with those doubts that shadow them).

[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, living poetry by Les Kay
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If you just read what those on on the left, particularly the gay left, and in their MSM echo chamber said about Carrie Prejean without hearing the beauty queen’s actual words, you might have thought she had slandered gays, saying that the reason “homosexuals” weren’t worthy of state-sanctioned married was because we were perverts, incapable of relationships.

But, she didn’t smear us. She just articulated how she defined marriage — which is how all societies have defined the institution since time immemorial, by gender difference.* [Read more →]

Tags: his & hers by B. Daniel Blatt
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