Pretty People Behaving Stupidly

I’ve been learning about the romance genre recently. I have no intrinsic interest in it at all, but I have an intelligent friend who plows through romances the way I read SF, and we’ve been discussing the conventions and structural features of the genre. Along the way I’ve learned that romance fans use an acronym… Continue reading Pretty People Behaving Stupidly

Blame The Audience

In Summer Fading, Hollywood Sees Fizzle, a writer for the New York Times explores the theory that movie attendance is tanking because the quality of all too many mega-hyped “major movies” has plunged into the crapper. Well, no shit, Sherlock — what was your first clue? Pearl Harbor? Alexander? Mission Impossible II? What’s really news… Continue reading Blame The Audience

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Appreciating Joe Satriani

I like to listen to instrumental electric guitar, and have a very large collection of the genre from the pioneering Jeff Beck albums of the 1970s forward, and including most of the output of Jeff Beck, Steve Morse, Eric Johnson, Steve Vai, Gary Hoey, Marc Bonilla, and half a dozen other guitar virtuosi. The seldom-disputed… Continue reading Appreciating Joe Satriani

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Susan Sontag is Dead

Imagine a writer/playwright/intellectual whose most famous single remark was “the black race is the cancer of human history”. Who said “The Pinochet revolution is astonishingly free of repression and bureaucratization.” Who praised the attack on Pearl Harber as a brave deed. Do you suppose such a person would collect laudatory tributes and glowing obituaries on… Continue reading Susan Sontag is Dead

The Revenge of the Nerds is Living Well

Grant McCracken has argued in his book Plenitude that one of the defining characteristics of the last fifty years is an explosion of subcultural variety — people creating new lifestyles and new identities around occupations, sexual tastes, hobbies, genres of art and music, religions, and just about any other investment of time human beings have… Continue reading The Revenge of the Nerds is Living Well

Hurray for Dollywood

Hot damn! I wonder if this here post by Iowahawk means I’m gonna git me someplace near here in Pensylvay-ni-ay that can serve up a decent mess of Texas barbeque? Put me down as a proud purple-stater. I like guns, but I hate country music. I love burnt-ends sandwiches, but I despise chewing tobacco. I… Continue reading Hurray for Dollywood

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The Far Side of Irony

Having seen Team America: World Police last Friday on its opening night, I’m amused by the mainstream-media spin that this movie is an anti-right-wing satire too subtle for the yokels to get. In fact, I think it’s it’s something much more peculiar and interesting — a movie that hides a strong fundamental patriotism and appeal… Continue reading The Far Side of Irony

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The Art of Science

One of my earliest blog essays (Terror Becomes Bad Art) was about Luke Helder, the pipe-bombing “artist” who created a brief scare back in 2002. Arguably more disturbing than Helder’s “art” was the fact that he genuinely thought it was art, because none of the supposed artists or arts educators he was in contact with… Continue reading The Art of Science

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Sex and Tolkien

Yes, I went to my local instantiation of the all-three-LOTR-movies marathon on Tuesday, and enjoyed it immensely. The movies were a delight; Peter Jackson’s Return Of The King fully lived up to the promise of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. Despite minor flaws and some questionable omissions, Tolkien fans have reason… Continue reading Sex and Tolkien

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The Last Samurai

Hollywood has given us a run of surprisingly good movies recently. By ‘surprisingly good‘ I mean that they’re rather better than one might expect from their genre. Loony Toons: Back In Action, for example, could have been a mere merchandising vehicle, a repetition of clichés and tired sight gags. Instead it was a wickedly funny… Continue reading The Last Samurai

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Cthulhu and Christ

This parody below comes to us from an artist named Howard Hallis, to whom all credit is due. I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing it here because the design of his website leads me to suspect that this cartoon might be replaced by something else the next time he has a fit of artistic inspiration.… Continue reading Cthulhu and Christ

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Communism and the Jews

Uh-oh. I see another identity-politics double-bind coming. Eugene Volokh comments on the anti-semitic canard that Jews were disproportionally influential in the development of Communism. The sides in this kind of dispute are very predictable. One one hand, the anti-Semites, a disgusting crew of racist troglodytes with evil motives. On the other, the good-hearted and right-thinking… Continue reading Communism and the Jews

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The desexualization of the American (fe)male

There’s been quite a blogospheric flap lately about Kim DuToit’s essay The Pussification Of The Western Male. The single feature of the conversation that surprised me most is that nobody connected it to Steven den Beste’s equally searing essay Anglo Women are an endangered species. Steve’s point complements Kim’s and amplifies it in some useful… Continue reading The desexualization of the American (fe)male

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Toxic Christianity, round two

In the October 15th Best of the Web, James Taranto asks: So let’s see if we have this straight: The head of the Anglican Church is telling us that the wanton murder of thousands of innocent people [by Palestinian terrorists] is a sign of “serious moral goals,” while the liberation of millions [of Iraqis] from… Continue reading Toxic Christianity, round two

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Mohammed was a Christian

In a recent blog entry I mentioned that Islam appears to have begun life as a mildly schismatic Christian sect. In the comments on that entry someone called for sources. Here is what I know about this: (First, a note on my general background: I am neither a Christian nor a Moslem, and in fact… Continue reading Mohammed was a Christian

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Nuke ’em for Christ

Pat Robertson, the same paragon of Christian virtue who has opined in the past that Wiccans like me should be burned alive the way they used to in the good old days, just created an interesting dilemma for me by suggesting that the State Department should be nuked. As a pagan anarchist, I’m completely uninterested… Continue reading Nuke ’em for Christ

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Brother, Can you Paradigm?

I just read an interview with my friend Tim O’Reilly in which he approvingly cited Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. There are some books so bad, but so plausible and influential, that periodically trashing them in public is almost an obligation. The really classic stinkeroos of this kind, like Karl Marx’s Das Kapital,… Continue reading Brother, Can you Paradigm?

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