Category: Quotable
What a Tangled Tweet We Weave When First We Practice to Get Outraged
A “good job” according to whom? May I ask when exactly was the last time you were in an elementary school and sat through an entire school day with first graders? I ask because my mother makes this same argument frequently, yet has not been in an actual elementary school building since 1976. Her grandchildren were taught at home so she, therefore, has no experience either visiting a school or evaluating a public school education since 1976.
Movie Night: Red Dust
“The attraction here isn’t really the cultural relic/curiousity value, it’s the variation of the old man meets woman, they hate each other, they clash with sparkling dialogue and then end up together ’til death they do part. This bit has been done to death in Hollywood’s 100+ year run, but it can be freshened and redeemed if the scriptwriter is up to the job.”
Movie Night: Born Yesterday
“Born Yesterday is pretty fabulous. At least until it sinks in that it’s just as applicable today (especially today!) as it was in 1950. In that year, it could have been warning against the House Un-American Activities Committee, which ultimately wrecked lives, but failed. But today, the movie is depressing when you realize that Broderick Crawford’s Harry Brock is in charge of the country, the Senate and the judiciary and is sitting in the White House tweeting.”
The Indictment
“Senate Republicans are setting a dangerous precedent that threatens the republic itself. I’m not naive enough to think they would hold Democratic presidents to the low standard they’ve applied to Trump, but all future presidents will be able to point to Trump to justify …”
Movie Night: The Big Clock
“Regardless of whether you saw it then as scandalous that such perversions were being exhibited in public theaters or whether you see it now as being stereotypical, offensive and overly focused on white, male, straight actors and queer panics and Italian stereotypes, to wit … offensive!! … there is much to actually be loved here.”
Movie Night: The Yellow Rolls Royce
“… this is probably the granddaddy of all product placement movies, far more egregious than even Joan Crawford’s conspicuous scattering of Pepsi bottles in Strait Jacket …”
Movie Night: Sweet Charity
“The songs and dances, Shirley MacLaine and Cita Rivera, et al, were great; it’s just the stuff in between that is less than satisfying.”
Movie Night: Strait Jacket
“The bonuses here are George Kennedy as a farmhand foreshadowing by 22 years Billy Bob Thornton in 1996’s Swing Blade (“I like them French fried potaters.”), all the Pepsi placement, and Lee Majors in pre-Six Million Dollar Man mode, along with his very hairy chest, fluffily rising and falling just before the axe falls.”
Movie Night: The Ritz
“Regardless of whether you saw it then as scandalous that such perversions were being exhibited in public theaters or whether you see it now as being stereotypical, offensive and overly focused on white, male, straight actors and queer panics and Italian stereotypes, to wit … offensive!! … there is much to actually be loved here.”
Movie Night: Desk Set
“Not only is it hilarious, it has fabulous midcentury (ugh, that word) interiors, jokes only librarian/book/research nerds understand, an awesome supporting cast including EMERAC and Kate gets to get blotto and talk about the “Mexican Avenue Bus” (the Lexington Avenue Bus, that is).”
On Crime and Punishment This Fourth of July
“It’s well worth a challenging read-and-think on everyone’s part at this particular moment in the country and society.”
Pocket Guide to France, or, Onward to Parisian Mademoiselles
“You are a member of the best dressed, best fed, best equipped liberating Army now on earth. You are going in among the people of a former Ally of your country. They are still your kind of people who happen to speak democracy in a different language.”
Paranoia, Fear, Terror and Facebook, et al.
“Insane levels of fear and control and succumbing to terror. We are a nation which is perhaps the most fearful of all countries.”
Corporate Power
“Many states whose sovereignty is threatened are now finally waking up to the danger. But is it perhaps already too late to do anything about the seemingly over-mighty corporations?”
The Wages of Sin, America, is …
“It is impossible to engage in intellectual discourse with National Socialist Philosophy. For if there were such an entity, one would have to try by means of analysis and discussion either to prove its validity or to combat it. …”
Random American Notes
“An American gentleman . . . likewise stuck his hands deep into his pockets, and walked the deck with his nostrils dilated, as already inhaling the air of Freedom which carries death to all tyrants, and can never (under any circumstances worth mentioning) be breathed by slaves.”
Kit Marlowe is a Naughty Nellie and Probably a Witch
I just caught this from two years ago on The Guardian‘s website. Two years behind, that’s about my speed. But
Deadly Chinese Fentanyl is Creating a New Era of Drug Kingpins
“Fentanyl’s potency has « transformed the global trafficking — and policing — of narcotics.”
Beery Originalist Quotables
Here are a few Original Originalist quotes worth Originally quoting, from a few of our first Original Founders:
Squeezed to Death
“On every airline flight, a crew member talks to passengers in the exit rows to see whether they can, as Federal Aviation Administration regulations specify, “pass expeditiously through the emergency exit” if needed. Given how passengers have grown in inverse proportion to the spaciousness of airliner seats, anything like “expeditious” evacuation of an entire airliner seems doubtful.”
Of Manifestoes and Buildings and Truman and Stuff
[Edited two days later to fix some typos and unclear, stream-of-consciousness-type unclear phrases.] During the recent effort to rename the
Atomic Poetry
On 1-Jun-1945, six weeks after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, new U.S. President Harry Truman convened a meeting to update
TCM Tonight: Summer Under the Stars – Joan Crawford
Of COURSE we had to watch some Joan tonight. Not taking time to behold the wonder that is our patron
Treading a Careful Path in Post-Castro Cuba
“There is a discrete left-opportunist trend that seeks to throw all developments in Cuba post-1959 into the dustbin and forget about it. This does as little for us as the right-opportunist line; both fail to grasp the full reality of revisionist corrosion and capitalist restoration in Cuba, although one cloaks itself in stultified theory.”
A Final “Hangin’ Out the Warsh”
«This is Bill’s final column» out of countless ones he wrote over 71 years for the Falls City Journal. With
History as Prophecy
I have been attempting to read «Michael Burleigh’s The Third Reich: A New History» since it came out in 2000. Instead, I’ve read «William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich» twice. Nothing wrong with anything I’ve read of Burleigh’s work; quite the contrary. In fact, it has to do with how big the book is; the first edition is 950-plus pages and weighs a ton and I’ve had hand/wrist problems since, well, 2000. And I have Rise and Fall on Kindle.
Entitle This
Rep. Larson Slams GOP for Labeling Medicare and Social Security 'Entitlements' Congressman John Larson (D-Conn.) scolded Republicans in a fiery
Dictionarialy Speaking
Want to know what words were recorded in dictionaries for the first time ever in the year you were born?
S.T.E.V.E.
Finally, I have an identity. I am a "Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement." Strong. Thermal Emission. Velocity… Posted by Steve
Scenes from Old Age …
[Scenes from old age (level 54 edition)] From “Mail Call Three” episode of M*A*S*H (S6,E20; 1978, when I was 15),
Arm Me With …
#ArmMeWith … so many other things than a Glock. Posted by Steve Pollock on Saturday, February 24, 2018
This is Our Reality Now
This is our reality … (another in a series): Posted by Steve Pollock on Tuesday, February 20, 2018
This is Our Reality, Teachers
[Yeah, it's long and snarky. Yes, again. Read and think or move along.] A teacher's perspective: This is our reality,…
On Shitholes
Every single day is a new low. How low can we go? There is no bottom. So pretty goddamned low. Shithole low.
Roy Moore's Gotterdammerung
“Antonio: ‘Mark you this, Bassanio, The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. An evil soul producing holy witness Is
They Don’t Like the New ‘America First’ As Much As They Did the Lindbergh Version
So let’s see if I’ve got this. Germany, a country in which there are still many women alive who were raped by invading Russian Red Army soldiers and in which the human products of those rapes are still living, now trust … Russia more than the United States.
American Carnage: 10-Nov-17
Peckerwoods! What we learned this week: • Comedian Louis CK and Crusading Crazy Ass Roy Moore were accepted into that
Fiery Marble
“I always knew I loved Maureen O'hara. Now I know why, thanks to this clipping from 1945.”
Fiery Marble (FB 2017)
“I always knew I loved Maureen O'hara. Now I know why, thanks to this clipping from 1945.”
The Dawn of Childish Just Me
William Bradley’s ‘The Dawn of ‘Just Me’: Zack Snyder’s Neoliberal Superheroes’, just published in the Los Angeles Review of Books,
Piranha Club, Bang On
From longtime favorite strip, "Piranha Club," (still known as "Ernie" in Scandinavia), a 'toon from October 1999 that I… Posted
Sassoon and Gaza: A Hundred Years, An Unchanged Mankind
In Palestine “On the rock-strewn hills I heard The anger of guns that shook Echoes along the glen. In my
The Old Lie (2018 Memorial Day)
On Remembrance Day … remember. War and the military should never be “celebrated.” Remembered with solemnity and an understanding of
The Old Lie
On Remembrance Day … remember. War and the military should never be “celebrated.” Remembered with solemnity and an understanding of