Reading James B. Stewart’s depressing account in the New Yorker of the amazing mindset of the Hewlett-Packard bosses who prowled through the personal activities of executives, employees and absolute ourtsiders not at all on their payroll, you can feel comfortable that Richard Nixon is not dead — not only does his dark, malevolent spirit live [...]
Entries from February 2007
February 27, 2007
Punch Line?
Maybe the laugh track’s broken. Maybe it’s all a joke and we’re just not getting it.
How else to imagine the madness of King George who alone in his cobwebbed tower thinks that he is Napoleon and Caesar and Alexander the Great rolled into one. In fact, he is Nixon and LBJ rolled into one, but [...]
February 26, 2007
Advise and Consent
Sayeth The New York Times:
“In 2004, the Democratic Party sent celebrities to swing states like Ohio to canvass voters. ‘People in Ohio, just like people in New Jersey, don’t want somebody from California to come tell them how to vote — ‘I’m here to save you,’ ” said [Eli] Attie. ‘It has a negative [...]
February 22, 2007
The Little Story
Doing great journalism is easy; it’s doing good journalism that’s hard.
The on-going hoo-ha between the blogs and the mainstream journalists is mostly the banging of hollow drums, says this guy who’s done both.
The squawky blogs, like me, say that the mainstreamers, like me, are all wet, that the dinosaurs failed fatally on the big story: [...]
February 21, 2007
Cut & Run
So the Brits are cutting and running. Exactly as people in their right minds have suggested – while earning the hatred and scalding abuse of people not in the right minds – they are leaving the mad war on Iraq.
This, exactly as the Emperor Bush and his obstructionist satraps are sending ever-more troops to [...]
February 20, 2007
Cornucopia
What on earth is this?
Have they repealed the laws of physics?
How exactly can a 178-pound man produce 179 pounds of, well, stuff that comes out of his (my) poor Rudolph nose when I get a cold?
I have heard that birds eat their weight in food every day. Big deal, teenagers do the same. But having [...]
February 19, 2007
Freedom of No Speech
So there you have it.
They are quite happy to send your children off to the slaughter of Iraq but they refuse to allow the Senate of the United States of America to even discuss it.
The war party warriors of the Cheney-Lieberman-Goode movement so love the mess they are responsible for and its purported goals that [...]
February 16, 2007
Overshare
Because of a big project I’m involved in, the glorious National Writers Workshop in Hartford, I have been dealing a lot in e-mails. We send out great batches of e-mails, which makes me think:
People so often have really cutsie-pie e-mail addresses. Oneeyedjoe@ aol or stillavirgin@ xxx or impossible to remember one, 7834576Mary@ YYY or others [...]
February 15, 2007
The Queue
A few years ago we found ourselves in Fez, a wonderful city in wonderful Morocco filled with wonderful Moroccans who treated us with such friendliness and openness. We loved the place.
We loved the place even as in their own modest version of such things, the government and religious figures kept a cold eye on [...]
