Bookworm Room

Tweet I know I’m just grumpy, but this promotional mailing from Ithaca College rubbed me the wrong way: Ready to write environmental wrongs.  Ithaca College will turn your academic passions into unforgettable experiences — and make you ready for the adventure of your life. I know that the first sentence is meant to be a [...]

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I have a problem with that, especially having grown up with a workaholic father. The fact is, I am too exhausted to be constantly looking for a job or working more-than one job.” She let it be known that she really resented the implication that she should be expected to go out and work hard to earn her own financial support.

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Tweet Thanks to a handy-dandy Amazon gift certificate, I just bought myself a Kindle copy of Greg Gutfeld’s The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage.  It sounds like a book that is simultaneously important and enjoyable.  I’ll be reading it with a close eye, because his ideas [...]

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Tweet Is the media to blame for the Aurora shootings? I would like to make the case that it is, not for any specific action that any specific media outlet has taken, but by its very nature. In 1970, Alvin Toffler published his seminal work, Future Shock, in which he predicted that one of the [...]

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Tweet It’s a long post title, but actually quite a short post.  What I really have is a matched set. First, an image that’s been circulating on the liberal side of facebook: For those of you who aren’t too conversant with popular culture, the one on the left is Snoop Doggy Dogg, who has avoided [...]

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Tweet Crazy people have always reflected their own society’s pathologies.  In a pre-modern era, crazy people thought they were the Devil or, perhaps, the Hammer of God.  In the atomic/space exploration age, insanity tended to involve aliens.  People thought they were abducted, thought aliens were among us, or thought that they were themselves aliens. What [...]

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Tweet What the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protestors don’t realize (yet) is that they have been suckered into becoming the agents of their own enslavement. Orwell had it so right in defining the Left because he was a man of the Left. The term “Orwellian” now refers to the Left’s use of terms to mean [...]

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Tweet One of the things that I try to understand is the Great Divide between today’s Liberals and conservatives that has left us talking past one another on policy issues. Frankly, I have concluded that discussion with Liberals is often futile because we attribute different meanings to words and concepts. One of those concepts, I [...]

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Tweet I don’t know what Tina Fey’s politics are, and I don’t want to know. The NBC show 30 Rock, which she writes and in which she stars is one of the best social satires around, which includes repeated deft and funny political asides. The show skewers both parties with such a light touch that, [...]

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Tweet Miramax is releasing a new motion picture called “Becoming Jane Austen,” which purports to tell of Jane’s abortive romance with a wild Irish lawyer. There is no doubt that, when she was young, Austen met Tom Lefroy, a young Anglo-Irish lawyer, thought he was nice, and had fun dancing with him. That’s it. That’s [...]

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Tweet I won’t blog here about my thoughts about Love, American Style, because I already wrote about it here, at American Thinker.  Check it out, and then be sure to come back and let me know what you think!

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Tweet My son asked me how Valentine’s Day began. I explained that, a long time ago, there was a man named Valentine who was known for his kindness to young couples who wished to get married (and he may have given doweries to poor girls so they could marry). He was also a Christian who [...]

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Tweet I wonder where she’ll go from here? It’s a tough (impossible?) act to follow. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the last of seven installments of the boy wizard’s adventures, will be published July 21, authorJ.K. Rowling said Thursday. Rowling announced the publication date on her Web site.

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Tweet In a peculiar way, I’m becoming very fond of David Denby, one of The New Yorker‘s resident movie reviewers. It’s clear that he aspires to be another Frank Rich — Rich, of course, being the former New York Times‘ theater critic who made the leap to ultra liberal political op-ed columnist. In the short [...]

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Tweet I’ve become very fond of David Denby’s movie reviews in the New Yorker, largely because he can’t resist letting his politics leak out all over the place. I’ve blogged before about his slobbering praise for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and his compulsion to use Garrison Keilor’s Prairie Home Companion as a forum for [...]

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Tweet My mother and I put our heads together tonight and began bemoaning the absence of charm in our modern world. The subject came up when, a propos something in our conversation, I quoted a line from “Singing in the Rain.” We fell silent a moment as we thought of that most wonderful movie, and [...]

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Tweet Although we didn’t ask for it, TiVo decided to record Airport, the 1970 airport disaster movie that started a whole genre of movies about burning buildings and sinking ships, and goodness knows what. I’d never seen it before, although I’ve seen seen Airplane several times. As you know, Airplane, which was released in 1980, [...]

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Tweet I don’t ordinarily read Time Magazine, since I decided years ago, even before my political transformation, that it held little interest for me. (Although I distinctly remember, in 1982, a “hip” young man I worked with castigating it as a conservative mag fit only for parents.) The only reason I even read it now [...]

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Tweet Since I have a sometimes embarrassing fondness for romance novels (Mr. Bookworm teases me a lot), I’ve written about romance novels before (once about British chick-lit, which I think is demeaning to women; and once about the conservative morals underpinning American romances). I was therefore intrigued when AP did a little story about the [...]

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Tweet When two people leave me messages saying I must, absolutely must, read a movie review, I take that seriously.  I therefore headed over to the Washington Post and read the review for Ant Bully.  I can now tell you that you must, absolutely must, read the Ant Bully review.  Even if, after the first [...]

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Tweet I can’t decide if this is the beginning of the end for any hope of normal society in Holland, or if it is an appropriate event in a free society, which allows issues to be aired and decided upon by the voters: A Dutch court refused Monday to ban a political party whose main [...]

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Tweet One of today’s most emailed NPR stories discusses a book by Robert Jensen, a professor of media ethics and journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.  In his book, Jensen purports to explain why all white people are in fact racists. I haven’t listened to the story, nor have I read the book [...]

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Tweet The New York Times has come up with an editorial that contains a perfect bootstrapping argument, one that works off the premise it is supposed to prove.  It's an almost impressive piece of dishonest rhetoric, whether or not one agrees with the sentiment expressed.  The context for this amazing piece of rhetorical sleight-of-hand is [...]

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Tweet NPR's Fresh Air recently did a replay of a 1996 interview with Tiny Tim (born Herbert B. Khaury), who died only a few months after the interview.  It's quite amazing.  Tiny Tim was a complete nut, but also a true musical savant, with an encylopedic knowledge of old American music, and a wonderful, although [...]

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Tweet The West Wing, the now defunct NBC show, is the ne plus ultra illustration of how Democrats think the world should be run. Indeed, you can amuse yourself with a list of top Left Wing scenes culled from all of the show's episodes. Last night, though, I was struck by a plot line that [...]

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