Bookworm Room

Tweet When my first was born, I had a lot of sleepless nights, not to mention a lot of sitting around during the day during feeding times.  It was during these first few months that I discovered Lois & Clark – The New Adventures of Superman.  Or more accurately, I discovered Dean Cain as Clark [...]

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Tweet I’ve always had a rule for myself:  leave a party while you’re still having fun.  If I know I’m going to have to leave anyway, I don’t wait until a sense of boredom or disgust creeps in.  Instead, as I’m on the cusp, feeling tired and aware that things will soon go downhill, I [...]

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Tweet When it comes to clothes, I settled into my color palette in junior high school.  My favorite color is black; my next favorite is gray.  This is not because I’m a depressed person or into Goth.  It’s because I have absolutely no ability to match colors. That’s where black and gray come in:  everything [...]

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Tweet Did I ever tell you that I got to meet with David Swindle last year?  He’s an associate editor at PJ Media, which is kind enough periodically to publish my articles.  I’ve been corresponding with David for several years, and was delighted to get the chance to meet him.  He is, as you would [...]

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Tweet From my email:

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Tweet I am really becoming a fan of Kevin Williamson, over at National Review.  Today, he goes beyond Progressives’ superficial characteristics (wealth reallocation, gun fear, etc.), and digs deep into their values and their psyches.  It’s fascinating reading on its own terms.  It’s also extremely useful because, as Williamson himself says, you have to understand [...]

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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 “Hey, kids! Let’s put on a show!” Back in the late 1930s and early 1940s, every American knew those words. In myriad movies, Andy Mickey Rooney, with a glowing Judy Garland at his side, enthusiastically announced that, if all the kids would just combine their musical talents, they’d be Broadway bound. Sure enough, with [...]

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Tweet I’ve always been a Scott Baio fan.  He was the only one I liked in Happy Days.  I liked Charles in Charge, in part because it had an old-fashioned morality.  And I like his courage in being an open Republican in Hollywood:

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Tweet I was living abroad when Fast Times at Ridgemont High was released, so I didn’t see it until a few years later, when I was in my mid- or late-20s.  I say this because, had I seen the movie when it first came out, when I myself was fairly close to the character’s ages, [...]

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Tweet James Taranto writes from Tampa about the Leftist protest and its sponsor (emphasis mine): “Really hard to notice the RNC protesters if you’re not running around trying to find them,” Slate’s Dave Weigeltweeted early yesterday afternoon. “V far from convention, other events.” The convention’s start was delayed a day, and so was the late-afternoon [...]

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Tweet The much-talked about Magic Mike (talked about because it involves male strippers, so people can feel a frisson of naughtiness just attending the movie) is surprisingly good.  The movie manages to be simultaneously very funny, quite risqué, deeply depressing, and unexpectedly heart-warming. It works because Channing Tatum (or do I mean Tatum Channing?  I [...]

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Tweet I am reading a delightful book about Fred and Adele Astaire, one that offers a little insight into a long-vanished world.  Along the way, the book mentions Eddie Cantor.  That reference reminded me of a song I always liked:  We Can Build A Little Home, from 1933′s Roman Scandals.  As was the case for [...]

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Tweet Despite any actual evidence, Elizabeth Warren sticks resolutely to her claim that she is 1/32 Native American. This is how crazy people think.  Do you know how I know that?  Because I just watched Bowfinger with the kids. Bowfinger, which was made in 1999, when one could still be at least a little bit [...]

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Tweet My husband and I are current watching The Ides of March.  That I am staying awake during a movie that stars the bovine George Clooney, the insipid Ryan Gosling, the obscenity-spouting Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and the “I don’t get why he’s famous” Paul Giamatti and that, forty minutes into the movie, still has no [...]

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Tweet We have been watching a new HBO show called Veep, a comedy that stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a fictional Vice President.  The show isn’t about politics (we never see or hear from the President, although a goofy jerk is his liaison to the Vice President’s office).  Instead, it’s about office dynamics.  Louis-Dreyfus’ character is [...]

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Tweet I love fairy tales.  I’ve always loved fairy tales.  Growing up, I devoured fairy tale books, with special emphasis on the Disney movies, with their beautiful princesses.  My personal favorite was Disney’s Cinderella.  I saw it once when I was a child and then, in a pre-video era, all I could do was replay [...]

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Tweet I had the opportunity the other night to see a first run movie and I ran out the door so fast, I forgot my jacket.  The movie was the smash hit The Avengers.  Of the predicate movies that introduce the various characters, I’ve seen only the first Iron Man, so it took me about [...]

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Tweet Here’s an old, bad (really bad) joke: During the 1973 war, the Israeli Army determined that at least one third of all Arab forces arrayed against them were named Mohammed.  They quickly developed a new tactic.  The IDF troops would take cover and holler out, “Mohammed!”  In response to the call, one third of [...]

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Tweet We finally got around to watching The Iron Lady, which won Meryl Streep another Best Actress award.  It was a movie that failed at so many levels, most strikingly in its obvious goal of denigrating Margaret Thatcher and leaving a sordid historical record behind.  To appreciate how the movie failed in this manifest goal, [...]

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Tweet Stockholm Syndrome:  In psychology, Stockholm Syndrome is an apparently paradoxical psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and have positive feelings towards their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them. These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake a lack of [...]

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Tweet Subject to a very few exceptions, I don’t see movies during their first runs in movie theaters.  Instead, I see them when they’re released on DVD.  That’s why I’m only watching The Help now. (The Help is a movie about black maids in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi.) Before I go any further [...]

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Tweet I’d never heard of Roshon Fegan before last night, when I finally caught up with this season’s premier of Dancing With The Stars.  Now, I’m unlikely to forget him.  The guy can move: Incidentally, for those who’ve heard that this season’s opener was the best ever, that’s no hype.  With the exception of Martina [...]

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Tweet In 1990, the movie Pretty Woman took the country by storm and turned Julia Roberts into a major star.  It was a “new age” Cinderella story, one that saw a prostitute, through her soulful innocence, redeem a corporate raider.  I was not charmed.  To me, corporate raiders are useful people, while prostitutes are very [...]

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Tweet Today’s news — if you can call it news — is that Rosie O’Donnell, is not only to the left of Left politically, she’s no lady when it comes to her day-to-day interactions with people, especially people in subordinate positions: Through all the changes [in the form of the just-cancelled The Rosie Show], some [...]

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