Miniver Cheevy

The Thick House's production of The Creature in San Francisco isn't quite the best Frankenstein ever — Mel Brooks' film may...

There are a million other things I should be doing with my time, but duty calls. An old acquaintance asks, “What's the response to t...

Remember the time-traveling mechanical elephant I wrote about a while back? There haven't been any sightings lately, but some of his f...

I offer you Dorothy Parker: If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram I never seek to take the credit We all assume that Os...

DrinkSafeTech.com offers a useful product. The Drink Safe Personal Test kit contains two tests. About the size of a credit card, they in...

For lovers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies , Jane Austen's Terminate with Extreme Prejudice , and especailly Philip José Farmer's...

In times past I've quoted my father saying that Doctor Who was just a lot of walking around in corridors and talking. I discover that ...

Shorter Petition for Roman Polanski Everyone knows film festivals ought to be lawless temporary autonomous zones, because if a guy ca...

If you've been enjoying The Sartorialist —you know who you are—I offer you a convenient flowchart of how to get photographed by him.

Update: I just realized that this is a case of “life imitates action figure. ” John Hodgman, of course, saw this this coming.

About a month after 9/11, there was a benefit concert in Madison Square Garden to raise money for recovery efforts et cetera . It was ful...

I used to work with Nanci Houlgate, and in addition to her other skills she turned out to be a very accomplished baker of elaborate and deli...

Via Pecunium, I learn that Fred Clark at Slacktivist offers an excellent retelling of a story from evangelist Tony Campolo's memoir Let...

It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes — or ...

Is it genius, or is it madness? We start with 100% beef jerky, and SEAR your contact information into it with a 150 WATT CO 2 LASER. Scr...

Will Wilkinson, in the course of a right-on blog post talking about how our current era of tricky mixed expectations about how a gent behav...

Ted Kennedy 1932-2009 Statesman He was as good at being a United States Senator as anyone ever has been. And by my lights, he was not on...

Via Hal O'Brien, from Stephen Minkin's obscure novel A No Doubt Mad Idea : On to the library. And all through his time at the card...

The Onion: “Congress Deadlocked Over How To Not Provide Health Care.” Read the whole thing.

I should have suspected as much. Dig the crazy trailer for Legion , the forthcoming Killer Angel Action Movie. By owning a copy of The ...

John Hughes 1950-2009 Filmmaker I'm pretty much the exact right age to mourn the passing of Mr Hughes: I was a teenager when he was ...

Neil Gaiman, saying “it's either beautiful or the stupidest thing I've read today” points us to a UK Telegraph story about a yell...

Via the magnificent Rachel Maddow, I learn of the Hawthorn Group. The Hawthorn Group is an international public affairs company of senior...

Via James Howard Kunstler I am informed that Robert Crumb's immortal comic A Short History of America has a sequel .

You probably already know “Come Together.” John Lennon famously said, “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might ...

Paul Graham offers a nifty essay about two kinds of working schedule. There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manage...

Now that Walter Cronkite has passed on, who is America's most trusted newscaster? Again, it's about the difference between f...

I've been holding my breath, hoping that the moves the Obama administration has made to justify detention without trial as policy, á ...

Today I find myself thinking of how as the year 2000 approached there was lots of talk of the Greatest X of the 20 th Century or the M...

I've spoken in praise of Jimmy Carter before. You'd think after finally winning the Nobel he'd be ready to ease up. But via ...