When I have an earworm, you must suffer.

Actually, the earworm’s a pretty good one. “Solace,” (also known as “Mexican Serenade”) by Scott Joplin. I picked up a cheap DVD of the movie, “The Sting,” and watched it Sunday, and now the song’s stuck in my brain (I was going to embed a YouTube performance, but couldn’t find one I liked).

“The Sting” got me thinking about the general falseness of the film medium in general, and the general awfulness of con men in particular. I’ll leave my deathless thoughts on movies for tomorrow. My subject tonight is con men.

One of the standard dishonesties of the cinema is to make us like somebody by putting them up against somebody even worse. The Man With No Name in the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns, for instance, wasn’t particularly admirable, but he was an absolute saint compared to the desperadoes he gunned down. In the same way, the makers of “The Sting” got us to tolerate—even delight in—the dishonesty of the protagonists by making them the little guys, trying to get some revenge on the vicious crime lord, The Big Mick, who killed their friend Luther. Continue reading The cons of Cons →

Self-test for the American “leftist”: “Are you tired of living in this capitalist hell?,” asks Alex Tokarev. If so, click here.

Lynn Vincent points out some word usage in a terrible story of a couple who had a miscarriage within a month of conception. To sum it up, the mother discharged the tissue naturally at home and then wanted to cremate their child properly. Miscommunication began between all officials involved, and soon the police had entered their apartment on a report that they were keeping human remains.

The coroner is quoted saying, “The husband was nothing other than cooperative and gracious, and I felt very bad for him. We run into cases where people don’t want anything to do with the baby, and here you run into circumstances where someone wants to do the right thing. I was a little surprised to see a detective there.”

Note the coroner used the word baby. Lynn writes: “But with abortion-on-demand, this country has created a linguistic looking glass: On one side of it, a baby is a baby and the parents of a dead baby grieve. But on the other side is a lethal Wonderland where, as Alice said, everything is ‘nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. . . .'”

God help us.

Good news from the people who put together and those who contribute to Relief Journal—babies, book contracts, and editor positions. Note also all the good things that happened last year. Bravo. Have you picked up at least one copy of Relief yet? It’s good reading.

I think I’m beginning to recover from Daylight Savings Time-Lag. This morning I found myself 5 minutes ahead of schedule getting dressed and breakfasted, and I still don’t know what part of my morning routine I forgot to do (and yes, I had put on my pants, thank you very much).

Today is the day of the Great Snowstorm. Well, it’s great up where Roy Jacobsen lives (or so I understand), but down here it’s a storm without enthusiasm, an ambivalent storm where the snowflakes come down still uncertain whether they want to be snow or rain, and opt for rain once they hit the pavement. It’s cooling down now, so I suppose we’ll get some accumulation, but I’m not counting on a snow day off from work tomorrow.

I meant to do a second post last night, but the idea I’d been working on all day flew out of my mind entirely (blame Daylight Savings Time). Let’s try this again:



Over at The American Spectator, Daniel Oliver posted a column yesterday about a few common political quotations which weren’t (or can’t be proven to have been) said by the people who generally get credit for them. Apparently nobody said them.

Wait. Somebody must have said them. Continue reading You may quote me, whether I said it or not →