Robert Caro is the famed biographer of legendary New York planner Robert Moses and is currently working his way through a multi-volume epic biography of Lyndon Johnson. What connects the two is that both Moses and Johnson were skillful accumulators and wielders of power and this topic fascinates Caro. [Read more…]
Sanal Edamaruku is the head of the Indian Rationalist Association and has a flair for the dramatic.
Long-time readers of this blog will recall the time I wrote about a Hindu ‘tantric guru’ (whatever the hell that is) who claimed that he could kill someone without touching him or her, just by performing rituals. Edmaruku challenged the guru to kill him on live TV and hilarity ensued as he laughed and taunted the guru as the latter desperately went through his entire repertoire of mumbo-jumbo to no avail. Now that is what I call must-see TV. [Read more…]
The US government is now relying more and more on private security contractors like Blackwater (which changed its name to Xe and then later again to Academi) to do things that the military used to do.
A series of videos have surfaced that show these contractors acting like they were in the old west, shooting indiscriminately at people as they careened dangerously through the streets of Iraq and not bothering to even stop and help when their vehicles knock down pedestrians.
I rarely eat out at restaurants and never at the expensive higher-end ones unless I am the guest of someone else. But on the rare occasions that I do go to such places, I am always amused by the wait staff who recite from memory the ‘specials’. It usually goes by so fast and has so many esoteric details about what the dishes contain and how they are prepared that I almost immediately succumb to information overload and cannot keep track. So I usually just listen politely and then order from the menu. I always thought it would be a lot easier to simply print a single sheet with the day’s specials and hand it out along with the menu than have the wait staff memorize and then repeat the same thing hundreds of times a day. It seems such an obvious thing to do that not doing so must be some kind of affectation, part of the ambiance of expensive restaurants that their customers expect. [Read more…]
Now that the Republican primary race seems to be effectively over as far as the pundits are concerned, they will have to fill airtime and newsprint with other sources of endless and mindless speculation. Brace yourselves because from this point onwards, you can be sure that nothing substantive will be discussed and the media will lurch from one ginned-up ‘controversy’ to the next, often about the most trivial things, with each one being framed in terms of its impact on the election. [Read more…]
Even the most die-hard anti-Christian is likely to concede that a lot of the music inspired by Christianity is excellent, although the words are often simply appalling. Growing up in the Methodist Church with its emphasis on singing, I used to love the hymns we sang in church and the Christmas carols. [Read more…]
I wrote recently about ‘the talk’ that black parents give their adolescent sons in order to try and keep them out of trouble. Writer John Derbyshire decided to publish his own ‘nonblack version of the talk’. It included such gems as: [Read more…]
Have you ever wondered what might have happened if Alfred Hitchcock had tried his hand at comedy? Me neither.
But in his latest commercial, Herman Cain tries to channel the master of suspense in a remake of The Birds and ends up with an ad that I think is supposed to be scary but which made me burst out laughing. Watch out for that skeletal arm, kid! [Read more…]
Now that it is widely conceded that Mitt Romney will be the Republican party nominee, we enter phase two of the presidential election cycle.
It may be the scientist in me but I tend to favor theoretical models that enable some predictivity in events, rather than the idea that we are totally at the mercy of idiosyncratic factors. This is true even in the world of presidential elections, despite all its seeming unpredictability. As I wrote earlier, strip away the surface turbulence and you see the steady flow of a predictable current. [Read more…]
On The Daily Show Jon Stewart suggests ways to try and even the score.
(This clip appeared on April 9, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)