Into each life, if we are lucky, some hilarity will descend. How or when that happens depends in part on what you find funny. For me, one moment of unalloyed comedy came during the early Schooner Girl days as I apprenticed on the schooner Appledore.
The memorable day took its first turn when the sailors George and Bobby both didn’t show up, and we had a usual sail planned from Sag Harbor to Block...
Friday, January 26, 2007
Monday, January 15, 2007
1.15.07: A Uniquely American Day
It’s Martin Luther King Day. The only national individual besides the looooooong dead Presidents Washington and Lincoln to be so honored. It was first formally observed in January 1986 and had a bumpy start, with holdouts in the South and Arizonia for years.But it seems to have settled into the national consciousness, and the idea of “A day On, not a day Off,” is building, to do something—-paint...
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Travels with Cadfael: The Drive of the Native
We planned to spend one day around Siena with Pietro, the classically handsome Italian friend of Cadfael's. We met-up in a parking lot in the outskirts of the city, for Cad and me to switch to Pietro’s car for the tour with the native.
I sat in the back and watched those clay hills roll under the stunning Tuscan sky, with the pop Italian station and their melodic Italian chatter providing the soundtrack....
Thursday, January 11, 2007
We interrupt this scheduled broadcast . . . .
There was a palpable malaise in people today, following the unequivocal nightmare of Bush's speech. And many blogs that I expected to post about it are more or less quiet on the subject, as though the speech is so beneath contempt that there's nothing to say.I have a two small observations.How quickly some of the networks went right back to the evening's programs, instead of going to talking-head...
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Q.Q.F. File: Paging Thomas Crown
Q.Q.F. is that US Helicopter now offers service from the Downtown Heliport (near Wall Street) to Newark Liberty International Airport. It isn’t just for moguls, really. And the benefit isn’t just that you beat the airport traffic by flying over it (total time to Newark: 7 minutes). It’s that you check in and go through security at the heliport. When the copter touches down, you are whisked by shuttle...
Sunday, January 7, 2007
Ian McShane Alert
It is fun to run into early guest roles of Swearengen. And he’s been on so many series in his long career that sightings are not that few and far between.A McShane line from a recent sighting on Magnum, P.I.: “I swear Magnum, if I have to find you, I’ll gut shoot you and leave you for the rats.” Surely his whole career has been in preparation for ...
Note to NBC: Be Nice to "Women"
NBC is mistreating its female characters (a subject I know something about). Last week’s viewing brought sad examples of killing women characters and laughing at them—a strange perversion of the classic tragedy/comedy motif.The series Medium gives us some of the most relentlessly ugly, graphic (fictional) scenes of women being harmed on a weekly basis. Last week’s episode—“Mother’s Little Helper”—brought...
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
Wadadli New Years 2007
It’s not the Jamaica of Fleming’s Goldeneye nor Coward’s Blue Harbour/Firefly. Antigua is more aloof than that. It has inspired great anger in Jamaica Kincaid, "You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a Prime Minister would want an airport named after him--why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great public monument," and great healing for Eric Clapton at Crossroads, An International...
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