Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick have confirmed plans to star in a Broadway revival of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple. It will commence in October and probably play to packed houses for however long the two of them feel like doing it. Before you ask: Lane is playing Oscar and Broderick is playing Felix, and […]
Buzz Dixon directed me to this neat site that's all about names. They have a Java program over there — it should work on most but not all computers — that displays charts of the popularity of the 1000 most common first names. You can enter "George" and watch how it's declined in popularity or […]
Thinking of buying something that comes with a money-saving rebate? You might want to read this before you do. […]
Actually, it's not a new weblog at all. Three items ago, I thanked Frank San Filippo for pointing the way to an interesting site. What I should have done was also point you to Frank's blog. He just posted this comment on the percolating scandal about the phony reporter who seems to have been planted […]
The fine cartoonist, Don Simpson, is now blogging, which is both good news and bad. The good news is that he has some interesting perceptions on his vocation. The bad news is that when he's putting them up on the web, he isn't drawing. […]
Jane Mayer on the use of torture in the current war. Among her conclusions is that it's wrong, that we know it's wrong so we outsource a lot of it to keep our hands clean…and that it rarely yields the kind of information that it's supposed to extract. […]
Here's a website that offers a bit of circumstantial evidence that William Rehnquist — the gent who's now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court — was Deep Throat. It's an intriguing possibility that would add to the pile of contradictions about Rehnquist's personal ethics and views, but I'm far from convinced. On the other hand, […]
In my book, Wertham Was Right — which you can order here, he tried to mention unobtrusively — I wrote an essay about Dr. Fredric Wertham. Back in the fifties, he was the main purveyor of the theory that the comic books then being published spawned juvenile delinquency and should be…well, it's not clear what […]
Frank Rich on those who would see the current movie, Million Dollar Baby, as a political statement. […]
Ray Arthur writes… Has Haig been discounted for practical reasons or just because Woodward, et al, said he was not? My thinking is, if Bernstein had talked too much, which he is wont to do, and Haig was D.T., they would have to lie and deny in order to protect the General. Has anyone checked […]
But hey, enough about our government being run into the ground financially. Let's talk about important stuff. Let's talk about delicatessens. And we'll start with this e-mail from my pal Tom Galloway… This reminded me of when I was at UMichigan, and Harlan Ellison was speaking there. I was responsible for him while there, and […]
Remember when it was extravagant (or at least, barely acceptable) for some folks that the Bush prescription drug bill was going to cost $400 billion? How it is that few of those people are upset at current, undenied reports that it will be more in the neighborhood of $1.2 trillion? Here's one of those reports. […]
Maybe it's like being shocked that a duck quacks, but I continue to be amazed at how reporters will try to manufacture a story where none exists. The other night, KNBC news in Los Angeles did a sizzling "exclusive" investigation that revealed that a person who has no way to knowing any of this is […]
Here's the latest on Peter Paul, the financial officer behind the now-defunct Stan Lee Media. That was the Internet company that went belly-up trying to market Stan's new concepts on the web. I have more than a passing interest in this because I worked there for a few months. […]
A little counter that you can't see but I can informs me that this is my 3000th post on this weblog since I switched to Movable Type software on 4/23/03. This is a frightening statistic, especially when you consider all the constructive things I could have been doing with that time. So I will seize […]