The Poster
June 27, 2009
Farrah Fawcett 1947-2009
If you’re into mourning complete strangers, then mourn this one. Yes, I had a copy, but so did 12 million other guys…And yes she was a Roman Catholic Girl. She was a work of art…R.I.P.
Weekly Standard to be sold…
June 12, 2009
“…The Weekly Standard has been the flagship publication of the neoconservative movement since it first appeared in 1995. William Kristol and Fred Barnes have been at the heart of the magazine, whose influence soared during the Bush administration, when it championed invading Iraq. The news that Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corp., is selling the magazine to the billionaire Philip Anschutz, who also owns the Washington Examiner, raises some questions about the magazine’s future direction.
Will Kristol and Barnes remain at the helm? Or will the magazine turn toward a more traditional conservatism?…”
Because you’ll need the help…
June 4, 2009
With biting wit and amusing personal anecdotes Harry Stein’s I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican chronicles the every day survival of those plucky conservatives marooned in liberal bastions that loathe them, from Manhattan to Hollywood-and even deep bleu France. The result is a conservative’s guide to love, work, dinner party mischief and staying un-smeared in liberal America.
Down and out with Mr. P
June 3, 2009
Last weekend Mr. P, sans Mrs. P was in St. Louis. Therefore and whatnot I got a call and, needless to say, plans were laid for serious debauchery on a global scale. Howevah, there was another call placed that day, one without the sound of champagne chilling in the background, I might add…This short, quiet and altogether soul-destroying call between the Countess and Mrs. P put paid to all our plans.
Needless to say we still went out and about the town last weekend, but it was done under the baleful gaze of our personal Sauron, the Countess. She covered us like a free safety whose contract is up for renewal. Dinner Friday night at Mike Shannon’s downtown where Mr. P’s strange airs and stranger accent caused him to be suspected of being from Chicago, or worse, a Cubs fan, and we barely got into the joint. As it was they seated us near the kitchen just in case. And despite our “sentry on a hill”, there was a somewhat bewildering, long running argument concerning the proper color of a Manhattan, in which most of the restaurant staff and a few bystanders were also involved…I’m not quite sure what the answer was in the end, we were too busy drinking Manhattans to care.
Saturday night, after Mass, which we will not go into, except to point out that I did demonstrate to Mr. P the proper way of avoiding hugging, hand shaking, Mayfair kissing and other kum-bah-yah nonsense while attending the illicit Norvus Ordo community meeting. Mr. P did body block my attempt at tripping the liturgical dancer, (I was that close) and I’ll probably never forgive him for that. Spoil-sport. Anyway, our original plan was for a Japanese bath house, which became a Japanese Ginsu knife restaurant after the Countess Hays Code was finished adjusting our itinerary along more family friendly lines. We did accomplish some deft prank phone calls from our table, with the help of the Baron, to Mrs. P (which turned out to be one of the little Ps). I’m sure she’s scared for life. Just like my shirt which the Baron so liberally sprinkled with soy sauce when he mistook my arm for a plate of chop suey. The brute. Family friendly indeed.
We did get Mr. P back to the airport on time, somewhat a little worse for wear, but with a Countess Seal of Approval for a no sex, drugs, public drunkenness or violence weekend. Damn the luck!
Anyway, I guess Mr. P had a good time. I haven’t heard from him yet, but he’s probably still sleeping…I have heard from Mrs. P, but it’s probably best not to go into that here…
List
June 3, 2009
The Top 10 Public Ineffectuals:
3. Camille Paglia. The only entrant in our list to be a world record holder — 195 very long words in just under a minute, according to the Guinness Book of World Records — Camille Paglia is the author of a major literary biography, Shakespeare, Schmuckspear; an autobiography, But Enough About You; and many ineffectual critiques, including From Jane Austen to Britney Spears, in which she argues that Spears’s seminal “Hit Me Baby One More Time” is a major feminist work of art, and stands comparison with some of the raunchiest work of Austen and Eliot.
9. George Steiner. In his recent publication My Unread Books (Faber), Professor Steiner unearthed at least a dozen of his own works that, for one reason or another, no one has quite got round to reading yet. In one of them, he devotes 600 pages to his discovery that the words for “mantelpiece” and “moribund” are the same in Swahili, and in another he relates his most recent sexual conquests in a dialect spoken only in a three-acre area of Upper Moldavia.
You can’t be as stupid as that makes you look…
June 3, 2009
“…Why does anybody, other than thugs, policemen and employees of fast-food establishments that insist upon them as part of a uniform, wear a baseball cap? Even old people in increasing numbers now sport them. Is it some kind of perverse desire to look stupid, a form of auto-humiliation? Is it an attempt to persuade other people that they are humble folk who think that they are no better than anyone else?…”
In Vino Veritas
June 3, 2009
“…Puritans lack this sense of measured and temperate appetite. When sexual taboos were lifted, therefore, they found no further reason to refrain from indulgence. Since no virtue was at risk in our sexual transgressions, these ceased overnight to be transgressions. Thereafter, no proof of the damage done to children by premature experiment, no proof of the moral and medical chaos of uninhibited sexuality, could be heard. Puritanism turned an absolute no into an absolute yes. And it looked around for other pleasures that it could forbid, not because God was offended by them but because they offended the thing that had replaced God in the Puritan conscience — namely the Self. Any pleasure harmful to the self must now be subject to the same absolute condemnation as had been directed against the pleasures of sex. Hence the hysterical campaign against smoking, which has not taken the form of advising against something harmful, but the far more alarming form of condemning that thing as a sin. You can portray young people on the screen as engaging in sexual orgies, beating each other up, swearing and exhibiting every kind of nastiness. But you must never show a young person with a cigarette in his hand, since that will be condoning and encouraging sin. Portraits of famous smokers like Brunel, Churchill and Sartre have been doctored by the Ministry of Truth in order to remove the offensive item from between their fingers, and side by side with the poster on the school notice board that advises 12-year-olds on safe sex and free abortion, is the absolutist edict saying that thou shalt not smoke…”
Schlafly
June 2, 2009
You won’t find their beer more than 50 miles from St. Louis, but unlike the other brewery in town, they are locally owned. If you’re ever in town, it is worth the trip to visit the Schlafly Tap Room or Bottle Works, which are Brew Pubs…Not a bad brew by any means, and they do brew a stout or two…
essential for eccentrics…how odd
June 2, 2009
Based in part on the popular Web site of the same name, this diverse
collection mixes quirky lists, intriguing facts, and playful reflections
in a unique brew that is entertaining, thought-provoking, and
utterly absorbing. Building on the success of Lumsden’s Web site, the
lists in the book have been revised and expanded to include even more
curiosities from around the world. Inside, readers will learn the answers
to such fascinating questions as
• Who wrote “Ode on the Mammoth Cheese”?
• What thirteen things do we inevitably discuss in bars?
• What are the world’s most disgusting foods?
• Where do people speak Bile, Poke, or Mango?
• What kind of creature is the bloody trivia?
From interesting general trivia (”Thirteen unusual mammals you
probably haven’t heard of”) to pop-culture lists (”The real names of 35
comic superheroes”) to the odd and unusual (”Twenty-five cheeses
beginning with L”), the range of information in Vitamin Q offers something
for every word lover and trivia buff or anyone drawn to funny and
obscure facts.
Siegfried Sassoon
June 2, 2009
Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 in Kent, and began writing verses as a boy. While a brave young officer, he confronted the terrible realities of the First World War on the battlefield, in verse, and, finally, by announcing his opposition to the war in 1917, showing that physical courage could exist alongside humanity and sensibility.
In 1918, Sassoon found himself one of the most famous young writers of the time, a mentor to Wilfred Owen, and admired by Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence. He joined the Labour Party, became literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald, and began close friendships with Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster, while trying to adapt his poetry to peacetime. Then Sassoon fell in love with the artistocratic aesthete Stephen Tennant, who led him into his group of Bright Young Things who inspired the early novels of Evelyn Waugh. At the demise of his passionate and fraught relationship with Tennant, Sassoon suddenly married the beautiful Hester Gatty in 1933 and retreated to a quiet country life until their eventual estrangement and Sassoon’s subsequent conversion to Catholicism.
From his famous war poems to the gentler vision of his prose, Sassoon wrote masterfully of war and lost idylls, and this work and its complex author are brilliantly illuminated in Max Egremont’s definitive biography.
