As I wrote in September, my friend Charlie bought my kids and me a ticket for a Willy Wonka-ish contest. Promoter and businessman David Klein, who likes to be called The Candyman, is giving away a candy factory in Florida, and the winner will come from…
A screenshot from ‘Nomad,’ distributed by Music Box Films. The film Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin was shown at Tribeca and Telluride, and on the BBC, in 2019, but it is just now available in the US, on several platforms. The film is a documentary on…
Imagine if some of us were in our cups—let’s say we had a day off and a backyard big enough to social-distance—and the topic turned to military service. I guarantee that long before we reached the dregs, veritas would come spilling out: We have very different ideas on what “service” means.
Misery may love company, but it adores relief. Hope of relief is what the miserable live for. A hot meal for troops in the field is not strictly necessary, any more than hot showers. Only calories count, and packaged cold rations provide them. But a hot breakfast is a psychological…
Outside Donald Trump’s St. Louis Campaign Headquarters, election night. It has been a week. Anything else anybody wants to announce? We could all use a break. My sons and I were out and about during election week, to bear witness to the historically significant, should it occur. But…
Sean Connery, in a screenshot from ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.’ I can remember when a critic went coocoo-bananas that Sean Connery had supposedly started playing father/mentor roles. This was after the release of 1986’s Highlander, in which he played a “Spaniard” from ancient Egypt who trains…
When I was a kid, Sinclair Oil Company used to hand out Apatosaurus toys and soap-on-a-rope as incentives, since their logo was “Dino” the dinosaur. Word on the street with the banana-seat bunch was that oil came from dead dinosaurs. Oil began, of course, as algae and plankton mixed…
Maria Bakalova and Sacha Baron Cohen in the new Borat sequel. The Borat sequel, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, was released last night on Amazon Prime, a few hours earlier than announced, to coincide…
I could not relax, walking the bike path today, among people blaring country music, the guy shouting at heaven, large unleashed dogs thinking heroic thoughts, and clouds of biting gnats in the sun. But what spiked my irritation was the group of five middle-aged guys on expensive…
One of my old friend’s names is a synonym for king. I have known him since we were maybe eight, when his mother placed him in my mom’s Cub Scout den. We were all rascals, but he and I were fatherless and poor. Due to the authority of his size,…