“You’ve gotta live,” people like to say, shrugging off some constraint or precaution. I was always the first to agree. Until COVID-19. “If it’s my time, that’s up to God,” a woman remarks to me late in lockdown, adding that she does not wear a mask. Pressing my lips…
Back in the early ’90s, when we were living in sin, my future husband and I stayed at a bnb in Nauvoo, Illinois. We were there to learn the town’s Mormon history, and we were a little shy with the hospitable but devout Mormons who assumed we were legally wed.
After three months on furlough, I was scared to gear up again. I had forgotten how to use a zipper; stopped even bothering with lip gloss for Zoom. I was not sure my adrenal glands still functioned. Taking permission from catastrophe, I ate, drank, and slept as I chose, cheesecake…
Ricky Gervais has made six or seven series for television, depending on how you count them, including The [BBC] Office, Extras, Derek, and Life’s Too Short. His most recent is After Life, for Netflix, with one season (six episodes) in 2019, one season…
Image from Wikipedia CC. Higher education in the United States is a big ship, with a well-established route and trade. I was a paying passenger, for the usual time, then served as a line officer for two decades. One day, in some backwater in the Horse Latitudes, I…
A still from the Q&A after Herzog’s latest feature film. Director Werner Herzog’s latest feature film is now available, which always gives me cause for relief and surprise. In a world of Netflix fast-food, a Herzog film is a bowl of Bavarian leberknödelsuppe—something interesting and nourishing, with…
The character Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation is likable because we understand he is better than the sum of the parts he wants to present to the world. Actor Nick Offerman uses his Ron Swanson persona a little in the new CuriosityStream series The History of…
The Pythons: Terry Jones, Graham Chapman. John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, and Michael Palin. Wikimedia promotional images. The documentary series Monty Python: Almost the Truth (Lawyer’s Cut) is available on Netflix. Originally airing on BBC and the Independent Film Channel, in 2009, it is just six episodes, a…
Netflix, which uses the odd tagline “Netflix is a joke,” released Dave Chappelle’s new standup special yesterday on YouTube. As I have written before, standup as an art continues to become something other than jokes, and Chappelle, who won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor…
Grocery shoppers in St. Louis, Missouri, have begun making their choices, this Dairy Freedom Week, for the kind of milk they like best. Red Team Milk and Blue Team Milk appeared, over the weekend, in separate refrigerated cases in six of the largest supermarkets in the region. The milk…