May 2011

Top three things to rant about

May 16, 2011

I like this list in the Washington Post, all about things in American culture we should really do without. My personal favorites: auto-tune, small talk and smartphones. None of those things are going away soon, of course, but it’s always pleasant to imagine a world without them. Anyway, the list got me thinking about  items [...]

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Peace through violence in ‘Liberty Valance’

May 10, 2011
jimmy stewart

I was 11 years old when I first saw The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and it’s been one of my favorite movies ever since. I consider it among the best westerns ever made — right up there with the Coen Brothers’ version of True Grit, or Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. I’m glad to see [...]

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Way down upon the Suwannee River

May 8, 2011

On Saturday we floated a few miles of the Suwannee River, a placid stretch of water on the Florida Panhandle. This is the same river Stephen Foster was talking about in the song, although he misspelled it, and, it appears, never actually visited it. Canoeing in Florida is a little different than canoeing in Montana. [...]

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Judgment day is just around the corner

May 7, 2011

Was it just two years ago that the Rev. David Wilkerson was predicting imminent catastrophe along the Eastern Seaboard? Yes; according to our archives here at the Fiction Warehouse, it was. Perhaps he was referring to Derek Jeter’s abysmal  hitting since then. But if he really meant “earth shattering calamity,” in the sense of cities [...]

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Too much sharing, not enough content

May 5, 2011

I may not be the best person to dispense Facebook advice, since my number of friends remains stuck in the low double-digits and my occasional comments invariably seem to stifle further discussion.  But this is not Facebook so I will hold forth anyway. The main thing thing to remember about Facebook is that, like everything [...]

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Geronimo’s loss is your gain

May 4, 2011

The Bin Laden residence in Abbottabad, valued by U.S. analysts at $1 million, was really worth only about $250,000, according to this story in the Guardian. That suggests the late terrorist had a lot in common with the American infidels he hoped to destroy:  He was upside-down on his mortgage. It’s a familiar tale. Bin [...]

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Bin Laden’s neighbors had had enough

May 2, 2011

Finally, it was the water slide that did in Osama bin Laden. For months, the neighbors in Abbottabad had been grumbling about the construction noise, and the profane workmen who played Aerosmith at top volume and occasionally wandered over to pee on neighboring lawns. Residents were even more incensed when that 18-foot wall went up, [...]

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