Dave's Fiction Warehouse

T oday was supposed to be the Rapture. Again. I haven’t kept meticulous records on these predictions, but I’m pretty sure at least 165 Rapture dates have come and gone since I was first made aware of the phenomenon around 1970. That’s based on a conservative assumption of three end-of-time dates per year. Spoiler alert: Every one of them was 100 percent wrong. We’re all still here, righteous and sinners alike. Well, except for the billions who have sadly expired of non-theological causes over the past five-plus decades. I’m this close to concluding that all Rapture predictions are utter bullshit. Speaking of percentages, the author of this latest forecast, South African pastor Joshua Mhlakela , said a couple of weeks ago that he’s “a billion percent sure” this time is the charm. I would like to remind Pastor Josh, and a certain American president , that percentages don’t become more dramatic with the addition of random zeroes beyond 100. Anyway, if you and yours do experience the Rap...

R obert Redford was probably a better director than an actor, mostly because he was too damned good-looking to be fully believable in any of his best-known roles. But it’s hard now to imagine anyone else playing them.  I’m thinking mostly of “The Sting” and “Three Days of the Condor” and of course “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” For those of us who were young men in the early 70s, this is the way we covertly longed to look and be. Not that we ever could. We lacked the wardrobe. And the smile. And the tousled hair. And yeah, the easy charm and the good looks and the journeyman acting talent.  Check out the opening scene in “The Way We Were”: Redford standing at the bar, ostensibly passed out on his feet, resplendent in his Navy dress whites. There were and are better actors, but none of them – even Paul Newman – ever looked that cool. I’m guessing that the look in Barbra Streisand’s eyes during that scene didn’t require a whole lot of method acting. She was genuinely smit...