One of the pleasures of the run up to New Year’s Eve is reading the list of celebrities who’ve died during the past year. You can gloat over the demise of people you always hated who’ve been taking up space in the world that you require for other purposes, and then enjoy fuming over the obligatory media tributes to those horrible creeps. I still remember fondly the death of Ingmar Bergman in 2007. That miserable old git! What a kick that was, I thought he’d never die! I bet he didn’t feel so pompous about God’s absence when he was choking on his last breath!
Of course, occasionally somebody good dies, and then you feel a little bad, especially if they never got their just due in the world. So, like a lot of pleasures, Celebrity Death Revelry can backfire.
(more…)
“You know, win or lose, I gotta say I love my day job”: The Pashtun positive work ethic I’ve been watching the news out of Afg—I like it spelled that way, “Afg”; kinda gets the spirit of the thing. The…
True Grit is a big hit for the Coen brothers, giving them their best opening weekend ever. Their growing popularity cues two inevitable reactions: 1) the claim that they’re improving as filmmakers, finally learning how to do it right, “it”…
This article was first published by AlterNet. If you didn’t know better, you’d get all excited reading about the Army’s new shoulder-fired cannon, the XM-25. It’s being hyped as a “game-changing” weapon that will literally blow the Taliban out of…
This article was first published by AlterNet *** “For the first time in the nation’s history, there is no longer an authoritative, public record of who owns land in each county.” — University of Utah law professor Christopher Peterson There…
This article was first published in the New York Press on February 8, 2005. Thank God for the Iraqi insurgency. If it weren’t for the resistance tying us down, we would have already moved against far more serious foes like…
eXiled Online Special UK Correspondent LONDON–As you’ve perhaps completely failed to notice, Russia recently won the prize of hosting the 2018 World Cup finals. Any ignorance about this on your part is understandable since a) you’re likely to be American…