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…
Posted on: December 31st, 2010 | Comments (42)
There’s this hit series on AMC called The Walking Dead . Just so you know—in case you hear different—it’s a rotten show. Like zombie flesh, it reeks and festers, but not in a good way.
Posted on: November 23rd, 2010 | Comments (53)
Of course it goes without saying that you don’t watch Glee, you couldn’t care less about Glee, you wouldn’t touch Glee with a stick. It’s a teen musical on TV, for Christ’s sake, there could hardly be anything lamer than…
Posted on: April 11th, 2010 | Comments (24)
I woke up for the second morning in a row with a vague feeling that something terrible had happened. Then I remembered I watched the Oscars.
Posted on: March 9th, 2010 | Comments (36)
Other day I was walking down the street past a weedy guy and his obstreperous five-year-old who was clamoring to go in the opposite direction, and I heard the guy say to the kid, “Tsst!” The kid promptly heeled, and…
Posted on: February 15th, 2010 | Comments (22)
You probably know about it already, but in case not, there’s a really bracing animated half-hour series on the F/X Network called Archer. It’s a spoof of the James Bond-type spy genre, which doesn’t sound too good, but never underestimate…
Posted on: February 5th, 2010 | Comments (19)
It’s fashionable to dismiss The Simpsons, to claim never to watch it anymore because its best days are long gone. It’s been fashionable to do this for ages. I remember when the show was about five years old and staggeringly…
Posted on: January 11th, 2010 | Comments (40)
Listen to the Radio War Nerd podcast [subscribe here] with guest Gunnar Hrafn Jonsson of Iceland Public Radio on the massacre in Orlando and how online Islamic State jihadis are dealing with battlefield defeats and the shrinking caliphate. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd through the show’s Patreon page.
The political establishment’s racist, authoritarian reaction to the 1992 LA riots—blaming broken black families, massing cops and troops, and Ron Paul’s advice to his family on how to kill black “animals” and get away with it…
You’re gonna have to give me the weekend off. I moved yesterday. To a new town, new job. Trusted Google Maps to get me there. Don’t ever do that. That’s what I think must have happened to that famous lost…
Something’s been going on in Syria for a while now. I’ve already written about the Deraa protests as an example of the big role guerrilla funerals play in irregular war, but it’s time to look at the more general prospects…
Years ago I got an angry email from somebody claiming to be in one of the Baltic militaries. Whoever he was, he wrote in grammatically perfect English so he just had to be from Northern Europe. We can’t talk English…
Before I confess how wrong I was about a big issue, I’ll give myself a little pat on the head for being right about a much smaller deal, the Afghan jailbreak I talked about two days ago.
There are times when you look back and wish you’d had the courage to say what you were thinking. With me it’s a spotty record: Sometimes I do, but more often I wimp out. I wish now I’d said the…
You can’t keep a good Talib down. Or in jail, apparently.
Last Sunday I was grumbling about how there are so many great books about war and not that many great war movies. That got a lot of readers lobbing in their suggestions for good war movies. One reminded me that…
