February 2012
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I like to think that I have a sense of humor, but I just don't get this one-liner by Rick Santorum's Daddy Warbucks, Foster Friess. "And this contraceptive thing, my gosh, it's so–it's such–inexpensive, you know, back in my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees and it…
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In Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), man suffers traumatic shock, man loses memory, man relives experience and regains memory. It's garden-variety Hollywood amnesia, hortus hollywoodiensis. The amnesia is neither credible nor possible, but it doesn't matter, because it's the world of film, where the most malleable of mental afflictions takes whatever form is convenient for the…
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Remembering, in a melancholy mood early this winter morning, some of the friends and relations who left the room far too early: Arthur Oberg, Bernice Kliman, Bob Nero, Bob Pois, Curtis Barnes, David Gaillard, David Novarr, Ed Nolan, Eleanor Gottlieb, Eugene Pearlman, Gary Stahl, George Chodorow, Herb Eldridge, Honi Haber, Howard Smokler, Ila Warner, Jane…
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As a boy, I naturally assumed that Riis Park was named for Harold (Peewee). Later, I learned that Jacob Riis was a well-known reformer whose 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, a chronicle of life in New York's slums, shocked Gilded Age complacency. Nowadays, Riis is known more for his pioneering photography than for…
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Today it's Santorum, who has staked out positions to the right of the Pope, where there isn't all that much room. Yesterday it was Gingrich. Before that, in their turn, Perry, Cain, Bachmann. Each month brings a new anti-Romney and just as inevitably, his/her decline. The extremists who control the Republican party want a candidate…
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I have to admit that I'm thoroughly taken with the Jeremy Lin story. It's so wonderfully, ridiculously improbable. Asian-American guy, Harvard!! economics grad, plays OK with the Erie Bayhawks and the Reno Bighorns but is released by two not-so-strong NBA teams. A last-resort number 4 point guard on the Knicks, sleeping on a couch in…
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Eric Sanderson's Mannahatta (New York: Abrams, 2009) reconstructs Manhattan as it would have appeared to Henry Hudson when he sailed the Half-Moon into the harbor in 1609. The glory of the book lies in its illustrations. Here's a conjectural reconstruction of old Manhattan island: And here's a clever juxtaposition of ancient and modern: In 1609,…
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Who knows what crimes or dark deeds my black-sheep Uncle Max had committed that made made him such a pariah in our o-so-respectable family, but they must have been something awful. Although he was my father's older brother, his name was never mentioned except with embarrassment or distaste. Inasmuch as I'm now the "patriarch," it's…
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Next summer's vegetable seeds have arrived in the mail. Hard choices; the gardening will is infinite and the execution confined; which is to say that there just isn't enough room to grow all the varieties we'd want. But in addition to the old reliables, we try to make room for some exotics and antiques. This…