Wednesday’s Child: Changing History
Of course the sinking of the Titanic was huge news in 1912 and immediately afterward, but by the 1950’s it figured no more in the public consciousness than, say, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 or the sack of Troy.
Category: Access
Videos Revisited by Vince Cornell: Escape From New York
This is a John Carpenter movie, so there are no pretenses to being highbrow (there is an actual professional wrestling match with trash can lid shields and nail covered baseball bats!).
A Life in Shreds and Patches: Greatness Almost Thrust Upon Me, Part I
This is a slightly fictionalized piece of personal history. Some of the names have been changed to protect the sensitive, and the dialogue, while it represents the substance of what was said, has been sharpened by recollection.
Two Winter Poems
The first is by Robert Louis Stevenson…. The second is by Thomas Hardy There will be more.
“What A Country!”
This morning my wife asked me why Gavin Newsome has been behaving so foolishly in public. “That’s easy,” I told her, “He’s watching Donald Trump and picking up cues.”
Autodidact–Shakespeare and Greek Tragedy, Hamlet
Hamlet is, like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, a death-obsessed neurotic, and the similarities between the play and the film must have given Franco Zeferelli the brilliant (if zany) idea of casting Gibson, a morally unstable movie star of limited talent, as Hamlet.
Shall/Will and Should/Would
Nothing better indicates the mental confusion of postmodern Americans than their constant abuse of modal auxiliary verbs like shall and will, should and would, can and could. In introducing the Italian conditional, I included the following preface which may help some to understand how future and conditional are formed in English.
Crocodile Tears
Reading stories on the teapot tempest over the sinking of ship and the subsequent attack on the survivors made me think, for just one second, that the Mainstream Media were finally going to tell the truth about Israel’s illegal and savage attack on the USS Liberty in 1967.
