Latest Parries
April 2012
From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S
Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous
After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.
January 2012
A Scheme of a Number of Friends
Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.
October 2011
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
March 2010
Friendship is for Weenies
It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.
Before the Setup
Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.
February 2010
Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio
On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.
October 2009
My Hope: Obama’s Change
Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.
July 2009
At Modi’in Mall
There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
Israel, the Bad So Far
I’m surprised at the general appearance of Tel Aviv folks. Yes, it’s hot, but people appear dressed as if they’re in, I don’t know, Be’er Sheva. And the people in Be’er Sheva, last time I was there, looked to me like they’re dressed for Gaza.
T hanks to Auntie, I grew up with an extended family of presentable Englishmen in my Jewish grand suburban house south of Glasgow in Scotland. One of them was the irascible Bob Monkhouse, who died at 75 after battling prostate cancer. I will never forget him. He is etched into my psyche. Certain friends remind me of him. I think it was primarily the voice. There was something silky smooth, like a more earthly William F. Buckley, but there was also something edgy and nervous as well, and neither ever completely disappeared. He wasn’t ever really very funny, and if you tried to find him funny you ended up finding him sickening, but there was something completely captivating as well.
Seeing him older, quite recently, on Parkinson was a jolt. I think you could see that he was a tormented man who spent his life keeping the demons away and entertaining television viewers in the process. Unlike the Pythons, say, who each found fabulous fulfilling careers later (Terry Gilliam and his huge movies, Michael Palin and his huge trips, John Cleese and his recent TV series investigating things he finds interesting), Monkhouse looks like he could never break the mold of being TV Personality. Perhaps because he never found a suitable foil. There was something solitary about him. I mean, just think of the image of Celebrity Squares: all the people in a house like trapped dolls, and he alone behind a desk with the trappings of dignity. He could have been a good “It’s a Knockout” commentator — did he ever guest that?
Seeing that I left Britain in 1980 I don’t know if he ever did more. Goodness, he was in his 50s then and could have been in his 30s for all I knew at that age. Well, he is an immortal, if only in the context of 1970s British family entertainment television.
Previously
Ode to Salame