My new favorite YouTube star, Smooth McGroove has fulfilled what he told me was a very popular request (and one of my requests as well): The Moon theme from DuckTales, the 1989 NES game based on the Disney cartoon. I remember as a kid playing this game, and being really impressed by this piece. Most of the game’s music, as I recall, was pretty standard happy-Disney-video game fare, and then Scrooge McDuck gets to the Moon, and this oddly moving... Read more
Stephen Fry, one of my heroes, recently tried to commit suicide, and has since told the whole tale of his battle with depression in such a way that only he can. One passage in his latest post stands out to me, a very familiar paradox concerning loneliness, especially considering he and I are both performers, stage performers even, who prize our wit and can seem on the surface to be gregarious and light: . . . perhaps I am writing... Read more
No one is happier than I to see good takedowns of rhetorical straw men, particularly when those straw men are in the shape of folks whose non-straw brains are think are pretty admirable. So on the one hand, I’m pleased with Mark O’Connell’s review of Curtis White’s The Science Delusion, which appears to be a kind of polemic against “scientism.” O’Connell very rightly takes White to task for ad hominem attacks against those with whom he disagrees (for example, attacking... Read more
The NSA snooping story is fishy. Here’s Ed Bott at ZDNet: . . . a funny thing happened the next morning. If you followed the link to [The Washington Post‘s] story, you found a completely different story, nearly twice as long, with a slightly different headline. The new story wasn’t just expanded; it had been stripped of key details, with no acknowledgment of the changes. That updated version, time-stamped at 8:51 AM on June 7, backed off from key details... Read more
Image by Miranda. Read more
Ladies and gentlemen, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, at Princeton: This is indeed an impressive and appropriate setting for a commencement. I am sure that, from this lectern, any number of distinguished spiritual leaders have ruminated on the lessons of the Ten Commandments. I don’t have that kind of confidence, and, anyway, coveting your neighbor’s ox or donkey is not the problem it used to be . . . I spoke earlier about definitions of personal success in an... Read more
Patrick Stewart magnificently describes his efforts in combatting (and his childhood experience of witnessing) violence against women. Watch the whole thing, and then read on for some thoughts. Perhaps most moving to me is his discovery of what had moved his father to be violent toward his mother: PTSD brought on by his time in World War II. It is this revelation that brings him to a new milestone in his own campaign for the cause, wherein he gives his... Read more
It had seemed to me that, in the ideal, the chief distinguishing characteristic of the blog format, as opposed to, say, formal print newspaper and magazine article, was that it represented a piece of a larger conversation. Not in the strict sense of point-counterpoint, you-go-I-go, but in the sense of being an individual’s considered musing upon a given topic that contributes to the overall swirl of thought and content going on all around. That’s certainly the picture painted by someone... Read more
iMortal
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In