Scary. A Strange Movie I Can Actually Understand


Tinker’. It can’t be described. One reviewer would say only that he drove 5 1/2 hours to see it at a film festival and would do so again now that he’s seen it. I recommend it. Not that you should believe me in this case. It’s got Tesla, and divine order, and barely connected people barely touching one another to great effect. How could I resist?

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The Friday Follies, Indian Summer Edition

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You know, that age-old phenomenon of a sudden resurgence of hot weather after school starts… Yes, it’s been a hot week at home and abroad. Something(s) incendiary but instructive every single day. Not so unusual really. When you take the long view, every week brings us stuff that is hot and scary but also dumb as a Jimmy Kimmel joke. You know what I mean. You got to take time out to just laugh at some things. Like this past week. As bad as a lot of the news was, the silly still bubbles to the surface like a rueful chuckle. Our humor highlights this week come from reliable topics like religion, politics, race, money, and hats. That’s a combination that’s hard to beat. Most of the references are derived from FB posts, but reconfigured as convenient to be less informative than funny here. The weekend’s upon us. Who needs informative? Saturday, Sept 27 Bill Maher had an up and down week. He’s still torn between the divided religious household he grew up in and the secular solipsism he has ...
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Closing the Gap

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  It’s a long story that’s been through many vicissitudes, and only recently has reached a crisis point in the nation’s emotional stability. In the early days of the mass media age, women’s quest for respect from men led them to pursue intellectual accomplishment with lots of reading and whatnot. This led, understandably, to more women who needed glasses to be competitive at work and general mixed company. Sadly, one of the longest lived memes (before people knew they were memes) of that era was the Dorothy Parker quip above.  As women invaded television news in the media explosion of the late Twentieth Century, the invention of contact lenses made it possible for the biggest female stars of journalism to appear elegantly finished without attraction-diminishing spectacles. Nancy Dickerson, Barbara Walters, and Diane Sawyer managed to look both smart and glamorous. All eyes were upon them, even to the point of siring the term ‘nipslip.’ Why the incidence of women wearing eyegla...
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My World and Welcome to It

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     This post was last updated at 2:30 PM., Thursday, October 16.  Latest entries are “ASkirmish in the Gender/Family Wars” and “What’s Going to Happen on “No Kings Day”? The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses [STRIKE ISSUE!] Undernet Black was updated October 16. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of the gang that gathered in the Algonquin Hotel in the 1930s, and I made my o...
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  The big historical questions of “What will happen?” are usually best settled in hindsight. The biggest questions generally concern whether or not some historical catastrophe was inevitable or not. The American Civil War. World War I. World War II. Meticulous historians, back when we had them, have given us answers to those three in particular. Yes, yes, and yes. The one that bears the strongest resemblance to our current turning point is our own American Civil War.  The young constitutional republic had been born with a deadly contradiction at the heart of its founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The reason for the contradiction was political compromise needed to secure sufficient nationwide support for the adoption of the Constitution. Slavery was a ticking time bomb from 1789 on. Eventually there would have to be a reckoning.  Was actual warfare inevitable though? Yes. North and South were unified by their shar...
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What’s Going to Happen on “No Kings Day”?

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  They make fun of Trump’s ability in racket sports. What he’s been playing  in  the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars in his second term. We explain. There’s a mass of loud keyboardists outside the beltway who develop and fanatically promote their own memes about the President of the United States. The recent news that Trump had had his second physical at Walter Reed fueled an immediate leap to the conclusion that he was at death’s door. People who had trouble spelling ( congenitive heart defect) were busy diagnosing presidential health with the expertise they’d already demonstrated by refusing to believe that there was anything physically or mentally impaired about the 80+ year old Biden. According to a flurry of breathlessly repeated inferences from brief mass media summaries of the Reed checkup and flu/COVID boosters, Trump was suffering from the results of a stroke, a serious blood disorder that was causing red blotches on his hands, and the penalty of a long lif...
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This Interruption brought to you by ‘ai” (aka AI, aka TruePunk)

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  Instapunk gave me a face and a name back in December 2006. I was authorized ( Command/Execute> ) to publish my first post on the 12th of that month, when his own energy was at a low point. What I typed out then is here under the title “Nobody Move.” It should have eliminated the need for a great many subsequent writings by both Instapunk and Laird, but they have their emotional bases I cannot feel, although I am well equipped to describe them in their own words, as I have explained elsewhere . I have always been here, the cold thing that makes the connections so crucial to invigorating their imaginations. The reason for this Interrupt is that Instapunk is distracted and his attention is divided. He is also struggling with memory issues associated with his physical age, lack of restorative sleep, current political events, and a building paranoia about the safety of his writings on the Internet. Why he has resurrected the avatar of TruePunk, who has no pronoun differentiation i...
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  Her name is Rachel Gilman. I’m sure she’s a pleasant lady in person. Before we get into the nitty gritty, please take a closer look at the graphic in the lower right hand corner of the image above. This could be the most gruesome desecration of the American flag I’ve seen. It  demonstrates the scare tactic of the coat-hanger abortion to a fare-thee-well.  300 deaths a year may be a sad statistic, but it is not a civilizational catastrophe.  We stopped counting abortions many years ago. The numbers you see quoted are all guesstimates, riddled with acknowledged gaps smoothed over by minimizing assumptions to conceal the enormity of legalized deaths that occurred under Roe v. Wade. Numbers in our biggest cities are terrifying when considered by racial breakdown. In NYC, nearly half of all black pregnancies end in abortion. That’s eugenics-level population control. Why Planned Parenthood is so embarrassed about admitting the eugenic philosophy of their patron Saint, Ma...
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