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My World and Welcome to It

My World and Welcome to It

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     This post was last updated at 4 AM, Monday, April 6.  Latest entries are “History in Hindsight” and “A Sudden Bout of Dragonfly Mode.” The Instapunk Times is still on Strike! APRIL FOOL’s MONTH SPECIAL ISSUE ! ] Undernet Black was updated April 6. 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 own pilgrimage the...

History in Hindsight

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This post is a pick-up from an entry at another website of mine from Good Friday, a couple days ago. Originally, I didn’t see it as having an audience here because I don’t want to overdo the archaeology of my own work and past personal experience. But looking back is part of the process of using insights past in new ways that illuminate the present and the challenges of the future. So I rethought the placement and offer it here without apologies. The one day a year devoted entirely to death. Got to wondering, what’s the single deadest thing in our culture right now? Deader even than journalism, the fine arts, literature, music in every genre, and the scientific method. My own answer is history. I’ve read and studied a lot of history, both in school and as an avocation. As an elementary school kid, I saved a Sunday supplement that put color pics of all 35 Presidents on one sheet of newsprint and I memorized the order. Before college I got AP credit in both American and European history....

Sudden Bout of Dragonfly Mode…

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  It   strikes   me now and again. Can’t help it. Just try to control it… I’ve only done one thing: That’s all. I swear. Okay. Couldn’t help it. But’s that’s all. Really. I was working on my long postponed post about the best movies in the first 25 years of the 21st Century when this overpowering sense of ennui overcame me, and dissing the movies suddenly struck me as more important than debunking the big lies mass media tells about itself. Working my way through it… P.S. An old friend just checked in with an enhancement of my comic cover that blows mine out of the water. Couldn’t resist sharing it with you all. ________________________ Below the Fold What I had of the new/old post I was trying to finish:  Keeping My Promise about the Best 21st Century Movies It’s that time of the year when movies are back in the news more than usual. The recent Oscars broadcast was chiefly notable for its record-low viewership, inane political rhetoric from the podium, and a crop of...

The False Gold of the Meidas Touch

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I first heard of Meidas Touch shortly after I joined ‘X’ in the wake of Musk’s takeover of the poisonous lefty site called Twitter. The lefties continue to be a dominating presence there, and even when freeloader Citizen Free Press links a decent post there, the first one or two replies at least are screeds by the kind of crayon-armed haters who want all Republicans assassinated. CFP loves to indicate that outrageous lefty posts are ‘buried’ or ‘destroyed’ by MAGA derision, but this is usually an overstatement. Why I was occasionally moved to reply to the worst of them. The Meidas Touch editor Filipkowski was one of the first to tempt me to. After a quick review of the MT site, I told him it was the most egregious pile of vile libel made up completely out of whole cloth I had ever seen. (A permanent sidebar there declared that there are over 20,000 pending lawsuits against Trump for a variety of sex crimes.) I told him he was a disgusting cancer on the corpse of journalism that was sti...