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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...

AI Fun with Dick and Jane

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How this post came to be. Saw this promo from the wrecked icon called the New Yorker and was reminded of a post put up here some months ago: Why didn’t I crop out the squatting woman? Truth in advertising.  That’s not true, actually. In fact, it’s a lie. I wouldn’t have stumbled on this lovely screenshot if it weren’t for an image I’d used in a Facebook post some days before: You won’t believe this, but while Iwas posting the pic just above, my wife showed me her ROFL pic from the The Babylon Bee… …Which is obviously directly relevant to the rantings of the Glasser person who thinks everything Trump has ever done or will do is a mortal sin against the Manhattan scripture called The New Yorker. Don’t get me wrong. I used to love The New Yorker. Then they surrendered it to the Smart Women, under the subscription-shrinking stewardship of Tina Brown, whose legacy has led gradually to the dollar-a-copy pitch shown in the first graphic above. Today’s mag looks a like the old one, but tha...

BREAKING: Up to the minute news on Iran Talks

  Sorry. Not in the Mood. They’re all talking past us. I’m not playing. Oh, okay. If you must …

Tell me I’m making it all up for myself

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Haven’t been here for a while. Cooling my heels on maybe half a dozen posts for which I have content materials assembled and the writing just awaiting the typing I don’t feel like doing against the relentless pass rush of AutoCorrect/AI. Stranded, I guess. My principal emotion is akin to what I felt back in 2019, when I took a year off from this site because who can write about dread every day? Like then, my mind is telling me the Dark Age is upon us because we don’t deserve to be saved from the fate our enemies intend for us. They’re brain-damaged sociopaths; a near majority of us are just brain-damaged. Good guys and bad guys both done in by appalling lack of education and undeveloped consciousness skills at foreseeing consequences from a Universe-of-One perspective. I don’t like gas prices at the pump, I don’t like the way Trump talks so mean, and the Iran thing I just don’t get, so I won’t vote this time. Fine. We get what we deserve as a nation. That’s the real American Way. No ot...

What’s a Little Hagiography at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave?

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We, of course, were as offended as anyone by the President’s evident pleasure in  being depicted as Creator of the Universe. His later insistence that it was just a plate of food that happened to have blond hair was disingenuous to say the least. There. That’s out of the way. Putting aside all the bluster about blasphemy by secular observers whose relation to religion is probably a checkbox item, I believe there is a real story lurking in all the feigned outrage. a neon flash of double standards. It’s a media story, probably meaningless to those who aren’t ancient enough to have witnessed Obama’s first year in office. He was kind of everywhere, on every news interview program, every newspaper headline, and every magazine cover. (For the youngsters in the audience, there used to be things called magazines with words and pictures in them. It was a big deal to be featured on their covers.) If you weren’t a big Obama fan — and maybe even if you were — this got to be kind of sickening a...