A Man Called Ove




Laughs, tears, and a smart blow against the Swedish Nanny State. Showing on Amazon Prime. Peas in a pod.

Compare with this Swedish TV Masterpiece from InstaPunk Rules.


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     This post was last updated at 11:25 AM, Tuesday, July 8.  Latest entries are “Responding to a Post by Michael Smith,”  “Sometimes They Drag Me Back in,” and “An AI video Hoax to be wary of.” The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses... NEW: Undernet Black was updated recently. 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 193...
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Trump the Fascist Dictator

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  Il Douche as the lefties like to call him On the first day of Summer, 2025, it’s time to take stock on what is and is not going on in these United States of America. The desperate remnant of what used to be the official Democrat Party is still trying to depict Donald Trump as an anti-Democratic authoritarian fully engaged in the process of destroying our Constitutional protections against a single executive ruling by decree and the tactics of terror. We’re five months in now to the second term of this president, and it’s appropriate to demonstrate what could have happened in that time and did not. The pic up top is of Mussolini only because there’s a superficial physical resemblance between Il Duce and The Donald . The more accurate comparison for our purposes is with the favorite avatar of the left, Adolf Hitler and His Nazi Party. People with Internet access, even Democrats, can confirm to themselves that Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933  by means of an electoral ...
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Click the graphic to go right to The Glossary I know there are those out there in the Facebook Universe who do come to look at the longer thought pieces I generally reserve for IPR and other of my websites. The traffic here, by the way, is not chiefly driven by Facebook, which accounts for only 17 percent of the IPR audience. This post, though, is primarily for you FB friends who may want to see one of the taproots of views I regularly express about the UniParty, the decline of the rule of law, the nexus of media and left-leaning government institutions, the assault on Judeo-Christian principles, the abortion debate, and the ongoing war between and among victim classes in the United States of 2023. Now that may sound like a dose of medicine, but it isn’t. The Glossary at Shuteye Nation was a satirical work of a little more than 10,000 words, presented dictionary-style, words and terms in alphabetical order with their definitions. It was written in the year 2000. With the possible excep...
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  In recent years, I’ve been making it a practice to snap a photo of myself on my birthday as I ascend into the heady realm of old age. I turned 72 on July 10, which is supposed to be the new 40 or something if you’re up to date on the newest dietary supplements and anti-prostapocalypse Kegel exercises that keep you youngalike for decades longer than your dad. 70 is not the new 40 though. By coincidence, if there is such a thing, a young lady I’ve regarded as a daughter since I met her sent me a photo she found just last week. I was 44 then. The Boomer Bible was 7 years behind me. She wasn’t trying to be unkind, just reminding me how long we’ve known each other. The years take their toll now, just as they always have. I don’t deny playing with the photos after I take them. My motives aren’t even pure. I’m trying to stage-manage the future, at least in part, because when they show us portraits of a long dead writer they tend to want us to see what they looked like toward the end, wh...
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One of these installed in at least five different cities You probably think this is going to be a screed or a lecture. It isn’t. It’s an honest question, asked out of curiosity: WHAT ARE YOU GETTING OUT OF ALL THIS? Almost no one comments here, so I’m not expecting answers. I’m asking you to think about the question for yourselves, with some specificity. To wit: Has the amount of emotion you’ve invested in hating Trump for 10 years made you happier? Is your marriage better, your sex life more satisfying, your circle of friends wider, your career more prosperous, your state of mind more equable and fulfilling? How has your perspective on life changed during the last 10 years? Are you more or less optimistic, diversified in your leisure-time pursuits, content with the personal choices you’ve been making on a day-to-day basis, balanced between the frequently opposing pulls of intellect and emotion? How has your self image (your amour-propre, as the French would say) evolved during this p...
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By my watch it’s the third day. How to explain what Trump has been up to in the Mideast? He’s been doing what he always does. Working for the deal he wants after all the rhetoric and bluster and the moves and countermoves are done.  What did he want? The safety of Israel, which is our only agent of Democracy in the Middle East. An end to the killing as soon and for as long as possible. And most of all, he wanted Americans to be as safe as possible from the deliberate and collateral damage inflicted by crazy people in the greater Islamic world. What were the obstacles he had to overcome? 1) Irrational, incredibly violent emotions on both sides, by Israel and by Iran and the organizational instruments it has used for 45 years to attack, terrorize, and otherwise intimidate Israel and its few real allies in the western world. 2) A seriously degraded U.S. intelligence capability, lacking both the political will and the human on-the-ground resources to discover What the Hell was really g...
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