Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
Something else I owe my wife for
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All right. Won’t be any surprise. I always gave women their due, I thought, when it came to singing. I loved Piaf, Ella, Doris Day, Lena Horne, Billie Holliday, Ronnie, Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston to a point, you know, all the good ones, even Martha Tilton. I even made excuses for the also-rans, Grace Slick, Stevie Nicks, Pat Benetar, the Heart sisters, Janet Jackson, Diana Ross, and even Roberta Flack, who broke my heart with two songs and was never heard from again. (No. Find your own links.)
But when it came to opera I knew nothing. Nothingk. My wife and I grappled with the great Pagliacci-Domingo debate. One’s too this, one’s too that. Nessun Doooormat. Blah blah blah. Until the day she brought up Maria Callas.
Well, I knew all about her. Nice beak. Onassis castaway? Opera? Wasn’t she that? Who’d want Jackie? I mean, really. Eurotrash.
And Pat said, “Have you ever actually listened to her?”
Well, no. I stopped listening to sopranos when WFLN kept talking about Joan Sutherland. Old lady singers singing young girl arias from ‘La Boheme’ with discreet coughs interspersed.
“Get over yourself,” Pat said. (Tact has never been a hindrance for her. The last thing she is, according to her three children, is a controlling person. “She’s just, uh, candid,” they all say.) ‘She’s the greatest female voice in history. Listen…”
I did. She was right. I went directly to the Super Bowl of female arias.
GOAT is the word I’m groaping for. From gentle and soft to soaring and heart-breakingly, piercingly anguished, world-breaking angel with no transition at all? With no break in voice at all. And not even at the end of her range. Impossible. Nobody can do that but an archangel.
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...
Here’s the story that’s running at the righty news outlet called National Pulse. Here’s what they think we need to know: Sufficient for us to know he’s a “Biden Judge.” What if the lead graphic of their post had looked like this instead? See, they kind of left out the most sinister background of this story, which goes far beyond a medical issue, however grave it is to those involved. National Pulse fails to see that our real concern should be the supine role played by Congressional Republicans in enabling this man to be seated on a federal bench. For once, it is truly important to read the entire Wikipedia entry about this man, which is alarming even in the prose of the far-left leaning site that published it: <<Mustafa Taher Kasubhai (born 1970) is an American lawyer who has served as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Oregon since 2024. He previously served as a United States magistrate judge...
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...
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...
Lewis Hamilton wins Seventh World Championship at Formula 1 Grand Prix in Turkey: A stunning drive from Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton in the Turkish Grand Prix gave him his 10th victory of the season – and, more crucially, saw him claim the seventh drivers’ title of his career, to equal the record of Michael Schumacher, as Racing Point’s Sergio Perez and Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel completed the podium after a thrilling race in Istanbul. Hamilton had started the race in sixth, risen to third midway through the first lap and then dropped back to sixth by the end of Lap 1 after an error at Turn 9. But a decision to change his intermediate tyres just once saw Hamilton drive a masterful race to claim victory by over 25 seconds from Perez. The win alone was enough to claim championship #7, but it was even more assured after a disastrous race for Valtteri Bottas - the only man who could have stopped Hamilton winning the title today - who spun six times en route to a P14 finish.
*I’ve* never even had one of these. I’ll leave this one for one of you guys. Plenty of time to get this before Christmas. Here’s the EBay proffer for what’s called the ‘Pinback Button.’ The cute graphic treatment even includes the pin side. It you actually want to read a physical book that you can hold in your hands, put on your shelf, or give to some friend or family member who’d like to understand what happened to the Great American Experiment you can find a copy quite easily, still in time for Christmas, via the following retailers and others. Just search the ‘Shopping’ tab at Google for “The Boomer Bible” and you’ll find it. (If you’re viewing this on a tablet, you can read this graphic more easily by clicking on the pic and turning your device 90 deg counterclockwise.) I don’t make any money from your purchases obviously, but I feel like I’m doing a public service in showing you what’s out there. For example, here’s something that’s out there I hadn’t actually found till yesterday...
Hot Videos of the Week New York Post: Why Kentucky Derby Disqualified Maximum Security in Stunner CNN: Plane Skids off Runway into River News Busters: Medley—Blaming Trump for Terror Attack and Paving the Way for Pete and Joe PLUS: ABC Can Barely Speak of 50 Year Low in Unemployment Desmoines Register: Elizabeth Warren Campaign Even Disrupted by Animal Rights Protest C-Span: Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham Reacts to Barr Hearings ABC News: House Judiciary Chair Gives Ultimatum to A.G. Barr, Could Charge with Contempt Breitbart: MSNBC Panel—‘We Can Handcuff People Who Ignore Subpoenas Media Research Center: Tutorial on Media Bias [ bkgd ] CNN/Van Jones: Chelsea Handler—Trump Was a Personal Trigger for Me Power Line: This Week in Pictures—Close Down the Barr Edition VIDEO ARCHIVE BONUS: New York Daily News: Inside Old Abandoned City Hall Station _______________ Ed. Not...
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Facebook Jail — Repeat Offende r I’ve made it a practice to offer my thoughts about the state of the nation every year for the last decade save one. Links to all of them are listed below. The missing year is 2019. For a long time I thought I had simply misplaced it. Not so. Last week I decided to do a search at Facebook for December of that year and see what I was writing about. Here’s what I found: a battle royal against the censors of Facebook that kept me too busy to do as I had done in years previous. Viewed in aggregate, however, the posts from that time do amount to ‘End of Year Thoughts.’ I had been taking time off off from Instapunk Returns since May in order to focus on the swirling issues of the 2020 re-election campaign. Most of my writing time was spent on Facebook, whee I was running into constant censorship issues, including nonsensical penalties imposed by FB fact-checkers. They were almost always clearly wrong, demonstrably from the actual,posts they were objecting to. ...
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