Norman Rules

This post was last updated at 5:30 PM, Wednesday, June 18. Latest entries are “Is Newsom Real or is he AI?,” “Through the Past Brightly…,” and “Israel Bullying Their Neighbors Again.” The Instapunk Times is still in the racks... NEW: Undernet Black is a recent update. 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...

The Real List of Worst Presidents

May 23, 2025

Some illiterate mug sent me this at my FB page this morning. I know it’s a fake, because there’s no way the ghost of Time magazine could survive a defamation suit like the one ABC just had to settle for many millions with Donald Trump. Still, it reminded me that the Missing-in-Action opinion editors of the biggest mass media outlets are addicted to soliciting Worst President rankings from deranged left-wing college professors who have written books about the left-wing despoiler of the Oval Office they most admire. (One of them had Biden ranked at 17th best two years into his catastrophic single term.) The only reason why such lists are popular with the media propagandists is the inevitable punchline that Trump and Nixon are first and second worst in some order. Which is nonsense. Generally, people with any education ignore the lists because they’re predictable, biased, sloppily argued and cited, and transparently a provocative political statement rather than a product of scholar...

I need to do more of this…

June 04, 2025

Another neglected orphan All writers have orphans. Stories they really liked but somehow never finished. Poems and stories no publisher wanted. Great book proposals rejected by form letter. Published works that died on the shelves without publicity, advertising, or bookstore signings. Then there’s the worst kind. The accidental project that even the writer keeps forgetting about because he thinks he’s bigger than the trifle that always seems to be standing quietly behind the door. I rediscovered one of this last kind when I was belatedly doing some hard work to revive the life of maybe my biggest orphan, the graphic extravaganza called Shuteye Town 1999 . Shuteye Town is a huge, uncategorizable thing made up of 3,500+ hyperlinked computer graphic files. It’s a place you go and can get lost in, even though everything that happens in there is occurring in the final minute of the 20th Century. It’s a story in which the reader/player is the protagonist of a narrative he creates by th...

The Brightbelt Spinoff Opus

November 30, 2024

The link included here is actually already available to IPR readers through the Menu button that appears at the top left corner of the site and each post. The Menu button is a box formed by four white horizontal lines. There’s an enormous amount of material accessible there, as well as the file you can find by seeking the word “Brightbelt.” Brightbelt Political Coverage of Disastrous 2022 Election Campaign Why am I highlighting the link here? Because it’s a pretty complete time capsule of a critical phase in the political tone in the nation that changed very dramatically with Biden’s vicious speech at Independence Hall early in September of 2022, right before the Red Wave that did not materialize as expected that November. The referenced work here is a selection of my own posts at Facebook for just two weeks following the Biden speech. In that timeframe I believe I captured the level of vitriol leveled at Trump by numerous members of the UniParty (the Administration + Democrats +...

Party Time

June 05, 2025

No, I’m not going 100 percent Youtube on you. Truth is, the post I did the other day about the Progs getting nutso when elections don’t go their way was an accident. I was really searching for the songs I’ll be posting here, and those political clips kept showing up in the sidebar. So I grabbed a few of them just to remind you that they really are out of their minds out there. Right now, of course, a lot of MAGA people are also out of their minds, with very little power or insight about what’s going on behind the media tantrums. That’s why i started collecting this little musical refuge. When is it the right time to party? By which I don’t mean drug yourself into a coma but find a sound and a best that will make you dance or at least reach a philosophical state of equilibrium. It’s always time for that. Because not all party songs are happy things. Some of them are quiet reflective moods when the dancing and singing are winding down. Not a bad place to be when you thi...

Israel Bullying its Neighbors Again

June 13, 2025

What’s all the fuss about? Israel is only twice the size of LA. Not worth even half the attention, right? This may look complicated, and in the mechanics and timelines and geopolitics of it all it is, but underneath all the noise it really is simple this time. Iran is committed to the destruction, the utter annihilation, of Israel. They will never change their policy about this. Iran wants a bomb. No amount of wheedling, negotiating, or compromise will end this obsessive hunger. Israel wants to take care of them alone. Why? Apart from Trump in the White House, there is no one they can trust. The opposition party and even a big chunk of the Republican Party are willing to sell out Israel with intelligence leaks, stall tactics, and and everything conceivable to make Middle East conflict profitable for their purses and careers. Netanyahu, battling appeasing insurrectionists of his own, has decided this is his best and perhaps only opportunity to cut off the head of the snake. None o...

The Instagram Follies

May 27, 2025

I know you can’t read it. Just showing you the Instagram format here. I’ve explained before, or elsewhere, that being on Facebook has somehow put me on Instagram too. I did a brief profile to direct people here, but I hadn't yet realized that Instagram is completely in that skinny “reel” format I find so hard to read wherever it appears. Then I must have checked a wrong box I can’t uncheck, but my phone started notifying me of IG posts that “you might like.” Right. Overwhelmingly, these forwarded posts are the work of TDS sufferers who obviously get all their info from the alphabet networks on TV. Since they’re the first thing that pops up on my screen when I wake up at 0-dark-30 everyday, I look at them sometimes, there are always a bunch of them, and I occasionally make a brief comment. Then I get notifications that I have new Instagram followers who can’t be located by me. Big bunch this morning. Why I got the idea to do this post. One I can simply link when I see the same cra...

Have you ever listened to pet sounds?

June 11, 2025

This will be an uncharacteristic post for this site. I remember The Beach Boys. They were still playing on the .45 record players when I went away to school in 1966, but the British Invasion was already taking over the music charts by then, and I never followed their music. Still, I feel an obligation to note the passing of Brian Wilson, because he was more important than I knew for a long time, and most of the news surrounding his later life has been about sadness, mental illness, and other flavors of woe. His personal decline didn’t have the glamor or spectacle of the famous (and largely apocryphal) 27s, like Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, and Cobain. What he left behind for us, and you, was not trashed hotel rooms or legendary sexcapades. He left a body of music that played a part in the cultural turning point that was the Sixties, and his contribution was not about revolution but a layering of harmonies that still affect us in head and heart. But I can’t write about him without faking ...

Through the past brightly…

June 17, 2025

A key video that won’t load after a brief title flash in the time capsules below Yes, the President is standing on a knife edge that stretched all the way from California to Iran and beyond. I’m keeping an eye on it, as I’m sure many of you are too. But unlike the pundits and other seers of the mass media, we the people who live in the real world know that there’s not much we can do to affect what will happen in the hours and weeks ahead. We’ve already done what we had to do, which is elect the best available candidate for the job of making the tough decisions about how best to proceed in our interests. Beyond that, our responsibility is primarily to remain calm and do the work we’re best suited to doing. In my case that means writing stuff I think it worthwhile to write about as honestly as possible. That accounts for most of my time, but being as old and uniquely situated as I am, there’s also a continual overhead I have to pay in the form of what I call Reclamation ; that is, ...

The Games Pollsters Play

May 24, 2025

It’s a mistake to think we don’t have to worry ourselves about polls until the 2026 midterm campaigns begin in earnest. They’re being used right now to fill the gaps left by the news mass media doesn’t want to cover or investigate in any depth. What are people thinking about this and that? What should you be thinking if you’re one of the smart ones? Are you thinking what we want you to think yet? I recently stumbled across a good example of how the polling game is played, even on what is supposed to be friendly turf. A source we can look at without the fingerprints of WAPO, the NYT, NPR, YouVote, Morning Consult, 538, Quinnipiac, or even Rasmussen (whom I have beaten on plenty for several years). It’s my habit to be wary of the “nose under the tent” phenomenon. Even rampaging MAGA strongholds like Real America’s Voice (RAV) can be manipulated on a fairly regular basis. Why I’ve been hard on Breitbart for their continual publishing of interviews with old, retired, out-of-office na...

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