InstaPunk Returns

  (1957-1966) You’re going to think this is as bad as being directed to the Hallmark Channel, the Lifetime Movie Network, or reruns of Fantasy Island. It isn’t. Yes, we found it because we’re old and remember when we watched it with grandparents or at home on Blaxk and white TVs. But this is one of those rare cases where the experience of seeing it again is better than the clichéed memory. There’s a lot more to watch than the one true plot of Perry identifying the murderer on the stand against all odds and confounding D.A. Hamilton Burger and Lieutenant Tragg yet again.  You realize almost immediately that you’re visiting a skillfully produced presentation of a completely different, bygone world that makes every episode fun to watch. The first two or three years will do. Unbelievably, they made 30 a year from 1957 to 1960. Each episode is 52 minutes long, which means advertising was confined to about 7+ minutes, compared to the 12-14 minutes per hour of ads on network shows no...

Just got my usual wake-up notification from the standard Instagram donkey expressing disbelief that Trump’s latest press conference didn’t land him in the loony bin. He was particularly outraged that “there is no more national media” to protect us from the President’s insanity. Which is to say that Trump met his objective for the press conference: goading the moribund Democrat Party to keep sawing at the limb of the tree they’re sitting on.  I went looking for an animated cartoon that illustrates my point. Unable to find it even with the help of Google’s AI know-it-all, I cobbled one together on my own. Simple and brief as it is, my little animation shows what the lefties are hoping against hope for, that blessed moment when the saw severs the link to the poisoned tree for good and saves them from it. There follows that brief stretched out moment when the limb remains suspended alone in midair while the tree falls. Then the illusion ends and the limb crashes to the ground as the la...

  Minimalism has been a periodic ideal of modern and post-modern esthetics. Purely arbitrary, of course, though not without possibilities and even infinities of its own. For example, there are those who regard Haiku as a sort of supreme test of the poet, since poetry is commonly defined as the best words in the best order. This leaves the door open for imagining that there is an absolute minimum definable for capturing profound truth in the fewest of the best words in the least of the best order. In Haiku there must be 17 syllables, some reference to a season (ensuring universality I guess), and a prohibition against rhyme to prevent cheating (another guess). What if this definition of the minimum is wrong? What if there’s some way to reach great truths in less than 17 syllables? In less than a single word even? And, gasp, in less than a single letter on the page? Impossible? Well, why the hell not? I propose that the graphic above is a poem, subject to meaningful exploration, inte...

  It’s time for me to do something I really dislike having to do. I need to write a book that will be printed on paper and will also consist as entirely of words as I can manage. It has been many years since I have regarded that as my preferred medium of expression. I find it confining, technologically and artistically retrograde, and I would avoid doing it if I could. Not that I can’t do it. I have done a huge chunk of work that way. But that aspect of my writing was supposed to be over nearly 30 years ago. The author of every creative project is a unique persona. He is the state of his consciousness during the period of producing it. What medium or genre he is working in. What his original intention was. What in personal life and in the world around him was drawing his attention at the time. And what was changing in him as he moved from intention to completed work. Instapunk is a persona, an artificially created one who started as a performative voice and became an alternative mo...

  It’s August going on September. Vacation time. Where we’re all supposed to be. Except maybe for mass media news outlets who still haven’t recovered from the late starts and early “lids” of the Biden days. They’re all still phoning it in, repeating the same lies, even the 10-yo ones about the Steele Dossier, the Epstein case, and the impeccably fair system of elections throughout the nation. Also still pleased with the 4-yo lies about poor, virtuously democratic Ukraine besieged by a corrupt authoritarian state outside their own borders, and the treacherous complicity of OrangeManBad in covering, again , for Putin and raining down death and destruction on innocent migrants, corpse-looking federal judges, and everyone else who isn’t a white man with a billion dollars. Yeah. Got it. Here’s an idea. Let them all keep playing amongst themselves with none of us watching until they fall asleep or something. In the meantime I’m having a little get-together here for my e-friends. Got the...

  Here’s the “official” story as it has stood for a quarter century. This will be an unusual post. It contains my longest ever direct quote of another source, which happens to be the longest ever post I have seen at the Gateway Pundit website. Ordinarily this is a kind of topic I would have handled fairly briefly at Facebook, but the relevant text by Gateway and by me is too substantial for that. I tried doing it that way before choosing this site instead. Here’s the graphic I prepared for the FB post: After I’d  prepared the graphic, things started to get complicated. There was just too much relevant content for a Facebook post. I have a personal connection to the Oklahoma City bombing story you probably have to be 50 to share. I remember exactly where I was when it broke into the regular cable programming one April morning in 1995 with a Special Announcement of an unfolding catastrophe in the state where my sister lived. My TV, large screen for the time and equipped with sur...