InstaPunk Returns

Happy Independence Day No. 250!  I’m planning to do my part for the year-long celebration of the still remarkable birth of the United States of America. Just starting to realize that the number of us who remember the last big anniversary in 1976 is getting smaller every day. Why I have some special ideas about focusing on the moment of transition, that is the tick of the clock last night when the 249th year became the 250th. A kind of time capsule that may be buried now but dug up later to see who were way back when you were still as young as you think you are now. My credentials for the job. Quite a few actually, but the most important one today is that I was a working participant in the official Bicentennial celebrations back when I was still young. I wrote a post about it almost 10 years ago, ancient history in today’s 24/7 chronometer dial.  In honor of the ones no longer with us from that time, I dug up the old post from the Wayback Machine and put it back together here a...

This is cross-posted from a confidential site I use to communicate with an old friend on matters more concerned with writing than this one normally is. Sometimes the two sites intersect in unexpected ways. (e.g., See The French Hurry-Up from Feb ‘26.) This does seem an appropriate follow-up to my most recent IPR post. Up to you what you make of it… Inevitably, another major commitment of my time called Instapunk Returns will occasionally stick its nose into the doings here. Working on both, I’m sometimes forced to ask myself how I got from Point A to Point XXX as I seem to have done yesterday at IPR. Specifically, how did I manage to get from here… Yes, I did ‘Shapes’ at graduation, but we all learned our ABCs too. …to  here ? The concluding flourish of my latest IPR screed,  Thoughts on Foul Language I put the Little Red Hen Nursery School in the same context with the song  abcdefu  because we all have an important personal timeline with respect to the alphabet. My...

  A cartoon stolen from ****ing Alarmy, who always watermark their stuff There comes a time when you realize some critical cultural variable has reached the kind of tipping point that transforms into chaos. I recently realized one of these tipping points has been reached when the streaming services, desperate for new product in the vacuum left by their failed woke productions, suddenly dumped a bunch of theatrical releases and straight to video movies from the years 2023 and 2024 on their platforms. I watch a lot of movies on streaming services, but I quickly learned not to watch anything dated ‘23 or ‘24. Too much gender confusion nonsense, too much (un)veiled lefty politicking about this and that, but most of all, way way too much foul language. I’d long had a rule that more than 10 F-bombs in 5 minutes was a signal to bail from any movie. Now I knew that this low bar couldn’t be met by the overwhelming majority of movies from the past few years. I’m not a prig. I probably hold ...