There are women who really ARE Audrey Hepburn. Meet Eleanor.

You know how they say wives are the better half. My wife knows Harvey Sklar. Who would be Al Pacino if he were a foot shorter.

Twice as smart as everyone. You know the cliche about software geniuses? Welcome to the reality. Not every genius comes from Brooklyn. The ones not from Salem do.

And then they got married.

Who wouldn’t want some part of this story? (Click for much bigger.)

My own motives are brute simple. I know Harvey is one one of the smartest people I’ve heard tell of. And I know Eleanor is a master chef. I want a meal and a conversation. Neither of which I’ve been allowed to have yet. My wife hasn’t opened up about this possibility. Shame on her.

Stanley Kurtz

Stanley Tucci

One’s a scholar and an indefatigable investigative reporter. The other is a consummate character actor who can play any role, from comedic to tragic, with absolutely convincing invisibility with respect to the act of acting.

What do they have in common for me? Very few people I would rather have dinner with. The possibility of real conversation with both of them is practically irresistible. Don’t feel that way too often. My intuition is that they are equally good at thinking, listening, and talking without bombast. Measured men.

A rare and wonderful virtue these days.

Smarter than Scotland apparently.

He doesn’t like windmills. They sound like flies. Which he has no use for. He’s smart that way.

She’s the thing. Scotty forever.

You have no idea. Scotties will always kill you before they submit.

Ye Greate Street, Greenwich, NJ. For this and all subsequent, click for much bigger.

All this time, I’ve been thinking Fife had to be prettier than where I grew up and ran around as a kid.

Not competing now, but for the first time I feel proud of the backcountry where I grew up.

My wife has proven there are no windmills.

Dawn. A great thing.

Where we live.

It takes an eye to see.

We have fall too.

Things get mostly red. We don’t talk about it much because we’re from Jersey.

Did I say we’re on the Delaware, the greatest river in the Americas? (The Mississippi is a trickle compared to the Delaware, which leads to the ocean.)

Yeah. We can sit on shore and watch monster ships glide past our filets.

That’s all the big stuff. But there’s also small stuff.

We played on the Cohansey River.

Which tended to look like this to our high speed Boston Whalers, airboats, ChrisCrafts, etc

Doing Cool things on the water.

But the town was mysterious and mystical too.

Patterned buildings.

Where the Brits assassinated colonists.

Killed us in the night. Scots’d have been on guard. But we weren’t there at the time.

Quakers. Don’t ever negotiate with them when money is involved.

Yeah, we had a Tea Party in Greenwich too. Just without the Southie accents.

Of course. We had to circumscribe Ship John Light. Can’t be a man without doing that.

So. Is it all on fire?

Yes.

Smarter and cooler than me.

Guy named Matt Zwolinski. Professor at San Diego State. Mixed it up with him over police brutality video. We declared a kind of truce on Facebook, and he assured me he was not a progressive. But I stirred the pot by calling out California’s one party state and the idiotic policies that led to the current water shortage. Then his minions came in as commenters. One, a brightly boy from the Cato Institute, was particularly dismissive. I asked for his credentials. He ducked and insulted me, ducked and insulted me, and ducked and insulted me. Then Matt, the Facebook father, informed me that I was defacing his “wall” and wouldn’t tolerate it. It all ended this way. I made nice with him after the Cato contretemps:

You don’t get it that your young followers know absolutely nothing? Why are you so protective? I had a blog for ten years in which I never banned people, no matter how four letter they were with me. I contended with them and they stopped coming. Take a look at this, a long look. I redefined writing in the Internet era. I did a LIVE Intercolumn Reference in a book that began on an Underwood Standard typewriter.

theboomerbible.com

It also, as one of your followers extorted from me, sold 100,000 copies in print. I don’t usually lead with that. But your defensiveness I find annoying. The lefties call people motherfuckers, shitheads, racists, sexists, and everything else they can think of. Haven’t done that. I just contend. What I’m used to.

I think I like you. Until you retreat into this hypersensitive cocoon that, whether you’re a lefty or not, smacks of political correctness. I’m not interested in that. If you want to talk for real, we’ll talk. If you want to pose, the answer is simple. defriend me.

Then he lowered the boom.

Robert, look. You’re kind of a jerk. I’m sure it’s comforting for you to tell yourself that the reason people don’t want to talk to you is that your ideas are simply too powerful, or that they can’t handle the truth, or whatever. But the fact is that you’re just coming off as a bitter, rude, and arrogant person. And I have no wish to spend my time talking with someone like that. So, goodbye.

I responded. But I had already been defriended. Welcome to the Facebook era.

Maybe I am all those things. How old are you? I’ve watched my country being demolished for decades. You’re a professor in San Diego. While academe rots and putrefies. I’m rude and bitter because I’m watching a rape of institutions I believed in all my life. You’re a disgrace. What single thing do you do to keep freedom of speech alive in your world? Anything? As Hemingway would have said, I unprint myself of you. What is your educational mission, son? Or is it just coasting on tenure?

Anyhow. I did no name calling. No four letter words or accusations about patrimony. I quarreled, asked for attention to my own writing, and persisted in asking for the credentials that make a disrespectful (being kind here) 21 year old commenter Cato Institute material. That makes me a jerk. So be it.

If this were happening in your home, what would YOU do? (click for bigger.)

Odd how things work. I’m new to the Facebook phenomenon. I friended a guy from Canada who, it turns out, likes the socialist Bernie Sanders and eats up all the climate change propaganda of the alarmists. So I criticized — politely (for me anyway) — his sources in comments. Whereupon he “liked” some of my critiques. So I made contact with him in the message function and we had a very cordial discussion about everything BUT climate change. He’s a good man.

Then he asked me if I knew anything about UKIP and I said yes. Not enough maybe but some. He said he had a friend who shared my horror of the bird slaughter associated with wind turbines. She was from Scotland. So now I have a Facebook friend from Scotland. Her name is Deborah Pender. I urge all of you to friend her and follow the awful situation she finds her home country in.

The picture above is a representation of the destruction by green good intentions of the place where she lives. She thinks there’s a role to be played by us Americans in resisting the onslaught of environmental fascism.

I’m still working out in my mind what that role might be, but that’s no reason for any of you to delay jumping on board. Feel free to educate me about what I can and should do.

I’ll close with a couple glimpses of what it’s like here in New Jersey, where I don’t think she’s been, land of, so far, no wind turbines.

Turbine free. (Click for bigger)

Stepping Back.

Good News and Bad News from the Bird Garden.

And, of course…

Wintertime.

The warming hasn’t gotten here yet. (Click for bigger)

Yeah. He died young. He smoked, you know.

Audience participation time. Take a look at these two graphs and tell me if you spot any problems. (I’ve got lots of other charts and graphs if you’re interested. Nothing is what we think it is, ever.)

I just love charts and graphs.

And it’s even better when there are bar charts.

Kind of disappointing, eh?

If you see anything suspicious, let me know. Seriously.

Our beautiful campus, which does not exist.

All right. It’s idiotic for our children to go hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for a college degree that teaches them nothing but ideological hatreds. Are we agreed?

The Internet offers an alternative, but it’s become a for-profit opportunity that costs just under the tuition of “real” universities.

There’s another opportunity here. An opportunity for real education. Stay with me here. There must be a vast pool of educated old folks, retirees from academe and other professions who are concerned about what is going on in the slagpile our universities have become. People who can compose a syllabus for a major, assign papers, and grade those papers the way they were graded when they were young, long ago. You know. As much attention to grammar and spelling as to logic, argumentation, precision, research, and underlying intelligence.

What if? What if we established a college whose faculty worked for free? Couple of levels here. Professors Emeritus from formerly great universities, complemented by graduates of those same universities who have specific subject knowledge. Key point: we’re not talking STEM curricula; we’re talking liberal arts. The intent is an old fashioned liberal arts education. History, art, literature, natural science, and, yes, writing and reasoning.

What if we created a path from high school for absolutely anybody? Go to Community College and get a two year technical associate degree. Then, if your grades are good enough, you can be admitted to Novasen College, where you will receive the complement, the real learning required to be a college educated person.

You will declare a liberal arts major. You will receive a syllabus. You will receive assignments to write papers. You MAY, if finances permit have video conferences with professors and fellow students. Regardless, you will submit papers and have them returned to you by fax or other physical means carved to pieces in every possible respect. You will rewrite those papers as directed and learn how to write, argue, and defend your well thought out positions.

It will take two years. At the end of it, you will — IF YOU PASS AND NOT EVERYONE WILL — receive a Bachelor of Arts degree from Novasen College. Will it matter? Yes.

Accreditation is a farce. A Novasen grad will have the personal endorsement of the entire faculty, whose credentials will beggar what most grads can tender. More importantly, the rigor of the two year Novasen curriculum will ensure that grads can function in real AND corporate life.

Interested? Shouldn’t everyone be? An actual education without a hundred thousand dollars in student loans. If you want to be a pioneer, you might be helping the ones who come after.

Think about the idea.

The Tigress of Fox News. Don’t try to track her into the bush..

Tried to hang in there because where else you gonna go, but I’m nearly done.

When you look up their skirt these days, and they have a lot of skirts these days, all you see is Bush. Watching the new Redeye right now and all they’re talking about is vaginas. And nipples and farting. As if the way to sell conservative views is to be as vulgar as lefty comics. The conversation is moving on to dominatrixes, with another pass or two at nipples and vaginas. Thank God for the pure class of FBN’s Dagin McDowell. Think she’s about to joke about the smell of period pads. Sigh.

Rivers died, so E! Found Kathie Griffin. Gutfeld had a hangover and Fox gets Dagin. Ain’t life sweet? Guess it depends on how you feel about raspberry douche. Ask this month’s Redeye.

Where was I? Bush. Granted, some of them don’t have skirts you can look up, but they’re all working overtime for Bush. Chris Wallace, Bill O’Reilly, Geraldo, Shepard Smith, Krauthammer, Karl Rove, Karl Rove again, even Hannity, van Susteren, and Megyn Kelly (oops, but there’s no sign she’s definitely for Jeb Bush.)

All so afraid of the Independents. I once wrote something serious about Independents and how they’re not moderates at all, just mixed and too complicated in their views to pander to, but I can’t find that thoughtful piece so I’ll go with this instead.

Undecided Insanity.

Redeye is now degenerating into a cesspool of dirty flaccid unfunny snark. Why they should have cancelled it when Gutfeld retired. Thinking this new crew’d be happiest with four more years of Billary sex jokes. (Homophone intended.) Anyhoo.

Fox News. Becoming a farce. Rising from ratings success to ratings dominance and they still can’t spell their chyrons correctly or teach Brian Kilmeade how to pronounce names. Their chief correspondent — White House, Middle East, Oklahoma tornado beat — is the son of the former local weatherman Steve Doocy. No nepotism there. The afternoon hostess is a former Miss America, and the “serious” news shows still think Juan Williams is a commentator anyone can take seriously and then they invite the Borg known as Charles Lane to represent the mainstream media. Vomit time.

I could put up with all of that if they weren’t working so hard to pave the way for Jeb Bush. Oh yeah. Let’s be as Hispanic as Jeb and amnesty’s not so bad, because we all know most everybody is either gay or perverted anyway, meaning we need all that hot new hot blood, and the country has to change into something else like Obama says only he didn’t do it right and the RNC and Chamber of Commerce can do it better. And Kennedy on Outnumbered is the dumbass MTV future because look at her big fat white legs and her cool horn rims and Dana Perino is as dumb as Democrats think all Republican women are and she just laughs and laughs and defends them anyway because she likes their parties and Chris Wallace keeps on keeping on being the most obtuse graduate of Harvard since Al Gore and if we keep listening and laughing and swallowing the bull they’ll all get invited to the Jeb Bush Inaugural and they can keep on pretending they believe in something besides themselves and how important they are. Which they absolutely, positively aren’t.

I forgot. Eric Bolling. He sits next to Bob Beckel every night and has never once punched him in the mouth. Screw him too.

Which brings us all the way back to Megyn Kelly. Bush. You of all people should be guarding against just giving it away without a sense of judgment. You have a hubby and kids. The Bush propensity could give people entirely the wrong idea. Get rid of your glass desk. Until then you’re a shark vulnerable to yet another clam joke. As is your network.

Sorry to say. And by the way Fox, learn how to goddam spell. I mean it. You embarrass people like me every single day. Except I’m not watching you so much anymore. Like a lot of the rest of us. You know, the ones who actually believe in smaller government and don’t need Mexicans to landscape our lawns. Those of us who don’t make a million dollars a year and would like jobs for Americans in our own neighborhoods without having to buy the Rosetta Stone software to hire them. Stupid little trivia like that.

Advice to all who face the progressive tide from Mordor. At the very least, pull on your panties before you go to war. Treebeard will back me up on this. Did I say the end of Fox News? Maybe I should have said the split-end of decent reporting.

P.S. I admit I still like Harris Faulkner and Kirsten Powers, right and left, notice. They try to think, they have nice hair, and I’ve never seen their pubes or panties. What does that say about the state of journalism?

Half of you still approve of this dictatorial little fascistic halfwit hater of your own country. How stupid can you be? Look in the mirror.

You’re gorgeous, aren’t you? The perfect brick.

Yeah. That stupid.

Alternatively, Look at That Stupid Guy.

What’s that you always say? Yeah. Whatever.

Kelly Clarkson.

I’ve nothing against Kelly Clarkson. Don’t much like Chris Wallace. But he’s allowed to make a joke in response to a clear invitation to do so. I’m at odds with my wife on this.

Kelly got fat. Sorry. She’s a celebrity. People are allowed to offer subtle needles. Deep dish pizza seems a mild needle to me. Are we also supposed to pretend that Aretha Franklin doesn’t outweigh a Sherman tank? What are the new rules? Orson Welles wasn’t fat? Jackie Gleason? Kate Smith? Dom Deluise?

I was as close to him as you are to the person right next to you. I know that sounds awkward. But he was completely, utterly enormous. It was his whole schtick.

Too bad, honey. This time I side with Fat Face. Lay the hell off, everybody.

Me, when I bother to dress up.

I have two favorite shows on TV these days. “Sleepy Hollow” and “Forever.” Why don’t I like all the serial killer shows instead? Because they are serial killer shows. Can I move on?

Why do I like the protagonists of these two shows? Because they don’t give up. I spend most of every day trying to give up. Haven’t been able to yet. Part of me is Ichabod Crane of Sleepy Hollow, a hopeless archaism still fighting the Revolution, still believing in the eternal battle between good and evil.

Part of me is also Dr. Henry Morgan from Forever, fatigued by the modern life he has survived too long to appreciate. It just might be better to die than be confronted every day by shallow idiots who know they know everything important and know absolutely nothing instead.

But they don’t give up. And I’m not supposed to either. However much I want to.

On the other hand, I have to admit I don’t really care about most of you. You’re selfish, stupid, narcissistic, uneducated and unworthy. I care, to the extent I do, out of a sense of duty.

The good news is that none of this dudgeon I maintain has anything to do with racism, sexism, LGBTism, antisemitism, or even antiIslamism. I despise all of you equally. I’m what used to be termed a misanthrope. A curmudgeon. Why I’m such a devout if undenominated Christian. I love you all because I must. Why I reference duty.

Love you all. Once again, Happy Easter.

Yinka Graves. Flamenco dancer extraordinaire.

Today is the one day of the year that Jesus Christ is dead. It’s appropriate to speak therefore about the promise of resurrection.

Once again, been watching Bring It! Black women from Atlanta showing their fire, sexuality, and determination to succeed. We watch with admiration and a sense of fun. It’s like seeing Ali in his youth. We’re gonna win and this is how we’re gonna do it.

But there’s also a sense of sadness. Bring It! has an air of the NBA about it, sacrificing art for competition. Lots of trash talk and ferocity bordering on violence. There’s a show on that can’t be compared because it’s so different and yet so much the same. Dance Mums, which is from the U.K., shows girls equally determined, with equally crazy mothers, doing dance in a wholly different way. Technically proficient, sometimes inspired, and intending something different from getting a scholarship for the on-field dance team at a big football university. Makes you sad about the state of race relations in the U.S.A. Some of the Bring It! girls could be ballet dancers. Or whatever the hell else they want to be. But we’re not set up that way, are we?

Two examples. Both of them Graves.

Yinka.

Ignore the screechy music. Beauty. She’s a dancer.

And Denyce.

Happy Easter, everyone. Resurrection is a promise for everyone.

In Hollywood, careers rise and fall. We were watching the show Numb3rs today. It had quite a good cast. Guess who’s there that we still remember. Judd Hirsch. Everybody else in the show has no more career. The star, David Krumholtz, has turned into a blue whale. The guy who played his brother, whatshisname, has never been seen again. Diane Farr retreated to some hole in the wall south of Houston Street. The black guy made a couple token appearances on CSI. The beefy white guy is totally missing in action.

But Judd Hirsch rises from strength to strength. We first met him on Taxi, when he was already middle aged.

Somehow, he’s still middle aged. What’s up with that?

I started getting vexed with him in Independence Day, the Fourth of July. He played Jeff Goldblum’s father, and I was bothered by the Yiddish accent.

He toned it down in Numb3rs. Flexibility.

Now, with everybody else’s career down the drain, he’s shining once again in Forever. As the son of an immortal played by Ioan Griffud. Life is funny. But so is Judd Hirsch.

P.S. Well, Peter MacNicol goes on forever. That’s a whole different post.

How cool can you be?

Everybody’s all over the fact that Eskimos have 180 words for snow. Nobody cares that they have no prepositions.

Life is life. Or it’s death. Or it’s gas. Or worse.

Hi. I’m Ringo.

A challenge from my wife. I’m not allowed to mention the band that made the Beatles look silly. Done.

Hi. I’m Ringo.

Here’s the point. (I hate it when people don’t get to the point. You?) Ringo Starr is a superstar drummer who doesn’t drum. He’s just Ringo. John and George are dead. Sir Lord and Master Paul is on top of a boring world of oldheads. But Ringo is still picking up teenagers, I’m thinking. Without drumming a lick. How cool is that?

Other drummers have to drum.

Gene Krupa.

Buddy Rich.

Art Blakey.

Even the Def Leppard guy with one arm.

And the man who has no name from the band that can’t be named. For this,one, he dragged his whole drum kit into a highrise stairway.

Throughout, there’s always a guy named Ringo. Who doesn’t drum. They work. He coasts. Gotta love it, right?

Hi. I’m Ringo. I don’t drum.

P.S. Everywhere else, drummers drum.

Hi. I’m Ringo.

I’m from Liverpool. I’m a Beatle. I don’t drum. I just sit here. And bask.

P.P.S. the best beat ever.

Under the hood a blueprinted Hemi.

That quickly, I’ve been informed I have to do a followup. Good Grief.

Music to my ears.

So tired of cliches. Chevrolets ’55, ’56, and ’57 were all boring, boxy crashing bores of cars. The only time I side with liberals. People who obsess about these mediocrities really do stress me out and cause me to wonder about the intelligence of the obsessives.

Equally fatigued with Jim Rockford’s Trans Am. And Magnum’s Ferrari. Love both cars, but they’re hardly anti-hero bait. The first is more gas than an anti-hero can afford, and the second is just ridiculous.

We have to ask ourselves, What does an anti-hero really need? You know he lives in a bad part of town. Probably in a walkup or a trailer. His car can’t be some easy steal, or a wanna steal, or anything but a whybother.

There’s only one answer, despite all your fond hopes. The Brits had a naval classification in WWII called a Q-Ship. It looked like a merchant vessel, sluggish, old, and vulnerable. But it had lethal guns.

There were Q-ships in American cars of the past. Whoops. May need another post…

1966 Mustang convertible. Most boring classic EVER.

Don’t even know where to start. My parents traded an infinitely cooler car for the first Mustang in 1965, which was a Ford Falcon with racier sheet metal and a 289 V-8. I hated it. I was 12. Old enough to know that it felt, looked, and was cheap.

Then the years rolled by, as they do, and gradually the Mustang became the indispensable accessory of every TV hero who was supposed to be seen as some kind of rebel against authority. Men and women both. If they were eccentric or down on their luck or on the side of the people against The Man, they invariably owned a clapped out 1966 Mustang convertible, always always red. The scriptwriter’s easiest exposition of character.

I can tell you my wife is sick to death of hearing me rail against this nonsensical trick. In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit I bought a five liter Mustang once, trying to replace a Chrysler 300 I’d given up for financial reasons years before. It was a joke. Where the Chrysler lived to spread its wings and run, the Mustang had to have spurs dug deep into its flanks. Oh really? You want to go fast? Oh well. I’ll try (grunting and protesting the whole way). And handling? Forget it. When the merest mist hit the pavement, the Mustang became the tail-happiest critter on earth. Simultaneous understeer and oversteer. What a treat. I got rid of it in less than two years.

I have nothing against anti-heroes. I just don’t think they should be cliches. There’s no way to stop the stream of seedy private eye shows on TV. Not even trying to do that. I’m just suggesting that some of them should drive something besides a junky 1966 Mustang convertible, red.

You’re all probably too upset about Iran and POTUS treason to think about this. Which is why I’ll end this here. But if you are interested, I’ll do a followup with nominations for replacement anti-hero cars.

Let me know if you have ideas of your own.