With Hurrican Ike, Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, and the sale of Merril Lynch to Bank of America, it was pretty rough last weekend in the news. So, you may be interested to learn that according to The Rapture Index, which is a “Dow Jones Industrial Average of end-time activity,” we’re sitting at a very uncomfortable level…
Read MoreThere is quite a bit of buzz about the upcoming release of the new film Man on Wire, which is a documentary account of Philippe Petit’s 1974 illegal and clandestine 110-story high tightrope-walk between the World Trade Towers (pictured left). I remember first learning of Petit’s stunt a few years back when I read about…
Read MoreRecently, I was reminded of a passage from Micheal Herr’s excellent 1977 memoir Dispatches. Herr was a war correspondent for Esquire magazine during the Vietnam War, he helped write the screenplays for Coppola’s Apocolypse Now and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, and he (along with Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe) pioneered the literary genre…
Read MoreAlas, the mighty have fallen. The news was released yesterday afternoon that John Edwards engaged in an extramarital affair in 2006 and that he lied about it during his campaign for President last year. Edwards’ paramour, Rielle Hunter (who, apparently, is also the inspiration for a Gen-X literary character), now claims that Edwards is the…
Read MoreWe Memphians just saw the conclusion of what has been a truly U-G-L-Y battle between the candidates for Tennessee’s 9th U.S. Congressional District, incumbent Steve Cohen and challenger Nikki Tinker. As you may already know, our district Representative before Cohen was the DNC wunderkind Harold Ford, Jr., who was famously done in by his Senate-race…
Read MoreYesterday, I did an “all sad songs” episode of my Rhodes Radio show Americana the Beautiful. (If you’re interested, you can listen to or download the podcast here.) In the process of putting together my song list, I was struck by the fact that so many of the songs involve some kind of cheatin’, lyin’,…
Read MoreIt all started back in April of this year, when an ill-worded comment by Obama suggesting that some white voters were a tad “bitter” prompted his then-opponent Hillary Clinton to accuse him of being “elitist.” Since the end of the primaries, McCain has jumped on that bandwagon as well, most famously running the television ad…
Read MoreJohn McCain announced his running-mate (in this case, his running-matron) yesterday, barely before the Democratic Convention euphoria could even begin to wane. When I first learned of his choice, Alaska Governor and former “Miss Alaska” Sarah Palin, I was a little embarrassed that I had no idea who she was. No worries, though. Apparently, neither…
Read MoreExiled Russian novelist, political activist and Nobel Prize for Literature winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn brought the horrors of the Soviet labor camps to the attention of the world in his 1973 The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn’s criticism of the Soviet police state resulted in his exile for almost two decades, but he returned home to Russia in…
Read More
Recent Comments