“Wodehouse was merciless to pretentiousness, and aspiring writers are the most pretentious fellows on the planet. So there’s that spiritual benefit” (Writers to Read, p. 50).
In the Pot Nine Days Old
Introduction: Let us talk for a moment about the way appeasement usually goes, and begin by citing Churchill in his trenchant response to Chamberlain. “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.” Appeasement Shows Up Everywhere: The emotional makeup of the appeaser is consistent, regardless of …
Review: Piers the Ploughman
Piers the Ploughman by William Langland My rating: 4 of 5 stars Fascinating glimpse of a very different mental world. I was particularly struck by this very medieval assumption that the Antichrist was going to form in the papacy. View all my reviews
Review: The Kingdom of Speech
The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe My rating: 4 of 5 stars A great entertaining read. Wolfe gets off some magnificent and irreverent lines, aimed at the neo-Darwinian hand-wavers. Moreover, he is largely invulnerable to any counter attack from them because the one place he does his own hand-waving is a place where none …
Captured Him Perfectly
Not a Quantitative Thing
“True, there is an occasional stray hell or damn, and this is unfortunate, because many modern Christians do all their worldview analysis through the simple process of counting them” (Writers to Read, p. 48).
Send Lawyers, Guns and Money
An old Warren Zevon song sums up the severity of our situation nicely—somebody needs to send Lawyers, Guns and Money. I hasten to add that I am of course speaking metaphorically. We have gotten to levels of brazenness that are hard to comprehend. Before a particular lie is exposed, we still have enough of the …
Ready to Wreck
I know that some of my readers come in and out, and I know that others are regulars, checking in on some kind of schedule. For those who drop in occasionally, depending on what publishing event draws them, it is possible for you to get wildly disparate ideas of what is going on here. I …
Yea, Though She Fall Into the Van
The latest thing to take the Internet by storm, and the presidential campaign by storm, and the imagination of meme-makers everywhere by storm, is the video shot of Hillary Clinton collapsing into her vehicle. It was a moment filled with . . . moment, you might say. Now of course our public discourse immediately began …
500 Pounds of Stratosphere
We are now at that stage of our cultural devolutionary farce when, any day now, some bright kid is going to wear a tee-shirt to his government school, and on that tee-shirt a message will be emblazoned, and the message will read “endowed by his Creator with certain unalienable rights,” and he will be sent …