Month: August 2004

One of my favorite actors, Peter Falk, is interviewed over at the Onion AV club, and he has a lot to say about John Cassavetes, one of my favorite directors: Well, the entertainment industry is loaded with extraordinarily talented people. But the true, genuine originals, they’re rare. Cassavetes was a true original. His contribution to…

Victor Davis Hanson, the eminent classicist and historian of ancient warfare, has an excellent piece on John Kerry at the National Review, rife with classical allusions and the wisdom of Thucydides: And so now we have the present mess that will go on for weeks and can only hurt Kerry. He is earning a reputation…

August is one of those months! Here it is early Saturday morning and instead of sleeping I am getting ready to hit the road and leave for the weekend. My blogfather Jeff still seems to be away on a combination vacation birthday celebration, but I don’t know when his birthday is, so I don’t know…

I have no idea how to celebrate Glenn Reynolds’ birthday, because he’s taking the day off and his blog contains no instructions. So here’s what I did. Not long ago, some silly leftists mounted an absolutely ridiculous attack against the InstaPundit because they didn’t like his taste in T shirts, of all things! Seems his…

There have been too many missed Online Test Days here at Classical Values! (Regular readers will know it’s a year-long Friday tradition.) I was on vacation last week, but for a few weeks it seemed the tests had almost dried up. Well, I am happy to report that I found some good ones today, enough…

Here’s a new idea — Escape-a-Date, a phone service that rings or pages you with fake urgent messages so that you have a polite excuse to bail out of a dull or unpromising evening. Before venturing out on an evening of adventure, you preprogram your cell phone to ring at a particular time with one…

Still playing catchup! It’s tough to write about stuff like this. And scary too! But I missed out on an important local news item (many stories, actually) about New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey’s, um, lover? Boyfriend? Consultant? Victim? The old newspapers have been lying around still wrapped in plastic, and this morning when it was…

Finally catching up with old news! I watched John Kerry’s famous 1971 speech last night. What shocked me the most was how little the guy has changed in all these years. He’s more consistent than I thought he was. As articulate and phony then as he is now. To be honest, I expected a lot…

A couple of points for those who are still interested in John Kerry. First, tonight at 8:00 p.m., CSPAN is broadcasting the entirety of Kerry’s 1971 speech before congress. And Glenn Reynolds links to a site where you can read or download another classic from 1971, John Kerry’s The New Soldier. This is the same…

My friend Eric from Why Dave Bergman is Neat just showed me Al Franken’s Great American Shoutout: What’s going on? On September 2nd, 2004, at approximately 10 pm, George W. Bush will appear on television screens nationwide. For some of our fellow citizens, this will be a moment of joy. But for most of us,…

Inspired by this post (by Freelance Journalist Dennis), last month I questioned the following assertion by Salon.com’s Senior Editor Eric Boehlert that the United States Air Force began drug screening tests in 1972: In 1972 he asked to be transferred to an Alabama unit so he could work on a Senate campaign for a friend…

Imagine the outcry if the Bush campaign were calling on Miramax to stop distributing “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which really does have numerous proven falsehoods. — James Taranto, Wall Street Journal Imagine….. I am so sick of politics that I feel like taking a break from writing about it. But I am more bothered by the hypocrisy…

Glenn Reynolds asked whether Richard Nixon denied having United States forces in Cambodia during John Kerry’s periods of Vietnam service. A good question. I’d like to know too, so I did some preliminary research. As to John Kerry’s service in Vietnam his campaign web site says it ended on March 17, 1969: March 17, 1969…

My father was in the navy. My mother was in the navy. They met in the navy, and I grew up in the navy. This doesn?t make me an authority on navy life, far from it, but it does give me a wealth of anecdotes. I was reading some recollections of John F. Kerry the…

Here‘s some more fuel both for people who think we need to be protected from ideas and people opposed to the death penalty: Two Children Die Imitating Rare Execution Wed Aug 25, 2004 08:29 AM ET BOMBAY (Reuters) – India’s first execution in 13 years has claimed an additional toll of at least two children…

Can a hero become a victim? What would Aristotle say? How about Sophocles? What, if any, are the implications to Classical Values? If this sounds too much like a contradiction, consider the case of former United States Senator Max Cleland, decorated Vietnam hero who’s going the extra mile for John Kerry by traveling to Crawford,…

It seems every time I turn around columnists are echoing the blogosphere. Here’s Nat Hentoff on Moore’s Iraqi ‘insurgents’: The divisions in this nation have become increasingly surreal as the elections approach. Many jubilant Democrats venerate Michael Moore. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe were at the Washington premiere…

John Kerry loves boat analogies. Class war. And other swift thinking….. First, there was his memorable acceptance speech at the DNC, in which he said that “we are all in the same boat.” And just yesterday, at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, he gave the boat a name: The Titanic! YOU WOULD think by now that John…

In a discussion on mind uploading, Glenn Reynolds quoted Larry Lessig: Larry Lessig has written that whoever controls the code, controls the Internet. Ominously true. And while we’re not yet at the mind uploading stage, the Internet (which stands at the apex of human potential thus far) is now allowing people to communicate in ways…

Whoa! I just realized that I almost forgot to post any pictures from my trip. Here’s one which expresses my mood perfectly: Frankly, looking at that picture makes me jealous! These little critters don’t have to worry about elections; they can just tuck themselves into their shells. Well, maybe not “their” shells in the strictest…