Do You Have To Read A Friend’s Book?
From Slate: No. One cannot just go around reading the books of friends and acquaintances. The exceptions to this rule are few and obvious—looking at a draft to give constructive criticism,…
Visit Sunny Florida!
[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgAo1kj-duU&w=560&h=315] My thanks to Larry Dahlke for providing the voice. There's no way I could have sold this the way he does.
Block Wardens: The Eyes and Ears of the Gestapo
One of the things that surprised me when I started researching the Nazi police apparatus for Summer of Long Knives was how small the Gestapo really was: 40,000 agents and staff to…
I Hate The Sun, and We Have to Save America From It.
In 2007, Slate inaugurated the A Fine Whine column, in which a Slate writer lets fly at some (usually petty) annoyance for a couple of pages. It came infrequently at first, but…
Ernest Goofiness In Its (Possibly) Highest State: Tommy Wiseau
Yesterday, I talked about the importance of ernest goofiness in the great bad movie. Today, I read the introduction to Greg Sestero's inside account of Tommy Wiseau's anti-masterpiece, The Room. Here's…
Wilhelm Frick: The Man Who Nazified Germany
Frick was many things to the Nazi party. As one of their earliest members of parliament he drafted legislation which would eventually become the Nuremberg Laws. Frick was also the…
What Makes A Great Bad Movie?
Over on Facebook, someone responded to my posts about Birdemic: Shock and Terror, with a request for my top ten bad movies of all time. For those who were wondering and…
Wherein Someone Says Something Slightly Positive About Something I Wrote
From yesterday's review of Dismantle the Sun. (Thanks, Indie Books R Us): Every-so-often, a book comes along that I can’t put down. I don’t want to rhapsodize about this book, because that’s…
Reinhard Heydrich: The Young Evil God of Death
Like all the most ambitious people, Reinhard Heydrich was a collector of titles: SS Obergruppenfuehrer, Head of the SD, Head of the Prussian Gestapo, Head of Gestapo for the Reich,…
Where Did Spam Come From? And What Does It Mean?
A few weeks ago I made a plea for better written spam, because if we can't get rid of spam and consign its manufacturers to the Phantom Zone (oh, how…