Too long; do not read.
Poor President Obama did his best to avoid bombing a Middle Eastern country, but when he fell off the wagon, he fell off it hard. Sending in the Navy cruisers and the fighter jets represents the laziest, most thoughtless form of response to any kind of diplomatic crisis; it’s what …
Key Largo, as can be sniffed out from its somewhat stagey, cramped qualities, had its origins as a stage play. It bears little resemblance to the original product — a bit of a surprise since Maxwell Anderson was, at the time, an extremely popular playwright and a go-to source for …
The problem with so many citrus sodas, says the guy who is all of the sudden Mr. Big Expert on carbonated drinks, is that they interpret the citrus taste as sweet rather than tart. This is the case with basically all lemon-lime sodas, which favor ‘crisp’ (sugary) and ‘clean’ (flavorless) …
It was bound to happen: the Sandwich Century project has run head-on into the grim reality of living in San Antonio. Oh, sure, we’re a 21st-century burg, and we have our share of Asians contending for their share of the Frito pie while Germans and Mexicans fight it out for …
It is a sign of the confidence — indeed, the audaciousness — of the current conservative movement that they are making real headway in an attempt to strangle the union movement, already gravely wounded, once and for all. It was Reagan who dealt the unions their first critical blow beginning …
It’s probably unfair to say that the public had fallen out of love with Bogart and Bacall by the time 1947’s Dark Passage rolled around. (They certainly hadn’t fallen out of love with one another, despite the 25-year difference in their ages.) But they’d gone from The Big Sleep, one …
As I’ve mentioned before, as a living, functioning human with working taste buds, I prefer sugary soda, but as a crypto-diabetic man-bear, I mostly confine myself to diet. However, since the introduction of lo-cal pop, folks in both the amateur and professional theaters of Carbin-Nation have been trying to game …
Desperate times call for desperate actions, and desperate people, apparently, call for desperate sandwiches. While cheapness and ease of assembly are a big part of the appeal of the sandwich, they’re qualities it’s altogether too easy to overdo, and you end up with something that sullies the entire notion of …
Humans are the only animals that can make metaphors or moral judgments. Unfortunately, we make far too few of the former and far too many of the latter. The appealing thing about placing social problems in a moral context is that it allows you to start ignoring the problem; if …
I have never been particularly fond of Tennessee Williams. Part of this may be because I’m not his intended audience, but with very few exceptions (I enjoy A Streetcar Named Desire), I find his stuff a little, well, airy for my taste. Reading his plays and novels, and comparing them …
I want to like Stephen King. I really, really do. He’s undeniably an important writer, at least insofar as he’s written a ton of books that have sold enormously well, and become virtually synonymous with “contemporary American novelist”. He’s managed to remain successful even in a terrible downtime for fiction, …
You can often tell more about a political movement by the things they choose to remain silent about than the things about which they speak out. In the last election, it was telling that the latter-day Birchers known as the Tea Party movement were instrumental in defeating Proposition 19, a …
Joseph H. Lewis’ reputation was built on his ability to create surprisingly artful films out of extremely base material, transforming ultra-low budgets and relatively unknown casts into movies that, if they weren’t cinematic classics, were at least far better than they had any right to be. Responsible for two of …
Though this may be on the verge of changing — Dr. Pepper, having owned the brand for a while, is starting to ramp up its marketing and distribution and use it as a competitor of Mountain Dew — but Sun Drop is a valuable lesson in the risks of underselling. …
“I never met anybody,” Richard Pryor once pointed out, “who said when they were a kid: I wanna grow up and be a critic.” Did he ever meet anyone who said ‘I wanna grow up and watch movies and listen to music and read books all day’? That will remain …
