• The Dale Cooper Quartet

    When we were discussing Twin Peaks a week or so ago (on the Favorite Movies thread?–I can't remember), I mentioned that I had discovered that there's a band named Audrey Horne, and one named The Dale Cooper Quartet. (For those who don't know Twin Peaks, those are prominent characters.) I wondered if the Dale Cooper name was

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  • Lena Dunham is an actress whose name I recognize, though I have never seen her perform, because she gets into the news now and then. She attracted some attention during the 2012 election for some asinine comments comparing voting for the first time to losing one's virginity to a special someone, with the special guy

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  • Lambeth Cancelled (?)

    This doesn't seem to be a joke. Seems like a pretty big deal, as the Lambeth Conference has been an important feature of Anglican life for generations (since 1867, to be exact). I'm not all that well informed on things Anglican, but I would think this represents a significant recognition of the lack of unity that

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  • 52 Guitars: Week 39

    Ralph Towner I don't think I had even heard Ralph Towner's name when I saw Blue Sun in a record store sometime back in the 1980s and bought it on the strength of the cover art. I don't know how well you can make out the photograph that occupies the center of it, but it's a

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  • I think I put this early (1953) Bergman work in my queue almost as soon we joined Netflix, which is getting to be quite a while back now. I did it more out of a sense of duty than in expectation that I would actually like it, as I didn't expect it to be as

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  • Youthful Idealism

    Youth, as everyone knows who has passed through it some time ago, is the age not of idealism but of self-importance, uncertainty masked by certitude and moral grandiosity untouched by experience of life — or, of course, the age of total insouciance.  –Theodore Dalrymple Dalrymple is musing on the dangerous mixture of youth and ideology

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  • If some characters from Atlas Shrugged wandered into Twin Peaks. Please pass this idea along to David Lynch if you know him.

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  • 52 Guitars: Week 38

    Jim Thomas Who? Well, allow me to introduce you to The Mermen. Don't be too quick to turn up the sound.   They're an instrumental trio who began around 1990 as a sort of neo-surf band, but they've gone far afield from that, though you can still hear some of it in their sound, which

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  • And the critics are really fired up. In a sense.

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  • I wondered the other day whether some novelist had written an alternate-history exploration of what the world would have been like if the French Revolution had not happened. Paul obligingly posted a link to this 1948 story by H. Beam Piper, which you can read or download in various electronic formats at Project Gutenberg. It's

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