AfterPunk

 …duel with Shakespeare… …or tell women the truth about themselves….? Thought not.

Just click the pic.  

  Let’s return the favor and send our own balloon to China. Everybody’s pretending to be shocked. Did you correctly guess which of these is which g****r? I didn’t try, don’t care, not shocked. Try your hand with these American pop icons.  That wasn’t Breitbart’s first crack at the Grammies story. That was here, right up top, more newsworthy as you can see than hundreds dead in 9.1 earthquake in Turkey and another sly slam at Trump over Chi-Balloons (assuming what is not in evidence, kind of like talent at the Grammies). But as I said, us good people still want to be shocked. Even Twitter wants to play. (A long, long article at  Gateway Pundit eventually leading after a decade of popups to the offending Twitter clip.) Which looks more like this in closeup : If our media mentors had any respect for us, all this coverage would be far less coverage and it would be far less sensational. You expect us to be shocked, you want us to be shocked, as if that’s our best virtue signa...

Empty, darling, Here’s the thing. All or nothing. I can either link everything, which is a month’s work for one paragraph, or link every term of memory, which will take months. The Bucket List is all the things you wanted to do and never did, are now wishing you’d done, because if you’d done them way back when or even now they’d make your life complete. Don’t have one. A Bucket List.  Most BLs are about sex. Old guys dreaming about doing the stuff that makes women want you, even though your stuff is mostly quiet now. Starting at the top or bottom, depending on where you reside in your own bucket, I don’t have unfulfilled sexual desires. I’ve actually lived all my fantasies, which [censored by woke wife..] Everything else is showoff time, people and places seen or met, glamor moments, and collisions with beauty, stark fear, spectacular landscapes and room service, instances of confronting the essence of human experience face to face, and fantasy make-believes of heroism and good mak...

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR R. F. Laird emerged on the literary scene with the publication of  The Boomer Bible  in 1991. It has enjoyed a long and controversial history (88,000 copies sold), as has its reclusive creator. At the time of its release, the 880 page work was announced by The Wall Street Journal as “a sprawling, wickedly funny rewriting of the Bible meant to sum up a generation.” The San Francisco Chronicle hailed it as “One of the oddest, darkest, funniest, smartest and most innovative books to come along in years.” In the same month, the book editor of the New York Times informed the publisher’s publicist that “the Times will  never  review The Boomer Bible.” And thus began the complicated writing career of the Jersey boy who graduated from Harvard at the age of 19 and got himself banned from American book publishing with his second, even more controversial manuscript, a mock nonfiction work satirizing feminism, social science, and recently divorc...

  The Making of a Harvard Education What does all this add up to? Harvard is a part of my identity, but Harvard did not define me. It was rather a necessary experience for my development as a person and a writer. It was just something that had to be for some reason, for both good and ill. I might have been what the world calls happier if I had gone somewhere, anywhere, else. But I would have missed out on an opportunity that simply isn’t available anywhere else. I acquired much of my education there. Eminent professors like Edwin Reischauer, Benjamin Schwartz, Walter Jackson Bate, Mason Hammond and Wendell Clausen, Alfred North, and an inspired set of distribution requirements that enabled me to be an English major while taking courses in Chinese, Japanese, Roman, and German history, Einsteinian physics, Latin poetry and drama (in Latin), art history in overview and in closeup, as well as an extraordinarily comprehensive tutelage in the entire history of English literature (I.e., “...

  Well well well. Someone sent me this. I would swear on a stack of bibles I had nothing to do with dreaming up this sign. Though I did include it in a blatantly self-serving product placement in a cheap ploy (un)worthy of Madison Avenue. It’s not like I’m a stranger to advertising. I’ve written my fair share back in the day. In fact, as even wrote multiple tasteful ads for a New England casket company. Not this kind of mirthful grave goods, however. I don’t do advertising at all these days, not because I disapprove, but because I can’t afford Google prices any more than I can trust their business ethics… and so it goes.

  Coming to the end of another college football season with The OSU Buckeyes contending again for the playoffs while many teams are unexpectedly stumbling in the wake of the recent rule-free “GO Fish” approach to player recruiting/hijacking. Why I don’t much care about who gets the big trophy. Nobody knows who’s going to win or lose. Except maybe not me. I didn’t watch the Harvard-Yale game because I don’t care who wins the Wokest Ivy F___ball Championship anymore, and Harvard proceeded to lose, at home, and I don’t care. What do I care about? Millville High School In neighboring Cumberland County. I’ll explain why so you believe it.  I actually lived in Millville for more than a year when I was driving a truck for a lumber yard and eating the best cheese steaks in the known universe, courtesy of Shannon’s sub shop, where the ladies behind the counter were magnificently large and generous with their steaks.  Millville is also a point of personal connection. Its modest air...

Me without Sidney Yes, he stole our hearts. We’re not new to the terrier rescue program. Before Sidney, two Scotties. Muffy and Buster. Both old, in their teens, and both died about two years after they came to live out their days with us. They were Scotties, old terriers with the remoteness that seems to steal over them all over the years, kind of like me. We loved them and they kind of loved us, Buster especially, and then they expired.  The two year thing weighed on us. We’d given up on rescuing greyhounds after seven gorgeous couch potatoes. They are too big for us now. Both of us are not exactly frail, but when they start to fail, as they do, we are not strong enough to cope. But our greyhounds, with one exception, lived with us for a lot more than two years. So when we saw a rescue cairn, who was billed as 6 to 8+ years old, we jumped at the chance. We can have him for more than two years! He had beautiful, incredibly white teeth, something we’d never seen in our greyhounds. ...

That’s not me, except for the body type. I do have a chef’s jacket (a gift).  But  it’s  not me because I don’t wear my expensive wristwatch anymore either. Never thought I’d be doing this. Yeah, I cook. Not like Gordon Ramsey or those other psychopath chefs. I cook, or used to, in order to feed women I love. Not going to get into the nitty gritty. You just have to assume I can deliver the goods, the meals people enjoy. The proof is they ask for them again.  Scrambled eggs and omelets (the bacon part is understood) All right. Some nitty gritty. No, you don’t just fling eggs (shells a’crackin’) into a skillet on high heat and push them around for a minute or two, with a ketchup bottle at the ready. Here’s what you do. Cook the bacon first. Medium high heat. Half a one pound package. Fork in hand, you start turning as soon as the sizzling begins. Only half needs to be overdone for your wife’s sake. This is 100 percent attention time. As soon as they’ve been turned onc...