The 2012 Skillet Surprise, Roscoe on the Hudson, Chronicles of Anarchia, Did You Ever See a Walken Dream?, &c.
Since 1896 the unanimous seasonal and pre-seasoned favorites of all the DJ ... here at WDSL.-AM and FM: the Lodge cast-iron skillet, Dutch oven and two-in-one combination. Great gifts - not to mention intruder repellents 
, 'cos you never know if the masher from the neighborhood comics pages thinks himself a winner whenever he smells dinner.
, 'cos you never know if the masher from the neighborhood comics pages thinks himself a winner whenever he smells dinner.
... police concluded the man — probably already dead — had fallen to the ground when a jet passing overhead lowered its landing gear as it neared the runway at nearby Heathrow Airport.The apparent stowaway had no identification papers — just some currency from Angola, leading police to surmise that he was from that African nation, especially as inquiries showed that a plane from Angola was beginning its descent into Heathrow at about that time.
Tropic of Tainted Cans, Sir
What's with all the recalls at Trader Joe's?
The kind of food the chain carries has a greater risk of contamination, an expert says.Many other stores sell it, too
... And it turns out that [Human-Americans who buy their food from American food stores] may be right to be concerned. Trader Joe's is on par with other large retailers like Wegmans and Whole Foods when it comes to number of recalls, food safety experts Yahoo! Shine spoke with agreed. Anyone selling lots of packaged food is at risk, Reef said, because "the more human hands that are on a food and the more machinery that have come in contact with a food, the more likely it is to be recalled. We see more manufactured product recalls than we do in the fruit and vegetable arena." Still, she pointed out that 18 people died from eating cantaloupe in 2011.
Yahoo! Finance/Scott Olson/Getty Images - Snow falls in downtown in Fargo, North Dakota.
The Cities Where Everyone Has a Job: Especially college towns, state capitals and cities within an eight-hour drive of that old crypto-knight from The Electric Company - "Fargo North, Decoder".
Totally Unfuzzed
How About a Friendly Frisking?: The Myth of the 'Consensual' Police Encounter
"The unspoken power dynamics in a police/civilian encounter will generally favor the police, unless the civilian is a local sports hero, the mayor, or a giant who is impervious to bullets ... Most social interactions proceed according to implicitly understood rules, and there are unspoken potential penalties for violating those rules. When your boss greets you with a paternal clap on the shoulder, you know you’re not supposed to reciprocate by pinching his cheek. When a police officer initiates a conversation, you know you’re not supposed to run away.Also from Slate's new crime columnist: the applicant at an FBI job interview who, in seeing honesty to a fault meet to his occasion, squealed all over himself over his child-porn stash. The judge's elaborately dry summation reads like a John Cleese voiceover from a sketch on How To Be Seen.
mptv imagesBuster Keaton (left), Fatty Arbuckle (center), and Al St. John, circa 1917
Poet Charles Simic on "Manhattan's Forgotten Film Studio":
On April 23, 1917, The Butcher Boy opened in two hundred theaters across the country, including the Strand in Times Square, and soon became a big box office success. Following that, Arbuckle and Keaton made, I believe, two other films in the same building—A Reckless Romeo and Rough House, the first of which no longer survives as far as I know. The company then moved to the Biograph Studio on East 175th Street where Coney Island, His Wedding Night, and a couple of others films were made before it relocated to Long Beach, California in October 1917. Roughly twenty to twenty-five minutes long, these shorts, which can be seen on YouTube, are still very funny. Along with Arbuckle and Keaton, they feature Al St. John, Arbuckle’s second banana (and nephew), a gangly, loose-limbed acrobat dressed like a scarecrow who played country bumpkins and various kinds of villains. Beyond the slapstick and roughhouse typical of the times, the number of thoroughly original and brilliant comic ideas found in these shorts is staggering. (See, for instance, the marvelous clip on YouTube of the boys eating spaghetti in the 1918 film The Cook.) Keaton once said that making funny pictures is like assembling a watch; you have to be sober or it won’t tick. He also said afterward that everything he knew about film comedy he learned from Fatty Arbuckle, who by the time they met had already been in some twenty films.
Scott Lahti"Arbuckle and Keaton made, I believe, two other films in the same building—A Reckless Romeo and Rough House, the first of which no longer survives as far as I know."Actually, A Reckless Romeo, a print of which, per Wikipedia, "was discovered in 1998 in the Norwegian Film Archive in an unmarked canister with The Cook (1918)", was released by The Milestone Collection in 2003 on a DVD triple bill with the latter and Number, Please? (1920); the online versions posted to YouTube and elsewhere seem to have been removed after copyright claims by Milestone (I did find a brief animated GIF). Some of the outdoor scenes were filmed at Palisades Park in Fort Lee, New Jersey. The ending of the Wikipedia plot description is itself rather a side-splitter: "A philandering husband's public flirtation with a beautiful girl -- and the resulting brawl with the woman's boyfriend -- are captured by a newsreel cameraman. When the husband takes his wife and her mother out to the movies, the footage is shown on-screen. The husband tries to flee the theater, only to be spotted and leaped on by the woman's boyfriend, treating views to two simultaneous fights between the same two men, both on-screen and in the aisle."
Interim Archives/Getty Images
Elsa Dixler reviews Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman by Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich:
... During the 1970s, Goldman became a hero of the resurgent women’s movement as an advocate of self-expression and unconventional choices; her autobiography, “Living My Life,” enjoyed wide popularity. “Everyone . . . was naming things after Emma Goldman — health collectives, dogs, even babies,” Candace Falk, the director of the Emma Goldman Papers project, recalled. T-shirts emblazoned with her face and the slogan “If I can’t dance I don’t want to be in your revolution” were ubiquitous. In the 1980s, excellent biographies of Goldman by Falk and by Alice Wexler were published; Goldman appeared as a character in E. L. Doctorow’s novel “Ragtime” (1975) and in the movie “Reds” (1981).... For the rest of his life [following his release after 14 years in prison for his attempt upon the life of steel executive Henry Clay Frick], Berkman lectured on prison reform — “a prison,” he observed Foucaultishly, “is the model on the lines of which civilized society is built” — and advocated for anarchist prisoners around the world. He also edited Mother Earth, the magazine founded by Goldman in 1906, and in 1916, he started his own journal, called The Blast, naturally. He became active in the progressive Modern School movement and helped to found the Ferrer Center in New York. He was a leader in the campaign to save Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, who were unjustly convicted of placing a bomb that killed 10 people in San Francisco in 1916. As the United States moved toward entry into World War I, Berkman and Goldman campaigned against militarism. The Wilson administration closed down dissent, and with the passage of the Espionage Act in 1917 it imprisoned left-wing opponents of the war.... For a modern reader, “Sasha and Emma” contains many surprises. One is that early-20th-century anarchist rhetoric sounds remarkably contemporary. Goldman’s question to a crowd in Union Square in 1893 — “Do you not realize that the state is the worst enemy you have?” — would not be out of place at a Tea Party rally, although Goldman deplored the state as a pillar of capitalism. It is also interesting to remember how frequent depressions were in the 1890s and early 20th century, and how often they engendered huge marches and demonstrations of the unemployed. And bombings — a long string of them, large and small, culminating in 1919 with the attack on the home of Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general, which became a justification for the Red Scare.
"Mrs. Higden, Sloppy*, and the Innocents" by Sol Eytinge. Illustration for chapter 16 of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend in the Lee & Shepard (Boston), and Charles T. Dillingham (New York) 1870 Illustrated Household Edition.
*[Wikipedia: Sloppy – foundling who assists Betty Higden in taking care of children; raised in the workhouse; appears to have a learning disability but is nevertheless adept at reading the newspaper for Mrs. Higden; portrayed as inherently innocent because of his disability; carts away Wegg at the end of the novel; shares the beginnings of a romance with Jenny Wren, though some critics take issue with this,[who?] believing that Dickens only paired the two together because of their disabilities.]
Hang on, Sloppy: from the NYTBR:
LETTERS
In Different Voices
To the Editor:In his review of “Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy From Slavery to Hip-Hop,” by Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen (Nov. 18), Kevin Young opens his interesting discussion of minstrelsy with the suggestion that T. S. Eliot’s original title for “The Waste Land,” “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” refers to the minstrel tradition.The line is in fact a quotation from Charles Dickens’s novel “Our Mutual Friend.” A young boy is there praised for his versatility in reading the police report: “Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.”ARYEH KOSMAN
Haverford, Pa.
The writer is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Haverford College.
... I found that Christopher Walken is a man who walks through the world as if through a dream, blissfully unaware that most people are frightened by him, and inexplicably unaware that he is a cult figure. One reason for this, which everyone already knows, is that at an early age, Walken was sucked into a galactic wormhole, then spat out half a second behind (or was it ahead?) of the reality the rest of us occupy.
SNL: "Meet the Family" (each of whose hair-shocked members,baby not excepted, are ... Walken that way).
From a 1996 review by David Oshinsky of Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 by James T. Patterson, a
An overbearing man, often a bully, [Lyndon Johnson] once surprised the Pope during a ceremonial gift-giving in Rome. The Pontiff handed the President a 14th-century painting; Johnson gave the Pope a bust of himself.
Illustration by Istvan Banyai
A few quotes from the Patterson book ("A Magisterial History"), courtesy Atlantic reviewer Jack Beatty:
Of Thomas E. Dewey's vapidity in 1948 the Louisville Courier-Journalobserved, No presidential candidate in the future will be so inept that four of his major speeches can be boiled down to these four historic sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. The future lies ahead.Priceless, but vulnerable as prophecy. Tom Dewey, make room for Bob ("Like everyone else in this room, I was born") Dole.... Of the election in that same year the humorist Fred Allen said, "Truman is the first President to lose in a Gallup and win in a walk."
... Eisenhower ... to his diary, on the subject of William Knowland, the Senate Republican leader and gruff voice of the China lobby: "In his case, there seems to be no final answer to the question, 'How stupid can you get?'"
... John F. Kennedy to Theodore Sorensen, while working on Kennedy's inaugural speech: "Let's drop the domestic stuff altogether." ... JFK to Richard Nixon: "Foreign affairs is the only important issue for a President to handle, isn't it? ... I mean, who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25, compared to something like Cuba?"
... JFK to the journalist Charles Bartlett in 1963: "We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. We don't have a prayer of prevailing there. But I can't give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and then get the people to reelect me." ... On Vietnam again, this time from the speech Kennedy did not live to deliver in Dallas: "We dare not weary of the task."
... Patterson [describes] an incident that took place after McCarthyism, as Ike joked to his Cabinet, had become "McCarthywasism": "When Nixon visited Milwaukee during the 1956 campaign, McCarthy sidled up to a seat next to him. A Nixon aide asked him to leave, and he did. A reporter found him weeping."
"[FBI director] Hoover was vain, surrounded by sycophants, obsessed with order and routine. People who met him in his later days at the F.B.I. were led through his many 'trophy rooms' to his office, which glowed with a purplish insect-repelling light that Hoover, a hypochondriac, had installed to 'electrocute' bad germs."
And on the charge of Sheriff Jim Clark's men against peaceful civil-rights marchers on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and the felling of John Lewis:They tore forward in a flying wedge, swinging their clubs at people in the way. Lewis stood his ground, only to be cracked on the head. He suffered a fractured skull. With white onlookers cheering, the troopers rushed ahead, hitting the demonstrators and exploding canisters of tear gas. Five women were beaten so badly that they fell down near the bridge and lost consciousness. Sheriff Clark's horsemen then joined in the assault. Charging with rebel yells, they swung bullwhips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire.We have seen that charge many times in TV documentaries, yet Patterson makes us see it as if for the first time. Such is the power of writing.
Two letters to The New Yorker in response to "Tax Time" by Harvard historian Jill Lepore:
Jill Lepore, in her article on the history of Americans’ opposition to taxes, writes that Congress briefly taxed carriages and whiskey (“Tax Time,” November 26th). The latter tax was certainly unpopular, as the unsuccessful Whiskey Rebellion proved, in 1794. But the federal government has often relied on excise taxes on alcohol sales. According to the I.R.S., taxes on liquor, beer, and wine, as well as on tobacco, accounted for ninety per cent of its revenue between 1868 and 1913. One of the consequences of Prohibition was the loss of this revenue. Some of the wealthy—the Du Pont family and John D. Rockefeller, a lifelong teetotaller, among them—abandoned their earlier pro-Prohibition stance and supported its repeal, hoping that the resumption of tax revenues from alcohol would ease their income- and corporate-tax burden.Frances FrankenburgBedford, Mass.
... Lepore might have noted that the wealthy have always been willing to pay more than everyone else for the same goods and services but have not seen fit to pay higher direct taxes or income taxes. The Code of Hammurabi, written circa 1750 B.C., set the cost of surgery for the removal of a tumor or an abscess from the eye at ten shekels for a nobleman, five shekels for a freeman, and two shekels for a slave, to be paid by the slave’s master ...
Harry PerlstadtProfessor Emeritus, Dept. of SociologyMichigan State UniversityEast Lansing, Mich.
"Florence Williams [Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History] travels to the deep woods of Japan, where researchers are backing up the surprising theory that nature can lower your blood pressure, fight off depression, beat back stress—and even prevent cancer."
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