Unrequired Reading: June 12, 2009

What am I, made of links? Just click “more”!

Roger Ebert on the phenomenon of John Wayne, who died 30 years ago. Seriously, you oughtta check out Ebert’s blog regularly.

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Will no one think of the young Welsh Patagonians? (Amazingly, this is not a Masonic code-phrase.)

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30 Rock = The Muppet Show. (Except without that musical scene of vikings pillaging a town, set to In The Navy.)
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Sure is a heck of a cast.

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I wish I could write, “. . . it stood as the core of Anglo-American chicanery and cozenage . . .”

(I don’t think the association that Angleton’s approach to ambiguity = the American approach to it is valid, but I guess it holds up okay in its discussion of Empson & Angleton and the nature of counterintelligence.)

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Eli Eli lama sabachthani? (Anyone know the Aramaic for “endowment?”)

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MPD Guy = Magic Negro?

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Now We Know:

The truth, of course, is that neither Coulter nor Navasky, nor any of the many others who have joined this particular battle, is really interested in history. They and their respective allies instead wish to score points about contemporary politics–points that bear only a tendentious relationship to the events of the 1930s and the 1940s. Coulter and her ilk want modern liberals to be identified with the CPUSA: Hiss = Obama. Navasky and his friends suspect that anyone who investigates Hiss is covertly promoting “the wholesale suspension of liberties”: historical research = Guantanamo. There is something dim and lifeless about this kind of apologetic argument, which is why wading though the writings of the Coulters and the Navaskys is a torment, like watching an endless episode of Crossfire.

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If you need 3,576 round-cut white diamonds to spell out, “CRUNK AIN’T DEAD,” then maybe it’s time to admit that crunk is dead.

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I guess when you move up in society, you can’t just say, “I had a hankerin’ fer some strange.”

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