My all time favorite Bande dessinée. Tintin as a gay icon? — he’s as asexual as Shaun the Sheep! Though in many ways it reflects its time, I think it has aged remarkably well (it embodies that timeless and comforting modern-retro style that is now the rage). Each new book to one’s collection was so much more exciting than even going to the 70s’ blockbuster Saturday matinee in Leicester Square. But as any Tintin fan will tell you, the animated version(s) really is so flat in comparison — however closely the script is to the original hardcopy books.
What happened to left-wing libertarianism?
Far too many people on the left want to put government in charge of everything, and far too many people on the right want to put God in charge. Why are we so reluctant as a species to embrace freedom, so keen to (in the words of the poet Hilaire Belloc): “always keep a hold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse”?
Who is Big in Computing?
A collaborator, the very excellent Ted Lewis, looks at this question via network theory.
More than 70 years into computing, Moore’s Law keeps on doubling performance of the basic engine of the post-industrial information age. Looking back at this incredible progress makes me wonder, “Who has had the biggest influence on computing since electronic digital computers were designed and built for the first time in the 1940s?”
In the Penal Colony
Of all of Kafka’s pieces I’ve always have been of the view that In the Penal Colony was the only one that could be plausibly rendered in film — but as an opera? And with no machine and with an homoerotic spin? The Boston Globe thinks it works.
LSU Press marks the anniversary with a new edition of A Confederacy of Dunces
Here’s a small snippet from Louisiana Public Broadcasting hosted by my ever enthusiastic chum James Fox Smith commemorating the thirty-fifth anniversary of the publication of CoD along with a lovely new CoD related book by Cynthia Cynthia LeJeune Nobles.
Blazing Saddles: These are people of the land, the common clay of the new West. You know…morons
What a brilliant a script it was that made “Blazing Saddles.” (And never mind the gags). It is scathing, satirical, funny and bawdy — and still fresh. This is one of Hollywood’s few successfully close-to-the-bone comedies along with To Be or Not to Be — unfortunately poorly remade by Mel Brooks.
Mel Brooks: 10 things you never knew about ‘Blazing Saddles’
Oakeshott’s Wise Defense: Christianity as a Civilization
WALKER PERCY WEDNESDAY 58
Beware of Episcopal women who take up with Ayn Rand and the Buddha and Dr. Rhine formerly of Duke University. A certain type of Episcopal girl has a weakness that comes on them just past youth, just as sure as Italian girls get fat. They fall prey to Gnostic pride, commence buying antiques, and develop a yearning for esoteric doctrine.
. . .
“Our marriage is a collapsed morality, like a burnt-out star which collapses into itself, gives no light and is heavy heavy heavy.”
. . .
“Who was it who said: if I were offered the choice between having the truth and searching for it, I’d take the search?”
Allen Toussaint (1938 – 2015)
One of the greats has passed. The very excellent Keith Spera captures him best ably supported by the very excellent Wayne Curtis:
A Tale of Ants, Slime Mold and the New Jersey Turnpike
The very excellent Simon Garnier:
