Tagged: bronwyncsposts

Good news this year as the Wal-Mart Shopping Season revved into high gear on the Friday after Thanksgiving: Although there were plenty of police-on-shopper beatings , shopper-on-shopper violence , and in-store tramplings, at least no one died this year , as did Jdimytai Damour, a Wal-Mart temp employee, when he was trampled to death by a bargain-frenzied crowd in 2008. (Well, actually, Walter Vance of Charleston, West Virginia, did die in a Target store this year, but that was from a heart attack and at least it didn't impeded any of the other shoppers, who [...]

Sluggo sent me these, and that's all I know about 'em, except that they're amazing.

Back in 2010 I posted the video for the Best Party's campaign song here on Beware of the Blog. The Party—which was started as a satire of regular Icelandic politics—actually won a majority in their local election, and their founder and chairman, Jon Gnarr, became mayor of Reykjavik. Now, through the magic of Benjamin Walker, and due to some mistake that no one can explain, I am to meet His Honorableness, Mayor Gnarr, and his chief strategist and campaign manager, Heida K. Helgadottir, when I introduce their keynote address on Saturday at the WFMU Radiovision Festival . [...]

I skipped all the coverage of the 9/11 commemorations today. The message seems to be "Never forget," but what is it that we're supposed to remember? I remember 9/11 very well: the immediate realization, when the second plane hit, that this was no accident, the WTF moment when we heard the Pentagon was burning. I remember trying to get to WFMU to do my first show afterwards, and being turned back by NJ State Patrol officers until I figured out an alternate way into Jersey City. I remember insisting that Sluggo and Dog Baxter go [...]

Memorial Day brings cable channels full of war-movie marathons, but mostly these are not movies about war. War is the wholesale slaughter of those Other people you've come to believe are not even human, and is very tedious to watch. If the Viewer wants entertainment, then torture porn, where people are killed off one by one, is far superior. But of course Hollywood "war movies" are just character dramas in a war setting, so, you know, Pearl Harbor . I have seen a couple of genuine war movies lately, though. The first, City of Life and [...]

I only know that it involves a clown, and fire, and numbers chalked on a wall.

On St. Patrick's Day, Sluggo and I went to see War Horse at Lincoln Center, just because it was puppets and it was so incredibly expensive that it seemed like the sort of thing we should do for our 20 th wedding anniversary. We knew pretty much nothing about it, so it was a happy surprise when we found out it features South Africa's Handspring Puppet Company . We'd seen their puppets in exhibits in 2006 at the World Financial Center and [...]

The Westminster Kennel Club dog show is today and tomorrow, but this year I won't be there. Back before magazines ceased to exist, I worked as an editor at a dog magazine, and part of my job involved attending the Dog Writers of America awards dinner on Sunday night, and going to Westminster on Monday and Tuesday, and having Wednesday lunch at Sardi's where the Best-in-Show winner was served a plate of steak. I am not kidding when I say that meeting Rufus, the colored Bull Terrier who won in 2006, was one of the nicest things that [...]

When I was younger, living sustainably was called "being poor." You lived in a small space and shared resources with other people—sometimes unknowingly, like that incident with my bath towel—and bought stuff used, and patched things up, and made do. Not that you couldn't have a perfectly fine life, being poor in New York; I remember an article from the Village Voice, back when people would pay for a copy of it ... Aww, c rap! I'm starting to sound like Andy Rooney! … Anyway, I believe the author used the term "privileged poor" to refer [...]

My Grammy Carlton always said, "You can never have too many books!" and sometimes we owned as many as 20 all at once, including the Bible and a volume called The Library of Universal Knowledge (the Practical Self-Educator) . Since I intended to know everything when I grew up, I began working my way through the Great Books on a recommended reading list I found somewhere. It was a good list, in that I read some books I would never have considered, or even known existed—Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand and Stars , for instance. It was good to have [...]

Listeners to Thunk Tank know that we've progressed pretty far with our Putin fan fiction project. Besides the regular "Salutin' Putin" feature, we've done an entire Salutin' Putin show and also interviewed Sam Derse, the guy who does Vladimir Putin Action Comics . We've even started a Saturday morning cartoon spin-off called The Putin Pals , featuring all Putin's animal companions. Or at least all the ones we've made up so far. But it turns out Putin has many, many animal friends in his so-called "reality" as well. [...]

p Here's what I'm excited about today: End of History Ale! Okay, it's English ale, and I believe it's 110 proof (!) and it comes in dead-animal bottles, and there's only 12 bottles made (seven stoats, four squirrels, and a hare) and it costs $762/ bottle, so probably I shall never have one. But I am no Janey-come-lately to the world of rogue taxidermy—far from it! As a child I became enamored of the jackalope, beast of lore and legend and Wyoming roadside attraction rest stops, and I began collecting jackalope postcards at a [...]

Scientists and Experts have been doing some serious thinking at the Large Hadron Collider (aka That Thing That's Going to Create the Black Hole into Which We Will All be Sucked). First they thought about the Higgs bosun particle (aka the "God Particle," and that's what the physicists themselves call it, I am not making that up). Higgs bosun is a theoretical sub-atomic particle that physicists think may be the one thing that gives all other particles their mass. After they thought up Higgs bosun, the Scientists and Experts brought in Dr. Lily Asquith, who is a particle physicist specializing [...]

Last night I played Red Dead Redemption , which is a fancy cinematic video game about Ye Olde West and outlaws and gunfights and whatnot. There are horses. It's pretty amazing, in the way that all these new games are. I've watched a friend play Heavy Rain and Alan Wake , and watching him play was sort of like watching a crap old movie on TV—you could sort of just sit through it, and it wasn't terrible, it just [...]

fine. It was fine, or even good, and pretty funny. But you know how it is when you want something, and think about it, and anticipate it, and fantasize about it ...mmmmmmm....and then you get it, and it's just not that big a deal anymore? Well, I have been living in a Robogeisha frenzy since I first posted t he link to the trailer on Twitter, back last July 7, and I have searched online for info about the release in Japan, and how FUNmation had picked up the rights to distribute it here, and when they were [...]

On Friday, a close friend of a friend of mine died, suddenly and unexpectedly; he was 29 years old. Station Manager Ken's father, David Freedman, died two weeks ago, at age 89. So I have been thinking about death a lot for the past few days, although it is something I often think about anyway. p Our WFMU Listeners know that for many years I did a regular feature called "News of the Dead" on my shows, and some may know that I'm the writer of a graphic anthology called "The Big [...]

pIt's tempting to start this review with the whole life story of Yoshisaburō, later known as Utagawa Kuniyoshi, but you can read all that stuff on Wikipedia. And no images I can post can give you even a fraction of the experience of seeing his actual work, which you can do—and should do— until June 13 at the Japan Society . p The show is basically works owned by a private collector, Arthur R. Miller, who's donated the whole batch to [...]

I live in New York, and so I have no friends. Friends are people you actually speak to, people you see once in a while. This is not possible in New York, where everyone is busy, busy, busy and lives a 1-hour train ride away. pThe telephone stopped working when the answering machine was invented. I had a dear friend, John Fox, a writer, and when he died I wrote my newspaper column (Newspapers! Remember those?) about how all we ever really did was leave each other [...]

Big news today, as Hank Williams was awarded the Pullitzer Prize! In 2010! Like, 57 years after he died! It is kind of inexplicable, except that the award comes from the same organization that gives prizes to that Big Gray Pack o' Lies, the New York Times , on a semi-regular basis. Congratulations to one of WFMU's favorite singer-songwriters!

pI went to the Miroslav Tichy exhibit at International Center of Photography a few weeks ago, and then I went back again last Friday. (See Vinnie Smith's earlier post here on Beware of the Blog .) Miroslav Tichy is an old Czech, born in Kyjov, Moravia, in 1926. He went to art school, and then stopped painting sometime in the late 1950s. He became very unkempt, dressed in rags, and started wandering around Kyjov with cameras he constructed out of garbage—shoe boxes, twine, lenses from broken eyeglasses. According to some of the local residents who were interviewed for a [...]