Samuel Johnson

Recent

What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.]   One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

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Seeking the King

A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do

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He’s the Guy

Those social media posts of ‘this moment in this famous film was totally unscripted!!!’ as if that by itself makes it better miss the point. Moat unscripted material, like most ideas, inventions, ideas, notions, &c … fails — such is the nature of creativity: the best stuff, it is devoutly to be wished, sticks around;

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‘Round Here

Imagine someone, potentially anyone, even you, perhaps, but let us, in any case, say. Yes, you. You pull into the diner – Earl’s, Norm’s, Dinah’s, something like that. A sort-of Googie architecture … but maybe not quite, as if it’d been a little late for the Space Age, and late is the one thing you

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Random

Can We Tawk?

Comedienne Joan Rivers’ catchphrase was, ‘Can we talk?’ with all that that entails — its rhetorical nature, the Jewish thing, an implication that at least one of the parties will be better off for having done so … Like God. T’other day a priest spoke of ontological remembrance, the immediate and ongoing memory of past-present-future

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Forget What?

Today is the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Poking around, I found this short item, from the Fictional Newswire New York (FN) — Eleven years after the World Trade Center attacks here in September 2001, most haven’t forgotten … they just don’t know why they were supposed to remember. “Uh, I’m pretty

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Lyric Lent

Mostly I gave up meat for Lent. Or to put it another way, I gave up meat (mostly) for Lent. And this is how Lent often goes and the difference I think isn’t usually that it doesn’t go that way but that it’s OK when it does. Not that it’s OK to give our word

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You’re Doing It Wrong

A friend once recounted how a mutual acquaintance of ours had told her God spoke to him, which he meant both literally and verbally. It’s enough on one point to note the gent didn’t say God spoke with him — which wd seem to be preferred, all things taken together — but that isn’t what I’ll

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