Oh, good, since it's that time of year again, a week of 9/11 coverage. When kitsch, media, and jingoism hit and take down a historically recent traumatic event.

The Guardian ran a nice piece where they asked novelists to assess Barack Obama and his presidency. Some interesting answers.
https://www.theguardian.com…

I think I had rose-colored glasses on because it was GDT and it was a book series first. The events of the first season followed the first book (with some changes), even though the novel wasn't very good. But I thought you must respect the fidelity of the source material. If it had been an original show, I probably…

Right, The Strain, S3 Ep. 2 Thoughts,

The internal thoughts of a celebrity—or anyone unimportant—are not news. Who cares? (Thank you for reading my public, unimportant thoughts.)

Comedians in Cars getting Coffee, the Jim Gaffigan episode. Where they go to a famous New York deli and order a ton of food, which I'm sure they fed to the crew, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to walk out of there. It starts with soup and salad, then some serious pastrami sandwiches, plate of fries, some sort…

See, we don't need European-length vacations. One day is enough!

Not much pop culture, but I did give up the ITV-transported-to-Netflix show, Marcella starring the great Anna Friel. Weirdly, it was around the 6th episode mark. I knew from the beginning how ridiculous it was—purposely so I hope—requiring such a huge suspension of disbelief, but I had liked how that was conveyed in…

In my defense, he was asking for it. That beginning can only be the dinosaur, with the eye physiologically not bothering to read the rest of the word.

I discovered the wonderful Mary Beard this year. Her BBC documentaries on ancient Rome, where she fluently reads tombstones and rides around on a big bicycle (which I hope she does in real life), are delightful. Her books, like SPQR, are pretty good, too.

I've been calling you Velociraptor! Why didn't someone tell me? Oh, I've been making an idiot out of myself!

How does Velocirapstar keep up with the news like that?

The New Yorker recently ran a good piece on Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, scion of another morally dubious real estate family (his father went to prison for tax evasion, illegal campaign donations). They're running Trump's campaign, and, despite being friends with Chelsea Clinton and her husband, are all in…

There's a Slovenian magazine called Suzy? Okay. Is the interim head of the J. Peterman Catalogue a subscriber?

The thing to do to prevent that from ever happening again, is to develop an ice-cold heart, where any and all traces of human kindness and empathy are destroyed in you. Good luck!

I don't know what else can be said beyond "America's for-profit health care system is shameful and uncivilized."

I'm gonna just steal someone else's bit here. Keep this quote in mind with the current political situation.

I finished Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics by Daniel Stedman Jones, which ably describes how we got to the present world system, basically. It was refreshing to read about policy in a nonfiction book (when a lot are histories and biographies), when the author in the last…

I wonder how much that speech was Bannon's idea, if he wanted to get his pet issue in there before Trump lost, or he thinks his candidate will surely win because his issue is really all of America's.

Mark Harmon's demise was my first listen of a classic song that too many American Idol contestants sing.