I am a fat gay man married off to a guy who pretty much looks the way he did 1/3 of a century ago, when I first met him. I was thin and muscular then too. He maintains a regular gym regimen (to the point where, when Emperor Cuomo shut down the gyms, we installed our own). I, on the other hand, had my metabolism…

I’ve always thought that about Fox “News” hosts. You take a man, age 30 to 70, give him a conservative haircut, put him in a suit and tie, apply a little TV makeup/coloring, and you’re done. You have so little room for improv, and yet when we’re flipping around it’s not uncommon to stumble upon a Fox “News” host who…

One of the most insane things about “Dark Shadows” is that it aired in the afternoon, every day, like other soap operas, but it was the late 1960s so “Dark Shadows” seemed like perfectly normal daily daytime programming. I mean, not really, the network knew what it had on its hands, but still. My mother was absolutely…

And by all accounts Kaiser Wilhelm II was the favorite of all of Queen Victoria’s 138 grandchildren, or however many she had.

Now there’s a phrase you don’t see often enough in public discourse. William F. Buckley had a famously wide-ranging vocabulary. I wonder if he ever wrote something like, “This Cleveland Steamer of a proposed law would ensure for a generation that the well-meaning populace of our grand Republic would...”

In the early aughts I worked at a company where a very senior person was a total Luddite. I only got to interact with her because she would sometimes receive communiqués in a foreign language only I could speak. (It was a global corp. and HQ was abroad and they had a very bad email distribution list team, so she’s get…

FWIW my money’s on William. Who else had as much motive and opportunity? He counseled Harry to go slow with Meghan. He picked a nice girl from the Home Counties (although not nearly as high-born as his own mother, a Spencer, of the Spencer-Churchill-Marlboroughs, in a sense far more “noble” than his German import…

You should really head over to deadsplinter.com. There’s a recurring series, “Food You Can Eat,” and I’m a contributor under this username. My stuff is bizarre but they are super-indulgent. Around the holidays last year I posted recipes for Boeuf Bourguignon, a Chateaubriand, and a Beef Wellington. I actually make all…

I’m sort of fascinated by Omid Scobie. He’s like an Evelyn Waugh character from one of his 1940s satires.

You’ve seen “The Queen” I take it. That was another Peter (“The Crown”) Morgan production. I love that movie, have seen it more than once.

Three of QEII’s four children are divorced and she had to OK all of them. The only one who’s not is Edward and there have been rumors about him since he was a teenager, but I guess he and Soph are making their marriage work so good for them. 

I admit I have not been following Saudi-Chandelier-Earrings-Gate that keenly, but aren’t women in the Royal Family, especially the ones who marry in, allowed to have private possessions, like jewelry? Didn’t Diana leave jewelry to heirs in her will? Although she was divorced. Let’s take Kate. Suppose Wills gives her…

The only strange thing is that she didn’t appropriate the space and illegally list it on Airbnb while she had the chance.

Marsha’s walking a thin line, though. She doesn’t dare want to give the impression to the powerful Cro-Magnon voting bloc that Neanderthals are worthy of some sort of special rights or consideration. Her Neanderthal-Cro-Magnon coalition is fragile as is, and with Trump the Savior silenced on Twitter there are precious…

“sereptitiously takes her fathers place”

I bet a lot of it was in assets, not cold hard cash. The Wildensteins had one of the world’s foremost art collections (the husband was The Wildenstein Gallery Wildenstein) and probably some of it was real estate, jewelry, & etc.

Ms. Alford should become a stringer for BBC Radio.

I’ve studied/used to be able to speak three foreign languages, two Romance and German, and my personal yardstick for grammatical fluency is if you get to the point where you can say, “If I had known she was going to be there, I would have gone” you’ve done well for yourself.

They should really go all in. Apparently “Baldwin” roughly meant “brave friend” in the early Middle Ages, so they should become Alejandro y Hilaria Amigovaliente. Since Hilaria’s maiden name was Thomas, and given Spanish surname structure, the children would be the Amigovaliente Tomás clan.

This doesn’t seem that strange. In my neighborhood we have precisely one decent “Chinese” restaurant and it’s only because Asians work there and can be persuaded to serve non-Asians like me food that they would eat. Otherwise it’s a lot of fried chicken and whitefish, which...why? In a Chinese restaurant? Goes with…