You might like “The Time of Their Lives” about the founding of Plymouth Colony. It’s not as breezy or funny as “Wordy Shipmates” but it is fascinating. For example, the original plan for the colony was that everyone would live communally and contribute their labor as much as they could, but of course there were…

(“Somebody to Love” by Jefferson Airplane, featuring proto-Goth Grace Slick. This is American Bandstand but they also performed this at Woodstock.)

It was Ailes’s job to get Nixon into the White House (which he did) not to keep him there. He went on to work for Reagan’s campaigns and for George H. W. Bush, who was the last VP to actually make it to the Presidency, and one of the few in history to get there to succeed his former boss while the President was still…

Some comedian once remarked, “What is it like to wake up every day hoping for news that your mother has died so you can finally get a job?”

Unless I’m reading my tabloids wrong, William married the daughter of two flight attendants (or at least that’s how they met, when they were both working for BA.) Maybe Catherine is really somehow the issue of Scandinavian royalty or something but you’d think we would have heard about that.

Oh no! I love the Melbourne ladies. I like it when they speak in something approximating Home Counties English but they get a few drinks in themselves and start sounding like extras in a “Crocodile Dundee” movie.

Get back to me when one of them throws her prosthetic leg while seated in a restaurant 25 years past its prime. Or flips a table. Or invites along a psychic who tells another one that she will die soon, miserable and alone.

I am reading an encyclopedic biography of Nelson Rockefeller who, with his mother (mostly his mother), conceived of, funded, and loaned/gave tons of works to the Museum of Modern Art in its early days. When Rockefeller was governor he stocked the Mansion and his spacious work areas with priceless paintings and…

I love orange too and good for you for wearing it. But I’ve been told by many a designer, graphic and fashion, that it is the most controversial color. It’s the color of danger or distress, it’s used for prison jumpsuits and life jackets and warning signs and ambulances and crossing guards, because on the human eye…

In 1968, at the tender age of 28, Roger Ailes ran Nixon’s TV/media campaign. If you’ve ever seen any of those ads (several focused on “law and order” and showed video of the chaotic Democratic Convention and footage of the aftermath of the urban riots of the period) you’ll see he’s been honing his craft for almost 50…

I told people in work today that Donald Trump had invited Obama’s Kenyan half-brother, who claims to have been buddies with Khaddafi, to be his guest at the debate tonight. People now think I’m a moron who will fall for clickbaity satire pieces.

I live in an area with a LOT of storefront freelance Evangelical “churches” and I dread taking my dog out for his noon-ish stroll on Sundays. The freaks don’t come out at night; they clog the Sunday sidewalks and engage in decidedly un-Christian behavior when they see a white guy walking his happy, friendly black Lab.

Sadly Australian programming is almost non-existent here in America (we didn’t even get “Neighbours,” which I think was one of the most-watched Anglophone soap operas in the history of the genre, with a vast global audience.)

Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital ex-colleagues probably aren’t using the ones they used to compile their binders full of women. Since that remark came from 1952 but was said in 2012 you might have to contact a long-distance operator to connect you to Bain Capital.

Is that Marie Romano?

I was going to reply that “The Kennedys had their moments!” but then I did a GIS for “Kennedy state dinners.”

The Statue of Liberty analogy flew by me but maybe you’re right!

Yes! But only a few days later. We were in a Duane Reade or somewhere like that looking for aspirin and we found ourselves in the condom section. I happened to glance at some ribbed ones, thought of “ribbed for her pleasure,” and then blurted out, “Did you know that ribbed condoms used to be called ‘French ticklers’?…

That Boston rant was kind of weird. If in some alternate life someone said, you can replicate your New York life (friends, apartment, job, etc.), but not actually in New York, sure, I’d pick Chicago or LA first, but Boston wouldn’t be far behind.

I laughed out loud a few times during “Titanic,” which did not endear me to the sobbing teen girls in the theater who were obviously on their fifth or fiftieth viewing. This was second-run theater so it was maybe a third full.