News

Actor Patrick McGoohan died in Los Angeles on Tuesday after a brief illness; he was 80. Beginning in the summer of 1968, the seventeen episodes of The Prisoner ---the British spy-science fiction series he helped to create and starred in--- were broadcast on American...

You can almost feel the frisson that must have gone through what's left of the newsroom at the Los Angeles Times when an anomaly in a fifty year old story seemed to hold out the possibility that RN was lying in the very first line of his 1978 memoirs where he writes...

As reported in today's (London) Times: The classic British bulldog, a symbol of defiance and pugnacity, is to disappear. A shake-up of breeding standards by the Kennel Club has signalled the end of the dog’s Churchillian jowl. Instead, the dog will have a shrunken...

Last night the Golden Globe Awards were handed out, with the sleeper Slumdog Millionaire sweeping every category in which it was nominated. Ron Howard's acclaimed Frost/Nixon was completely shut out. Not even Frank Langella got the award for Best Actor - that went to...

As President George W. Bush conducted the final press conference of his tenure in the White House today, he was relaxed and reflective. He is clearly looking forward to riding off into the Texas sunset to enjoy life as a member of the former-presidents-club. He...

As a once and future New Yorker I have at least some small stake in Governor Paterson's impending appointment to the State's soon-to-be-open Junior Senator's seat. The stake is unlikely ever to be anything other than small because the Empire State's Senate seats are...

The book section of today's Washington Post includes a review of Russ Baker's book Family Of Secrets by Jamie Malanowski (once a mainstay of Spy magazine in its 1980s heyday, later managing editor of Playboy) which includes this observation: In a particularly weak...

Last night SNL turned its attention to F/N and came up with a mildly amusing F/OP.   One definite pleasure is watching Darrell Hammond's Langella's Nixon.  

Hattie Carroll died in 1963. William Zantsinger died last Saturday; his death is reported in today's papers. Hattie Carroll lives on. The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring...

  I was born in a house my father built.  My birth on the night of January 9, 1913, coincided with a record-breaking cold snap in our town of Yorba Linda, California.  Yorba Linda was a farming community of 200 people about thirty miles from Los Angeles, surrounded by...