SNL Homowatch: 3/6 (Zach Galifianakis)

For years I’ve been vaguely (in a teensy way) bothered by Saturday Night Live’s complete dependence on sketches that make fun of being gay. I don’t know exactly why. I’ve written a little about this before — “enlightened homophobia,” which is probably socially harmless (as is most televsion, really) but nevertheless irritates me. In the…

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One-man book club: Bring out your dead

It’s one-man book club week here in Tonsil-land, where I say all the things I would say if I was in a book club (and the selections were all up to me). Monday and Tuesday I blogged about seven books. But today is the dark-interlude portion of the one-man book club meeting, where a moment…

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One-man book club: Here to exhaust you

Nothing helps one grieve for the demise of one’s own sad little book than … reading other people’s books! And knowing, as you read them, that every single one of these books may well nearly have killed its author and also knowing that somehow, someway every single one of these books is also someone’s letdown.…

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A VD transmission from the Roller universe

They’re infrequent (even more infrequent than these blog posts), but an e-mail came today from Donald Roller Wilson, with a strange (of course) Valentine’s Day wish. And a new Naughty Betty painting! It’s called “It Would Become the Third Disastrous Attempt for Naughty Betty to Ratify Her Bat Mitzvah.” Many of you have asked what…

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State of the real union

Not the Obama speech, but the Apple iPad unveiling. That’s your state of the union. Rapt worship of the new gizmo, and, naturally, it’s not just another thing to pay for and plug in and carry around and fuss over, it’s salvation. It seems like I have 100 clear thoughts a day about the renaissance…

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