Category Archives: Steve Jobs

11/19/2012
2 Comments
Barry Goldwater, Ding Dongs, Garry Wills, GILF, Helen Mirren, Hitchcock, Ho Hos, Hostess, Jack Lemmon, Northwestern University, Some Like It Hot, Steve Jobs, Television, Twinkies

The Pencil Today:

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THE QUOTE

“When you’re young, you look at television and think there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.” — Steve Jobs

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WHO WILL MITT BE NOW?

Hat tip to Roger Ebert for pointing out this short essay by Garry Wills on Mitt Romney’s legacy in the New York Review of Books.

Wills, the respected author and history professor at Northwestern University, doesn’t think much of Mitt. And that’s not because he disagrees with Mitt’s stances on things.

Garry Wills

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For instance, Wills praises Barry Goldwater despite having little in common philosophically with the late conservative leader.

No, Wills posits that Romney does not measure up as a man to others who’ve lost presidential elections. Wills says almost all also-rans in the quadrennial beauty fests have gone on to contribute to the world long after their political humiliations.

Romney, Wills thinks, won’t.

You May Be President, But I’m Rich!

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Read the piece, it won’t take you long.

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THAT AIN’T FOOD

Personal to all those who are mourning the possible demise of Hostess Brands’ flagship products, Twinkies, Ho Hos, and Ding Dongs

Stop crying, you knuckleheads.

First, those “pastries” aren’t going to disappear. The union busting slobs who ran Hostess into the ground will sell the brands and their recipes off, ensuring their financial futures in ways their now-out of work employees can never imagine.

You’re Crying Over This?

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Second, Twinkies, Ho Hos, and Dingdongs suck. You can argue all you want but if you think they’re good or tasty, you have the palate of a stray dog.

You know how dogs dig through Dumpsters looking for anything at all to eat? That’s you. Only you’ve actually spent your good, hard-earned cash on the garbage that Hostess has had the effrontery to call food.

Look, I’m a chocolate lover. What passes for chocolate on Ho Hos and Ding Dongs has more in common with long-chain polymers than the product of cocoa beans that was invented by perhaps the greatest human in the history of the world.

For chrissakes, the “chocolate” coating on Ho Hos and Dingdongs is crackly and shiny. That’s the same description for glossy latex paint or Bakelite. You’ve been eating it and enjoying it, you poor dopes!

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So stop.

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EEK!

You know how Helen Mirren has been the poster girl for hot women “of a certain age”?

She’s brought glamor and allure to the GILF (or even G-GILF) world.

A Certain Age

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I haven’t exactly be doing handstands over her since she remade herself into a dowager sex symbol but I can see the attraction. Were I a randy, single young man and she crooked her finger at me, I’d very well drift her way.

Imagine, then, my discomfort upon seeing the online banner ad for her latest film, “Hitchcock,” in which she plays the great director’s wife, Alma.

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By god! She looks almost precisely like Jack Lemmon as Daphne in “Some Like It Hot!”

There Goes That Fantasy

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Yeesh. I do believe whatever fantasies I may have entertained about Helen Mirren have just vanished.

01/10/2012
7 Comments
11/22/63, Barack Obama, Bringing the Shovel Down, Craig Thompson, Dave Torneo, Democratic Party, Eric Burdon & The Animals, European Space Agency, George Clooney, Guns, Habibi, ICBM, International Space Station, John F. Kennedy, Miles Kington, NASA, Nuclear Weapons, Open City, R.E. Paris, Republican Party, Ross Gay, Ryder, Samuel Beckett, Sky Pilot, Stephen King, Steve Jobs, Teju Cole, Vietnam War, Walter Isaacson

The Electron Pencil:

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TODAY’S QUOTE

“Astronomers. like burglars and jazz musicians, operate best at night.” — Miles Kington

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LOOK TO THE SKIES

If you’re a space geek and an early riser here in Bloomington (a scant club, I admit), you’ll have plenty of opportunities to see the International Space Station over the next couple of weeks.

With the late sunrises at this time of year the sky remains dark even after some of us unlucky souls are planted at our desks, casting dirty looks at our fellow miserable coworkers. But if you’re alert and can spare the energy to look upward you can see the mighty ISS shooting overhead between the hours of 5:30 and 7:30am.

Here’s NASA’s schedule of sightings from Bloomington:

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The ISS is home to a half dozen astronauts: three Russkies, three brave and handsome Americans, and one Japanese. Sorta neat how Russian and American spaceguys (and gals on occasion) are now cooperating for long months aboard an orbiting laboratory, isn’t it?

The International Space Station At Sunrise

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This is especially so considering that the true aim of each country’s space program back in the 1950s and very early ’60s was the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Eventually, thousands of ICBMs were pointed at cities in the two nations for the purpose of incinerating them with thermonuclear weapons.

It’s a wonder any of us who grew up in those psycho, edgy years are even acquainted with sanity now.

For that matter, who among our parents and grandparents alive during the Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima years would have dreamed Japanese and Americans would be among the tightest of geo-political pals in the 21st Century?

Believe it or don’t, there is a bit of good in this mad, mad world.

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RYDER’S TOP TEN ISSUE

My pals R.E. Paris and Dave Torneo and I are three of the featured writers in the Ryder magazine annual Top Ten issue.

R.E. breaks all the rules and selects some three dozen books that fascinated her and, in her learned view, are representative of trends in the publishing universe. Her choices range from the “Steve Jobs” bio by Walter Isaacson to Stephen King’s “11/22/63,” an alternative history that supposes John F. Kennedy had survived his wounds on the eponymous date, and to the Islamic fairytale graphic novel, “Habibi.”

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Dave, one of the most serious readers I know, writes about his ten best books of the year. He actually read the 800-page “Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1941-1956.” Man, Beckett probably kept the Royal Mail in the black all by himself. Torneo also dug Teju Cole’s “Open City” and Ross Gay’s “Bringing the Shovel Down.”

Beckett

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Me? I pointed my smart-assed knives at the city and state’s elective office holders, pricking the top ten political stories of the year. (And, yes, the pun is intentional, on three levels). By happy coincidence, one of my top stories is Bloomington’s rewriting of its gun laws to coincide with Indiana’s. I note that it is now legal to pack heat in the Monroe County Public Library.

Comforting, isn’t it?

Guns N’ Books

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Anyway, pick up the Ryder this month or you’ll be woefully ignorant for the rest of the year.

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WE DO FACEBOOK SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO

A no-spamily, no brattle zone.

◗ Special educator extraordinaire Erin Wager-Miller directs our attention to movie hunk George Clooney’s take on the difference between the two parties in this holy land. The Dems, Clooney feels, can’t sell themselves as well as the Republicans.

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Here’s a closeup of the quote:

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SKY PILOT

Eric Burdon & The Animals‘ 1968 song was not about the elation of soaring through almost unimaginable altitudes (which I’d thought when I first heard it as a 12-year-old). It was an anti-war polemic about a military chaplain in Vietnam who blesses a unit of soldiers preparing to go out into the jungle for an overnight raid.

Now, nearly half a century later, we still pay military chaplains to sprinkle holy water on men and women to go out to kill and be killed. And, just as in Vietnam, this nation’s bosses still can’t give us valid reasons why in the hell they’re doing it.

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