Bite Me, Tony

Okay, so let me just get this out of the way right here and now. All my friends, both in the real world and on Facebook, are insisting that I absolutely must see Steven Spielberg's remake of West Side Story . And the critics seem to like it, too, with some calling it "masterful" and "charismatic".  Well, then. I get it, I do. You guys all love the movie, and you want others to share in the love. It's the same way I feel about most of Quentin Tarantino's movies, Fellini, all the incarnations of Twin Peaks , and Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman .  A lot of my friends and fellow moviegoers don't care for the movies (and TV shows) that I love, and probably haven't even seen most of them. These films simply don't appeal to them. See what I'm saying? I just really don't have any interest in seeing West Side Story . I didn't love the first version when I saw it at age 12 (or whenever it was reissued for the big screen) and I didn't love i

Well, as is sometimes the case, I was almost finished doing something (in this case, writing a rather lengthy book review on amazon) when an unexpected event occurred (a sudden power outage), causing several hours worth of work to be lost in space, if not to the ages. It was a good review, if I do say so myself, but amazon does not allow reviewers to save their material as they write and, while I had a premonition that it would be just my luck for a power outage to occur at just the wrong time today, I still didn't bother to save my work in Word. My misfortune, but that's the way it goes. The world will have to wait to read my brilliant and incisive review of the very late James Robert Baker's posthumously-published, transgressively savage, darkly comic, AIDS-era noir, Testosterone. My brilliance and incisiveness occurs in fits and starts and doesn't, as a rule, translate well to the page, so well, now you know. It could be awhile before the Muse pays a return visit.  A

  I'm not sure why but I'm feeling much less bah-and-humbugish than I did at this time last year. Perhaps it's because I did all my Christmas shopping early for a change, or maybe it's because COVID has abated enough to allow us to get out of town a few times, most recently to visit some of C's family in North Carolina. One thing that definitely makes this Christmas season a thousand million trillion times better than last year is the fact that that ludicrous, lying, gobsmackingly awful, wonky-haired orange ogre no longer occupies the Oval Office of The People's House (aka The White House) in Washington D.C. True, he's just up the road a ways at Smarm-a-Lago and if the wind is coming out of the north-northeast, you can catch the distinctly Trumpian stench of bloat and corruption. However, all things considered, better he spend his down time in Palm Beach, scheming and bloviating, than in any official capacity in the U.S. capitol, wherein a perceived lack of