GORE VIDAL’S VISIT TO A SMALL PLANET PART 1
“THE PURPOSE OF SATIRE, it has been rightly said,” humorist Michael Flanders observed, “is to strip away the veneer of comfortable illusion and cozy half-truth. And our job, as I … Continue reading
SAVORING LENNY LIPTON’S LABOR OF LOVE PART 2
I’VE JUST STARTED Lenny Lipton’s astonishing 795-page celebration of The Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Age. It’s not the … Continue reading
SAVORING LENNY LIPTON’S LABOR OF LOVE PART 1
MY ACQUISITION OF BOOKS arises occasionally from reading The New York Times Book Review or the London Review of Books. This time around, it involves the latter, but in a … Continue reading
AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY YEARS
THIS IS A CELEBRATION OF WIFE DOTTIE, known to many of you as Dorothy Clendenin. A person-to-person get-together was planned for relatives and friends for today, July 23, the date … Continue reading
AUTO GOSSIP
AFTER HAVING SPENT an eventful 33+ years following the world’s auto industry, it has been fun in the last ten focussing my interests primarily on automotive gossip: gleaning tidbits of … Continue reading
SWORDSMAN, VIOLINIST, CONDUCTOR, COMPOSER, ABOLITIONIST—AND BACK TO THE SWORD
HERE’S A TALE WORTHY of an opera, heightened by the fact that this swordsman/violinist/conductor/composer/abolitionist was the acknowledged son of a wealthy French colonialist and an enslaved African Guadeloupean. I learned … Continue reading
1951 MUNTZ JET
“HERE’S THE ROAD TEST you’ve been asking for,” proclaimed Road and Track, September 1951. Well, perhaps not exactly you here in 2022 unless you were tantalized by John R. Bond’s … Continue reading
“GOIN’ FOR A RIDE” AND OTHER OBSCURE PHRASES
MOTORING WAS SOMETHING OF a cult activity. We usta go for a ride, just for fun. Like any good cult, we had a lot of cant, the linguistic term for … Continue reading
JOHN R. BOND’S SPORTS CAR
IN RECOUNTING 48,000 MILES in his 1949 Ford Custom V-8, Road and Track, March 1951, John R. Bond said the car was “a ‘sort-of’ test car during construction of a … Continue reading
OUR LANGUAGE’S THEY/THEIR SQUABBLE
I SEEM TO HAVE sidestepped our English language’s non-gender hassle. Indeed, I have LBGT family and friends, though assigning any of them “he/she” or “his/her” never seems to be a … Continue reading
Simanaitis Says 