Back in the 1950s when TV was still young, all you needed to get content was an antenna.  You put up your antenna and connected it to your TV set, and voila! TV shows appear on the channel you select.  It was magic, and the only cost for getting these TV shows was the cost of the antenna and the TV set.  The ads that accompanied the TV shows as well as the endorsements put out during the shows paid for the service.   One immediately thinks of Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions, or Dinah Shore belting out: “See the USA in your Chevrolet.”  And you got it all for free — what a miracle!

Today, you don’t get TV content for free anymore, but the ads are still there.  Think about that for a moment.  In effect, you are paying to watch ads that you don’t really want to…

I walked past a couple in Portsmouth, N.H.  They had just stepped out of a time machine.  She was dressed like a 1920’s Flapper, with a billowing dress and an interesting, roundish hat fit snug, and he was dressed to the nines, with red suspenders, elegant patent leather shoes, a bow tie, and a straw Boater hat.  Could have been F. Scott and Zelda themselves.  They were clearly on their way to an event from another era entirely, but just walking along like everything was completely normal, as cool as a cucumber.

Portsmouth has a large complex called the Strawbery Banke, which imitates what an 18th-century colonial settlement would look like — I guess spelling has evolved quite a bit since then.  You go through all these historic houses, see how the interiors looked like way back when, and witness the people inside wearing suitable attire for that period.  Somehow…

Rather than sanctions, the United States should consider taking the humanitarian high road and provide Venezuela, a country on the precipice of actual starvation, with food — with no strings attached.  Frankly, we do humanitarian a lot better than we do military.  Wouldn’t it be a nice change of pace if the rest of the world actually respected something we did abroad?  And the farmers in the United States wouldn’t mind a bit if the government bought some of what they have to offer.  We could simply tell the world that, while we don’t agree with the politics of the current regime in Venezuela, we refuse to see people starve in the Western Hemisphere.

North Korea — What to Expect

Crimea

Nuclear Winter

It was the greatest speech ever given in American history: Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address at the dedication ceremonies at Gettysburg, given on November 19, 1963.   The speaker before Lincoln, Edward Everett, a very famous orator in his own right, droned on for over 2 hours.  After the respectful — and perhaps thankful — applause upon the conclusion of Everett’s speech, Lincoln took the podium.  His speech lasted less than 2 minutes.  When it ended, there was dead silence from the massive audience that had assembled to hear the speeches and pay their respects at Gettysburg.  There was dead silence because no one realized  the speech, so brief and to the point, had actually ended.  Slowly there was hesitant clapping from the audience.  This — silence and confusion — was the immediate and ironic response to the greatest speech ever given in American history.  Of course, all the Northern newspapers…