Living in a state where the elected leadership tends to fall somewhere between the criminal and the brain-dead, it is always a relief to turn from the political to the real. The meaning of “real” is debatable: As English authoress Elinor Glyn once opined, “California is a small island off the ...
If Oxford is the home of lost causes, California appears to be the Quonset hut of stupid ones. The latest to excite municipal legislators’ brains (in San Francisco and Santa Monica, anyway—Barstow and Fresno appear unaffected at this writing) is anti-circumcision. The author of ballot measures ...
The California that gave us the film industry was far from a blank slate. In addition to the land barons, Midwesterners, and gurus whom I mentioned last time, there had also been an influx of creative types. After Mark Twain and Bret Harte planted their literary flags in the Golden State, a crowd ...
In February, fresh from the great victory at Oxford, I went to a dinner party in London. At one point my historian friend asked: "Don"t you miss Europe?" My response was a halting "Ye-e-e-e-s-s-s, but..." It is difficult to explain to a European. For all that annoys or disgusts ...
A few years ago, I brought a young visitor of mine from the East to Moonshadows, the Malibu boîte where Mel Gibson commenced his ill-starred drunken drive. As my friend went out to smoke a cigarette, the young bartendress complained to me, "How can you let him do that?" I explained that ...
On a recent trip to New York, I did something radically different from my usual forays back to the city of my birth: I visited the UN headquarters. To be sure, my One-Worlder credentials are very poor; I did not even trick-or-treat for UNICEF as a child. But that very childhood in the early to ...
"This House would abolish the monarchy" was the resolution to be debated at the Oxford Union on February 3, 2011. I had been summoned to join the team opposing the resolution; thus, I found myself last Candlemas night at Magdalen College. I refer the uninitiated to Edward Davies's fine ...
I love tobacco. I have been a pipe and cigar smoker since my 16th birthday. (My father had offered to buy me both if I abstained from cigarettes until that date). On that memorable occasion, he took me down to Santa Monica's storied Tinder Box. Dad showed me how to roll the cigar when lighting, how ...
In politics, words are often elusive things. Definitions change from speaker to speaker and writer to writer and age to age. Well do I remember, in the palmy days of the 1970s and 80s, mainstream columnists talking about "conservatives in the Kremlin." This was a phrase that meant something ...
Last month marked the fourth anniversary of what must be seen as the most exciting event in the Catholic Church in this writer's lifetime: the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. At that time I was doing commentary for ABC on the various ceremonies connected with the death ...
