NEW YORK—Nature is at her best right now, the leaves still holding, Central Park awash in golden browns and reds. I go there every morning, half a block away from my house, and under a giant elm I put the creaky body through its paces. Twenty push-ups, thirty deep knee bends, twenty-five kicks over a knee-high bar for each leg, and I finish with twenty-five punches against a leaf for speed and accuracy. Then a quiet walk and ...
Here's a funny coincidence. Just as Netanyahu is hyperventilating against the interim deal Uncle Sam has struck with Iran in Geneva, a poster campaign by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Berlin intended to identify aging Germans who might have participated in Nazi crimes has produced more than 3,000 posters in cities all over Germany. "Late But Not Too Late" is what the signs say, with a concentration camp in the ...
Is there anything better for Christmas than a bit of a laugh? Well, a visit by, say, the blonde CIA agent in Homeland would be preferable, but I think she's got other things on her mind than yours truly. Great comebacks are my favorites. For example: When the great French actress Arletty was dragged into court and accused of giving comfort the French way to a German Luftwaffe officer, her only defense was, "If you men ...
You know you’re old when people start writing kindly about you. Especially when they are colleagues. First Jeremy Clarke, now Deborah Ross. Debbie could of course be spoofing—if you look down at your bag of popcorn you’ll miss me—but thank you very much anyway. When my new boat is ready there will be a cabin built exclusively for Deborah Ross. The only thing she really got wrong is the moolah. If I’m a billionaire, ...
Everyone’s doing it, so I might as well jump in also. After all, I knew so many of the people involved, including JFK and his widow Jackie, and—sorry for the name-drop—even actor Rob Lowe, who plays the slain president in the film that’s coming out for the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. I only met Senator John Kennedy once—a year before he became president—at a party thrown by Alice Topping, a society ...
I suppose the secret of death is to choose not to expire on the same day as famous people. I read in Lapham’s Quarterly that JFK, C. S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley all met with the man in the white suit on November 22nd, 1963. John Jay Mortimer, a friend of very long standing, died last week and I attended his funeral in Tuxedo Park, the seat of his very old and fine family. After his daughter Minnie gave the reading, Lewis ...
Like all proper banana republics, the Olive Republic of Greece has jailed some elected members of Parliament and charged them with criminality, as obscure and vague an accusation as hooliganism used to be when Uncle Joe Stalin was displeased with some Russian writer. Stalin used dissidents for target practice; the present gang in power in the birthplace of selective democracy simply lifts their parliamentary immunity and sticks ...
NEW YORK—Hot money from China, India, Russia, and Singapore is pouring into London; hotter money from the same countries is flooding into the Bagel. London has become unaffordable for the average Joe around Kensington and Chelsea, as has the West Village in downtown New York. Well, “unaffordable” is relative. There is a delicate social-ecology system pointing toward the wrong direction in both metropolises, but—like a ...
James Toback is a very intelligent screenwriter and director who discovered Harvey Keitel and also turned Mike Tyson into an actor of sorts, mostly playing Tyson. Toback relishes pushing people's buttons and has a devilish radar for psychodrama"all of which comes into play in his latest movie, the riotous Seduced and Abandoned, a fly-on-the-wall depiction on how to get"or not get"a movie financed during the Cannes ...
If, according to a Viennese wit, psychoanalysis is the disease that calls itself the cure, then Steve Cohen’s deal with the US government is the highway robbery that calls itself justice. Cohen is a bald Wall Street hedgie whose $18-billion fund, SAC, has scored Madoff-like returns the last twenty-odd years. He is a secretive kind of guy whose first wife blew the whistle on him because of his lack of generosity toward her. ...
NEW YORK—He came from a wealthy background but was always in trouble. His parents were not particularly religious, but nevertheless they insisted that little Jimmy read the Torah scroll and grow up to be a good Jewish boy. You can imagine their horror when they found naked pictures of Hedy Lamarr and Brigitte Bardot among the holy pages—the former in Ecstasy, the latter in Contempt. He was given a hiding and taken to all ...
NEW YORK—Libyans are among the most civilized people on Earth. When a Russian hooker (I assume) killed a Libyan Air Force officer, a mob stormed the Russian embassy seeking revenge. They failed, but not for lack of trying. This time last year another mob murdered the American ambassador and three others in a similar attack, although no Yankee gal had harmed any Libyan flyer. The civilized Libyans also did democracy proud when ...
NEW YORK—The trouble with driving into the city is nostalgia. Manhattan Island looms into view and it always induces the same wonderment it did long ago. Once walking the streets, however, reality sets in with a bang. And it is a bang! Manhattan is one big building site, cement mixers and drills having replaced the soft tunes of Tin Pan Alley as I first heard them when walking to Broadway and 47th Street. Back then it was the ...
A man whose reputation rivals that of the Clintons" for dishonesty and lies recently claimed overhearing a conversation by a gangster confirming that Bobby Riggs had thrown his match against Billie Jean King in the infamous Battle of the Sexes on September 20, 1973. (King won 6-4, 6-3, 6-3.) According to the Clinton wannabe, Bobby was $100,000 in the hole to the Sopranos, and in order to extricate himself he told the hoods ...
The Swiss canton of Ticino is holding a referendum on a burqa ban, and it is about time. Burqa, niqab—it’s all Arabic to me, although I understand firsthand how deep-seated the hatred of women is in Arab countries that men wish to cover them up. Funny enough, when you see these bearded assholes shouting on TV, it is the men who are so ugly it should be a mandatory cover-up. When I lived in the Sudan and Egypt while on ...
Ini yaitu berjenis-jenis pertanda permainan domino sesuai untuk perjudian Anda. Jika Anda ingin bertaruh uang Anda sendiri dan menempatkan keterampilan gameplaying Anda untuk tes dengan taruhan. Permainan dominoQQ dapat dimainkan dengan uang tunai dan menawarkan elemen kegembiraan ekstra untuk bermain. Ingat, Anda tidak semestinya bertaruh dengan uang sungguhan. Anda selalu dapat bermain dengan counter, krupuk, korek api, atau ...
