Laughing When You Know You Shouldn't

Reading the writings of David Sedaris is a guilty pleasure. Hearing him read his stories the other night at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown was even trickier because I laughed out loud in a crowd when I knew I shouldn't have.

Sedaris read two short stories, including one I read some years ago in The New Yorker about his late sister Tiffany. I now recall sending that story to my siblings because it spoke so humorously yet honestly about losing a sibling to addiction and mental illness, a sad and tragic outcome my family experienced as well.

He finished the night by reading a few dozen wicked diary entries. I'm paraphrasing from memory here, but one of them went something like this:

"After a reading and during the Q&A, a young man asked me about being a gay man. He said he was a gay Muslim living in Texas and asked for my advice.

"I said, 'Accept Jesus Christ as your savior.' "

Perspective

Claude Monet ~ Wheatstacks End of Summer 1890

Michael Crawford ~ The New Yorker

Political Conventions

I watched Leslie Stahl's Trump - Pence interview last night on 60 Minutes.

Today I read a New Yorker article about what the ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal really thinks about Trump: Donald Trump's Ghostwriter Tells All.

Trump or Clinton?

Lord help us.

The New Yorker ~ David Sipress

Martha's Vineyard in 1933 and in Color

According to the Vineyard Gazette, an Eastman Kodak executive and his wife were vacationing in Vineyard Haven in 1933 when they shot this first color movie film of Martha's Vineyard.

Stargazing from the International Space Station

When I was a boy, my grandfather used to quote Emerson and encourage me to "Hitch your wagon to a star."

International Space Station ~ NASA

I'm mad as hell . . .

I watched the 1976 film Network again last night. It's about a last-place television network that moves its evening news broadcast under "programming" to improve ratings. I first saw Network when I was a political science undergrad and aspiring newsman, and planning to follow in the footsteps of my grandfather and father who had worked at CBS. It was Jimmy Carter's "malaise" era of high unemployment and inflation, the Weathermen, Symbionese Liberation Army and Patty Hearst. My parents had recently abandoned life in a NYC suburb in Connecticut to husband a 12-acre farm and livestock in Vermont. Three years later, Iranian students took 52 American embassy diplomats and employees hostage in Tehran whose captivity led to Ted Koppel's Nightline news broadcast on ABC. After 444 days, the hostages were released the morning of January 20, 1981, just minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President. Along the way, in June 1980, CNN and 24-hour news were born.

Oscar-winning screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky penned the prescient Network screenplay which the Writers Guild of America now calls one of the 10 greatest screenplays in the history of cinema.


Who knew then that "Howard Beale's mad prophet of the airwaves" foresaw the future of not only network news, especially cable news, but also reality TV and talk radio. Beale's live assassination in the movie also presaged live streaming and found footage of events like the police shootings of Philandro Castille and Alton Sterling, which triggered the televised assassinations of five policeman in Dallas.

And who knew that in 2016 we'd be facing an election between two media-saturating and Twitter-addled candidates whose asylum-worthy character defects are getting the highest Nielsen ratings in election history?

Too Big to Fail?

Statement by FBI Director James B Comey:

"Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

"None of these emails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is especially concerning because all of these emails were housed on unclassified personal servers not even supported by full-time security staff, like those found at Departments and Agencies of the U.S. Government - or even with a commercial service like Gmail.

"We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account. We also assess that Secretary Clinton's use of a personal email domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related emails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal e-mail account."

The New Yorker ~ Kim Warp

Feed Your Head II

The New Yorker ~ Seth Fleishman

Shark Week

It's Shark Week again on the Discovery Channel, with lots of hysteria about the record number of attacks so far this year. I wonder if the sharks talk about how many more humans are in the water?

Sharks, ISIS and Trump, oh my!