A friend tells me about the time he was having drinks with a couple of Texans who seemed unremarkable until the topic turned to high school football. “Those people were crazy,” he says. “I mean, absolutely nuts.” A fair appraisal, if H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights is accurate. Bissinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, wrote Friday Night Lights after taking a leave of absence from The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1988 to […]
My expectations of mainstream media have gotten so low that, to quote Lord Feathering Walthamstone, they really have to “touch cloth” to get my attention these days. And that’s exactly what CNN.com did this morning with a homepage headline displayed at a size worthy of “JAPANESE BOMB PEARL HARBOR. AGAIN!!”. Sweating big black Franklin Gothic bullets […]
“Panem et circenses. Bread and circuses. How the Romans kept the people passive. We’re addicted.” – Lobster, the Clown As we did in “Monkey Gods,” Peter Saputo and I begin “Under the Big Top” mid-conversation at our usual table. It’s such a useful device, that table, so comfortable, so unobtrusive. Peter wears a clown shirt […]
