Joel's humanistic blog

While tickets are available for the Queens Drive-In's screening of Men in Black, I may as well blog my letter to the editor  from back in April about the cosmic classic, and how the real-world Queens borough hopefully is more exemplary of its populism than its simultaneous distrust of the populace.

Today's film-industry headlines, as foreseen by Premiere magazine 21 years ago:

Alex P. Keaton's favorite economist with Leonard E. Read favorite tool Someday, I'll get around to elaborating on how everything wrong with American politics is that it's in the image of All in the Family  rather than  Family Ties , but for now, I have a letter  championing Alex P. Keaton over Archie Bunker that made it to the editorial pages of the Queens Chronicle .

My "Small Business Versus the State"  went up over the weekend at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism .  This is the first time I've contributed a column to comrade Thomas L. Knapp 's news commentary project since 2018, but we're gearing up for more to come.

Before Doug Henwood announced  yesterday that his venerable mailing list described as a " forum for the discussion of economics, politics, and culture from a broad left perspective " was shutting down, I admit that I was unsure whether lbo-talk was still going, with so few messages hitting my inbox that I was genuinely unsure whether or not it had quietly vanished. (The website for the Left Business Observer it was named after tersely notes that periodical ceasing its increasingly erratic publication seven years ago, and the actual content hasn't been updated since Barack Obama's  candidacy .)  Yet while he insists that "lbo-talk has said enough" and is enough of a Marxist to quote Karl that "Last words are for fools who haven't said enough" I am enough of a foolish Bakuninist to note that, as moribund as it was in its later years, its extensive archives offer a lively chronicle of the early-Internet left through the Battle of Seattle, 9/11 ...

The Russians were going to have come in 2010! "U.S. and Russia in space"  in the Queens Chronicle looks back at the little-discussed sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey , and how it envisioned less tense relations between the US and the then-assumed-to-still-be-Soviet-in-the-2010s Russia.  (I should also clarify that I am not now, nor have I aver been a member of the Russian conspiracy, though I technically can't truthfully deny association with  "H.U.A.C."  since the "House of Un-American Activities" was the unofficial nickname for the home of some college friends back in the day.) This image is a rerun, but so is the content it's illustrating. "Reducing costs"  in the Queens Examiner  (and the other outlets in the Queens Ledger/Brooklyn Star Newspaper Group) asks free-market advocates to stop brushing aside concerns about "materialism, social inequality and economic instability" and instead start pointing out how econom...

"THE YEAR IS 2019. America's finest men don't run for President." ... my troubles definitely weren't far away, but it was a day of several significant milestones: all of the events of  Akira , Blade Runner and The Running Man were finally all definitively set in the past of 2019 and before; it was the 9th anniversary of me joining Twitter ; it was the 10th anniversary of my blog comrades Darian Worden and Tom Knapp getting hired/promoted to do good work at the Center for the Stateless Society (Darian wound up penning around 100 commentaries  while I've only managed about a third as many , let alone Tom's  250+ ); the belated growth of the public domain that began (after a twenty-year hiatus imposed by retroactive copyright extensions) with the lapsing of 1923 copyrights a year ago  continued for works published in 1924.

I've been quiet here, but I can't let the decade end without noting my presence on the letters to the editors pages in the last weeks of the 2010s: "Whose school rules?" in the Queens Chronicle "Hitchcock's genius" in the Queens Chronicle "Vendor cap vs. progress" in the Queens Chronicle " Who Knew Debs Supported Gun Rights for Individuals?" in the Wall Street Journal "Chanukah Songs Beyond Sandler" in The Jewish Week (week of December 7, not online yet)

Wouldn't you know it, today is National Grouch Day on a week in which ToughPigs.com is running a contest to make memes based around Sesame Street pals Ernie and Bert. So I'll make up for not yet linking to their past contests which yielded a trash bin of Oscar the Grouch memes and, a bit farther down the street, a cookie jar of Cookie Monster memes . Both compilations of humorous image-caption combinations include submissions by this very blogger, who may not have found his way to Sesame Street (or won the contests) but was able to indulge in dated references to everything from Atari 2600 games to Arnold Schwarzenegger one-liners to the Lazy Sunday SNL skit.

The current issue of the Queens Chronicle  newspaper has a letter to the editor by yours truly about the latest of the MTA's bad decisions endured by NYC transit riders.  I kept it as concise as possible for print, but on my own blog I can try to expand a bit on why the removal of QR codes was so particularly annoying: It takes a bit of technical know-how to explain what exactly QR codes actually are — they're sort of like an Internet-connected update of bar codes for the wireless age — but their removal eliminated the benefit they had for riders who knew how to use them, without any countervailing gain for those who don't. The QR codes linked to significantly more useful and accurate schedule information than could be conveyed in the static schedules that were phased out for supposedly being too costly to maintain, and can keep access to up-to-date info  without  needing the physical printout to be replaced: each code is tied to a webpage link which not on...

When I read a quote by the founder of a Queens film festival asserting that its movies weren't "low-quality – like avant-garde, silent film, black and white – something that mass audience wouldn’t care to see" I just had to write in to explain just how many audiences such "low-quality" films were attracting in NYC,  and my reply made it to the  pages of the July 25 issue  of the Queens Courier :

Well, I didn't intend for three full months to pass since I last blogged here for New Year's Day.  My intended returns to regular blogging, on the other hand, have never really worked out in the past.. but I may as well drop in on the one day nobody believes anything they read online anyway.

slogans from Eric Eldred's campaign to overturn the Copyright Term Extension Act  Never thought I'd live to see today... the day on which new works enter the United States public domain. In the mid-1990s, it still seemed to be a routine matter for copyrights to expire on older work, with the occasional news story about which works of 1920, 1921, and 1922 were becoming free for all to access, publish and adapt . Then in 1998, 20 years were added to all existing copyrights, after copyright holders realized they could simply lobby for increasing the lengths of existing copyrights that were about to lapse (as opposed to the gradual lengthening of how long copyrights will last on new works). Eric Eldred's taking to court the unconstitutionality of such potentially-perpetual retroactive delays (which pretty clearly contravene the Constitution's statement that such terms shall last "for limited times") resulted in the Supreme Court upholding them in 2003. ...

It has been a while since I last  blogged about writing for Thomas L. Knapp 's William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism , but at long last I've capped off a planned troika of op-ed commentaries started this summer with the Oscar-baiting "The Madness of the Academy."    "Can't Stop the Bookstore"  struck back with my examination of how Amazon's $15 wage may not be the pure concession it has been assumed to be on both sides of the conflict. Along the way, I took a look at the forgotten history of corporate liberalism, explained how a small bookstore has succeeded where Barnes & Noble failed, and found a plotline that The Simpsons  hasn't done yet. The trilogy concludes with  "Protectionist Presidents are the Parents of Our Country's Trusts"  taking on the still-current fallout of Trump's trade policies, uncovering the hidden history of free trade as a progressive cause.

When I posted  last week about my commentary piece "The Madness of the Academy" I didn't know if my take on the Academy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film would get any attention. After some time circulating through the series of tubes, I dare say that it's more popular than the Oscar itself. It's made its way to the New Haven Register , Citizens Journal , USA Today's The Spectrum , and  Counterpunch  (and, via Counterpunch, to Open Mind News ,  Radio Free  and Bestseller Magazine ). It's even made it to the print-as-in-on-actual-newsprint opinion pages of  The Register Citizen , The Middletown Press , The Daily Lobo  and Salt Lake City Weekly . And no, I'm not Tom Knapp (but then again, that's what I want you to think - have you ever seen us in the same place?), but the words inadvertently credited to the guy who created The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism , wrote 99% of its content, encouraged t...

"The Madness of the Academy" is my take on the Academy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film, my first commentary piece in a long time for Thomas L. Knapp 's The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism . I've enjoyed getting back in the op-ed writing game and set to write a couple more in the coming months ... but I'll be able to write more of them if Tom has more money to buy them from me!

What, me patriarch? "Even in Pleasantville, there was more to life than Pleasantville," as Jesse Walker noted, but there was even more among the undead in Mockingbird Heights: "Herman, as head of the house, I think you should get to the bottom of this. Now, you go right on upstairs and have a father-and-son talk with your boy." "Well, gosh, Lily, I'm not very good at that, y'know, dear. You're his mother. Why don't you  go up and have a father-and-son talk with him?" "No! A think like that is up to the father !" Anyone who's watched Father Knows Best  for nine years ought to know that." "All right. But Donna Reed always handles these things on her show, y'know." (Eddie's parents in the Munsters episode "Operation Herman")

The first of an upcoming series of Joel’s overlooked personal favorite places, events and other things that should be better known. What is it? A palatial movie theater. Where is it hidden? In Jersey City, New Jersey. Why is it a treasure? The screen is huuuge .  Like, very huge.  That-aquatic-dinosaur-in- Jurassic World -that-dwarfs-a-whale huge.  While some IMAX and similar screens may be larger, the sheer feeling of an entire building devoted to one humongous screen is like nowhere else. Popcorn and drinks are a dollar each. With tickets usually going for $8 (less for double or triple features!), there’s no better value for a dropped Hamilton. The building is unique and historic. It dates back to 1929!  Built just before the stock market crash, the last pre-Great Derpession moment when lavish building for a mass audience was economically feasible, it maintains much of its original style.  Much of the facade still needs fixi...

It's been a while. This blog was never updated on a daily basis even in its early heyday, but it trailed off in a major way.  Some of this is due to Twitter and then Facebook, and my attempted clean break to Wordpress  was unsuccessful in starting new momentum where the old had stopped. But I've been craving a return to the old-school blogosphere from the maelstrom of gossip and trivia and venting that is social media.  That's where everyone seems to be nowadays, but some of my fellow bloggers who started around the time I did, like Tom Knapp , have kept at personal blogging with a regular if relatively small readership, so it can be done. And I was sick through most of May, so any attempt at doing a whole month of writing would have to wait. So in a new month, here I am.  Are you?

My challenge to myself this month: how much can I write, including but not limited to this blog, in the shortest month of the year?