Book Review: Jackie and Bobby (2009)

Bobby and JackieA love story
by C. David Heymann

Okay, I confess, lots of times when I’m in the supermarket, and in the checkout line, I’ll read the gossip and celebrity tabloids. It’s like once in a while taking a bite out of a jelly donut, it tastes good, and with just a morsel you don’t suffer any ill effects.

Books like Bobby and Jackie, though, while they deal with celebrities and famous ones, provide more than the titillation of living vicariously in the moment. Plus, they’re books. So the process of taking in the message of the author is a longer and more deliberate task, requiring an active intellectual approach to get the most appreciation. Bobby and Jackie falls in the category of pleasure reading, for most of us: no particularly heavy concepts, nothing new ideologically, like bedtime stories for children or trying on a comfortable old pair of shoes. Continue reading

Movie Review: JFK (1991)

Classic dramatic film achievement routs all
pretenses about the CIA’s[1] criminal conspiracy

JFKJim Garrison: Could the Mob change the parade route, Bill, or eliminate the protection for the President? Could the Mob send Oswald to Russia and get him back? Could the Mob get the FBI, the CIA, and the Dallas Police to make a mess of the investigation? Could the Mob appoint the Warren Commission to cover it up? Could the Mob wreck the autopsy? Could the Mob influence the national media to go to sleep? And since when has the Mob used anything but .38’s for hits, up close. The Mob wouldn’t have the guts or the power for something of this magnitude. Assassins need payrolls, orders, times, schedules. This was a military-style ambush from start to finish… a coup d’etat with Lyndon Johnson waiting in the wings. Continue reading

Brian’s Column: “Yikes! When did toothpaste get to five dollars a tube?!”

From the mundane to the sublime: an epiphany
Originally posted 9/7/2009

Busch's MarketSo here I am at Busch’s—a family independent grocery store that sprouted on the corner of Meadowbrook and 10 Mile Road in Novi, Michigan—used to be a Farmer Jack. Not having children, never much of a grocery shopper, my idea of going to stores for things, for nearly 40 years, has been, “That looks really good (or cool, or different); just throw it in the basket. $19.95 may be a little steep, but that’s why God invented MasterCard.”

And so it would go… for food, for clothes, for drinks, for car stuff, etc. Continue reading

Movie Review: Executive Action (1973)

Suppressed groundbreaker on JFK killing __ 8/10
Review by Brian Wright

Executive ActionTV Commentator: In the three years after the murders of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald eighteen material witnesses died, six by gunfire, three by motor accidents, two by suicide, one by a cut throat, one by a karate chop to the neck, three by heart attacks, two from natural causes. An actuary engaged by the London Sunday Times concluded: On November 22, 1963, the odds of all these witnesses being dead by Feb. 1967 are one hundred thousand trillion to one. Continue reading