Oval Office Thunderdome: Ted Cruz Will Never Be President

The Republican Party has a problem. They have mastered the art of gerrymandering to the point that they can win the House every two years while receiving less total votes, by millions, than Democratic candidates. They have also been able to leverage the conservatism of less populous states to win control of the Senate, even though the Republican members of that body, over the course of the three election cycles that turn over the Senate, received less votes than their Democratic counterparts across the aisle, again by millions. But the story is different when it comes to presidential politics. Continue readingOval Office Thunderdome: Ted Cruz Will Never Be President”

The 2015 Shitty Movie Sunday Awards

I’ve written a lengthy column about what I thought was the best in film that I saw from this past year. Now it’s time for the worst — for the dark side of my cinematic experience to come forward. There won’t be as much structure here as in the Empty Balcony Awards. It doesn’t matter what year a film was released, or if I’ve even seen it within the last year. These are awards for film garbage. Continue reading “The 2015 Shitty Movie Sunday Awards”

The Third Annual Empty Balcony Awards for Movies I Saw From Last Year

I like a sense of inflated self-importance. It’s one of the reasons I maintain a website that has never managed to garner more than a few thousand hits in a month. (Except for that one time the site was hacked by someone in Russia and the increase in traffic crashed the servers. Sorry about that, Dreamhost.) Does anyone out there really care what I have to say, on any topic whatsoever? I’m sure there are a few people who do, here and there. But I’m only pretending that anything that appears in this space is more than just tiny words muttered into the vast information ether. I read somewhere, once, that we, here in the Information Age, are generating data at a per day rate that eclipses the accumulated data of the entirety of human history from before the internet. That’s a lot of noise, and no matter how relevant one’s contribution, that contribution still consists mostly of noise. Continue reading “The Third Annual Empty Balcony Awards for Movies I Saw From Last Year”