There are a lot of reasons "Lee Daniel's The Butler" (2013) fails, the most obvious being that Lee Daniels, who directed the movie, thought it proper to cast widely recognizable actors as former presidents although they have little resemblance to the presidents they are portraying. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how Robin Williams was even
I grew up in the wonderful state of New Jersey. It is a source of great pride for me, but for reasons I’ll never truly understand, my source of pride seems to be an international embarrassment for most people.
Mocked as the “Armpit of America” by many Americans, the views of foreigners about the State of
The 27th Amendment to the United States Constitution all started with a C paper.
It was 1982, and the constitutional debate du jour was the Equal Rights Amendment, which was intended to guarantee equal rights for men and women. The amendment passed both houses of Congress in 1972 and was given to the states to ratify
I had a weird reaction as I watched "Argo" (2012). The longer the film went on, the more I became convinced that things didn't go the way that events was depicted in the movie, but also the more I enjoyed the film. It brings to mind what I always say about reality, which is that
I had one of the most deeply reflective moments about life in college in, of all places, math class, from a professor who shared a story about a failure of Johannes Kepler before he discovered that the planets orbit the sun in an elliptical curve.
Back in Kepler's days, scientists were aware of only six planets. Kepler
"The Iron Lady" (2011) is maddeningly frustrating. You watch the movie mesmerized by the performance of the lead, yet realize, as the movie stumbles forward, that the script and the direction of the film makes it entirely forgettable if it wasn't for that performance.
If there is a Japanese military officer from World War II that both Americans and Japanese respect, Adminiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Imperial Navy, is it. The story that looks into this reluctant warrior who opposed Japan entering the war against the United States yet planned the attack on Pearl Harbor would make
My Southern friend occasionally forwards me "You know you're a Southerner if..." e-mails. For me, many of these are list of aspirations, things I wish and hope to one day become.
My trip to Tennessee was partly to discover whether I'm cut out to be a Dixie, wearing shirts with confederate flags, speaking with a
One of the perks of my current job is that I get to travel a lot on someone else's dime. No, I don't get to enjoy whatever that location has to offer, but I get to color in another state and that's pretty cool.
A while back, I got to cross off Missouri and Kansas off
Far too often, we appreciate greatness only in retrospect. We remember what happened then, before and after and realize, relatively, that the person or the event was great.
But in rare times, we know when we're a witness to greatness of historical proportions and we don't want to miss a minute of it.
